Faculty Meetings: Avoiding the "It ain't over 'til everything has been said by everyone" problem

My colleague Bill Klein famously opined that law school faculty meetings cannot end just because everything has been said. Instead, they can end only when everything has been said by everyone.

Tom Bell has the radical idea of invoking Robert's Rules of Order to make faculty meetings more efficient:

Faculty meetings may have their charms, but efficiency does not rank among them. Many a time I have looked around a room full of my colleagues, long minutes into a winding discussion of what was supposed to take only a few moments to resolve, considered the full agenda still stretching before us, and bemoaned the deadweight social costs of law school governance. Allow me, then, to share a couple of partial cures—one an old favorite and the other a new find—from Robert's Rules of Order.

I've long been a fan of "calling the question," as we casually style the motion at my school. Full-on Robert's geeks know it as the "Previous Question" motion. Call it what you like, you have to love its effect: It takes precedence over every debatable question and, if the motion carries, forces a vote on the issue under debate.

Suppose, for instance, that a handful of faculty members have been arguing back and forth about some relatively inconsequential motion for 20 minutes or so, as everyone else's attention wanders and more important business goes untended. You get the Chair to recognize you and simply say, "I move to call the question." Once the motion carries—and often with sighs of relief—you and your colleagues can vote on the trifling motion and move on to other topics. (Section 20 of the Rules offers caveats and details, but most law school faculties seem to manage, surprisingly enough, with less than the full panoply of formalities.) Try calling a question the next time a faculty meeting starts spinning its wheels. You—and most your colleagues—will enjoy the ride.

Calling the question does not cure all the inefficiencies that afflict faculty meetings, however. Because we law profs so love to hear ourselves speak, for instance, we sometimes run on (and on and on) a bit. Polite coughs, finger drumming, and the like usually suffices to keep our monopolizing tendencies in control, happily. In fact, it was only very recently that I found myself wondering what a fellow could do when those informal measures failed. Here, too, Robert's Rules offers a remedy: a Question of Order pertaining to decorum.

Roberts Rule's provides, in § 34, that "no member shall speak more than twice to the same question . . . nor longer than ten minutes at one time, without leave of the assembly, and the question upon granting the leave shall be decided by a two-thirds vote [§ 39] without debate." Upon encountering an infraction of that rule, you have the right to interrupt the speaker. As section 14 says, one who so objects "shall rise from his seat, and say, 'Mr. Chairman, I rise to a point of order.'" The Chair must then decide the issue immediately, without debate. If the Chair finds the challenged speaker out of order, and if anyone objects to the speaker continuing, he or she must cede the floor unless the assembly votes to grant leave.

I am of three minds on this issue:

1. As someone who spent much of his youth serving as parliamentarian of multiple student government organizations, I have a great deal of affection for Robert's Rules. In addition, so long as the group really sticks to the rules, there's a certain amount of power that comes from being the only person in the room who really knows the rules.
2. On the other hand, I like to believe that time spent in faculty meetings counts against my stint in Purgatory. Since I'm anticipating a rather lengthy stint therein, I'd like to shave as much time off of it as possible now.
3. On still yet another hand, I have sometimes been one of those bad apples who speaks "more than twice to the same question" and, worse yet, have sometimes spoken for "longer than ten minutes at one time."

On balance, I guess I'd like to see us adopt Robert's Rules. But I won't be holding my breath.

Comments

[ohwilleke]

Robert's Rules works best in a quite narrow range of circumstances.

In groups of several hundred or more, it only works supplemented by a tight agenda intermediated through the equivalent of political parties or a rules committee.

In groups of a dozen or fewer, simply selecting a facilitator with good judgment and absolute control over the course of the proceedings is far more efficient and functional.

Robert's Rules can work reasonably well for intermediate sized meetings (which is the size of the legislative bodies from whose rules Robert abstracted his rules), but whether that works well for faculty meetings largely depends upon the size of the faculty that actually participates in such meetings. For a moderate sized liberal arts college (as a whole), or a large academic department in a larger university, they can be quite functional. But, in a small academic department or for an institution-wide gathering of faculty at a decent sized university, Robert's Rules are dreadfully disfunctional.