Month: October 2013

The Faculty Council spent the first hour of its October 22, 2013, meeting in a faculty-only session to review and discuss the results of the faculty governance survey conducted in early fall. Of the approximately 3,000 surveys sent, 1,084 faculty responded. Half of the respondents were in non-tenure track positions, more than half were male, and more than half were in the School of Medicine. More than three quarters reported their race as “white.” In the closed session, Council chair Deb Houry says, the group discussed “the lack of visibility of University Senate and Faculty Council work, which we could interpret as a call for members to report more to colleagues and to improve school-specific communications.” Also discussed, she added, was the role of these governance bodies: “What needs to be dealt with at an individual unit level, and what rises to the university-wide level? And what are the mechanisms for those larger discussions?”

Additional reports from survey results are available in the below post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emory Provost Claire Sterk joined the October Faculty Council meeting after the faculty-only session to further discuss and respond to the results of the faculty governance survey. “If we can reach a shared understanding of what we mean by faculty governance, I believe we would be in a much better place to have constructive conversations moving forward,” she said. “By ‘shared’ I don’t mean that everyone must agree to every word but rather that we agree on the principles at the university level and within each academic unit. In five different conversations, I might hear five different meanings of the term. The issues raised are always important. But what we should consider is, are the issues tied to faculty governance or to something else?”