Tiger Chair

As a typical professor of Science, I know little about effective management skills, except what I have been able to pick up along the way by experimenting on students and postdocs. Most of my faculty colleagues have had similar experiences (i.e., a lack thereof), including those who find themselves in charge of committees, departments, and so on. I should therefore have sympathy for these colleagues when they struggle to "manage" us faculty, surely a difficult task for anyone.

And I do have sympathy, to some extent. What I hate, though, is the Scold Approach of management used by some chairpersons of various academic groups. I have recently experienced two modes of the Scold Approach:

Mode 1: in which someone in charge of something scolds a group of people in advance of their having done anything wrong. That is, the scolding is proactive, based on the assumption that some or all of us are likely to screw up, do something annoying, or waste the chairperson's time. This assumption may well be based on experience, but is it effective? Does it in fact decrease the chances of people doing the things they are criticized in advance for hypothetically doing?

Mode 2: in which someone in charge of something scolds certain unnamed people (typically, just one or a few) in a larger group of people, most or all of whom are blameless of the incident provoking the scolding. Recently, while sitting in a group that was scolded for something rather strange, I then spent the next 5-10 minutes sifting through the possibilities to understand the reason for, and the targets of, this criticism. I concluded that one or two people who were at the meeting were being scolded for possibly not being at the meeting, although they were definitely there and had not missed any meetings for months. As far as I could tell, all of us at the meeting were vaguely warned that we should all be at the meeting because 1-2 people might not have attended even though they did.

Is the Scold Approach an approved management technique, widely known as an example of best practices for persons tasked with producing deliverables whose outcomes for stakeholders need to be assessed? (for example)

This approach doesn't work well on me, perhaps for the same reason that use of the terms stakeholders and deliverables in an academic context makes me queasy. That is, being proactively scolded does not inspire me to be a better person who follows the rules in a timely way.

In place of mode 1, I would instead prefer being made aware of the rules/guidelines/deadlines/policies and politely reminded of what is required, and in place of mode 2, well, I would just get rid of mode 2. If there is a specific issue that potentially affects a small number of people, why not just talk to those individuals and not bother the rest of the group unless it becomes relevant to do so?

Those would be my preferences, but perhaps my approach would lead to misbehavior and chaos. I haven't found that to be the case with my gentle, non-scolding approach to parenting, which may or may not be different in important ways from being in charge of an academic committee or unit.

Perhaps mode 1 does decrease problems and makes a committee or unit run more smoothly? And perhaps mode 2 is a good way of reminding the group about procedures and expectations? I am hoping that readers will chime in and say "No no no, those are terrible ways to lead a group of people. It is much better to be nice and efficient than to be scolding and random. The next time someone proactively scolds you like that, you should snarl at them and show your fangs."

But feel free to dash these hopes.

Bludgeoned by Meetings (But Not Today)

On this Thanksgiving Day, I am just thankful that I don't have a meeting today. Otherwise, 'tis the season for time-sucking, soul-destroying meetings (and then more meetings) for me.

If it sounds like I am feeling sorry for myself, that is because I am. Or, more accurately, I was. Tonight I was reading some (= many) files at home on the couch, even though, without even trying, I can think of 127 things I would rather be doing, but then one cat came over to help, then another, and then another. Who knew that cats are so fascinated by committee work? Somehow, file-reading became less of a chore. Also, I wasn't able to get up off the couch, and that helped me stay on task.

I am also thankful that my in-laws are far far away, and that, although they managed to wreak their usual quota of holiday trauma, angst, discord, and despair from afar, that was hours ago, and the cats and I have decided to let go of our unconstructive thoughts about in-laws.

Of course there are many other things for which I am thankful, and if I did not have a cat on my elbow right now, I would list these things, but instead

One-way Traffic?

One of the committees I was on this year recently consumed quite a lot of my time, and involved a marathon session in which a group of faculty from all over the university got together and discussed other faculty. I (mostly) enjoyed the wide-ranging debates and glimpses of academic life in other disciplines. I had particularly intriguing discussions with an art historian and a psychologist, and felt overall that my time on this committee was well-spent.

This was my first time on this committee, which I agreed to join in part because I had always found this committee's methods a bit mysterious and I wanted to know how it worked.

