4. Courtesy: Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised

Who Ordered This?

General Henry M. Robert created Robert’s Rules as a response to what he perceived to be chaotic communication methods in the Gold Rush west, where Robert was an Army Corps engineer and enjoyed an active calendar of social, religious, and philanthropic clubs. Each of these clubs used a different format for meetings, an inconvenience to Robert—or, as historian Peter Loss generously explains, a barrier to participation in charity.1 General Robert’s initial manual, as the introduction to the current Robert’s Rules Association edition narrates, attempted to combine earlier parliamentary procedure with an American sympathy for geographic and cultural difference. The sympathy, however, merely recognized that these differences existed so that they could be eradicated. The manual was an exercise in the extent to which a near-religious commitment to discursive homogeneity could be extended into the general populace. After a slow and self-funded start, Robert’s idea that club meetings needed to be protected from nonconformists took off—perhaps unsurprisingly, as these methods tend to protect the status quo. Loss lists many philanthropic organizations that took up Robert’s Rules in the charitable explosion of the 1910s and 1920s, including HBCUs, but it should be said that many HBCUs were under white leadership late into the twentieth century.2 Although proponents of Robert’s Rules argue that the rules have been singularly formative in American citizens’ uptake of democratic principles, the rules are actually formative to the white mainstream uptake of democratic principles. The Colored Conventions of the nineteenth century, for example, created their own rule books by adapting previous rule books to their own values; though the initial adaptations predate Robert’s Rules, the conventions continued to organize their own rules, per geographic location, through 1899.3 The persistence of local variety in the rule books suggests that variety was important to the efficacy of the conventions and/or the quality and meaningfulness of the conventions’ findings. In her chronicling of the Fisk University student protests of the 1920s, Carmen Kynard notes that “Black student protests function as a kind of counterinstitution that circulates its own specific modes of literacy learning.”4 Black-led organizations, such as the Student Nonviolence Committee, that appeared later in the twentieth century did not use Robert’s Rules for their internal proceedings, and neither did the Anti-Defamation League or activists at Stonewall—yet certainly, they were all effective.

That the presence of Robert’s Rules has strengthened as a result of its association with whiteness becomes apparent through its online footprint. Today, Robert’s Rules is a hopping commercial brand managed by the Robert’s Rules Association, a “partnership of direct descendants formalized to manage and advance the Robert’s Rules of Order books and legacy.”5 Multiple editions of the rules are sold on the website, and a quick search on Amazon shows a slice of the variation in Robert’s Rules ephemera, with most of the versions touting that they make the rules simpler; there are also a variety of versions sold as “cheat sheets” or “for dummies.” A dip into YouTube reveals a vast landscape of videos that urge you to “know your rights!” and direct you to the Robert’s Rules Made Simple organization, which claims former Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul as a supporter. For some, Robert’s Rules is nearly a lifestyle in which self-appointed watchdogs are vigilant against those who speak out of turn.

Celebratory tropes we have discussed in previous chapters make culminating appearances in the introduction to the Robert’s Rules Association edition of the rules. Taken together, these tropes double down on the ideas that in university communication, “what is old is best” and “men of the same spirit” should contribute to governance. For example, the introduction situates Robert’s Rules as a deferential update of British parliamentary procedure that only needed to be ushered into modern times by a “good man” actor. Readers get a sense of this laudatory orientation to the past in the association’s explanation of colonial parliamentary procedure:

When policies of the mother country in the 1700s had gradually changed with the growth of the British Empire in such a way as to set the stage for the American Revolution, representatives of the different colonies considered common resistance to the actions of Parliament. In these deliberations, the colonists were able to function effectively by depending on procedures originally developed in Parliament itself!6

Robert’s Rules, as presented by the association, suggests that what is best is what is traditional. The introduction further situates Robert as the guardian of a long history of men making decisions, dating back to The History of the Peloponnesian War. Crucial pieces of sixteenth-century parliamentary procedure carried forth by Robert include “one subject at a time” and “decorum and avoidance of personalities in debate.” What denotes “one subject” is a rhetorical issue that still plagues committees today. Think of how a discussion about curriculum, for example, may turn into a discussion about workload but may unsatisfactorily table the workload issues, never to be discussed again. “Avoidance of personality in debate” calls up the fact that what denotes “personality” might simply be a nonstandard means of expression.

The restricted editorship of the manual after Robert’s death also smacks of the “men of great spirit” trope that exists in charters and policy authorship. Editorship of the rules was handed down within the Robert family until the 1970s, and all editors have been white, with only one woman serving as editor. Perhaps, as a result, race is completely written out of the history of this book, as are all other kinds of marginalization. For example, Sarah Corbin Robert, editor from the 1930s into the 1960s, and also president of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), was pivotal in that organization’s (in)famous decision to refuse African American opera singer Marian Anderson the stage at Constitution Hall in 1939. The DAR, who describe themselves as a “female lineage society,” still defend Robert’s decision by explaining that she was simply a “stickler for rules and order”7 and was following the segregation laws. One wonders what the present-day “stickler for rules and order” in a university committee meeting misses, in this same vein. Being a “stickler for rules and order” is still an acceptable excuse today for dismissing agenda items that seem out of the scope of the committee, such as those items that contain more than one topic or seem inappropriate, despite how urgent they may be.

