What I Learned in the Faculty Senate

The 1966 Statement describes the role in institutional government that faculty should be accorded, but it does not speak to the bearing of that role on the rights and freedoms of individual faculty members.3 In this essay I will describe my service in the Penn State faculty senate over the past seven years, during the last two of which I have served as an officer—first as chair-elect, then as chai. [...] But back in the fall of 2013, he was a new arrival, and in response to the wellness debate he came to the senate and pledged that he was committed to the restoration of shared governance at Penn State. [...] It’s also about the senate and Human Resources; the senate and the Office of Research and Compliance; the senate and Information Technology; the senate and the Ethics Office; the senate and the Athletics Department; the senate and the Office of Risk Management; and the senate and the Office of General Counsel. [...] 9 What I Learned in the Faculty Senate Michael Bérubé The third major policy consultation involved policy AC80, “Outside Business Activities and Private Consulting.” Our contact for this was the director of the Conflict of Interest Program in the Office for Research Protections, housed in the Office of the Vice President for Research. [...] (This is still a problem we have with curriculum revision, and guess what? I formed a committee to fix that.) The result is that we had strong faculty representation on the committee I charged in the summer of 2018, the special committee to review and revise our policy on consensual relationships; and after eight months of negotiations with the office of the vice provost for faculty affairs, I man.