The Faculty Code of University Government
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Preface
Faculty have played a role in the shared governance of Carolina since the University opened its doors in 1795. In the earliest days, the entire faculty served as a governing body, with one member designated the presiding professor. By 1835, the University had a president who met weekly with the faculty and worked with both the faculty and the Board of Trustees to run the institution.
The University experienced rapid growth following World War I. Faculty governance became more unwieldy as the number of faculty members increased. A proposal for a faculty senate first emerged in the mid-1920s, but the faculty decided to have an elected advisory committee to work with the administration instead. After some experience with the advisory committee model, the faculty returned to the drawing board in November 1942, when a faculty committee on university government was established. During its years of study, which were disrupted by World War II, the committee made numerous progress reports to the faculty and developed a set of recommendations. In November 1947, after several meetings and the adoption of amendments, the faculty approved the committee’s recommendations to be the University’s Faculty Legislation. Further amendments were adopted in 1950, the most important of which provided for the establishment of the Faculty Council, a representative legislative body. In 1974, Faculty Legislation was renamed The Faculty Code of University Government.
The Faculty Code has been amended many times in the years since. The Faculty Executive Committee was created and given certain legislative and advisory powers by a resolution of the General Faculty (April 10, 1992). The current organizational and numbering scheme is the result of a complete editorial revision in 1997. A second comprehensive revision was undertaken by the Committee on University Government in 2003. The first four Articles were comprehensively revised by the General Faculty on January 16, 2004 with the final adoption of Resolution 2003-11. The remainder was comprehensively revised on March 23, 2007 (Resolution 2007-4).
In 2022, The Faculty Code was amended to provide that the Chair of the Faculty will be elected biennially and the person elected will serve for one year as chair-elect before assuming the chair position for a two-year term. At the same time, the term of the Secretary of the Faculty was reduced from five years to four, and a two-term limit was imposed (Resolution 2022-6). In 2023-24, the Committee on University Government began a comprehensive review of faculty governance committees’ membership and charges, resulting in the amendment of several sections of the Code. Other amendments to the Code have been approved by the General Faculty from time to time, and the Committee on University Government has been empowered to approve technical corrections (Resolution 2018-2). A list of the sections amended and the date of amendment is available on the Office of Faculty Governance website or by request.
“The Joint Rules of Procedure of the General Faculty and Faculty Council” that appear at the end of this document were adopted by the faculty on April 15, 2016. They are included for convenience, but are not part of The Faculty Code. Similarly, items that appear in brackets are annotations and not part of the Code proper.
Jill D. Moore
Secretary of the Faculty
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
June 20, 2024
