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Remarks to the Faculty Senate

Ricardo Padrón, Chair
September 25, 2007

September finds us busier than usual for the opening of an academic year. This is a good thing, as far as I am concerned, insofar as it signals how far the Senate has come over the past few years. Thanks to the work of Senators past, we are no longer what we once were, a well-meaning organization in search of ways to make the University a better place, but are now a vibrant contributor to shaping its central mission. This role, more than any other is what has kept us busy this month. Before handing our meeting over to the President and Provost, allow me to give you an idea of what has been going on, as well as what we can expect for the year ahead.

As all of you know, we returned to Grounds this semester to find two pieces of business demanding our immediate attention. Later this afternoon you will hear from Ann Hamric, the Chair of our Academic Affairs Committee, about one of them, the proposal to create a new school of leadership and public policy, the Batten School. This represents a historic opportunity for our University, one to which all of you will be able to contribute by participating in a meeting on October 15th that will be devoted entirely to this issue. There you will have an opportunity to debate the merits of the final proposal to come before the Senate. The school cannot be created without Senate approval, and that approval cannot be voted upon without open and serious debate. I invite all of you to participate and represent the collective wisdom of a broad spectrum of UVA faculty. I also invite all of you to comment on the procedures we have followed in bringing this proposal to the Senate. As you know, UVA has not created a new school in roughly half a century. The creation of the Batten School has served as a laboratory for how that task can be accomplished in a consultative and collaborative manner, which we need to evaluate as future programmatic initiatives are developed.

The second piece of business that has occupied us this September is the ongoing work of the Commission for the Future of the University, about which you will hear more from the President, the Provost, and from Lilli Powell, the Chair of our Planning and Development Committee. Those of you have had a chance to look at the draft reports of the Commission’s work available on the web have had a glimpse into the broad scope and the far-reaching ambition of those documents. It is now the Senate’s responsibility to assess them, and to provide a critical perspective on the path they chart for our collective future, so that the Commission’s work can move forward informed, among other things by the faculty’s sense of priorities. In doing so, it is incumbent upon us to take the broadest possible view of the institution’s needs and priorities. There are few organizations on Grounds that bring people together from across the University’s schools the way the Senate does. It thus falls upon us to watch out for the whole, to help build a University that is greater than the sum of its parts. Lilli Powell will tell you more about these efforts, particularly about the October 3rd work session during which the members of her committee will present their impressions of the Commission’s work for your review and discussion. I encourage all of you to attend, to make your voice heard.

Other Senate work looms ahead, both in terms of new opportunities and regular commitments. The Committee on Faculty Recruitment, Retention and Welfare, lead by Jennifer Harvey of the Medical School, is putting the finishing touches on the survey of faculty needs and priorities conducted last year. You’ll be hearing from Jennifer later on about this project, as well as about plans for the committee’s work once it’s completed. I am thrilled to report that 61% of the faculty responded to this survey. This high response rate means that the survey data offers a reliable snapshot of faculty opinion about a wide variety of issues, including University governance, research support and infrastructure, benefits, housing, and diversity. I have communicated a summary of the results to Gertrude Fraser, the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and one of the chairs of the Commission subcommittee charged with considering faculty issues, as well as to Lilli Powell and the Planning & Development Committee. In this way, we hope to bring the survey results to the attention of University decision-makers, and to weave these faculty priorities into ongoing planning and development work. Once Jennifer’s committee finalizes its report on the survey, we will distribute it to a broader spectrum of UVA leadership.

Other committee chairs will not be reporting today, but I would nonetheless like to introduce them to you. Chip Tucker from the English Department has agreed to serve as the chair of the Senate Grievance Committee. We all hope that he won’t have much work on his hands. Teresa Culver, from the Engineering School, has agreed to continue as head of the Policy Committee. Amy Bouton, from the Medical School, will be heading up Research & Scholarship, a committee whose primary work involves awarding the Harrison Undergraduate Research Awards. William Kehoe, from the McIntire School, will continue his work as head of our ROTC committee. My thanks to all of you, and to Ann Hamric and Lilli Powell as well, for agreeing to take up these important leadership roles in the Senate.

I would also like to thank Ken Schwartz, our former Chair, who has agreed to serve as the faculty’s representative on the Educational Policy, Diversity and External Affairs Committees of the Board of Visitors. For several years now, the Senate has been advocating for a faculty member on the Board itself, in the hopes of opening up a direct line of communication between the faculty and the Board of Visitors. Last year, Rector Farrell met us half way, offering us a seat on these committees whose work directly involves issues of central concern to the University’s faculty. Although we continue to hope that our faculty representative will one day have a seat on the Board, we welcome this development and look forward to engaging the committee members in conversation.

Certainly there will be other tasks, other challenges, other opportunities. Some of them will emerge as the Senate leadership continues to engage with other University communities. We have had some contact with the Provost’s Employee Council, a group that represents classified staff in the academic division, about various shared concerns. In a few weeks, the joint committee of the Faculty Senate and the General Faculty Council will meet to discuss issues of shared interest, and make plans for future collaborations. Later this semester, I will be meeting with the UVA Student Council to share with them news of the Faculty Senate’s work, and to listen to their suggestions about how the Senate can work with students to improve our intertwined intellectual and academic lives. Today, we will be hearing from James Hilton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, about his vision for the future of academic computing. He will provoke us to think about the ways in which information technology stands to revolutionize what we do, and will challenge us to engage that vision. Other opportunities will arise as the work of the Commission is completed, and the attention of the University moves from planning to development and implementation. We will not want this to happen without faculty participation, and will actively seek ways to remain engaged with this important work. One of our tasks will be to continue to advocate for planning and development work rooted in the understanding that excellence can only be achieved by attending to those activities at the core rather than at the periphery of the University’s mission to create knowledge, to develop civic-minded student-scholars, and to serve the public interest.

In closing, let me invite you to take, as I mentioned before, the broad view, because that is what we, as members of the Faculty Senate, must do. The University of Virginia stands poised on the verge of important changes. Our planning and development work is proceeding briskly, painting new horizons for the University’s mission and striving to marshal the resources needed to explore them. Half of our deanships stand vacant, providing us with the opportunity to infuse the institution with new leadership and fresh ideas. I urge all those serving on search committees to find those candidates who are not only best for your school, but best for the University as a whole. Many of the members of our faculty are poised to retire. These are the people upon whom much of our reputation for excellence stands, and upon whose experience we have so often relied. Their impending retirement thus presents a challenge to the continuity of our programs in many ways, but it also provides us with an opportunity to reassess intellectual priorities, to change directions where necessary, to foster innovative new collaborations, and to create a professorate that reflects the diversity of our nation and our world. We cannot afford to allow the retirement of a generation of scholars become the ebb-flow of our university’s intellectual life: we must assure that the tide continues to rise, so that we can become what our founder meant us to be, an institution of international prominence, a public university in the best sense of that word, working for the public interest, serving the public good.