"I want to chew my leg off."

So said the note from another professorette, as we tried to stay awake through the end of a particularly bad meeting.

Also noted:

Aggressive senior faculty who have lost a lot of weight on Atkins do smell kind of funny, and they maybe make less sense than they did when they were fat.

Respected senior faculty, survivors of administrative postings, are still capable of writing notes to neighbors using the phrases "quagmire mind!" and "diarrhea of the mouth!" At least when the subject is an aggressive full professor on the Atkins diet.

If you want to make a room full of well-meaning faculty trying to write a "mission statment" all sit up, use the word "bias" in an unexpected way. A quiet "Actually, I think there's some humanities bias in what you've written so far," induced near panic. It probably would have gone more smoothly if I'd just tuned out. But they did ask what I thought, after all.

If you want your faculty to stay well-meaning, you shouldn't ask them to write "mission statements," of course.