A frequently mistaken belief about boards of directors is that they are more than the sum of the human beings who sit on them, that somehow their members are magically transformed into a unified, supra-human whole the moment they take their seats.
This was Naomi Singer’s hope when she was summarily removed from her job by the vengeful president of her college. She was about to turn to the board for recourse when her situation was rectified. But once on the board – she had been elected as a representative of her employee group – it takes a single sitting for her to realize that there is no such thing as the ideal she had imagined. The board she has just joined does not have a collective persona that transcends the different personae of its members but is composed of twenty individuals, all of whom have come there with distinctive ideological bents that make of some fervent supporters of the powers that be, of others open-minded individuals willing to judge by the evidence, and of others, like her, thanks to their intimate knowledge of the president’s ego-tripping, his irreconcilable opponents.
As just as was her cause, Naomi realizesthat she might not even have been given a hearing by the board, let alone a fair hearing.
Boards, like chains, are only as good as all the links of which they are composed. One weak link and the whole thing can fall apart, as it does in The Language Professor, the story, among other things, of Naomi Singer’s eye-opening encounter with micro-politics in a post-secondary educational institution.
Debora Resnick
author of
The Language Professor
Eloquent Books
Strategic Book Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-60911-868-6
http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/TheLanguageProfessor.html