Time to Show Robert the Door

A couple of years ago, a colleague wrote the following message on our faculty email list after another faculty discussion was thwarted by Robert's Rules of Order (Robert's Rules henceforth):

If what someone has to say can’t be heard or doesn’t count unless it’s phrased using a very specific set of words that are rarely used in everyday language, then how inclusive is the meeting? . . . Why should [faculty members] have to know the words, “I move to set aside the orders of the day,” in order to simply mention an important topic that should be of interest to all of us? When was the last time any of us had a conversation where we used such a phrase? Frankly, it sounds like something a character would say in a British period piece. . . .

There have been many times when I have felt the stranglehold of Robert’s over the years, but I will say that today was one of those meetings where it was far more difficult to understand why we are holding so fast to this manual. During meetings, people will even say things like, “Robert’s doesn’t like that.” If the internet is to be believed, Mr. Robert passed away in the 1920s. And while it seems the manual has been updated many times over the years, maybe we just let Mr. Robert and his rules rest easy and create a new system that can accommodate our needs and interests better?

For the sixteen years that I’ve held a full-time position in academia, nothing has generated more sustained controversy on my campus than the use of Robert’s Rules at faculty meetings. The email message above captures much of what people find frustrating. But let’s take a deeper look at why Robert’s Rules are not in the best interest of faculty, especially faculty of color and other historically underrepresented groups, and why it is time for us to find better alternatives.

Instead of starting with the assumption that the rules are universally applicable and, in principle, neutral, as many an avid Robert’s Rules enthusiast would have us believe, it helps to put the rules in the historical context in which they were written. Henry Martyn Robert, the author of Robert’s Rules, was born in 1837. He graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1857. Through the 1860s and 1870s he traveled the country as an army engineer based in various locations, presiding over local meetings that often turned unproductive or downright rancorous. The experience of unproductive meetings and shouting matches plagued General Robert (as he was known after his promotion to brigadier general in 1901). At one fateful meeting in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1863, the assembly erupted into open conflict, leading him to conclude that shared rules of order were a necessity for public meetings. In 1867, he was promoted to major and sent to San Francisco, which, according to the introduction of Robert’s Rules of Order, “was then a turbulent community made of people recently arrived from every state. . . . Each member of these organizations had brought from his home state different and often strong convictions as to what were correct parliamentary rules.” Convinced, yet again, of the need to devise a common set of parliamentary rules, he then began to write his own code, producing the Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies, which he published himself in 1876. The rules are very much a product of his military background, his experience in the Civil War, and his life in a country violently divided in its loyalties. The principle around which General Robert developed his rules was that “it is necessary to restrain the individual somewhat, as the right of an individual . . . is incompatible with the interests of the whole.” The emphasis in Robert’s Rules on majority rule—the rules afford minority voices an opportunity to be heard but expect those in the minority to graciously accept the majority opinion after being given such an opportunity—also stems from his experience. Over the years General Robert kept revising the manual, and, after his death in 1923, his family members took control of it.

Once we place Robert’s Rules in their historical context, it becomes easier to acknowledge that they suffer from drawbacks that are hard to reconcile with the values of academia today. The most significant of these drawbacks are that Robert’s Rules are dense, unnecessarily complex, rigid, and hierarchical; do not offer sufficient consideration of minority views; and have the potential to be weaponized by those who know how to “wield” them.

Form over Content

Too often, meeting participants act as if they must “perform” Robert’s Rules correctly, as if Robert himself were looking down from above and judging. They spend lots of time debating what Robert’s Rules says rather than figuring out what is actually needed in the meeting. . . . What we want people to understand is that when they face a difficult situation, they have the ability, power, and obligation to figure out what to do, not to turn those decisions over to some form of scripture or committee of wise men. To solve a problem by claiming the authority of an obscure paragraph in a book is disempowering.—Mike Parker, “Members, Not Robert, Should Rule”

