Welcome back to campus
August 28, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
As the 2024-25 Faculty Senate Chair – and on behalf of your Faculty Senate – I write to you today to welcome you to the fall semester and share some ambitions for what we can accomplish together this year. Having spent much of the summer walking around a quiet campus from meeting to meeting, I enjoyed the influx of fresh energy from attending the opening ceremony of ÁùºÏ±¦µäFIT and experiencing the enthusiasm of approximately 3,500 new members of the Wolf Pack family celebrating the start of their university experience. My chair term began on July 1, and I have already had a chance to meet with colleagues from every major unit on campus to deepen my understanding of how to speak effectively for all academic and administrative faculty at the University. I field numerous questions in every conversation, but the most overwhelmingly frequent question I receive, reminiscent of the movie Office Space, is this one: “What would you say you do here?” In this introductory letter, I hope to offer examples of the impact of our campus’s shared governance body, the work we pursue together, and opportunities for all 2,427 voices from our academic and administrative faculty to be heard.
Our first full Faculty Senate meeting will be this coming Friday, August 30, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. in the Rita Laden Senate Chambers on the third floor of the Joe Crowley Student Union. Prior to every meeting, you will receive an agenda from your major unit’s senator(s). If you have questions to ask any of our meeting guests, observations to share, or suggested support, opposition, or amendment(s) to any of our action items, please convey those to your senator(s). For subsequent agenda releases, you will also receive detailed minutes from the prior meeting with answers to those questions and updates on our policy actions. These policies will most often take the form of advisory input on updates to the University Administrative Manual (UAM) and Recommendations for Action (RFA’s) submitted through our nine standing committees (pending the proposed merger of our Budget and Planning Committee with our Salary and Benefits Committee to create a unified Salary, Benefits, and Budget Committee) and four ad hoc committees. You are also invited to attend and observe our meeting in person or on Zoom with a link provided in the agenda release. We have moved our meeting times to mostly take place on Friday mornings rather than Thursday afternoons to facilitate K-12 school pickup for faculty with childcare responsibilities and to gain the cognitive advantages of holding complex policy discussions earlier in the day.
At the end of each academic year, Faculty Senate committees make recommendations to university administration for action and review. We have implemented a new system for tracking recommended actions and administration responses year over year to promote accountability and follow-through. Attached to this e-mail, you will find infographics detailing some of the highlights from last year’s Faculty Senate, events we held, and ways we represented the voices of faculty in rooms where decisions are made. We also have printed materials on our resources, awards, and the rejoinder, reconsideration, and grievance processes we facilitate at our office, Mackay Science 300. If you find yourself considering a rejoinder, reconsideration, or grievance, please contact Heather Kemmelmeier at hkemmelmeier@unr.edu to schedule a confidential conversation with me to discuss your options. So much of what we do for academic and administrative faculty comes in the form of confidential work and solving problems before they become problems by advocating on behalf of faculty with the upper administration. We will also be announcing an open house and Faculty Senate Chair and Manager office hours soon so you can get to know us in person.
We have an outstanding Faculty Senate Executive Board this year: Chair-elect, Jennifer McClendon (Human Development and Counseling); Past Chair, Peter Reed (Sanford Center for Aging); Parliamentarian, Cheryl Hug-English (Family and Community Medicine); Members at Large, Ned Schoolman (History) and Catie McKinney (Enrollment Services); and Senate Manager, Heather Kemmelmeier. This is a passionate, plugged in, candid group of faculty who are all deeply dedicated to improving campus policies and workplace culture. We held two retreats this summer, and I was astounded to emerge from a nine-hour meeting with these colleagues feeling energized by their commitment to actionable outcomes. In addition to the regular activities of the Faculty Senate and the events we hold, we have agreed as a group to commit this year to tangible progress on our academic standards process, faculty input in our hiring practices, developing our leadership pipeline, reviewing our software platforms to identify improvements and possible eliminations of unhelpful, costly platforms, and to address our backlog of major unit and department bylaws revisions.
The ÁùºÏ±¦µä Legislature’s 83rd Session will begin in January and fall is a critical time to plan and prepare. The Faculty Senate has been prepping for this since last year and we are working with the Vice President of Government and Community Engagement, Michael Flores, to ensure our message is on-point. We have also had discussions with Chancellor Patty Charlton, members of the Board of Regents, campus administration, and other Faculty Senate chairs across NSHE institutions. Let us know if you have an interest in being involved with legislative priorities on campus and we will get you connected. We will hold a Campus Conversations event following the general election in November to discuss our priorities and strategies for the legislative session.
President Sandoval’s State of the University Address is scheduled for Tuesday, October 8, at 3 p.m. in the JCSU, Milt Glick Ballroom; please join me in attending to learn about the trajectory of our university.
It is truly an honor to serve as the 2024-25 Faculty Senate Chair. Please reach out to your senator(s) or e-mail me with any questions you may have related to faculty issues. If you see me on campus or at one of my public concerts, please say hello and let me know how things are going. On behalf of your Faculty Senate, I look forward to working with all of you this year!
Best Regards,
Dr. Aaron Hill
2024-25 Faculty Senate Chair
Associate Professor of Oboe, School of Music, College of Liberal Arts
facsenchair@unr.edu