Guydosh's Report on 
The SUNY University Faculty Senate
Winter 2004 Meeting

As Plattsburgh State's University Faculty Senator, I recently represented our Plattsburgh campus at the Winter 2004 plenary meeting of the University Faculty Senate in Oneonta, NY. The University Senate's mission is to represent the voice of SUNY Faculty state-wide. It is composed of faculty representatives from each of the State University campuses and is organized much as our own local Faculty Senate. 

After the customary welcome by local dignitaries, University Faculty Senate President Joe Hildreth presented a report on recent issues and topics.  Among topics President Hildreth mentioned were the creation of a new College of Nanotechnology at SUNY Albany without faculty consultation (http://www.albanynanotech.org/info/news/1_7_04_release.cfm) and creation of a new SUNY unit (campus?), the Levin Institute, having no permanent faculty or faculty governance (http://www.suny.edu/Levin-Institute/). Hildreth also spoke about the preliminary experiences with the new Teacher Education Transfer Template (which guarantees transfer of lower division courses from Community College teacher education concentrations), and the upcoming report of a committee which would define best practices in Faculty Development and SUNY's Faculty Development Initiative.  

The meeting continued with four presentations, the first from Marti Anne Ellermann of the Office of the University Counsel.  Marti spoke about the ten most common legal issues facing SUNY faculty.  Her top ten list included: Affirmative Action, Sexual Harassment, Academic Freedom, Rights of Disabled Students, Privacy Issues, Post 9-11 Security Issues, Computer Use and Intellectual Property, Conflicts of Interest, Due Process In Termination, and Free Exercise of Religion and Establishment Clauses.  For about half of these issues, she provided some detail and commentary. If interested, I have a handout of her PowerPoint presentation.

Assistant Provost Beth Bringsjord spoke about the new round of Mission Review of SUNY campuses.  Based on a survey of stakeholders in the first round of Mission Review, the new round will focus on opportunity for planning and goal setting, will involve greater faculty participation, will be compressed and streamlined.  Incidentally, the various Campus Memonanda of Understanding from the previous Mission Review are available at http://www.sysadm.suny.edu/provost/MOUs.htm The new round will begin this month and continue through Spring 2005.  Further details will be forthcoming.

Vice-Chancellor for Finance and Business, Brian Stenson, offered a brief update on budgeting.  In summary, SUNY's proposed budget is up (State support increased by about $6.5 million), while all other state agencies suffered a loss averaging 5%.  (About $3 million of that support to SUNY is funding for the Levin Institute.)  You have already heard John Homburger provide most of the details on the proposed budget at the recent Planning Days.  

Carey Hatch, Assistant Provost, Office of Library and Information Services, spoke about Faculty Rights in the Digital Age  According to the provided summary, "Carey's goals were to encourage faculty to protect the copyright of their works in order to build institutional repositories as an alternative strategy to traditional forms of scholarly communication, to inform the Senate of the issues of the Elsevier ScienceDirect contract in the context of current forms of scholarly communication, and to impress upon the Senate the importance of faculty activism in the open access movement."  To me, this was perhaps the most thought-provoking of the presentations and the summary does not do it justice.  You should check out the link above for details.

There were various other reports and committee resolutions of less interest to us at Plattsburgh.  As an example, one called for the Chancellor to encourage greater resource support of faculty governance on local campuses. 

In the never-ending discussion of Uniform System-Wide Assessment, most local governance leaders and groups and University Senators rejected the University Senate's proposed cooperation with the Chancellor's four "suggestions" for a process for System-Wide Assessment which were  previously circulated, including to our own Faculty Senate in December.  Instead the University Senate passed a resolution, proposed by the University Senate Executive Committee, calling for further discussion.  A copy is available on this site.

      
As usual, these are all my own perceptions and other folks may have seen things differently.  As I have said in other reports to you, I appreciate your confidence in choosing me to represent the Plattsburgh campus as your representative to the University Senate.  I would be pleased to provide you with more detail about any of the items in this report, if I can do so.