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Faculty Senate hears committee reports
Faculty Senate committee chairs provided colleagues with updates on issues, including UB’s canceled Methods of Inquiry program and a new, campus-wide faculty mentoring policy, at Tuesday’s full senate meeting, the last of the academic year.
Senators heard reports from five committees:
• Teaching and Learning Committee. Chair Phillips Stevens Jr., associate professor of anthropology, explained that Methods of Inquiry, a course that helps students become better critical thinkers, was canceled despite his committee’s efforts to preserve the offering. Stevens said committee members found out in early fall that the more than 20-year-old program, which he called “remarkably successful,” was slated for cancellation due to costs.
“We assembled a lot of support from all over the university and from alumni as well,” Stevens said. “We established a new home for Methods of Inquiry…The Graduate School of Education had been its home, but they didn’t want it any longer. John Kearns and the philosophy department were prepared to give it a home. And as a last resort, we asked the provost whether we couldn’t keep a skeleton.
“The total cost of Methods of Inquiry was slightly less than $200,000 a year, and it served about 600 students. And the provost did the formula and concluded that that was too expensive,” Stevens said. He said later of the decision-making process that, “I felt that we were simply being given lip service, being given our time, and that was that, but the decision was really beyond us. An awful lot of people were very, very angry. We tried to maintain our cool because we have to have good relations with the provost and with other administrative offices,” he told senators.
Faculty Senate Chair Robert Hoeing, associate professor of linguistics, said he believed faculty members’ voices were heard in the decision-making process. Faculty asked the provost to carefully consider ways to keep the course, and the provost did just that, said Hoeing, who views the cancellation as a product of UB’s budget crisis.
“Methods of Inquiry is not a program, it’s a course,” Hoeing said. “And the provost is very interested, to the extent possible, in protecting the programs and the departments we have...That’s his primary concern. And so, I think it is unfortunate. There’s no doubt about it…But the hope is now that the ideals and the principles of Methods of Inquiry, and its practices can continue somehow in the newly revised general education requirements.”
• Commission on Academic Excellence and Equity. Chair Richelle Allen-King, professor and chair of the Department of Geology, reported on a policy the commission developed to pair tenure-track and clinical/research faculty with mentors from UB and other institutions. The policy specifies that mentors and mentees should sign off on a mutually agreed upon plan, and that annual department summaries of mentoring assessments should be available to all faculty.
In response to concerns raised by colleagues, Allen-King said that balancing the need for privacy against the need for transparency will be an issue to address as the policy is implemented. Click here to read the new mentoring policy.
The commission, a joint committee of the provost and Faculty Senate, has turned the policy over to the provost’s office, Allen-King said. The body continues to examine faculty issues, including advancement, mentoring and work-life balance support, path to tenure, recruitment and the tenure review process.
• Budget Priorities Committee. Chair Claude Welch, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science, called the university’s budget situation “the worst I have ever experienced.” Welch said that in a series of meetings—many attended by Provost Satish K. Tripathi, the committee discussed how reductions will affect UB in the short, medium and long term; how administrators are distributing cuts on campus; and how effective the university has been in “getting out the message” about the implications of cuts.
• Information and Library Services Committee. Chair Stephen Dyson, Park Professor of Classics, said the budget has been the major concern of his committee, with cuts affecting staffing and libraries’ ability to acquire and provide access to materials, including books and journals, both digital and in print. Continued cuts in funding could lead to reductions in hours of operation, Dyson said, noting that anticipated reductions in fiscal 2010-11 would bring total recent cuts to the library to more than $2 million.
• Grading Committee. Chair William Baumer, professor of philosophy, spoke to his colleagues about two proposed policy changes. First, the Grading Committee is recommending that the university assign a new grade, “FX,” to students who have never attended a course. Second, the committee is recommending that UB mandate that undergraduates complete the Library Skills Workbook, a general education requirement that helps students develop research skills, in their first year of study at UB. Students currently can complete it any time before graduation, Baumer said. Senators will vote on the proposals at a later date.
Besides hearing committee reports and offering feedback, the Faculty Senate Tuesday engaged in a discussion on its future. Hoeing suggested, as he did at the senate’s last meeting, that downsizing the body could improve its effectiveness. He pointed out that a lack of a quorum is a “chronic” problem, with the senate’s executive committee voting sometimes in lieu of the full senate—an alternative that James Holstun, professor of English and an activist for increased faculty governance, said is not allowed.
Holstun also asked Hoeing to reactivate a committee that deals with academic freedom, saying that the screening of questions and prohibition of certain questions during select university speaker events was a serious concern that faculty members should address.
Hoeing agreed to reconstitute the Academic Freedom and Responsibility Committee, and said he also planned to reconstitute the Research and Creative Activities Committee and the Bylaws Committee. But his overarching message was that scaling down could help improve faculty governance. Fusing some of the senate’s 18 standing committees might increase efficiency, Hoeing said, noting that the Bylaws, Governance and Elections committees tackle similar problems.
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