From: Gwen Steigelman [mailto:gwens@uoregon.edu]

Sent: Friday, April 10, 2009 11:55 AM

To: John E Bonine (UO)

Cc: Paul van Donkelaar; Peter Gilkey

Subject: RE: senate08-09: Emeritus professors as members of the voting

faculty

 

Dear John,

 

I'm not sure if you recently received a partial email from me regarding the emeritus membership issue or not -- I had trouble with my computer monitor which meant the computer had to be restarted and now the email appears lost. So I'll start over. The question of "who is faculty?" arose during the May 3, 1995 assembly meeting (see http://www.uoregon.edu/~assembly/dirassembly/A3May95.html) discussion to legislate the new form of governance. The work "faculty" was excised from the proposed legislation (which provided the legislation for the new senate and the assembly) and replaced with the term "officers of instruction" to clearly different the instructional faculty from, say, OAs and purely research faculty. It appears to suggest that for the documents under revision -- the enabling legislation which included the by-laws of the senate and organization of the assembly -- to intent was to use employee occupational categories (officers of instruction, officers of administration, librarians) for memberships in both these governance bodies. I've copied the relevant text below.

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"Mr. Tom Givon, Linguistics, stated that the motion was a good proposal but three main issues had to be decided. 1. Who is faculty? 2. Disenfranchisement of those who teach on Wednesday afternoons and cannot attend meetings. 3. Nine students gives too much power in the proposed senate five would be a better number. Mr. Jack Sanders, a member of the committee, encouraged passage. The present system does not work and the proposed senate would give you a body that would work because it would represent you directly. The number of students that the motion proposes is the lowest number the committee could agree upon. The number is a compromise, and it is very unlikely that the students would ever have an opportunity to control the vote of the senate on any issue. Mr. Frank Geltner, EMU, asked why the number of officer of administrators was limited to three. Ms. Alpert explained that the total number of OAs specifically not tenure related was roughly 280 to 300. This excluded tenure related OAs, such as the President who has tenure in the School of Law, and Librarians. The main duty of the Senate would be in the area of curriculum and instruction as well as discipline and thus those directly related to these three areas especially the first two are those who are tenure related. The largest number of senators should represent these faculty.

Ms. Nan Coppock Bland, University Editor, asked if the franchise was to

be extended to those who are in research or were instructors. The answer

was that other than the directions given in section 4 the various units could include or exclude as they wish. But the directions in section 4 had to be the basic voting group for the various units. After a brief exchange it was decided that the word "faculty" would be excised from the motion and replaced with "Officers of Instruction" in order to clarify the meaning of the motion.

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When they retire, emeritus faculty are no longer designated as officers of instruction, unless of course they teach under separate arrangements, usually as part of a 600 hour appointment. When the new governance was implemented in January 1996, the policy statement from 1984 that you quote (and which still appears) should have been updated with the new legislation superseding it -- that was never done. (This predates my appointment as secretary -- Keith Richards was secretary then.) In 2003 when there was a petition to hold an assembly meeting, with full legislative power, I initially did not include emeritus faculty as members of the assembly -- they were not in a category listed in the enabling legislation. But when they 1984 policy statement about emeritus voting faculty status came to my attention -- it may have come from Frank, or I may have stumbled across the policy myself -- in the interest of trying to be inclusive, an attempt was made to contact as many emeritus as possible and include them in the membership of the meeting. (Addresses of emeritus faculty were not easily obtained once they left employment status with the university.) So that is about as much as I know about the status of emeritus faculty as members of the assembly. The recent DOJ opinion regarding governance matters does not define statutory faculty other than by the terminology "the president and the professors." Best regards, Gwen