After passionate debate, a path forward

I think my favorite moment at the faculty meeting last night occurred when a colleague who is not a native English speaker struggled to produce the phrase "throw out the baby with the bathwater" and colleagues from all departments and divisions of campus and from every side of the conflict chimed in to help her out. See? We know how to work together!

This was the fourth and, thankfully, the last in a series of very long faculty meetings (most lasting two or more hours) in which we've been debating a proposal to make sweeping changes to the General Education curriculum. Depending on whom you ask, the new curriculum is either The End of the World as We Know It or The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. After all those meetings and all those hours of (mostly civil) debate, the Sliced Bread party prevailed, although not by much.

In the end I was more interested in the process of the debate than in the final vote. Yes, we'll have to make some changes to adjust to the new curriculum, and our department will need to start working on a new minor and perhaps discover some other ways to engage students outside the major, but we can handle that. What impressed me is that we survived some pretty passionate debate without losing respect for each other.

Lots of faculty members spoke--from untenured newbies to grizzled veterans of the curriculum wars. Most spoke succinctly and to the purpose. The Faculty Chair and his assistants from Council kept the debate orderly and civil, assuring that no single voice dominated and that those who wanted to speak could be heard.

And they were heard. There was some very intense listening going on in that room, and even when remarks got a little heated, no one was rude or dismissive. It does us good as a faculty, I think, to hear how much our colleagues on all sides care about our duty to provide a meaningful education for our students, and nothing happened at any of those meetings that will prevent us from working well together in the future.

Aside from a few minor tweaks, this is the first major revision of our General Education curriculum since around 2001, when I was the untenured newbie uncertain whether I could contribute anything to the debate. I don't recall much about those meetings, but I could name some colleagues so incensed by the result that they stopped speaking to each other--permanently. 

But I won't. Because life goes on, you know? Times change, curricula change, committee appointments change, and we will all have to keep working with each other regardless of which side of the debate we favored. This time, though, I think we can do it.