The University Senate voiced its discontent with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s new reporting structure at its meeting Wednesday. The Senate unanimously passed a motion urging University President Dave Frohnmayer to restore the reporting relationship to the Provost’s Office once a new executive director is hired for the museum.
Sherwin Simmons, head of the art history department, presented the motion and made a case for its passage.
“There’s never really been a satisfactory explanation” for Frohnmayer placing the museum under University Advancement, Simmons said. “It seems to me that the change in reporting relationship has suggested to everyone that there’s something different about our museum. And that I think has created an issue in our present search that is somewhat awkward to explain.”
Frohnmayer made the switch in June. University art museums traditionally report to the administration’s central academic division; for an art museum to have a reporting relationship with the institution’s fundraising office is basically unheard of.
Andy Schulz, art history associate professor and member of the executive director search committee, also encouraged the Senate to pass the motion.
He said the search process has brought two “fundamental truths” to his attention: Students are the museum’s primary audience, and its primary mission is to serve the University’s academic mission.
“Given those it really seems inescapable that the place to which the museum should report is the chief academic officer,” Schulz said. “It’s really a structural necessity that this new director have the reporting relationship to the provost.”
The motion passed with no discussion.
After its passage, Frohnmayer and about a dozen senators left the meeting. A couple of people patted Simmons on the back.
Another hot topic at the meeting was course evaluations, which are currently being reformatted.
Psychology professor Bertram Malle spoke on behalf of the committee charged with reviewing the course evaluation forms and rewriting them with additional specificity, something that was formerly lacking.
Malle presented the motion to replace the current required questions with 10 new, more specific ones, and said the new form is “the best course evaluation given the fact that it’s never going to be perfect.”
Several faculty voiced support for the questions, as did ASUO Senate President Athan Papailiou on behalf of the ASUO Senate, but faculty expressed concern over the format of the new evaluations.
“It’s hard for me to know whether I should vote for this or against this because the really important thing is how this information is used,” said mathematics assistant professor David Levin. “This has a big impact in terms of changing how we are evaluated.”
Faculty asked how individual questions would be weighted and suggested including more qualitative rather than quantitative questions.
The 10 questions Malle presented were only one part of the brand new course evaluation forms – currently in the process of shifting to an online format. The other part is an open-ended question portion in which individual departments will be able to ask the students unique questions.
This term, the online evaluation will be “piloted” by three groups of students: those in the Lundquist College of Business, the political science department and the math department.
“Our plan is to go live with the entire University in the winter term using the current set of questions,” said mathematics professor Brad Shelton. “Whatever is decided today about these questions, we will not implement those in the winter.” Shelton said it would probably be best to wait until the 2008-09 academic year to begin using the new questions.
And although Shelton said “the brevity and clarity of these questions is a huge improvement over the old questions,” he asked the Senate not to pass the motion. Senate President Gordon Sayre made a motion to form a new committee to examine the issues raised at the meeting.
The Senate unanimously passed Sayre’s motion, and the membership and charge of the committee will be announced at the next meeting.
During his State of the University remarks, Frohnmayer said the new Academic Learning Services building at the east entrance to campus is “much more of a certainty.” A just-promised donation will allow the ALS offices to relocate from cramped Esslinger Hall. The new building will be “part of the creation of an exciting and vibrant neighborhood,” along with the new arena and the soon-to-be-renovated Hamilton Complex serving student interests, Frohnmayer said.
Frohnmayer also talked about the new arena, saying the project and its financial underpinnings have been discussed extensively by many groups on campus, and they all have approved it. McArthur Court is worn and inefficient, Frohnmayer said, and it is imperative to construct a new facility and use the old one for “more general academic or student uses.”
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