Over the years, many of my colleagues have voiced frustration about the inaccessibility of Robert’s Rules and how their use has hampered productive discussion rather than facilitated it. The latest edition of Robert’s Rules of Order runs to more than seven hundred tightly packed pages. To become an expert in or even just a somewhat proficient user of Robert’s Rules, one has to undergo special training or devote many hours of study of the manual. Fortunately, Robert himself offers us a guide for how to approach the book. Unfortunately, as Kent Puckett points out in “Reading, Race, and ‘Robert’s Rules of Order,’”

After pages of detailed guidance about how one should use the manual, Robert appends a very brief and gnomic note “to the reader”. . . . “The reader is advised,” he writes, “to read this Manual in the order suggested in the Plan for the study of Parliamentary Law, page 305.” On page 305, one is directed to immediately turn back and read from pages 275 to 292 and then back again from pages 25 to 51, then jump back to page 5 before moving forward to page 20 and then forward again to page 313 and then back to page 134, and so on.

One can hardly keep straight what the order of reading is supposed to be, let alone what the order of actions is supposed to be. It is no wonder, then, that faculty meetings under Robert’s Rules can feel like going down a rabbit hole of rules with no light at the end of those tunnels. We often sort through rule after rule and lose sight of the deliberative body’s larger goals.

Adding to the discomfort caused by complexity is the rigidity and deference to hierarchy inherent in Robert’s Rules. The manual prioritizes rules as rules over the outcome of the deliberative process. They encourage us to adopt rules for the sake of order rather than for the sake of productive outcomes (which General Robert assumes flow naturally from a meeting that is orderly). Thus, Robert’s Rules take great pains to delineate how and when debate must unfold in an assembly. But a rigid form of “debate” where one must direct all comments to the presider rather than the assembly and speak either for or against a particular motion (and only once it has been moved), where a harmless quip from a member might result in the presider sternly informing them that they do not have the floor, is hardly the way to build community or arrive at the best possible outcome.

As Lawrence E. Susskind and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank write in Breaking Robert’s Rules, “Good outcomes don’t necessarily emerge from Robert’s Rules. Why? There are lots of reasons. Questions can be framed only in certain ways. They can be changed from the way they were originally framed only when specific conditions are met. They can be voted on only one at a time, in a certain order (so possible trade-offs are very hard to consider). They can be reconsidered only under very narrow circumstances, even when new information becomes available, and even when most people in the group want an opportunity to reconsider.” The restrictions around the format of debate stifle meaningful and creative dialogue, which, in turn, limits the ability of the assembly to make the best or the best-informed decisions. For instance, Robert’s Rules do not allow for an assembly to consider new information or take a “straw vote” or a “nonbinding” vote to direct its work productively. One could take steps toward achieving these ends by going into a “committee of the whole,” but that is often a fraught decision and requires some parliamentary gymnastics.

The rigid emphasis on form rather than content discourages participation by individual members of the assembly. People unfamiliar with the rules and the language worry about being ruled “out of order” and are likely to stay silent instead. And those people who are already marginalized in academia or feel like “outsiders” will prefer not to jump into these uncertain waters for fear of being embarrassed by a Robert’s Rules–wielding colleague or chair who might question their actions or words. Untenured faculty members, new faculty members, and faculty members unfamiliar with academic cultures often find the complexity of the rules, the specific formality of the language, and the rigidity of the format daunting and mystifying. It is not surprising, then, that they often choose to remain silent during faculty assemblies.

Finally, the emphasis on exact phrasing and mode of presentation smacks of a politics of respectability—a demand on those seeking change or simply those belonging to underrepresented communities to present themselves and their arguments in ways that align with dominant ideals and standards. It is a type of surveillance and discipline (often accompanied by punitive measures or disapprobation) that overemphasizes individual modes of presentation and “performing civility” over the actual transformation of communities and the creation of more inclusive spaces. In my experience, no sentence starting with or including the phrase “my esteemed colleague” ever actually displayed much esteem for said colleague. In fact, quite the opposite. 

