Decision-Making in a Quaker Context

[FAHE office]

Decision-Making in a Quaker Context
by Paul A. Lacey
I am going to begin what I have to say by quoting the Jewish
philosopher Martin Buber, who said that "all real living is meeting."
That may be a grim idea for some of you. You are sitting in a meeting,
and I am addressing a meeting. Perhaps some of you are dreading a
meeting with some distant relative whom you have an obligation to
visit. Hall meetings, class meetings, business meetings, meetings for
worship - if that is the sum total of all real living, things are
worse than we thought.
Of course that isn't exactly what Buber meant, but it has a
connection. Think of what it means to meet another person. What we are
aware of first is difference between us, separation. I am here and you
are over there. But when something good and meaningful happens between
us, we come together; we find similarity, mutuality, perhaps a high
degree of identity in common. I am here and you are there, but we are
also someplace together, in a center which we share. Certainly a
number of you have already met people you can call friends and some
others who give promise of being friends if you meet often enough.
That is the sense in which I want to talk about the phrase "all real
living is meeting:" the great possibilities for knowing meaning in our
lives come through encounters with other people, strange situations,
new demands, in which we experience difference which leads to
identity, conflict which leads to reconciliation. We have a meeting of
the minds, we say, or we really met someone where he really lives.
Now, I describe the experience this way to emphasize that meetings are
not guaranteed successes, and that they
can be hard unsatisfying work. If you meet your mother's second cousin
Arthur, you could be discovering a wonderful life-long friend, but you
could also be meeting a complete dud. The same, of course, is true for
him.
You have heard a certain amount about Quaker methods of governance and
decision-making, and if you know nothing else you know that we do
things in the pattern of the Quaker business meeting - that word
again. I want to tell you something more about our methods of arriving
at decisions, but I want you have in mind both the risk-taking and the
frustration and the satisfaction implied in the word "meeting," as I
have been using it.
To begin with, Quaker business procedure grew up in the early days of
the Religious Society of Friends as a way of resolving the most
practical matters in a religious context. That is, the group which met
to consider committee reports, the treasurer's report, and the like,
sat in a meeting for worship in which business was held up to the
Light for guidance. Every meeting was held in the expectation of
Pentecost. Friends spoke literally of being led to action, of feeling
the way open. They met each other in that which is eternal; they also
met God.
The business procedures presupposed a highly homogeneous group, for
whom both the vocabulary of action and experience were held in common.
Edward Burrough, an early Quaker leader, wrote a letter of advice on
business meeting which is cited in Arnold Lloyd's Quaker Social
History. First of all, these were meetings "for the management of
truth's affairs." As Lloyd describes it, "All members who
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were sound of principle and judgment were to feel free to attend. They
were particularly urged 'not to spend time in needless, unnecessary
and fruitless discourses,' but equally were not to reach quick
decisions by vote. They must determine, not in the way of the World by
hot contests, by seeking to outspeak or overreach one another in
discourse..... but in love, gentleness and dear unity."
Now this is a tall order. Friends were to wait and try to open
themselves to God's leading, because they knew the wisdom and power of
God directly. If they earnestly sought to be led, treating each other
in love, gentleness and dear unity, the truth would be revealed to
them all. They would express the sense of the meeting as a single
unified perception of what they should do. That is a statement of the
ideal, but of course the fellowship of the saints rarely approached
the ideal.
Howard Brinton, writing on Quaker education, distinguishes what he
calls three classes of doctrines which are characteristic of Friends.
The first is the doctrine of the Inward Light which can lead every
human being who will be open to leading; the second concerns the
meetings for worship and business, social institutions created so that
the group can search for a corporate understanding of the leading of
the Light; the third doctrines concern the social testimonies of
community, pacifism or peacemaking, equality and simplicity. Brinton
says Quakerism is unique only in the second class of doctrines, those
having to do with meetings for worship and business which are
laboratories in which we can test the leading of the Light of Christ
and express them in the social testimonies. Those meetings also shape
the small community of believers who exemplify in their life together
what the larger community can be like.
