And they all realize--and reject--the alternative to their busy schedules.
"You could do away with meetings by letting the deans make all the decisions, but if you want the result to reflect Faculty opinion you have to go to meetings," Mansfield says.
Thompson says that at an institution like Harvard, where change comes slowly, the administration is unlikely to dismantle the committee system anytime soon. Even the handful of committees that Thompson identifies as superfluous are hard to disband, she says.
"It's hard to get rid of things around here. It's easy to grow things, [but] it's hard to cut them," Thompson says.
Part of the reason the system doesn't change is that few professors are anxious to reinvent the wheel, no matter how hard Faculty must work to make it roll.
"Nobody has proposed a better system for doing all of this," Vendler says. "Even though we complain about it, no one can think of a better way to do it."