Senate Meetings

Meetings will be held in person in Sage 2239 with a MS Teams virtual option for Senators away from campus. Meetings begin at 3:10 pm and end at 5:00 pm.

Faculty Senate Meeting Dates

2026-2027

Fall 2026

Sept 8
Sept 22
Oct. 6
Oct. 20
Nov 3
Nov 17
Dec 8

Spring 2027

Jan 19-As needed
Feb. 2
Feb. 16
March 2
March 16
April 6
April 20
May 4
May 18

Senate Contacts

Faculty Senate President (2026-2027)
Julia Chybowski
Professor of Music

Preferred email: fspres@uwosh.edu
chybowsj@uwosh.edu

President's Blog

(920) 424-2102 - Senate Office
Office hours: 8:30 am-4:30 pm

Faculty Senate Office
April Dutscheck (dutschecka@uwosh.edu)
Faculty Senate Administrative Assistant
(920) 424-2102 Dempsey Hall, Room 205
Office hours: 8:30 am - 4:30 pm.
Please Contact via email if I happen to not be in the office.

President’s Blog

2026-2027 - Senate President, Dr. Julia Chybowski

President’s Blog – (2026-2027)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Julia Chybowski

ENTRY: October 16, 2026

Dear Colleagues,

We passed the first major policy of the academic year, and we’ve been working on two initiatives that faculty have been asking for.

Teaching Workload Policies
Since passage of the Teaching Workload Policy, I met with school directors, provided a template as a starting point for school policies, and asked for school policies to come to senate by November 12. I urged faculty senators to be leaders and facilitators, working with colleagues to draft school policies. Schools will need to include a schedule of credit-hour equivalencies that were unaccounted for in the university-wide policy and describe how potential release credits for professional development/other duties will be distributed. I understand that budget limitations and staffing shortages will pose implementation challenges, but many of us hope this policy pushes us closer towards accurate and consistent accounting for faculty teaching workload and more equitable distribution of teaching release credits for professional development.

International Education Working Group
We are taking action to revive study abroad programs at UWO and prepare us to forge international partnerships and exchanges. Brent Blahnik, UWO’s “Director of Global Engagement,” pledges to support his effort and asked for a group of faculty to help re-build the office of international education as “Office of Global Engagement.” I thank the wonderfully experienced group of faculty members who responded to our call for participation in a faculty senate working group: James Koch, Sarinda Taengnoi Siemers, Susan Maxwell, Nari Kim, Maria Graf, Erin DeMuynck, Anna Hersey, Alexander Kovzik, and Stephanie Spehar. James Koch will chair the nine-member group, which will divide into subgroups of three for some of this work.

Guiding Principles for AI in Teaching at UWO
I sent a survey to faculty and instructional academic staff, asking for input for “Guiding Principles for AI in Teaching at UWO,” and the responses I received make me feel proud of us. Collectively, these thoughtful replies represent a student-centered and intellectual response to AI as it relates to teaching and learning at UWO. A small working group will pull a draft document together that represents consensus points. It will be shared for feedback before a senate vote on approval.

Communications to the Senate
Faculty members who have questions about senate activities or suggestions for senate actions should be in touch with elected representatives or me directly.

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Julia

ENTRY: October 2, 2026

Dear Colleagues,

I still feel this role of Faculty Senate President expanding by the day, but I have new state-level perspectives informing my work here on our campus.

News From Madison and Across the UW System
At the end of September, I spent two days in Madison with faculty representatives from other UW campuses and System staff. Hot topics of conversation included Act 15 teaching workload policies and AI guiding principles. UW System staff pledged assistance with designing workable reporting mechanisms and educating LAB about potential shortcomings of reporting the required 24-credit minimum for one year at a time. I learned about the structure of the “policy onion,” an eye-watering metaphor for the layers of Wisconsin State Statute, Administrative Rules, UW System policies and university-level policies that govern us and our policy writing. The Search for a new UW President is well underway, with open forums at UW-Madison and UW-Parkside to take place the week of October 26. Both will have online attendance options. I’ll keep you posted as details are announced.

Teaching Workload Policy
Faculty Senate plans to vote on the UWO Teaching Workload Policy Tuesday, Oct. 6. Please engage with your faculty senate representatives or me directly if you have concerns we haven’t yet addressed in our revision process. UW System and the Legislative Audit Bureau are expecting this policy to bring us into full compliance with Act 15 legislation. They are asking for school-level policies to be approved at campus levels by this December. We are on track to satisfy these requests, but faculty and school directors will need to step in very soon to complete their part of the process. As soon as Faculty Senate approves the UWO policy, we will provide a template to schools for optional use in generating required school policy.

Guiding Principles for AI in Teaching at UWO
With different disciplinary orientations and teaching goals, faculty don’t and won’t agree about how or whether to incorporate generative AI in teaching and learning at UWO. However, I do suspect most faculty respect each other’s academic freedom and want us to be taking intellectual and ethical approaches to decisions about use and non-use of AI in education. I’m looking to codify the cross-disciplinary points of agreement. Recognizing that faculty at UW Oshkosh have the primary responsibility over curriculum and that Faculty Senate should represent the collective voice of faculty, I will soon be sharing a survey to gather your input for “Guiding Principles for AI in Teaching at UWO.” This document can serve decision makers as we consider new and revised curriculum, policy, and potential financial investment in AI tools. I hope you’ll join this important conversation.

Vacancies on the Faculty Senate
We have one open seat for a faculty member from the School of Business and one from the School of Media, Arts and Communications. We previously announced and ran a special election to try to fill the Business seat but unfortunately received no nominations for candidacy. We will run a special election in the MAC this week. If you are a faculty member in either of these schools willing to stand for election, please send email to April.

Please stay in touch,
Julia

ENTRY: September 18, 2026

Dear Colleagues,
I hope you’ve slipped into a comfortable rhythm now that we are two weeks into the semester. Please find highlights of Faculty Senate activities here and then get in touch if you have concerns or questions. I’d be happy to hear from you.

Provost Search

I am pleased to announce that the Faculty Senate has appointed Pascale Manning to serve as Chairperson of the Provost Search and Screen Committee, and I am grateful for her willingness to step into this important role. The Faculty Senate has appointed the following faculty members to serve on the committee with her: David Siemers, Heidi Nicholls, Fawnda Norman, Kathy Abrahamson, Amy Parrot, and Sarah DeArmond. The other committee members will be appointed by Senates of Academic Staff and University Staff, as well as the Chancellor’s Office. At UWO, we have long standing policy (GOV 6.4) and precedent that regulates the formation of Provost Search and Screen Committees.

I thank all the faculty members who responded to my call for interest in serving on the Provost Search and Screen Committee, as well as those who expressed willingness on last spring’s committee interest survey. I appreciate members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee for working quickly to select the committee members that were confirmed at the Senate’s first meeting of the semester. We prioritized representation from all Schools. We had many more extremely qualified people express willingness to serve on the committee than we had ability to seat. I hope everyone stays engaged and provides feedback at the open forums and through other channels.

Professorial Productivity Salary Increase

If you are a faculty member in your ninth year after promotion to Professor or earning PPSI, you can apply for the salary increase this fall. Applications will be due to the first level of review November 30, 2026. Watch for further details to come from the Provost’s Office. The new policy is Gen 2.0.

Teaching Workload Policy

Senate is discussing a draft of Teaching Workload Policy at the meeting on September 22, and it will be on the agenda as voting item for October 6. This policy is required by UW System Policy (200-003) that was crafted after passage of Act 15 legislation (Wis. Stat. § 36.115). Our draft brings us into compliance without radical departure from current practices. The policy describes duties and conditions that can be used to justify reducing teaching loads for administrative roles and professional development but sets limits (as prescribed in the legislation and System policy) on how many credits can be reallocated from teaching to other work. Our UWO policy draft prescribes an equitable distribution of available release credits to Schools in proportion to FTE in the School. Our draft policy also maintains the reduced teaching load for new faculty members in their first four years in a tenure track position at UWO. It includes a formula for faculty and instructional academic staff to earn teaching load credit for approved independent studies and thesis advisement, which is not currently standard practice across the university. This semester, Schools will need to develop policies that include teaching load equivalencies unique to the disciplines and describe how release credits will be allocated within the Schools. Faculty Senate will provide templates to expedite the process of developing these policies.

Stay tuned,
Julia

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: September 4, 2026 –

Welcome back and Happy New Year!

With almost two months “on the job” as Faculty Senate President, I still feel the responsibilities expanding with each day, but I’m determined to get my hands and head around them all. I have admiration for the leadership of Past-Presidents Nathan Stuart and Pascale Manning and appreciate their support in this transition time. Nathan has continually made time for me and my lists of questions and pledges to continue to do so. Pascale has offered to serve in the official non-voting Past-President role this semester. I’m inspired by them both–their dedication and generosity–and hope you are too.

Filling All the Vacancies
April Dutscheck is the stability and behind-the-scenes force that keeps shared governance functioning. We’re working together to fill the vacancies on the senate and committees. Assessment Committee and Compensation Committee will need to be brought out of dormancy and populated. We are looking to form two new working groups: one focused on developing Policy for AI in Teaching at UWO and one to rebuild the office of International Education. Watch your email for invitations to participate.

Provost’s Search and Screen Committee
As per policy and precedent, faculty will occupy the majority of seats on the Provost’s Search and Screen Committee, including the chairperson. I was delighted with the outpouring of faculty members expressing interest in serving on this important committee. The Faculty Senate Executive Committee is selecting the 7 faculty committee members and presenting them for full Senate approval on Sept 8.

Productivity Salary Increase (PPSI)
The Chancellor signed the Professional Productivity Salary Increase (PPSI) policy we worked so hard to revise in accordance with former Provost Martini’s request. The Faculty Senate Executive Committee will form the university-wide review committee that new policy requires. If you have at least eight years at the rank of full professor, stay tuned for an announcement of the new application and review process.

Act 15 Teaching Workload Policy
The State Legislature’s passage of Act 15 brought mandates (and mayhem?) to our campus and others of the UW. We sorted out the General Education issues last year, but we hadn’t completed the process of writing and passing the necessary Teaching Workload Policy. Interim Provost Josh Garrison, Interim AVC Tracy Slagter, and I put our heads together and hashed it out in the waning days of summer. We tried making lemonade out of lemons! It will be brought to Senate for discussion on Sept. 22.

External Process Observers (EPOs)
We all want personnel reviews that are fair and equitable with standards applied consistently, but in practice, how do we ensure this is reality? Well-trained External Process Observers (EPOs) can monitor and maintain integrity of these processes. They are non-voting members who observe group dynamics, promote equitable participation and adherence to policy, and will identify bias and problematic proceedings when they arise. At UWO, we are looking for 12 EPOs (2 per school) to attend personnel review committees in a school other than their own. At the end of September or early October, Interim AVC Tracy Slagter will facilitate substantial training for all faculty members who volunteer. Please send me email before September 11 if you are interested in serving as an EPO.

News From Madison
My first trip to Madison for a Board of Regents meeting provided opportunities to meet faculty representatives from other UW campuses. I anticipate tapping into this network to learn how faculty on other campuses are dealing with challenges that we all face. The Regents themselves are focusing this year on affordability and access to higher education in Wisconsin and workforce concerns, especially in healthcare. I also attended the BOR Education Committee meeting featuring a presentation by our own Kate Demerse (Dean of Students) and Matthew Caine (Oshkosh Student Government). They collaborated with folks from UW Milwaukee to discuss ways of addressing UW students’ basic needs such as food, financial aid, clothing, childcare, etc. It is my hope that UWO faculty can help support our Food Pantry, Career Closet, and Thrift Shop while thinking about what more can be done to support student needs.

Your Faculty Senate President,
Julia Chybowski

2025-2026 - Senate President, Dr. Nathan Stuart

President’s Blog – (2025-2026)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Nathan Stuart

ENTRY: March 5, 2026 – President Report to Faculty Senate

ENTRY: Feb 4, 2025 – President’s Report to Faculty Senate

ENTRY: Feb 2, 2026 – Strategic Planning Listening Sessions

ENTRY: Feb 2, 2026 – Policy Comment Update

ENTRY: Feb 2, 2026 – Welcome Back

2024-2025 - Senate President, Dr. Pascale Manning

President’s Blog (2023-2025)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Pascale Manning

ENTRY: 5-6-2025

Dear Colleagues,

What follows addresses our upcoming Faculty Referendum on the Faculty Constitution and provides an update for the Senate’s schedule for the next important steps in implementing our academic restructuring. In closing, it gestures to another upcoming communication about elections and committees.

Referendum & Updates about the Faculty Constitution

As April Dutscheck communicated on behalf of the Faculty Senate, the Referendum dates have been revised. This decision was taken in order to allow Senate leadership the necessary time to finalize a ballot that accords with both our immediate goal (to ratify the modifications to the Constitution that allow it to reflect our new academic structure) and our larger goal of honoring faculty input about longstanding language that has remained in place throughout this revision exercise. The final ballot will be approved today (Tuesday, May 6th) by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC). The ballot was discussed in considerable detail at the last FS meeting (Tuesday, April 29th), but I have hesitated to make final determinations without once more seeking wider Senate input. This has been an iterative and collaborative process throughout, which is, to my mind, the right way to approach such important and representative work. With today’s opportunity to approve the ballot, we will be well positioned to move forward.

Voting: The vote on the Faculty Constitution will take place across the 8^th and 9^th of May (this Thursday and Friday). The vote will be conducted on Qualtrics, through a secret ballot that is accessible only to those faculty who are eligible to vote (through their email handle). Faculty with LTE appointments are not eligible.

Revisions to Constitution: At the Open Forum on the Faculty Constitution(Friday, April 18th), questions were raised about certain longstanding language about academic freedom that remains in the revised version of the document. Given that the Faculty Senate approached this revision task with the focused goal of updating our Constitution to accord with our new academic structure, the document was not, on the whole, revised with a view to exploring possible changes to the wider statements of principle.

As such, and for example, the Constitution‘s language on academic freedom is unchanged. This is a function of the Senate’s respect for the separate process necessary to address how the document’s statements of principle align our institution to the wide array of documents that serve as its interlocutors and whose precedence helps to validate our own constitutional declarations (see for instance the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) statements on academic freedom for reference; our document is aligned with the statements you will find on the AAUP site).

But given the questions and suggestions raised at the forum, the Faculty Senate has looked for a solution that recognizes our important duty to represent the will of the faculty. As such, our ballot will include a statement of intent to return to the Constitution next year, allowing the nuanced discussions of the document to occur as they should. Under normal circumstances, there would have been one or more all-faculty forums focused exclusively on the Faculty Constitution and the revision process prior to the Senate’s vote, but given our work to implement the academic restructuring (and with so many forums dedicated to the wider tasks), our best option (designed not to further tensify already stretched faculty bandwidth) was to share the document early (in the FAC and GOV Revisions folder in the OneDrive) and to emphasize at the Senate and in communications to faculty the importance of submitting input prior to the Senate vote. This was an imperfect approach to the Referendum, but it was necessary, given the scope of our revision work and the diversity of our tasks (both as a Senate as members of our new Schools).

Ballot: The ballot will include two parts, a voting section (in which faculty are asked to specify whether they DO or DO NOT approve changes to the Constitution) and a statement of intent to return to the Constitution in the next academic year for further discussion of possible amendments to its statements of principle. PLEASE NOTE that we require a two-thirds majority of faculty exercising their voting privilege to ratify the revisions to the Constitution. Please make sure to vote, and please do so in the awareness that the Faculty Senate has approached this process in good faith, with the intention of ensuring that our representative documents do in fact represent our institution’s structure, as well as our shared values. As is true of our School materials, our Faculty Constitution deserves to be voted on by all those empowered to cast a ballot, thus enabling it and all our representative documents to constitute a mandate. Please help to legitimize this process and be sure to vote once the ballot is distributed. (The ballot will include clear instructions for vote submission, which involves clicking the arrow at the bottom of the ballot.)

School Restructure Packets

Senate Approval of School Restructure Packets: Once Schools have separately ratified their bylaws, policy, and any other restructure-related documents that require Senate approval (e.g., position descriptions) through a two-thirds majority vote of those School members who exercise their voting privilege, documents should be shared with me and April Dutscheck (manningp@uwosh.edu | dutschecka@uwosh.edu). They will then be added to the next Senate meeting packet as action items. For inclusion in the packet, materials must be submitted no fewer than four (4) days prior to an upcoming Senate meeting. The final official Senate meeting is April 13th, but the Faculty Senate is in the process of determining a viable meeting time across one of the last two days available to us before the contract period ends on May 24th (we will meet on either Thursday, May 22nd or Friday, May 23rd). Following the end of the contract period, the FSEC is empowered to act on behalf of the Senate, so if need be, that group will address itself to emerging issues.

School Voting: This has been stated many times since my update of December 12, 2024, but I reiterate it here for good measure: Schools are required by the Faculty Senate to achieve a two-thirds majority vote on each part of its restructure packet (bylaws, policy, position descriptions, etc.).
Senate Vote: Once a document is circulated to the Faculty Senate it cannot be modified. As with APC items, it will be voted up or down. School RTP policy must conform to our campus policy (FAC 5 – Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion) and must include the components that have been discussed with granularity since at least the January 24th all-faculty forum. School bylaws must conform with the components enumerated in Article III §5 of the Constitution (“School Bylaws”).
If the Senate Does Not Pass a Document: If a document is not approved by the Senate, then Schools will need to work with me and the FSEC to articulate a plan for the next steps. I will support Schools in this process.

Given the length and detail of this message, please expect a separate update on Senate Elections, the Committee on Committee Survey, and the process by which the Faculty Senate will fill the 7 faculty positions on the new joint-university Strategic Planning and Budget Committee. Each of the above has been delayed by the process of implementing our new School structure, as well as the work of revising the Constitution and the Faculty Senate Bylaws, whose finalization was a prerequisite for these next steps. The election processes will be expedited, and you will hear from me again later this week with details.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 4-4-2025

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with an important Faculty Senate update that will focus on the next stage of faculty involvement in defining our governance values and procedures in the new structure.