Howard Brinton emphasized that these doctrines are closely
interrelated and animated Quaker schools and colleges when those were
homogeneous communities. He goes on to note that Quaker schools and
colleges face a dilemma whether to allow themselves to develop "solely
as institutions of excellent standing, meeting the needs of families
who can afford the luxury of private schools, or shall they appeal to
a more limited constituency by discovering and applying the
distinguishing characteristics which a Quaker school ought to embody
today?"
As long as I have been at Earlham, we have been on the horns of that
dilemma, and I assume we will remain in that awkward position for as
long as any of you are here. That is to say, we cannot resolve the
question in an either-or fashion. We wish to discover and apply the
distinguishing characteristics appropriate for a Quaker college today,
but that surely means for a heterogeneous student body like
yourselves, for whom many things early Friends took for granted, are
in serious doubt. For that matter, you know that the Society of
Friends is highly heterogeneous.
We have stayed on the horns of this dilemma because no other position
was more tenable - if the mental image that conjures up isn't too
awkward to contemplate. Howard Brinton asked "Can a Quaker educational
community be conducted on the principles of the Quaker meeting for
worship or for business with the consequent embodiment of the social
doctrines of community, pacifism, equality and simplicity?"
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In a fumbling, tenuous, imperfect fashion, we have tried to answer
that question in the affirmative, particularly by the way we govern
ourselves. I want to emphasize this point: we often do the job badly,
we are often inconsistent and mistaken, sometimes unfaithful to the
principle we enunciate, but as an institution we try to be a Quaker
educational community, we try to conduct our affairs on the principles
of the Quaker meeting for business, and we hope to see the social
testimonies embodied in our life together. It is easy to dismiss our
failings as hypocrisy - a word which springs much too readily to the
lips of people at Earlham - but I want to emphasize that even when we
fail there are a substantial number of people trying to understand how
to be faithful to Quaker business procedures.
Now, what is the business meeting like? I have already described it as
a meeting for worship in which practical matters are held up to the
light. Let me describe it in a bit more detail. A clerk presides over
the meeting whose job is both to introduce the business and to gather
the sense of the meeting about what should be done on each subject.
The clerk calls on people who wish to speak and from time to time he
or she may try to express what is being said and the direction the
meeting is going in its quest for agreement. That is, the clerk will
try to phrase in words acceptable to the group whatever measure of
agreement there is. If that is well done, the group can recognize what
is still to be considered, what it has unity on, and what is still a
matter of doubt, disagreement, or lack of clarity. Notice I spoke of
the clerk expressing the sense of the meeting. We speak often of
consensus, or the substantial agreement of the whole group, but it is
also important to think of what is meant by the "sense of the
meeting." The clerk does not count votes, but it is his or her duty to
weigh what is said, to take into account the weight of experience and
wisdom behind each contribution in the discussion. This is very hard
to do well, and it can be very frustrating to everyone. At times it
seems clear that a great deal of wisdom and judgment are on one side
of a question and that there is less on the other. The meeting may be
moving toward a very definite sense of what should be done, even
though several people are opposed or unconvinced. When that happens,
the meeting as a whole may want to postpone action until those who are
unconvinced have more time to consider their position, or until they
can convince the others that the sense of the meeting is mistaken, but
that is not an absolute requirement. I make this point with some vigor
because a number of people get the idea that they can always have a
personal, private veto over what everyone else wants to do. That is
not the case. The sense of the meeting does not have to be unanimously
agreed on. If there is still division, the meeting has to consider
whether it should proceed when there is not complete unity, and those
who disagree on the action being considered must ask whether they
shouldn't unite with the meeting, agreeing that the sense of the
meeting is to go ahead.
