Category Archives: Governance

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: St. Vincent’s president a lightning rod for criticism

As H. James Towey finishes his second year as St. Vincent College president, there are benchmarks he enjoys sharing, including a 38 percent rise in student applications and an endowment that grew by a third last year.

Yet whenever he speaks to campus groups he also must be ready to confront persistent rumors at the college.

He hopes to lay some of those to rest tonight at a town hall meeting he regularly holds with students. The meeting may also provide an opportunity to address a recent letter some faculty members sent to St. Vincent’s board of directors that was highly critical of him.

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Star Phoenix: U of S board of governors grilled on housing, recent labour strife

Students, student representatives and union workers quizzed the University of Saskatchewan board of governors Friday at the board’s annual public accountability meeting.

The meeting, only the second of its kind at the U of S, drew a large, sometimes emotional, crowd with questions that ranged from how the board plans to tackle the lack of off-campus housing to how the university plans to repair relations with the labour force following a strike by support staff this winter.

A member of the Canadian Union of Public Employees expressed his frustration at not having a voice on the board of governors, which has representatives for both faculty and students. U of- president Peter MacKinnon said he plans to hold discussions in the next few months about the labour environment on campus.

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The Chronicle: Florida Legislature May Dismantle University System’s Governing Board

A battle in Florida over the financing of public higher education is escalating, as state lawmakers are pushing legislation that would sharply curtail the authority of the university system’s governing board.

In an effort to counter a series of state budget cuts for Florida’s 11 public universities, the Board of Governors recently sought to reduce the system’s enrollment while increasing tuition. But that maneuver irked state lawmakers, who have proposed a constitutional amendment to diminish the board’s size and power.

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Inside Higher Ed: At U. of California, a Systemic Governance Crisis

For decades, the University of California has been held out as a model of how governance can and should work at a major university, with clearly delineated roles for the systemwide governing board, central administration, campus chancellors and faculty members.

How far the mighty have fallen.

The well-publicized compensation scandal that badly embarrassed the 10-campus California system in 2006 revealed one aspect of the university’s governance dysfunction, but masked a larger and potentially more damaging one. The full extent of UC’s trouble was laid bare last month in two highly critical reports from the university’s accreditors and in interviews with more than a dozen current and former university administrators, faculty members, and others close to the institution.

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Inside Higher Ed: A member of the board of the College of William & Mary has sent an unusually frank letter of resignation to student leaders, in which he calls into question the way board members made the decision not to renew the contract of Gene Nichol as president. In the letter, Robert Blair praises Nichol, particularly for his efforts to diversify the campus, and says that he and others argued to keep Nichol on as president. When he realized he was in the minority, Blair said he accepted the decision with disappointment and accepted the good faith of trustees with whom he disagreed. Wrote Blair in his message: “There has been an incipient effort by some members of the Board of Visitors to pick apart President Nichol’s accomplishments. To what end? They gained their stated objective. I have also seen mean-spirited communications that are not worthy of the professional deliberations of any managing board, but most especially not the Board of Visitors of William and Mary. Such communications call into question the real motivation for the initial decision not to renew the president’s contract.” A spokesman for the college said he had not seen the resignation letter and could not comment on it.

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Chicago Tribune: Chicago State board takes action

Chicago State University trustees took steps Wednesday to tighten their control over university finances, the day a Tribune investigation reported that the university bought two high-priced copy machines this year from a company owned by one of its employees.

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Inside Higher Ed: Asking for Input — Deliberately

Among the 50 or so participants, some clearly came into Carnegie Mellon University’s deliberative poll on same-sex marriage Wednesday with a “gut feeling —- a perspective that they weren’t able to articulate a clear rationale for,” says Michael Bridges, associate director of educational support at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and an adjunct professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon.

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Youngstown Vindicator: Survey: YSU board doesn’t have a clue

Are Youngstown State University’s trustees out of touch with campus issues affecting faculty, staff and students?

Some members of the board of trustees reacted with surprise when informed that a campus climate survey done in the spring showed a high percentage of respondents suggested the board doesn’t understand faculty, staff or student concerns.

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Inside Higher Ed:

Antioch College’s students, faculty and staff passed a joint resolution of no confidence in Toni Murdock, the chancellor of Antioch University. A separate resolution was also passed calling for the college to be governed independently of the university. Many students and professors blame Murdock and the university board for the decision to suspend the college’s operations after the current academic year. The outcomes of the votes were announced in the middle of the night and Murdock could not be reached for a response. But she and board members have said that they are facing serious financial problems and are committed to the college. The texts of the two resolutions may be found on the Web site of the campus paper, The Record.

