This Week's Message
On behalf of the Committee on Committees (C2), I would like to invite you to participate in a discussion about committee structure at Augustana this week at the Friday Conversation.
You might wonder why a committee structure discussion is important (especially on a Friday afternoon). Since the 2008-2009 Senate Steering committee was given the task of examining committee structure on campus, we have learned that there are 136 faculty positions on the 19 committees responsible to the faculty. Keep in mind that there are approximately 70 additional faculty positions on 22 committees responsible to the administration. At a time when we are engaged in load reduction conversations, it seems logical to critically examine the efficiency of our committee work as well.
The role of committee work in shared governance and the function of the College is extremely important; however, comparison data to other peer and aspirant institutions demonstrates that we have many more committees than other colleges like us.1 Furthermore, we currently have several committees that do not comply with AAC&U recommendations of leadership.
Joe McDowell, Katie Hanson, Kathy Jakielski, Mark Vincent, and I have been thinking about these issues since Spring term 2009, and we would like to share our observations and suggestions with you. We need your feedback on the changes we are proposing. Our recommendations, if enacted, would affect all members of the faculty-- so it is important that we get feedback from as many of our colleagues as possible.
I hope to see you on Friday afternoon in the Wilson Center. Refreshments begin at 3:30 p.m., and the conversation will begin at 4:00 p.m. Complementary babysitting is available.
Sincerely,
Kristin Douglas
1White Paper: Faculty Governance and the Augustana Committee Structure 3/8/2009.