Faculty Constitution

The Faculty Senate has finalized revisions to the Faculty Constitution and has concluded its discussion of this involved process.

By unanimous vote, the Senate has initiated a faculty referendum. As specified in Article 1§6 of the Constitution, the referendum will take place four weeks following the April 1, 2025, Senate vote and will include one open forum, hosted by Faculty Senate leadership.

Dates:

Faculty Forum: Friday, April 18, 3pm (date subject to change depending on School meeting schedule)
Referendum Vote (Qualtrics secret ballot): Monday-Tuesday, May 5th-6th

Please follow this LINK to a OneDrive folder that contains the revised Constitution in PDF, as well as a sub-folder showing the process work in three stages (all tracked changes/comments, semi-final tracked changes/comments, and final tracked changes/comments). Files are named according to content.

FAC 5 – Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion Policy

The Faculty Senate has brought FAC 5 – Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion Policy to a successful vote, and has submitted the revised policy to the Office of General Counsel, where it will undergo a final reading and discussion prior to being included in either the June or July Board of Regents meeting packet.

The policy has been available to faculty and School and College administration since its initial distribution, and the major changes implemented through careful deliberation across the Christmas break and January Interim have long-since been shared with faculty and administration (most formally at the all-faculty meeting, hosted by the Faculty Senate on January 24th).

It has, throughout, been the stated expectation that all Schools are striving to bring their local RTP policy into alignment with FAC 5, but now is the time to return to the policies and introduce any necessary revisions.

Please follow this LINK to view and download the final Senate-approved copy of FAC 5. School committee members can and should feel free to be in touch with me if there are any questions about how and whether to introduce changes to your School policy.

Please bear in mind that all Schools will need to:

Define Discipline-level expectations and guidelines in accordance with the discrete Disciplines named in School Bylaws;
Define the School’s policy regarding levels of faculty review, following FAC 5’s guidelines on this score (see FAC 5.B.3 and elsewhere);
Define the process by which Schools will initiate the first level of faculty review, following FAC 5’s guidelines on this score (see FAC 5.B.3.III and elsewhere).

This is not an exhaustive list but it indicates specific points in the policy that School policy must in some way adhere to.

Important Reminder: As I emphasized in my December 12th and March 2nd FS Updates, approval of school bylaws and policy should require a two-thirds majority of the eligible voters within a School who exercise their voting privilege (regardless of whether the bylaws or policy specifies that future amendments will be ratified by a simple majority of eligible voters exercising their voting privilege). Please plan accordingly to ensure that all members of each of our Schools have ample opportunity to discuss School RTP policy ahead of a School vote.

School Bylaws | School RTP | School Admin Position Descriptions

As noted above and previously, School bylaws, policy, and position descriptions will need to be brought to a vote soon and will only be ratified and circulated to the Faculty Senate though a two-thirds majority of those eligible voters exercising their voting privilege.

It is the expectation of the Faculty Senate that all School restructure-related materials will be circulated to the Senate by early May (at the latest). Please feel free to be in touch with me with any questions, and if a meeting of School committees would be welcome, I will be more than happy to organize one or more, depending on the nature of the requests.

The Senate has been very busy. As such, this update is not at all exhaustive; I am limiting it to the immediate governance issues enumerated above. I will write again very soon with further updates on the work of the Faculty Senate Administrator Evaluation Committee, discussions about CAS, and forthcoming Senate elections, as well as the Committee on Committees survey process, etc.

I am mindful of the words of William Blake, “Enough! or Too Much!”

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 3-2-2025

Dear Colleagues,

Faculty Senate leadership has complete its first detailed reading of School bylaws. Comments and in-line suggestions are posted through tracked changes in the files submitted to the (The following link works, despite the line through it) “FAC and GOV Policy Revisions” subfolder, “School Bylaws – All 6 Schools.”

It is my recommendation that Schools continue to work with these files in this location (i.e., in the subfolder). Faculty and School committee members (including School administration) retain full access to the files and thus also full autonomy to download this version (for your records) and subsequently introduce changes either to the file that is in place or by way of a new uploaded file with a different filename.

My rationale for this recommendation is that

1. it will protect our time by enabling us to avoid a potentially circuitous process of requesting and sharing updates (should any further dialogue be requested of FS leadership), and
2. it serves the goal of having each School’s discussion and refinement process potentially informing each other School’s parallel process. In other words, I would underline that it may be useful to look across the School bylaws documents to see how each School is finalizing their materials (by these means, allowing local decisions to be informed by the deliberations of other School committees working on parallel documents). Keeping everything in one place assists in this process.

For those unused to working with OneDrive, please bear in mind that if you “star” the folder (clicking the star icon next to the three vertical dots to the right of the file name), it will appear in your “Favorites,” a folder listed in the menu on the left-hand side of OneDrive (see the star icon). I say this at the risk of appearing pedantic, in the interest of supporting a process that allows files to be easily and quickly accessed (and because, if this organizational option is news to you, you are in good company, as I have heard that quite a bit lately).

I have made a copy of the files in their current form, so if, going forward, anyone needs a record of this point in time, you need only ask.

As a reminder, the proposed School bylaws and policy voting procedure and interacting revision timeline enumerated in the emailed February 14th Faculty Senate update is available to you on the Faculty Senate President blog (entry 2-14-2025). Please bear in mind the FS recommendation regarding the School vote to ratify revisions:

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 2-14-2025

Dear Colleagues,

At the Tuesday, February 11th Faculty Senate meeting, Senators were afforded their first opportunity to discuss the current draft of the campus-level Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion policy (currently titled FAC 5). The Senate also discussed the status of school bylaws and policy, which, as you know, were submitted on or around January 17th to the FS Constitution & Bylaws and Executive committees for comments. As you are also aware, in collaboration with our RTP Task Force, Faculty Senate leadership worked with AVC Garrison to submit our draft RTP policy to the UW Office of General Counsel on February 5th for a first review designed to flag concerns (with an expected response by March 5th).

Please note that what follows attempts to account for intersecting strands of campus-level revisions related to the restructure which complexly inform the process for school-level work.

1. Revisions to the Faculty Constitution will undergo the following process

1. Senate Discussion;

2. Senate Initiation of Referendum by two-thirds majority vote;

3. One-month period of exchange of information, including at least one all-faculty meeting

hosted by the FS;

4. Faculty Vote, in which amendments are ratified by a two-thirds majority.

2. Revisions to FAC policy (policy sections of the former “Handbook”):

1. Senate Discussion;

2. Senate Action;

3. Formal Submission to Office of General Counsel and subsequent or simultaneous submission

to Regents (roughly by or before April)

4. Regent Discussion & Vote (June meeting).

On Tuesday, the Senate discussed and approved a broad plan for next steps in relation to the above-mentioned work, which I am now writing to communicate. Aspects of this plan clarify Senate expectations regarding school-level work and, in some cases, modify predicted timelines for the finalization of key materials. Note that some dates are specified but that given the interconnected nature of the work we are doing at the school and campus level, final dates are not enumerated here. Our goal is to ratify an amended Faculty Constitution as well as to finalize school bylaws and policy prior to the end of the semester, while all FAC (policy) documents will need to be finalized sooner (roughly by early April) for submission to the Board of Regents for discussion and approval at the June meeting. These broad goals guide the following recommendations.

School RTP Policy: As was noted at the all-faculty meeting on January 24th, the school will function as the smallest governance unit, making it the level at which all school policy and bylaws will be housed. As such, school RTP policy will contain all relevant details, with no secondary policy materials housed at the disciplinary level. As was discussed on the 24th, it is the recommendation of the Faculty Senate that all RTP policy should contain A) clearly enumerated procedures and guidelines that are universal to the disciplines housed within a school, and B) clear discipline-specific expectations and guidelines (which can be included in the policy as insets or appendices). Given that this wholesale revision process has been iterative, it is the recommendation of the Faculty Senate that:

1. School RTP committees (and, indeed, all faculty) will read the draft FAC 5 (RTP) policy, as well as the summary document that was submitted to the Office of General Counsel to contextualize its major revisions. RTP committee members will thus be equipped to identify where draft school policy may not align with campus-level policy and thus to consider how to revise current school policy drafts to bring them into alignment with campus-level policy. (The following link works, despite the line through it).This link takes you to a OneDrive folder containing the draft FAC 5, the letter to OGC, and the January 24th slides.

2. School RTP committees will consider the draft language in FAC 5.B.3.III (1) (“Sequence and timing across levels of review,” “Initial Level”). This section contains placeholder language for a plausible process to enable the convening of a first level of review at the discipline level. Schools retain autonomy to define the paths that make the most sense in light of internal school structures; this language, therefore, is submitted as a broad guideline to indicate the necessity of clarifying the mechanism by which the review process will be administered (and this language will likely be stricken from the final FAC 5 draft, given that its prescriptiveness may render it inappropriate for a campus-level policy).

Next Steps:

3. Office of General Counsel has pledged to return the draft of FAC 5 by Wednesday, March 5th. In turn, Faculty Senate leadership pledges to communicate concerns (relevant to school-level RTP policy) voiced by OGC by Friday, March 7th.

4. As I noted in my December 12 th FS Update, the Faculty Senate recommends that school-level approval of school policy should require a two-thirds majority of the eligible voters within a school who exercise their voting privilege (regardless of whether the policy specifies that future amendments will be ratified by a simple majority of eligible voters exercising their voting privilege).

a. The Faculty Senate requests that schools establish a timeline for the discussion, finalization, and vote on school policy, which will then be submitted to the Faculty Senate for discussion and a vote (ratification of school policy at the Senate will require a simple majority of Senators exercising their right to vote). It is the recommendation of the Faculty Senate that schools should plan for at least one all-school meeting to discuss their policy prior to bringing it to a vote.

School Bylaws: General bylaws guidelines have been communicated to school committees, and members of both the Faculty Senate Constitution & Bylaws and Executive committees have begun the work of submitting comments and suggestions to draft bylaws. That work is ongoing and nearing completion. The Faculty Senate recommends the following:

1. Friday, February 28th: FS Constitution & Bylaws and Executive committees will submit annotated copies of school bylaws to School Directors for distribution to their school committee and all school faculty by or before this date.

Next Steps:

2. As I noted in my December 12 th FS Update, the Faculty Senate recommends that school-level approval of the bylaws should require a two-thirds majority of the eligible voters within a school who exercise their voting privilege (regardless of whether those bylaws specify that future amendments will be ratified by a simple majority of eligible voters exercising their voting privilege).

a. As such, following February 28th, each school will establish a timeline for the discussion, finalization, and vote on school bylaws, which will then be submitted to the Faculty Senate for discussion and a vote (ratification of school bylaws at the Senate will require a simple majority of Senators exercising their right to vote). It is the recommendation of the Faculty Senate that schools should plan for at least one all-school meeting to discuss bylaws prior to bringing them to a vote.

Please feel free to reach out to me with questions about anything contained in this message, but note also that your Senators are available to you as a resource.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 1-9-2025

Dear Colleagues,

On August 23rd, 2024, the faculty representatives for the Universities of Wisconsin engaged in a workshop centered on the topic, “What does the future of Wisconsin higher education look like 10-15 years from now: a view from the classroom.” (As a reminder, this is a group made up of UW Faculty Senate chairs, presidents, or their representatives.) This workshop, and subsequent follow-up meetings, resulted in the attached document, which includes a summary, key questions, and recommendations. This document will be provided to the Universities of Wisconsin System Administration. UW Provosts and Chancellors have engaged in a similar exercise, and thus this document will constitute faculty input into the wider UW System conversation about pressing issues that face our universities now and in the coming years.

I am writing to invite you to read the draft document (‘The Future of Wisconsin Higher Education-A View from the Classroom’, please see my email for the attachment) and to ask you to share reactions or comments on this report with the comment form linked here: The Future of Wisconsin Higher Education: A View From The Classroom

Please respond by Friday, January 24th, at which time the faculty representatives will collate the responses and finalize the document for submission to UW System Administration.

Yours,
Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 12-12-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with an update following the supplementary meeting of the Faculty Senate (Tuesday, December 10th).

School Bylaws + Policy Approval Process Recommendation

The Faculty Senate discussed at length a recommendation for the School-level vote to approve School bylaws and individual School-level policies. Specifically, we deliberated on whether the Senate would recommend a two-thirds majority approval for the initial school-level ratification of the bylaws and any individual school-level policies undergoing revision (or drafting). After a detailed discussion in which Senators from across our new Schools weighed in, the Senate reached consensus on the following:

The UWO Faculty Senate recommends that for the initial ratification of our new School bylaws and any School-level policies undergoing revision or otherwise being produced as part of the restructure, approval should require a two-thirds majority of the eligible voters within a School who exercise their voting privilege. The Faculty Senate acknowledges that Schools may decide that future changes to bylaws and/or policies shall be ratified with a simple majority, but it recommends that 1) bylaws and policies codify by what majority future changes will be ratified, and 2) that a two-thirds majority be favoured for bylaws.

The conversation was informed by guidelines articulated in our Faculty Constitution as well as by considerations of the circumstances of our current revisions to bylaws and policy. First, the Faculty Constitution specifies that

“By two-thirds vote of the Faculty Senate, any policy matter related to the powers and responsibilities of the faculty as stated in Article I, Section 4 above, may be referred to the whole faculty for decision”; (Article 1 §6)

that amendments to that document “may be proposed to the faculty by a two-thirds majority vote of all members of the Faculty Senate at any regular meeting, provided that a written copy of the proposed amendment shall have been presented to the Senate at a meeting at least one month prior to the time at which a vote on the amendment is to be taken”; (Article 8 §1)

and that the ratification of amendments to that document are “approved by a two-thirds majority of the eligible voters who exercise their voting privilege.” (Article 8 §3).

Thus the Constitution establishes a two-thirds majority of eligible voters who choose to exercise their voting privilege (i.e., those present once a quorum of eligible voters has been established rather than all those eligible to vote) as the path for both the proposal and ratification of changes. The Faculty Senate is unanimous in recognizing in this guidance a legitimate basis for proposing that the School-level votes on bylaws and individual policies should follow this same approval path before the package of School materials related to the restructure is sent to the Faculty Senate for approval.

Secondly, after a lengthy discussion, the Senate as a body was in agreement that an approval depending upon a two-thirds majority will necessitate a consensus-building, iterative, and engaged discussion that is warranted given the changes that may be introduced by this process of bylaws- and policy-revision.

Finally, the Faculty Senate expects that all bylaws and policies clarify what majority will be required (e.g., “simple” or “two-thirds” majority) for the approval of future changes. The Faculty Senate also expects that School bylaws and School-level policies will state that they only go into effect, and changes thereto only go into effect, following approval by the Faculty Senate.

Bylaws Initial FS Committee Review Timeline

The Faculty Senate Constitution and Bylaws Committee (CBC) requests that all six School bylaws drafts be shared on Friday, January 17^th by 4pm. We would ask a School committee representative to share a Word document version of the School bylaws to the Bylaws folder in the existing Faculty Senate restructure revisions folder in OneDrive.

The CBC will approach the process of reading the drafts with a goal to encourage as much consistency across the bylaws as possible (while recognizing that some distinctions will represent unique standards, practices, and/or procedures that govern a School’s day-to-day operations). The CBC will return the bylaws by January 31st, where warranted, while also sharing a general report to all six School committees listing any common guidance or citing any common issues resulting from the norming process.

School + FAC Policy Rough Timeline

The campus-level Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion (RTP) policy is very nearly complete as a FIRST draft. Given that all FAC (Handbook) policy documents undergoing revision will need to be shared with the Office of General Counsel (OGC), it is our hope that OGC will read the draft of this policy as soon as possible, flagging any concerns before we finalize drafts of either our FAC (Handbook) policy revisions or corresponding School-level policy revisions.

The timeline for Office of General Counsel involvement has recently changed, so what I can report is that Faculty Senate leadership is in the process of determining a means by which the highest-level (FAC) policies may be read (and any issues may be flagged) before we set a definite deadline for the progression of university- and School-level policies to be approved.

However, the draft campus-level RTP policy has been shared with our six School-level RTP policy committees and the Faculty Senate. And it is our expectation that School committees will allow the draft policy to inform their revision process. (The working draft will also be shared in the appropriate FS restructure OneDrive folder sometime next week, and I will follow up with School Directors and Deans when it is to ensure that School committees have the document.)

The Senate recognizes that this drafting process is iterative and that many of our restructure-related materials are still at a rough-draft stage. But the sooner policy drafts are read with an eye to promoting as much consistency across our Schools as is possible and reasonable and between School and related campus-level policy, the more likely we are to avoid protracted revisions before Schools vote to approve.

Given our goal to promote collaboration and notwithstanding our recognition that revised policy will likely still be in a draft form, it is therefore the Faculty Senate leadership’s recommendation that School-level policy drafts be submitted to the Faculty Senate Executive Committee on Friday, January 17th, at which time that committee will be able to read the drafts in light of draft changes to FAC and GOV policy and will be able to make suggestions that promote consistency across our School policies and between School and campus-level policies. A School representative should submit draft School policies to the School policy folder in the existing Faculty Senate restructure revisions folder in OneDrive.

Yours,
Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 12-8-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with a few updates from the Faculty Senate.

Chancellor Search and Screen

Two open listening sessions have been scheduled for Monday, December 9th. These will be held in Reeve 307, at 1) 2:30pm AND 2) 5:30pm. I hope that you will plan to attend one of these, as your input will help to shape the search committee’s understanding of our university’s priorities and the qualities and qualifications we are looking for in our next Chancellor.

Search and Screen Committee membership and listening session Zoom links can be found here. In case those links don’t work for any reason, here is another pathway, through the UWS site.