Here are some miscellaneous observations about this committee experience:

1. My generally optimistic view of academics was confirmed. There were a lot of nice people on this large committee. These were faculty who devoted quite a lot of time to tasks intended to help other faculty, and in particular early-career faculty. I would say that the committee is moderately powerful -- not as powerful as a P&T Committee but more powerful than most policy committees. Yet these faculty were not in it for the power or for settling scores or whatever other cynical reasons people might imaging would impel professors to take on a time-consuming committee assignment.

2. When evaluating other faculty, the Liberal Arts Professors (LAPs) and Fine Arts Professors (FAPs) were harder on their colleagues than they were on the scientists, engineers, or social scientists. In fact, the LAPs and FAPs were harder on their colleagues than the scientists etc. were on anyone.

I certainly am not going to make a sweeping conclusion about this based on one experience with a particular set of individuals. Nevertheless, I found this phenomenon quite interesting. Warning: I am about to muse about this one anecdotal event despite the small sample size and lack of a control group, statistical analysis, IRB permission, and coffee.

Hypothesis: The LAPs and FAPs were not comfortable being highly critical about research topics far outside their expertise, so they tended to give the benefit of the doubt to science and engineering faculty. They were more critical of fellow professors, even highly successful ones, because they felt that they had a more solid basis from which to be critical.

The converse was not true -- science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) and social science faculty showed no particular propensity to be more critical of any particular discipline than another. Does this mean that we STEM etc. faculty are nicer? Or are we so egotistical that we think we know something about everything? Or is it because we are not intimidated by the non-scientific research in the same way that the LAPs and FAPs are intimidated by more quantitative fields?

These last questions remind me of a part of the novel Solar (by Ian McEwan), about which I will write more tomorrow. The main character is a loutish Nobel Prize-winning physicist. As a university student, he seduced a young woman by intensely studying up on Milton, her major intellectual interest. He read Milton, he read criticism of Milton, and within a short amount of time he could converse as an apparent expert, impressing her greatly and winning her heart. This woman became the first of his 5 wives.

The successful seduction of this woman by pretending to know and care about Milton..

".. was a turning point in his development, for he knew that no third-year arts person, however, bright, could have passed himself off after a week's study among the undergraduate mathematicians and physicists who were Beard's colleagues. The traffic was one-way.. The reading was a slog, but he encountered nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge, nothing on the scale of difficultly he encountered daily in his course."

Once the physicist has this realization, he feels "intellectually free". Remarkably, although McEwan lets many more obnoxious thoughts and actions pass with no subsequent enlightening experiences to alter the physicist's perception of himself and others, this particular episode is later put into humbling context: many years after the seduction-by-Milton event, the physicist tells the story to a professor of English, who says:

".. you've missed the point. If you had seduced ninety girls with ninety poets, one a week in a course of three academic years, and remembered them all at the end -- the poets, I mean -- and synthesized your reading into some kind of aesthetic overview, then you would have earned yourself a degree in English literature. But don't pretend that it's easy."

On my university committee, I don't think any of the STEM or social sciences faculty shared this fictional physicist's view that the liberal arts are "easy". I saw no evidence that we underestimated the LA or FA research, or thought "I could do that with little or no effort" (because it's so easy).

One of the great things about these all-university committees is that diverse faculty are sitting in a room together. It's difficult to feel (too) skeptical about the rigor of another discipline when faculty from that discipline are sitting across a table from you, making interesting and persuasive contributions to the discussion. The LA and FA professors did need to explain some things to us scientists about the culture of their disciplines -- Why did so many LAPs, for example, seem to have determined the outcome of their research before they started the project? -- but I detected no contempt for "unscientific" research. And whenever we were faced with a research project that seemed truly bizarre, no matter what the topic, we all tended to agree about it.

I don't know why the LA and FA faculty were so harsh on their colleagues. I do know, however, that despite this tendency, the committee overall had no trouble reaching consensus on what what we thought were the best of the best of the faculty/research documents we were examining, no matter what the discipline, so in the end, I don't think the LAPs and FAPs were at a disadvantage by having sharks for colleagues.

If I Have to Stare at One More CV This Year..

This year I somehow I ended up on four (4) committees that review Other Faculty and their research ideas, accomplishments, and/or productivity. This seems excessive to me, but there are at least 2 explanations for this turn of events:

1. The usual reason for senior FSPs: There are so few female full professors in the physical sciences-engineering-math that we get called on quite a lot to serve on certain committees. Sometimes I just say no because I don't have the time (or interest), but sometimes I feel that it is important to say yes. This accounts for one of the committees this year.

