The art of interpreting English

So much has happened in the newsroom since I last posted. We are trying very hard to stay on top of all the news, but all the desk editors (with the notable exceptions of graphics and photography) have experienced shortages of writers. They have all done tremendously well, especially Brett, who put together an entire page by himself, from writing all the stories to the design. Thanks guys!

That said, I think we’ve become much more efficient at getting our pages done. Instead of being in the newsroom till 1 or 2 in the morning, oftentimes we’ve got everything sent by 10. This shows greater familiarity with the programs we’ve been using, and increased efficiency. I hope that over the rest of the summer we can do even better than this.

Along with my other duties as editor in chief, the past few weeks I have been attending many administrative meetings, and there’s a term that keeps popping up. Shared governance. It’s become very overused at Texas A&M and I’m going to share my thoughts on the whole matter.

Shared governance is a big dispute right now. Every side, from the students to the faculty to the administration, thinks that the other sides don’t have it, and everyone wants to be included. As a whole, everyone can agree that shared governance is a good thing, but no one can agree on exactly what it entails. There’s even a committee that’s been formed, that the chairman of the board of regents is on, to define shared governance, and they haven’t figured it out yet.

To me, shared governance means everyone gets a say in what goes on. That the people who are affected by any decision are the ones who get to make that decision. I think that’s what the student body thinks shared governance is as well.

The faculty might think that shared governance means the people in charge ask the people who are experts in the decision that is going to be made for advice on how to make that decision, and when the advice is given to them, they use it. So shared governance, to the faculty, means that those who understand the problem should get to make the decision.

The administration, however, I believe thinks that shared governance means that they’re in charge, but they ask for people’s opinions. Sometimes they ask the experts, and sometimes they just ask for general comments. Then, however, they take that information and add it in with what they want to do, and make the decision regardless of the feedback.

The term that goes right along with shared governance is open communication. So, sure, if you try hard enough, you can give your opinion, but whether or not your opinion will be listened to is a completely different matter.

That’s what I’ve gotten out of the last few weeks’ discussions of shared governance, and where to move forward with the University. My next project is shared services, because I am highly suspicious of this initiative. The Board of Regents wants to start implementing it in September, and they just made teams to get feedback. Feedback from where? Feedback from whom? More than half of the students are gone, so it sure won’t be feedback from them. They’re supposed to be talking to the faculty, but the people affected by consolidation of business services, IT services, marketing services, won’t be the faculty, it’ll be the students and staff. And I get the feeling that “consolidation services” and “maximizing efficiency” is just fancy talk for cutting jobs.

I know I’m supposed to be talking about communication practices I’ve learned, but this is what I’m learning now – the manipulation of language by politicians to deceive people. So I’m going to do the best I can to take all the fancy, dressed-up vocabulary and put it into plain English.

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