Provost Robert E. Palazzo, along with Vice President for Student Life Eddie Ade Knowles, spoke last week to the Student Senate concerning the actions taken and plans conceived for reviewing faculty governance. Palazzo came to give the Student Senate a better perspective on the status of the faculty governance issue, and answer questions.
Palazzo started by describing his history working at RPI, then went on to describe the events that have lead up to the current situation from his perspective. Shortly after losing the title of interim, and gaining the provost position permanently, Palazzo was e-mailed to review a proposal sent to the Board of Trustees. The aim of the proposal was to modify the constitution of faculty governance submitted by the Faculty Senate to the Board giving clinical faculty, not solely tenured and tenure-tracked faculty, voting rights in the Senate.
The Board of Trustees then told Palazzo to find a way to improve the Institute’s previous structure of faculty governance. Palazzo responded by recommending that the Faculty Senate be suspended, so that governance can be rewritten, and a committee be arranged to review faculty governance and benchmark it against other university faculty governances.
Last August, Palazzo announced the official suspension of the Faculty Senate. The administration’s stance is that the elections last spring were illegitimate, and that, due to this fact, the current Senate is not a legitimate governing body. Palazzo, who has previously referred to the Faculty Senate as “destructive” and stated that they have “lost credibility,” summarized his position in front of the Student Senate that “faculty governance has not been what it needs to be.”
In response to the mention of an article printed in The Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the suspension of faculty governance at RPI, Palazzo explained that the Faculty Senate is not the only aspect of faculty governance at the Institute, and went on to give three reasons for the Board and his decision. Firstly, the faculty did not pursue the correct process by submitting the proposal to expand voting rights directly to the Board of Trustees. The faculty voted to ignore the Board’s directive, which stated that the Board will recognize only tenured and tenure-tracked faculty as the official voice of the faculty; Palazzo mentioned that 366 of the 500 faculty are tenured or tenure-tracked. Thirdly, the Senate conducted an election last spring not in compliance with those same directives of the Board.
Moving forward, Palazzo has chosen faculty members from the nominations from each department to populate the Faculty Governance Review Committee. He said that, “The Board wanted to make a point to recognize other faculty and involve them, but leave it up to tenured and tenure-tracked faculty to [make decisions and conduct the formal process].”
When queried about what is being done to prevent potential spillover to the class room, and what is being done to protect students from being affected by the issues at hand, Palazzo respond sternly, “If any faculty uses the classroom to bring forward issues and not to teach … that would have to stop.” Palazzo went on to urge any student who knows of any such incident, to report it to the Office of the Provost so that it can be dealt with accordingly. “The only limit is the Board’s directive,” stated Palazzo.
The remainder of the Senate meeting covered topics of slightly lighter notes. The Panhel/IFC Committee will be selling boob-shaped cupcakes along with t-shirts to support breast cancer research in October. The Committee on Student Life is beginning to organize a game of ‘Assassins,’ and the Community Relations Committee is continually looking into expanding the use of RAD to off-campus establishments, as well as working with the CDC regarding externship programs.
