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February 8, 2001

Future of Senate Council to be considered by faculty committee

Should Senate Council be restructured, or even scrapped?

University Senate President Nathan Hershey has asked the Senate's bylaws and procedures committee to study the issue.

Hershey told Faculty Assembly on Jan. 30 that he has sensed "a fair amount of dissatisfaction," particularly among faculty, with the current Senate Council format.

Many Council meetings consist of unrelated reports by faculty, staff, students and administrators that don't call for discussion and eat up time that would be better used for debating campus issues, said Hershey, paraphrasing faculty complaints.

Pitt's University Senate includes two representative bodies: Faculty Assembly (which, as its name implies, is limited to faculty elected from each Pitt school) and Senate Council (composed of faculty who have served for one year on Faculty Assembly, plus representatives of Pitt's senior administration, the Staff Association Council and several student governance groups).

Faculty Assembly tends to act as a lower house, debating resolutions before passing them along to Senate Council — although the Assembly sometimes issues its own statements and endorsements, especially when it wants to publicly protest or praise administrative actions.

Neither Faculty Assembly nor Senate Council has the power to set University policy. But Council approval carries more weight because the group includes Pitt's chancellor and other administrative decision-makers.

One downside of having the chancellor and his appointees on the Council is that they vote as a block, Hershey said. "If the chancellor makes clear his position, can [other administrators on Council] really vote differently?" Hershey asked.

He cited Council votes on resolutions urging that Pitt consider extending health benefits to same-sex partners of faculty and staff. Administrators on Council voted unanimously against the resolutions, after Chancellor Mark Nordenberg stated that Pitt would not consider extending the benefits as long as the University is defending itself against a lawsuit seeking to force the issue.

"I have the impression," Hershey said, "that students and the staff have various direct routes to the chancellor, but we as faculty don't have any route to the chancellor except through recommendations that first go through the Faculty Assembly and then on to the Senate Council, where students, staff and administrators join in the voting.

"I wonder whether it might be appropriate," Hershey continued, "to consider just having a Faculty Senate and doing away with the Senate Council."

By a show of hands, Faculty Assembly supported Hershey's idea of letting the bylaws and procedures committee examine the Senate Council question and bring suggestions to a future Assembly meeting.

But while they agreed that Council's meetings can be boring and its agendas unwieldy, Assembly members didn't favor eliminating the group.

For one thing, they said, Council meetings provide a rare opportunity for faculty, staff and students to publicly question Pitt's chancellor, provost, senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences and other administrators.

"I don't think that [public forum] is necessarily well-used, but I think we should not lose that aspect," said law professor Alan Meisel.

Senate bylaws don't mandate the current Senate Council format, noted psychology professor James Holland. Jerome Wells, of economics, suggested focusing meeting agendas on specific issues rather than a succession of reports.

Chancellor Nordenberg, interviewed after Monday's Senate Council meeting, called the Council "a good forum in the sense that it brings students, faculty, staff and administrators together. It gives us a chance to swap information and get to know each other better. And I think, particularly in the last year or so, we have dealt constructively with some issues that are important to the faculty community at large" — for example, upgrading Pitt computer systems.

"We had pretty free-ranging discussions of that topic during several Council meetings in the fall, and today we had students, staff and faculty indicating that there had been a response to their expressions of concern," Nordenberg said. "I'm sure that the plans that were put in place really did benefit from those discussions."

See computer story on page 1.

Rich Colwell, president of Pitt's Staff Association Council, said he values the "open forum quality" of Senate Council.

"It would be a great loss for staff if Senate Council were eliminated, although our group doesn't like to bring up our dirty laundry at Council meetings," Colwell said. "We generally don't bring issues to Senate Council except as a last resort, when we can't resolve them behind the scenes."

Senate President Hershey urged faculty to send comments and suggestions about Senate Council to the Senate office at 1234 Cathedral of Learning, by fax to 624-6688, or by e-mail to: fczak@pitt.edu "If people are unhappy or uncomfortable or dissatisfied with Senate Council, we'll try to find out if there's a consensus for changing it," Hershey said. "If nobody's interested, we'll just abandon talking about the subject."

— Bruce Steele


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