University Times

University Senate President Keith McDuffie says he will make one last effort to convince Pitt's Board of Trustees to keep faculty, staff and students as voting members of board committees.

"Removing faculty, staff and students from those committees would be a step backward in University governance," McDuffie told Faculty Assembly at its Feb. 4 meeting.

Besides representing the University community's interests, Pitt personnel and students bring valuable expertise to trustees' committees, the Senate president said.

McDuffie said he has discussed the issue with board chairperson J. Wray Connolly and other trustees, but that he will try to reach Connolly again prior to the board's Feb. 20 meeting. McDuffie said he also may request to speak at the meeting. (Non-trustees may not speak at meetings without permission.) At the Feb. 20 board meeting, trustees are scheduled to hear a report from a special committee appointed last summer to study alternative ways that students and employees could have input on board committees without being voting members.

Trustee Jeffrey S. Blum, one of two members of the special committee, declined to comment on the report yesterday — except to say it isn't finished yet but probably will be mailed to trustees prior to Feb. 20. "Beyond that, it would be premature for me to comment. The report will speak for itself," said Blum, an attorney with the Downtown firm of Klett Lieber Rooney and Schorling.

McDuffie recommended that faculty write to board chairperson Connolly c/o The Office of the Secretary, 159 Cathedral of Learning, urging that faculty, staff and students remain as voting members of board committees. Board secretary Robert Dunkelman said his office will forward the mail to Connolly.

Since 1992, faculty, staff and student representatives have been voting members of all board committees except the compensation, executive and nominating committees.

But a comprehensive report on Pitt operations, released in January 1996 by a group led by education consultant James Fisher, included a recommendation that faculty, staff and students be removed from board committees. The Fisher Report argued that the presence of the three constituencies on the committees encouraged campus groups to bypass the chancellor.

Some trustees also claimed they could not freely discuss sensitive issues at meetings when faculty, staff and students were present.

McDuffie, a professor of Hispanic languages and literatures, told Faculty Assembly: "The reason this whole thing has come up is due to a very small but very articulate number of the trustees who have argued for — I don't know what else to call it but greater secrecy, keeping matters more within the Board of Trustees itself." Other Assembly members were less enthusiastic than McDuffie about maintaining faculty, staff and student representation on the committees.

Leonard Plotnicov, of anthropology, recommended that he and other faculty members who have served on board committees should meet prior to Feb. 20 to discuss the cases for and against continued representation. "There will be an opportunity to respond after the trustees vote," Plotnicov said. "In the meantime, those of us who have served on these committees could share our experiences and study the question of whether indeed this has benefited us or whether it would in fact be better for faculty not to serve on these committees." Following Faculty Assembly, Plotnicov declined to elaborate until after the Feb. 20 trustees meeting.

James Holland, of psychology, said faculty pay a price for serving on trustees committees. "For example, you are bound to silence on some things that you might have known about anyway.

"It's not a cut-and-dried issue," Holland said. "But on balance, I think the University is better off for having faculty on these committees." Other Assembly members said faculty shouldn't waste their time arguing for the status quo when board leaders obviously have decided already to eliminate faculty, staff and students as voting committee members.

In other Faculty Assembly business: * McDuffie asked Assembly members to help recruit more women, minorities and younger faculty members to run for election to Faculty Assembly and Senate Council. "The great majority of us are living, white, middle-aged males," McDuffie noted. The Senate president also said he will call on deans and department chairpersons to reward faculty for Senate service.

* By Feb. 10, the Senate's new electronic vote-counting system will identify the five faculty members elected to serve on the search committee for a new senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences. About 1,000 ballots were returned, McDuffie said.

* Senate vice president Nathan Hershey proposed a petition process through which faculty could serve on administrative search committees if they first obtained 25 signatures from other faculty, nominating them to the committee. Currently, such representatives are chosen by the Senate's nominating committee — a system that may exclude some faculty members who want to serve on search committees, Hershey said. Assembly members referred Hershey's proposal to the Senate bylaws committee.

— Bruce Steele