Last Friday, Provost Robert E. Palazzo announced in a letter to the faculty that the Faculty Governance Review Committee has been selected.
The committee is made up of 11 senior faculty members, representing each of the Institute’s five schools, and it will be chaired by Rosalind and John J. Redfern Jr. ’33 Professor of Engineering Jacob Fish.
Deans from each school received names of faculty members nominated by each of their departments to serve on the committee, and the deans then forwarded a minimum of four names from their school to the provost for consideration. The provost selected two out of the faculty members recommended from each school, totaling 10 members on the committee. An additional member was then selected by the provost to serve as chair, bringing that total to 11.
Once the provost selected the committee, it was sent to President Shirley Ann Jackson for final approval.
The committee includes eight full professors as well as three associate professors. Two committee representatives, including Fish, were also members of the 2006-2007 Faculty Senate.
The committee will be chaired by Fish, who will be joined by Associate Professors Ken Warriner and Ning Xiang from the School of Architecture, Professors Don Vitaliano and Wayne Gray from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Cary L. Wellington Professor Iftekhar Hasan and Warren H. Bruggeman ’46 and Pauline Urban Bruggeman Distinguished Professor Phil Phan from the Lally School of Management and Technology, Professor Robert Messler and Samuel A. and Elisabeth C. Johnson Jr. Professor of Engineering Mark Shephard from the School of Engineering, and Associate Professor Christopher Carothers and Professor Harry Roy from the School of Science.
The FGRC is tasked with performing a broad review of faculty governance and bringing forward recommendations of how to modify governance within the directives of the Board of Trustees, while taking into consideration the perspectives of all tenured and tenure-track faculty and instructional staff.
Once the review is completed, which is expected by the end of the semester, the committee will propose a process of how to best transition to the recommended governance structure.
“The committee represents a balanced and distinguished group of teacher-scholars who have generously agreed to serve Rensselaer during a challenging period of change,” Palazzo said in an RPI press release. “While there is still much work to be done during the transitional faculty governance period, this committee, working with the faculty of Rensselaer, and through appropriate outside input as well, will chart a new course as we seek to resolve issues that have compromised faculty governance.”
