Minutes - February 11
Minutes – Governance Restructuring Committee
February 11, 2008
All members present.
Jones moved, Pultz seconded to approve the minutes for the December 12 and January 28 meetings. Motion passed.
Committee members had examined the materials gathered by Karen McClaskey from the list of peer institutions we specified. Each member commented on likes and dislikes about governance structures in those institutions. We liked:
–the idea that total faculty vote could support or override Senate decisions (we see this as good check and balance design)
–when the role of the executive committee was spelled out
–the idea of having a permanent committee to continually review core values and mission (we are uncertain if SPAC is a permanent group)
–representation from all faculty and others in the campus community
–a review of new governance structures after a period of 3-5 years
–careful layout of committees and subcommittees without having too many committees
–institutions where governance structures have fewer administrators involved
–the interdisciplinary focus shown in some structures.
The effective use of committees is of particular concern to this committee. Under the current constitution and bylaws of Faculty Senate, committees are created through bills. The Undergraduate Council is a Council created by Faculty Senate, as is Graduate Council. We will consider whether four to six standing committees on Faculty Senate might work better structurally. Currently, we believe the standing committees (created by bills) are the Budget Committee and the Personnel Policies Committee. We believe that other committees, such as our own, are ad hoc committees. Standing committees offer some advantages, such as training for leadership and development of expertise throughout the faculty in university affairs.
Neitzke and Pultz reported that they have reserved a short time on the UGC agenda on Thursday to talk about issues concerning a future UGC. We will take input from that meeting and pose questions to the full faculty regarding UGC.
We spent the remainder of the meeting discussing a possible model that would include the following:
Voting members – University President, 1 representative from library professional staff, 1 representative from military science (included in CLAS), 1 representative from each department in CLAS, 2 representatives from the School of Business, 1 representative from each of the departments of HSE (Nursing, Comm Disorders, Education, and HES).
Non-voting members - one department chair, two students, provost.
Invited guests – (voice, no vote) – Dean of Students, Registrar
This scenario would be about 26 voting members. If the representation from departments were to be proportionalized, we would add approximately 8 members if the cutoff for additional representatives were to be 20; 4 new members if the cutoff were to be 25.
We will discuss this model and others at our next meeting on February 19 at 8:30 a.m. in VH2151.