The headline of this article is not a negative reaction. Instead, it is a rather shocking realization that people can sometimes be civil. Recently, I had my first faculty meeting of the new academic year. Given my lengthy history of faculty meetings, I have rarely ever approached them with a sliver of optimism.
In fact, I began questioning some of my life choices after my very first faculty meeting at Remus College. Between the collective fear of military veterans “losing it” in class and the chair of the meeting commenting that faculty should no longer get into relationships with students, I wondered if I had wandered into the Twilight Zone. I witnessed a lot of asinine things while working there. It is all well documented in my book series, so I will not go in depth here.
When I began working at Romulus University, things felt a little more normal. At first, there were no outlandish comments or bizarre paranoia. It took a few years for the cracks to start to show. It reminds me of when I was growing up, thinking I had a relatively “tame” family, only to discover that they were far more dysfunctional than I realized as I got older. As things got more chaotic during what I will call “The Upheaval”, the faculty’s true personalities started to emerge. It reminds me of when the final boss in a video game takes on a second form that is scarier than the first, and its health bar regenerates into an even longer one.
Going into my first faculty meeting here at New Harbor, I had no idea what to expect. I remember the faculty training conference was lively and upbeat. However, I didn’t expect that to happen again. Surely some of the more outspoken characters would show up at this meeting. To my surprise, the meeting was relatively stoic and unemotional. It was borderline Vulcan. Mr. Spock would be neutral about the situation, given his penchant for logic, as no emotion was on display. The questions were appropriate and warranted. They prioritized clarification and transparency, and people were civil. Nobody got into a huff over anything that I could notice.
The faculty couldn’t be putting on an act for me because nobody is coordinated enough to maintain work-culture appearances over six weeks without somebody cracking. Turns out, it isn’t an act. There was relatively little ego on display at the meeting. That is not to say that there weren’t a few outbursts of first-world problems, but even those were insanely tame. In fact, I would call their complaints downright adorable. The biggest complaint I heard was about missing a few chairs in a classroom. At Remus, I have held class in rooms that didn’t have seats for two-thirds of the class. No matter how much I reported, it took a near miracle from God to get those desks. Well, that, and one of the students happened to work in the president’s office. If this is the level of complaint that I hear in meetings, I think I’ll be okay here.