Faculty Senate: How much influence does yours have?

[theblackbox]

I'm curious how different institutions view their Faculty Senate and whether or not they seem to have a sturdy role in shared governance, influence upper administration, or actually control much of anything at all on-campus. How is it where you are?

• Is the Senate respected by faculty, or seen as trivial?
• Is the Senate respected by the provost and/or president, or largely ignored?
• Do Senate proposals/votes seem to carry weight and change processes outside of curriculum?
• Do junior faculty or FT non-TT faculty have avenues to participate in Senate, or is it generally a space only for tenured folks?

[Aster]

I'm at an institution that is one of just a few in my state that does not have a Faculty Senate.

I can state quite clearly that our faculty keenly feel the lack of having the organized, recognized service that a Senate brings. Let's just look at the most basic Senate role, communication.

For faculty that disparage the effectiveness of a Senate, just see what happens when you don't  have one. Imagine a situation where faculty rarely know what's going on outside their departments, and have no formal way of communicating collectively with the administration. You're shut out of most decision making at almost every level. You don't know when input is even elicited, you don't have a mechanism for communicating your input, and you don't have a way to even know what decisions are even made until after they've been made and delivered to you.

For just this, our College operates very slowly and inefficiently compared to our peers. Our faculty are also much crankier and dispirited than faculty at our peer institutions. We rarely know what is going on until after the fact, and we commonly are tasked with fixing all of the screw-ups the college makes with its decision making because it doesn't have a Senate to guide its decision making processes better. We are constantly reinventing the wheel and rebuilding the wheel. Faculty are kept very isolated within their academic departments. We have a much higher turnover of faculty and administrators than our peer institutions, and part of this turnover I believe is connected to people just getting exhausted.

[Dismal]

    At my large state U, we have a faculty senate.  We have a department member who could be untenured or tenured.  Sometimes our rep keeps us very well informed but other times we just get occasional emails from the Senate.  The senate does have some voice with the Prez and Provost - I'm not sure if they have a lot of power or just some.
There is a faculty Senate workgroup that is now working to develop a policy of mandatory cuts in pay or perhaps retirement contributions  for faculty and staff- we have been invited to provide input.  I expect the process to be transparent and fair.

[Ruralguy]

At my school, every faculty member has a vote in everything. There are some faculty who wish we could have a senate because they just don't care enough about most issues to be bothered with serving on the relevant committee or voting in a general faculty meeting. Administration loves this idea.  I have been bucking against a Senate because I think it will give the administration even more reason to ignore most faculty. To be sure, there is effectively a faculty senate because the administration only deals directly with the 4 academic Dens, and to a lesser extent, the Chairs of major committees and the Chairs of depts. That's about 20-25 faculty (most issues would only have initial discussions with 5-10 of these folks at most by admin), and the voting faculty body is about 80, with usually 65-70 voting.

[lightning]

some but not as much as the faculty union, and certainly not as much power as a rogue group of full professors organized around a vendetta . . . . .

[polly_mer]

I went from a regional comprehensive with a faculty senate with representatives elected from departments (must be full-time faculty, but non-TT, TT, or T acceptable) to Super Dinky in which all non-one-term-adjunct faculty were required to attend the monthly meeting, vote, and serve on committees.  The distinctions were much as Ruralguy and Dismal describe.

The faculty senate was good enough when the people elected put effort into talking with their constituents before anything was finalized and the questions before the senate were such that we could have several months of discussion before a final decision.

The all-hand method was pretty good when the discussions actually happened and again we could have several months before a final decision had to happen.

However, when push came to shove and decisions had to made in under a month with severely constrained resources for a plan that had to be done in under a semester, neither of those faculty-governance methods really helped the institution make decisions.

The problem still is when the mission of the institution has to change and really should have changed several years ago for the institution to survive.  Asking people to vote on what courses/programs are no longer supported and thus which jobs are cut tends to not go well.  Faculty insistence that some other decisions could be made instead tend to rely on treasured ignorance about how the institution actually functions.

[Anselm]

Our senate was non-existent for a long time and that was a sore point with the accrediting agency.   Today it has about as much power as the high school student council.

[writingprof]

Our senate was non-existent for a long time and that was a sore point with the accrediting agency.   Today it has about as much power as the high school student council.

Anselm's first sentence is where my university is now.  His second sentence is where I fear we're headed.  Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me. 

[sprout]

Zero to none.  Very limited involvement of faculty - always the same handful of people at meetings.  And much lip-service from administration about the importance of faculty senate, but very little actual respect or attention.  Our faculty union is strong, at least, and has a good working relationship with the administration.