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Chair's Report 2005-2006

Houston Wood Chair & Kenneth Schwartz, Chair-Elect

Excerpted for Educational Policy Committee of the Board May 16, 2006

Madam Chair and members of the Committee, the following comments are excerpts from Houston Wood's final report to the full Senate on April 28, with a few of my own comments on the year ahead.

This year began with some sad and disturbing racial incidents, with a number of our students suffering abusive comments. As part of our reaction, Houston asked several Senators to draft a response on behalf of the Senate. With input from our Executive Council, we prepared a statement which was placed on our website soon after the events. Through conversations with University administrators, who were in direct contact with these abused students and their families, we know that the timely action of the Senate helped soothe the wounds and reassure our students they are indeed welcome in our community.

We learned from the experience of the Semester at Sea program that we all need to do a better job of communicating with our constituencies. As Houston indicated, "If I could go back to October and replay the events, I would have suggested that planning and conversations with faculty, especially Arts & Sciences faculty, should begin immediately in order to prepare for the possibility of winning the contract. Continuing to quote from Houston, "I do have confidence the Semester at Sea will eventually be a much better academic experience than before UVA took over, but only time will tell whether this is a good fit for us or not".

We conducted a retreat in January with two facilitators, John Pickering and Tyler St. Clair of the Weldon Cooper Center. We identified five interest groups, and each of those groups has prepared a report about activities in which the Senate should engage. The retreat and subsequent activity have prepared the foundation for the future of the Senate over the next year and beyond. Coming out of this process, we created three new standing committees from the interest groups. The new committees are:

  • Faculty Recruitment, Retention and Welfare Committee
  • Policy Committee
  • Communications Committee

I will appoint chairs of these new committees and draft charges for them. These will form the focus of much of our work during the coming year. There is also interest in exploring and discussing the University's policy of housing such a low percentage of its students on Grounds with the sense that we are losing some qualitative advantage of the full educational experience enjoyed by students at our peer institutions, particularly among the Ivy League schools.

On April 13, Houston met with the Rector and discussed the Senate's strong interest in faculty representation on the Board of Visitors. He gave Mr. Farrell a copy of our report, which in turn contains the report Michael Smith delivered to the BOV when he left the position of Senate Chair. Our view is the faculty wants a representative firmly on the academic side of the line, understanding that the President and Provost are the administrative leaders of the University. We believe that the process should be institutionalized to more fully prepare the University to deal with eventual changes in administrative leadership.

One other area of interest involves the Capital Campaign. The Faculty Senate Planning & Development Committee has worked diligently over the past year, generating a Faculty Vision Statement (see attached). The Committee, under Marcia Childress' leadership, also organized a series of dinners in partnership with Provost Gene Block and Vice-President Bob Sweeney. Gene hosted these at his pavilion, and they were spectacular. I attended two of the three, and they were very successful in identifying several pan-University "big ideas" including topics such as an Institute for Energy, Economy and the Environment, Global Initiatives (with many dimensions), the revitalization and re-conception of the Shannon Center with additional emphasis on graduate education and teaching, and increased opportunities and sources of support for graduate students through links with teaching and research. These discussions were not at all parochial responses - with junior faculty (from the first dinner) to senior faculty (the second dinner), and a combined event at the culminating dinner earlier this month, everyone weighed in with ideas that could prove to be galvanizing. And everyone came away with a sense that the Faculty Senate will continue to have a strong voice in the process. We expect that the Planning and Development Committee will continue its work in helping to articulate faculty-generated visions for significant funding opportunities as part of the Capital Campaign, and we are grateful for the collaborative spirit shown by Bob Sweeney and Gene Block in this enterprise.

I see my role as facilitating increased engagement by Senators in areas of individual and shared interest. Our task groups were tremendously successful this spring, and they provided the foundation for continued engagement. A key element in this is communication, and we need to do better within the Senate. Toward that end, I will be working on several ways to support improved communication between Senators and their constituencies, and between the Senate and the University administration. One element of this will be an electronic bulletin board. I have been working with ITC over the past several weeks to set this up, and by September, we should have a tool to allow topical discussions organized on the "MY UVA" website.

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

A Faculty Senate Vision for U.va.

As a site for cutting-edge research in major scholarly fields and as the home for an unparalleled undergraduate experience, the University of Virginia is already poised to assume leading rank among all research and teaching universities. To achieve this goal, U.va. must invest new resources in targeted initiatives of high ambition that will extend our research and teaching excellence, without decoupling the reciprocal relationship between the two. If we excel across the University with this dual distinction, our research-and-teaching academical village will become a paradigm for higher education, both public and private.

The Faculty Senate fully endorses a range of initiatives already underway - including efforts in the sciences, movements toward internationalization of the university, a commitment to new initiatives that will enhance current programs in the visual and performing arts, investment in growing libraries and in digital technologies for research and teaching, and a renewed commitment to public outreach, especially in K-12 education. To these we add and encourage several concrete initiatives that, if taken together, would lead toward the transformational goals we regard as both necessary and within reach.