2. There is a very nice, competent, hard-working, smart, and generally awesome staff person in charge of organizing some of these committees, and whenever she asks me to serve on a committee, I find that I can't say no. This accounts for 2 of the committees this year.

I have no explanation for the 4th committee, other than I felt that I should do it so that I had a voice in some things about which I would probably otherwise have complained.

I sort of followed my "conservation of committee mass" rule of quitting a committee if I add a new committee. The only one I added without quitting another was the least time-consuming of the four.

In none of these cases, when asked to be on one of these committees (or when I agreed to be nominated for an elected position), did I think "OK, but I really don't want to be on that awful time-wasting committee". I was lucky in that, I guess. I felt that all these committees were in some way worthwhile.

I am pretty sure that I would have said nyet if asked to be a committee that I felt a great reluctance to join because I thought it would be even more boring than most committee assignments or because I didn't think it was a good use of my time. I suppose that is a selfish, but any guilt I might feel is completely assuaged by my awareness of how much time I devote to institutional service.

When asked to be on a committee, do your criteria for accepting vs. declining to be on the committee depend on your prediction of whether you would find the committee interesting and/or a good use of your time, or does your sense of duty and academic citizenship triumph over such selfish concerns?

Always On My Mind

In the old days, when everything was made of paper, certain tasks involved reading file after file after file of documents. Who remembers the old days of submitting NSF proposals on paper, by mail, in quintillioniplicit? Some of us are even (barely) old enough to remember the days before the 15 page limit on the project description.. And if you were on a panel in those days, you no doubt also remember getting boxes filled with proposals (with everyone's Social Security number on the front page!), and then lugging them all back to NSF for the panel meetings.

In addition, in the old days, any committee work that involved the reviewing of files (for admission to an academic program, for hiring, for promotion, for awards) involved spending much time poring over many documents organized in files and binders of various sorts. My file-gazing typically occurred on nights and weekends, when I could have uninterrupted time and access to the files I needed. In some cases, the files could not be removed from a certain room, adding to the logistical complexity of the file-evaluation process and typically decreasing the likelihood of reviewing the files in a comfortable or pleasant setting.

And what if the time you set aside for reviewing documents coincided with the time when your most obnoxious colleague also chose to review documents? I shudder at those memories that I have not yet successfully repressed.

Some of my more senior colleagues tell tales of having to review files late at night in a certain room in an administrative building whose lights all went out at midnight. My colleagues brought flashlights so they could keep reading and, later, find their way out of the darkened building. I rather like the image of professors wearing headlamps, wandering around empty, silent, cavernous buildings in the dark of night, but I'm glad I never had to do that myself.

I know there are some committees that still do things with endless files of paper, but for some committees, everything is online or, at the very least, available in some sort of electronic format that can be accessed via personal computer. I am very happy about this because I like the convenience and the flexibility of being able to examine the relevant documents when I want and where I want. There can be security issues involved with transferring and storing files, but there are ways to deal with that in a reasonably effective way.

The convenience aspects are excellent, but there is a downside to having all the files available all the time: they are always there for you to read. You can never say "Well, here I am at home relaxing on the couch knitting my graph paper patterned sweater. I guess I won't be able to read those files since they are across town and my car is at the mechanics and there is an extremely large cat sleeping on my legs." That excuse is gone. The files are always with you. You don't even have to move the cat.

Not long ago during a committee meeting involving the evaluation of many files consisting of many documents, all of which were available online, one of my fellow committee members pointed to his zippy little laptop and said "You know what's great about this? It's a lot better than larger laptops for working while you're lying in bed."* Some, but not all, members of the committee stared at him, incredulous.

But he kind of had a point. We had an insane number of documents to read in a short amount of time, all the documents were online, and we had 24/7 access to them from our laptops. So why not read them in a comfortable place?

Well, I can think of a few reasons why not, but every day I read files in all sorts of places. The files were always with me, and that turned out to be a good thing. If I had been restricted to reading physical files in a designated secure location, perhaps even in a building across campus from my office, I would have been spending nights and weekends in a dark empty building reading these files. Instead, I read files at home (sitting on a couch), in cafes, in a comfy chair in my office, at my daughter's piano lesson, on airplanes, while driving, and at the dentist's office.**

Despite the potential for feeling oppressed by the ever-present files, for me: convenience rules. I strongly prefer having the relevant documents always with me and available for viewing compared to the old days of complex logistics and piles of files. And I get far fewer paper cuts these days.

