[Uosenate] Material from last Wednesday's Senate meeting

[Senate President]

Dearest Senators,

Thank you for a most productive meeting yesterday! I am writing to follow up on 3 items, so that there will be a paper trail in addition to the spoken versions of things that came up.

First, I want to recognize and thank Senator Harinder Khalsa for adding visual images and links to her reading of the Land Acknowledgement — for those who are interested in following up on those links, I attach her slides here.

Second, with regard to the four items I brought up in my remarks at the start of the meeting:

  *   Reapportionment: Betina, in her role as Senate Executive Coordinator, will add the slides to the Senate website. Short version: CAS Social Sciences and Physical Sciences will each lose one seat in the Senate; LCB and SOJC will each gain one seat.
  *   Reports requested via the 2020 Senate Anti-Racism Resolution (sections 2.5 and 2.6 of https://senate.uoregon.edu/senate-motions/us1920-18-resolution-against-racism-and-systemic-oppression) were put on hold last fall due to possible overlap with a parallel request from the Board of Trustees for a transparent dashboard that breaks down student success according to various demographic variables at various levels of granularity. We will have a presentation from the UO Academic Data Analytics (ADA) group at our first Senate meeting of spring term (April 6), with a possible follow-up presentation at a later meeting to present a similar dashboard that explores faculty demographics. Senators, please come to the April 6 prepared (i) to identify components of our requested information that are not covered by the new dashboards, and (ii) to think about what we will do with the new information in order to advance our shared work against racism and systemic oppression.
  *   I forward the message that I read from the Co-Chairs of the CIET committee regarding the use of Student Experience Survey data in evaluating the performance of instructors this term:

The sense of the CIET is that, given the uncertainty and changes in modes of course delivery during this Winter quarter, the end of term Student Experience Survey should be conducted, but the results should be available to instructors only, if this is technically feasible. In any case SES responses should not be used in reviews and evaluation unless the instructor chooses to include them in their teaching statement. My understanding is that the faculty union leadership supports this and is attempting to negotiate an MOU with the administration to this effect.

We encourage senators to reach out to the CIET co-chairs Kara Clevinger <kclev at uoregon.edu<mailto:kclev at uoregon.edu>> and Bill Harbaugh <harbaugh at uoregon.edu<mailto:harbaugh at uoregon.edu> if they have questions or comments on this.


  *   I attach the flow chart that Senate Parliamentarian Sandy Weintraub prepared explaining the three types of Senate Motions, and especially what distinguishes them in terms of content (i.e., why a particular motion might be put into each category) and process (i.e. what actions follow passage of each type of motion). Crucial here is the distinction between Senate Legislation, which treats academic matters and over which we have a greater degree of authority, versus Policy Proposals and Resolutions, which treat non-academic matters, over which the Senate has less authority. This flow chart will also be placed on the Senate Website to guide future motion-makers to select the best type of motion for their matter.

Third, I want to follow up on our discussion of whether the change of term from Emeritus to Emerit in all university policy should qualify as falling into the category of Legislation, which must be “regarding academic matters as commonly understood.” As you may recall, I quoted a private message that President Schill sent me in the chat, for which the critical component reads as follows:

On the emerit issue, the legislation is not about an academic matter.  Titles are not curricular or academic issues.  That said, if it is characterized as a resolution and passed by the Senate I will accept it.

In our deliberations, we agreed that the substance of this issue was more important than the formal framing of the motion as legislation vs. resolution, so we formally voted to change the motion to a resolution, after which it passed by a substantial margin. However, some senators also expressed discomfort with excluding from the category of “academic matter” decisions about the titles that identify honored faculty retirees. This discomfort reveals a larger question that we have not dealt with well, that of how we determine the scope of the concept “academic matter”, and in particular how we might resolve disputes about what does and does not constitute an academic matter. At the conclusion of the discussion, I agreed to look over the comments in the chat and I invited Senators to send me their thoughts by email, with the idea that I would synthesize them into some sort of statement to accompany the four motions that we passed yesterday when we forward them to President Schill for his consideration. So far I have received only one message, so to give you-all a bit more time to send me your thouhgts, I am holding off on this part of the work until next week — I plan to report on this matter to the Senate at our next meeting, March 9.

To those of you who managed to read all the way to the end of this message, my thanks (and admiration) for your dedication — have a good weekend and strength heading into the final two weeks of the term!

Best,
Spike

Spike Gildea
Professor of Linguistics
President of the University Senate, 2021-2022

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