Note: Names of faculty members who spoke during the meeting have been omitted in accordance to the terms that allowed the Wheel to attend the meeting.
College faculty met in White Hall on Wednesday, Feb. 11 to vote on potential major revisions to the bylaws of the Emory College faculty. The potential revisions included the proposed replacement of the faculty’s current Governance Committee (GovCom) with a College Senate.
The College faculty bylaws act as a governing document for faculty members, a category which includes all non-honorary professors and lecturers who primarily work in the College, and it establishes the rules for both voting and meeting in order to best advance the interests of the faculty collectively.
The proposed College Senate would seek to streamline the self-governance of the faculty of Emory College. The proposal would reduce the number of yearly full faculty meetings to only two while introducing an elected representative body that would meet at least once each month to vote on more pressing issues, or those for which it wouldn’t be feasible to call a meeting of the entire College faculty.
The full faculty body would be superior to the Senate and would have the capacity to override any College Senate decisions by a majority vote according to the proposed bylaw revisions.
The meeting focused on clarification of newly proposed bylaws as well as debate over primarily procedural matters for the proposed Senate.
Some proposed amendments to the text, such as a more explicit definition of “primary appointments” in the context of determining whether a faculty member could be a regular voting member of the College faculty body, passed almost unanimously, while others generated significantly more disapproval, such as an amendment to add “and tenure” to a section describing the role of the College Senate as to “protect academic freedom.”
When the amendment was opened to debate, one faculty member described the potential effects of such language as a step towards “disenfranchisement [of a] part of the family” by moving focus to tenured faculty at the expense of the untenured.
“That is not what ‘and’ means,” another speaker succinctly replied.
The amendment did not pass.
Two amendments in particular were contentious and passed with very narrow margins in the single digits.
The first, seeking to add “and service” to a passage stating that “the [proposed] College Senate will work with faculty and the College Administration to ... create and implement policies regarding the core college missions of research and teaching” generated debate over adding words when their meaning was “already implicitly present,” as one speaker said. The resolution passed. Emory College’s mission statement lists “research and creativity, teaching and service” as the methods to achieving Emory College’s mission.
The second contentious amendment, regarding the definition of quorum at College Senate meetings, sought to change the definition of quorum from 50 percent of the Senate’s voting members present to 15 out of the 23 members present.
“Fifty percent is pretty typical from what we have found [in our research of other faculty representative bodies],” explained History Professor and Director of the Institute of African Studies Clifton Crais, who is also the GovCom chair.
Many faculty members, however, expressed concern with the potential for under-involvement by the senators. After a fairly lengthy debate, the amendment narrowly passed, raising the threshold to achieve quorum in the proposed College Senate.
The meeting was adjourned at about 5:10 p.m. after a very close vote on whether to adjourn for one week.
“We are over the hump!” Crais said in an attempt to convince faculty to finish the discussion and vote on the bylaws. The meeting had progressed through six of 12 major articles of the proposed bylaws revision
The faculty of the College will reconvene next week on Feb. 18.
— By Sam Budnyk, A&E Editor
Faculty Talk Bylaws, Governance at Meeting
Goodrich C. White Hall. Photo by Jason Oh.
