Brown University Task Force on Faculty Governance Minutes of Meetings

Minutes of The Task Force on Faculty Governance

September 26, 2002

Attending: Nancy Amstrong, Russell Church, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Richard Fishman, Peter Gromet, John Savage, Rajiv Vohra, and Michael White.

Guest: Russell Carey, Bill Beeman

1. The opened at 1:05pm and adjourned at 3:45pm.

2. The minutes of September 19 were approved.

3. Administrative Advisory Boards and the FEC

   We replaced the phrase "key administrator" with "senior administrator" and decided to require that for boards to be recorded in Faculty Rules and Regulations they be submitted to the FEC for review and to the Faculty for approval. We agreed to modify the charge to the FEC to incorporate this change.

4. NCFEC

   We changed the membership so that it would consist of the faculty chairs of TPA and FAC and the faculty vice chairs of APC and URC.

5. TPA

   We decided to include the following paragraph in the Operations section of the description of this committee.

   • l. The President, or in the President's absence, his or her designee, shall grant to an academic unit Chair or Director or a faculty member under review, if he or she is dissatisfied with the Committee's recommendation and/or the Provost's decision, an opportunity to discuss the recommendation with the President, or his or her designee, in person, or to present materials in writing.

   We also decided to move section e. of the Charge to a. and to delete superfluous language from the original section a.

6. Committee on Grievance

   We were informed by Russell Carey that the General Counsel was reviewing the draft description of this committee that he has prepared.

7. Affirmative Action Monitoring Committee

   We explored if and how we might address the faculty search monitoring function currently assigned to this committee. Anne agreed to draft language that we could consider at our next meeting.

8. University Curriculum Committee, College Curriculum Council, Grad Council

   We changed the description of UCC so that it is now an umbrella committee with nine members, the Registrar and four each drawn from the CCC and the Graduate Council. The four would be the dean, the Faculty vice chair, a second faculty member, and one student, the latter two chosen by the appropriate committee. A faculty member would be chair of UCC.

   UCC would be required to meet once per semester to review curricular matters that have both graduate and graduate components.

   We agreed to revise the charges of the CCC and the Grad Council to require that they refer curricular matters with grad and undergraduate overlap to UCC. We also agreed to delete from the membership of each of these councils the dean who chairs the other council. Finally, we agreed to incorporate section e. from the charge of the Graduate Council into the charge for the CCC.

   Submitted by
   John E. Savage