Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to the new academic year. I’m writing to introduce the Faculty Senate, and myself, as I have the honor of serving as your Senate Chair this year.
The Senate represents you. It is the legislative and deliberative body of the UW faculty as we work with executive administrators in shared governance. My highest goal is to be worthy of the trust placed in me, and I look to you all to keep me accountable to the business of the faculty.
We are always looking for colleagues to work with us in the various sites of governance. Whatever you care most about, chances are good there is a way to advocate for it, particularly in our Faculty Councils. Many service opportunities are not time-intensive, and they offer unique institution-wide perspectives and connections across our three campuses. I’m truly grateful to all who overload their busy schedules for our collective benefit: Senators, Faculty Council chairs and members, Elected Faculty Councils, and my Chair’s Cabinet this year.
That said, I acknowledge that service often feels unrecognized at an R1 university, and this year, the Senate will work with you all to find ways to better identify and reward the many forms of hidden work upon which this institution depends. This is related to my framing priorities:
- workload equity;
- expanding our understanding of excellence;
- ongoing differential pandemic impacts.
Some of the other issues we’ll be working on this year include:
- The election of a new Faculty Regent.
- Support for excellence in teaching, including rethinking evaluations.
- Including service and equity work in tenure and promotion metrics.
- The role of teaching faculty at an R1.
- Tri-campus administrative alignment.
- Merit reviews: process, function, and relation to compensation.
- General Education requirements, including the current Diversity credit.
- Academic freedom.
You will also have heard that the UW is looking for a new President this year. The Faculty Senate is and will be engaging with the Presidential Search Advisory Committee to ensure that faculty input helps shape the candidate profile. Please look for related e-mails and web updates from the Board of Regents.
Campus climate will be multiply challenging this year. Back in 2017, also a time of amplified conflict, the Senate passed this resolution in support of a faculty letter of shared values, which I encourage you to read. Today, faced with escalated attacks on higher education itself, it can be useful to revisit, reaffirm, and where necessary revise, such statements of value, while not neglecting the hard work of bridging the gap between aspiration and policy. The 2017 letter also highlights the importance of understanding the university as a community of experts, and the Senate will draw your attention to events organized for our benefit by colleagues who can help us understand our most pressing problems. This includes the question of academic freedom itself, which will be addressed by some of our colleagues in AAUP this November.
We have an outstanding and hard-working team in Senate leadership this year: Aarti Bhat (Vice Chair); Cynthia Dougherty (Chair of the Senate Committee on Planning and Budgeting); Jake Vigdor and Amanda Kost (Legislative Representative and Deputy respectively); Gautham Reddy (Secretary of the Faculty); Jordan Smith and Joey Burgess (Assistants to the Chair and SecFac respectively); Alexandra Toyoda and Naomi Liftman (Policy and Council analysts respectively); and our Council Chairs. The Senate represents the faculty of our three campuses, but Tacoma and Bothell also have their own governance structures. Anne Taufen is the incoming Chair of UW Tacoma’s Faculty Assembly, and Linda Watts will chair UW Bothell’s General Faculty Organization. Thanks to last year’s Senate Chair, Cynthia “Cindy” Dougherty, and to our retiring Secretary of the Faculty, Mike Townsend, for their tireless work on behalf of us all.
Shared governance at the UW is slow, messy and sometimes frustrating, but that’s precisely because it is shared: across 18 schools and colleges and 3 campuses, more than 5,000 voting faculty, faculty and staff administrators, university and elected faculty councils, and the executive office. One role of the Senate Chair is procedural: to make sure that faculty voices are heard via processes that are as inclusive and representative as possible, whatever the issue. Governance works for and through you, and I hope you will communicate what matters to you by engaging with your senators and with university faculty councils this year. Thus, we can elevate our collective concerns and create the conditions for us all to do, and be rewarded for, our best work.
Thank you for the trust placed in me. It will be an honor to serve and work with you this year.
Sincerely,
Louisa Mackenzie
Chair, Faculty Senate
Associate Professor, Comparative History of Ideas (College of Arts and Sciences, UW Seattle)