At its February 15, 2011, meeting the Faculty Council heard a presentation from the Library Policy Committee (LPC) on the continuing campus dialogues on a proposal for a Universitywide open access policy. Such a policy would enable immediate, unfettered access to Emory faculty-authored scholarly articles. After receiving faculty feedback on questions of implementing an open access repository for Emory, the LPC proposed to present a revised draft of a resolution in support of an open access policy that would minimize administrative burden. The resolution would 1) invite faculty to opt in to participating (at least at first) in the repository, rather than requiring that they opt out, and 2) emphasize that Emory faculty work that already is available through existing digital repositories would be “harvested” for inclusion in the Emory repository as it is implemented. The Council agreed to review a revised resolution draft for a possible vote during the Spring 2011 semester. This vote would express the Council’s support for the principle of open access as official University policy.
Month: February 2011
Committee to Examine Class and Labor Issues
At the Council’s February meeting, Provost Earl Lewis announced that on February 3, 2011, he and Vice President for Finance and Administration Mike Mandl charged a new committee to examine issues of class and labor on the Emory campus. Composed of faculty, students, and staff and chaired by Professor of Psychology Nadine Kaslow and co-chaired by Vice President and Deputy to the President Gary Hauk, the committee will begin by focusing on Emory’s non-academic labor force, including questions of compensation and benefits, advancement, retention and turnover, and supervisory skill levels across the university.
“We see this as the first of a three or four phase conversation” to take place over twelve to eighteen months, Lewis said. “The first phase would deal with non-academic labor, the second with academic labor, and the third with relationships between members of the academic and non-academic labor forces. A fourth phase would involve our students and their relationship to both academic and non-academic labor.”
Faculty Life Course Committee Seeks Members, Ideas
The Faculty Life Course Committee of the Faculty Council addresses issues likely to enhance faculty life at Emory across the academic career, from junior faculty to emeritus status. This committee brings faculty concerns to the attention of senior administrators and the Faculty Council. Central concerns are to improve academic productivity, facilitate retention, and augment the quality of life and sense of community for faculty at Emory. This year and next the committee would like to focus on mentoring, changes in career pathways post-tenure, decisions around retirement and benefits, and progress toward the 2007 recommendations for non tenure track faculty. The committee is seeking new members interested in these issues and ideas that faculty would like us to focus on.
Please contact Pat Marsteller (pmars [at] learnlink [dot] emory [dot] edu) to bring up issues or to join a working group. And for more information, please see http://www.worklife.emory.edu/facultylifecourse/index.html.
Distinguished Faculty Lecture Feb 2
The Faculty Council invites all to the sixteenth Distinguish Faculty Lecture, to be delivered by Professor of Nursing Ora Lea Strickland on Wednesday, February 2, 2011, at 4:00 in the Winship Ballroom of the Dobbs University Center. Professor Strickland will speak on “The Women’s Health Initiative: Scientific and Sociopolitical Lessons Learned.” Prior to the implementation of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), there had been very few large prospective trials examining the benefits and risks of therapeutic interventions in diseases with significant morbidity and mortality that are common to women. This exclusion was premised on an assumption that results obtained in men could be extrapolated to women. Several social, political, and medical research issues contributed to the decision to conduct the WHI, which included 168,000 women from 40 sites around the United States. Although the WHI resulted in many important results related to women’s health, it also resulted in many lessons learned for its teams of investigators and for the care of women. This presentation will address those issues and lessons. A reception will follow the lecture.
What Makes Emory Distinctive?
At the January 2011 meeting of the Faculty Council, University President James Wag- ner commented on the beginnings of a semester-long conversation taking place among several governance groups around the university on the question, “What makes Emory distinctive?”
“There are times when it’s important for us to stop and see who we are, for the purpose of being able to declare that, to explain who we are, to invest in what we find is good in that,” President Wagner said. He added that these questions had been taken up by the University Senate and the President’s Cabi- net, and they had been discussed at length at a recent Emory College faculty meeting.
Along with President Wagner, the Faculty Council plans to engage with the question of identifying Emory’s distinctiveness at its next meeting, on February 15.
Exploring New Revenue Streams
The Faculty Council heard a brief presentation in January from University General Counsel Steve Sencer and Sarah O’Brien, a consultant brought in for three months to identify, evaluate, and implement new opportunities to generate revenue for the uni- versity. A Goizueta Executive MBA alumna, O’Brien and her team are focusing on two general areas: 1) non-degree professional education and certificate programs and 2) digital learning initiatives. O’Brien is serving as a resource to schools looking for help identifying and prioritizing revenue-generating ideas, as well as with implementation. O’Brien said she is already working closely with the Candler School of Theology, the Laney Graduate School, Emory College, and the Center for Lifelong Learning. “We want to generate revenue, but it has to intersect with the [University’s] mission,” O’Brien said. “We want to make sure we move forward the educational mission but at the same time have an opportunity to improve the recognition of Emory globally.”