Small committes, big effect

I thought that I had finished work for the day, having reached 9 hours at task. But, I stayed online with email open past the dinner hour. My mistake. Faculty often return for a post-perennial top-off-the day session of a little more work. So, I was in for another half hour of e-problem solving.

The issue was curriculum revision. Although we have not yet had the first meeting of this academic year, I am the default chair of the division curriculum committee. Default because I have served as the chair for the past several years. Default because no one else wants to add committee work to their late evening task list.  Default because I tend to get things done.

In preparation for our first meeting of the academic year, I went through emails saved in my "curriculum" mailbox.  I was searching for items for the agenda that I vaguely remembered being sent to me over the past couple of months. Our "satellite" and local online certificate programs each have a minor revision. Those got added to the agenda and documents posted online for the committee to see. Then I found the biggie. Biggie in the sense of not being clear cut, being somewhere between minor and not minor, involving an ardent emailer.

The particulars are not the issue. The issue is that none of the fussing, the paperwork, the ethereally supported consensus building gets seen or noticed until it shows up on a list of courses that are required for a degree. So very few ever ask why or how we come up with that list of courses.  The list everyone notices and abides by. But no one really notices the committee, unless it is not meeting and getting work done or is holding up proposals that need to move along from division to school to campus curriculum committees.

It occurs to me that the work of this committee, the group of 3 or 4 or 5 of us that meet once a month, is oddly the very core of academia.  Smart people trying to create, maintain, evolve a curriculum for an unpredictable future of individuals we do not yet know. It's worked in the past. We assume that what we create will work in the future. But, this seemingly obscure little committee actually determines the character of the degrees and certificates offered by our division. We, as a faculty self-governance committee, influence the reputation of the school and thus the school's financial health.