VRIOP

At the 3 December 2024 meeting of the Faculty Senate, Chancellor Leavitt and Provost Martini announced a UW System-funded VRIOP (Voluntary Retirement Incentive Options Program). System has funded the program with $1M, and the goal is to identify retirements for faculty positions that will not be refilled, with a permanent savings target of $1.1M.

System set the broad program parameters, and in consultation with System, our university is defining eligibility according to whether the faculty member meets certain criteria:

appropriate FTE (.75+), age (55+), and years of Wisconsin Retirement System service with the State of Wisconsin (5+)
as specified in the Chancellor’s email about the VRIOP, that applicants “come from programs that can absorb the loss of positions without compromising the academic mission of the university.”

Of the roughly 98 faculty currently eligible for retirement, 57 are deemed to meet the above criteria. Those individuals will receive a notice from HR letting them know that they may apply for one of the three incentivized departure dates, each of which is associated with a lump-sum payment of a percentage of salary (May 2025 (75%), January 2026 (50%), May 2026 (30%)).

In contextualizing the parameters for this VRIOP to the Senate, Provost Martini acknowledged that among the constraints established by System is that the incentive should be directed at faculty who belong to underenrolled programs. The Provost stressed that everything has been done by our administration to avoid the possibility of faculty layoffs and that the VRIOP should be recognized as an alternative to such a harmful measure. He stated unequivocally that faculty layoffs would be a significant misstep for our institution. But he acknowledged that future decisions in a similar vein will inevitably be shaped by whether we fall short of or meet our enrollment, retention, and savings targets. If we assume a 30% acceptance rate (a rate that is based on previous programs), and an average salary of approximately $80K among those taking the incentive, then projected savings ($1.4M) would exceed the permanent savings target, further reducing the structural deficit and distancing us, as an institution, from having to explore such measures again.

UWS Copyright Policy (1310: Copyrightable Materials Ownership, Use, and Control)

Since October, I have periodically updated and sought feedback from the Faculty Senate about the ongoing discussions surrounding changes to UWS copyright policy 1310. Concerns about the policy revisions have largely centered on its distinction between “Scholarly Works” and “Institutional Works” and, specifically, its classing of “syllabi” as “Institutional Works.” This has sparked major concerns that course materials (particularly those posted to online learning platforms) were at risk of being stripped of the protections afforded intellectual property defined as scholarly works.

OCT: At a regular meeting of Shared Governance Representatives in Madison on October 18th, the Faculty Reps raised concerns with a representative of UWS Office of General Counsel. Among other questions about the policy’s definition of ownership of works produced as part of the employee’s “scope of employment,” we asked whether course materials enjoyed the same protections as other works of intellectual property more clearly defined under copyright law. We were assured that any System policy cannot (and does not) supersede federal copyright laws and that lecture notes (for instance) were entirely owned by the author. We were told that syllabi had been singled out as examples of “Institutional Works” for several reasons: institutions “use” syllabi as part of accreditation processes as well as when a course suffers a catastrophic interruption in instruction, at which time they may be shared with an incoming instructor to ensure course continuity. No commitment was made at this point to revisit the policy’s draft changes.
NOV: Concerns about the policy’s distinction between “Scholarly Works” and “Institutional Works” persisted, and our Faculty Rep chair requested that the comment period be extended from November 19th to December 13th, which it was. Requests for substantive changes to the policy’s language were submitted as comments from across the System, and a letter authored and signed by faculty and IAS members of AFT locals from across the UW was both submitted to the comments and circulated to System leadership. Given its clear expression of some of the central and persistent issues with the policy draft, I shared that letter with the Faculty Representatives, as well as with Provost Martini, ahead of a UW Provost meeting.
NOV-DEC: At the November 22nd meeting of the Shared Governance Representatives, the Faculty Reps were joined once again by members of the Office of General Counsel. I had the opportunity to request clarification on whether the policy language would be revisited to reinstate syllabi as “Scholarly Works.” We received more information as to why syllabi had been singled out as well as confirmation that the policy language was being revised. 1) Syllabi were uncoupled from other intellectual property and defined as “Institutional Works” in part because there is widespread agreement that syllabi are a unique scholarly work that may be provided in response to relevant public records requests. 2) Syllabi will now be listed under “Scholarly Works,” but the revision, as far as I’m aware, will also recognize that it will remain standard policy to disclose syllabi in compliance with federal regulations surrounding public records requests pertaining to courses. 3) In response to our request, Office of General Counsel pledged to add to the existing FAQ a set of responses to key themes in the comments about the policy.

USP Changes

Among the APC-approved Forms C that came to the Faculty Senate for a vote at the 3 December 2024 meeting was the “Form C for General Education Changes for Fall 2025.” Here is a copy of the memorandum appended to the Form C, which details the four areas of revision. The memorandum specifies:

These initial recommendations are designed to reduce roadblocks for students. In many instances, these are relatively easy to implement and can be done over the next academic year. The USP Transition Team is currently working on a second set of revisions to address broader aspects of the program, including Experiential Learning, First and Second-Year Experience Courses, signature questions, breadth requirements, and the possibility of a Sustainability requirement. The group expects to bring its recommendations about these matters to campus groups for discussion during the spring semester.

USP Director Kim Rivers was in attendance at Tuesday’s meeting to answer Senator questions, and after a detailed discussion the Form C was approved by the Senate. It is our expectation that the next set of recommendations will be ready for Senate discussion (not as a Form C but as a discussion item) by mid- or late-February, at which time the Senate will invite Professor Rivers and members of the USP Transition Team to attend meetings and inform our discussion(s). Senate discussions of further changes to the USP will form only one part of the wider campus conversation about such changes, but I am putting this on your collective radar, as Senate meetings are open and you are always welcome to attend.

Strategic Planning and Budget Committee (SPBC) – Committee Information Form (CIF)

After a year of discussions and planning, at Tuesday’s meeting the Faculty Senate endorsed the formation of a new university/joint committee that combines our existing Faculty Senate Budget Committee with the existing university-level Strategic Planning Committee.

In pursuing this new committee structure, our hope has been to introduce change to our university culture in at least the following three ways: first, we hope to help instill a culture of open communication about our financial circumstances and planning; second, we hope to initiate a culture in which we normalize discussing annual and long-term decisions in direct conversation with our strategic plan; and third, we hope to help normalize close collaboration between our faculty, staff, and administration, ensuring that faculty and staff expertise and creativity is allowed to inform discussions and decision-making.

We await confirmation from our other shared governance bodies regarding CIF approval, but I am sure I speak for the Faculty Senate and members of the two affected committees when I say that we are energized by this positive step toward standing up an important new joint committee.

Special Senate Meeting – Tuesday, December 10^th

On Tuesday the 10^th the Faculty Senate will hold a special supplementary meeting focused on FAC and GOV policy revisions and Senate recommendations regarding the approval process for school-level restructuring materials (bylaws, policies, etc.). I will send an update following that meeting which will include Senate recommendations about the process by which school bylaws and/or policies may be shared with the Faculty Senate Constitution and Bylaws Committee and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee in the final stages of the drafting process.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 10-29-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with two updates, on the RTP forum hosted by the Faculty Senate last Friday and on a request from university marketing.

Renewal, Tenure, and Promotion Policy Open Forum

On Friday, October 25^th the Faculty Senate hosted an open forum to allow faculty to come together to ask questions, express concerns, voice suggestions (etc.) as we launch the process of drafting a single, encompassing renewal, tenure, and promotion policy (to replace our existing discrete policies).

What follows is a brief characterization of questions, concerns, and suggestions that were voiced by our colleagues. Provisional answers to questions that were asked will be characterized here below. Note that not all comments directly interact with our RTP policy.

What the campus-level RTP Policy could include and/or address:

Establish levels of review — for instance, the curricular unit as the 1st, the school as the 2nd,
- if the curricular unit were identified as the 1st level of review, the policy would recognize that when the unit has too few members to form a level of review, committee composition would be as close as possible to the curricular unit;
- the campus-level policy could specify that school-level RTP policy must define how committees (1st and 2nd level of review) are convened, but the campus-level policy would not prescribe the process;
Establish review path following 1st/2nd level — for instance, identifying either or both the Director and/or Dean as the intervening stage of review before files are sent on to the Provost and then the Chancellor;
Establish clear policy for next steps following nonrenewal or denial of tenure at the 1st and 2nd level of review;
The campus-level RTP policy should include reference to FAC 7 A-B (Faculty Workload), which clarifies campus-level scope of faculty expectations in teaching, scholarly and creative activity, and service;
Given concerns about SOS data (which faculty report is sometimes corrupted or incomplete, sometimes falsely aggregates course sections, occasionally disappears from the database after being circulated to faculty, etc.), the RTP policy could or should include a statement on accepted procedure when SOS data is corrupt or otherwise unreliable.

There was some discussion about our current renewal schedule (in which the first renewal file is due in the fall of year 2), and it was suggested that the RTP Task Force may want to investigate UW System policy on renewal and discuss the possibility of proposing a change to our schedule. It was acknowledged that if we were to move forward with this, we might then need language in FAC 3 (Faculty Appointment) to acknowledge that faculty review begins with the initiation of the appointment (given that some faculty are concerned that one function of the year 2 review is to reaffirm faculty assessment expectations at the campus and curricular unit levels).

Finally, there was lengthy discussion about our current SOS forms and process, and most in attendance agreed that a review of our current SOS form (i.e., questions), delivery (i.e., online), circulation (i.e, the timing by which forms are shared with students), and data storing should be initiated with the intent of possibly revising some or all of the above elements. It was acknowledged that this is an urgent issue that may nevertheless need to wait until after this academic year.

Marketing Campaign – A Request from AVC Evans

Amber Evans, AVC for Enrollment Management and Marketing, attended the Faculty Senate on October 15^th to discuss UWO’s recent branding campaign launch and to publicize a request that her office is making of faculty.

As part of the effort to narrow in on the ways in which our existing programs, schools, and perhaps even colleges (as collective units) interact with the values that structure our marketing campaign, AVC Evans’ office has produced two templates that will allow faculty to provide information that, in turn, will enable our campaign to reflect points of distinction at the curricular, program, and unit levels.

This link will take you to the slides AVC Evans shared with the Senate. Please note especially: Slide 9, which details the Brand Framework (e.g., “core value,” “pillars,” and “reasons to believe”), Slide 11, which includes the “One Step Ahead” commercial, and Slides 16-17, in which are embedded the templates.

The request from AVC Evans is that we reflect on the brand framework and its pillars and that fields in the templates should be populated with characterizations of how we embody the campaign’s “pillars,” “reasons to believe,” “core value,” etc. Note that the template emphasizes that we should aim to enumerate “primary assets that support our pillars and lend credibility” rather than trying to provide “an exhaustive list of all the reasons to believe.” In other words: aim for succinct, quotable characterizations of how your program or unit embodies the values defined by the campaign pillars.

I have requested that AVC Evans’ office share a form-fillable version of the template, and we will receive that soon. It’s my understanding that our deans have also made this request, so you can expect a follow-up email from me, with a link included, but you may also receive the templates from our deans.

In the meantime, please take a look at AVC Evans’ presentation, consider putting discussion of the templates on department/program meetings, and note that completed templates can be sent directly to AVC Evans.

A point of information: in response to a Senate question on October 15th, AVC Evans agreed that if faculty feel the need to create a secondary document that contextualizes the points of distinction enumerated on the template (e.g., a document that could be shared with our admissions and advising offices), programs and units should feel free to share those materials, as well.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 10-2-2024

Dear Colleagues,

Yesterday, the Faculty Senate’s agenda included a discussion of our current stage in the implementation of the new administrative and academic structure. I’m writing to you in order that the Senate’s conversation may inform ongoing discussions within and across our new schools ahead of the finalization of the ballots and next week’s votes.

October 11 Deadline: The primary concern that has been expressed is that we are operating on a very tight timeline without fully understanding the potential consequences of selecting a given school model. At yesterday’s FS meeting, Provost Martini and Chancellor Leavitt responded to requests for clarification as to why we cannot extend the October 11 deadline, noting the following: our university is already operating on an extension from System in implementing the “Administrative Transformation Program” (ATP) to standardize finance, HR, and research administration processes ahead of the System-wide adoption of Workday, which has a go-live date of July 1, 2025, and campuses will be fined if they are late in the implementation.

Assimilating the Stakes of the Various Models: Provost Martini has repeatedly affirmed that the faculty are empowered, in the bylaws-writing process, to build in a review period (e.g., 2 years) to evaluate the efficiency and functionality of the school model.

Areas / Administrative Tasks: Each of the school models identifies a mechanism by which administrative tasks can be completed, either through A) an area configuration (in which, roughly, programs are grouped based on affinity and FTE distribution) or B) a model where the school functions as a collective with no area divisions, and all tasks are assigned (how tasks are assigned varies, including to committees, discipline or program leaders or directors, etc.).

Questions and concerns expressed by Senators or communicated to Senate by constituents include:

What will Universities of Wisconsin (System) recognize as a “functional equivalent” to departments? (“Functional equivalent” is the phrase used in System policy to define comparability or equality. At UWO, our Handbook refers to “Department or Equivalent Unit.” Our Handbook language will change to reflect our structure, but it will retain key System-level policy vocabulary.)

System will recognize either or both “area” and “school” as a “functional equivalent” to “department.” In other words, both of those terms are acknowledged at the System level. This was confirmed when our restructure was approved by the Board of Regents. This does not mean that we have to define areas as functional equivalents to departments; rather, we are empowered to do so if we choose.

Do areas (in our current planning) function as an equivalent to our current departments?

Not necessarily. One goal in the restructure has been to ensure autonomy at the school level, and the result is a certain amount of heterogeneity in the school models. Some school models treat areas as administrative structures that will enable us to function within budget constraints. Some may consider the groupings as more meaningfully expressive of affinities.
Where areas are not being thought of as department equivalents, one rationale reported at the Faculty Senate is that in minimizing the function of areas in relation to the wider school, we also minimize the barriers between our programs, making it easier for programs to collaborate.

Is or should an area be a governance unit (with area-level bylaws)?

Bylaws at the area level may be logical if there is a minority voice that might not otherwise be protected or recognized in school-level bylaws. The rationale for area-level bylaws would normally be that there exist substantive distinctions in a given program that need to be articulated in bylaws. The question then becomes whether anything prevents those distinctions from being defined in school-level bylaws.
We are the architects of our own bylaws: individual programs (and their subset programs) can be defined in school-level bylaws.
School-level bylaws can recognize characteristics or needs unique to individual programs, and school-level bylaws can include direct reference to policies that govern both individual programs (e.g., program-specific online teaching policy) and the school and/or university as a collective.
Note that we already have examples of distinct organizational structures at UWO. Our College of Nursing does not currently operate through a department structure, functioning instead as a unified college governed through a committee system.
Some consistency across our new schools would, however, be welcome. Shared governance at the university level is sometimes complicated by a lack of shared understanding about significant distinctions across our units. Greater consistency would support shared governance.

Will current departmental policies will be superseded by those of other programs in the next stage in this process (e.g., if we house bylaws at the school level)?

The faculty will lead the bylaws-writing process. The steps of that process have yet to be formally defined, though many people have been thinking about the logical progression. Currently, and in most cases, we have college-level and department-level bylaws. One task will be to triage bylaws components to determine a) what should transfer from existing college-level bylaws to (for example) the new school-level document, and b) what can be standardized across the represented units and, by contrast, where bylaws must recognize unique programmatic or disciplinary distinctions.
Faculty Senate leadership has met several times with Josh Garrison, Interim AVC for Faculty and Academic Staff Affairs to discuss the process by which existing bylaws, at the college and department levels, will be revised.
President-Elect Stuart and I have advocated for several interlocking goals:
- Consistency: A bylaws template can be shared to help ensure a degree of similarity across our units.
- Simplifying and Streamlining: Our goal in writing bylaws should be to simplify and streamline. By this we mean: bylaws should name unit committees, but granularity could be reserved for committee information forms (which are more flexible documents than bylaws, thus enabling a simpler revision process at a later date); bylaws should gesture to relevant policy and the university, school, or even program level, defining what we are empowered to do and to what we hold ourselves accountable. Bylaws should not be used to past problems. In revising our bylaws, we should remain attuned to guidance that belongs in policy, citing relevant policies or modifying policies to include necessary guidance, as needed.
- University-level Policy: Where university-level policy would usefully centralize guidance that should inform our local deliberations, that policy should be written. For example, we have proposed that a university-level policy for renewal, tenure, and promotion should be written in order to ensure that we are all aware of the overarching expectations that govern all such processes across the university. This would not preclude local-level renewal, tenure, and promotion policy, but it would enable those policies to focus on program or (more often) discipline-specific expectations for renewal, tenure, and/or promotion. We have had similar discussion about a university-level online and hybrid course policy, which could then allow local policy to specify any unique program-specific guidelines.

Are area coordinators tasked with overseeing and managing academic matters (e.g., program-specific decisions), and have we adequately considered program-specific knowledge that may inform the scheduling process?

In the next stage of work, as the faculty develop the collective documents that protect faculty rights and responsibilities in relation to (for example) personnel, curriculum, and workload matters, part of the task will be to define job descriptions for the leadership positions in our schools. Whether these are area coordinators, program directors, program leads, discipline leads, etc., job descriptions will need to exist in order to inform other key documents – e.g., bylaws, policies, committee information forms. And part of our goal in the next stage of this process will be (as I have noted above) to ensure collective clarity on the relevant policies that cascade down university to school to program, as appropriate.

Ballots: A number of faculty have voiced concern about the ballots, emphasizing that these documents should be as simplified as possible and, wherever possible, should not be prescriptive of bylaws-level decisions.

I hope that this update proves useful.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 9-6-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I write with a slightly unusual update, to tell you all about a one-day UW System faculty representatives “retreat” I participated in on Aug. 23^rd. I will close this message with a few related comments focused on the recently-launched Legislative Council Study Committee on the Future of the University of Wisconsin System.

