Faculty Meeting: Navigating Departmental Politics

Faculty Meeting: Navigating Departmental Politics is a richly layered sketch that can be productively used to focus on two issues important to any university: faculty hiring and departmental climate. It presents a range of interactions between individuals in a department currently seeking a new faculty hire. Depicted scenarios include both an official discussion of the search in a faculty meeting and more casual, private conversations. Audiences can engage with the performance by considering what kinds of practices and interactions may negatively impact the recruitment and hiring of a diverse and excellent faculty. Alternately or additionally, they may use the sketch as an impetus to think through the challenges of navigating departmental politics. This sketch was commissioned by the U-M ADVANCE Program.

The typical session length is 120 minutes. Faculty Meeting: Navigating Departmental Politics is only offered as an in-person session.

What people have said about Faculty Meeting: Navigating Departmental Politics :
It was interesting to see multiple views on the same situation. It was helpful to understand that reactions to a particular situation within a department meeting often originate in back-stories that may be invisible to us as observer/participants in the same meeting.
This day has been eye-opening and encouraging. When we can identify the barriers to being great, we can address them. Thank you for facilitating a conversation that drove us to create solutions.
[The session] helped me reflect on how I play into the different roles and how I react to them. It gave me strategies for better responses in the future.
Having people at all stages of their career involved was very helpful and the play was so well constructed I could see that we identified with all different players. It gave me a chance to see a bit of myself in all the roles.
Click here to visit our What the Audience Is Saying page to read more.
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