* I briefly considered but then rejected a title for this post based on this anecdote; I bet you can guess what it was.

** I made one of these up.

F = 2

Whenever I find myself on a new committee or on a committee whose membership changes from year to year, it is a reflex for me to scan the list of committee members to see if there are other women on the committee. My heart sinks if I am the only woman (F = 1), and I feel immense relief if there is at least one other woman (F >= 2).

When I am the only female member of a committee, I may or may not have the same status as the other committee members, depending on how obvious it is that I am the token female. There have been many instances in my career in which I have been added to a committee because the committee had to have a woman member. In some of these cases, my opinions have counted for less and I have been criticized by other committee members for being "biased" in favor of women or women's issues. I hate being on these committees, although in some cases it has turned out to be important that I was there.

I like being on committees that have at least F = 2. On those committees, we women are treated as equal members of the committee -- as people who were chosen for our expertise, just like the men. It's amazing the difference F = 2 makes compared to F = 1.

I was just thinking about this today because I was scanning the list of a new committee that I joined this year. To my relief I saw that there is one other woman. Now I don't even have to think about it any more. We will just be a group of scientists and engineers getting together to discuss things and do a task.

The day seems far off when such committees of scientists and engineers will have equal numbers of men and women or random gender ratios that arise when people are selected out of a gender-balanced pool, but for now, I am grateful when F = 2.

Conservation of Committee Mass

Lately I have adopted a new practice when it comes to being asked to serve on a committee or do some other service task: I only agree to add a new service responsibility if I can also subtract one.

Of course it is hard to balance things exactly, so there are hazards in this seemingly simple approach. For example, the added committee might be a lot more work than the subtracted one. In some cases it can be difficult to know in advance what the time commitment and degree of satisfaction with a service responsibility will be. So you might actually be dropping a committee that didn't take much time and adding a committee that will consume your life. It's quite possible.

It can also be difficult to balance the administrative species (for lack of a better term) of committees. For example, it might be possible to subtract a department committee if asked to serve on a university committee, but the reverse would be more awkward unless the department committee is really important (e.g., a hiring committee, when there were such things).

And then there are professional service obligations that might be important to continue, even if you get loaded up with service work in your department/university.

But sometimes this system works. I was recently on a committee that wasn't a huge amount of time, but I really didn't like the committee dynamics and some of the things we had to deal with, so that was the one I dropped (with great glee) when asked to be on a different one at the same administrative level of the university.

You don't need an excuse to quit a committee that you find boring, useless, or otherwise abhorrent, but a handy one is that you are taking on another committee responsibility and will no longer have time for the Time-Sucking Boring Committee.

Meeting of the Minds

One of the university committees to which I devote some of my time involves discussion and voting via email. Thus far this year, the committee had not met in person in a real room with chairs and a table and a carafe of ice water and such. In fact, one of the enticements the Dean used when he called me last year to convince me to be on this committee was the fact that this committee "never" meets except by email.

This has been fortunate, because the committee involves a fair amount of time reviewing documents and summarizing things and making decisions. The time commitment would be oppressive if we had actual meetings.

One member of the committee, however, has been longing for us to meet. He has made passionate pleas for an actual meeting because he thinks that the back-and-forth element of discussion in real-time with real people is an invaluable aspect of the decision-making process.

He is right of course, and the committee chair finally acceded to these pleas. We recently provided our schedules for the near future (a sobering thing, seeing one's essentially full schedule typed out for the purposes of filling in one of the few 'open' time slots in it), and a time was found for us to meet.

Regarding scheduling, appearances are deceiving. It's true that I didn't have a class or other meeting at the chosen time and chosen day, but I don't really have time. I had agreed to substitute-teach for another professor later that same day of the meeting, and I had 57 million other extra things to do on top of the usual things during a week when my husband is traveling and my daughter has a disrupted school schedule and so on and so on.

But meet we must, I suppose, so I went to the meeting and tried not to resent the committee member who wanted us to get together. I did not make passive-aggressive pseudo-sarcastic comments to him such as "So, you're having a relatively easy term?" or "I'm really inspired by your dedication to this committee".

I don't know whether I'm glad we met or not. The positive aspects were some of the discussions and the random chit-chatting with professors from other departments.

The negative aspects were the time and the fact that I didn't feel entirely comfortable during some of the more contentious discussions. I have felt quite comfortable contributing my opinions by email, but it is an entirely different experience to sit around a table and argue.

