Avery: Faculty Meeting

"Faculty Meeting" by Tom Whalen

At noon, ten minutes after the faculty meeting should have ended, I stood up and said, "To the agenda under discussion I have little if anything to add, not because I think any of what has been said already by you, my colleagues, or you"—I nodded to the school's principal—"my dear Administrator, is of any value or to any purpose, for I do not think it is, but because for twenty-two years the agenda has never changed, the same topics always appear on the agenda, the same things said about it. It makes no difference whether my colleagues are the ones from twenty-two years ago or not"—none were—"or whether the administrator is the same or not"—he was the third principal I had worked under— "regardless of who has been in attendance at these so-called faculty meetings, the same, I must reiterate, the exact same words have been used time and again, and in all cases these words have been utterly ineffectual, meaningless, possessed of an incoherence I find so astonishing that it amazes, no, stuns me that you can bear to say or hear them, you, my esteemed colleagues who sit here and spout such utter nonsense, such drivel as if what you said mattered, as if he"—I gestured towards my principal—"our dear Administrator cared, when it should, after all these years, be perfectly clear that he does not in any sense hear what you have said. Your words, meaningless and trite as they are, do not in any sense affect him any more than the incomprehensible and thoroughly ineffectual words he speaks affect you."

The room in which the meetings were held as always was overheated, the custodians always stoked the furnace too high, and around me in a semi-circle sat my sixteen colleagues, their faces plunged into their hands, as was my principal's, waiting, I assume, for me to conclude or continue.

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