When it comes to academic matters at U-M the faculty should have “the loudest and first voice,” President Mark S. Schlissel told the executive arm of the university’s central faculty governance system Monday.
Schlissel met with the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs for the first time since becoming president, covering a variety of topics including his notion of faculty and administrative roles in guiding the university.
“There are certain aspects in the governance of the university where the faculty rightly has the loudest and first voice,” Schlissel said, citing as examples such things as academic standards, defining a degree or curriculum, and what the ideal student population should be.
“I think the faculty should largely own, and the administration should be largely respectful of, those kinds of decisions,” he said.
In those instances where a department may not be meeting university standards, it is the role of administrators at various levels to step in, he said.
“And then it does become important for deans to be more heavy-handed than they would be otherwise, and the same with the provost and, ultimately, the president,” Schlissel said. “Those become judgment things — rare judgment things.”
Conversely, faculty should be consulted and involved on non-academic issues, but they “can’t own the nature of how a six-and-a-half-billion-dollar enterprise is governed. It’s too big, it’s too complicated, and there are too many faculty with too many views that are divergent from one another.”
“You need to have lots of opportunity to criticize and contribute, to weigh in, but at the end of the day administrative things are administrative things just as academic things are academic things,” he said.
At the University of California, Berkeley, where Schlissel was a professor and dean of biological sciences earlier in his career, the elected chair of faculty governance sat on the Council of Deans, providing a non-administrative faculty perspective that benefited both sides.
“I’d be really happy to talk about it and figure out how to do it (at U-M),” Schlissel said. “What I need to do is figure out the ideal way to work together.”
SACUA Chair Scott Masten, professor of business economics and public policy, said the relationship between faculty governance and the administration has been good in recent years and “we look forward to working with you.”
Much of the 45-minute discussion took the form of the new president asking SACUA — and through it the faculty at large — for guidance on a variety of topics including:
• Determining the most effective way to use federal research dollars in an environment where that funding faces an uncertain future. “We’ve got to figure out what’s the right scale for Michigan to be successful.”
• Functioning strategically across all units of a university that is “almost unimaginably decentralized.”
• The suggestion that U-M should be more transparent in the way it publicly reports salaries, including total compensation as well as base pay.
• Ways to make U-M a place where “each of us can do our best work.” What is it about the environment here that contributes to one’s ability be a great scholar, and what’s missing?
“Of the things we can do, where’s the bang for the buck in making this a place where people don’t think to leave here once they’re successful?” he asked.
