A person with any kind of authority assumes it means dictatorial power and cannot believe it if anyone stands up to them. That is the South for you, although when there is opposition it is particularly valiant.
I am passing my committee role on to someone else and the committee chair is requiring a meeting between the new person in my role and himself, so that we can talk to each other under his supervision (as though we could not talk on our own). He is also inviting another deanlet to supervise us all as we talk. Neither he nor this deanlet understand or have the capability of understanding the piece of software I am going to show the new person how to use, but they want to stand over us as we have this conversation.
I do not want to be locked into a room with this committee chair and less with the second deanlet. God only knows what they want to do or say, or what kind of rhetorical trap they want to set. I wrote back saying: if you are going to bring an administrator from a professional schools to this meeting, can I bring a professor from Letters and Science? I am thinking of one of the following. I listed a Full, an endowed chair, and a department chair in the sciences and the social sciences.
We will see how that makes the committee chair feel. I am tired of this individual who cannot understand the abbreviations i.e., e.g., or n.b. and does not accept that many consider knowing these things to be a part of being literate.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
That Senate is like the Cortes in Spain, under Franco or a non constitutional king, perhaps.
And that committee makes me ill.
Quitting it is among the very smartest things I ever did.