March 21, 2007
Faculty Governance News Digest
March 21, 2007
From the UNC Office of Faculty Governance
200-204 Carr Building
UNC-CH Campus
Contact: Anne M. Whisnant (anne_whisnant@unc.edu)
Next Faculty Council and General Faculty meeting is Friday, March 23
he Faculty Council and General Faculty will meet March 23rd from 3:00 – 5: 00 p.m. in the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center. Among other items, the meeting will consider the second reading of a resolution amending the Faculty Code. All faculty are encouraged to attend. Would you like to better understand the roles and responsibilities of the “Faculty Council” and the “General Faculty”? Read about them in the Faculty Code.
You may also be interested in the complete agenda for the March 23rd Council meeting and the complete Faculty Council meeting schedule for 2006-07.
Faculty Council to consider “achievement index” at the March 23 meeting
Friday’s Faculty Council meeting will include an hour for discussion of an Educational Policy Committee proposal, “Adopting the Achievement Index as the Metric for University-Wide Comparative Rankings of Students.” Prof. Peter Gordon, chair of the EPC’s subcommittee on grading, will present the proposal and entertain questions.
Faculty elections coming in April
April is the month for the annual elections for the Faculty Council and eleven elected faculty committees including the Faculty Executive Committee, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee, the Faculty Athletics Committee, and the Committee on Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure. The Council and these committees provide key vehicles for faculty input into many important decisions about the direction and mission of the University. We will soon be posting a Voter Information Guide on the Faculty Governance website to help members of the Voting Faculty in selecting their candidates. Members of the Voting Faculty should watch their email for the ballot, which will be sent in mid-April.
February Faculty Council meeting passes resolution on celebratory bonfires
In February, the Faculty Council passed a resolution encouraging students to celebrate major basketball victories in ways that do not carry such a high risk of serious personal injury as building bonfires in the street and jumping over them. The Council also heard annual reports from the Administrative Board of the Library, the Undergraduate Admissions Committee, and the University Ombuds Office. Read the minutes of the February 13 meeting for more information.
New series of campus / community meetings about Carolina North begins March 27th
The University will host a new series of meetings about Carolina North for the campus and local communities on the last Tuesday of each month through May, beginning Tuesday, March 27. You are invited to attend one of two sessions on March 27. The first session will be at 3:30 p.m., Room 2603, School of Government, Knapp-Sanders Building. The presentation will be repeated at 5:30 p.m. in the same location. Parking is available in the Highway 54 lot and Rams Head deck. The School of Government parking deck is available only for the 5:30 p.m. meeting.
University representatives will present potential uses of Carolina North and three conceptual approaches to its development. Attendees will have opportunities to ask questions and share comments. The feedback will help the university as it develops a concept plan for the UNC-owned property. The conceptual plans that will be presented draw on the guiding principles developed by the Leadership Advisory Committee for Carolina North, an ecological assessment of the property and sustainability strategies.
The university’s Board of Trustees has directed the administration to submit a development plan for Carolina North to local governments by next October.
For more information about Carolina North, go to the website, http://carolinanorth.unc.edu.
Parr Center for Ethics to sponsor lecture on academic freedom, March 30th at 3:00 p.m.
Lecture Title: “Academe at War: A Critical Look at David Horowitz’s Campaign Against Academic Freedom”
Lecturer: Professor Kurt Smith, Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Princeton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
Time/Place: Friday, March 30, 2007, 3 p.m. in Murphey 116
Complete information about the lecture and about Prof. Smith and his work on behalf of academic freedom may be found at the Parr Center’s website.
Faculty Governance Reading Room
An occasional feature highlighting interesting reading about universities, faculties, and governance. This week’s selection:
- AAUP’s new new report on faculty retirement policies on U.S. campuses. The report surveyed policies at 500 public and private universities and concluded, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, that “Universities are much more concerned about recruiting and retaining faculty members than about retiring them.” But as more faculty age, universities are developing new policies to address the complexity of the retirement process, especially given that mandatory retirement for faculty members became illegal under federal law in 1994.
