Faculty Senate to discuss enabling legislation, research faculty voting rights at first meeting today

The Faculty Senate holds its first meeting of the academic year today, and will be considering some Class A legislation (the kind that changes the Faculty Code). The legislation - which will be up for a first reading - would grant voting rights to research faculty. Although such faculty members may be given voting rights by their individual units for unit-specific issues, Faculty Senate Chair Mary Coney explains, they are not eligible to serve on the Faculty Senate and may not vote on University-wide issues.

After today’s first reading, the legislation will go back to the Executive Committee and the President, where it may or may not be amended. It will then come before the senate again to be voted on.

The senate will also be taking up another subject as a discussion item today - the contentious issue of enabling legislation. “The faculty has voted three times by way of a Class C resolution that it wanted enabling legislation that would give it the right to organize,” Coney says. “But we’ve never gone beyond that to spell out the conditions under which we would support such a bill in the State Legislature.”

Last year, in fact, the University was included in a bill for enabling legislation and chose to withdraw from it because faculty members were displeased with what was included in that particular bill. So this year the senate’s Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs is drafting some conditions that any enabling legislation for collective bargaining would need to fulfill to conform to UW faculty requirements.

There are four other major issues that will come before the senate later in the academic year:

  • Tri-Campus Issues: There is draft legislation being discussed which is intended to establish a more collegial relationship among the Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma campuses. The legislation would increase representation so that Bothell and Tacoma faculty would have one senator for every 15 people, as Seattle faculty do, and Tacoma and Bothell would also have a voting member on the executive committee. “We also plan to create a new body - perhaps a council - devoted to thinking about relationships among the three campuses,” Coney says.

  • Distance Education: A subcommittee is studying whether the current residency requirement (last 45 credits taken in residency) should be changed and whether distance learning courses should be marked as such (as they currently are) on transcripts.

  • Honorary degrees: The Council on University Relations is studying the idea of offering honorary degrees, a practice that was discontinued early in the 20th century.

  • Rewards for teaching: The Council on Instructional Quality is studying ways the University might reward teaching in a more substantive way than is currently done.



    University Week
    The faculty and staff publication of the University of Washington
    uweek@u.washington.edu
    October 26, 2000