Skip to site navigation

Faculty Senate Chair's Report

Educational Policy Committee of the Board

Kenneth Schwartz
September 12, 2006

Madam Chair and members of the Committee, I am pleased to report that the Faculty Senate is off to a good start and well positioned to engage a number of important issues for the coming year and beyond. It is difficult to capture the wide range of topics that the Senate discusses in its committees and with the full eighty-member body, nonetheless I have taken to calling our theme for the year – Faculty Moving Forward. Our specific initiatives are in many cases collaborative opportunities with the Provost and other administrative officers of the university, and they include the following topics:

Faculty Recruitment, Retention, and Welfare is a new standing committee of the Senate and this group will be working with Gertrude Fraser, Bill Harvey and others in identifying the top issues for the short-term of one to three years and the longer range of 3 to ten years. As a committee they will be discussing and debating a wide range of issues, and it is our hope that the priority-setting exercise in committee will then lead to a healthy discussion by the full Senate, most likely during our January meeting. How we recruit, retain, and nurture promising, distinguished and diverse faculty represents a serious challenge that interests many on the Senate and throughout the university as a whole. This is clearly a priority for the Board and the University administration, and we are pleased to be active partners in this enterprise.

The Planning and Development Committee of the Senate will continue their collaboration with Bob Sweeney of the University’s Development Office and Provost Gene Block in co-sponsoring a series of dinners. These will focus on galvanizing faculty ideas that could prove to be helpful as the President, Mr. Sweeney, and the individual deans pursue major transformational gifts. Three of these dinners were conducted last spring, and all agreed that they generated tremendous opportunities for connecting faculty insights in emerging research and teaching with potential funding for the future.

I observed the Board of Visitors’ Special Committee on Planning in May and again yesterday, and I was encouraged to see and hear a great deal of overlap between issues that the Senate has discussed and those that have been under serious scrutiny and priority-setting by this committee and the full board. I expect that there will be additional momentum provided by the Senate’s deliberation on many of these crucial aspects leading to continued progress for faculty and the university.

Our first meeting of the Faculty Senate this year is on September 21, and we are pleased that President Casteen has made a special request for all deans and vice presidents to attend. I look forward to the coming year, working closely with faculty colleagues, the Executive Council of the Senate, the University administration, and the Educational Policy Committee of the Board of Visitors.

Kenneth Schwartz, FAIA

Professor of Architecture

Faculty Senate Chair 2006-2007