Dear Senators: I want to strongly urge you to vote against the proposed resolution on transparency since it is aiming at the wrong target. In my experience as a senator, the resolutions I led were readily put on the agenda by the DoF and the UFC. I have to say that it was a tremendous honor to work with our senate cosponsors, on those as well as other resolutions they taught me a lot about how to work with a good heart, they are among the finest people I have gotten to know. I think Eve and Charlie have been tremendous at enabling voices to be heard in the senate through resolutions. I also have to add that I have tremendous appreciation for what Mike and Martha have done for us all in many many ways. Case in point is to maintain our financial stability and health(!) while insuring staff employment throughout the pandemic. Nevertheless, I am still fuming over what happened a year ago over the joint program between the Hotel School and Peking University: on top of our agonizing over how to respond to Martha’s antiracism initiative, we were faced with a sham vetting of the our relations with China (yes, for me it’s about the Uygurs, cf Frank Rhodes going up against China and ahead of the US State Department to have the former president of Taiwan speak at the reunions) in the proposed program. Charlie bent over backward to design a path for vetting such programs in adherence to Cornell’s stated values. In the last senate meeting I thought we had postponed a decision by tabling further discussion on resolution 174. Rather the admin brought the program before the trustees at graduation. That’s what I meant when I said in the discussion that we were sucker-punched.
Carl (Carl Franck, Senator from Physics)

I urge senators to vote no on this measure because I do not think these measures will improve the effectiveness of the senate.

When I joined the faculty over 15 years ago, the UFC was spectacularly un-diverse as was the faculty senate. In the years since, the UFC has diversified as has the faculty senate. For the first time ever, we have a Black woman dean of faculty and we have an Asian woman as associate dean of faculty. I think that this shift toward a more diverse faculty senate and its committees is an important form of transparency and effectiveness. The members of the UFC are elected faculty representatives – the entire faculty votes for the UFC, the associate dean of faculty and the dean of faculty. It’s striking that transparency is an important rationale here; we should perhaps ask WHY a resolution favoring “transparency” emerges at a moment when the faculty senate is becoming more diverse.

There have been several major changes to make the senate both more transparent and effective: meetings are now recorded so that we have a full textual transcript and a recording of audio. In addition, anyone can post comments to resolutions that are pending. These measures were intended to expand the opportunities for a larger group of faculty to engage with faculty governance and have their voices heard. The meeting times were shifted to 3:30 to accommodate those with care responsibilities. The inclusion of the RTE faculty representatives in the faculty senate significantly expanded who the senate represents.

Given those changes, it has been profoundly demoralizing that at a moment when we are all invested in hearing more voices on important issues, we learned at a recent senate meeting that on average we hear regularly from the same half a dozen people. In the May 11 faculty forum on the transparency and effectiveness resolution, in a meeting of 117 minutes, two speakers spoke for over 30 minutes of the allotted time for discussion.

Last August, I was surprised to see a version of this resolution submitted to Dean Eve de Rosa three weeks after she took office as dean of faculty. I can see the resolution is aiming toward transparency, but it feels like surveillance. Before Dean de Rosa had even chaired a single UFC or faculty senate meeting, there were concerns that she needed to be reformed in her approach toward setting the agenda and appointing ad hoc committees, tasks that previous deans of faculty had been trusted with. I am not sure why this correction was necessary. I will note that this measure is being characterized as “common sense.” If it is common sense, I would ask why introduce in the weeks before the first Black woman dean of faculty took office?

We all agree that we need more voices in the faculty senate, we need more transparency, we need to be effective in voicing our concerns to the central administration. I do not think this resolution will get us there and I would urge you to vote no.