Rules

So its come back to me that there's some burbling at work about rules. It makes sense as this week is School of Drama Playground and Playground is one of the more difficult seas to navigate in terms of rules. The gist of the complaint, as pretty much always, is that the rules make no sense and that nobody knows what the rules are, and if you ask three people to clarify the rule you'll get three different answers.

So, how would I answer this charge? I believe I would say "Yes. Welcome to my world."

I can tell you first hand, many of the rules make little sense, often many people don't know what the rules are, and nearly always multiple inquiries get you multiple answers. It has been my discovery, much to my chagrin, par for the course.

Well, why is this? There are a couple of reasons. First we're not a true hierarchical structure; although the school has a head, there's also the Dean, and a bunch of other Deans, and a university administration and often it is difficult to tell who's particular set of rules governs a particular situation. Also, the same thing applies within the school as options and individual faculty are given quite a bit of latitude to run their shops. Within a classroom a teacher has *almost* unfettered discretion to do whatever the darn well please, only running up against others' policies when someone chooses to elevate a complaint beyond the classroom door. So, often I have known what I thought to be the rule only to discover it was an "option only" rule and that the school or the university knows nothing of it.

Is this a problem? Well day to day, minute to minute it can be; chasing down multiple players and finding consensus can be frustrating. It can however also allow for a much more customized experience, so in a stupid way you could look at this like an advantage and a weakness.

Another reason? Institutional drift. It would be one thing if we were doing the same thing over and over with the same people, but we aren't. The students, and what type of people they are, are perpetually changing - now we're getting to know "The Millennials" (I hear they are renaming themselves "Generation O." Good for them.) Faculty and staff turn over too. I can't tell you the number of times we've set out an agenda only to be told by someone who has been here longer that it is in opposition to some existing policy. The curriculum and classes and policies change too. We have an online handbook which we often refer people to for information. I have to confess that often I feel that the one thing you can be sure of is that if you read it in the handbook that's *not* how we'll be doing it. Many university publications are only revised every three, four, or five years. Something like that is simply gauranteed to be out of date by the time anyone actually reads it. In this environment it often feels to me that if you can put something down, static, and it doesn't moot soon, well, then you're doing something wrong.

So how does this work? Let's look at playground since it seems to be front and center. First we should say that we haven't done playground forever, so there are many people currently in the SOD that don't remember a time before Playground - and so wouldn't be first hand party to the policies surrounding Playground at its incepion. Students used to CONSTANTLY propose independent projects of all kinds and flavors to take place all over the building at all times of the day with all kinds of ramifications. Although it was something we desperately wanted to support it started to become a real drain on resources and there were any number of conflicts on the calendar and in the spaces. This lead to a very high threshold that needed to be met in order to get an independent project approved, and then lo and behold a year or so later an advisory board told us that there were insufficient opportunities for students to do independent work. As a response to that criticism, and in a fashion that got around all the conflicts, the decision was made to roll all the independent projects into a single week, cancel everything else in the School of Drama and call it Playground. Peachy.

So where's the participation rule wrinkle? Well, prior to Playground, any student not currently in good standing could not propose an independent project. So, since Playground was the current manifestation of all independent projects, the rule followed the change and students not in good standing could not participate in Playground. The thought was that students in academic distress would be able to take the time during Playground and right themselves prior to classes beginning again the following week.

But Playground isn't really the same as the way we used to look at independent projects. It has an ethos of its own. And, really, School of Drama commitments are supposed to be lifted during the Playground week. So an argument could, and would, be made that Academic Actions take a week off with classes. That would mean that even students in trouble ought to be allowed to participate. Take that point, along with the institutional drift to the independent project implementation, add in some new people, disagreement from the start and presto you have a rule enforcement problem.

What is the rule now? I don't know. I do know it has changed each of the last three years. I think right now the application is that students on action may not propose Playground pieces, but may still participate in a piece, if, at the time Playground falls in the semester, that student's advisor and option coordinator concur that the student is at that moment not in academic jeopardy for that semester.

Clear, yes?

The most interesting dimension to me about the whole rules thing is this: most of the rules are there to insure people are as successful as they can be within the program; they're there to enable and facilitate, not to restrict or punish. And in that framework I guess none of them would be necessary at all if people used good judgment in prioritizing their experience. Here's what the Playground rule (or the work for the school rule for that matter which also gets a lot of derision) should be:

IF YOU ARE TOO BUSY, DON'T DO IT

That's all. The problem is that given a free choice often people choose what they like over what they need, and in our environment that would lead to summations like "It's really too bad such-and-such failed their classes and had to be dropped from the school, but did you see their magnificent Playground piece." Now, maybe we're all adults here and we shouldn't slant the floor to prevent things like that, but my experience leads me to believe that really isn't the case; the university, parents, and even students expect us to erect these barriers to assist people in making the right decisions for themselves. Still, I believe much of the ambiguity people perceive in policy or application is due to a residual desire to just let things take care of themselves rather than to interfere at all. Maybe that can be a comforting thought the next time any of us are trying to unravel a policy tangle of one kind or another.

There's another dimension to this as well, but it's probably a topic for another post, that goes like this. Even when the policy is clear, the people governed by the policy inevitably think there is some reason why they are a special case and the policy doesn't apply to them. Which I guess is my way of saying to those who long for more defined rules that even when the rules are defined the application becomes hopelessly muddled. Or maybe: "You're in Drama School, not a military academy, sometimes art is messy. Learn to deal with it."