The Future Of The University And Faculty Involvement
 Report of the Chair-Elect to the Faculty Senate
May 2, 2007

Last January, you heard me speak about my hope that the Faculty Senate could devote its attention to various types of intellectual collaboration next year.  I continue to believe that this is an important issue, and one that merits Senate attention, but it’s not what I’m going to speak about today.  As I indicated when I made those remarks, I suspected that the other issues facing us that day, issues having to do with the role of the faculty in planning the future of the University, would take pride of place on the Senate floor, demanding continued attention, persistent involvement.  These are the issues that that I will address today.
I have the luxury of accepting the baton from a chair, Ken Schwartz, who has given us a superb foundation upon which to build.  On behalf of the Senate, I’d like to thank Ken for the many hours he has dedicated to the chairmanship, the deliberate reflection with which he has approached all of his responsibilities, the impeccable integrity with which he has conducted himself, and the good cheer that he has always brought to the job.  My colleagues on the Executive Council I’m sure have noticed, also, the way that Ken has steered our deliberations and our decisions toward enhancing the effectiveness of the Senate as a voice for faculty concerns and perspectives, and as a constructive partner in fashioning a bright future for the University.  It is my intention, and my hope, to build upon the successes we have enjoyed in this regard under Ken’s capable leadership.
We all know that the University of ten years from now, even five years from now, will not be the University of today. Needless to say, much of the change will be fueled by the current capital campaign, which promises to have a transformative effect on our institution.  But what sort of transformation?  One answer emerges from the story so far of the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy.  There we saw a programmatic initiative that came out of the UVA faculty  (our five-year BA/MPP program) converge with the interests of a generous donor to create something that promises not only to add exciting new opportunities for scholarship and teaching, but to do so in a field that dovetails beautifully with our University’s historic identity and sense of purpose.    Certainly, the hard work of making the Batten School a reality remains ahead of us.  It is work that will involve the Senate, and particularly its Academic Affairs Committee, which is charged with approving all new degree programs before they are sent on to the governmental powers-that-be. Yet the role of the Senate should neither be to rubber-stamp innovations nor to obstruct them.
In fact, the conscientious work of our Academic Affairs Committee, like that of our other committees, has demonstrated precisely what the role of the Senate can be.  The Faculty Senate is at its best when it functions as a deliberative body that focuses the wide-ranging talents, the extraordinary expertise, and the deep commitment of University faculty on problems and opportunities of concern to the University as a whole.  The Senate’s future involvement with the Batten School, I hope, will serve as a model for how it can continue to perform this role within the context of the sort of initiative that UVA has not seen in almost half a century, the founding of a new school.   I hope that work will serve as a model for future programmatic initiatives in its openness, its transparency, its effectiveness, and its collaborative spirit. 
(Let me add, too, that since the creation of the Batten School presents a unique opportunity for the University as a whole.   Its faculty and programs will inevitably intersect with those of various existing units, and although it remains to be determined which ones these will be or should be, one thing is clear: making those intersections work offers us an opportunity to iron out questions of how we can make interdisciplinarity work at UVA.)
I hope, too, that the year to come will see some consolidation in the Senate’s role as an active contributor in broader planning and development efforts.  As you all know, our Planning and Development committee has generated a series of proposals for future programmatic initiatives.  Those initiatives have found their way onto the agenda of the deliberations of the Commission for the Future of the University, just as many of the members of the committee have found their way onto the rosters of the Commission or its various subgroups.   But while these ad hoc arrangements have proven, and are proving, quite capable of harnessing the community’s imagination and expertise to the task of imagining a new and improved UVA, they cannot take the place of an ongoing, institutionalized mechanism for generating, reviewing, or developing ideas, and for referring them to the people, whether development officers or administrators, who could make them happen.  The time is rapidly approaching when our ad hoc initiatives will have to mature into ongoing, sustainable structures capable of moving initiatives all the way from brainstorming to implementation.  If these structures are to respond to the core needs of our institution, moreover, they will have to involve faculty in a significant way, whether through the continued involvement of some iteration of our current Planning and Development Committee, or some other arrangement. 
Next year, I hope to engage the administration in conversations about what these structures might look like, and how they can best incorporate faculty perspectives.  I look forward to working with our new Provost and Executive Vice President, Tim Garson (congratulations, Tim, on your appointment) on this issue and many others.  I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing Provost, Gene Block, for the great job he has done as a genial and constructive leader and collaborator.  Best of luck, Gene, with your new position at UCLA.
Change, transitions.  We have just navigated one important change of leadership and have several others looming.  That transition itself signals something of the shape of things to come.  In Mr. Garson’s appointment as Executive Vice President as well as Provost we can see that these transitions are not a simple matter of finding new people to do the same old jobs, but of rethinking the way we do things, the way we’re organized, the configuration of the jobs themselves.  Certainly, this process, one of vital interest to the University community, is far from concluded.  I would like to offer the skills and insight of the Faculty Senate as a valuable resource that can be tapped in carrying it through effectively and advantageously.  
The coming years will see change not only at the upper echelons of University administration, but throughout the institution, as University faculty begin to retire in ever-larger numbers.  These retirements, coupled with the plans to grow the faculty set forward in the Provost’s ten-year academic plan, will necessitate the hire of hundreds of faculty members over the course of the next decade or so.  This is one of the most far-reaching changes that our leadership, new and old, will have to manage, and that our resource-development efforts will have to enable.  It is also one in which the Faculty Senate will have to involve itself in a serious manner, since it involves nothing less than the composition of the faculty itself, and thereby the academic caliber and intellectual identity of the University of Virginia as a whole.  Some of this year’s work has already begun to speak to this issue, albeit indirectly.  Our committee for Faculty Recruitment, Retention and Welfare has begun to assess what current faculty think about various dimensions of their lives here, including perceptions of the collegiality of the institution and satisfaction with salary and benefits.  The results of these efforts will provide one measure of our preparedness to retain good people and attract good replacements, an issue which will most certainly have to enter into whatever planning efforts take shape over the coming years.
But more difficult issues press upon us as well.  If we are to hire hundreds of new faculty, what kinds of people will they be?  Tenure-track?  Junior?  Senior?  In which fields will we grow, and in which not?  Will the fields themselves remain the same, while the faces change, or will structural change come as part and parcel of the transformation? What new fields will we have to consider engaging?  What spaces for interdisciplinary collaboration will we have to mark out and empower? Certainly, we could muddle our way through the coming years without asking these difficult questions, but to do so would be to squander an opportunity to fashion UVA into an institution designed to face the years that lie ahead of us, rather than one resting on the laurels accorded to us by years gone by.   It is this opportunity, more than any other, that necessitates a proactive approach to planning, one that is inclusive, transparent, sustainable, and effective. 
These are the issues, then, that face the Faculty Senate. They are issues of broad concern to the University as a whole, and they are not issues that will be resolved during my chairmanship, or that of my successor.   I invite all of you in the Senate to join me in engaging these issues by deepening our collaborative ties with University leadership while maintaining the critical perspective and independent voice that are the very things that make the Senate a valuable contributor to the life and future of UVA.