Committee Service: An Unpleasant Necessity Of Academic Life

Author: Robert Finn
Date: January 5, 1998

Committee service is one of those time-consuming chores that are part of virtually every academic scientist's life. While many researchers regard committee work as distasteful drudgery, others relish their service. Experienced scientists say that service on internal and external committees, when performed with a strategic eye, can help advance one's career. They also note that there are ways to make serving less onerous and to make committee deliberations more efficient.

Of course, not every scientist is willing to serve on committees. Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the California Institute of Technology, was notorious for avoiding committee work throughout his career.

This clearly placed the burden of additional service on his colleagues, recalls David L. Goodstein, Caltech's vice provost and the Frank J. Giloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor. However, "in Feynman's case nobody would complain. . . . Feynman was much more than a Nobel Prize winner. He was a living legend. Everybody at Caltech basked in his glory."

And even Feynman finally was persuaded to relent. In 1986 he reluctantly agreed to serve on the presidential commission investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. He was instrumental in getting the commission to focus on the twin causes of the disaster: the rubber O-rings that lost their pliability at low temperatures and the pervasive underestimation of risk at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that allowed the spacecraft to be launched despite the cold weather.

UNSUNG SERVICE: Virginia Tech's Joseph Merola suspects that most committee service does little to enhance a scientist's résumé.
"When you think of what Feynman was able to do on the Challenger committee, it's kind of a shame that they didn't have his expertise on some other committees that may have really benefited from it," remarks Joseph S. Merola, a professor of chemistry at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

"Committees perform an important service, especially at a university, where everything is done by consultation, deliberation, that sort of thing," maintains Goodstein. "And so, if you want to participate in the life of a university, you have to be willing to serve on a reasonable number of committees. It can be backbreaking for certain people, like minorities and women . . . who get asked to do everything. You've got to learn how to say no. But I wouldn't make it a principle not to serve on committees unless you're a Feynman." And hardly anyone's a Feynman, Goodstein points out.

Personal Satisfaction

Although some scientists regard committee work as a distasteful chore, others derive great personal satisfaction from their service. A case in point is Rosemarie Marshall, a professor of microbiology at California State University, Los Angeles. She chairs her institution's academic senate, she's a member of the statewide academic senate, she serves on 14 other university committees, and she serves on four committees for the American Association of University Professors and the California Association of Clinical Laboratory Scientists.

One year, "just for the fun of it, I counted my on-campus and in-state committee meetings," notes Marshall. "It was over twelve hundred. But most of these committees I love. . . . I'm interested in what's happening at the university, and I'm interested in the changes and the adaptations that our higher education is undergoing right now. I want to be a part of that change."

Barbara J. Tewksbury, a professor of geology at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., probably echoes the opinions of most scientists when she says, "I enjoy being on committees if there's a job to be done and I think I can contribute. But I don't do it because I particularly like committee service for its own sake."

Beyond personal satisfaction, some committee work can help advance a scientist's professional career. But in this respect, departmental, university-wide, and external committees seem to be valued differently.

CONSIDER YOUR GOALS: AAMC's Janet Bickel notes that the value of committee service to scientists varies according to where they are in their careers.
As to which level of committee service to choose, Janet Bickel, associate vice president for institutional planning and development at the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Medical Colleges, advises, "If your goal is to get tenure, . . . your priorities are going to be different than if your goal is, say, to become president of your specialty society in five years."

Regarding service on departmental committees, Merola comments that conscientious service provides few tangible benefits, but "if you don't do a good job, you can certainly get an awful lot of negative reward for it."

Merola considers service on university-wide committees less beneficial than departmental service to one's career. He points out that most performance evaluations come at the department level, and deans rarely provide input to the department chairperson regarding a faculty member's committee service. "That kind of stuff is ignored," Merola complains. "It's invisible to people at the department level."

And concerning committee service in general, Merola comments, "If you think you're going to get brownie points, or if you think that somehow this is going to look good on the résumé, I have a suspicion that the number of brownie points and the value on a résumé of most committees is pretty darn low."

External committees may be the exception. "If your goal is to develop a national currency in your field as a scientist, getting on the [National Institutes of Health] study section in your area is extremely important to your development and can also increase your currency at the institution," suggests Bickel (R. Finn, The Scientist, Aug. 21, 1995, page 1).

"One of the most helpful things that could happen to a new assistant professor is to serve on a review panel where they actually read proposals," contends Earl D. Mitchell, Jr., a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and associate vice president for multicultural affairs at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater. Work on these panels, Mitchell points out, serves as an excellent lesson in proposal writing.

Tewksbury, who serves on the executive committee of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT), thinks that service with professional societies is especially likely to enhance a scientist's career. About the NAGT executive committee, she notes, "It allowed me to develop contacts with people all over the country. . . . Those are the kinds of professional connections that can mean a lot to someone's career."

THAT'S LIFE: Caltech's David Goodstein says committee service is essential "if you want to participate in the life of a university."

Committees To Avoid

Clearly, some committees are more onerous than others. According to Marshall, committees established to select new faculty members fall into this category. "Sometimes on a selection committee you end up doing a lot of [tasks like] calling references, and you're meeting people at the airport, and you're squiring them around, and you're picking out the hotels, and those kinds of duties are extraordinarily time-consuming."

