Not a scintilla of scintillation

Over the past few days, I have read (well, skimmed) five years' worth of minutes of Faculty Council meetings. "Scintillating" is not the word I would use to describe the experience. It was a reading (skimming) experience fraught with, well, I don't know what you'd call that odd mixture of puzzlement, concern, and sheer boredom.

I'm trying to track down whether or when a particular piece of legislation was approved by Council, and while I haven't found the answer to that question, I have learned some other things, such as the Law of Lacunae: the more you need to know something, the less likely it is to appear in the minutes. There are gaps in the minutes, such as an early April meeting in which the March minutes were approved--but the March minutes are missing from the archive. Some minutes consist of four or five short sentences to describe two-hour meetings, while others go on for page after page of excruciating detail about matters that must have seemed important at the time, but again, "scintillating" is not the word.

It's encouraging to be reminded of all the important matters Council has discussed and actions it has taken in the past five years, but it's discouraging to see certain topics coming up for agonized and lengthy discussions year after year after year without much evidence of change. We're clearly working really hard to make things happen, so why do we keep coming back to the same issues over and over? Perhaps there's no solutions, or perhaps we're not equipped to find it.

At this point I'm willing to admit that I'm not equipped to find the missing piece of legislation, so I intend to bring it up to Council again and see if we can make any headway. Let's see if we can jog loose any memory of when this matter was approved--and if not, let's go back and restart the conversation, as we have done so many times before.

Scintillating it isn't. But no one ever said faculty governance would be scintillating.