The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs met Monday and continued to revise their agenda to prepare for the larger Senate Assembly meeting consisting of 70 people on Dec. 16.
Colleen Conway, Senate Assembly vice chair, talked about the main issues the committee will discuss in the Senate Assembly meeting, which meets once a month.
“The decision was made to spend some time talking about (grievance) processes, Office of Institutional Equity investigations and faculty experiences,” Conway said.
The committee members also worked on a response to James Hilton’s, vice provost for academic innovation, presentation two weeks ago regarding faculty receiving royalties for their published work.
“SACUA is continuing to consider the things that James Hilton said when he was here two weeks ago,” Conway said. “We have to make sure a letter of response is only in response to what was said by James Hilton.”
This conversation regarding a response to Hilton’s presentation was a follow-up to the last Senate Assembly meeting. In regards to the debate between open access of published work by faculty and the royalties associated with the distribution of the work, Professor of Nursing Ivo Dinov talked about how the University needs to continue their support of the author and work with faculty on a case-by-case basis.
“It’s simple, the University needs to continue support for the Michigan Press,” Dinov said. “They need to provide mechanisms for delivering content for free as well as content for purchase as negotiated with the faculty author.”
The committee also discussed the issue of providing surveys to faculty regarding reporting grievances and concerns. Senate Assembly Chair Joy Beatty led the conversation about the availability and importance of these surveys.
“It’s hard for us as Faculty Senate to make a difference if we are not hearing about this,” Beatty said. “Maybe we should be doing a multi-pronged defensive here where we collect feedback other ways, like a hotline link on our webpage.”
SACUA ended their weekly meeting by passing a motion to send a survey regarding faculty governance out to all faculty.