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President Schill to hold reception supporting shared governance. This Wed 4-5PM Gehrlinger

Rumor has it that you will be able to fill out a paper copy of the committee volunteering form on the spot, and there will be lemonade and sweets.

Reception with president, Senate leaders aids shared governance

President Michael Schill at a reception last summer.

University Senate President Randy Sullivan is inviting the campus community to a reception with President Michael Schill and other members of the Senate leadership team to learn more about shared governance.

Nominations are now open for Senate and committee positions, and the event will be an opportunity to hear from campus leaders about the need for candidates and volunteers. Current members of committees and other panels also will be on hand to answer questions and discuss service opportunities.

The reception will be from 4 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, March 2, in the Gerlinger Lounge. Nominations will be open through Sunday, March 6.

[Full Disclosure: I stole this word for word from Around the O]

17 Comments

  1. honest Uncle Bernie 03/01/2016

    It all seems to be central governance to me — except for the negotiations with the various unions.

    Redistribution of revenues, forced NTTF cuts, cluster hires …. What next?

  2. Sextus Empiricus 03/01/2016

    I have to agree. The upper administration’s various ham-fisted maneuvers and power grabs over the past 7 years have made a complete mockery of “shared governance.” Although Schill is certainly more accessible than Gottfredson, shared governance remains as elusive as ever.

    • uomatters Post author | 03/01/2016

      Show up tomorrow and tell the man that. Or at least eat his chocolate.

  3. Sun Tzu 03/02/2016

    What a ridiculous waste of time.

    President Schill: Please stop throwing useless, silly parties and start putting your efforts into strengthening shared governance. Actions speak louder than chocolates.

    UOM: Please stop appeasing Schill. You are losing your credibility.

    • Forrest Gump 03/02/2016

      Chocolates?

    • uomatters Post author | 03/02/2016

      Yeah, we were so much better off fighting with Gottfredson and Geller. Those were the golden years.

      • Canaduck 03/02/2016

        Ah the golden years, where “asked and answered” receptions were the 2013-era version of shared governance.

      • Dog 03/02/2016

        What, we had golden years? And really Sun Tzu – uomatters has
        credibility? Yeah, that must have occurred in those golden years …

      • Very Recently 03/02/2016

        Bizarre comments from the peanut gallery in Senate. Marcus praises Gottfredson for his amazing foresight and advice. Provost Coltrane ridicules interim president Coltrane and other past presidents for not having fired a bunch of NTTF sooner.

        Some administrators continue to enjoy huge raises. They moved so fast they tripped over themselves to give the football coach a few million extra dollars. The cuts are really about putting faculty back in their place, and undermining their unionization efforts. Pretty bold for a President whose main job is fundraising to fund his priorities on the backs of NTTF.

        • Anonymous 03/03/2016

          @ very recently

          agree mostly with this, but it is important to keep in mind that we are overly rubric driven at the UO at our current fraction of total SCHs taught by NTTFs is very large. Some scale back is needed but I am not convinced this will be done in any sensible and fair manner

  4. Gina Psaki 03/03/2016

    I’m so interested in this narrative about how humanities TTF have abdicated our teaching role, shuffling it off on our NTTF colleagues. CAS-Humanities and SSci TTF have a “normal” teaching load of 5 courses per year. (Some units teach more, and some less, but it’s 5 in my unit except for supervisory or service-related course releases.) As long as I’ve been here, UO has incentivized only one behavior for TTF: published research. Published research gets you tenured, promoted, and financially rewarded. And to comply with that lopsided emphasis faculty found ways to secure the time it takes to complete and publish their research. Now the rules have shifted, very suddenly, and units are scolded for faculty having successfully got themselves out of the classroom to conduct and publish more research. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be equally attentive to creative course design and instruction–I’m just saying that to date we have not been. And it seems a bit like rigging the game, to now spin the results of this long practice as a failure for the humanities or for humanities instruction.

