The Joint Faculty Senate/Provost Academic Affairs Shared Governance Implementation Team will continue the significant work of the Joint Faculty Senate/Provost Academic Affairs Shared Governance Task Force by reviewing the Spring 2023 recommendations and working closely with the co-chairs to assess specific recommendations and set goals and timelines for implementation.
The table below is best viewed at horizontal orientation on your device.
| Recommendation | Status | Notes | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| M1. Protect Tenure and Academic Freedom | In discussion | The team is gathering additional data on semester credit hour generation and RTA and tenured/tenure-eligible lines by department. The committee hopes that this will lead to annual reporting and easily accessible information. | The Task Force recognizes the crucial connection between tenure and academic freedom for faculty, on the one hand, and genuine shared governance on the other. JMU must reverse trends toward contingent hiring in the academy (both adjunct teaching faculty and those on other time-limited, non-tenure-track faculty contracts) in a concerted effort to restore a historic balance of tenured faculty in our faculty ranks and avoid the adjunctification that is sweeping higher education. (Local data analysis on this issue would be key.) This is the most primary and fundamental step JMU could take to creating a sustainable ongoing culture of meaningful shared governance. Substantive and meaningful faculty participation is a function of the health of the faculty as a whole, including the percentage of tenured faculty who have the necessary job security and academic freedom to speak truth to power. |
| M2. Slow Down | In discussion | The team believes a better framing for this recommendation would be: "Ensure sufficient time for collaboration and feedback and include transparent time benchmarks for projects, initiatives, and policies." Planning for such initiatives, projects, and policies should take into consideration the seasonable nature of instructional faculty work. | Wherever possible, and particularly in areas of joint authority and faculty primacy, JMU must resist the frenetic pace that seems to drive us to rapid decision-making and action as a default stance. We should recognize that we often make mistakes as a campus by moving faster than is necessary or supportive for shared governance. Slowing down is not an obstructionist tactic, and (importantly) does not mean that all parties must agree before action is taken; it simply leverages the power of shared governance to employ campus expertise more fully to inform decision-making and seek positive outcomes. A slower pace wherever possible would support better communications among stakeholders and encourage all parties to verify assumptions before acting. Key to breaking a pandemic-induced cycle of treating all action as emergency action will be the embracing of procedures that call for meaningful faculty input and require effectively “closing the loop” in communications. |
| M3. Advance These Recommendations as One JMU | Addressed | The Implementation Team considers the appointment and work of the Shared Governance Implementation Team as fulfilling this recommendation. | This Task Force report and set of recommendations should be received jointly by the Faculty Senate and the Provost’s Office, jointly owned, taken forward, and considered to be a living document, with regular reporting to the President’s office and BOV, as well as clear intervals established for re-assessment of progress made and new initiatives needed to support the health of shared governance on campus. |
| M4. Include All Faculty | In discussion | The team is discussing whether the Office of the President should engage with professional faculty to discern whether and how they would like to participate in shared governance conversations. | To ensure full and effective voice for JMU’s instructional and professional faculty in matters of shared governance, and the fair representation of faculty with professional appointments among our A&P faculty ranks, the JMU Faculty Senate should create a pathway to election and representation of JMU’s professional faculty members on the Senate. This could be similar to the recent inclusion of adjunct faculty senators or could entail the creation of new structures to represent A&P faculty concerns. |
| M5. Meaningfully Include Staff and Students | In discussion | The team is discussing whether the Office of the President should engage with staff and students to discern whether and how they would like to participate in shared governance conversations. | More attention should be paid to the role of staff members and students in shared governance at JMU, perhaps even through future examination of this issue in a dedicated committee or task force. |
| M7. Continue Crafting Charges Jointly | Addressed | Joint task forces in the division are formed and charged consistent with this recommendation. | For the establishment of future joint Faculty Senate/Provost’s task forces, it is crucial to ensure that members of the Provost’s Office/JMU senior administration and elected representatives of the faculty (through the Faculty Senate, college councils, appropriate department-level faculty committees and groups, etc.) have a co-equal and substantive opportunity to shape charges, goals, and timelines. This will enable the best choices to be made as to leadership and representation or membership for any given charge, and will allow for shared understanding as to goals and expected outcomes to be built and transparently communicated to all constituencies. |
| M9. Balance Representation | Addressed | Joint task forces in the division are formed and charged consistent with this recommendation. | Likewise, where possible, task forces should be designed with attention to balanced representation across JMU’s colleges and relevant administrative units. Task forces should additionally commit to ensuring that the voices of all relevant faculty constituencies and stakeholder groups (tenured, tenure-track, professional faculty, adjunct faculty, and those on other contingent contracts, such as RTA appointments) are represented through open comment periods and other inclusive feedback mechanisms. |
