Why Committees Go Rogue -- An Inventory of Hypotheses I

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Too many hypotheses chase too few data when we try to understand why the Academic Standards Committee [ASC] went astray or ran amok over the last two years. Undeterred, I inventory explanations that might be offered.

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Explanation 1 -- Stable Misrepresentation Foments Groupthink.

The ASC habitually features a representative of the Academic Vice President who is usually the only faculty member of the ASC who serves more than three consecutive years. In addition, the Registrar, the head of advising, and a representative of the Dean of Students repeat on the ASC year after year while faculty and student members come and go.

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Faculty or staff who fester on the ASC for more than three years tend to acquire and to generate beliefs or presuppositions that most faculty need not share. This can lead to groupthink: "... a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink> ASC fixtures will tend to share enduring dogmas, doctrines, anecdotes, and shibboleths as well as perspectives and orientations that may diverge starkly from the beliefs, frames, concerns, or priorities of students and faculty "outside" the ASC sub-culture.

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When the fixtures as a group UNDER-represent students and faculty and/or OVER-represent the distinctive problems, concerns, and goals of a department or office, the fixtures lose touch with what most of the community sees, believes, thinks, or wants. The fixtures become fixed upon in-group perspectives.

• Is the current policy regarding incomplete courses troubling this repeater on the ASC? Then the ASC should finally do what the repeater has long recommended. From the view of insiders/fixtures, the ASC has repeatedly failed to act on the insiders' preferences for policy.
• Another fixture on the ASC has for years argued that permitting students choices is permissiveness? Then clearly [to insiders and fixtures] the ASC newbies and especially the ASC students should accede to the expertise of and the "history" brandished by that fixture.
• A long-serving administrator on the ASC abhors what he calls grade inflation? The moment he chants "grade inflation" or uses "grade inflation" to explain anything, the fixtures will "observe" that "grade inflation" has troubled the ASC acutely and repeatedly. Insiders' lamentations and liturgy will conjure what no serious attention to evidence and inferences can disclose -- grade inflation..........

Thus do repeat performers recycle their causes and their prejudices over the years, especially if faculty who were around for the last epidemic of groupthink have cycled off the ASC so that the ASC's "history" may be not simply brandished but brandied.

Explanation 1, then, invites us to look to the beliefs, values, prejudices, shibboleths, and blarney of those who persist on the ASC for more than three years. Perhaps unwitting victims of groupthink themselves, these repeating members encourage groupthink [and lack of wit] among transient students and faculty on the ASC. This is especially the case with faculty who are merely serving their time on the committee, a special matter to be considered in a subsequent part of our inventory.

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But the fixtures together constitute largely a constant. Constants seldom explain variables.