joshuazelinsky | Committee Meetings at Magic Schools

(Note this is an old Facebook entry I'm copying over to here.)

We've read a lot of stories about kids going to magic schools but this genre seems to have very little about the day to day aspects of the teachers and professors. In particular, they seem to downplay how much committee work and discussion there would be. Here are two possible snippets from magic school faculty discussions:

1. Professor Featherstone: "I'm really concerned about a lack of interdisciplinary material in our curriculum. A student can go through their entire time here and avoid taking a single Divination course. Worse, many of our students in the pre-Elementalist track seem to be doing just that, with the track requiring so many classes that important skills like Divination fall by the way side. Are we a genuine liberal arts mage school or just a professional mage school?"

Professor Pigwhistle: "Featherstone, you bring this up every single meeting. Can we please concentrate on adopting the new Potions standards?"

(Note: This repeats for another 30 years and continues after Featherstone becomes a ghost. He continues to harp on this even when the school folds the pre-Elementalist track in to a different track. Eventually, they get an exorcist because apparently being a tenured ghost does not protect you from being exorcised.)

2. Professor Anat: "Look, we can't cut funding to our department. Necromancy requires a lot of raw resources, especially onyx. If we can't have our students take at least three practical animations in the regular course, we won't meet national accreditation standards for the class."

Professor Wormwood "So just have the students pay for the resources themselves."

Then proceeds a rambling ten minute argument about socioeconomic issues, with some claims that Wormwood is speaking from a position of privilege which eventually leads to the following exchange:

Professor Witchhazel: "There's a real problem that we're recruiting primarily from wealthy students from major mage families. Aside from the ethical considerations, the vast majority of kids who turn out to be Chosen, Destined ones who are prophesied to be the only hope against vast and mighty threats come from poor backgrounds."

Professor Smith: "Well, considering that such students generally seem to end their terrible battles with great evils in climatic ways destroying large parts of their schools right when they should be graduating, that may be an argument in favor of our current policies. We barely have enough gold to pay for basic upkeep as is."

Other possible issues that may be discussed include:

When the school gets stuck in a timeloop for a few months, how does HR decide paychecks? Does time in a timeloop count against your tenure clock?

For schools that have both humans and longer-lived species (like elves) how does one deal with the inevitable problems when eventually all faculty are elves? Is deliberately having human hires an acceptable move to promote diversity or is it speciesist?

How does one politely tell the tenured lich that his department has a limited budget and he has to use the same base scrolls as everyone else, and not to throw death curses at the departmental secretary when she refuses to order the fancy parchment? Also does anyone know how to get to the lich to stop complaining in every single meeting that the students in his advanced scrying class don't know basic wand work? Also, please by all the gods in whatever setting this is in, can someone get the lich to understand that he can't put in writing that he prefers students from the Valley of Thorns over those from Riversong?