Faculty meetings may have their charms, but efficiency does not rank among them. Many a time I have looked around a room full of my colleagues, long minutes into a winding discussion of what was supposed to take only a few moments to resolve, considered the full agenda still stretching before us, and bemoaned the deadweight social costs of law school governance. Allow me, then, to share a couple of partial cures—one an old favorite and the other a new find—from Robert's Rules of Order.
I've long been a fan of "calling the question," as we casually style the motion at my school. Full-on Robert's geeks know it as the "Previous Question" motion. Call it what you like, you have to love its effect: It takes precedence over every debatable question and, if the motion carries, forces a vote on the issue under debate.
Suppose, for instance, that a handful of faculty members have been arguing back and forth about some relatively inconsequential motion for 20 minutes or so, as everyone else's attention wanders and more important business goes untended. You get the Chair to recognize you and simply say, "I move to call the question." Once the motion carries—and often with sighs of relief—you and your colleagues can vote on the trifling motion and move on to other topics. (Section 20 of the Rules offers caveats and details, but most law school faculties seem to manage, surprisingly enough, with less than the full panoply of formalities.) Try calling a question the next time a faculty meeting starts spinning its wheels. You—and most your colleagues—will enjoy the ride.
Calling the question does not cure all the inefficiencies that afflict faculty meetings, however. Because we law profs so love to hear ourselves speak, for instance, we sometimes run on (and on and on) a bit. Polite coughs, finger drumming, and the like usually suffices to keep our monopolizing tendencies in control, happily. In fact, it was only very recently that I found myself wondering what a fellow could do when those informal measures failed. Here, too, Robert's Rules offers a remedy: a Question of Order pertaining to decorum.
Roberts Rule's provides, in § 34, that "no member shall speak more than twice to the same question . . . nor longer than ten minutes at one time, without leave of the assembly, and the question upon granting the leave shall be decided by a two-thirds vote [§ 39] without debate." Upon encountering an infraction of that rule, you have the right to interrupt the speaker. As section 14 says, one who so objects "shall rise from his seat, and say, 'Mr. Chairman, I rise to a point of order.'" The Chair must then decide the issue immediately, without debate. If the Chair finds the challenged speaker out of order, and if anyone objects to the speaker continuing, he or she must cede the floor unless the assembly votes to grant leave.
That sounds like strong medicine, granted, and would doubtless ruffle some feathers. But faculty meetings pose a classic tragedy of the commons, one where just a few overly-talkative people risk consuming far more than their fair share of everyone else's time and attention. Raising a Question of Order can help you save you—and thus your school—from the perils of a grossly inefficient faculty meeting.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, MoneyLaw.]
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
My Favorite Motions
Friday, January 01, 2010
Linguo-Economic Blogging
Two recent posts at my brother Neal’s blog “Literal-Minded” caught my attention because of their connection to economics.
First, Neal links an article on whether “no problem” is an acceptable substitute for “you’re welcome.” Personally, I have no problem with “no problem.” In fact, I think it’s often preferable to the somewhat stuffy “you’re welcome.” But it’s notable that the no-problem opponents’ chief complaint relates to the use of “no problem” in commercial contexts:
Many especially dislike hearing “no problem” in commercial transactions and from folks in customer service jobs, since, as the customer is always right, nothing a customer could ask for could ever be “a problem.” “I assume my business is not a problem,” huffed one complainer on the message boards at the Visual Thesaurus. Others on the Internet have taken the same tack: “Why would it be a problem? It’s her job, isn’t it?” and “It better damn well NOT be a problem, because I just gave you my money.”When a commercial transaction has just concluded, I have to agree that “no problem” is inappropriate -- but not for the reasons stated. “You’re welcome” would sound just as bad to me as “no problem” because, as I’ve observed before, the appropriate response to “thank you” in this context is “thank you.” Trade is a mutually beneficial transaction, in which both parties do something that benefits the other. In the context of a straight-up favor, on the other hand, the benefits travel in one direction only.
