4/27/2015 update:
To: University Campus Community
From: Robert Kyr, University Senate President
RE: Please Sign Up for Senate & Committee Service—
Final Deadline: MONDAY, April 27, 2015
I am writing with a last reminder that Monday, April 27 is the deadline to sign up for Senate and Committee service through the following qualtrics survey:
University Senate and Committee Nominations Survey 2015
With the arrival of Michael Schill, our incoming President, your service is needed more than ever as we begin our collaboration with a new administration. During his recent campus visit, President Schill signaled his strong commitment to working with the Senate and the entire campus community through shared governance.
I strongly urge you to sign up now for Senate and committee service so that we can work together with our incoming President to create the best future for our university. Please know that your service is greatly valued and much appreciated.
All the best, Robert Kyr, University Senate President
4/22/2015: Coltrane wants better advice from the Senate and more functional committees, and he wants this in place by July when Schill arrives.
The draft minutes of this April 8th meeting, which started with a long harangue from Coltrane about the irresponsibility of the Senate messing with Duck Athletics matters and was followed by the patient, respectful responses from Senators, are here. It seems clear to me that when the administration talks about respect, they mean the faculty shouldn’t ask tough questions, and when they talk about trust they mean the faculty should believe what they are told.
The Coltrane plan to make the Senate more complacent starts with trying to stack the elections with new candidates that are more friendly to authority and less skeptical of the administration than the current Senators, whose long exposure to the many-year-long Johnson Hall train wreck has left them just slightly cynical.
Regardless of which side you are on, you can put your hat in the ring for the many open Senate and Committee seats. The nomination survey is here: https://oregon.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_77hfWNdQDtOoONL and Senate President Ky has extended the deadline til the end of Monday 4/27 to ensure as broad a pool as possible.
One good thing about shared governance is meeting engaged academics outside your department. Nothing like an exciting committee meeting to break the ice, then solve the two body problem by dating someone who’s already got a job here… The list of open seats and committees? http://senate.uoregon.edu/content/2015-university-senate-and-committee-vacancies
Hmmm. As has been pointed out recently this blog’s community standards are pretty flexible, so I could hardly delete this interesting appeal. I’m not sure what the UO faculty handbook says about dating fellow committee members though – because Doug Blandy and Barbara Altmann still haven’t produced a faculty handbook. https://academicaffairs.uoregon.edu/faculty-handbook