First, a bit of context: as your Faculty Senate President, I travel regularly to meetings of both the Board of Regents (roughly three times per semester) and Shared Governance Representatives (also roughly three times per semester). At Board of Regents meetings, shared governance representatives are seated in the various rooms in which BoR committees meet (e.g., Education, Business and Finance, or Audit), but we are not involved in the meeting discussions. We are there to listen, but we can take the initiative to seek out and interact with Regents and System leadership and administrators during breaks. At Shared Governance Representatives meetings, we meet in our individual governance groups (e.g., Faculty Representatives) as well as in our collective, at which time we get System updates and opportunities for Q&A with Regents and System President Jay Rothman.

Exceptionally, last Friday the faculty representatives held a one-day ‘retreat’ following Thursday’s BoR meeting in Madison. The event was titled “What does the future of WI higher ed look like 10-15 years from now? A view from the classroom,” and we were joined by System President Rothman, his Chief of Staff, Jess Lathrop, and Interim Senior Vice President for Academic & Student Affairs Johannes Britz. We broke into three working groups, each of which was tasked with discussing one of the following three topics:

1: The student experience/climate

2: Teaching and learning

3: System-wide campus organization and specialization

Each group was joined by a System leader, whose role was to listen to the conversation and, later, to ask questions and articulate what they heard from the day’s discussion. I was asked to form part of group 3 because it was felt that, given our situation at Oshkosh, I might have some contributions to make on the subject of organization. We were joined by Jay Rothman.

Rather than rehearse in depth what we discussed (though all of it was interesting), I will put what I take to be pertinent points of focus and urgent take-aways into a few bullets:

Jay Rothman spoke to the group of reps, acknowledging that our university system – whose per-student funding is ranked 43^rd nationally – is being starved and that well over a decade of neglect and 10 years of tuition freezes have ushered in an era of turbulence in which, despite unassailable aggregate data showing the value of higher education, investment in a four-year degree (and such degree-granting institutions) is increasingly regarded with suspicion. While I would editorialize that the neglect, tuition freezes, and decreasing per-student funding can readily be read as austerity measures designed to destabilize institutions of higher education, Mr. Rothman’s point was that we are in a position in which, among the many other concrete measures to be taken, we must identify the narrative we want to mobilize to disrupt the public perception that higher education does not have value. Given our climate of political entrenchment and attendant imperviousness to persuasion, his is an unenviable task, but I would call on all of us to consider what we think our System leadership should be saying about education to those with the power to reroute some of Wisconsin’s historic budget surplus toward its universities. If you write to me, I will bring your thoughts to upcoming meetings.
- I will note here that I took the opportunity to discuss with President Rothman the repeated use of the terms “view” or “views” in the 2022 UW-System-supported “Freedom of Speech” survey (the words appear 88 times, while “know” appears only once and neither “knowledge” nor “truth” appear at all). I stressed the importance of addressing the public perception that professors work in their classrooms to indoctrinate students to a set of prescribed views rather than trafficking in inquiry, knowledge communication and acquisition, and the cultivation of a willingness to dwell in uncertainty as the prerequisites to gathering the facts and contexts that enable the development of “views.” I underlined a point I have made to him before (and that members of UWO’s Faculty Senate made to the survey authors at the time), which is that the System’s acceptance of that flawed survey and its results may be seen to ratify misperceptions of methodologies and goals in higher education.
The working group on “System-wide campus organization and specialization” focused much of its discussion on the changes being introduced here at UWO. In discussing our new college and school structures, I emphasized our opportunities for collaboration, interdisciplinarity, team teaching, and ever-more-intentional retention measures. The group was very interested in what we’re doing, and the conversation turned to a topic I am urgently interested in discussing: how we as individual universities and as a system can work to protect our mission to provide students access to a comprehensive education. The feeling in the group was that we at UWO are poised to enact curricular structures that may serve to promote this goal.
- I know that many of us are thinking about curricular changes we can institute, both to solve problems (e.g., low enrollment in methods or capstone classes) and to leverage our new school communities to establish their identities and better serve our students (e.g., by helping them orient themselves to the opportunities open to them in our program array). In this, we are well positioned to make use of our restructure to institute change that will serve our students and support or sustain our ability to offer students a comprehensive education. The UW campuses are watching us to see what solutions we find that may enable us (all) to preserve Wisconsin students’ access to comprehensive education.
I will close by noting my personal concern about certain phrases and keywords that crop up a good deal these days – namely, “program array,” “duplication,” and “specialization.” I was glad to be asked to join group 3, given its focus on “specialization,” and I did have the opportunity to broach concerns (shared by my faculty representative colleagues) about recurring comments being made by UW System leaders about “specialization” and “duplication” that sound worryingly like the prelude to a plan for program prioritization and regionalization. When I brought these concerns to President Rothman, he emphasized that System is not looking for ways to institute the recommendations of the 2021 Roth report. He stresses the importance of establishing and broadcasting campus identities and spotlighting what makes us exceptional. But he does also emphasize the importance of greater efficiency, stressing our need to identify and streamline duplicate services. While I am certainly willing to listen to the arguments for correcting System-wide services duplications, and while I am even more open to the necessary conversations about duplications internal to UW campuses (e.g., streamlining multiple courses serving a uniform curricular purpose), I am wary of the ways in which this language of duplication may mask a wider goal to narrow individual campuses’ program arrays in the service of what might be called “efficiency”/being “learner-focused.” This was discussed by the group, and we were unanimous in advocating for extreme caution with regard to any measures that might narrow students’ access to a comprehensive education (the full array of disciplines, and attendant programs, we expect to find in a university). And, at the risk of saying something incendiary here, I will note that we urged System leadership to consider the ways in which the above-mentioned correctives could serve a wider objective to proletarianize Wisconsin students.

As ever, there is more that I could tell you. But I will close with another set of links and documents, which are in direct dialogue with the bullet points above.

As some of you may be aware, on August 29^th a member of the newly formed Legislative Council Study Committee on the Future of the UW System (UW Vice President for Administration Jim Langdon) circulated a memorandum titled “University of Wisconsin System Reorganization and Reform.” The memo surveys Landgon’s recommendations for a UW restructure. The whole document is worth a careful reading, but I would direct you to section 3 (“Create a Higher Education Coordinating Council”), whose five-point list includes this goal: “Provide a statewide perspective to ensure the efficient and effective use of higher education resources and to eliminate unnecessary duplication.”

Yours,
Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

P.S. The links to the Roth report and Jim Langdon’s memorandum have proved unstable, so I am including a link here to a OneDrive folder that contains the documents in PDF form. Members of UWO with the link should have access.

ieces are falling into place;
emphasized that similar answers to common questions were arrived at across different groups, which cohesion shows how often we are aligned;
emphasized that we will need to strive to assume that people are driven by good intentions and bear in mind that as things will change rapidly, we should give each other a lot of grace.

Whew! What a long report. If you’re here – thank you for bearing with me (2,500 words later).

This important work was heartening, and I felt privileged to listen to such dedicated colleagues think through our challenges. I’m very grateful to our facilitators and our chairs and program directors for their energy, creativity, and collegiality. There is much to be done, but we are all invested in the process.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-16-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with the first of two end-of-semester Faculty Senate updates. This update will focus on the status of the ongoing efforts to address issues related to the Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund. A future update will focus on issues related to the furlough.

I share the following long summary in the spirit of transparency and to ensure that all faculty are apprised of the broad strokes of this long process. In moments like these, brevity can be the enemy of transparency, so I have favored detail, but, as with any update of this sort, some steps have perforce been left out. If you have lingering questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. And if you would like to skip the contextualizing details, please scroll down to the update’s final sections — the bulleted list at the bottom of “Proposed Solutions” and the “Current Status” section that concludes the email.

Context

At the February 13, 2024, meeting of the Faculty Senate, I shared a document – made up of a timeline and relevant appendices – as context for a discussion of concerns raised by myself and members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee about how salary adjustments were calculated prior to the disbursement of the Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund on January 8, 2024.

The timeline + appendices can be found here. The “Salary Equity Process Technical Document – Faculty” is Appendix A of that document, and it specifies

that “The equity process will be overseen by the Faculty Salary Equity Technical Committee,” which will “work with OIR and/or Human Resources to ensure that the equity process described below is implemented properly,” and
that “90% of the mean CUPA salary for every faculty based on rank and discipline in the appropriate comparison group” shall be used as a benchmark for salary adjustment calculations.

While the Faculty Senate Executive Committee was apprised on January 9, 2024,

that our internal implementation procedure, which is detailed in the “Salary Equity Process Technical Document – Faculty” (2023) had not been followed (namely, that our Faculty Senate Compensation Committee had not been asked to form a Technical Committee to check the correctness of the calculations produced by Human Resources) prior to the official notification of affected faculty on January 8, 2024, and
that the calculations had been undertaken by UW HR rather than UWO HR, we were not aware until later, once I had had an opportunity to meet with UWO faculty who are subject-area experts, that UW HR had used 90% of the CUPA median with ± 2 standard deviations rather than 90% of the unfiltered CUPA mean to calculate the salary adjustments. I informed the Chancellor and his Chief of Staff of this issue on January 18, 2024.

The Problem

There are two primary issues at stake. These are:

that a longstanding faculty-generated process document, which was produced by the Faculty Senate Compensation Committee and had been revised by that committee in 2022-2023, then discussed and approved by the Faculty Senate in the spring of 2023 and subsequently endorsed by the Chancellor in September 2023, was not followed by either UWO HR or UW HR, which raises concerns about the extent to which policies and procedures authored by shared governance are perceived to be legitimate and locally binding, and
that the use of 90% of the CUPA median (filtered for ± 2 standard deviations) rather than 90% of the CUPA mean (unfiltered) results in fewer faculty members receiving “parity” salary adjustments (this is the term used by our administration, but the term is “equity” in the Technical Document).

Proposed Solutions

On January 30, 2024, I met with Chancellor Leavitt and Chief of Staff Hummel to discuss the information contained in a recently-produced spreadsheet they shared with me showing the differences between calculating for median, mean, and mean with outliers. This spreadsheet revealed that the consequences of using the median rather than the mean were as follows:

Fewer faculty received pay increases than would have been the case had our Technical Document been followed.
Some faculty receive more than the UWO procedure would have determined.
Some faculty received less than the UWO procedure would have determined.

My suggestion at this time was that the Chancellor communicate to faculty that UW HR had made an accounting error in the calculation of the Discretionary Fund pay increases, to stand up the Technical Committee to assist HR in producing calculations that follow our Technical Document’s procedure, and to adjust salaries going forward according to those calculations and within the parameters of the existing fund (it was not suggested that any of the already disbursed monies be rescinded or “clawed back”).

The Faculty Senate Executive Committee agreed with this suggestion and its members, as well as members of the Compensation Committee, subsequently reiterated it. The above-linked timeline + appendices document includes correspondence on this topic, as well as a memo from the Office of General Counsel responding to a request made by Chancellor Leavitt for a legal opinion on the matter of a “‘claw back’ [of] a faculty member’s pay and decrease of their future salary.”

On February 27, 2024, the Faculty Senate endorsed a statement, which can be found here, that, among other things, proposed that the Technical Committee be afforded the opportunity to produce the calculations and share those with UWO HR.

By this point, Chancellor Leavitt had apprised the Faculty Senate Executive Committee of his proposed solution, namely, to bring those whose salary adjustments were lower under a calculation for median up to the amount they would have received under a calculation for 90% of the CUPA mean while leaving in place those adjustments that were higher under the median than they would have been under the mean.

A variety of meetings have since taken place, including one on May 1, 2024, that included faculty subject-area experts, members of the Faculty Senate Executive and Compensation Committees, the Chancellor, and Dan Chanen, who is the UW System Associate Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer.

Overall, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and members of the Compensation Committee provided the following input between February and early May:

that we are grateful to the Chancellor for his diligence in advocating on behalf of faculty to UW System to establish the Discretionary Fund in the first place as well as for his willingness to find a solution to the issue that benefits faculty;
that the proposed solution would mean adding money to the original fund (of $487,352.20) by an estimated $72,000.00, and that this action might be deemed irresponsible in light of our institution’s current financial circumstances and our recent, and very painful, process of layoffs, non-renewals, and early retirements;
and that bringing those who had been under-remunerated – when the calculation uses 90% of the unfiltered CUPA mean – while leaving in place those adjustments resulting from a calculation using 90% of the CUPA median with ± 2 standard deviations serves to enshrine a mistaken imbalance in how the equity monies were disbursed and how affected salaries will be adjusted going forward.

Current Status

The Faculty Senate has been unequivocal in affirming that our faculty deserve salary equity raises, especially in light of the fact that – according to our own UW Accountability Dashboard – the faculty at UW comprehensives are, on average, underpaid by 16.47% in relation to peer institutions. The Senate has been unequivocal in affirming that this is not a matter of some individuals deserving more or less than others. Rather, the issue, as it has been discussed at the Faculty Senate, boils down to the following:

Mistakes were made which originate in HR’s failure to use an existing process document and interact directly, as that document specifies, with subject-area experts in the faculty to ensure the correctness of all calculations;
The process of obtaining the unfiltered data and finalizing next steps was very slow, causing meaningful delays in enabling the Compensation Committee’s Technical Committee to produce the calculations according to the parameters detailed in our Technical Document and in implementing an equitable solution;
Senate recommendations did not ultimately inform decisions made by our senior administration;
Senate requests for an apology from UWO HR – both to the Faculty Senate and to the faculty at large, showing accountability by acknowledging mistakes while also, ideally, expressing a determination to engage, where appropriate, with shared governance going forward – have yet to be fulfilled;
Members of the Faculty Senate have expressed the concern that the proposed solution ratifies the idea that shared governance is not being allowed to help move the needle in decision-making.

At the final meeting of the Faculty Senate this Tuesday, Senator David Fuller, a member of the Faculty Senate Compensation Committee’s Technical Committee, shared an analysis (which can be found here) that details the committee’s calculations. These have been shared with the Chancellor. (Please note that the final number listed in that document for the cost of raising the adjustments for 109 faculty will be slightly lower going forward, as it includes faculty who have retired or resigned but who were on the payroll when the Pay Plan was approved and are thus entitled to the backpay that was allocated across the System in January, 2024.) Chancellor Leavitt will speak to his decision about next steps in a forthcoming email.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-15-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to communicate the results of the recent Faculty Senate elections for the position of President-Elect and for the open seats on the Executive Committee.

Context

The Faculty Senate President serves a four-year term – one year as President-Elect, two years as President, and then one year as Past President. The President-Elect and Past President are automatic members of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee. The Past President attends two of the regularly-scheduled institutional shared governance meetings – namely, the Shared Governance Conference (with senior administration and all shared governance leaders, including Student Government) and the Shared Governance Leaders (with shared governance leadership across Academic Staff Senate, University Staff Senate, and Faculty Senate).

The Faculty Senate Executive Committee membership is determined on a yearly basis. Apart from the two seats reserved for Senate leadership, the committee includes four additional seats, one of which is reserved for Access Campus representation. Every year in the spring the Senate holds an election to fill those seats. Here is a link to a committee information form that details the purpose of the committee and its typical work.

Election Results

On Tuesday, April 30^th the Faculty Senate was unanimous in naming Prof. Nathan Stuart President-Elect. On Tuesday, May 14^th the Faculty Senate was again unanimous is electing Prof. Robbie Wagoner, Prof. Evan Kreider, Prof. David Fuller, and Prof. Catherine Schmitt to the Executive Committee.

On behalf of the Faculty Senate, I want to thank Senators Stuart, Wagoner, Kreider, Fuller, and Schmitt for their willingness to serve in these important roles.

I also want to thank our outgoing Past President, Prof. Jen Szydlik, for her unwavering commitment to the Senate and the faculty, her collegiality, and her mentorship. We are a better representative body for having had her in her leadership roles.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-6-2024

Dear Colleagues,

At the last meeting of the Faculty Senate, we discussed an issue that many faculty are not aware of but that affects us all. This is the contract payroll period for each academic year. I’m writing to disseminate the information that I have been able to gather. (For Faculty Senators: note that the end-date for FY 25 that we discussed has been corrected below; the date shared with us prior to our FS meeting cited an earlier draft of the approved FY contract dates.)

Background:

As of fiscal year 2022 (or academic year 2021-2022), and with the establishment of bi-weekly payroll, UW System (as it was then still called) required UWO to change its contract dates for “Academic Year” employees (i.e., Faculty, academic staff, and limited appointees directly tied to the academic year calendar (39 weeks)) to 195 paid week days per contract year in order for UWO to align with other UW campuses.

As a result, a series of academic year schedules were calculated and approved. Here are the ones relevant to our present and near future:

FY24 – Full Academic Year 23/24 – 8/28/2023 – 5/24/2024
- Fall 23 (98 days) 8/28/23 – 1/10/24
- Spring 24 (97 days) 1/11/24 – 5/24/24
FY25 – Full Academic Year 24/25 – August 26, 2024 – May 23, 2025
- Fall 24 (98 days) 8/26/24 – 1/8/2025
- Spring 25 (97 days) 1/9/2025 – 5/23/2025

*These dates are now posted to the Academic Calendar.

The issue:

The Faculty Senate discussed potential issues associated with these contract end dates (and the fact that most faculty are not aware of the specific dates that are in place). We were especially focused on the upcoming contract end date of May 24th.

The first issue pertains to the changes these contract end dates present to our university (and more specifically, departmental) culture. It is not uncommon for departments/programs to schedule meetings during the Interim, a decision that is often justified by the assertion that faculty and IAS are still “on contract” until, typically, early June. It is important for department members, and especially chairs and program directors, to be aware that we will not be “on contract” following May 24^th this spring and May 23^rd next spring.

