The UVA faculty has seen a vision of the future and is trying to tweak it.
The vision is the draft report of the Commission on the Future, a huge document chock full of ideas “proposing directions for the University for the next decade and beyond,” in the words of the draft introduction. While anyone who wants has been able to submit comments online, members of the faculty gathered last week to review the document, the largest and most organized response to date.
To get a sense for the faculty’s take, C-VILLE talked to Elizabeth Powell, a Darden professor who chairs the Faculty Senate committee on planning and development. She broke down the general response:
For starters, the University needs to be “highly selective of truly new initiatives,” says Powell. While the new Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy is all well and good, for instance, UVA can take only so many new schools at a time without sacrificing what it does well.
Graduate students also need more love. “UVA historically prides itself on having a strong undergrad experience,” says Powell. “If you had to generalize, our graduate education is more moderate in its success.” Part of that love is higher stipends, but part of it is also hiring top faculty.
How do you hire top faculty? Make sure you’ve got sweet buildings for research. The faculty committee wants to make sure that investment keeps getting made in the infrastructure with new buildings such as the three science buildings approved by the Board of Visitors last week. And since the University’s hiring, it might as well pick up a diverse bunch—diverse both in terms of demographics as well as intellectual thought.
Once UVA gets all those smart and diverse faculty members, they shouldn’t all languish in their own departments. The Faculty Senate wants to see more interdisciplinary research and teaching. But it also wants to see more collaboration between faculty and administration. One step would be to give the faculty a seat on the Board of Visitors, something the Faculty Senate has advocated for years. But Powell says that the new provost, Tim Garson, has “been very generous in sharing information and views during the process.” She points out that he even postponed a deadline in order to get the faculty’s opinion on the draft report of the Commission on the Future.
Finally, the faculty thinks it’s time to stop planning in an ad hoc way and to establish a permanent planning body, perhaps out of the provost’s office. After all, UVA has had a lot of great plans recently—the 2020 plans for the University, the 10-year academic plan—but, says Powell, “the likelihood of these plans being successful is undermined because you don’t have someone to implement it.”
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