In practice, meetings can be so concerned with achieving unanimity or
overwhelming consensus that they search for compromises to make
everyone feel better, or they put decisions so vaguely that the
decision commits no one to anything significant. Some times meetings
get so vague and indirect that no one says anything
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significant. Sometimes meetings get so vague and indirect that no one
knows what is really being said. You may have heard of the Friend who,
when he heard a name of which he disapproved suggested for a
committee, said, "That is not a name which would have occurred to me."
Now that is a strong expression of disapproval in some circles, but no
one could be blamed for thinking it isn't so direct as it might be. I
noticed another way Quakers have of arriving at consensus through
compromise when I attended a meeting of Meeting for Sufferings in
London Yearly Meeting last spring. A statement was brought forward
which had substantial support, but also some strong disagreement from
a few weighty Friends. Of course, whenever we talk about the text of a
statement, there are suggestions for additions, corrections and other
improvements. At the end of the discussion, the meeting did something
as typical as it is frustrating. It enlarged the drafting committee to
include some of those who were opponents, so that the statement which
came forward next time would be more evenly-balanced. The meeting also
asked that the statement be shorter. Think about the action: the
meeting enlarged the committee and therefore the scope of the
statement and asked that the statement be shorter. The effect will be
to make the statement more general, but it will also require the
opponents to take their share of responsibility for the statement.
I have been describing meetings of Quaker groups, but of course when
we talk about decision-making at Earlham we are talking about a
method, which is not understood only, or even primarily, as a
religious activity. Not everyone who goes to community council
meetings, (where student-elected representatives and a small number of
appointed faculty and staff members meet regularly to deal with issues
of general community concern) or who attends a dormitory hall meeting,
does so expecting to be led by God to make the decisions before the
meeting. There is, in fact, a very great danger to our life together
if we try to make every issue a supreme moral or ethical test of
ourselves and of the business method. A friend of mine who has lived a
number of years in experimental religious communities once said to me
that he was never able to see that there was a way of determining what
color the Holy Spirit wanted the community to paint the dining room
walls. If asking for divine guidance on a matter essentially neutral
in its meaning or - at the worst - if you happened to have people with
strong opposing views, you painted the walls half one color, half the
other. Now if there is anything worse to imagine than the discussion
of the moral implications of paint colors, it is the effect on people
who have to dress up their personal preferences for blue, white or
green in high-flown moral language. Yet I can assure you that over-
using the method of arriving at decisions lets us in for that kind of
excess. Parliamentary business methods encourage long-windedness,
pretentiousness, trickiness perhaps, but Quaker business procedures
can encourage all of that and self-righteousness as well. In the
recent past we have seen people argue not just against the wisdom of a
decision taken perhaps years before they thought of coming here as
student or faculty member, but against its very legitimacy - as though
the Quaker procedure required not only an absolute democracy, but also
behaving as though this is the first day of creation.
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Let me emphasize these points. Quaker business procedure, even when it
is following the principle of one-person-one-vote, is more and less
than that. Greater wisdom and greater experience receive greater
weight in a decision, but wisdom and experience are not merely assumed
to belong to the older people here. I remember a faculty member from
another college telling me about a proposal in their faculty meeting
that failed because it was proposed by an assistant professor. All the
assistant professors were for it, but all the associate and full
professors were opposed. Even now, when it is harder to get tenure and
younger faculty are more conscious of their exposed situation, you
could not determine weight by rank in the Earlham faculty, and
certainly there is no sense that the person speaking to business is an
assistant, associate or full professor. Neither does the procedure
require that every decision be reopened just because someone new has
arrived. You join an on-going institution whose direction and shape
you may have some opportunity to influence, but the obligation is
greater on the newcomer to know and understand what has happened, to
cover more of the distance in reaching a meeting with others.
