To: Faculty Council

To: Lynne Huffer, Speaker of Faculty Council

From: Task Force on Faculty and Shared Governance:

Janet Braam (Co-Chair), Professor, Dept. of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

Steve Zeff (Co-Chair), Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting

Carl Caldwell (Secretary), Professor and Chair, Dept. of History

Keith Cooper, Professor and Chair, Dept. of Computer Science

Dick Grandy, McManis Professor, Dept. of Philosophy

Elizabeth Long, Professor and Chair, Dept. of Sociology

David Scott, Noah Harding Professor, Dept. of Statistics

Re: Recommendations for the Reform of Faculty and Shared Governance at Rice

Date: October 27, 2004

The Task Force on Faculty and Shared Governance has spent the last five months examining Rice University's governance system, including the Faculty Council and University Council, the Promotion and Tenure Committee, and University and standing committees. This system has been in place essentially unchanged since 1971. The Task Force met more than fifteen times as a group. It conducted lengthy interviews with President David Leebron, Provost Eugene Levy, Deans Kathleen Matthews, Robert Stein, Gil Whitaker, and Gary Wihl, and Professor John Ambler. Individual members of the task force discussed the tasks and functioning of University and standing committees with a number of their chairs. The Task Force received more than two dozen responses from the faculty to its web page laying out problems of faculty governance and many more informal responses.

On the basis of this work, the Task Force has reached the following recommendations:

1) The Promotion and Tenure Committee should be separated from other organs of faculty governance, whether the current Faculty Council system is retained or a Faculty Senate is implemented.

2) All standing and University committees should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that they are continuing to serve useful functions and that they are carrying out their duties. Most committee charges have not been reviewed since 1986. A systematic review of current committees and consideration of the need for new committees should be a high priority of the Faculty Council or Faculty Senate.

3) The current Faculty Council should be replaced by a Faculty Senate, consisting of about 25-30 representatives elected by school. The Faculty Senate should be given authority to decide most matters currently decided by the faculty in plenary session.

4) The Faculty Senate should elect from its ranks a Speaker, to serve for a two-year term, and a Deputy Speaker, who will serve for one year. These two officers should be joined by six other members of the Senate, elected by the Senate, to serve as the Senate Executive Committee. The new Faculty Senate and Executive Committee should include ex officio representation by Provost and President.

To ensure adequate voice for the faculty, provision should be made for voting faculty to place items on the Faculty Senate's agenda, to address the Faculty Senate if recognized by the Speaker, and even, under certain extraordinary conditions, to call for a meeting of the entire voting faculty and a referendum on a matter of great importance.

The proposals made by the Task Force seek to address the main problems identified by the Faculty Council in its list of "issues facing faculty governance at Rice":

1) "We need to reconsider the role of the assembled faculty in faculty governance." The Task Force came to the conclusion that the assembled faculty cannot function well as the central decision-making body in faculty governance. There is no good meeting time for all faculty members, and long meetings from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM tend to exclude certain faculty, in particular those with children and assistant professors concerned with tenure. We have recommended a Senateãbut at the same time have provided for referenda, in the event that matters arise on which the faculty wants to decide directly. In other words, this proposal, while providing a new model for handling most agenda items, retains a decisive element of the old model.

2) "We need to reexamine the authority and representation of our elected representational governing councils: University Council and Faculty Council." The Task Force has determined that faculty representatives need to be better connected to their constituencies. We think that elections by school would avoid both the problem of the current system, where representatives are elected by a constituency that often is unable to judge the candidates, and the problem of creating representatives too closely connected to particular interests (e.g. departments).

3) "We need to reevaluate the effectiveness of the standing committee structure." The Task Force has made recommendations for procedures that would permit regular, careful review of committees at Rice.

4) "We need to consider the unwillingness of most faculty members to run for election to Faculty Council/University Council, and to determine whether that unwillingness reflects a changed climate on campus, the weakness of existing faculty governance, and/or the lack of recognition for service to the university." The Task Force agrees that the climate on campus has changed since 1971; the movement of professors into parts of the city further from campus, the growing prominence of two-career households, and higher requirements for advancement in the field have lowered the percentage of faculty members at faculty meetings and have reduced interest in governance. We believe that a Senate cannot address all of these problems, but that it can at least specify a number of representatives who would have the responsibilityãand authorityãto consider and make decisions for all. One of the problems with faculty unwillingness to serve is that the double duty of serving on the Promotion and Tenure Committee while serving on Faculty Council is a deterrent. We recommend separating P&T from faculty governance. We recommend that P&T continue to be elected by the faculty, though we have proposed additional structure to facilitate balance.

5) "We need to address the problem of a lack of continuity in leadership within faculty governance." The Task Force has recommended a two-year term for the Speaker of the Faculty Senate to enhance continuity of leadership.

attachments:

Recommendation concerning Promotion and Tenure Committee

Recommendations concerning University-Level Committees

Recommendation for a Faculty Senate Model

Links to the attachments: