The University Faculty Assembly will begin meeting again in May after several years of not functioning as a governing body. The assembly is open to all faculty members, but there is some disagreement as to what “faculty” means.
Once the assembly reconvenes it will have to decide how much power to delegate to the University Senate and whether to continue meeting. The assembly was originally the University’s governing body, but in the 1990s that power shifted to the University Senate, which has representatives from the faculty, staff, administration and student body.
Oregon statute defines faculty as anyone with a “president or professor” title. Professor titles include assistant, associate and full professors. It does not include adjunct or retired professors. The omission of the latter has some upset.
Frank Stahl, professor emeritus of biology, is one of those people. He said retired faculty should be included in the assembly, for several reasons.
“They have an institutional memory,” Stahl said. Retired professors know the history of their university and have the time to research issues, which full-time faculty don’t have, he said.
Emeriti faculty may not have had time to devote themselves to internal governance when they were full professors, he said, and would like the opportunity to do it now.
According to the University policy on emeritus appointments, emeriti titles confer the right to participate in internal governance, even though Oregon statutes don’t say so.
University Senate President Paul van Donkelaar said defining faculty is tricky. “It’s really difficult to draw a box around a group of people and say, ‘Here are the faculty.’”
Another group that risks omission under some definitions of faculty is the librarians. Van Donkelaar said that while librarians do receive professor titles, they do not receive tenure and usually don’t teach, so there is an argument to be made that they are not exactly faculty. He did not say what he thought, however.
Dean of University Libraries Deborah Carver said librarians are faculty and should be included in the assembly. The library community has a unique perspective and a long history of academic contribution to campus, she said.
The librarians’ lack of tenure should not be used as criteria for faculty assembly participation, she said, because nearly all other Oregon University System schools have tenured librarians, she said.
“I think it would be a loss to exclude them,” Carver saiProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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Van Donkelaar said the decision of who to include is very important because the purpose of a faculty assembly is internal governance. In other words, the group makes decisions on how the University should be run.
The same Oregon statute that defines the faculty states that the University should be run by the president and professors, and van Donkelaar said there was some doubt the University’s faculty had properly delegated its power to the Senate.
One of the main reasons for the May meeting is to bring the faculty into compliance with Oregon law, van Donkelaar said, which means the faculty will have to vote to accept all of the Senate’s past resolutions and vote to delegate power to the Senate. It will also have to decide whether the faculty wants to continue meeting.
Van Donkelaar said he expects between 100 and 200 people to show up at the meeting, which is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, May 6. If the entire faculty showed up, the number would be between 500 and 600, he said.
Carver said the librarians intend to participate in the assembly meeting. Stahl does as well. He said faculty governance is crucial to the University.
The administration has the responsibility to protect the institution, Stahl said, which can conflict with educational goals, especially when that protection involves marketing, athletics or making money.
The faculty, on the other hand, is “motivated by educational ideals,” he said, and “that’s the main purpose of the University.”
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