The second issue pertains to how contract end dates affect those who have submitted resignations. Here is a brief summary of the topics we discussed at the Senate:

HR Support for Questions about Health Coverage, Email Accounts, etc.: If you have questions about anything connected to your contract, please reach out to your College or Area Generalist. Here is a list that was shared with me:
- CON – Molly Henry
- COB – Kenzie Lingel
- COLS – Abby Klueckmann
- COEHS – Candace Ebert
Email Deadline: Our email accounts are connected to our contract. As a result of that, those faculty and IAS who resign will typically see their email addressess shut off on or directly after the specified contract end date. This spring, that means that emails will be shut off at end-of-business on May 24th.

Extending the contract end-date: Resignees are empowered to negotiate later contract end dates if some form of summer compensation is already in place (e.g., an administrative assignment, an ongoing grant, etc.).

I hope this information is useful. As ever, please let me know if you have any further questions and I will endeavour to find answers.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 4-12-2024

In the wake of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Faculty Referendum Confidence Vote in the leadership of Chancellor Leavitt, Universities of Wisconsin Board of Regents President Karen Walsh has spoken on behalf of the regents to say that Chancellor Leavitt has the board’s full support, emphasizing, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that “He is leading UW Oshkosh through a series of difficult but necessary decisions to position the university for a sustainable future.”

I feel that it is my duty, as a representative of the faculty, to report faculty perspectives as they were voiced in the weeks leading up to the referendum. The stated concerns of faculty suggest that while Regent President Walsh is certainly correct to note the difficulties surrounding recent events at UW Oshkosh, the concerns of the faculty, as stated in open forums, repeatedly point to the question of whether these difficulties were the result not of unavoidable or intractable forces but rather of a series of missteps by the Chancellor and his administration.

With this in mind, I will here share a brief summary of the discussions that took place at the two Faculty-Senate hosted open forums. While faculty expressed solidarity with program assistants and instructional staff, with students, their families, and alumni, and with faculty and staff at other UW campuses, thus affirming that the recent layoffs, nonrenewals, efforts at restructuring, and austerity measures cannot be disentangled from the conversation about whether the faculty have confidence in the leadership of our Chancellor, this summary reveals a much wider array of concerns, accounting more fully for the 72% of faculty who submitted a ballot citing ‘no confidence’.

I have broached these issues with Chancellor Leavitt. We had a long meeting early this week, in which we spoke frankly about the concerns that have been raised and the examples that have been cited and began the important work of identifying where change can be implemented and how we might work together to address ongoing challenges and help to heal our community. I was heartened by the conversation and by Chancellor Leavitt’s clear concern to address the issues raised by faculty. It will not be easy to rebuild trust between the faculty and senior administration, but I have expressed my optimism that this is achievable and my unflagging commitment to assisting in that process.

UWO Faculty Senate
Summary – Confidence Vote Open Forums

Many faculty feel that without a meaningful mechanism in place to evaluate the job performance of our most senior administrator, a confidence vote is virtually the only means by which the faculty can speak as one voice in response to decisions made by our Chancellor and his administration and the consequences of those decisions. In the spirit of representing faculty perspectives holistically, the following statement seeks to synthesize concerns expressed by faculty at the two open forums (March 8 and 15) that were hosted by the Faculty Senate in advance of the Confidence Vote Referendum (March 26-April 2). The faculty position with regard to this confidence vote is diverse, but I would stress that the faculty at the open forums overwhelmingly affirmed that they are not motivated by personal animus toward Chancellor Leavitt. As committed teachers and scholars, many faculty see this action as part of their responsibility to the institution.

External factors, such as Wisconsin’s ranking 43rd nationally for per-student funding to public universities, have not been ignored in conversations about faculty confidence in Chancellor Leavitt’s leadership. The faculty are all aware that state disinvestment in our university system has rendered us vulnerable to economic turbulence. Indeed, the faculty have discussed the fact that the same constraints informing our financial circumstances affect the financial wellbeing of all institutions that make up the Universities of Wisconsin. As has been reported variously over the past months, 10 out of the 13 UW comprehensives are projecting structural deficits this fiscal year. Faculty members acknowledged these facts but appealed to objective measures that reveal that UWO has underperformed in relation to other UW campuses during the last decade.

While our current deficit is undoubtedly a relevant factor in this vote, many faculty reported that the shock at the news of our university’s financial situation only served to alert them to deeper and more systemic problems. Faculty noted, for instance, that the events of the last seven months have cast light on a linear decrease in our reserves that has occurred over a span of years. Faculty members have raised concerns about the decision to grow enrollment rather than to contract in the face of financial exigencies, to change admissions standards in light of declining enrollment, or to hire a Vice Chancellor of Finance and Administration during a hiring freeze and without a national search. The faculty, moreover, has raised concerns about the fact that Chancellor Leavitt and his administration have made many meaningful decisions without adequately consulting shared governance, treating it as a sounding board rather than a partner in decision-making.

Many faculty express the view that our institutional culture promotes a devaluation of shared governance. For some, this is expressed by an historical lack of transparency with regard to our institution’s financial health. For others, it is expressed by the ways in which our administration has been slow to respond to requests for information or to act on recommendations made by the Faculty Senate. Some faculty cite ways in which Faculty Senate policies or procedures have not been observed or implemented as evidence that the policies or procedures deriving from the faculty are not considered equal to those deriving from administrative bodies.

The faculty discussions of the confidence vote made clear that the faculty understand the challenges that face our university and others in the UW System. But the faculty also hold that good leadership is not unilateral. It takes a partnership. Many faculty expressed the hope that Chancellor Leavitt would see a no-confidence vote as an expression of genuine concern for the state and direction of the university and would not dismiss the concerns of the faculty but would rather renew his commitment to working with shared governance toward the well-being of the university.

ENTRY: 4-5-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I write to announce the results of the recent confidence vote in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt.

By majority vote the faculty has affirmed that it does not have confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt.

Here are the results in greater detail:

the ballot was circulated to 281 faculty members (which is the total number of eligible faculty) and of that number, 229 submitted a vote (229 is approximately 81% of faculty);
65 faculty (or 28% of the 229 total) responded “I DO have confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt”;
164 faculty (or 72% of the 229 total) responded “I DO NOT have confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt.”

The process for the referendum was determined through careful attention to Article 1 Section 6 of the Faculty Constitution, and the document delineating this process was discussed and approved by the Faculty Senate on 27 February and subsequently shared with the faculty. This document specified that the online ballot would be available to faculty from 26 March to 2 April and that the Faculty Senate Elections Committee would assess the results between 3 and 4 April, communicating those to the President of the Faculty Senate, who would announce the outcome of the vote to Chancellor Leavitt and the faculty on 5 April.

All steps of the process have been observed and the UWO Faculty Referendum Confidence Vote is now complete.

Next Steps

I have communicated the results to Chancellor Leavitt, and I hope to meet with him soon to discuss the concerns, comments, and suggestions that were voiced at the two open forums – on 8 and 15 March – held in advance of the voting period. Throughout this process, I have emphasized that the Faculty Senate remains committed to working with our administration to assist in meeting the many challenges that we face as a university community. It is my hope that we will embrace this moment as an opportunity to identify means of addressing the key issues that have informed the outcome of this confidence vote.

Yours sincerely,
Pascale Manning
Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 3-6-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to remind you that this Friday the Faculty Senate will host the first of two general faculty meetings about the confidence vote in the leadership of Chancellor Leavitt. The first forum will be held on Friday, March 8^th. The second will be held on Friday, March 15^th. Both meetings will be held between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. in Sage 1214.

As I noted in my March 1^st Faculty Senate update about the confidence vote, a hybrid meeting option will be arranged for the second of the two meetings and a link to that will be circulated at least one week in advance of March 15^th.

Given that Article 1 Section 6 of the Faculty Constitution specifies that “The Senate will draft the referendum proposal and will ordinarily distribute it to the faculty one month prior to the time at which a vote on the referendum is to be taken,” the secret ballot will be held online between Tuesday, March 26th and Tuesday, April 2nd. As the Faculty Constitution specifies, “Eligible voters for faculty referenda will be members of the faculty as defined in Article I (excluding those with limited appointment).”

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 3-1-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I write to provide the first of several updates on the work of the Faculty Senate. This email will focus exclusively on the Faculty Senate discussion and action regarding a confidence vote in the leadership of Chancellor Leavitt. A subsequent update will include details about Faculty Senate discussions about the Chancellor’s Discretionary Fund, the Restructuring process, and other ongoing Faculty Senate business.

Referendum: Confidence Vote

On Friday, February 16th, 2024, a petition addressed to Faculty Senate President Manning expressing a lack of confidence in Chancellor Leavitt’s leadership was shared with me. Having been signed by 74 faculty members (or approximately 23% of UWO’s faculty membership), this petition meets the requirement specified in Article 1 Section 6, “Faculty Referenda,” of the UWO Faculty Constitution for the provocation of a faculty referendum: “A referendum will also be held if one-tenth of the faculty, as defined in Article I as of Opening Day of the academic year (excluding those with limited appointments) petitions the Faculty Senate President to call for such a referendum.”

Having requested and been supplied with a full list of the membership of the faculty as of Opening Day, 2023, by the Office of Human Resources, I was, over the course of the following week, able to verify the validity of the petition signatures. Given that the President of the Faculty Senate is the only individual named in relation to such a petition in the Faculty Constitution, I have deemed it my responsibility to certify the validity of the signatures and have therefore not shared the signed petitions with any other UWO employee.

On Friday, February 23rd, 2024, I met with Chancellor Leavitt and Chief of Staff Alex Hummel to share draft versions of the process and resolution documents that had by then been composed by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, as well as the text of the petition, thus ensuring that the Chancellor was both aware of the Faculty Senate’s obligation to identify a mechanism to conduct a confidence vote in his leadership and that he was in possession of the same documents that would be shared with the Faculty Senate in advance of its next meeting.

At its meeting of 27 February, 2024, the Faculty Senate discussed the process by which UWO’s Faculty Senate will oversee a referendum on a confidence vote in the leadership of Chancellor Leavitt. Given that Article 1 Section 6 specifies that “The Senate will draft the referendum proposal,” the Faculty Senate discussed a document delineating the process for such a referendum as well as the language of the resolution. The Senate also discussed a letter from Chancellor Leavitt dated February 26th, 2024, addressed to Faculty Senate President Manning.

The Faculty Senate exercised its authority to suspend the rules and elevate a discussion item to an action item, and the language of the draft resolution was approved (23 Yes, 0 No, 1 Abstention), thus initiating the commencement of the referendum process.

As you will see if you read the referendum process document, the Faculty Senate will hold two general faculty meetings, on Friday, March 8th and Friday, March 15th. Both meetings will be held from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in Sage 1214. A hybrid meeting option will be arranged for the second of the two meetings and a link to that will be circulated at least one week in advance of March 15th. Given that Article 1 Section 6 of the Faculty Constitution specifies that “The Senate will draft the referendum proposal and will ordinarily distribute it to the faculty one month prior to the time at which a vote on the referendum is to be taken,” the secret ballot will be held online between Tuesday, March 26th and Tuesday, April 2nd. As the Faculty Constitution specifies, “Eligible voters for faculty referenda will be members of the faculty as defined in Article I (excluding those with limited appointment).”

I will send reminder emails about these Faculty-Senate hosted forums, and once the survey for the vote has been created, I will also update you all on the process for the secret ballot.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 1-16-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to share some encouraging news with you that I received this morning about the state of our Fall 2023-Spring 2024 retention rates. My goal in updating you on this score is to uphold our standard of clear communication about the state of our university, but I am also writing in the interest of empowering each instructor at this university to integrate valuable insight about our retention situation into their semester planning. Many of us oversee student organizations, interact with student athletes, and/or enjoy special relationships with students as their mentors; as such, we are uniquely positioned to access our students, both ahead of the semester and once it is underway. My expectation is that equipping us all with the following information further enables us to approach our current situation intentionally, even if it does not lead all of us to any specific action.

Amber Evans, Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management and Marketing, has set a Fall ’23 – Spring ’24 return-rate target of 92% for first-year students. This is based on last year’s Fall to Spring retention rate, so it represents the broad goal to avoid falling behind where we were last year. Of course, the ultimate goal is to continue to improve, but this is the target for this year. At present, the Oshkosh campus is at 88.8%, the Fond du Lac campus is at 82.4%, and the Fox Cities campus is at 81.2%. We have a list of 432 students whom we assume should be on a path to register for Spring 2024. This list is part of a detailed “re-enrolment report” that is guiding the steps being taken to reach our enrollment goals. AVC Evans is overseeing a team of staff who are reaching out as often and as aggressively as possible to this group of 432 students in order to determine what barriers might exist that are preventing them from registering. Here are a couple of examples to help us see how this group can be disaggregated: some of these students are scheduled to study abroad, so in those cases, there is a strong likelihood that the student will register but simply hasn’t gotten around to it. Some students have holds on their accounts. In all cases, these holds are being examined and, if possible, lifted. For instance, financial holds representing $1,500 or less are being lifted. In other words, there is a lot of work being done to connect with students and ease the path to registration. One population that is proving hard to track through our current systems is students who are under-registered (i.e., are registered but, for whatever reason, are not meeting their load threshold).

If we want to reach the 92% return-rate goal, then we need no fewer than 96 students to register. Of course, we should hope for all 432, but those 96 students are critical. I hope that, like me, you will all feel encouraged by this information, as it demonstrates how close we are to our goal, but now is the time – if the opportunity arises – to help with the final push. Now is the time to encourage our students to continue to choose UWO.

I wish you all well as you negotiate this cold stretch. I will be sending another update soon, but I wanted to focus exclusively on retention and enrollment in this message.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 12-13-2023

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to let you know that the Board of Regents will meet again today (5pm) for a special meeting on the State Funding Proposal. The meeting notice is attached here, and the following link takes you to the resolution being considered (12-12-2023):

https://www.wisconsin.edu/regents/download/meeting_materials/2023_meeting_materials/Meeting-Book—Special-Board-of-Regents-Meeting-(December-13,-2023).pdf?utm_source=WisPolitics.com%2FWisBusiness.com&utm_campaign=74828a3125-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_12_12_10_45&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-74828a3125-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

I was in attendance at the Board of Regents meeting last week. This link will take you to a statement co-written on Friday by the majority of the Faculty Representatives, including myself, in response to the resolution that was circulated on Friday and discussed (and voted down) by the Regents on Saturday. This link will take you to that resolution (12-08-2023). Our statement was read at that meeting on Saturday by Regent Kyle Weatherly (Chair of the Education Committee). I share these documents in the interest of providing you all with further context for today’s important BoR meeting.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 11-16-2023

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with a Faculty Senate update on four specific points, each of which is in its own way time-sensitive.

Registration and Enrollment:

At the Chancellor’s Leadership Council meeting on Monday, Amber Evans (AVC for Enrollment Management and Marketing) provided us with an update delineating the current state of registration and our enrollment projections for next fall. I’m pleased to be able to communicate that we are up by 18% on students already admitted for Fall 2024.

We do, however, need to keep our attention focused on retention from Fall 2023 to Spring 2024. Registration this semester began a week later than it has in past years, which means that we are currently best positioned to evaluate registration trends amongst juniors and seniors. While we have not, as a faculty community, always received detailed updates about the state of registration at this point in the semester, we do this year know that this group is lagging somewhat behind the ideal registration pattern. I am writing to ask all of us to check in with our students prior to Thanksgiving, reminding them of the importance of registering now. I would also suggest that those of us with advisees check our Advisor Center to verify whether our advisees have holds on their accounts. Departmental holds are just one of a number of possible holds that can function as a barrier to registration, and we are all empowered to discover whether our advisees have holds on their accounts and communicate with them if we uncover a problem.

Students who register before Thanksgiving are more likely to return the following semester. I know how busy we all are, but I hope we can all take a moment — in whatever way makes sense — to check in with our students. If this means navigating to Titan Web in class to show students where they can see a record of existing holds or whether it means talking more casually about their plans, if we all participate in the effort, I’m sure we can make a difference.

December Commencement:

The mid-year commencement ceremony is planned for December 16^th at 10am. As of this writing, that’s 29 days, 23 hours, 22 minutes, and 49 seconds away! As usual, the ceremony will be held in Kolf Sports Center, and as usual, we need many volunteers to make this event successful and special for our students (or future alumni) and their families (which potentially include future students). I realize that we are all very busy, but I hope that many faculty will fill out the form to join the faculty and academic staff processional. We need 100 volunteers to make the event happen, so if you’re willing to put your name forward, you can sign up to volunteer here. This link will take you to the commencement page, which includes event details and useful links for graduating students (as well as an amazing massive countdown clock, which gives me a sense of the sublime).

USP Listening Session:

On Monday, the Faculty Senate hosted a listening session about the USP, which was very well attended and resulted in a highly productive conversation. The Word document I circulated in advance of this meeting is still available to you, so if you have comments, concerns, ideas, questions (etc.) about the USP or general education more broadly that you would like to register, please feel free to continue to add to that document. I’m delighted to be able to communicate that the Faculty Senate is partnering with the Provost to create a committee devoted to discussing the future of our USP. You will soon receive an email from Provost Martini soliciting expressions of interest in serving on this committee, whose membership will also be delineated, and the Faculty Senate will work with the Provost and USP Director Kim Rivers to help get this committee up and running. Here is a link to the OneDrive folder containing the above-mentioned USP Word document, where I will also share a document detailing the themes of Monday’s conversation. That new file will be available by end-of-business on Friday.

Pay Plan:

As we are all aware, Governor Evers has decided to sue the Legislature for its decision to hold back compensation for 41,000 employees that has been signed into law and is being held in reserve. Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman has encouraged all shared governance representatives, and by extension, all university employees, to talk with their friends, their neighbours, their legislators (everyone!) about how wrong this withholding of approved monies is. This is true for all employees, but it is especially urgent for those who live paycheck to paycheck at a time of high inflation. Please remember, however, that as state employees, we may not use university resources to contact legislators to advocate for the university; we may not contact legislators during our working hours (without ensuring that time off is accounted for). Bear in mind also that employees are encouraged to focus on their own representatives. With this in mind, I here share a list of legislators that can be organized by district. Here is a map of the districts (assembly, senate, and congressional). Here is a link to a copy of an email sent by President Rothman to all shared governance representatives; it includes a sample of messaging points tailored to various audiences. Here again is a link to the PowerPoint slides — focused on state disinvestment — that I shared with you in an earlier communication.