    • Gina Psaki 03/03/2016

      Oops, bad editing: published research isn’t a behavior…

    • honest Uncle Bernie 03/04/2016

      Interesting that now they want even MORE emphasis on research, scholarship, and publishing — to get their “metrics” up to AAU levels — yet to have more of the teaching done by TTF. The long-range plan seems to be to increase the number of TTF. But that will take time to do it well — haste makes waste — and money. Where will the latter come from? One would think enhanced fundraising. But so far, the only enhanced fundraising I can really see is jacking up tuition 4.8% or so. In other words, sticking it to the students. Can they get away with this much longer? I have my doubts.

      Re the Humanities division of CAS: the “narrative” I keep hearing is that they KEPT ON hiring NTTF even as their student credit hours were dropping — probably wasn’t a wise move — especially in retrospect — now the NTTF who get laid off get to pay.

      • anonymous 03/04/2016

        There is a big discrepancy between class sizes between Hum and SocSci faculty, even as a 5 course load remains standard for both. SocSci faculty teach more students as a rule, both with and without grading assistance, than any Hum faculty I’ve seen. As a corrollary, in SocSci depts NTTF are not as integral to curriculum delivery as in Hum. They have not, in other words, depended on heavy NTTF enrollments to justify small class sizes for TTF–in the name or research or otherwise, even as they are held to the same research standards. The inequity is sometimes gross. Hum faculty are not per se more research productive than SocSci faculty; they just teach fewer students.

        • Dog 03/05/2016

          show the data that supports your claims. I think they are right but evidence based reasoning should always trump illusion, opinion and perception in an academic based environment.

        • Gina Psaki 03/05/2016

          “Big discrepancy Anonymous” makes a case about class sizes that needs to be nuanced. Courses taught to students who are beginning and intermediate language learners–where the language of instruction is not English–cannot have high enrollment caps and still succeed in honing language abilities and the skills of basic analysis & interpretation in the second language. It takes an immense amount of one-on-one work with student writing, for example. The same is true where a serious attention to improving writing skills (in English OR another language) is a major part of the class. And that’s true at all levels, from LD to 500-600.

          By saying this I’m not implying any inferior instruction in large lecture courses. But clearly, while course goals are not the same, and teaching modalities are not the same, faculty may spend the same amount of time (blood, sweat, tears) on the smaller group as on the larger one. At least that was my experience when I taught HUM 102 (to 250 students in the 90’s, to 110 in 2014–15) at the same time as small courses *in lingua*.

          Last but not least: I’m not sure it’s helpful to start comparing apples and rider-mowers and cameos. Not to mention that turning on each other is probably the *least* helpful thing faculty can do at the moment.

          • anonymous 03/05/2016

            I was not referring to beginning and intermediate language courses, which are not taught by TTF anyway. Nor really was I referring to large lecture courses, like Hum 102, in which a lot of the heavy lifting is done by GTFs, most especially as graders.

            The real difference comes at the mid-level, where there is a big discrepancy between a seminar-size class (around 12 students) and a semi-lecture/semi-discussion class that might enroll as many as 40 students without qualifying for grading assistance. And the issue is how much of one’s 5-course load is comprised of these, or of seminars–and so what the total SCH and grading load are per TTF. (Some of us sweat and bleed more than others, by choice, so we need to talk about comparitors than can be quantified.)

            As for what is or isn’t helpful, I meant simply to point out that it’s all relative: what one person might protest as unfair may seem to another person an overdue rectification of a long-standing inequity. When we are all held to the same research standards but not shouldering comparable teaching burdens, it’s hard to link arms and sing TTF solidarity.

            I heard that a bunch of TTF in the language depts protested that they couldn’t possibly be expected to teach intro or intermediate language courses because they are “historians of culture and ideas” not language instructors. My point is that, put bluntly, if they were historians (or anthropologists) at UO, they’d be teaching heavier loads. And they themselves introduced the comparison that provoked my remarks, thus lawnmowers to lawnmowers.

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