Goodstein highlights a different kind of committee whose work is extremely significant yet particularly unpleasant. "When we have those rare cases of scientific misconduct, . . . an investigating committee gets formed. And that might take up many hours of your time every week for a period of a year or more. And furthermore, it's a business that you don't want to be involved in at all. You're dealing with something that's extremely distasteful."

At the other end of the significance scale, Tewksbury recalls a time she served on the library committee. The problem was that the administration was uninterested in the committee's input. "I don't think we ever accomplished anything. Nobody ever asked us our opinion [and] it was a waste of time."

In order for a committee to be worthwhile, "the committee has to have a specific agenda or series of agendas. You need to know what you're there for and what the goal is," contends Tewksbury. "There needs to be some sense that . . . the discussion is going to be focused, that it's going to be directed, that it's going to go somewhere."

She suggests that at the first meeting of a committee the members should engage in brainstorming, coming up with as many as 50 ideas, which should be written on large pieces of paper. Then, every committee member should be asked to go up and put an X next to what he or she considers the three to five most important ideas. The committee would then work only on the ideas that drew substantial interest.

Tewksbury says that this technique can be especially effective "if one person on the committee who's really loud and really obnoxious and really persistent keeps pushing on a topic that nobody else wants to talk about. You can point to the list and say, 'But that's not what's important to the majority of the people on this committee, so let's put it aside.' That allows you to narrow down what it is you're talking about and not get sidetracked on some pet thing that somebody has a bee in his bonnet about."

What some people dislike about committee service is not the work itself but the meetings. "I think committees work best outside of formal meetings," maintains Merola. "I think committees work best when each individual is given a small chunk of the task, and everybody goes and does their job and comes back and it is all put together into one whole."

In this regard, "E-mail has revolutionized committee service," observes Tewksbury. In the NAGT executive committee, for example, members float proposals in E-mail for others to react to and revise. "By the time we bring it to the meeting there's far less to discuss. We can get more business done, we can spend more time brainstorming about the future, about strategic planning and so on." Still, she says, "There's nothing that substitutes for face-to-face meetings and talking."

CROWDED CALENDAR: Cal State's Rosemarie Mitchell once calculated that she had attended more than 1,200 committee meetings in a year.
Despite the efficiencies of E-mail, committee service tends to be a particular problem for junior faculty members, who have higher priorities. Many universities make allowances for this. Marshall notes that at her institution, "we try not to get new faculty too involved in university governance beyond their department level because the time commitment is so considerable, and at that stage of their careers most faculty need to work hard on their instructional performance and on their professional development."

Tokenism

But observers of the academic scene point out that scientists who are women or members of minority groups often are asked to serve in an attempt to promote diversity on committees. Since women and minorities are in relatively short supply, they may be asked to serve with greater frequency than their white male colleagues. This tokenism is unfair, some say.

"I think the intentions are often good, but it backfires in many ways," contends Bickel. "One is that a token is very unlikely to be effective because they're seen as a spokesperson for a huge group of people that they may not be any more alike than the other people sitting around the table. And the expectations for that person's contributions tend to be either skewed or higher, so that it's very difficult for that person to really be part of the team."

Marshall, however, thinks tokenism is dying out. "I think that might have been true 10 years ago or five years ago, but I think we've kind of caught on. I think that, at least in the California State University, our faculty is becoming very diverse, and we're understanding that the membership and service one would expect of a minority faculty member or a female faculty member should be no different than that which we would expect of any other faculty member."

Tewksbury recalls that she was flattered as a young scientist to be asked to serve on important committees. "It's easy to do what I did and say, 'Wow, they're asking me to serve. I'm really honored to do this. I'm so pleased that they're asking me.' Unless you keep a perspective on who else is doing what, you can easily be overwhelmed by committee service and not devote the kind of time you need to teaching and research." Tewksbury says that in part it's up to the department chairperson and other senior faculty members to let their junior colleagues know that it's okay to say no to committee service.

Saying No

One way to say no without literally saying no is to agree to serve only on committees that aren't much work. "There's a tremendous difference in workload between different committees," explains Goodstein. "Some committees are in name only and never meet. Other committees are really working committees that take a great deal of time. You can choose the ones that don't take a lot of time and say no to the others."

"Sometimes you can't say no even if you don't think [the committee] is going to advance your career because there's an institutional service expectation for every faculty member," Bickel points out. But she goes on to suggest that faculty members go to their departmental chairpersons and "strategically articulate" their goals and priorities while listing their current time commitments. And she suggests that instead of giving a flat no to a request for committee service, faculty members could postpone service or give a partial yes-promising to divide the labor with someone else, for example.

Given the realities of academic life, the consensus seems to be that most academic scientists will have to grin and bear the necessity of committee service although the rewards for such service often are meager. Goodstein likes to tell a story illustrating that committee service is subject to the wry adage, "no good deed goes unpunished."

Some years ago he served on a Caltech committee investigating the core curricula at several universities. He was assigned to write a report about the University of Chicago. "I don't know whether anybody on the Caltech committee actually read the report," Goodstein recalls, "except for my son. He read it and decided he wanted to go to Chicago.

"Cost me a fortune."

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