The Faculty Senate will convene May 25 to discuss and soon thereafter open a vote on a resolution to expand U-M’s central faculty governance system.
The event is open to the public and will take place from 3-5 p.m. in Room 2000 of the Alexander G. Ruthven Building. Up to about 200 people can be seated on a first come, first served basis.
The meeting also will be livestreamed, a link to which will be sent out closer to the meeting.
The Faculty Senate includes more than 4,150 tenured and tenure-track instructional faculty, research faculty, librarians, deans and executive officers from the Dearborn, Flint and Ann Arbor campuses, including Michigan Medicine.
This will be the first gathering of the Faculty Senate since Nov. 21, 2022.
The May 25 meeting will focus on a proposal to expand the Faculty Senate to include clinical professors, archivists and curators. This resolution would add about 1,810 members to the Faculty Senate, also referred to as the University Senate.
Faculty Senate members in favor of and against the resolution will give presentations, and discussion will follow.
The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs has announced that four faculty members will present a proposed amendment to the resolution at the May 25 meeting. The amendment proposes also adding lecturers to the Faculty Senate.
U-M has approximately 1,650 full- and part-time lecturers who are represented by the Lecturers’ Employee Organization. If both the amendment and resolution pass, the Faculty Senate would gain roughly 3,460 new members.
Following the meeting, Faculty Senate members will have 72 hours to vote electronically on the amendment, and the results will be announced May 30. If the amendment passes, it will be added to the resolution.
The vote on the final resolution will begin May 31. Faculty Senate members will again have 72 hours to vote via electronic ballot. The results will be announced June 5.
If the Faculty Senate approves the resolution, the Board of Regents will be asked to change the Regents’ Bylaws, which describe Senate membership.
The Faculty Senate is the largest of three components in U-M’s central faculty governance system. The Senate Assembly consists of 74 elected faculty members from the three campuses, and SACUA is the system’s nine-member executive arm.