Majority Rule

While General Robert took great pains to acknowledge the rights of minorities, he was clear in the introduction to his manual that “the great lesson for democracies to learn is for the majority to give to the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out, until they can secure its repeal.” This all-or-nothing position is highly unproductive in academic cultures, where we should be able to do better than settle for an acceptance of majority opinion (which once voted on becomes very difficult to challenge and undo under Robert’s Rules) that can be imposed on a minority of 49 percent of the assembly. At best, such majority rule results in unstable outcomes that don’t have sufficient support; at worst, the semblance of proper process becomes a way to legitimize repression and bureaucratize the expression of alternate viewpoints in order to make dissent ineffective.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s concerns in Democracy in America about the tyranny of the majority under democracy are relevant to a critique of Robert’s Rules. He wrote,

I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. When an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority, and implicitly obeys its injunctions; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority. . . . However iniquitous or absurd the evil of which you complain may be, you must submit to it as well as you can. . . . The majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. 

Under Robert’s Rules, members in the minority have even less recourse to mechanisms that would allow their opinion to be considered actively, rather than simply being heard so that it can be voted down. To be clear, consensus rules and supermajority rules can also be tyrannical in how they coerce agreement and suppress dissent or allow a minority opinion to stall decision-making. However, there should be room for a more robust engagement with minority opinions, and more room for thoughtful reconsideration, than Robert’s Rules allow.

Sanctioning the goal of a simple majority through elaborate and complex rules ensures that minority opinions will be perceived as legitimately defeated rather than legitimate. That the changing demographics of academia might entail a thorough consideration of the minority opinion is a point that is easily buried in the procedural strata of Robert’s Rules. And while Robert’s Rules allow for “securing an appeal,” such a move requires knowing formal rules pertaining to when the appeal must be made, who is eligible to put forward such a motion, and how big a majority is required to successfully undo a motion once passed. For instance, a motion to reconsider must be made in the same meeting and by someone who voted on the prevailing side; a motion to rescind may be made at a later date but requires a two-thirds majority to rescind. But general members of a faculty assembly are unlikely to be familiar with these nuances.

The particular form and formality and the insistence on a militaristic adherence to order, the injunction on a minority to “gracefully submit” and “cheerfully assist” in carrying out the will of the majority, must be understood for the mechanisms of compliance and obedience that they are. And to refer to this form and formality as a “neutral” way of handling faculty meetings glosses over the potential harm of using Robert’s Rules. As Puckett argues in his essay on Robert’s Rules, “The Rules are a historical artifact, a system that emerged out of a traumatic encounter with the fact of white supremacy and the experience of the Civil War. . . . More generally, because all rules are historical, no rule can ever be neutral or truly autonomous; we need to see even the formal autonomy of the rule qua rule as something real, necessary, and potentially violent.”

Weaponizing the Rules

“Everyone expecting to take an active part in meetings of a deliberative assembly should become sufficiently familiar with [the rules,]” General Robert wrote. Why did he make that recommendation? Because if you don’t, you can be pushed around by those who do. The game is rigged, and if you don’t understand the rules you will lose.—Lawrence E. Susskind and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, Breaking Robert’s Rules

General Robert’s intention was to create a system in which the chair would not have unchecked power and the rules would guard against the “caprice of the chairman.” However, the complexity of the rules makes it easy for a chair to manipulate the discussion or the outcome. One of the major flaws of Robert’s Rules is that they can be weaponized by those who know them well. And given that the book of rules is dense and immense, it is likely that a vast majority of the assembly is not familiar with them—with the likely exception of the chair and the parliamentarian. This situation can lead to the manipulation of rules by those select few who understand them or claim to understand them.

An early example of the weaponization of Robert’s Rules comes from the history of the Robert family. In 1939, Sarah Corbin Robert—General Robert’s daughter-in-law and “trustee” of Robert’s Rules at the time—used the rules to bar the world-renowned African American singer Marian Anderson from performing at the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. At the time, Mrs. Robert was the president-general of the DAR. She used a “white artists only” clause (which had been introduced into the organization’s rental agreements in 1932 but was not common or commonly enforced in Washington at the time) to block Anderson’s performance. A public controversy erupted and protests ensued, including public letters asking the DAR to reconsider its decision. Mrs. Robert convinced the DAR’s governing board that no exception could be made to the rules, regardless of social pressure. Kent Puckett writes, “With the committee and its rules behind her, Robert wrote to Anderson in terms that were both morally grotesque and procedurally correct: ‘The artistic and musical standing of Miss Marian Anderson is not involved in any way. In view of the existence of provisions in prevailing agreements with other organizations and concert bureaus, and the policy which has been adopted in the past, an exception cannot be made in this instance.’ She was, she argued, just following the rules.”