Let me illustrate my point with an example. Several years ago, when I
was an administrator, we were trying to decide between two candidates
for a position on the faculty. The department was divided between a
majority and minority view, based largely on two different conceptions
of what the department program should be. That is, the majority were
saying, "We need someone who can teach Shakespeare." And the minority
was saying, "No, never mind Shakespeare, we need someone to teach
creative writing, someone who is a writer." I use this example as an
illustration - the department was not English. Both Faculty Affairs
Committees, the committee elected by faculty members and the Student
Faculty Affairs Committee, were in favor of the majority's candidate,
primarily because that candidate seemed a stronger teacher. Students
in the department, however, agreed with the minority and demanded
their preferred candidate. We had, therefore, what I came to call a
monster meeting, where everyone with an interest had a chance to
present his or her point of view to everyone else. After two hours, it
was evident that there was no possibility in the short run of reaching
agreement and that Academic Dean Joe Elmore and I were going to have
to take the advice of all these other participants, weigh the
arguments, including our own, and make a decision, or the department
would begin the next year one person short. As I was leaving the
meeting, I asked one highly vocal student whether she thought she has
been heard. She answered, "that will depend on what you decide." My
reply was, "No, that wasn't what I asked. I asked whether you were
heard, not whether you convinced me. If I heard you I should be able
to restate your argument and conclusion well enough that you recognize
it as your own. That is a preliminary requirement to trying to weigh
it against other points of view in order to determine what seems best
given all these arguments for doing two mutually exclusive things."
I tell this story because it illustrates how easily we can do violence
to the whole system of consultation, advising and recommending on
which our decision-making rests. That student was so sure she was
right that she was already preparing to accuse me of not listening, of
pretending to consult, if I
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didn't come to the conclusion she had arrived at. Perhaps she would
have called me a hypocrite if I didn't agree, or she might have argued
that my decision lacked legitimacy if I came out with a conclusion she
didn't like.
I am not trying to blame one student for a reply to a question. I am
showing how easy it is to refuse to meet another person. I could cite
examples of administrators or faculty members being just as arrogant,
doing just as much damage to the process of reaching decisions. It is
very tempting to believe that anyone who can't be convinced by my
passionately argued beliefs is not acting in good faith. It is also
tempting to block action until everyone comes to my point of view, or
to railroad through a decision against my opponents because they are
not acting in good faith.
Now, it is reasonable to ask why we go about decision-making this way,
if it has so many headaches. There are several reasons which are
persuasive to me. The first is that it is an expression of my
religious faith - my faith that when people are open to being led to
do the best or the right thing, they will be led. But beyond that, I
believe our way of consulting and arriving at decisions is both
politically and educationally valuable. I believe the statements in
Earlham's compendium of rules and practices for community life, The
Little Read Book, fail to do justice to the political aspects of our
method. "Political" is too often contrasted with "religious" as though
one was always a synonym for dirty and the other a synonym for clean.
Quaker principles have always held that political process can also be
an expression of God's will, and I believe that about the political
system which is imbedded in our methods. I am not one of those who
thinks that voting is a dirty activity. It is another way of getting
at decisions, and it is worth noting that the same religious ferment
which led to the Quaker business meeting also led to other forms of
religious democracy, including that of the Congregationalists and
other groups who place great emphasis on the equal participation of
each communicant in the business affairs of the church. "Vox populi,
vox Dei" - the voice of the people is the voice of God. The Book of
Acts tells us the first Christians cast lots to determine who would
take Judas' place as an apostle. They believed that God would use the
laws of chance to make God's will known. There are a number of ways
with a better or worse chance of showing us God's will - including
voting or seeking the sense of the meeting. And every method of
consulting on decisions is also political in the sense that many
different groups' interests have to be taken into account in order to
arrive at actions that gain the assent of those affected by them. When
we say "let's enlarge the committee to include critics" that is a
political act - not necessarily to co-opt people or neutralize them
but to make the possibility of effective consensus greater. I believe
the Quaker business procedure has much to offer as a purely political
system: it makes people realize that a majority is a frail thing, so
it is better to aim for the widest possible acceptance of actions than
to force them through just because 51% of the voters want them; it
puts a high premium on considering one's opponents as people also
trying to achieve the common good, so it also emphasizes arriving at
decisions by appealing to what is noblest in people, not just to the
narrowest self-interest. It also puts emphasis on careful reflection,
reasoned argument - not
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hasty emotional decisions. It can enhance the possibilities of a good
life in community rather than exacerbating disagreements.
