Biology professor Nathan Tublitz won a vote for University Senate vice president conducted at the body’s last meeting of the year before the vote was dismissed by the outgoing Senate president, e-mails sent between senators reveal.
Tublitz, an outspoken critic of the University administration, declared he would run against assistant law professor Andrea Coles-Bjerre during the meeting, which senators said is uncommon in the history of the Senate. After tallying votes, then-Senate President Paul van Donkelaar decided to postpone the selection of a vice president until October, when the Senate has its next meeting.
Tublitz garnered 12 votes, while Coles-Bjerre received 11. The vice president becomes the Senate president after a year in the position.
Van Donkelaar cited the number of senators voting – 23 – for his decision. The presence of 25 senators was required for the 2008-09 Senate to make decisions. However, no one at the meeting tallied senators who abstained from the vote.
Because abstentions were not tallied, some have since questioned van Donkelaar’s decision, including Senate Parliamentarian Paul Simonds. Simonds’ job is to advise the Senate president on procedural matters.
“My take on this is that the election was valid since, normally, the quorum call cannot be made after the action is taken,” Simonds wrote in an e-mail to Senate leadership. “It can only be invalidated by ‘clear and convincing proof’ of a lack of quorum. Since the vote was taken with the assumption that there was a quorum and no one called for a quorum count, and, finally, no count of abstentions was taken, the ‘clear and convincing proof’ may be difficult to show.”
Van Donkelaar disputed Simonds’ claim. He said Senate Secretary Gwen Steigelman asked senators if they wanted to abstain from the vote, and none said they did, indicating that all present voted. He added that both Coles-Bjerre and Tublitz had agreed to the postponement of the election at the meeting.
It is still unclear who will be the next Senate vice president, but Tublitz said in an e-mail that the matter was discussed at a Faculty Advisory Council meeting held Monday and that he is “hopeful something will be sorted out in the next few days.”
To many in the Senate, the election pitted more than the qualifications of the two professors. Senior members of the Senate said it once governed the University on equal footing with the University president. However, Senator and Professor Emeritus Frank Stahl said President Dave Frohnmayer has eroded the body’s authority.
“We have had for the last 13 or 14 years a president whose style of government is Republican, should we say, or top-down,” he said. Stahl said it is “not government by the faculty.”
Tublitz is experienced – he was Senate president between 2001 and 2002 – while Coles-Bjerre is not tenured. She was nominated by van Donkelaar and current Senate President Peter Gilkey, and Stahl said Tublitz’s decision to run was likely a response to the prospect of someone so inexperienced.
“The Senate president, if he’s doing his or her job, will run into conflict with the University administration,” Stahl said. “To put a junior professor in that position, the Senate might worry – no matter what her qualifications – that she couldn’t fight with enough vigor.
Tublitz declined to speak to the Emerald about his candidacy because he said in an e-mail that he did not want to speak before a resolution was reached. However, he alluded to the concerns Stahl raised in a speech delivered after he accepted the nomination.
Speaking about perceptions of the Senate, he said, “Many of these people, many of them my friends, think that we are a large corporation run by a C.E.O. and management team.” He later added that the University Senate had “lost the respect of our colleagues and faculty members.”
Coles-Bjerre did not respond to e-mails from the Emerald asking for comment about her candidacy, but after the Senate meeting, she said her experience as a bankruptcy lawyer would help her in the execution of her duties.
Stahl suggested that is partially because of the conduct of Senate presidents.
“Some of the recent Senate presidents sometimes seem to be acting at the behest of the administration, rather than at the behest of their constituencies,” he said.
Though Stahl would not say whether he was referring to van Donkelaar specifically, he criticized the president in a speech at the May 27 Senate meeting, saying the human physiology professor had “dropped the ball” in the execution of his duties as president.
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Senate vice president vote dismissed; choice postponed
Daily Emerald
June 1, 2009
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