Faculty Beat is Business as Usual

The faculty meeting on Tuesday, April 1, began as faculty meetings typically do, with President Audrey Bilger taking the podium and bringing the minutes from the February 30 faculty meeting for approval. She then sighed and moved on to more serious matters. “I know we are all seeing deeply troubling events across the country and the world, and I share your concerns. After all, my wife and I almost lost our third yacht to sea monster attacks!” Bilger said, visibly emotional. “But I promise you, we will stand together as a community, and we will make it through together.” When asked by an audience member what specific actions the college was going to take to protect the community from zombies and other major concerns, Bilger simply said that a task force had been formed and they would continue to “persevere.”

Bilger also announced that, due to the continuing decline in enrollment and the corresponding decrease in income, the college is looking into alternate revenue streams. She said task forces had been formed to look into art heists, perpetual motion machines, and embedding ads in all official college correspondence. Additionally, she reported that, to save money, the college is looking into replacing several Residence Life employees with AI, which she predicted would cause no problems whatsoever.

Then, she turned the podium over to Dean of the Faculty Kathy Oleson. Oleson echoed Bilger’s concerns about the state of the world, with no further updates about what was actually being done. Moving onto brighter topics, she announced that this year’s faculty retreat will be held in the basement of a first-year student in the Bay Area, with weed catered by Gary Granger (more details to come). She also shared that, following a suggestion by the new Residence Life AI, all faculty will now be housed in Foster-Scholz-McNaughton. The sophomores who would have lived there will instead live in those faculty’s off-campus residences, which will be counted as on-campus housing for the purposes of the two-year residency requirement. There was a somewhat long debate about whether faculty are allowed to vote on this proposal per the bylaws, given that Residence Life is not really under their jurisdiction. The parliamentarian was preoccupied by a swarm of one thousand duck-sized horses and therefore was of no help whatsoever, so Oleson tabled it for future discussion.

Oleson then invited up Karnell McConnell-Black, Vice President of Student Life. He announced that due to concerns about student safety, the Owl Fight will be canceled this year. He said that CSOs were en route at that very moment to take possession of the Doyle Owl and return it to its rightful domain in Doyle. (The Quest has heard unconfirmed reports that a group of CSOs did break into a student’s off-campus residence, apparently in the hopes of stealing the Doyle Owl, but they were allegedly held back by a series of Home Alone-style booby traps.) “Don’t worry,” McConnell-Black said, “we recognize the importance of the owl scrum to campus culture. In its place, OSE will be organizing an egg and spoon race, in which the eggs are painted to look like miniature owls. We are excited to work with the student body to create a new tradition, which we hope will be just as fun and provide greatly needed stress relief.” 

Next was Ann Delehanty with the Committee on Academic Policy and Planning (CAPP) report. She had several major proposals. First was the approval of a new study abroad program in Atlantis, the famed sunken island. One professor asked how students were going to breathe. Delehanty acknowledged that this was a very important question. Unfortunately, your Quest reporter was distracted by the raging tornado outside and missed her response. It seemed satisfactory, though, given the responses of faculty members when this reporter zoned back in. Faculty also debated whether the Atlantean language would break the technology of the registrar’s system; whether this program really added anything that wasn’t offered by existing study abroad options; and whether it would create too much work for staff to deal with the amount of wet socks that would be created. When Delehanty finally called for a vote, it was so close that Bilger had to manually count the raised hands, but the program was ultimately approved.

Delehanty also brought a slate of new courses for approval: ANTH 336: Applied Witchcraft and Occult Studies, BIO 141: Introduction to Cryptozoology, ENG 005: ABCs, ENG 251: Advanced Smut Studies, HIST 395: The History of Noses, PE 101: Killing 108 Suitors, PHIL 330: Communication with the Beyond, and PSY 352: Teaching Rats Dragon Staff. All were approved easily, for the first and only nice, unanimous decision of the meeting (approving the minutes doesn’t count). 

Finally, there was a proposal to create a new Constructed Languages department under the Division of Literature and Languages, including potential new classes in Toki Pona, Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish, and more. Unsurprisingly, this sparked a long discussion. Arguments in favor included that students are very interested in these topics; there’s a lot of academic merit to learning a new language; and being able to communicate with elves is obviously very important in today’s global world. The chief argument against the proposal was that creating a new department, especially one in the already-large Group I, would pull funding from existing departments. This spiraled into the longstanding debate about whether faculty are making decisions based on pedagogy or enrollment and didn’t really get anywhere. The proposal ultimately passed very narrowly, for the second hand-counted vote of the meeting.

Up next was the Committee on Advancement and Tenure (CAT) report. Jan Mieskowski was away at a German fanfiction convention, so the report was given by his identical twin, Jan Meowski. Meowski provided very serious updates on the status of Socks, Habibi, and the dogs that chased him down the street on his way to the faculty meeting. He ended with a sad, pathetic little meow and appeared to eat a raw mouse on his way back to his seat until he was distracted by a laser pointer and ran rapidly out of the room on all fours.

The rest of the meeting, unsurprisingly, was spent discussing distribution requirements. The discussion was facilitated by committee chair Suzy Renn, who truly has more patience than a kindergarten teacher. Your Quest reporter seemed to have been stuck in a time loop for this part of the meeting, but it’s hard to tell if there were actually time shenanigans or if the discussion was just like that.

The discussion began by debating the merits of a quantitative requirement for approximately the fifth time. One humanities professor, whose name I was unable to catch, said, “I have never seen a class at this school that does not include numbers. After all, even my classes have lots of page numbers—and let me tell you, it takes a lot of math to calculate how many pages to assign in order to make sure my students have no free time!” Another professor responded with something I have written in my notes as “YOU MUST BE OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND IF YOU THINK–” but I am unsure if this is what was actually said or if it was just because “Cabinet Battle #2” was stuck in my head. (Don’t judge, you had a Hamilton phase in middle school too.) It’s worth noting that the Quest is not allowed to record faculty meetings for some reason, probably to prevent us from using the recordings in occult rituals, so all I have to go on is my notes here. Anyway, Renn hastily moved the discussion on at this point before the professors could devolve to throwing food at each other, which is a bit of a shame.

There was an extended debate about whether the groups should be titled Groups 1, 2, and 3 or Groups I, II, and III. I have a thousand words of notes about this discussion but honestly no one cares. Email me if you want to know which of your professors are pro-Roman numerals and which ones apparently hate them with a burning passion. 

For the first actually substantive proposal of the discussion about distribution requirements, there was a proposal to add a conlang requirement. Although there were some arguments for the pedagogical benefit of constructed languages, the discussion mostly centered around whether the new conlang faculty were just proposing this requirement to fuel their own enrollment. There was an amendment to the proposal to just make this an option as part of the already-proposed language requirement; then an amendment to the amendment to propose having the version where it is a subset of the language requirement just be another option in the eventual ranked-choice voting on distribution requirement changes; and then a great deal of discussion about whether they are allowed to have an amendment to an amendment to begin with. (If you’re confused, so is this Quest reporter.) The whole thing seemed to fail eventually, but by this point, half the room was sidetracked by the entrance of a horse-sized duck, so no one quite knows for sure.

For new business, Peter Steinberger (Political Science) rose to share his concerns about the lack of action being taken, and said he wanted it to be noted for the record that someone was concerned. Unfortunately, at this moment, a zombie broke through the window and ate his brains, and the meeting was hastily adjourned.

The next faculty meeting will be held on April 7, if the meteor doesn’t get us first. Students interested in attending should contact presidentsoffice@reed.edu.