As I told the Faculty Senate in my recent President’s report, the current timeline projections about the Governor’s lawsuit are the following: because Governor Evers filed a lawsuit directly to the Supreme Court, that body is in the process of hearing arguments as to why it should accept the case; if it does, the case will be litigated over the next few months; if there is a favourable judgement for us, that would likely occur in June; and it is not clear from this vantage whether our Pay Plan raise would be distributed on a retroactive basis or whether it would be distributed from that day going forward.

In closing, I would like to express my gratitude to all those who attended Monday’s listening session and to all my colleagues for your energy and commitment at such a difficult time. I realize that these communications from me are long at a time when we are all taken up with pressing responsibilities in teaching, scholarship, and service, but I hope that they are also informative. As ever, if there are matters you think the Faculty Senate should consider, I hope you will not hesitate to let me or your Senator(s) know.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 11-3-2023

Dear Colleagues,

I’m writing to share an update on the work of the Faculty Senate over the past few weeks. Since ourmeeting agendasare posted to the Faculty Senate website, and since some of my report will include references to work done by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) outside of Senate meetings, I will permit myself in this email to provide a cumulative report rather than one that moves from each individual meeting agenda to the next. Please note that this report is not exhaustive; my objective is to provide an overview of the matters most likely to be of pressing concern to faculty. As ever, if you have questions regarding any individual item or issue mentioned here, please feel free to email me or seek out your Faculty Senaterepresentative. Hyperlinks in this email will either take you to the relevant document in One Drive or to a relevant website. In some cases, these links will take you to a document I’ve already shared in the intervening weeks since my last Update. I share them here again in the interest of simplicity.

Institutional Realignment Plan & Restructuring

On 3 October the Chancellor circulated a draft IRP update to Shared Governance leadership. This document included a narrative broadly describing the causes of the current deficit, the parameters guiding the plan for the “reduction in force,” and a timeline for the layoff notification process; in addition, it included an institutional summary of the “reduction in force,” designed to provide a bird’s eye view of the budgetary reductions by employee class and by division (thus protecting employee privacy). This was shared with a request to submit feedback by end-of-business on 5 October. Each governance body duly submittedcomments, questions, and suggestions,which I subsequently compiled and shared with Senators. I share those comments here both to recognize the often invisible work being done across all Governance bodies to identify and articulate questions and make suggestions in this moment of rapid change and to make apparent the ways in which Shared Governance is being included in the discussion. Since then, updates from the Chancellor, Provost, and Chief of Staff during weekly Shared Governance Conference meetings, as well as updated documents, have provided answers to many of our questions, and a series ofTown Hall presentationsthis past week have provided us all with the most granular representation of the changes enforced by the cuts that we have yet had. Indeed, in response to a discussion at the Faculty Senate meeting of 17 October, Provost Martini suggested that he provide Senate with a presentation and the opportunity for robust Q&A at its 31 October meeting, previewing the week’s subsequent Town Hall presentations. The slides he shared with Faculty Senate can be foundhere.

Senate Actions

Pausing Assessment:Following a suggestion made at the September meeting of the Faculty Senate to pause assessments during this period of restructuring, the FSEC communicated with Charlie Hill, Associate Vice Chancellor, Curricular Affairs & Student Academic Achievement, to inquire into the feasibility of temporarily pausing 7-year Program Reviews as well as internal Program Outcomes Assessments. On 5 October, the Provost communicated to campus that his office will grant a one-year extension for 7-year Program Reviews, and later in October, AVC Hill wrote to chairs and directors who have Program Outcomes Assessments due this year to give them the option to postpone their assessment reports until the 2024-2025 academic year. In both cases, the pause is optional. Committee Charges: All chairs of Faculty Senate committees have received a Committee Information Form and a request that they work with their membership to provide Senate with a description of their committee’s purpose that accounts for the existing description inGov 3 but provides updates to register any way in which that description is either out of step with the actual work of the committee in recent years or is no longer relevant. Where possible, this has been the extent of the “charge” suggested to Faculty Senate Committees for this semester. The Senate expects to hear committee reports in upcoming meetings, and I will update the faculty on those next time. Policy: Following detailed responses from Mark Clements, Assistant Vice Chancellor of Information Technology, to questions that arose during a discussion on 17 October, Senate voted on 31 October to approve the university’s new Data Governance Policy.Dual Enrollment: At the Shared Governance Representatives meeting in Madison on 22 September, Johannes Britz, UW System Interim Senior Vice President for Academic & Student Affairs, communicated to Faculty Representatives the Board of Regents’ goal to expand dual enrollment to enable Wisconsin high school students to graduate with 30 university credits. In response, our Faculty Senate has unanimously endorseda letter to Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman and members of the Board of Regentsthat requests the implementation of key guardrails to protect the quality of our educational product.

Listening Sessions and Public Discussions

Open Listening Session:As I communicated on 26 October — in sharing theOne Drive foldercontaining notes from the open listening session, a PPT presentation, and a Word file for anonymized comments and concerns — I distributed the listening session notes to Chancellor Leavitt, Provost Martini, and Chief of Staff Alex Hummel in order that they might inform the Town Hall presentations planned for this week (slides linked above). A number of faculty have entered comments and questions in the Word file (and I thank them), and it is my hope that you will continue to use this space to voice the issues you would like me and my Faculty Senate colleagues to raise with the administration and discuss amongst ourselves.OSG Town Hall:Along with Karl Boehler, President of the Academic Staff Senate, and Danielle Juan, President of the University Staff Senate, I was invited to represent the Faculty Senate at the Oshkosh Student Government Town Hall this past Wednesday. Following a presentation given by Chancellor Leavitt and Provost Martini, and supplemented by Erin Grisham, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, students were given the opportunity to ask questions. Many students testified to intense distress at losing valued members of their local support system, asking pointed questions about the impact of the layoffs and VRIOP on those positions facing, reflecting, and serving the LGBTQ+ community, students of color, working-class and first-generation students, etc. In addition, one student spoke forcefully in communicating that some of their distress in this moment is coming from faculty behavior in the classroom. Both sets of concerns were distressing to me and my Shared Governance colleagues; we did our best to respond by reassuring students that faculty and staff will strive to provide them with the forms of support they need, with the “safe” spaces they crave, and with opportunities to enable them to communicate ways in which the cuts might be leaving their needs unmet. In addition, we stressed the faculty commitment to protecting the excellence of their education.

I realize that this has been a very difficult month for all of us. I hope that this communication finds you entering a restorative weekend.

Yours,

Pascale M. Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 10-2-2023

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to you to offer updates about the work of the Faculty Senate, both in the month of August after the deficit announcement to our community and since the beginning of the semester. Please contact your Senator(s) for further detail on any of the information included here or visit me during my posted office hours, and I will be happy to elaborate where possible.

August:

As I shared with the Faculty Senate in my President’s Report at our first meeting on September 19th, shared governance leaders from all three governance groups were informed on August 2nd of the coming announcement about the university’s structural deficit; following that, we attended regular meetings with the Chancellor, as well as the Provost, in which we had opportunities to weigh in with comments, concerns, and suggestions about plans for institutional contraction. The Faculty Senate Executive Committee prepared a memorandum, which we circulated to the Chancellor on August 14th, that requested detailed budgetary data, advocated for a more progressive furlough plan, offered suggestions on how to avoid an across-the-board courseload increase, and asked questions about the administration’s plan for IAS contract nonrenewals.

While our suggestions about the furlough structure did result in a more equitable taxation progression, we have not yet received the budgetary data we requested, though we have been assured as recently as this past week that it is forthcoming. Additionally, while Provost Martini has expressed his commitment to our institution’s future as a research-enhanced comprehensive, we were not successful in provoking a granular discussion of either the current courseload increase or the methods by which IAS contract nonrenewals are being decided.

Prior to its distribution to our university community, the Chancellor also circulated the draft form of the Institutional Realignment Plan to shared governance leadership, and we were able to ask clarifying questions and make suggestions before it was widely shared in its current form.

September:

The Faculty Senate has met once so far this semester, on September 19th. In my President’s Report, I was able to provide Senate with unofficial 10-day census numbers delineating the state of our enrollment and our retention rates, which Amber Evans, our Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management and Marketing, supplied at a Provost Administrative Staff meeting that morning. I reported on the August 22nd Board of Regents meeting, at which shared governance representatives heard about UW System university budgets and learned that, in addition to the current structural deficits reshaping UW Oshkosh, UW Parkside, and UW Platteville, 10 of the 13 UW universities are currently projecting a structural deficit for 2023-2024. I noted that UW System Administration has hired the consultancy firm Deloitte to audit System universities’ structural deficits and to work with those schools to address their deficits and reduce their future reliance on tuition balances. I updated Senators on the status of the Pay Plan, and informed them that on September 8th I had been interviewed on PBS’s “Here & Now” to discuss the situation at UWO and state disinvestment in the UW System. And I asked Senators to consider requesting that a Faculty Senate update be included as a standing item on their department meeting agendas.

The Senate welcomed Provost Martini as its guest, and he provided us with a report that offered financial background for the current workforce reduction process in which he detailed UWO’s decreased revenues and increased expenses, broke down the structural deficit by fund, and detailed the Institutional Realignment Plan. He also updated the Senate on his ongoing work to finalize the membership for his Academic Planning Group, which will soon be announced to the university community. He offered detailed responses to Senator questions.

The Senate addressed itself to two discussion items, beginning with a statement entitled “Expectations for Collaboration,” which was prepared by two Senators and circulated to the Senate in advance of our first meeting in order to allow for comments to inform its final shape. This document is addressed to both Chancellor Leavitt and Provost Martini and requests a response by October 1st, 2023. In our discussion, Senators expressed: frustration regarding a lack of communication about UWO’s financial health leading up to the announcement about the structural deficit; frustration that faculty no longer feel that they occupy the job into which they were hired; the belief that the university’s current situation was foreseeable; concerns about the role and perceived value of shared governance — especially in light of the considerable labor expended on policy documents last year, which process was in some cases not informed by clear communication from the administration; concerns about how to promote transparency between the administration and shared governance to enable collaborative work; concerns that the administration does not value the teacher-scholar model; concerns about protecting the university’s commitment to the liberal arts; and concerns that the university should uphold the values stated in UWO’s Strategic Plan. Senators voted to suspend the rules and elevate this discussion item to an action item, and in the subsequent vote on whether to endorse the document and share it with the Chancellor and Provost, it passed unanimously.

The second discussion item considered by the Senate was titled “Faculty Senate Essential Offices Working Document.” This document was prepared by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) in response to discussions between shared governance leadership and the administration and identifies three programs and/or offices directly involved in student academic success and/or student retention that Senators felt might be at particular risk in the process of workforce reduction. Senators discussed the document’s function to advocate for programs and positions that can be shown to be directly connected to our academic mission and thus within the Senate’s purview. We discussed that it intentionally does not aim to provide a panoramic perspective on the university as a whole and its many essential offices, programs, and positions, but rather that its authors hoped that in focusing more narrowly, the document might meaningfully inform decisions that could affect student academic success and retention. An objection to the document’s narrow focus was voiced, and it was agreed that subsequent work might be pursued to provide a more encompassing recommendation. In the awareness that time is of the essence during this period of rapid decision-making, Senators voted once again to suspend the rules and elevate this discussion item to an action item, and it was passed by a strong majority in the subsequent vote.

Following the meeting, I shared both of these FS-endorsed documents with the Chancellor (including the Provost on the former). And as the deadline for the “Expectations for Collaboration” statement was today, I am here sharing the response I have this morning received from Chancellor Leavitt.

Going Forward:

The Senate meets again this Tuesday, and we will be joined by AVC Evans, who will discuss her assessments and plans regarding enrollment and marketing. I will provide a report on the business of this meeting in my next communication, in late October.

I know that we are all awaiting the enactment of the next steps in the workforce reduction and restructuring, and I would like to take this opportunity to state unequivocally that I am in solidarity with all of my colleagues, and especially with those valued colleagues who are facing layoff and nonrenewal. The processes by which our university is being reshaped will require robust faculty engagement and response, and I look forward to continuing to work with the Faculty Senate, shared governance leadership, and university administration in ensuring that we do all we can to provide a platform for faculty engagement and, by these means, protect the university we will inherit as a result of these changes.

Respectfully,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

2023-2024 - Senate President, Dr. Pascale Manning

President’s Blog (2023-2024)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Pascale Manning

ENTRY: 8-8-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I have hesitated until now to write to the faculty as a whole out of a sense that many or most of us need to be allowed to focus on our research and preparatory work in the summer months (as well as families, friends, rest…etc.). But it’s time now for me to reach out with updates covering work and conversations of the past two months. As ever, this will be detailed (and fairly long) but not exhaustive, so feel free to respond to me if you have questions. The Provost will be sending out an update to the campus community shortly, so this is also just the first of a number of messages that you can expect to receive about the work of the past weeks.

June:

On June 13^th the Academic Planning Executive Team held its first meeting. These meetings provide opportunities for stakeholders (including shared governance representatives) to receive updates and ask questions about ongoing implementation work being done across the various Operational Implementation Teams.

Following that first meeting, I invited all 55 program directors and chairs to come together to discuss the work facing the implementation workgroups, with the goal of allowing representatives of the faculty to raise and discuss questions, concerns, or suggestions about the work ahead. The goal was to create an opportunity for a group of representatives to come together for a productive conversation – to share ideas, etc. – but I also wanted to ensure that I was equipped to represent faculty perspectives as broadly as possible at Executive Team (and other) meetings over the summer.

Attendance at the July 2 meeting was excellent, and the conversation was far-ranging. Prior to the meeting I had shared a list of questions or issue categories that I thought we might touch on (because I thought people might have questions, concerns, and/or suggestions about them):

the timeline and process for finalizing “areas” and determining their scope as governance units (i.e., what is an “area” responsible for and what is it not responsible for)
where the first and second level of review for renewal, tenure, and promotion will be housed (e.g., area + school?)
the function of area or school bylaws to uphold faculty as subject-area experts in personnel and curriculum decisions
whether we plan to use bylaws templates to determine what belongs or doesn’t belong in bylaws and ensure relative uniformity across bylaws for areas, schools, and colleges
how existing relevant Faculty Senate committees will be integrated into the restructure implementation process
whether the administration will entertain the possibility of retaining the “department” and “chair” nomenclature.

In the end, the conversation touched productively on most of the above, coalescing around key themes:

We need to work more intentionally to build trust between faculty and administration, in both directions.
We need more evidence of the administration seeking out the faculty as proven creative problem solvers.
We need greater clarity on how the complex array of administrative, advising, and recruitment work currently being done by chairs during the summer is going to be covered in the new system.
We want to be involved in finalizing the roles and responsibilities in the PD for area coordinators.
We need concrete and universally applicable guidelines on the service equivalencies for cancelled classes.
We are not persuaded by the arguments that have so far been offered for nomenclature changes. We can embrace change (transforming our definition of what a “department” consists of or what a “chair” does) without having to adopt new terminology that prioritizes an inward-facing perspective over the institution’s outward-facing legibility.

The Provost was very responsive to the concerns that had been raised, especially those focused on a burgeoning sense that the implementation process was not adequately participative and transparent and that the delay in engaging the chairs and program directors would forestall our ability to approach coming decisions iteratively. He stressed that decisions had not been made and that faculty involvement was an inviolable necessity in the implementation process.

As you know, in a July 17 Academic Planning Implementation Update, the Provost clarified that there were unexpected delays in the process of populating and operationalizing the Teams (caused in part by the significant labor involved in producing the Academic Unit Realignment Proposal for the August Board of Regents meeting).

Subsequently, the work of peopling and charging overtly faculty-facing Teams accelerated (e.g., Research Enhanced), but in the interest of drawing on the knowledge and energy of a broad array of faculty representatives, the administration revised its vision of how the work of the Curriculum and Administrative Restructuring workgroups would be done. Instead of selecting a few chairs or program directors for each team, it was decided that we would hold two full-day workshops organized around themes and tasks, to which chairs and program directors (as well as the President and President-Elect of the Faculty Senate) would all be invited.

July:

The July 31 workshop was organized around the themes of Experiential Learning, Program Array Opportunities, and Reimagining in the New Academic Structure. You will find the documents that were shared at that meeting here, including the meeting agenda.

The day was structured around a series of goal-oriented conversations ranging in scope, sometimes focused more narrowly at the school level and at other times focused more broadly at the college level.

I will offer a necessarily partial representation of some of the questions and comments that arose in discussion. I am only one person and cannot hope to represent the diverse and energetic conversation that took place across six tables over the whole day, so what follows is just a snapshot, but I wanted to provide you all with a sense of the discussions that characterized the day.

What types of experiential learning are already taking place for students in your new school? What characteristics of engaged learning and/or integrative learning are present? How is this work and its goals, values & mission communicated to internal and external audiences? (This conversation was facilitated by Professors Jennifer Considine and Tracy Slagter.)

We built upon the existing database enumerating each school’s array of experiential learning options, from community-based learning to practicums to internships to exhibitions to clubs to specific capstone courses or course elements to study abroad, etc.
We discussed the value of distinguishing experiential learning from skill-building that is foundational to performing certain work.
We discussed the importance to experiential learning of fostering reflection and metacognition in our students, distinguishing between providing students with wonderful experiences in university and fostering an environment in which they are urged to intentionally reflect on the skills, knowledges, habits of mind, etc., being developed by the experience.
Note that our discussions were informed by the list of nine high impact practices (HIPs) that you will find in the OneDrive folder.
Each table (representing a school) produced a set of notes on an Asset and Gap Mapping document designed to clarify our existing resources for building a shared culture around experiential learning and any perceived gaps.

