WHY STUFF HAPPENS AT UNIVERSITIES. Newmark's Door commends Greg Mankiw's Ten Principles of Time Management, with emphasis on the fifth.

I avoid university committees. They are vast wastes of time.

Which is an accurate characterization of many committees and an individually rational response that is potentially destructive in the aggregate. Committees thus tend to attract the Silent Generation (the folks who came up with that tag for the cohort between the G.I.s and the Boomers clearly never sat in on an Episcopal sermon or a faculty meeting) holdovers from the era when tenure was easily obtained, and hence see no urgency in shutting up and getting back to their research, as well as the Silent Generation's spawn in the various departments and centers of victimology and not much rigor in their teaching or their scholarship (compare Econometrica with Social Text if you doubt me) who get a special kick out of guilt-tripping the very elders who made their presence possible. And thus the coordination failure. It's individually rational to avoid the preening and work on one's research and tend to one's students (Professor Mankiw's seventh point, which really deserves the prominence of entry 1 or 2) but when Stuff Happens to your department or the Perpetually Aggravated mau-mau your colleague out of the presidency of the university, that might be because nobody was at the meeting to speak up.