Bad service= any committee with a disorganized chair, who forgets that his role as chair is to serve the committee, not just himself. ARGGGGHHH. I am currently on a committee (one of the few I don’t chair) whose chair wants ME to do the work to serve him.

Worst service: a three-day junket to a nice city, stayed in a suite, and spent endless hours in meetings and going to seminars considering how to bring diversity to one of the hwcu’s (historically white colleges and universitites). Losing proposition.

Enjoyable service: today I spent a couple of hours as a respondent to some excellent papers by graduate students in a workshop. The papers were by a historian, an anthropologist and a theorist, and we had a lively discussion.

Not too long ago she was on the campus’s architecture and building committee, and they were approving the final blueprints for the new engineering building. She’s staring at the prints, not really listening to the architect’s presentation, and something doesn’t feel right. Suddenly she has the realization: nothing in the whole building is labeled as a woman’s bathroom!

Not only had none of the other faculty thought to check on this in the however many years the plans had been going through the process, but the designer guy, when called on it, pretty clearly assumed that there wasn’t going to be any need for them since it was an *engineering* building. F*cker.

Unfortunately, I just heard that our campus’s new student services building had had a lactation room, marked “pump room,” on the blueprint, and that the construction people installed all the water and airconditioning pumps in there. In the middle of the women’s center. Gah!

Squadratomagico, I hear you about graduate studies only I found the way to become a part of a graduate program where I have very few students (three over almost twenty years) has been to become integrated into the administration of the same. You don’t have to be a graduate supervisor on a regular basis to run the program. The flipside is that it can begin to become “your job” and you spend eleven of the last fifteen years in that position. Bah. I’m tired and stepping down and I only hope that my colleagues have my replacement lined up because I’m sure not doing it again!

Sorry to have been checked out today–great suggestions and ideas in the comments. And, maybe it’s unsurprising, but it sounds like most of you take service pretty seriously. (That is, you all thought about these issues long before my post here today, even if it’s the first time you’ve commented on a blog about it.)

Another idea from the comments over at Bardiac’s I forgot to mention: transparency. Be sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and that will leave fewer corners for the shirkers to scurry into. Plus, the people who are doing the work will appreciate the acknowledgement. So: leadership is transparency, carrots not non-existent sticks, efficiency in running meetings, and “free fracking food!”

I’d like to discuss kw’s comment way up above about the fact that “[s]ervice, one quickly learns, is the cement of academic culture. It’s vital, and it can sink you.” (At least, I acknowledge this as a fact.) Also, LadyProf’s comment about the gendering of service, and even the different kinds of service expected of men and women. Personally, I think there are a lot more Senior women who could afford to say “no” more often–but that may be naive of me. Tenured women can’t be fired, but they can be denied other goodies and consideration, like reasonable teaching assignments and schedules, research funding, promotion to Full, etc. They may also be disinclined to give up something they know they do well and which is appreciated, in favor of something (like writing grant proposals and submitting articles and manuscripts for publication) that is riskier, but ultimately more rewarding.

kw’s current department, which sounds like it’s full of good citizens, sounds ideal–but how do you create a department like that, especially if you’re working with a faction of shirkers who won’t let you? As I have said here before, it seems a lot easier to trash a good department, than it is to un-trash a crappy one. (Along the lines of the fact that it’s a lot more difficult to un$h!t the bed. . .)

Does anyone have the magic formula?