- Academics
- Quick Links
President Turner, Colleagues, friends—not having learned to delight in such speaking opportunities as this, I will make my remarks brief. I thank my predecessor, Gary Evans, for having written a report of the major decisions of last year, so I won’t rehearse those events. I do want to let you know that our web master, JoAnn Lan, has just completed a new web site for the Senate, through which I plan to communicate current business and announce the agendas of upcoming meetings, meetings to which, by the way, you are all invited. I thank her for completing that significant task in time for this meeting.
I wish to speak today about the role I see for the Senate in the coming year and longer.
We are approaching the beginning of the Centennial Campaign, a topic I will leave President Turner to discuss. But I want to recognize what an important moment this will be in the history of SMU. Over the past decade, each of us has spent time negotiating the construction sites that have given birth to new buildings on every part of campus. It’s been a time of tremendous growth for the campus. And now, although we witness new construction in the schools of Theology, Engineering, and Education and Human Development, we are all well aware of the commitment President Turner and the Board of Trustees have made to the enhancements in faculty and programs in this new campaign. This commitment represents a determination to improve the academic quality of SMU in ways that would be hard to over-estimate. Last year Provost Ludden laid out a plan to this body to increase the external funding for research at SMU, funding that would be the engine for faculty growth, for attracting even better students, and for retaining our best students. Provost Ludden and our two most recently hired deans—Dean Jose Bowen and our new Dean of Dedman College, Cordelia Candelaria —have all made clear their desire to enhance both teaching and research by promoting collaboration across disciplinary lines, including hiring faculty to make such cross-disciplinary work possible. The commitment to the funding of dozens of new endowed chairs will, I trust, make possible the hiring of many dozens more new assistant professors, the life-blood of our intellectual endeavors. All of this pleases me. We have administrators and trustees that leave no doubt about the centrality of the improvement of SMU’s scholarly position.
The role of faculty, by comparison, seems quite simple. Read, write, experiment, perform, build, think, talk. Sometimes that work brings in external funding, which is a wonderful thing about our profession. We should do that, I think. And of course, we should teach. One of the things I have always been most proud of in working at SMU is that our faculty teach as well as anywhere, and when our students transfer, it is seldom because the faculty has not given them superb opportunities to learn. The Task Force on Substance Abuse Prevention, on which I served, did hear one disheartening theme from students: that we have not always been sufficiently demanding. How hard it must have been for them to tell us that, knowing that we might do something in response. Many students, the Daily Campus articles suggested, read the recommendations and had the dreary thought that all of this was going to add up to more homework, more drudgery. But that wasn’t the point at all. Rather, the point was to demand of students that they fulfill their potential, that they get used to the fact that learning is not simply a classroom exercise, but a total engagement that extends beyond the classroom, engagement with their libraries, labs, books, writing, fellow students—and even us. I know that I have not completely fulfilled that responsibility when I look at many of my colleagues and see them doing things I had not yet thought to do. And just imagine if it works and if our students, already a wonder, get better. I won’t promise more sober, but who knows?
Those are the simple things, the reason I suspect most of us got involved in the education business. It’s fun. And for good reasons, these are things the Senate plays a pretty minor role in. The faculty knows its job. And further, for the most part the faculty needs no one to represent its interests and positions in these matters: we speak up just fine. And we are fortunate at SMU that the administration shares the values and aims of the faculty. But the Senate has its committees for a reason: in some matters, the administration needs our advice. And they need it because the faculty is unlike most groups, free to speak, without fear of harm, in support of what each of us values in the university. Deans and Provosts and Presidents serve at the pleasure of the trustees, not a situation I envy. They must constantly think of this pleasure. They worry. They need our help. That’s what the Senate is for.
Most of this help involves the ongoing, annual dramas that take place in committees such as admissions, where the faculty works with the university’s admissions office to improve standards while under pressure to increase the number of students—and we have been fortunate lately to have done both. And the benefits council, likewise, works to enhance our situations against the pressures of rising costs of health, retirement and education. These are places where our collective voice works within the fabric of the University. And we should be gladdened to know that when the Senate asked the university to withdraw a clause from the Bylaws saying that we could be dismissed for a lack of loyalty to the ideals and aims of the University, the University moved, with the deliberation worthy of a great institution, toward compliance with our request while we work out a language to protect us all against unreasonable threat of dismissal. And when faculty get caught up in the disciplinary machinery of the University, we should all be glad that the Ethics and Tenure Committee can ensure that the proper deliberation is maintained, and with it due process. We work to preserve the rights of the faculty to speak, even when it gives no one pleasure.
