ON COMMITTEE MEMBERS
by Robert Runté
Reprinted from
I'm Not boring You Am I?
(1985)
Please Note: This was written when I still worked for the Education ministry.
I recently attended a committee meeting during which it slowly dawned on me that one of the committee members was an idiot.
Of course, the same could be said for any number of people with whom I work, but I am usually able to identify these fools the moment they disagree with me. (This is a joke, ok?) In this particular case, however, it wasn't a question of the woman taking a contrary or unsupportable position, but that she had no position at all. In fact, she appeared to be completely unable to follow the discussion at hand, and it became increasingly evident that she was attempting to bluff her way through a conversation that was entirely over her head.
Watching her, I realized that ten or twenty minutes after another speaker had made a proposal, she would simply repeat it, but in slightly different words. If I suggested, for example, that Topic A should be increased to 20% of a particular course and Topic B be restricted to 30%, a few minutes later she would propose that Topic B constitute 30% and that Topic A only count 20%. It sounded like she was saying something new and different (especially as the initial proposal would have been lost in the intervening discussion), but also rather intellegent since it essentially agreed with one's own position. In point of fact, she never contributed a single original idea.
This became evident only because, sitting in for the regular Chair, the chair of this particular session was a jokester who argues largely by reducto ad absurdum. If, for example, he felt that a particular section of the curriculum was receiving too much emphasis, he would advocate in a deadpan delivery that this objective was the most important piece of knowledge known to man and should be given 100% emphasis in all subjects at all grade levels. We would then all have a good laugh and agree to drop it from the course.
All, that is, except this woman. Ten minutes later she would solemly pronounce that this was a key objective and should be considered part of the essential learnings across disciplines. A shocked silence would follow, until someone would ask her to expand on her reasoning for this. She would then refer to the Chair's comments. The Chair would point out that he had been kidding. "Oh", she would say, "Yes. Yes, of course. I was making a joke too." Then the whole sorry pattern would be repeated a half hour later.
Her inability to distinguish between facetious and serious comment clearly indicates that she had no handle on the discussion at all, and revealed a pattern of bluffing built around parroting that is truly mindboggling.
Her ignorance was particularly astonishing because she has an established reputation as a highly knowledge expert in the area, a woman to whom the vast government bureaucracy constantly defers. How could such an abysmally stupid person manage to obtain such a prominent position?
Then the full horror of it all hit me as I realized that she had climbed to this height through my own intervention. Eight years ago I had put together a committee to validate an examination for which I was responsible, and her name came up as an experienced classroom teacher in the subject area. Mind you, no one had actually said that she was any good at it, just that she had racked up senority and was reasonably pleasant. But then someone over in the Curriculum Branch, struggling with the difficult problem of staffing one of their committees, decided that if she had worked on one of my committees she must be ok. Once on that curriculum committee, her name naturally came up to sit on this other departmental committee, and having sat on three separate committees, became the obvious candidate for promotion to a more senior advisory group. As each committee appointment increased her stature with her local school board, her superintendent naturally came to regard her as one of his key assests, and recommended her for yet more exhaulted positions.
The scariest aspect of all this, is that the same processes function at the highest levels of government and management. Bush made it to President of the United States thanks largely to his experience as Vice President. And now Dan Quayle is Vice President . . . .