My semi-discomfort stemmed in part from the specific composition of this committee. I am by far the youngest person on the committee, I am the only woman, and I am the only physical scientist -- the others are all older male engineers and mathematicians. It would not be unrealistic to suppose that my presence on this committee is owing entirely to the fact that they needed to have at least one woman member, and, because of the nature of the committee, the woman needs to be a full professor. That decreases the pool of candidates to a very small, sad number.

[Some commenters yesterday were right that being a full professor makes you eligible for all sorts of additional fun professional service opportunities, though I haven't seen any decrease in the number of these opportunities from when I was an associate professor. The committee types change, but not the committee numbers.]

In any case, I've spent enough time on committees as The Woman Committee Member to not obsess so much about having TOKEN stamped on my forehead. Mostly I just focus on the tasks at hand and make whatever contribution I have to make.

So I argued with the engineers and the math guys because they were using very rigid quantitative measures to assess things and I was using a more synoptic approach, and I was out-voted on almost everything and that was how I spent most of a morning earlier this week. I don't think I will be inspired anytime soon to plead for an actual meeting of this committee and will try to content myself with sending impersonal email votes.

Overcommitteed

August is typically a bit of a feeding frenzy for the forming and filling of committees with participants. I've received numerous requests in the couple of weeks from committee chairs with invitations to spend various amounts of time doing university or professional service work.

I said yes to two. I am cycling off some other committees, so I felt I could take on some new ones. I said no to the rest.

I have a pretty good sense for what I can take on and what would be too much, though sometimes it's hard to tell just how much time a particular committee or other service activity can take. And of course some service activities can fill all the time you have if you let them. Deciding what is worthwhile and learning how to balance time spent on service vs. research vs. teaching are things you figure out with experience (and/or good mentoring early on if you're lucky).

One positive aspect of being such a popular target for committee membership is that I have options. I can pick the ones that look like they might be interesting and a potential good use of my time. And, since I am doing a fair amount of service work, I don't feel (too) bad about saying no to the others, though I sympathize with the committee chairs who are trying to round up volunteers.

In the past 10 years or so, I have been on at least 6 university-level committees, some for 3-year terms, and I just got invited to be on two more; I said yes to one and no to the other. My husband has never been asked to be on any committee above the department level.

Of course there are many Male Science Professors who do a lot of committee work; I have never been on a committee with more women than men. Even so, that's what he gets for being a dime-a-dozen MSP -- he is much more likely to be a committee wallflower, uninvited and uncommitteed.

Short Days, Long Meetings

This has been a week of meetings, and in particular long meetings. I define a long meeting as anything over 1.5 hours, and by that definition, I had 3 long meetings this week so far. Now that classes are over, there is ample time for long meetings.

Today I had a 4-hour meeting. That was a long meeting, but in fact this meeting typically takes 6+ hours. For some reason, the committee was extraordinarily efficient and in agreement today. Perhaps it was a random event, or perhaps everyone just wanted to get things done and have the academic term finally finally finally end. Or maybe everyone is so fatigued that we all just agreed with each other.

I didn’t mind this particular long meeting because it involved a committee that has faculty members from many academic disciplines. The discussions are very interesting and I always learn a lot. Today I particularly enjoyed a conversation with history and English professors about the different ways that we approach our research. Despite huge differences in academic culture, there are important similarities. For example, we are all primarily driven by curiosity and deep interest in our field, and in our discussion today we all mentioned how thrilling it is to discover something – it doesn’t matter if it’s something in an old archive or something in a lab or even something that just occurs to you when you think deeply about a question or topic.

I liked being reminded about what is so amazing about universities. We are collections of people who are thinking intensely and passionately about the universe, life, art and everything. We are learning, teaching, and discovering, and we get to do this as a job. For me, being reminded of that is a good way to end the term.

Committee of Women

In the past, I've written disparaging comments about people who denigrate committees comprised entirely of women, as if the findings of a Committee of Women (COW) were somehow less valid and more biased than those of a committee comprised mostly or entirely of men. Well, maybe I'm a hypocrite, but I'm thinking of turning down an opportunity to be on a COW that is charged with improving the situation for women faculty at my university.

