University of Michigan Faculty Senate members will hear from President Mark Schlissel and Provost Susan M. Collins and also vote on five motions when they meet at 3:15 p.m. Oct. 4.
The meeting will take place in the Honigman Auditorium at the Law School, with members invited to attend in person or participate via Zoom. Faculty Senate members have been sent a link to register to attend the Zoom meeting.
The meeting also will be available to view through a livestream at umich.edu/watch/.
Schlissel and Collins will speak from 4-4:25 p.m., according to the meeting agenda. They will take questions from 4:25-4:45 p.m.
The five motions submitted in advance to the Faculty Senate Office call for:
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• The university to direct Work Connections to validate and support all medically supported requests to work remotely; allow instructors to work remotely if medical recommendations require them to socially distance and such distancing is not possible; reorganize Work Connections with input from faculty governance; and institute a process for appealing determinations by Work Connections.
• The university to increase COVID-19 testing frequency to twice a week for unvaccinated people, “and weekly testing be conducted for all community members” at convenient sites; make it so ResponsiBLUE does not instruct vaccinated individuals to automatically check “no” as an answer to a question about having contact with someone who was recently diagnosed with COVID-19; and re-establish the notification of close contacts.
• The university to “immediately re-evaluate and adjust its policy for in-person instruction, so as to better incorporate the legitimate input of the faculty.”
• The university to adopt recommendations made by women survivors of Martin Philbert’s misconduct and their attorney that would: require members of faculty or administrative search committees to retain a written statement from each committee member that they disclosed all known or suspected details of allegations of sexual misconduct; require leaders of units to document in writing in a staff or faculty member’s personnel file the factual basis for decisions on discipline relative to any allegation of sexual misconduct; require the Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX Office to “reference in writing any and all prior reports as a step in investigating and compiling reports on subsequent allegations, i.e., to access the data it has on hand to inform itself of facts, and permit the ECRT to act on iterative reports by re-opening or re-framing investigations as a way to call attention to and actively search for patterns of sexual misconduct”; and form a committee of sexual misconduct survivors to create additional recommended policies.
• The university to provide all instructors and staff who care for young children the option to move their teaching or office work online if their children cannot attend school in person because they are unvaccinated, must quarantine or are receiving medical or mental health care at home. The resolution also calls for the university to devote significant resources to “materially and structurally” support parents of young children and for SACUA to appoint an ad-hoc committee to determine recommendations around the shape and extent of this support.
Faculty Senate members will be able to vote on all motions during the meeting, and voting will remain open for 48 hours afterward. Motions must receive support from a majority of those voting, not including abstentions, to pass.
Also at the meeting, members will vote on candidates for secretary and parliamentarian. The Faculty Senate is part of U-M’s central faculty governance system. It has more than 4,000 members and consists of all professorial faculty, librarians, full-time research faculty, executive officers and deans.
