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Remarks to the Educational Policy Committee

Marcia Day Childress

Chair, University of Virginia Faculty Senate

This is a brief report on Senate activities and plans.

It was a quiet summer. I conferred with my predecessors. I updated the membership on our standing committees. I named Senate representatives to university committees. And I had a series of very interesting conversations with university vice presidents and with President Casteen.

Those discussions pointed up significant impending developments. There's the possibility of a renegotiated relationship with the Commonwealth. There are new directions for academic programming, including significant advances in science and technology and the arts, investments in keeping our strongest programs strong, and innovative interdisciplinary possibilities for research, teaching, and learning. There are the dizzyingly high stakes of the new capital campaign. Faculty are and will be affected by all of these initiatives. And faculty are interested in them all insofar as they will make the university better and contribute substantially to the quality of our common life here.

The Senate's first activity of the new academic year was our annual retreat, which took place last Friday, 10 September. Fully three-fourths of our Senators attended. Our theme was "Enriching Faculty Life at UVA - Interdisciplinary Collaboration." The idea of enriching our life as faculty was driven by the realization that salary isn't everything when you consider the quality of faculty life - appropriate compensation for work well done is important, to be sure, but I think pretty much all our faculty would readily agree it's not the only thing. What else makes or could make faculty life at UVA better, so much better, in fact, that we'd be less susceptible to being lured away elsewhere? My interest in focusing the retreat on interdisciplinary collaboration came partly as a result of my everyday interdisciplinary teaching and administrative work in the Program of Humanities in Medicine, partly because the interdisciplinary theme of "Science and Society" that Rob Grainger championed when he was Senate chair three years ago was so good for intellectual life here as to deserve revisiting, and partly because of what I heard in my summer conversations with university leaders.

We spent the afternoon exploring interdisciplinary collaboration of five kinds. Some of what we addressed involved support programs, infrastructure, and policies that apply across disciplines and affect faculty in all the schools. Our five areas were

  • interdisciplinary collaborative teaching, including Common Courses and the new University or January Term;
  • mentoring of and by faculty, including a new brochure promoting mentoring produced jointly by the Senate and the Women's Leadership Council;
  • faculty advancement - such things as recruitment, promotion, retention, and shifts in career trajectory, including ways of making more explicit and transparent the university's expectations of faculty and the paths by which faculty can achieve academic success;
  • cultivating a more vibrant community of emeritus and retired faculty, for their own satisfaction and as a tremendous institutional resource; and
  • assuring and benefiting from diversity in our ranks and across the institution.

We had lively, thoughtful discussions. The session was a great way to begin a year that will bring work on multiple fronts, among them

  • continuing our endorsement of undergraduate research through awarding Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards;
  • awarding dissertation fellowships to graduate students;
  • brokering a university-wide conversation about Honor (this a continuation of last year's preliminary discussions);
  • looking at what some of our peer institutions offer in the way of faculty benefits; " participating in the provost's review of promotion and tenure policies and in a new round of program reviews to be carried out by the provost's office;
  • sponsoring a faculty working group on interdisciplinary collaboration around the theme of Science, Technology, and Society.

I'll be reporting to you about our work along these lines at a later meeting.

Let me close by saying how impressed I am both with the quality of our faculty, individually and in the aggregate, and with the commitment of the faculty to the university. Even in these first few months, I have been deeply pleased - deeply moved, even - by the eagerness and good faith with which faculty from all across Grounds agree to undertake institutional service and invest themselves substantially in it. The faculty are a tremendous resource as the university seeks to move into the top tier of institutions nationally, public and private. They care deeply about UVA and are ready to work long and hard in partnership with this committee, the full Board, and the administration to make UVA a better place in which to work and to call our academic home.