Framework
In October 2020, the Faculty Governance Taskforce adopted the following framework as the basis for the proposal that it will put before Faculty Council in February 2021. Note that this is not the formal language of the proposal; this is an explanation of what the proposal does:
In this hybrid model, there is a Faculty Senate and a Faculty Assembly.
The Faculty Senate is made up of elected representatives of the faculty, and meets at least once per month.
Faculty Assembly includes all faculty members, and meets at least once per semester but can get called into special session in a variety of ways (by the Senate, by the leaders of the Assembly, or by any other procedures that the Assembly chooses). Faculty Assembly will also meet extra times during the first year of the new system, 2021-22.
For the purposes of this framework, “faculty” refers to all full-time faculty members (instructional, library, and administrative faculty - all the same people who are members of Faculty Council now).
“Schools” refers to the ten schools under the reorganization begun in fall 2020, plus Library and Learning Services. Every time we say "school" or "schools" we are referring to 11 academic units: the ten schools and the library.
The members of the Faculty Senate will be elected for two-year terms in elections near the end of the spring semester. Senators will be elected from each school. Each school has 1 senate seat for every 10 faculty members, rounding up. (See "notes on apportionment" at the bottom of this page.)
Nominations come from faculty within each school. In the event that a school has more nominations than seats, Senators from each school are elected by ranked-choice voting.
The Faculty Senate will have at least 2 tenure-track instructional faculty as members, filled by a special election if necessary, and at least 1 instructional non-tenure-track member, filled by a special election if necessary.
The Faculty Senate meets at least monthly, and has all the powers previously reserved to Faculty Council, with the exception that any Handbook changes must be approved by the Assembly.
Elected members of the Senate deliver reports on senate activities at their school meetings, and all Senate meetings are open to any faculty member to observe.
The President, Provost, other university officers, and chairs of faculty committees are expected to attend senate meetings when invited by the Senate.
Faculty Assembly, composed of all faculty, meets at least once per semester to hear reports from the President and Provost, to consider and pass resolutions outside of the purview of the Senate (including resolutions from the floor), and to consider changes to the Handbook and/or bylaws. Faculty Assembly can also be called into an additional special session by either a simple majority vote of Faculty Senate, the leaders of the Assembly, or by any other mechanism that the Assembly adopts.
The Faculty Council Leadership Committee, currently composed of the officers of Faculty Council and representatives from each (old) school, will be replaced with a Faculty Leadership Committee, composed of the officers of the Faculty Assembly and Faculty Senate and additional representatives from the (new) colleges if necessary, and will be chaired by the President of Faculty Assembly.
Notes on apportionment
"Faculty" refers to all full-time faculty, using the same definition of the current handbook. It does not include unfilled budgeted faculty lines, or FTE-equivalent faculty. The principle here is that the Senate represents actual, serving members of the faculty.
The rule for seat allocation is "divide by 10, then round up." So, a school with 10 or fewer faculty members gets 1 seat; 11 to 20 gets 2 seats; 21 to 30 gets 3; 31 to 40 gets 4; and so on.
Example of seat allotment
Here are estimates of the current number of full-time faculty in each school (these counts were provided by Academic Affairs in late fall, 2020, updated in January 2021 to reflect Art moving from Humanities to Design). These numbers are only an estimate. We include these estimates simply for illustration. The actual number of faculty in each school will change from year-to-year, as positions are vacated, filled, created, cancelled, and so on.
Currently, for example, Business has 21 faculty members and would therefore have 3 seats.
School faculty seats
Business 21 3
Design 18 2
Tech 12 2
Counseling 10 1
Education 10 1
Nursing 20 2
Health Sci 14 2
Humanities 28 3
Nat Sci 15 2
Soc Sci 22 3
Library 07 1
Total 177 22
Under the proposal, then, the Senate would have about 22 members.