This COW seems to exist mostly so that administrators can say they are doing something about women's 'issues'. In the collective administrative mind of my university, women's 'issues' are things like childcare; for some reason, this is not an issue for male faculty, and requires a COW to come up with the finding, which is then ignored, that faculty (and staff and students) need more quality childcare. I have talked to some women on this committee, and been to one open meeting. Although I think the committee is not taken very seriously by the powers-that-be, the women are impressive, and I think that on a personal level it would be interesting to interact with them.

One reason to be on the COW would be to work to make the committee a more visible and major player in changing the academic culture of the university. I don't think I need to be convinced as to whether that is a realistic goal or not in terms of deciding if I want to be on this committee. The theoretical mission of the committee appeals to me.

Even so, when my department Chair said he wanted to nominate me for this committee, my initial reaction was negative. My department Chair and my department as a whole do not even think I am qualified to lead a department committee or be on a college-level committee that focuses on general issues, but they think I could probably handle a committee focused on women's issues. If I had a leadership position in my department, I think I would happily do both that and the COW. As it is, I'd be spending my time on something no one in my department values or respects. I know that I should set aside my intra-departmental grievances and focus on the larger issue of how I can be most effective (and happy), and not make decisions based on whether my more primitive colleagues will respect my choice of professional service activities.

Academic Rankings of All Sorts

This is perhaps not the best time to write about anything, having just emerged from a 5+ hour meeting in which I and fellow members of an awards committee attempted to compare excellent philosophers with excellent aerospace engineers. It was kind of fun, but I am not as lucid as I could be. The ancient science guy who annoyed me so much last year was not on the committee this year -- this is the person who said I was biased and showed favoritism to women because I had 2 women in my top-10 list (he had 10 men in his top-10 list but this was not showing favoritism to men, though I can't remember why he thought not). This was a much more congenial committee, but we still had an impossible task. It was interesting to see how everything came together. We have been toiling in isolation for 2 months, poring over lengthy files, and then today we got to see how our individual rankings and opinions compared with the others. For some reason, my rankings correlated most closely with those of an historian and another physical scientists on the committee, and were most disparate from the biomedical faculty.

And I see in the newspaper today (NY Times) that we at public universities are all striving to be in the top 10. This is not news to those of us who live with endless strategic (re)positioning initiatives exhorting us to provide deliverables to our student-clients so that we shoot to the top of the rankings.

And to continue the theme of ranking: I have just finished grading. Grading final exams is gratifying and depressing, involving violent mood swings from exam to exam. How can Student X have gotten that question wrong even though it was on the practice final and we went over it in class several times and I clearly identified it as a major concept? Why didn't he/she come to talk to me before the exam? But then in the next exam.. Student W writes an amazingly clear and perfect answer to a difficult question, and I feel really pleased for them and for myself.

Maybe now is a good time to finish up some reviews.

This Post Contains "Words"

For weeks now, I have been reading research statements by faculty from many different departments on campus. Each statement is supposed to be as devoid of jargon as is humanly possible, and if one must use a technical term, the term must be defined. Most faculty from science and engineering departments make an obvious effort to avoid jargon in their research statements (though there are some spectacular failures at this), perhaps because we are aware that much of what we do is incomprehensible to most people.

And then there are the research statements from humanities faculty.. Nothing makes me more aware that I am a Scientist and have moved far away from my liberal arts roots than reading research statements by faculty in English, history, philosophy, and so on. I find most of the humanities statements very hard to understand. Fortunately there is a diverse committee evaluating these, and I learn a lot from discussing the files with colleagues from other departments.

My 2 main problems with comprehension of the humanities statements are: (1) when an unfamiliar term is defined, it is typically defined using one or more other unfamiliar terms; and (2) the extensive use of "quotation" marks "around" so many "words". Worse is when both occur in one sentence: e.g., Professor X has developed the novel idea that the literature of the Baltic states was strongly influenced by the unconscious retransfixation of "trees"(that is, the trans-identity of the arboreal "mind"). [note: I made that sentence up] I suppose that the quotation marks signal that a "word" might have lots of meanings for different people from different cultures or experiences and we don't want to limit ourselves to a single meaning as that would be "confining" or even hegemonic.

Eventually, we work these issues out in discussion -- the committee has broad representation from the sciences and humanities. One of the reasons this is a committee I actually like being on, despite the major time commitment, is because it is one of the few opportunities I have to meet and talk with faculty in other departments/colleges. Despite my lack of comprehension of some of the research statements, I do rather like reading them and getting a broad view of what's going on at the university. That's part of the fun of this professor job.