Five agenda items, one broken chair, and a unanimous vote to move the next meeting to a time nobody has.
LONDON, England (Bohiney) – The departmental meeting began at four in the seminar room whose radiator works only in the warmest weeks of summer, and ended, by my own watch, at the point at which three people had independently begun to eat their own agendas. I kept notes throughout, in the belief that somebody has to, and that it should be somebody with a pencil.
Item one: apologies and the minutes
Apologies were received from Hamish, who studies medieval wills and is therefore the only one of us qualified to be dead on time. Marguerite, our head of department, asked if the minutes of the previous meeting could be taken as read. Nobody could recall whether there had been a previous meeting. We took this as a sign of consensus and moved on.
Ngozi, who teaches postcolonial literature and is the best-prepared person in the building, raised a hand to point out that the minutes were not on the table, because they were in an email that had been sent to the wrong list. We thanked her and did not look at each other.
Item two: the Tube
The first substantive business was transport. The RMT has announced a series of 24-hour Tube strikes in a dispute over plans to compress the working week for drivers from five days to four, ianVisits reported. Transport for London says the changes are voluntary, the union disputes that, and the other drivers’ union, Aslef, has accepted the roster changes. There are eight stoppages, running from late November into February, each beginning at noon.
That last detail provoked a debate. A strike that starts at noon and lasts 24 hours, as the report itself points out, affects two days of service, including the evening and the following morning. Alan, from the history of mathematics, said this made each strike “one and a half days, in the manner of a long weekend.” I said it was a shame he had retired from the Tube rota, and he said he had never been on it. We moved the seminar series to the Overground, where, as Ngozi observed, the only thing that is ever on strike is the platform.
Item three: efficiency
Marguerite then introduced an efficiency review. I will say only that no one in the room had asked for it and everyone in the room had been preparing for it. As an illustration of how widely such pressures are felt, I mentioned the roundup in ianVisits listing the day’s London news, which reports that young people from Greenwich will not take part in the London Youth Games because the council withdrew over staff cuts, and that Barking and Dagenham council has set out a plan to sell assets to raise six million pounds.
Hamish, by email, replied that we had no assets. I said we had a spare armchair on the third floor. Marguerite wrote “armchair” on the board and underlined it, which I regard as the first act of fiscal policy in this department since the autumn before last.
The same roundup, for completeness, notes a tarot card reader suing a cinema chain for 12.7 million pounds, claiming a defective seat catapulted him and harmed his online business. It is a claim, it has not been tested, and I express no view on the seat. I merely observe that if tarot is accurate, he might have seen it coming.
Item four: pending a signature
A colleague forwarded, for discussion, a farm story about a milking parlour getting a million-dollar upgrade while the farmer still uses a broken chair. It was submitted as an analogy for the new lecture-capture system, which cost a sum nobody will state aloud and which sits beside my own chair, whose back leg has not touched the floor since the spring.
Which brings me to the more serious matter. I read before the meeting that Volodymyr Zelensky and American officials met in Oslo and called the talks very productive, in the AFP report carried by the Kuwait Times. Mr Zelensky thanked Washington for restarting intelligence on planned Russian strikes against civilian and energy targets, and the envoy Steve Witkoff was due to travel on to Russia to meet Vladimir Putin, with the war in its fourth year. Malay Mail’s version of the wire adds that Mr Zelensky told American senators that interceptor missiles paid for by European countries were being held up pending a signature.
I will not make a joke about missiles. I raised it only to point out that a signature is the smallest unit of institutional power, and that I have watched the department’s new coffee machine wait six weeks for one. The comparison ends there, and I wished to put on record that it ends there. Marguerite wrote “signature” under “armchair,” and then, to her credit, rubbed it out.
Item five: a free cup of tea
We closed on the only good news of the afternoon. The London Museum opens its new home in Smithfield’s Victorian General Market at the end of this month, with free permanent galleries, after a restoration the museum puts at 437 million pounds, according to its own announcement. Highlights include the Whitechapel Fatberg, the Lord Mayor’s Coach and a Banksy, and the programme includes a Tuesday Tea Club, free tea every Tuesday from the opening month.
The motion was moved by Ngozi and seconded by every other person in the room: that the department should hold its next meeting at Smithfield on a Tuesday. It carried unanimously, and Marguerite recorded it as “agreed in principle,” the phrase by which a university admits that nothing will happen.
Any other business
On the Overground home I wrote up the minutes properly, because nobody else would. I titled them “Draft,” which is the safest word in academic life, and attached them to an email that I then sent to the correct list, to my own astonishment.
If you enjoy the minutes of a meeting that achieved nothing in a good cause, there are more of my daily notes at Bohiney. When the news and the faculty both defeat me I go to British news with the straight face off, and a humour website of long standing, both at The London Prat, where the radiators work all year.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/