The unyielding position of the DAR led Eleanor Roosevelt to publicly resign from the group. In her resignation letter, the First Lady stated, “I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist. You have set an example which seems to me unfortunate, and I feel obliged to send in to you my resignation. You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed.” Marian Anderson instead performed in a public concert (at the invitation of the federal government) on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, to an enraptured crowd of seventy-five thousand.

Indeed, it is not just the ability to so easily weaponize Robert’s Rules that is concerning but also that the rules impede our ability to “lead in an enlightened way.” It is no wonder, then, that faculty members sometimes leave meetings run under Robert’s Rules feeling like the meeting was, in the words of Puckett, “morally grotesque and procedurally correct.”

Alternatives to Robert's Rules

If it is more important for meetings to “not be without some rules” rather than to have “good rules,” as stated by General Robert in the preface to the 1915 edition of Robert’s Rules of Order, what other formats might we consider? Any alternative rules that a body considers for adoption would need to address the underlying concerns discussed above. Rules that are straightforward, easily understood and employed, and more flexible would have to form the basis of any alternative to Robert’s Rules.

Fortunately, there are several available alternatives to consider. An option for those who have grown accustomed to the format of Robert’s Rules is Democratic Rules of Order, by Peg Francis and Fred Francis. This little handbook, which runs to eighty-five pages, including the index, seems like a great contender for those not willing to stray too far from General Robert and his rules. The Democratic Rules appear to be more intuitive, are easier to learn and use, and allow for more flexibility than Robert’s Rules. For instance, motions to rescind and reconsider involve far fewer steps than in Roberts Rules and do not require a two-thirds majority. The Democratic Rules also allow for a “mover’s privilege,” which enables the mover of a motion to informally refine and amend the motion instead of having to make formal amendments that must then be voted upon. Taking a straw poll of the assembly is permitted under the Democratic Rules. Finally, only one amendment may be discussed and voted upon at a time before moving on to another amendment (hence, unlike in Robert’s Rules, there are no amendments to amendments).

If a faculty assembly is ready for a more drastic change, it can consider other manuals that are based on consensus or concordance decision-making. Two of the more prominent ones are “Martha’s Rules,” developed by Martha’s Housing Co-op for families in Madison, Wisconsin, and Roberta’s Rules of Order, by Alice Cochran. While Martha’s Rules are a method of consensus decision-making and Roberta’s Rules aim for consensus but settle on concordance (achieved when a supermajority of voters agree with a proposal), they both allow for straw polls and discussion of multiple options (as opposed to a yes-or-no vote on one question); most important, they both propose putting the motion after a discussion of the problem. Martha’s Rules are explained in fewer than five pages and follow a simple, five-step process without details on specific roles in the assembly. Other books and manuals further elaborate on these rules, including Breaking Robert’s Rules by Lawrence E. Susskind and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank. Roberta’s Rules of Order is under three hundred pages (including templates for running a meeting, developing proposals, and writing bylaws) and is highly readable.

Any movement to bid farewell to General Robert and his rules in faculty assemblies will likely be met with uncertainty, anxiety, and resistance at first. We have gotten accustomed to feeling confused, disenfranchised, disciplined, and silenced. It’s hard to imagine an alternative that could solve these problems. But I have no doubt that an assembly of educators, thinkers, writers, and creators can effectively imagine and employ an alternative, if only it would take the first step of deciding that it’s time to thank General Robert and show him the door. 

For a satirical take on the (in)effectivenes of Robert's Rules, see Afshan Jafar and Sheetal Chhabria’s “Robert Really Does Rule!” published online with this issue.

Afshan Jafar is May Buckley Sadowski ’19 Professor and chair of sociology at Connecticut College. She is the chair of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance. Her email address is [email protected].