This is always the problem with faculty: for all our virtues, we are frankly conservative in our defense of academic values. As much as SMU’s national visibility and reputation may be enhance by having a presidential library, we will go on and on about the importance of the academic libraries to the quality of the institution. We all share a mission for SMU, but the details often come with different inflections. The Senate’s Library Committee, I feel assured, will remain tenacious in its defense of the academic libraries. Similarly, while we all figure out how we might work productively across disciplinary lines, many of us are concerned to preserve the strength of disciplinary knowledge, without which interdisciplinarity makes no sense. And so the Executive Committee is asking the Academic Policy Committee to attend to its standing charge to monitor interdisciplinary programs.
Last month I had the amazing privilege of visiting the White House and listening to President Bush discuss his plans for the Institute. It would be hard to deny his passion for the promotion of freedom and democracy, and I can only wish him success with this venture on the small, peaceful stage of SMU. I also saw clearly his expectation that scholars who come to the Institute would occasionally have concurrent teaching appointments with SMU. Some of these scholars will present us with extraordinary opportunities, and we should be thinking about how they will enter our classrooms. In rereading the terms of the contractual Agreement that SMU signed with the Bush Foundation, and then reading Guidelines for Concurrent Appointments produced by SMU’s Library Planning Committee, I was struck by the extraordinary latitude in hiring practices granted by the stipulation that SMU will, when making Concurrent Appointments, use “the same process that it uses for the appointment of regular SMU faculty of the same rank.” The paths to appointment are various, from the most rigorously formal to the last minute, ad hoc hires. To ensure the highest standards in teaching appointments, however, the Faculty Senate will be offering language to supplement the guidelines specifying that the faculty of the appropriate academic unit will evaluate and interview all concurrently appointed faculty. In this partnership, faculty must be attentive, and faculty must lead.
As we move toward this greater SMU, each of us will have a part to play. I, for one, am pleased to have been granted this chance to serve the faculty at this moment in SMU’s history.
General Faculty Meeting
January 20, 2009
May I have a motion to approve the minutes for the Faculty Meeting of August 27th? Second? All in favor? Thank you.
I want to take a few minutes from the busy agenda to talk about the work of the Senate in the last semester. Much of the work has involved the ongoing business of committees working with and for the larger university. The Benefits committee has in the last year seen an increase in allowances for preventive care and the addition of Roth IRAs. The Admissions committee and Athletics committee have put forward resolutions that simplify processes and ensure that faculty retain their role in admissions and transfer credit. The calendar committee, which, it turns out, is one of the harder working committees, has produced a model for the calendar that should allow a welcome consistency from year to year and reduce the amount of time faculty and seniors fiddle away awaiting graduation each spring.
Two important resolutions speak directly to the faculty’s role at the university. I was glad to be able to take President Turner a resolution asking for a change in Bylaws and the Policy Manual clarifying the terms under which faculty can be dismissed for cause, bringing our language in line with that of the AAUP and other universities and thereby helping prevent the infringement of academic, personal, and political rights. And we should very soon be presenting a resolution clarifying the necessary and integral role that we expect the faculty to play in the appointment of any fellow of the Bush Institute to a faculty position at SMU. With the departure of President Bush from the White House, I expect to see the Institute coming to life soon. As President Bush pointed out, he does not like to rest.
My guess is that most Faculty Senate Presidents leave the office just as they are getting a sense of the job. I have a little over three months left and feel certain that mysteries will remain. I have found that my conversations with President Turner and Provost Ludden provide me with a great source of information, as well as providing me with opportunities to convey to them the interests of the faculty. And I have come a long way in understanding some things about the people who serve the university as Trustees.
But despite the privileged role I have been allowed to play, I remain dissatisfied with the nature of faculty governance at SMU. Budgets are shared, but not with enough transparency to allow faculty to have truly useful oversight, much less to permit more active contributions to the direction the university takes. Last year Provost Ludden laid out a plan to greatly enhance SMU’s status as a research university, which should bring the attendant benefits of improved recruitment and retention of undergraduates. We would like to see more clearly the connections between those goals and the impressive gifts made to the university thus far in the 2nd Century Campaign.
While we all hope our profit-making sports will have winning seasons and all appreciate that so far the athletics program has remained within this year’s budget, we would like to see more accountability to athletic budget than we have seen over the last eight years. I would like to see the SMU campaign promote without reservation academic excellence as the “brand” by which SMU is known, so that the undergraduate colleges will come to have the scholarly recognition in the national eye that Cox, Dedman Law, and Perkins do. It will take more faculty engagement to do these things.
I will be asking the chairs of Senate Committees to look at the Strategic Plan documents and to suggest from their positions how the University might reach the goals they lay out. In another year, I hope that when the Senate is asked to report on how we have contributed to reaching those goals, we will be able to demonstrate a larger role in shaping SMU’s direction than I currently see.
Best wishes for a productive Spring.
© Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas | Legal | A-Z Site Index | Contact SMU
Share