Committees may use Robert’s Rules because they are fearful of getting off track, wasting time, or letting one person dominate. Looming over this fear is the imagined audience of the executive. The exigence of Robert’s Rules for a university committee arises because the committee has been given charges and must deliver textual products by the end of the term, for example, meeting minutes that demonstrate the efficiency of the committee, revised or new documents the committee was charged with creating, or a report that summarizes the committee’s actions. The audience for Robert’s Rules can be divided into two groups: real and imagined. One audience may be people on committees who are concerned with losing control or with underdelivering on the committee’s charges. Another imagined audience for university committees, as we saw in the last chapter, is the imagined audience of the executive. A committee might imagine that the academic CEO will be pleased that decisions coming out of the committee were arrived at via a traditional system that celebrates order, rationality, and majority rule—yet this may not be the case.

Rhetors of Robert’s Rules, defined as faculty who have adopted the rules as committee procedure, simultaneously build on and respond to the rules. Rhetorician Keith Grant-Davie explains that “rhetors are as much constituents of their rhetorical situations as are their audiences.”8 Faculty and administrators using the system may simultaneously respond to the text as disgruntled, overwhelmed, or frustrated readers while constructing the system as an unwieldy program that can be used piecemeal to silence or proceed over items in a halting manner. Robert’s Rules is long—my own copy is 714 pages, including notes—and difficult to navigate because it is ordered by motion and requires a base familiarity with parliamentary procedure even to interact with the text. Historian Loss concedes that one problem with the rules is that they are often carried out incompletely or incorrectly, undercutting the focus on consistency and sameness across committees. Because there is no procedure for invention in Robert’s Rules, only the motion—which presents an idea once it is formed into an actionable item—use of the rules over time builds the notion that agenda items and ideas come to the committee, rather than being invented from within.

The ultimate determinant of how Robert’s Rules works on a campus is not the committee itself but the container outside of the committee: the system the committee serves. Disregard for the container can lead to frustrating recombing through existing knowledge. As Carmen Kynard describes in the introduction to this book, “white faculty were always: scheduling meetings, reading the bylaws, revising the bylaws, thinking things over, looking into things, talking to you about your ideas and concerns, and planning to get back to you about your questions.” That Robert’s Rules is a communication practice that lays over a committee’s structure and the personalities and changing influence of its members makes it hard to refine the pace of particular issues or modify the modalities of communication to other committees or administrators. Robert’s Rules is designed to push rhetors toward decisions with the motion/vote format. Yet in my own experience, and in the experience of those I have interviewed, after a decision leaves a committee, it is often not finished—it proceeds to another committee, perhaps even one outside of the official governance structure, for further vetting and discussion or on to legal counsel, and then on to the provost, who often makes further changes. While committee members using Robert’s Rules may imagine that their authorship is final, committee decisions are rarely confined only to the committee.

Interruption as Committee Procedure

The risk of Robert’s Rules is the descent of committee dialogue into busywork that may seem effective in the eyes of the executive but is not meaningful given the institution’s larger ideals. Robert’s Rules of Order enforces “courteous spirit,” not “wasting” time, “common sense,” “formal control,” and “agreement,” all according to the introduction. These things might sound good unless your perspectives, values, and agenda items are perceived as idiosyncratic by the group. While Robert’s Rules attempts to offer fairness, it loses out on hospitality and personal investment in committee dialogue. To avoid the sinking of committee work into ritualized busywork that does not matter, I propose interruption9 as a method for breaking the spectator seal of committee discourse and, ultimately, holding groups accountable to institutional ideals.

It is a privilege not to be interrupted. Nedra Reynolds’s theory of rhetorical interruption is that it can be “part of a tactical rhetoric for marginalized speakers and writers—those who are often interrupted routinely as well as those who do not speak or write from a single location.”10 Even though Robert’s Rules tries to prevent participants from literal interruption, the procedures of Robert’s Rules interrupt the ideas and agency of those participants who are perceived to be threatening to the maintenance of the status quo. Women and children, according to Reynolds, and people of color are particularly punished for speaking out of turn. Punishment may range from mocking to microaggression to committee reassignment, disciplinary action, and other methods of silencing. Yet “unexpected interruptions, defined as either breaks or overlaps, by their suddenness or surprise factor, force others to pay attention.”11 I add that acting beyond expectation, yet in line with institutional values, can be a kind of interruption that works from common ground.

As we saw in the introduction to this book, to stop Nicholas Sever’s complaints was to include him. Sever repeatedly interrupted the stream of organizational business handled by the board of trustees with his personal, bleating complaints. I do not envy Leverett, and Sever is no hero of the oppressed, given his race, gender, and relative wealth. But their situation distills Reynolds’s rhetorical tactic: Sever interrupted Leverett’s narrative about executive power. Sever’s complaints were unexpected in that they disagreed with Leverett’s executive authority. They were beyond expectation, yet in line with institutional values, as they relied on evidence from previous iterations of the charter. Sever didn’t want to disregard the institution’s past; he wanted to use it. Leverett’s personal files, held by Harvard, have preserved the deference and “positive emphasis”12 his contemporary colleagues used in written communication to him. What makes Sever’s case stick out in the archives is that the collection, titled “the Fellowship controversy,” interrupts a relatively laudatory history of the institution. Use of Robert’s Rules in college committees prevents the personal from appearing and prevents appeals like Sever’s. Yet the personal is political and the gateway to making university procedures and policies more human(e). When individual actors are invited to contribute personally and in ways that are meaningful, governance is a communication system that can reinvent itself and the larger institution. We now move into this book’s concluding chapter, a discussion of the risks and stakes of a shared governance system that is allowed to sink into its ceremony without anyone taking up its calls.