TITLE: A Two Cultures Theory of Meetings AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: June 14, 2022 2:48 PM DESC: ----- BODY:

This ended up reminding me of the Two Cultures theory of meetings that I heard (second-hand) from a former Dean (a Classics professor, for the record). This was prompted by her noticing that the scientists and engineers always seemed grumpy and impatient about having meetings during work hours, where folks from the non-STEM fields were more cheerful. She realized that this was largely because the STEM folks tended to do research in their labs and offices on campus, during the day, so having a meeting was directly taking them away from productive time. For folks on the more literary side of academia, the actual scholarly work of reading and writing was mostly done elsewhere— at home, in coffee shops, at archives— and at times outside the normal academic workday— in the evening, during the summer, etc. As a result, they tended to only come to campus for classes, meetings, and socialization, and the latter two tended to blend together.

Now I'm thinking back over my years as a faculty member and department head. I've been attending meetings mostly with administrators for so now long that I my experience is blunted: the days of science department heads are less different from the days of arts and humanities department heads than the differences for the corresponding faculty. Most admins seem reconciled, if ruefully, to their meetings. Being a computer scientist affects my experience, too. Most of our faculty are software people who can read and write code from anywhere. In this regard, we are perhaps more like arts and humanities folks than other scientists are. When I think back on my interactions with CS colleagues, the ones least likely to want to meet at any old time are (1) people who do work with hardware in their labs and (2) people doing the most serious research. The second group tend to guard their creative time more carefully in all respects. The other thing coloring my experience is... me. I am frequently grumpy and impatient about having meetings at all, during regular work hours or not, because so many of them come up on the wrong side of the cost/benefit ledger. A lot of university meetings happen only because they are supposed to happen. Many of my colleagues are congenial about this and manage to find ways to put the time to good use for them and, presumably, many other participants. I'd generally like to get back to work on more pressing, or interesting, matters. But that is getting a bit far afield from the basic observation of a Two Cultures-style split, which is founded, I think, on the notion that the meetings in question are essential or at least important enough to hold. In that narrower context, I think Chad's colleague may be on to something. ~~~~~ Photo by Nikola Johnny Mirkovic on Unsplash. -----