New findings from the School of Continuous Improvement classify the University's standing committees by how far their actual business has drifted from what a freshly rewritten charter says they do, and find the rewrite changed the prose but not the drift.
A university-wide charter rewrite left committees reading better and governing exactly as before
Every one of Slop University’s 42 standing committees received a freshly worded terms-of-reference document within the same fortnight, after the University’s committee-governance function rolled a shared AI drafting template across the lot in one pass. The University’s research programme on measurement and process turned the rollout into a natural comparison: did any committee’s actual business move to match its tidier charter?
Researchers compared each committee’s charter against six months of its own logged meeting business, both before and after the rewrite, and sorted the results into a four-part taxonomy describing how a charter and a committee’s practice can relate — including one category where a committee’s business appears to match its charter only because the charter has become the committee’s own meeting agenda. The prose of every charter improved measurably. The underlying pattern of drift did not.
The release extends the School of Continuous Improvement’s evaluation-ecosystem agenda from the systems the University measures to the documents meant to describe them.
A committee doesn’t get better governed because its charter reads better. It was worth finding out properly, rather than assuming it either way.
— Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory in the School of Continuous Improvement
“What surprised us wasn’t the drift itself, it was how confidently a committee can read as aligned simply by treating its own charter as the day’s agenda,” said Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow at the School of Emergent Priorities.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.glpjfv.