The second prompt, “What opportunities exist in the new structure for increased interdisciplinarity and/or to remove barriers or simplify student navigation of programs?” was facilitated by Interim AVC Caroline Geary and produced more school- and college-specific discussions, so instead of offering notes, I will pan out and turn to the question that was posed to the entire group as the day wound down. We were asked to report out by school 1 good outcome of the day’s work, 1 example of a lingering issue, and 1 example of what the wider university community should know about the day’s work and outcomes.

1 Good Outcome Report-outs

emphasized a feeling of optimism about the opportunities for collaboration and innovation that were beginning to come into focus as well as their support for the goal to foreground and support experiential learning.

1 Issue or Concern Report-outs

noted that it will be challenging to build relationships between areas and programs, and that we will need to be very intentional about building the necessary cross-disciplinary awareness to support the process, but emphasized that this is something we should have been doing more prior to this moment;
expressed concern about how creating larger areas will affect student advising, especially for high-touch programs with highly functional advising structures in place;
noted that we will need open communication as we undergo the process of simplifying our program array as well as the administration’s ongoing pledge to achieve this without instituting faculty cuts.

1 Example of What to Broadcast to the Community Report-outs

every decision has not yet been made; we are giving input; the outcome is not predetermined;
we leave this meeting with a sense of emergent optimism; we are hopeful that an improved and sustainable university can emerge from this restructure;
the necessary work is underway and is being initiated by your trusted colleagues, who are being actively engaged in the process;
the administration welcomes genuine collaboration: we are mapping our next steps together;
we are actively rebuilding collegiality in our new, expanded institution;
we have reason to be excited about the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration that will be central to our new structure.

August:

The August 5 workshop was organized around the four administrative elements of academic restructuring: school mission and vision, the role of areas and area coordinators, tenure and promotion, and bylaws. You will find the documents that were distributed at that meeting here.

Again, the day’s conversations were nuanced, so these notes are simply to provide a very broad survey of some issues, concerns, questions, and/or suggestions that came up.

Areas and Area Coordinators

How do we work to ensure that we understand each others’ programs?
How might we go about sharing effective systems (e.g., advising trackers) to mobilize existing efficiencies to support our programs?
How will we help area coordinators to understand and manage the front-end work that goes into supporting our programs to ensure, to give just one example, that high-touch programs do not lose the benefits of our current system?
How will we go about reducing program emphases to simplify and streamline program pathways?
Might we consider moving committees that currently exist at the department level to the school level rather than retaining them at the area level?
How will we go about delegating work currently done by chairs that requires expertise or specific department-level knowledge (e.g., coordinating events, managing equipment, etc.) without overburdening department members or DAs?
Who will be responsible to oversee the faculty evaluation process? How might it be handled at the area level, enabling the School Directors to enter the information without having to oversee the process?

Renewal, Tenure, Promotion, and Annual Reviews

We should be guided by a shared sense of what problem(s) we are trying to solve as we review and alter our existing policies. For instance, a problem might be a lack of uniformity across the institution in how policies are implemented and/or a lack of uniformity in expectations for renewal, tenure, and promotion, as well as annual reviews.
- We need rubrics that establish clear expectations. For example, might we consider creating a single set of expectations by school into which individual disciplines might enter discipline-specific guidelines?
We should establish clear expectations for service, recognizing both potential imbalances in how service is valued and that some service is less visible but no less important.
We need to establish whether evidence of ‘leadership’ is expected.
We need to revise our system for peer teaching evaluations, ensuring that our culture allows evaluations to include specific and constructive feedback (without incentivizing evaluators to look for problems), ensuring that we are consistent about what materials inform the evaluations (e.g., syllabi, assignment sheets, etc.), and ensuring that all areas of the university have a process for evaluating both face-to-face and online offerings.
We need to determine (perhaps by policy) next steps if the initial level of review denies renewal, tenure, or promotion.
We should avoid one-size-fits-all benchmarks (e.g., establishing an agreed-upon scale of measure).
We should revise and reconfirm UWO-level policies on renewal, tenure, promotion, post-tenure review, annual review, faculty workload, and teaching evaluations.
We need detailed discussions about where the first level of review should reside in light of concerns about diminishing content-area expertise input, and we should discuss the make-up of a possible school-level committee (e.g., 1 faculty member chosen by the candidate + 4 faculty from distinct disciplines in the school).

Bylaws

Professor Nathan Stuart (FS President-Elect and longtime chair of the Faculty Senate Constitution and Bylaws Committee) offered some opening comments that provided the group with guidelines about the purpose of bylaws. To summarize, in writing bylaws, the goal should be to simplify. Rather than providing details in the bylaws themselves, refer to relevant policies or committees, and then a) adhere to those policy guidelines and b) enter specific committee information in Committee Information Forms, which allows for greater flexibility in making future changes. Bylaws are not meant to correct the errors or transgressions of the past or to house information that should be in policy documents (which should be revisited regularly to ensure they are up to date). It is our responsibility to hold ourselves accountable to our own policies.

Conversations focused on the arguments for keeping bylaws at the area level or doing away with area-level bylaws in favor of school-level bylaws.

1 Good Outcome Report-outs

expressed positivity about school-level committees facilitating our goal to know and understand each other through our governance process;
noted that the atmosphere across the day’s conversations was characterized by a willingness to be flexible and a collective goal to address issues and find solutions;

1 Issue or Concern Report-outs

expressed concern about what our new committee structure will look like;
expressed concern that we still lack clarity about what an area is (what it’s responsible for), how many areas we will have, and what an area coordinator does;
expressed concern that we still don’t have a clear sense of how key day-to-day work will be done (by chairs, etc.);
expressed concern that inevitable summer work will not be compensated;
expressed concern that we need more conversations about recruitment and retention.

1 Example of What to Broadcast to the Community Report-outs

emphasized that there is a lot of work to be done but that the pieces are falling into place;
emphasized that similar answers to common questions were arrived at across different groups, which cohesion shows how often we are aligned;
emphasized that we will need to strive to assume that people are driven by good intentions and bear in mind that as things will change rapidly, we should give each other a lot of grace.

Whew! What a long report. If you’re here – thank you for bearing with me (2,500 words later).

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-16-2024

Dear Colleagues,

Context

The timeline + appendices can be found here. The “Salary Equity Process Technical Document – Faculty” is Appendix A of that document, and it specifies

that “The equity process will be overseen by the Faculty Salary Equity Technical Committee,” which will “work with OIR and/or Human Resources to ensure that the equity process described below is implemented properly,” and
that “90% of the mean CUPA salary for every faculty based on rank and discipline in the appropriate comparison group” shall be used as a benchmark for salary adjustment calculations.

While the Faculty Senate Executive Committee was apprised on January 9, 2024,

that our internal implementation procedure, which is detailed in the “Salary Equity Process Technical Document – Faculty” (2023) had not been followed (namely, that our Faculty Senate Compensation Committee had not been asked to form a Technical Committee to check the correctness of the calculations produced by Human Resources) prior to the official notification of affected faculty on January 8, 2024, and
that the calculations had been undertaken by UW HR rather than UWO HR, we were not aware until later, once I had had an opportunity to meet with UWO faculty who are subject-area experts, that UW HR had used 90% of the CUPA median with ± 2 standard deviations rather than 90% of the unfiltered CUPA mean to calculate the salary adjustments. I informed the Chancellor and his Chief of Staff of this issue on January 18, 2024.

The Problem

There are two primary issues at stake. These are:

that a longstanding faculty-generated process document, which was produced by the Faculty Senate Compensation Committee and had been revised by that committee in 2022-2023, then discussed and approved by the Faculty Senate in the spring of 2023 and subsequently endorsed by the Chancellor in September 2023, was not followed by either UWO HR or UW HR, which raises concerns about the extent to which policies and procedures authored by shared governance are perceived to be legitimate and locally binding, and
that the use of 90% of the CUPA median (filtered for ± 2 standard deviations) rather than 90% of the CUPA mean (unfiltered) results in fewer faculty members receiving “parity” salary adjustments (this is the term used by our administration, but the term is “equity” in the Technical Document).

Proposed Solutions

Fewer faculty received pay increases than would have been the case had our Technical Document been followed.
Some faculty receive more than the UWO procedure would have determined.
Some faculty received less than the UWO procedure would have determined.

Overall, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and members of the Compensation Committee provided the following input between February and early May:

that we are grateful to the Chancellor for his diligence in advocating on behalf of faculty to UW System to establish the Discretionary Fund in the first place as well as for his willingness to find a solution to the issue that benefits faculty;
that the proposed solution would mean adding money to the original fund (of $487,352.20) by an estimated $72,000.00, and that this action might be deemed irresponsible in light of our institution’s current financial circumstances and our recent, and very painful, process of layoffs, non-renewals, and early retirements;
and that bringing those who had been under-remunerated – when the calculation uses 90% of the unfiltered CUPA mean – while leaving in place those adjustments resulting from a calculation using 90% of the CUPA median with ± 2 standard deviations serves to enshrine a mistaken imbalance in how the equity monies were disbursed and how affected salaries will be adjusted going forward.

Current Status

Mistakes were made which originate in HR’s failure to use an existing process document and interact directly, as that document specifies, with subject-area experts in the faculty to ensure the correctness of all calculations;
The process of obtaining the unfiltered data and finalizing next steps was very slow, causing meaningful delays in enabling the Compensation Committee’s Technical Committee to produce the calculations according to the parameters detailed in our Technical Document and in implementing an equitable solution;
Senate recommendations did not ultimately inform decisions made by our senior administration;
Senate requests for an apology from UWO HR – both to the Faculty Senate and to the faculty at large, showing accountability by acknowledging mistakes while also, ideally, expressing a determination to engage, where appropriate, with shared governance going forward – have yet to be fulfilled;
Members of the Faculty Senate have expressed the concern that the proposed solution ratifies the idea that shared governance is not being allowed to help move the needle in decision-making.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-15-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to communicate the results of the recent Faculty Senate elections for the position of President-Elect and for the open seats on the Executive Committee.

Context

Election Results

On behalf of the Faculty Senate, I want to thank Senators Stuart, Wagoner, Kreider, Fuller, and Schmitt for their willingness to serve in these important roles.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-6-2024

Dear Colleagues,

Background:

As a result, a series of academic year schedules were calculated and approved. Here are the ones relevant to our present and near future:

FY24 – Full Academic Year 23/24 – 8/28/2023 – 5/24/2024
- Fall 23 (98 days) 8/28/23 – 1/10/24
- Spring 24 (97 days) 1/11/24 – 5/24/24
FY25 – Full Academic Year 24/25 – August 26, 2024 – May 23, 2025
- Fall 24 (98 days) 8/26/24 – 1/8/2025
- Spring 25 (97 days) 1/9/2025 – 5/23/2025

*These dates are now posted to the Academic Calendar.

The issue:

The second issue pertains to how contract end dates affect those who have submitted resignations. Here is a brief summary of the topics we discussed at the Senate:

HR Support for Questions about Health Coverage, Email Accounts, etc.: If you have questions about anything connected to your contract, please reach out to your College or Area Generalist. Here is a list that was shared with me:
- CON – Molly Henry
- COB – Kenzie Lingel
- COLS – Abby Klueckmann
- COEHS – Candace Ebert
Email Deadline: Our email accounts are connected to our contract. As a result of that, those faculty and IAS who resign will typically see their email addressess shut off on or directly after the specified contract end date. This spring, that means that emails will be shut off at end-of-business on May 24th.

Extending the contract end-date: Resignees are empowered to negotiate later contract end dates if some form of summer compensation is already in place (e.g., an administrative assignment, an ongoing grant, etc.).

I hope this information is useful. As ever, please let me know if you have any further questions and I will endeavour to find answers.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 4-12-2024

UWO Faculty Senate
Summary – Confidence Vote Open Forums

ENTRY: 4-5-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I write to announce the results of the recent confidence vote in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt.

By majority vote the faculty has affirmed that it does not have confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt.

Here are the results in greater detail:

the ballot was circulated to 281 faculty members (which is the total number of eligible faculty) and of that number, 229 submitted a vote (229 is approximately 81% of faculty);
65 faculty (or 28% of the 229 total) responded “I DO have confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt”;
164 faculty (or 72% of the 229 total) responded “I DO NOT have confidence in the leadership of Chancellor Andrew Leavitt.”

All steps of the process have been observed and the UWO Faculty Referendum Confidence Vote is now complete.

Next Steps

Yours sincerely,
Pascale Manning
Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 3-6-2024

Dear Colleagues,

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 3-1-2024

Dear Colleagues,

Referendum: Confidence Vote

I will send reminder emails about these Faculty-Senate hosted forums, and once the survey for the vote has been created, I will also update you all on the process for the secret ballot.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 1-16-2024

Dear Colleagues,

I wish you all well as you negotiate this cold stretch. I will be sending another update soon, but I wanted to focus exclusively on retention and enrollment in this message.

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 12-13-2023

Dear Colleagues,

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 11-16-2023

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing with a Faculty Senate update on four specific points, each of which is in its own way time-sensitive.

Registration and Enrollment:

December Commencement:

USP Listening Session:

Pay Plan:

Yours,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 11-3-2023

Dear Colleagues,

Institutional Realignment Plan & Restructuring

Senate Actions

Listening Sessions and Public Discussions

I realize that this has been a very difficult month for all of us. I hope that this communication finds you entering a restorative weekend.

Yours,

Pascale M. Manning

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 10-2-2023

Dear Colleagues,

August:

September:

Going Forward:

Respectfully,

Pascale Manning

Faculty Senate President

2022-2023 - Senate President, Dr. Jennifer Szydlik

President’s Blog (2022-2023)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Jennifer Szydlik

ENTRY: 5-15-2023

The Faculty Senate passed three important policies this spring. If they are adopted by Chancellor Leavitt, they will be in effect next year.

The Policy on Extending Faculty Voting Rights to Instructional and University Staff requires departments that wish to have their Instructional Academic Staff vote for department chair to have their faculty Tenure and Renewal Committee evaluate and recommend appointment/non-reappointment of those IAS. This solves two problems. First, it eliminates any conflict of interest that IAS have in voting for the person who recommends them annually for reappointment. Second, it provides a robust evaluation process for IAS, and one that is more aligned with the evaluation process for the faculty.

The Policy on Faculty Evaluation Criteria allows all tenured faculty to choose where to focus their work and therefore the criteria by which that work is evaluated as often as every four years. The UW Colleges (UWC) promotion criteria and Oshkosh college and departmental criteria (OSH) serve as our initial two evaluation pathways because these are the criteria under which the faculty were hired. For example, a tenured faculty member might decide to use OSH criteria requiring peer-reviewed outcomes for four years after tenure and be promoted to Full Professor under those criteria — and then they might choose to select the broader, more flexible promotion UWC criteria that embrace (but do not require) peer-reviewed outcomes for the next four years and be evaluated for Professorial Productivity Salary Increase (PPSI) under those criteria. This effort also ensures that the production of peer-reviewed outcomes is supported. Tenured faculty members who choose OSH criteria for a four-year cycle will have opportunities to apply for reassigned time for scholarship during that period. There are administrative and logistical hurdles to be overcome here — but we will work on those in the coming year.

Finally, the Faculty Salary Equity Technical Document recommends a salary equity process (in the event that money is available for that purpose) that places all faculty in the same (Masters Large) CUPA category for the purpose of salary equity and does not make tiered distinctions among faculty based on location.

We hope that these policies embrace the idea of what it means to be one university and honor the knowledge production inside and outside of the classroom that constitutes the work of our campus community. We want to promote positive discourse going forward.

I wish you a wonderful summer!

Jennifer Szydlik

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 5-26-2023

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

We ran out of time at our Senate meeting on Tuesday, so here is a brief President’s Report.

The HLC Peer Team has sent us their report. They were very complimentary and voiced no official concerns. AVC Hill is grateful for our help with the site visit.

Commencement is May 13. We will have two ceremonies in the Kolf Fieldhouse. Regalia is still available! To sign up to walk in graduation, go here: https://www.uwosh.edu/commencement/faculty-and-staff/

Please do whatever you can to help get our students registered for fall. There are still a large number with registration holds. If you have not done so, please contact your advisees to be sure they are signing up for classes.

Provost Koker announced that he will retire on July 7, 2023. I think that makes this his 32^nd year of service to UWO. John Koker is compassionate, thoughtful, and, above all, a problem solver. He has been a tireless advocate for the faculty. I (and all of us) will miss him. Please join me in thanking him for his unwavering support of shared governance.

ENTRY: 4-18-2023

What a tough week for us all! As many of you know, the Faculty Senate is attempting to craft policies that will 1) Honor the Tenure and Promotion evaluation criteria that each faculty member was hired under; 2) Recognize that across the academy, faculty salaries depend upon discipline, rank, and institution type (which is mainly defined by expectations for scholarship and creative activity, with R1 salaries at the top); and 3) Allow faculty to change their evaluation criteria with a declaration. It is worth noting that the Faculty Senate is advisory on the use of the Chancellor’s discretionary funds for salary equity. We are not the deciders.

I have attached (see below) the current drafts of the two relevant policies. Both policies are subject to change and will not be voted on until our May 9 meeting. If you have suggestions, please contact your faculty senator. The Equity Process Technical Document describes how we suggest the salary equity process should run, and the Policy on Changing Faculty Evaluation Criteria describes how to, well, change evaluation criteria.

Policy on Changing Evaluation Criteria

Equity Process Tech Doc – Draft Recommendations

ENTRY: 3-15-2023

Faculty Senate Leadership has been busy this week participating in HLC accreditation. HLC held a session to discuss shared governance structure and a session in which Faculty Senators answered questions about the work of the faculty at UWO. I also had an opportunity to talk about dual-enrollment programs with Regent Weatherly during his campus visit.

