At faculty meetings, a quiet quorum

Nevertheless, attendance is not mandatory for faculty members, and the meetings are often poorly attended. Faculty members are not required to attend and agendas are always circulated in advance. Dean of the College Valerie Smith said in an email that the level of attendance at the faculty meetings fluctuates widely.

Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin added that since faculty members are aware of the topics that will be discussed before the meeting, many choose not to attend when the items on the agenda are mundane. He said that it is rare for items not originally on the agenda to be introduced, though it does occasionally occur.

“There are a group of regulars who always attend, and then people tend to appear when there are issues of interest to them,” Dobkin said in an email.

This group of regulars that Dobkin referred to mainly consists of department chairs. Politics department chair Nolan McCarty said in an email that he tries to attend every faculty meeting, unless he is away from campus. Even if he were away from campus on the afternoon of a faculty meeting, he said he would be sure to send the associate chair to the meeting if there were an item on the agenda that related to the politics department.

Robert Vanderbei, chair of the operations research and financial engineering department, said in an email that he attended the meetings “less often than I should and less often than I would like.”

Former chair of the economics department Gene Grossman, who is currently on sabbatical, said he would attend about two-thirds of the faculty meetings when he was chair but noted that his colleagues did not attend nearly as often.

“My colleagues in economics typically do not regularly attend these meetings, except when there are important, far-ranging issues being discussed,” he said in an email.

Most department chairs interviewed for this article said they encourage faculty members from their departments to attend faculty meetings if a change to their particular department were being discussed.

“If any agenda in the meeting is related to our department, then a group of our faculty are encouraged to attend the meeting, and usually do,” mathematics department chair Sun-Yung Alice Chang said in an email.

However, McCarty said the agendas at most faculty meetings are not of particular interest to the members of the politics department. Most of the topics of discussion, he said, “involve uncontroversial changes to the approved list of undergraduate and graduate courses.”

McCarty added that even if an item pertaining to the politics department were to be discussed, politics faculty would have already known about it.

“Any such changes that affect politics will have already been approved by the department,” McCarty said. “So there is little reason to encourage attendance at the University meeting.”

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Nevertheless, the most recent faculty meeting was well-attended. In addition to approving several major changes to curricula in different departments, the faculty members present approved the selection of the valedictorian and Latin salutatorian for the Class of 2012.