Meeting set by the upper level administration tend to be more frequent and less productive. Sometimes they are called to communicate things which could be conveyed through e-mail, sometimes they are called to get faculty “input” which is rarely included in final decisions. They are often called at times which are incompatible with the university standard course schedule.

I think the reasons for the difference are twofold:

First, those who are strictly administrators are part of administrative culture. Meetings are their job, so they are less focused and often much longer (as a department chairperson, I recently attended eight hours of meetings in a two day period for “back to school”–the department meeting ran 90 minutes and we got more accomplished).

Second, by holding endless meetings, they can point to the fact that they are involved in “shared governance,” when in fact they mostly talk at faculty rather than listen to them.

I have never minded attending meetings which have a reasonable defined task to complete, especially when that task has tangible benefits to faculty or students. I do mind attending meetings which are overly long, poorly defined, packed with useless busy work in the name of group input, or which have no tangible benefit.

But taking temperatures this way with students worked very well. Since they could dash off a response to me on their cell phones, rather than having to look me in the eye and tell me that I sucked or had been great, I actually got responses.

Making participants aware of the roles you’re expecting them to play can go a long way to making a meeting more productive all around.

I also find it helpful (as do others above, judging from their comments) to consider what can only be done in a face-to-face meeting and what can be accomplished via email or in one-on-one meetings. Facilitating a productive two-way meeting is a lot easier than facilitating a productive eight-way meeting, so I find it helpful to be extremely strategic with larger meetings.

So a one-hour meeting with six of these folks costs $120. More people with high salaries and longer meetings means more money, of course. After doing this kind of estimate, ask yourself, what are we going to accomplish in this meeting that’s worth that much?

But affect alone–anger and frustration alone–doesn’t make anything better. Quite the contrary, really.

I’d never tell anyone just to put a happy face on it. Rather, there are often small things you can do that will make things more tolerable.

Post-1st-year, I’ve tried to be very open about the amount of service I do (as well as my other obligations) so that I’m less likely to be asked to add to my responsibilities. And though I’ve never had the courage to give this strategy a try, I’ve often thought of answering a request for me to take something new on by saying, “Sure, let’s take a quick look at all of my other responsibilities so we can decide which one (needs to be reassigned to someone else | needs to be put on the back burner | needs to be put off indefinitely).”

I have to admit that I’m guilty of taking a laptop to meetings–something Jason admonishes us not to do–but it’s usually to take whatever notes I might need later, to research issues that are being talked about, or to send necessary emails related to the topic of that meeting. If I wait until the meeting is over to do that stuff it’s just going to eat into the time I’d be using for teaching or research and it’s just going to be less likely to get done, frankly.

In my unicorns-and-ice-cream world, meetings are places where we actually do things, not just places where we talk about the stuff we’ve done and the stuff we’re going to do. All reports are distributed ahead of time over email (and any questions about those reports are asked and answered ahead of time over email), and the meeting itself is reserved for voting, assigning tasks, and making some decisions, with unfocused discussions kept to a minimum.

“I don’t mind meetings, I think it has to do with age and seniority. The older you are the more you like people and the more senior you are, the more you can use meetings to tell others what to do. God probably loves all meetings, that’s why he created the universe – one long meeting he can chair.”

I don’t want to suggest that Geoff’s career is in its twilight or anything like that, but there is obviously far less pressure on someone like him (a chaired professor with a long list of accomplishments). Pre-tenured people and non-tenured people are a different story. I strongly support department policies that radically limit the number of meetings for these people. There’s a downside to that, of course, because being in meetings is one of the ways that you get to know people and come to understand how the place works. But I think it’s a lot fairer to tell someone like Geoff to suck it up than to tell an assistant professor that their increasing irritation over meetings is a result of their lack of commitment to faculty self governance.

I also think Geoff’s other comment is really telling:

“People don’t like them because they usually haven’t done what they should have and the meeting will expose that.”

Yep. That’s really stressful, and we’re happy to convey our dissatisfaction with that through our own shame culture. We can see it as an opportunity for “looking in the mirror” and suggest new, Tayloristic ways to optimize meetings, but part of me wants to suggest compassion toward those who are angry and frustrated. And this (from the comments above) doesn’t do that:

“Don’t like meetings? Become a hermit. You work for a university, which means you actually have to learn to cooperate with other people. In my experience, a lot of the loudest whiners about meetings are those who are always vaguely wishing that “someone” would address or solve some problem.”

What are your recommendations regarding academic meetings? That’s really what we’re after in this thread, I think. Is there anything an academic (especially the non-tenured, non-tenure-track ones) can do to avoid the problems you identify?

What have you found to be helpful strategies for dealing with meetings in your academic work life?