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Address to the Board of Visitors

Michael J. Smith, Chair, Faculty Senate

5 April 2003

It's a pleasure for me to be with you again, in this, my penultimate, appearance in this role-the term of the Senate chair runs from July 1- June 30.

I'd like to make my brief report in two parts: first to fill you in on the activities and plans of the Faculty Senate throughout this spring term, especially on the complex of issues surrounding diversity, and second, to present you with a proposal and a request on behalf of the Faculty to which I hope you will give serious consideration.

On Faculty Senate activities

It's perhaps worth reminding you that the official activities of the Faculty Senate represent a miniscule proportion of what faculty members are up to on any given day. If we glance at the University calendar we'll see an wide array of symposia; international conferences; classes; special evening events; dissertation defenses; committee work on every level of university governance. As Provost Block demonstrated by showing you the cover of Science, we are of course also engaged in our vital task of research and publication. So the official activities of the Senate, to be honest, do not loom large in the world of most faculty. Most of us are about the business of scholarship and teaching.

Nevertheless, what has the Senate officially done since we last met? Reviewed over 120 applications for 40 Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards; this involved all the members of our Research and Scholarship Committee working in concert with the Office of Undergraduate Excellence in the College. We also continue to examine and carefully review proposals for new degree programs, such as the program in engineering you just approved. Before such programs reach you, they undergo a rigorous and, we hope, helpful process of definition and revision before the Senate committee and then the full Senate passes it forward.

Diversity-related activities

Even before the horrifying assault that shocked the community last month (is it really only last month?) Faculty in and out of the Senate have been working with Provost Gene Block and Vice President for Student Affairs Pat Lampkin on several fronts

  • To create an online learning tool for opening discussion on issues of social, political diversity'
  • To build on the existing first-year seminar series that currently is directed from the Dean of Students offices
  • To highlight existing, and to create new and additional, learning opportunities for students interested in issues of cultural diversity
  • We've participated in several task forces on recruitment and retention of minority graduate students and, of course, of faculty

Faculty are also participating in our various schools in the university-wide curriculum review that you just heard about. We are reexamining the content of our offerings and requirements at all levels, using, in many cases, the framework of the "ideal undergraduate experience" laid out by Provost Block to structure our discussions. Curriculum review is always a challenge, and of course is must be led by the people doing the research and teaching, namely the Faculty.

But we are also asking questions about how best to create an inclusive, challenging learning environment in which all of our students feel, at once, welcome and safe and at the same time, willing to venture outside their own backgrounds and experiences. Learning is all about opening doors and venturing into unfamiliar territory-but all of our students must feel safe, and confident enough of their place in the wider community, to be able to take those risks of encountering new ideas, new people, and new perspectives on familiar ideas.

In the aftermath of the assault on Ms Lundy, faculty in and out of the Senate worked directly with Pat Lampkin, Deans Penny Rue and Rick Turner, to help bring about the moving community gathering that occurred on the day of the assault, and to open discussion with students in a myriad of forums and places. Many faculty took some time to address the issue in their classes. I'd particularly like to salute Pat Lampkin and her staff for their remarkable work in a difficult period: because Pat had established relationships of frank and open communication with virtually all groups of students, and because of her extraordinary energy, empathy, and integrity, students felt able to overcome many of their particular differences. And the wider community, shocked horrified as it was, has managed to move past a ghastly event that obviously should never have occurred, and onto a serious, thoughtful and continuing self-examination.

On this coming Monday April 7th, the Senate will devote its meeting to issues of diversity. In addition to our usual and welcome report from the President, we'll be hearing from Karen Holt from the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs on where we stand as an institution with respect to recruitment and retention of female and minority faculty. We'll also hear and learn about on strategies we might use-now that we are able in a limited way actually to do some recruiting-to increase our success in diversifying for excellence. We'll also hear from Dean Turner, Provost Block, and a range of students, undergraduate and graduate, who will have an opportunity to present their concerns directly to the faculty. We will use the meeting for open an exchange of views and ideas on all the issues surrounding diversity.

So we are moving with determination to build on the work we've already done to make the University of Virginia a leader in research, teaching and learning about the issues and challenges of creating a genuinely open, diverse, and democratic society in a world of many cultures. I'm sensing real energy and hope out there; I also feel a heightened sense of our collective responsibility for realizing some concrete, lasting, and institutional improvements. So we on the Faculty, both within and beyond the forum of the Faculty Senate, take this task seriously and pledge to work with you to make some genuine progress.

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 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.