UE Faculty Seeks To Offer Its Own Alignment Plan

UE Faculty Seeks to Offer its own Alignment Plan

Evansville— 12/29/20 — The University of Evansville Faculty Senate today passed a resolution calling for the creation of a committee that would allow the faculty to construct its own institutional alignment plan. This plan would be offered to the President as an alternative to that which he is presently constructing alongside his senior administrative team. The Senate’s resolution passed by a margin of 12 ayes to 1 nay with 1 abstention.

The President did not comment on the resolution at the meeting as he again chose not to attend a Faculty Senate meeting. The faculty will now have seven days to vote on this matter.

Since the President unveiled his draft academic alignment plan, he has consistently asked for faculty proposals that respond to that plan. The Senate’s resolution replies fully and positively to this request by seeking to offer not merely an academic alignment plan but rather a complete institutional alignment plan. It does so because, as the resolution observes, the Senate recognizes that “the academic component of the university is necessarily fundamentally intertwined with all its other components.”

The committee sought by the Senate’s resolution is a Faculty Institutional Alignment Plan Ad Hoc Committee. This committee would be comprised of faculty members from across the campus and it would work to construct an institutional alignment plan by the last day of the Spring 2021 semester, May 7th. The Senate’s resolution explains this tight timeline by noting the “President’s statements on the need for urgent action.”

Should the faculty approve the Senate’s resolution, that resolution will be submitted to the President. Without his approval, the committee cannot be created as proposed because the President would need to grant that committee the means and the time to create an institutional alignment plan. The resolution speaks of the committee as being “granted access to all institutional data and information it deems relevant to its purpose unless such access is prohibited by law or university policy.” The resolution also calls for the suspension of the construction of the President’s institutional alignment plan until such a time as “the Senate has submitted its institutional alignment plan to the President and the President has offered a full written response.” During the proposed suspension period, “no final decisions” would be made “regarding curricular changes or faculty appointments.”

The Senate’s resolution is a product of the faculty’s concerns regarding the process by which the President is constructing his academic alignment plan. The three main concerns are:

1. The faculty played no part in creating the President’s draft academic alignment plan, and, as noted in the last Senate resolution, the process he is using to develop that draft into a final plan neither complies with university policy on curricular change nor recognizes the faculty’s role within the university’s shared governance system.

2. The day after first presenting his draft academic alignment plan, the President gave the faculty access to, as he put it, “the data that served as a foundation for the draft academic alignment plan.” On inspection, the faculty has found this data to be incomplete. The data overlook secondary majors. It also fails to account for the teaching of non-majors within the General Education program and as part of other majors’ requirements. When a university spokeswoman was recently asked about this by Isaiah Seibert of the Evansville Courier and Press, she responded, “The other components were taken into consideration in the analysis, which is why the margin data was only one of four criteria used to evaluate academic programs.” This response begs two questions. The first is: If other data sets that include those components were used within the “analysis,” why have they not been released to the faculty? The second is: Why would the senior administration use incomplete data as the “foundation for the draft academic alignment plan”?

3. The faculty have been provided financial data on the university’s academics, but not on any of its other components. The senior administration has not released any financial data relating to the staff, the administration, or athletics. Furthermore, the faculty has been given no projections as to how the planned cuts will affect the university’s budget in the short- or long-term. Given the dearth of institutional information it has received, the faculty has no means of judging how the proposed academic cuts relate to the finances of the university as a whole.

We, the UE chapter of the AAUP, fully support the Senate’s constructive and necessary resolution. If the President is truly interested in hearing proposals from the faculty, he will enable the creation of the proposed Faculty Institutional Alignment Plan Ad Hoc Committee and grant it the time and the means it requires to fulfill its purpose.

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• E-mail us at ueaaup@gmail.com