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Inside Higher Ed: RPI profs want senate back

Professors at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute voted this week to ask their provost to restore their Faculty Senate and to recognize it as legitimate. The vote was overwhelming: 200 in favor, 21 opposed, and 7 abstentions. (The tenured and tenure-track faculty that voted has 359 members, and with one in seven on sabbatical, faculty organizers said that the vote was not only decisive, but represented strong faculty interest.) Robert E. Palazzo, the provost, announced in August that the university would no longer recognize the Faculty Senate because it had amended its rules to grant voting rights to faculty members who are not on the tenure track. The faculty held elections under those revised rules, rejecting a policy change mandated by the board, which did not want non-tenure track faculty to vote. The move by the provost infuriated many professors, whose relations with RPI’s administration have been rocky for years. Palazzo has said that he would respect faculty rights to come up with a new governance system as long as the board’s directives are followed. But Larry Kagan, a professor of art and president of the Faculty Senate that the provost abolished, said that such limits did not amount to “serious conversation” that professors feel is needed with administrators and the board. Following the faculty vote, William N. Walker, vice president for strategic communications and external relations, issued a statement: “The information from this unofficial faculty referendum will be discussed with the academic leadership of Rensselaer and shared with the Faculty Governance Review Committee. That group will review it along with the many other factors relating to faculty governance it will study as it considers its recommendations. Meanwhile, we are continuing under a Board of Trustees resolution that approved the establishment of the transitional faculty governance structure, including a temporary suspension of the Faculty Senate.”

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The Chronicle News Blog: AAUP Criticizes Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Over Faculty Governance

he American Association of University Professors has weighed in on a conflict over faculty governance at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The rift, between RPI’s faculty and administration, has widened since early August, when the university’s provost, Robert Palazzo, suspended the university’s Faculty Senate, citing concerns that the Senate had failed to amend its constitution following a directive from the university’s Board of Trustees.

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The Chronicle: Rensselaer Professors Challenge Provost’s Decision to Suspend Faculty Senate

A struggle over faculty governance is coming to a head at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where faculty members plan to vote next week on a proposal that would ask the university’s provost to reinstate the Faculty Senate, which he suspended in early August.

The provost, Robert E. Palazzo, has cited concerns about possible interference in a continuing review of faculty governance as one of his reasons for suspending the senate on August 7. But some professors say they suspect the move was in response to the senate’s election as its vice president a colleague who has openly criticized Rensselaer’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson.

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Inside Higher Ed: Gutting Shared Governance?

The journalism world was roiled and some within it recoiled back in 2005 when Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, widely regarded as a top school in the field, announced its pick for the new dean. John Lavine, an expert on media strategy and management, came in with a sweeping charge to integrate Medill’s journalism and marketing instruction in what many in journalism consider to be an unhappy and even dangerous marriage, and others describe as a necessary step in training future journalists for a rapidly changing business climate. Under the school’s strategic plan, “Medill 2020,” the school will be unveiling its revamped curriculum this fall, with the goal of ensuring that students learn about reporting and writing in the context of consumer, or audience, engagement.

Also upon Lavine’s arrival, though far less widely noted, the university suspended formal faculty governance procedures at Medill for 3.5 years – an act condemned as “unacceptable and in violation of the University’s Statutes” in a university-wide General Faculty Committee (GFC) resolution unanimously approved this month.

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The Boston Globe: Retro reform at UMass

THE DEBATE about governance at the University of Massachusetts, motivated by President Jack M. Wilson’s vision for “one university,” has paid scant attention to the history of state university systems. Across the nation are experiments that enable us to draw conclusions about the elements necessary to achieve the highest level of educational excellence. Massachusetts has a less mature state university system than some other states. Undoubtedly because of the large number of outstanding private colleges and universities located here, Massachusetts created a state university system relatively recently, in 1991, several decades after such systems were created in places like California, New York, Texas, and Illinois.

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Inside Higher Ed: A More Deliberative Democracy

Some educators think they’ve found the perfect metaphor for political deadlock in Washington: university governance.

“Universities are renowned for deliberations that take a long, long time,” pointed out Bruce Mallory, provost of the University of New Hampshire. Committees, task forces, the student government, the faculty senate, the board of trustees: Academe is full of representative bodies with mandates that sometimes conflict and competing interests that can lead to contentious disputes, bitter debates and long, drawn-out proceedings.

Mallory and others believe that divisive, adversarial politics are also being played out on the national stage, at an unprecedented level of intensity. He is a proponent of what is being called “deliberative democracy,” a process of informed and civil political discourse that ideally leads to a greater consensus and more rational collective decisions.

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