Coney found birds-eye view, chance to act on issues she cared about in Faculty Senate

By Nancy Wick
University Week

Mary Coney was drawn into faculty governance for two reasons. She wanted contact with the wider University outside her department and she wanted to pursue some issues she cared about.

The professor of technical communication has had a chance to do both in her years in the Faculty Senate, and this year she’ll serve as chair, presiding over a body with a very full agenda. “The senate has a number of really key issues to consider, and I’m looking forward to a productive year,” Coney says.

Mary Coney at the door of the Faculty Senate Office. Photo by Kathy Sauber

Like most faculty, Coney began her career in the senate as a representative of her department. That was back in 1985. But she didn’t really become involved until the early 90s, when she served on the Special Committee on Faculty Women, which is a subcommittee of the Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs. The committee was an example of an issue she cared about.

“When I first came to the College of Engineering in 1976 there were very few women in the college - a handful,” Coney recalls. “Women are still in the minority there, so I’ve always been interested in having a chance to talk to other faculty women.”

That subcommittee led to her serving on the Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs and then to chairing it. “I was chair in 1995, the year after the University had gone through a financial crisis and considered eliminating programs,” Coney says. “It was clear to me that we needed a better set of procedures so the University wouldn’t have to undergo what had happened that year again.”

So one of her acts as chair was to appoint a blue ribbon faculty committee, the Reorganization, Consolidation and Elimination of Programs Committee, to write new legislation to guide the University in similar situations. “I chose that title to keep the possibility of consolidation and reorganization in front of people rather than going directly to elimination,” Coney explains. “That seems healthier to me. The legislation was passed unanimously that year.”

Perhaps the thing that Coney is proudest of in her senate career, however, is the legislation on promotion that passed last year. She calls it an example of her “doggedness,” because the legislation was first introduced during her chairmanship of the Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs and failed twice.

But Coney didn’t give up because it was an example of one of those issues she cared about. “As a faculty member I’d seen what seemed to me to be some unfairness in promotion issues - not in my case but in others - that I thought was the result of a secretive process,” she says.

She describes the legislation that finally passed as giving a candidate for promotion or tenure a broader opportunity to participate in the process. The candidate is in charge of putting together the case that goes before the faculty, and any time that a faculty group meets to weigh the case and take a vote, a summary of that discussion and vote is given to the candidate with names expunged. The candidate then has an opportunity to write a response.

“I’m very proud of that legislation,” Coney says. “I think it opened up a procedure which in the past had been secretive and I think it’s a big improvement in the way the faculty does its work.”

The promotion legislation is also an example of why Coney likes the opportunity to participate in the larger University community that the Faculty Senate offers. “We as faculty members tend to stay in our own units week after week,” she says. “One of the wonderful experiences of serving on faculty governance is you get to meet faculty from all over and find out what their experiences are, which can be quite different from your own. And we can learn from the way other units do things.”

The committee working on the promotion procedure did just that, talking to two units that already had a more open process. They learned, Coney says, that standards hadn’t fallen in those units, which was one of the fears that had been expressed. On the contrary, the more open process seemed to go better and everyone felt better about it than they had about the secretive process.

After her service on the council, Coney next became a member of the senate’s cabinet at the invitation of then-chair Ted Kaltsounis. It was while serving on that advisory body, she says, that she was introduced to the “inner workings” of the senate’s administration. She served as vice chair last year, an office designed to prepare the individual to step into the chair’s position.

In addition to the legislation coming before the senate this year, Coney says she’ll be leading the senate in two other efforts. One is contributing to an improved campus climate for diversity. Although the faculty as a whole has several times voted down senate-passed legislation for an ethnic studies requirement, Coney says she doesn’t think this is because the faculty doesn’t care about the issue. Rather, many faculty feel that a requirement simply isn’t the way to go about improving the climate.

“The faculty passed a Class C resolution about five years ago saying departments would do all they could to increase diversity awareness in their own curriculum,” Coney says. “One of the things I said we’d do this year is to find out if there’s been any progress on that and to highlight some of the successes.”

The other important matter on the agenda is participating in President Richard L. McCormick’s efforts to review the University Initiatives Fund (UIF) program. Senate leadership, Coney says, is helping to appoint a “super committee” on the matter, and two faculty members will serve on that committee, along with University administrators and a number of outside members.

“The Faculty Senate will also be soliciting comments from the University community on their attitudes, ideas and experiences with the UIF,” Coney says. “We’ll be holding an open forum, probably in late February, that the local members of the super committee will attend.”

After the forum, the senate will collate all the information collected and provide it to the super committee.

Through all this activity, Coney sees herself primarily as a listener. “I’m not really a politician,” she says. “The only way I can learn about the various issues before us is to listen to faculty from all over the University. I hope that faculty feel free to come and talk to me about things that concern them. I do think I listen well.”