Our first and foundational recommendation is:

Immediate pursuit of a 1:15 faculty-student ratio, to be fully achieved within seven years through a targeted 20% increase in the number of faculty. These additional faculty would enable U.va. to increase the number of classes having fewer than 50 students and, especially, fewer than 20 students, and to extend faculty involvement with students in research. We propose a long-term goal of a 1:12 ratio by 2020.

Accompanying that goal and in large measure building upon it are these core aims:

  • A well-funded effort to build internationally prominent research programs, as assessed by academic metrics like National Research Council rankings, especially in the sciences, while taking steps at every stage to enhance already distinguished areas in the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools.
  • A commitment to have every undergraduate receive a course in writing instruction and to train all students in professional schools in relevant communication skills (writing, speaking, presentation technologies, etc.), as part of a resolve to make U.va. the national leader both in the teaching of writing in every school and in engagement with K-12 writing instruction.
  • Renewed initiatives to increase diversity in the faculty and student body, including a commitment to move U.va. into the top third of the rankings of comparable AAU institutions within the next decade in the percentage of female faculty and faculty of color.
  • Establish an ambitious program of cross-school exchange that will promote research and teaching collaborations among faculty, with incentives and rewards for creative collaborative work in targeted areas .
  • Offer unprecedented possibilities for undergraduate research, aiming toward, within seven years, a tripling of undergraduate research awards, such as the Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards, with funding for students and their faculty mentors.
  • A commitment to bring graduate funding up to market rates within five years by closing the gap in various disciplines' graduate fellowships between U.va. and the nation's most prestigious institutions in those fields.
  • In order to guarantee sustainability of these and other targeted initiatives, establish an ongoing academic planning process that would involve the Faculty Senate, the Office of the Provost, and the Board of Visitors and that would continue to work through and beyond the present capital campaign.

Beginning work on these complementary initiatives soon will ensure the University's ability to fulfill its potential as a premier institution of knowledge and learning, dedicated to human flourishing and engagement in public life.

-- Faculty Senate Committee on Planning & Development, adopted in spirit by the full Senate April 28, 2006

Faculty Representation on the Board of Visitors

Faculty Senate Task Group - April 7, 2006

Amy Bouton, Marcia Childress, Steven Nock, Jeffrey Rossman, Kenneth Schwartz

This statement has been prepared for consideration by the full Faculty Senate.

Adopted by the Senate, April 28, 2006

The University of Virginia Faculty Senate continues to advocate for the appointment of a non-voting faculty member to the University's Board of Visitors. A faculty presence would assure the Rector and Visitors of a faculty perspective and sounding board on the wide range of responsibilities that are the Board's purview. Efforts to gain faculty representation on the Board date back at least to 1983, when a non-voting student member was added to the Board. After more than two decades, University officials agree that student membership has enriched the Board's understanding of issues affecting students' experience at the University. Similarly, the Board deserves to have faculty perspectives represented in its deliberations.

In recent years, campaigns for faculty representation on boards at institutions of higher learning have been pursued by faculty at other public colleges and universities in the Commonwealth and by statewide organizations of faculty, including the Faculty Senate of Virginia. In 2004, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation that allows -- but does not require -- appointment of faculty representatives to nonvoting positions on college and university boards. Since then, many of our fellow institutions in the Commonwealth have named one or more faculty members to their Boards of Visitors, and several institutions have not moved forward.

Non-voting faculty members on BOV: Virginia Tech; College of William & Mary; Virginia Commonwealth University; Radford University; University of Mary Washington; George Mason University; James Madison University; Christopher Newport University; Longwood University

No faculty members on BOV: Norfolk State University; Old Dominion University; University of Virginia; Virginia Military Institute; Virginia State University

Several of the University's peer institutions nationally have faculty representation on their governing boards, including Cornell. Board members at those schools report that they benefit from the added perspectives provided by faculty and student members.

Addressing the UVA Board of Visitors at its April 2003 meeting, Faculty Senate Chair Michael Smith suggested that the Board would be well served in its deliberations by the participation of an informed and respected faculty colleague. He pointed out that a faculty presence would benefit Board and University alike by enhancing the Board's understanding of faculty teaching, research, and service and by strengthening communication between the Board and the faculty.

Recent legislation authorizing greater operating autonomy for the University makes it especially appropriate that the Board now assure itself of optimal communication with key constituencies. The Faculty Senate welcomes a discussion with the Rector and Visitors and the Educational Policy Committee about adding a faculty representative to the Board of Visitors.

Remarks to Board of Visitors

Michael J. Smith, Chair, Faculty Senate

Excerpt related to faculty representative on the Board of Visitors

5 April 2003

The hope of "institutional improvement" emboldens me to present my second main item today, that, with your indulgence, I will introduce indirectly. In one of my meetings yesterday, I learned of the extraordinary and generous way you on the Board acknowledged the contributions of our remarkable student representative on this Board this past year, Tim Lovelace. We on the faculty, too, are proud of Tim and have cherished our encounters with him both in and out of the classroom. He has given enormously to the whole university community. I gather many of you let him know how much his presence, and his continuing contributions have helped to influence your thinking and, even perhaps to introduce new ways of approaching issues.