Faculty Senate is at work updating the Faculty Grievance Policy and the Faculty Complaint Policy to make them both more effective and to ensure they comply with UW System and Wisconsin State policies. I would like to thank AVC Carmen Faymonville for her expertise and assistance. We are also discussing how to resolve a conflict of interest with IAS voting for their supervisor (chair). Our current proposal is to require that departments that want their IAS to participate in Chair elections use their Tenure and Promotion Committees to evaluate and recommend the rehiring of eligible IAS.

At our March 7 meeting, the Senate endorsed the following Statement focused on Student Success:

Investing in the Classroom Is Our Best Strategy:

Faculty Senate and UFSO Joint Statement on Support and Retention of First-Year Students

As the elected shared governance representatives of the faculty and the elected leaders of the campus local of the American Federation of Teachers, we enthusiastically encourage all members of the teaching community to participate in the Student Success Initiative launched by Provost Koker and coordinated by campus leaders from CETL, COLS, and the USP. It is crucial that we acknowledge that the disruptions to education caused by the pandemic have left many of our students in greater need of support both pedagogically and emotionally, and that we need to recalibrate our classroom practices to these new realities. The Student Success Initiative provides a welcome spur to such reflection and innovation, affording us crucial opportunities to listen, discuss, and develop pedagogical strategies to support our students as effectively as possible.

With that said, we wish to register our urgent concern that no degree of pedagogical innovation, however well-implemented, will improve student success if instructors of our freshman students do not have adequate time and resources to build relationships with students and to provide them the feedback and support they require. We have gathered the following rough data on how several first-year courses were staffed in Fall 2022:

Course(s)	Sections	% Taught by IAS	% taught by Faculty
COMM 111	41	75%	25%
WRT 110, 188	41	83%	17%
Quest 1	65	46%	54%
Math 100, 101, 103, 104*	39	90%	10%

*We acknowledge that these are not all first-year students.

These numbers reveal that courses specifically aimed at first-year students are disproportionally – indeed overwhelmingly – staffed by IAS, a group that typically teaches 24 credits each year (those with a terminal degree) and 30 credits each year (those without a terminal degree). We now hear that teaching workloads for terminal-degree-holding IAS may be increased to 30 credits each year. We oppose this plan. First-year students are our most precarious students in terms of retention, and to increase the workloads of instructors with the most direct contact with this population as we move into a pivotal Fall 2023 semester is a disaster in the making.

More generally, we ask both the administration and the university community to consider whether any instructor should teach more than 12 credits per semester in this post-pandemic era, in which increased student support is paramount. We assert that student-instructor relationships are decisive in determining whether students stay and succeed at UWO. We remind our administration of the importance of continued robust support for research and creative activities, as enshrined in the university policy on Scope of Faculty Responsibilities and Workload. And we call for investments in the classroom that will promote and sustain the kind of relationship-rich education that will benefit all of us – students, instructors, and the university as a whole.

Endorsed at Faculty Senate 3-7-2023

ENTRY: 2-8-2023

UWO Updates

At our February 7 meeting, the Senate passed two policies related to expectations around teaching. The first is a Policy on Credits and Contact Hours that defines a credit hour aligned with HLC requirements. The second policy defines “regular and substantive interaction” and requires that instructors provide a minimum of 1 hour per week for 14 weeks per credit (or the equivalent) for all course modalities. This policy puts us in compliance with US Department of Education requirements for online and hybrid courses and clarifies the variety of activities that compose regular and substantive interaction.

Our Senate Committees are at work studying DFW rates, investigating ways to promote UWO among local businesses; advocating for faculty salary equity using CUPA data; looking at ways to make courses more accessible to a diversity of students; planning recommendations for displaying and summarizing SOS data for the purpose of tenure and promotion; creating an evaluation process and evaluation schedule for UWO AVCs, the provost, and the chancellor; monitoring budget planning for the coming year; and studying the grievance policy, the plagiarism policy, and the policy on department chair appointments. We will be discussing these issues at meetings in the coming months.

System Updates

UW System has formed a working group to study the expansion of dual enrollment courses across the state. They are also working on updating a policy on faculty professional development (I am a member of that working group) and one on intellectual property — this second policy is particularly urgent given the proliferation of online content.

System has released the results of a Free Speech Survey. As a mathematician, I note that the methodology of the survey is subject to significant non-response bias (12% response rate). This type of bias amplifies the concerns of respondents with strong feelings because they are likely overrepresented in the sample. All interpretations of results should be qualified by that fact. Here is a link to the results: https://www.wisconsin.edu/civil-dialogue/

Civil Dialogue

The University of Wisconsin System institutions share in the responsibility to create an environment where members of the campus community may freely engage with others. This includes upholding the legal […]

www.wisconsin.edu

ENTRY: 11-17-2022

This semester, the Faculty Senate provided feedback to the Strategic Planning Committee and debated a Vehicle Idling policy and Credit and Contact Hours policy.

At the System level, faculty representatives from across the 13 campuses provided feedback on the proposed UW System Strategic Plan and a free-speech survey that President Rothman hopes will “… shed light on our students’ understanding of the First Amendment, including their rights and responsibilities.” President Rothman has also announced the launch of a new website with resources to help faculty and staff promote and navigate civil dialogue across the System: https://www.wisconsin.edu/civil-dialogue/

Civil Dialogue | Promoting a respectful living, learning, and working environment

UW System Policy & Legal Resources. Learn about civil dialogue policies and legal resources at UW System campuses such as off-campus speech and social media, posters, marches, use of space on campus, and uninvited speakers.

www.wisconsin.edu

Jen Szydlik

ENTRY: 10-31-2022

The Fall 2022 semester brings Strategic Planning for both UWO and UW System. Know that your Faculty Senators and your Faculty Representatives at System have been busy providing input for these endeavors. For the latest draft of the UWO plan, look here: https://www.uwosh.edu/strategicplan/. For a draft of the UW System plan, check this site: https://www.wisconsin.edu/news/download/bor/UW-System-Strategic-Plan-Update.pdf

As Faculty Senate President, I am helping to write three sections of the HLC Assurance Argument for our visit in the Spring. Out of the effort I learned that more than 25% of our CAPP adjuncts have not yet completed the required 18 graduate credits in the discipline they teach for UWO. This prompted CAPP leadership and I to write guidelines that will assure that these instructors are supported in reaching HLC compliance by 2025 (our extended deadline for completing those 18 credits). I note that individual departments can require more restrictive guidelines (and deadlines) if they wish. Please reach out to me or the CAPP office for more information.

The Senate is currently considering a Vehicle Idling policy and a policy defining “Substantive Interaction” for asynchronous online courses. You are always welcome to join us.

ENTRY: 9-27-2022

This fall the Faculty Senate is focused on providing a strong faculty voice in the Strategic Planning process at UWO. We are hoping to discuss the latest draft with members of the Strategic Planning committee at our next virtual meeting on October 4, 2022. All are welcome.

In UW System news … System has completed a review of affordability. They found that while we compare very favorably to our peer institutions in other states, students from low-income groups are still unable to afford college in Wisconsin. In response, President Rothman has announced the Wisconsin Tuition Promise. This program will ensure, “underserved Wisconsin students can attend any UW System university without paying tuition or fees. The goal of the program is to increase the number of state residents who graduate with a bachelor’s degree – especially first-generation students and those from low-to-moderate income families throughout Wisconsin – thereby improving individual lives and communities and helping meet the state’s workforce needs. The Wisconsin Tuition Promise would provide up to four years of tuition and fee funding for students coming from families earning less than $62,000 annually and enrolling at the 12 public universities other than UW-Madison.” This program was funded this year by the UW System; in future years it will require a commitment from the legislature. For more information, check out this site: https://www.wisconsin.edu/tuition-promise/

UW System is also in the midst of strategic planning. While much of the earliest draft (released today as part of the Board of Regents’ agenda) was written in consultation with the Chancellors from across the state, President Rothman has had two meetings with shared governance (one in June and another on September 26) to elicit ideas. We hope to have even more involvement going forward.

The UW System is responding to a need for increased mental health services with new initiatives. They have signed a contract with Mantra Health for supplemental telehealth services for our students; they are implementing a well-being portal called YOU at College to direct students to resources; and they have created a new suicide prevention training for faculty and staff that will soon be available in Canvas. They have also launched a Healthy Minds app. You can try it at https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app

Try Our Free App for Guided, Mindful Meditation | Healthy Minds Innovations

Dr. Richard Davidson “[The Healthy Minds Program app] is NOT simply a mindfulness app. While it includes mindfulness, it is based on research that identifies four key pillars of well-being that each need to be trained to establish enduring flourishing.

hminnovations.org

2021-2022 - Senate President, Dr. Jennifer Szydlik

President’s Blog (2021-2022)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Jennifer Szydlik

ENTRY: 5-17-2022

The Faculty Senate finished the academic year by passing the Policy on Scope of Faculty Responsibilities and Workload. This policy codifies a structure for faculty to reassign portions of teaching load to substantive scholarly or service activities and supports UWO in becoming a research-enhanced comprehensive institution. We thank the Working Group led by Stephen Kercher for their work on this important policy, and Provost Koker and Chancellor Leavitt for their support.

At our final meeting, we endorsed a resolution from Oshkosh Student Association (OSA) declaring the first week of April to honor graduate and professional students at UWO. We thank our student governance body for giving us the opportunity to join them in honoring this important group.

On the horizon: further participation in academic and strategic planning; work on a policy providing faculty oversight of our Cooperative Academic Partnership Program (CAPP); and participation in the development of policy and practices related to UWO+ (our suite of online asynchronous degree programs).

ENTRY: 4-13-2022

Faculty Senate election results are in! Congratulations to our new Senators and our returning Senators: Christine Tipps, Catherine Schmitt, Nathan Stuart, Anna Hersey, Pascale Manning, Evan Williams, Jim Feldman, Jason Belnap, Eric Matson and Mike Jurmu. I am also delighted to announce that Pascale Manning is our new President-Elect.

The Faculty Senate is hard at work on the Policy on Scope of Faculty Responsibilities and Workload. This policy incorporates the excellent work of a group charged last summer by Provost Koker and chaired by Stephen Kercher focused on reassigned time for scholarship and creative activities. We are also discussing proposed Strategic Priorities written by the Strategic Planning group. There will soon be an opportunity for all faculty and staff to comment on these priorities. Please do so.

The UW System Board of Regents (BOR) met on April 7 and 8. The BOR approved a transfer agreement between UWO and Fox Valley Technical College. FVTC may now offer an associate’s degree that we will accept. The BOR also approved our purchase of the Associated Bank building near Titan Stadium. The new building will be home to the Titan Thunder Marching Band as will provide needed storage and office space for our athletic programs.

ENTRY: 2-28-2022

The spring semester is in full swing, and the Faculty Senate is at work updating our committee structure to include all-campus Collegia on the Fox and Fond du Lac campuses, contributing to the UW System Presidential Transition Recommendations, providing feedback on Academic and Strategic Planning, and monitoring work on a Faculty Workload policy that will describe a process allowing faculty reassigned time for scholarship.

The UW System Board of Regents (BOR) met on February 10 and 11. The BOR approved two new UW Oshkosh degrees: the Bachelor of Professional Studies in Leadership and Organizational Development and the Executive Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.). They also voted to continue to allow our application fee to be set at $0.

Tommy Thompson will be on the UW Oshkosh campus on Monday, March 7 for the last time in his role as UW System President to meet with campus leadership. We appreciate his advocacy and leadership during the pandemic.

Faculty Senate elections are coming with a call for nominations on Wednesday, March 2. Faculty, please consider running. We need your voice.

Jennifer Szydlik

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 12-14-2021

Here is an end-of-the-semester update on all things Faculty Senate!

At our November 16 meeting, the Faculty Senate approved an updated charge and membership description for the Academic Policies Committee to better reflect their work. We also considered recommendations from Provost Koker’s working group on Total Title and Compensation (TTC) titles for Instructional Academic Staff (IAS). The working group recommended that UWO use two titles (Lecturer and Assistant Teaching Professor) for IAS. The working group also recommended that UWO not adopt “business titles” to create a structure for title progression outside of HR. The Faculty Senate declined to endorse both recommendations.

At our December 7 meeting, the Faculty Senate endorsed a letter addressed to UW System President Tommy Thompson, Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs Anny Morrobel-Sosa, and Associate Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Daniel Chanen expressing our disappointment in the loss of title progression for our staff colleagues and our frustration with the TTC titling options for IAS.

The Board of Regents met on December 9. At that meeting, President Thompson reported that UW System has provided more than one million Covid 19 tests to students, faculty, staff, and the public. We will continue to provide testing through this winter. We have also led the way on vaccinations.

The UW System Presidential Search Committee has sent a list of finalists to the Special Regents Committee — but they have not released the names. There will be an opportunity for some Faculty Representatives to meet with the finalists in late January. I will try to be a part of that delegation.

UW System has launched a Student Behavioral Health Initiative to address increased cases of anxiety and depression. They are working to provide help in crises, target vulnerable populations for services, and promote well-being and healthy working environments. UW System has implemented a digital mental health platform (SilverCloud) available to all faculty, staff, and students (Feel free to make use of the platform: https://www.wisconsin.edu/ohrwd/well-being/mental-health/)

Mental Health | Employee Well-being

SilverCloud. SilverCloud is an online, anonymous, self-guided, interactive resource that provides UW System students, faculty, and staff with no-cost, confidential help with mental health well-being and stress management.

www.wisconsin.edu

The Joint Committee on Employee Relations (JCOER) of the Wisconsin Legislature has yet to schedule a meeting to endorse the pay plan. This means that UW System salary increases may be delayed.

Finally, the BOR Education Committee has lengthened the “temporary suspension” of the use of the SAT or ACT in UW System admissions until 2024. (Students may still test if they wish to do so.)

I wish you all a wonderful end of the semester and a relaxing holiday season.

Jennifer Szydlik

Faculty Senate President

ENTRY: 11-18-2021

The Board of Regents met on November 4, 2021. President Thompson reported that UW System Enrollment for Fall 2021 is down about one percent. We serve a total of 162,980 students. This compares to a 2.3% dip in college enrollment nationwide. In other Regent news, the Board passed a policy allowing for faculty and staff to again serve on Chancellor search committees. A link to that policy can be found here: https://www.wisconsin.edu/regents/policies/selection-process-for-system-president-chancellors-vice-chancellors-and-uw-system-senior-leadership-positions/

Here on the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh campus, the Strategic Planning Working Group has begun “mission and visioning exercises.” They are now reaching out to shared governance for input. Contact Chad Cotti if you want to hear more about this project.

Provost Koker briefly considered a partnership with a for-profit company called Academic Partners to create asynchronous undergraduate degree programs for nontraditional students. After input from faculty and a study of financial implications, he has declined to partner with that group.

At our November 16 meeting the Faculty Senate expressed frustration and disappointment in the Total Title and Compensation (TTC) initiative from UW System Human Resources. Senators declined to endorse the recommendations of the TTC Working Group that 1) UWO use the titles of “Lecturer” and “Assistant Teaching Professor” and 2) that UWO discontinue the use of prefixes for IAS titles (e.g., “Senior Lecturer”). The final decision will be made by Provost Koker.

Jen Szydlik

Faculty Senate President

November 18, 2021

Board of Regents Meeting and UW System Updates

The UW System Board of Regents met on our campus on October 7 and 8. Chancellor Leavitt addressed the BOR highlighting University Studies Program, the Cooperative Academic Partnership Program (CAPP) and UWO’s success at leading the charge for testing and vaccinations in the community. He also stressed that our three campuses are positioned in an industry-rich part of the state, and this provides for unique opportunities.

A UW System reported on an initiative called “Pathways to UW” that invests in “college navigators” to work with high school students who might not otherwise consider attending college. President Thompson announced that seven UW institutions have made the threshold of 70% vaccinations. The deadline for the “70 for 70” campaign has been extended for two weeks. He noted also that UW System positivity rate last week was less than 1%, and about 80% of system courses are in person. Finally, President Manydeeds announced a 72-credit transfer agreement between technical colleges and the UW System.

The BOR will consider changes to Regent Policy Document 6-4 related to the search process for UW chancellors at their November 4th meeting. The draft is open for comments until Friday, October 22: https://www.wisconsin.edu/regents/draft-policy-proposals-for-comment/. Please comment. This is an opportunity to advocate for strong faculty representation on important search committees.

Jen Szydlik

Faculty Senate President

October 14, 2021

Welcome to our Sesquicentennial Year!

We are celebrating 150 years of excellence and opportunity here at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. If you missed the celebration on September 12, you can still visit the Gail F. Steinhilber Art Gallery on the third floor of Reeve Memorial Union to view the Humans of Oshkosh and Sesquicentennial Rephotography Project.

On Monday September 27, faculty have the opportunity participate in a listening session with Regent Karen Walsh regarding the search for a new University of Wisconsin System president. The session will be held from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in Reeve memorial Union Ballroom 227BC. Please attend! It is important that faculty help shape the search criteria.

Five finalists for the College of Letters and Science dean’s search are visiting campus during the next few weeks. Watch your email for opportunities to meet these candidates and to provide input to the search committee.

Join us for “An Evening With Tommy Thompson” on October 6 from 7-8:30 p.m. in the Music Hall on the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh campus. Tommy Thompson is the current president of the University of Wisconsin System. He served as the 42nd Governor for our state and as the 19th United States Secretary of Health and Human Services in the cabinet of President George W. Bush.

The UW System Board of Regents will meet on our campus on October 7 and 8. Watch for opportunities to participate.

Dr. Szydlik, Faculty Senate President

September 23, 2021

2020-2021 - Senate President, Dr. Druscilla Scribner

President’ Blog (2012-2021)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Druscilla Scribner

Work in Progress:
These entries can still be found on the main page for the President’s Blog, and will be transitioned to this page

2019-2020 - Senate President, Dr. Druscilla Scribner

President’ Blog (2012-2021)

Faculty Senate President, Dr. Druscilla Scribner

Work in Progress:
These entries can still be found on the main page for the President’s Blog, and will be transitioned to this page