| M10. Communicate Freely | Addressed | The Faculty Senate welcomes task force representatives to provide reports and seek feedback at regular meetings. | Joint Provost/Senate task forces should have a standing invitation to Faculty Senate as part of “Other Committee Reports” and an expectation of reporting out. They should also be expected to join periodic meetings of Academic Council. In both cases, this would be to share work in-progress and present emerging questions or requests for feedback. |
| C1a. Landing Page | In discussion | Faculty Senate and Academic Affairs should jointly create and maintain a simple landing page for shared governance at JMU. Models for such a page can be found at Virginia Tech and Grand Valley State University. | |
| C1b. Shared Governance Statement | Addressed | The implementation team drafted a statement that was endorsed by the Faculty Senate, Academic Council, Provost Kolvoord, and President King. | The most prominent feature of this page should be a common statement of values around shared governance. This Task Force—based on research and deliberative discussion—has crafted a starter draft for the common statement, shared here as an appendix. It now needs to be socialized, further edited, and adopted by the campus. Once Senate Steering and the Provost’s Office agree on the content of this statement, we recommend it go to Academic Council and the full Faculty Senate for further discussion and possible approval. Next, we imagine it would be shared with the President’s cabinet and taken to the Academic Excellence subcommittee of the BOV for consideration and potential adoption by the board and campus as a whole. |
| C2b. Revising the Faculty Handbook | Addressed | This recommendation is currently being addressed by the Senate and the Provost's Office. | Commission a joint faculty/administrative group to undertake a comprehensive review and wholesale re-write of the Faculty Handbook, to carefully consider and address flaws and points of confusion in handbook areas in need of greater clarity, such as the faculty grievance policy. This group should make such revisions with an eye to developing and enhancing structures and policies related to shared governance. Establish a regular schedule of whole-scale refresh and re-consideration (alongside the regular, more incremental work of the handbook committee). Give special consideration to the role of shared governance throughout. |
| C2c. Creating Clarity on Appeals | Moot | This will be addressed in the context of Recommendation 2b. | In cases of disagreement between faculty and administration/board leadership, where both have responsibilities (e.g., tenure), the faculty handbook and other governing documents should clearly state how disagreements are addressed/appealed and by whom. |
| C3i. Senate Subcommittee on Shared Governance | Addressed | The Senate has created a Shared Governance standing committee in response to this recommendation. | The Faculty Senate should add a standing subcommittee on Shared Governance charged with leading and participating in ongoing conversations and initiatives to improve the state of shared governance at JMU. |
| C4b. Faculty Voices on Climate Implementation | Moot | The team determined that it would be more productive to focus on the upcoming COACHE survey. | In keeping with COACHE recommendations and best practices of shared governance, we also recommend the addition of more faculty voices on the Climate Study Implementation Group. |
| C5e. Conflict of Interests | Moot | This will be addressed in the context of Recommendation 2b. | An Academic Affairs policy or guidelines document should be created that covers conflict of interests (COI) more broadly than merely speaking to Virginia statutes related to nepotism and financial COI—and that also treats the perception of conflict of interests (e.g., a person on the ballot should not be overseeing an election process). Individual academic departments should use this as a starting-point for documents specifically related to conflict of interests in connection with voting and survey processes. |
| C7e. Evaluation of Administrators | Addressed | Subgroup 4 drafted a policy to address this recommendation. By a 14-1 vote, the full committee supported the submission of the policy draft to the AAPC for full consideration and public comment by the university community. | Ensure that regular and transparent evaluation of all administrators includes robust faculty feedback. Faculty should regularly be invited to provide feedback on the performance of AUHs, deans and associate deans, vice provosts, provost, and the president of the university. This should be done with attention to “closing the loop,” or appropriately and without breach of confidentiality, reporting that the feedback was received and any results or actions taken by the administrator in response. This is intended as a positive, responsive, trust-building recommendation, so that faculty can adequately speak to the work of administrators (and build understanding of the work they do on behalf of the institution). Therefore, as part of this regular performance evaluation process, administrators should provide a brief summary of their activities. |
| C7h. Faculty Input into our R2 Development | Addressed | The team considered this addressed by unit-level discussion of JMU's R2 identity, culminating the the provost's R2 statement. | To fully leverage faculty expertise and enact shared governance in the context of our R2 transition, we recommend that a campus-wide representative faculty body, qualified to speak to research and scholarship needs from a faculty viewpoint, be created. In other words, a working group with a faculty majority should be established to look into typical practices of research support at the R2 level, and identify areas for improvement at JMU. The Vice Provost for Research and Scholarship should be asked to issue quarterly progress reports on JMU’s efforts to align our research initiatives and resourcing with R2 priorities. |
This page will be updated as the committee discusses additional recommendations.