Professors often complain about how obligatory but mostly pointless committee work drains away a lot of their time. One non-obligatory committee that also drains away time is the faculty senate.
So argues University of Southern Indiana business professor Jason Fertig in today’s Pope Center piece.
He has served for more than four years on his school’s faculty senate, and chaired it for one. In the article, he shares his thoughts about the experience. Mostly, they’re negative.
“Cynics claim that faculty senates are archaic, useless bodies,” he writes. “From experience, I can’t say that I disagree.”
What did USI’s faculty senate accomplish? Fertig thinks that its most notable “achievement” was getting a lot of media coverage for its resolution against an Indiana bill defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The problem is that the legislation had nothing to do with the university and indeed the university’s handbook specifically forbids using university property for political advocacy. Fertig pointed that out, but the majority on the senate was not to be deterred from making a statement.
One potentially significant issue that was raised was strengthening the school’s core curriculum. Fertig thinks there was much to do in that regard, but the end result was nothing but a Potemkin Village kind of renaming of the categories of required courses. No substantive change, but that’s what you should expect from a bureaucratic process dominated by people who mostly love to hear themselves talk.
“Perhaps faculty senates are best kept as ceremonial relics of times-gone-by,” Fertig concludes.