Frankly, we on the faculty would love to have that same opportunity to participate, discuss, and perhaps to influence your thinking on the vital issues facing this institution, this University where we have made our careers. And so we are asking-not demanding, not legislating-asking, as vital members of this special place, that you consider appointing a faculty member to a non-voting position on this Board. Please note that, although I'm a politics professor who specializes in the study of human rights in world politics, I'm not asking you to consider this request using the language of rights, though of course I could so. Frankly, this could be quite effective if all we faculty cared about was a metaphorical place at the table and were willing to engage in the rhetoric and politics of confrontation to gain one. But as I hope we've showed you over the years of our work together, we try to avoid posturing and point scoring for their own sake-satisfying as this sometimes can be. We all care too much about this place to drive a needless confrontation. I'm not here to pound on the table.

Rather, I appeal to your, and our, joint sense of community and shared governance. If we think about this issue on its merits, I think that the presence of a faculty member experienced in university governance would be a real resource to the Board. The retiring Senate chair could lengthen her service to the University by serving as a Faculty BOV member for one year following her term as chair. Of course no single faculty member can hope to convey the view of "the faculty", just as no business leader or attorney can speak for their whole communities. A university is a unique kind of institution, in which the faculty are clearly at the heart of the whole mission. The management-labor model that may lead some to be cautious about a faculty board member seems to me a poor and inapt analogy here, because our "product" is research and teaching, the creation and dissemination of knowledge. The continuing presence and active participation of a faculty member on the Board, I think, would benefit us both. If I may indulge in a spot of jargon, a faculty presence could contribute to a mutual process of demystification.

Certainly this has been the experience on the administrative side. The President, Provost, and Deans have all welcomed the faculty senate chair to their meetings, and I believe we have contributed positively to those deliberations. We help to convey current faculty views to administrators in frank and open meetings and then of course they make and execute the actual policy. We, for our part, we try to explain the apparently Mysterious Ways of Madison Hall to our faculty colleagues. I can't tell you how many times I or a fellow Senate member has been able to disabuse a colleague of a firmly held-but really quite thoroughly mistaken-view of why a particular decision was made, or indeed not made, by "the Administration." We can do this only if we are there at the meetings as full and valued participants, and not simply as occasional reporters or respondents.

I think the same would be true of a Faculty member on your Board. We can help to fill out your view of what's really going on out there in Faculty Land, and, I'm convinced, deepen your understanding of the hopes and concerns of the people who make a university what it is-its faculty and its students. Several Virginia institutions, like Virginia Tech, have faculty members on the Board, and the National Association of Boards of Visitors has apparently recently dropped its opposition to the Richmond legislation that would have mandated appointing faculty member to the Board.

An anecdote may help to make my point. A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call late on Friday from one of Leonard's able staff asking me as Faculty Senate Chair to accept a last minute invitation for a Monday morning event in Richmond. I hemmed and hawed a bit, explaining that I had a class of 200 students to teach that morning and could not really abandon them at this late date. "Well," she said, "that's the reason we're all here…"

Her comment says it in a nutshell-professors and students, research, teaching, and learning-these define our "core mission." Now of course I would not for a moment devalue the enormous contribution of all the many people who make up this university community at all levels of staff. Without them, we couldn't be here. But faculty and students - that's our rasion d'etre. "That's the reason we're all here:" to write, to experiment, to research, to teach, to learn, to engage in the many different aspects of scholarship and learning. Right now, in your important deliberations, we faculty are only indirectly, and intermittently, present. Quite simply, I think you and we can both learn more, and serve this university more effectively, if we were here more consistently, just in the way that our student is.

Of course, in cases where Board members are making appointments, or setting salaries, or dealing otherwise with personnel matters that might present conflicts, I assume that the Board, as it does now, could meet in Executive session without the presence of the faculty member.

In a text that I assign to my Political and Social Thought Students by John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, Mill-no raving radical-makes a strong case on many different grounds for direct representation. In a key passage in the chapter called "The Criterion for a Good Form of Government" he lays out "a twofold division of the merit which any set of [governing] institutions can possess."

The merit of these institutions, he writes, consists partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental advancement of the community, including under that phrase advancement in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency; and partly of the degree of perfection with which they organize the moral, intellectual, and active worth already existing, so as to operate with the greatest effect on public affairs.

I suggest to you that, together, we can make better use of the "moral, intellectual, and active worth" that already exists here in this university community, if you were to add a (non-voting) faculty member to this Board. Then, perhaps, we can really test Mill's notion that, together, we'll do better job of "promoting the general mental advancement of the whole community."

Now the 'general mental advancement of the whole community' may be a tall order, though it's not a bad definition of the purpose of a university. We might more simply wish to improve communication between Board and faculty for the purposes of better shared governance.

Please give this proposal your serious thought, and in due course, I hope, your formal consideration and positive answer. Faculty are ready to serve.

Thank you.