The method is also educational, in the way that meeting is educational
- meeting other people, meeting new ideas, even meeting oneself by
thinking through what one really believes or wants. We can learn from
what others believe and want. Perhaps their vision of the way we
should live together is so admirable that we become convinced. Perhaps
our practical solution to a problem is so persuasive that we can serve
ourselves and everyone else by presenting it for consideration.
Perhaps asking for the widest expression of opinion will reveal
terrible weakness in a plan which made good sense to the few who were
least affected by it. And, as important as anything, we may learn how
to behave respectfully, democratically, wisely in a lot of other areas
of our lives as a result of working together to decide about life
together at Earlham.
There are dangers in building up our method too much. When you
consider that perhaps 90% of every year's budget has been committed by
previous decisions, for example, it may be frustrating to think of
such an elaborate system being used for making decisions about the
remaining 10%.
I want to acknowledge such difficulties, but I also want to emphasize
that any opportunity we have for making decisions about making our
life together more meaningful is an opportunity worth taking. You will
spend a great deal of time in your dormitory hall, so it matters that
you learn how to confront and resolve issues there, whatever else is
happening around you. Learning to live together with mutual respect,
learning how to confront the thoughtless or selfish roommate, learning
how to shape your living situation to be supportive of your personal
and educational needs - these are very important goals. Don't
disparage them because someone tells you that all the power is in the
faculty or administrative council. You may notice that this is the
first time I have spoken of power. It is not a word which sufficiently
speaks to our situation. In a sense, no one here, from the president
to the newest student has a lot of power to make the institution do
anything. We all can have a certain amount of power to prevent things
from happening. We can get around rules, or make such a fuss that
people abandon their wishes. We may have a lot of power to neutralize
one another, but that is ultimately the most frustrating kind. The
faculty has the power to compel all of you into humanities classes;
those who are compelled into my class have the power to frustrate the
goals of the course by refusing to do the work, refusing to take part
in discussions or write the papers; I have the power to fail you if
you don't do the work. But what will have been gained if we operate
only according to our power? Nothing, unless you think of anger and
frustration as a gain.
Of far greater positive impact, I believe, is the influence we have
with one another. Teaching rests on persuading and influencing people,
rather than on compelling them alone. And we are influenced by
persuasive arguments, by good examples, by our respect and affection
for the people who are making their case to us. And I am influenced
primarily by people who seem to me to care about me, my opinion, what
I value in life. Why should I change my mind to agree with someone who
gives no evidence of
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trying to understand why I hold the views I do? If he can show he has
heard through my views and tried to accept them, I will be much more
willing to do the same for his views. And perhaps the result of such
an encounter is that we are both persuaded to a position neither of us
saw before.
In such a sense it is possible to say you can all be involved in
decisions-making at Earlham. You can have influence as you show that
you have more than narrow self-centered desires shaping what you
recommend, as you listen to others and try to practice
respecting them, respecting your own integrity, searching for what is
best for everyone. And of course what I am saying about you I would
say of every faculty member and administrator, from the newest to the
president, the faculty as a whole and the community council. When we
are at our best, things are not decided by appeal to authority or
challenges to legitimacy, they are decided by meeting - overcoming
divisions without eliminating differences, knowing oneself and others
in a common search for the truth, going outside one's personal
prejudices and wishes to ask what is best for the whole community. We
invite you to join us in this process, because we believe it will help
both you and the rest of us.