Second, Neal has a column at Visual Thesaurus on a subtle shift in the usage of “choice” by educators. Apparently it has become common practice to use the language of choice when describing behavior -- usually bad behavior -- by students. “Doug chose not to do his homework today,” for instance. Neal describes a movement from “free-choice choose” to “take-responsibility-for-your-own-behavior choose”:
Schoolchildren are told not to behave, but to make good choices, take responsibility for the choices they make, and accept the consequences that come with them. It's not that I didn't hear similar messages when I was in school: My senior English teacher had a poster that read, "There are neither rewards nor punishments; only consequences." But the way I hear that message in schools now, it's usually phrased with choose or choice. On a high school teacher's desk recently, I saw a sign reading, "Let the choices you make today be the choices you can live with tomorrow."Like Neal, I find this use of "choice" irksome, but I've been struggling to put a finger on why. After all, they're right: kids do make choices, and choices have consequences. Some choices lead to better consequences than others. What's wrong with saying that?
And I don't think it matters that some choices are clearly better than others. When people say, "I had no choice," that's often hyperbole. What they really mean is that some of their options sucked, so they went with the obviously best option. Nothing in the concept of choice requires all options to have similar value.
I think what bothers me about the new usage of "choice" is this: They're using the idea of choice to obscure the difference between natural consequences and deliberately imposed consequences. When you choose not to exercise, a natural consequence is that you'll get fat and have less energy. A deliberately imposed consequence is that your parent will dock your allowance, or your teacher will make you sit in the corner. Neal gets at this distinction when he says, “Only a few students are so cynical as to suggest that a choice between one alternative with a punishment attached and another without one is not really a choice.” I don’t agree that it’s not really a choice -- you really do have the option of taking the unpleasant alternative -- but I agree that an important distinction is being glossed over.
The failure to recognize the natural-vs-imposed distinction is potentially dangerous. It allows, for instance, a drug warrior to claim that the drug war respects freedom of choice. "You choose to take drugs, and you pay the price: going to jail." But just because you still have a choice doesn't mean your freedom of choice has been respected.
New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes, Part 7: The Inevitable Misinterpretation of New Paternalist Arguments
Happy new year! After a holiday-induced hiatus, I’m now resuming the series of excerpts from Mario Rizzo’s and my recently published article, “Little Brother Is Watching You: New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes.”
A number of our claims in the paper rely on the new paternalists’ arguments (which are largely based in behavioral economics) being misconstrued or misrepresented by other parties such as politicians, bureaucrats, and rent-seekers. We claim such people will often employ simplified, unsophisticated versions of the new paternalists’ arguments when crafting policy. Is this a fair line of criticism? We believe it is (p. 723):
Experts, and more broadly intellectuals like the readers of scientific and law journals, naturally respond to sophisticated argumentation. The complex interaction of multiple justifications is their favored milieu, the drawing of distinctions their stock in trade. Some of the claims of this Part might, therefore, seem anti-intellectual or unfair, because we are discussing the misinterpretation of the new paternalists’ arguments, rather than the new paternalists’ actual arguments. Why can’t the experts simply reject the simplification, distortion, and expansion of their justifications for policy?
The answer is twofold. First, intellectuals cannot always control the development of their own ideas. Many regular people, whose job is not the careful parsing of sophisticated arguments, nevertheless affect the policy process. These regular people include voters, of course, but in varying degrees other public decisionmakers, such as politicians, bureaucrats, and some judges. The point is not that such people are stupid, but that they are rationally ignorant. They act based on simplified versions of arguments because they do not have the time, energy, or motivation to explore the sophisticated versions. In short, simple is easy; complex is hard.The core of the new paternalists’ position is, put simply, that people make mistakes. If they are right (and surely they are), then they cannot deny or ignore the mistakes that will inevitably be made in the process of translating their policy prescriptions into political reality.
Second, decision-making takes place in a social context. The fact that some people will recognize certain distinctions as relevant does not mean that others will. The decisionmakers who create a policy are not necessarily the people who enforce it, or who interpret it, or who consider extensions of it. We therefore need to keep in mind Bernard Williams’s distinction between “reasonable distinctions” and “effective distinctions.” The former are distinctions for which a reasoned argument can be made, whereas the latter are distinctions that can be defended “as a matter of social or psychological fact.” The social and psychological facts, in a world of rational ignorance, often point toward simplification and even distortion of both theory and fact.
(As usual, full citations are available in the full paper. Cross-posted at ThinkMarkets.)
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