Here’s what the FAUW Board of Directors talked about at its last meeting.
The Nominating and Elections Committee. This committee is officially up and running! The committee will collect submissions from people interested in representing faculty on UW and joint committees to help the Board and President make selections, with the aim of casting a wider net from now on. The committee will also continue the work of the Elections Committee, overseeing and recruiting members to run in Board elections. If you’d like to join this committee, or get involved in any way, get in touch!
The FAUW Parliamentarian role. The description for this position is now finalized and we are looking for someone to fill it! A Parliamentarian advises meeting chairs, committees, and members on matters of meeting procedure and helps to ensure that meetings are conducted in a manner that abides by the rules of the organization while enabling members to participate equitably in deliberations. The parliamentarian will need to be, or become, familiar with Roberts Rules of Order and the FAUW constitution. You can learn more about this role on the FAUW website, and get instructions for how you can put your name forward or suggest someone you think would make a good parliamentarian!
Policy 33 (Ethical Behaviour). A new draft of this policy went out for consultation a couple of years ago and the Staff and Faculty Relations Committees (SRC and FRC) directed the policy drafting committee to make changes based on the comments received at that time. Since then, it has gone out for further consultation to the President’s Anti-Racism Taskforce. FAUW is bringing its final questions and concerns to a special meeting of FRC and SRC on January 31. The Equity Committee chair noted at Thursday’s Board meeting that concerns the committee had in 2019 have not been addressed.
The lecturers survey report. The Lecturers Committee submitted the report on its 2021 survey of lecturers and the Board agreed it’s ready to share. We will send the survey to members asap and post it on the Lecturers Committee page of the FAUW website as soon as we can get an accessible document ready.
The University’s pandemic response. We’re hearing from members that flipping back and forth between mode of delivery is untenable. We’re also concerned about the lack of collegial governance overseeing these decisions, some of which are very much academic decisions and therefore the domain of Senate. As we noted in our email to members on Tuesday and in our last blog post, we’ve been told that there is “local” consultation of faculty members happening, but we can’t find much evidence of this.
We have also been told that the administration is hearing from faculty who are doing just fine. We’re sure that’s true, but the University should not be weighing equally the people for whom the pandemic has been easy against the people for whom it’s been hard. We need to be listening to and helping the people who are struggling.
The Board had a lengthy discussion about what we can do at this point, since the University does not seem to be listening to our concerns. We shared some of what came out of this discussion earlier this week and we’re holding a town hall on Monday, January 31, to hear more from members.
The FAUW Blog 