“It’s a very strong start that we’re off to,” Provost Patrick Phillips said. “I also wanted to bring greetings from President [Michael] Schilll. He would be here ordinarily but I’m sure you’re well aware that this is Yom Kippur, so if you feel like this twitching vibration, that’s him not sending emails at this moment in observance of the holiday.”
The University of Oregon Senate convened for its first official meeting of the academic year on Wednesday and heard from Phillips in one of his few public appearances in his two-month-long time as Provost. Phillips unveiled his Provost-level academic initiatives for the year in a document known as a white paper.
Both Phillips and Senate President Elizabeth Skowron assured the attending senators that they would be working together this year on many different issues.
“We are going to be continuing to work together with the administration to build and revise a few existing policies this year that affect education, student success, faculty scholarship and impact our value to the state and local communities,” Skowron said.
On that theme, Phillips discussed his overall vision for UO and how he hopes it will grow into the future. Phillips said he has hopes for different colleges and majors across the university to work together to attain similar goals.
Phillips mentioned UO’s strength as an institution when it comes to studying the environment in both his speech and his year-long academic plan.
In his speech, Phillips said the College of Design, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Law School all have world class programs that address issues related to the environment. In an ideal world, Phillips said that he’d like to see all of these programs interact more with each other to put UO on the forefront of this national issue.
“I don’t think we do that enough as an institution, but there’s an opportunity to deepen that conversation and look for relationships between units,” Phillips said.
Phillips said he is not going to force this relationship on any unit but that he believes small meetings between faculty would be a good start to creating mutually beneficial relationships.
Some other areas that Phillips said he hopes to integrate more are areas often referred to as the “humanities” within the College of Arts and Sciences — Phillips refers to them as humanistic studies. The “humanities” include many of the social science majors and art related majors while humanistic studies utilizes all of these departments and more, to help understand and study Western culture.
UO has already began exploring these humanistic studies by offering a $13,000 research award for “tenure-track faculty in the creative arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences at UO. The awards will go to highly productive or highly promising tenure-track faculty working in humanistic areas…” according to the award’s webpage. Phillips said he would like to expand this focus into humanistic studies and to explore “areas of the humanities that would particularly resonate with Oregon as a place and culture.”
The white paper outlining Phillips’ initiatives for the year also mentioned UO’s unique position having both a Law School and a Business School in Oregon and said he hopes UO will leverage its status as the flagship university to become a major driver of economic development. This economic development and entrepreneurship that Phillips has planned out for UO may require a number of strategic investments and upgrades to infrastructure, according to the white paper.
“Obviously the senate is the constitutional seat of a shared governance, but my personal view is that shared governance really means hearing many voices from across the campus,” Phillips said, “and I will always strive to create venues for those voices to be heard.”
