26 April 2004

Dear Colleagues,

Two years ago Faculty Council undertook the task of reviewing all aspects of our present faculty governance. A sub-committee of the Council, the Governance Committee, proposed that we conduct a three-year process. Our aim was to improve the quality of faculty governance, to ensure that decisions were reached in a timely manner, and to provide reasonable procedures that all members of the University community could understand and follow. That project was generously supported and underwritten by President Malcolm Gillis.

In the first year the Governance Committee commissioned John Ambler, Professor of Political Science, to study faculty governance at Rice and at other schools to which Rice compares itself. We charged him, first, to find those governing documents, and then to analyze them in order to ascertain how various governments actually work in practice. John recommended that we hire a former lawyer and current doctoral student in History, David Connolly, to do the research. The result of that study was an extensive analytic survey of faculty governance in 33 schools. (This may be the most thorough survey in existence; Brown looked at three other schools before embarking on its reform.) Johnπs summary report [link] produced many important findings and recommendations. Perhaps the most significant conclusion was that no other school quite matches the Rice model. Schools with smaller student bodies and faculty and with few or no professional schools often govern through the faculty as a whole, while schools with larger populations and medical or other professional schools operate through some form of representative faculty governanceãa ≥Senate≤ of some sort. That report was presented to the Governance Committee and then to Faculty Council in September 2003. For the cooperation of many administrators around the country, and especially for the counsel and efforts of Vice President Ann Wright, who assisted us in understanding COFHE data, we are very grateful.

In the second year, the Governance Committee invited visitors from other schools to speak in public Faculty Forums and in seminars with the Faculty Council about the status of faculty in university governance. In December 2003 David Rabban, Jamail Centennial Professor of Law at the University of Texas and General Counsel of the AAUP, and Larry Gerber, Professor of History at Auburn University and former chair of the AAUP Committee on College and University Government, developed several important themes in their public Forum presentation and in two seminars with Faculty Council. From them we learned much about the status of AAUP policies and practices and about the experience of institutions that have adopted representative (i.e. ≥Senate≤) forms of faculty governance. On the whole, elected representatives have not proved ≥log-rollers,≤ but rather persons engaged both in the tasks of University governance and in communicating back to their constituencies on a regular basis. Then in early April 2004 John Savage, Professor of Computer Science at Brown University and Chair of the 2002-2003 Task Force on Faculty Governance, challenged us in a Faculty Forum presentation and in seminar discussions to move with constructive, deliberate, and decisive speed onward with our own project. Brownπs Task Force, strongly endorsed by its president, assembled for the first time in the summer of 2002; by the spring of 2003 the general faculty, administration, and trustees had signed off on a complete restructuring of governance. The Brown model [link] pairs faculty and administrators as colleagues addressing the major issues of governanceãacademic, professional, budgetary, and ethical.

So we now have before us several templates. One is our own structure, devised in the early 1970s. It might be refreshed and modified. Another would be to move to some form of representative faculty government. Yet another would be to partner faculty and administration in all aspects of University governance. Or we could take elements from each of these models in order to produce a structure appropriate to Riceπs uniqueness. More specific ideas have been put forth by Professors Carl Caldwell and Caroline Quenemoen [link] in a report they prepared for the Governance Committee and Faculty Council.

It is time to move forward. Faculty Council will appoint a Task Force on Faculty Governance that will work over the summer and with the incoming administration. That Task Force will be charged to report back to Faculty Council before the end of this year. We are creating a website that will not only display relevant documents and report regularly on the work of the Task Force, but also provide a site for interactive communication with the faculty. We anticipate bringing proposals for reform to the general faculty in the spring of 2005.

We now solicit your support, ideas, and participation.

Governance Committee

Ed Akin

Stephen Baker

Carl Caldwell, advisor

Tom Haskell

Caroline Quenemoen

Bob Patten, Chair