For the past six months I have had the privilege of participating in a series of inspiring conversations. In the spring of 2022 I joined the Care in the Academy (CITA) project as a facilitator. I have been helping to guide the work of the project’s thirty seven faculty and staff as they meet in small groups.
(image by fauxels at pexels.com)
It would be impossible to do justice in a brief blog post to the full range and depth of insightful and thoughtful work that these colleagues have done, and what I, in turn, have learned from them. As I pondered ways to reflect on my experience with the project, I decided to write about the place where we all spend a lot of time: meetings.
That choice of topic might seem strange and mundane at first. Yet all three of the reports that this project has generated so far talk about the need to demonstrate our care for our colleagues by creating spaces and gatherings that are accessible and meaningful to all participants. The reports make recommendations like the following: remote meeting options need to be available, materials need to be distributed with adequate time to review them, and we need to think carefully about the times and days of the week when we schedule meetings. I use the words “spaces” and “gatherings” deliberately here because I believe that our default settings around meetings within the academy are not serving us well. I think we need to re-engineer and re-imagine how we gather with our colleagues in the academy. While there are absolutely meetings that have worth and value, there are also (probably more) meetings that are information dumps and performative spaces for making ourselves seem accountable and productive (while ironically filling our schedules and making it harder to be either). And then there are just the meetings that are poorly organized and managed.
I take much of my inspiration for these ideas from a book recommended by one of the CITA project participants. This book, Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) is a manual for how to do the demanding work of community activism with compassion and a true sense of community. I’ll warn you, the academy is a long way from being ready for the kind of non-hierarchical, cooperative group work that Spade recommends! That said, there is much that we can learn from his observations about cultivating productive and supportive group cultures. (This post doesn’t even begin to do justice to Spade’s important work. It’s a fast read. Get a copy!).
The ethos undergirding Spade’s recommendations is one of intentionality. And this is where I think the academy has lost the thread. We meet because we think we’re supposed to meet. We are formed and reformed throughout the academic year and over the course of our careers into departments, committees, working groups, and task forces. But each time we are newly convened, we need to have a conversation about why we are meeting and how we are going to do the work at hand. We have tended to derive most of our purpose from the name of the committee (curriculum committee) or task force (e.g. student retention), but I believe we need to stop and ask questions about purpose. Purpose is not the same thing as goals. Lots of committees have goals or desired outcomes. Purpose is something more fundamental. It is the animating force behind gathering for a meeting. It is the thing that people in the room care about and want to nurture. The goal of a faculty committee might be to increase the number of majors, but the purpose of that committee might be something more about inspiring an enthusiasm for a particular discipline or demonstrating to students the value and transferrable skills that come from a particular course of study. Goals are good, but purpose will be the reason members of that committee will be willing to work hard and come to the next meeting.
And when they do, another way that we can demonstrate care is to show respect for each other’s time and labor. Committees need to jointly create group cultures that are supportive and constructive. Seemingly small things like agreeing to distribute meeting materials in a timely fashion, to start and end meetings on time, and to use an agenda template, send messages not simply about efficiency but also about healthy group cultures that value everyone’s participation. Meetings that have guardrails like “three before me” (where one person doesn’t speak again until at least three other people have had the chance to speak) and rotating facilitating and other responsibilities send powerful messages about valuing everyone’s contributions and not wanting to overburden or burnout any individual members.
Even if some of them can be emails, we are not likely to escape meetings in the academy anytime soon. But working together to create intentional spaces and supportive cultures within and around those meetings could go a long way to demonstrating our care for one another as we seek to sustain our work going forward.
(For more on good meetings/gatherings, see Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.)
Elizabeth (Liz) Lehfeldt (she/her/hers), Professor of History at Cleveland State University, co-facilitates the work of this grant with Professor Cate Denial. Professor Lehfeldt has previously been Department Chair and Dean of the Mandel Honors College. She is a former Vice President of the Teaching Division of the American Historical Association (2016-2019). She was drawn to the work on this project by her desire to create environments and promote strategies that support faculty in doing their best work as teachers and scholars.