Present: Mahmoud Abdalla, William Arrocha, Avner Cohen (Vice President), Sabino Morera, Thor Sawin (President). Absent: Andrea Hofmann-Miller, Pushpa Iyer,Katherine Punteney. Staff: Stacie Riley.
Proposed Handbook Changes: The Senate spent time going over a Google document of proposed Faculty Handbook changes. This document will be sent to the Assembly to gather feedback on the proposals in preparation for voting later this semester.
The issue pertaining to multi-year visiting faculty is the most urgent. The change to the handbook would allow visiting faculty to have a status similar to a regular faculty member (i.e. access to development funding, ability to serve on campus committees, and the requirement to undergo annual evaluation). Thor plans to send out a ballot the afternoon of February 12th, and if it passes multi-year visiting faculty would be allowed to participate in this round of development awards.
Faculty Senate President and Deans Meeting: On Friday, February 7th Thor meeting with Laura and Fernando. One of the topics of conversation was the MIIS Language Committee. The committee has not met for several reasons, one of which is they were waiting on APSIC to send their recommendation on the IEM proposal. Sabino and Mahmoud share that the Language Task Force will be a topic of discussion at the LS meeting on February 13th.
A discussion about the plan for French, Japanese, and Economics ensued. Thor asked that a Town Hall be scheduled to inform the community of the plans for these programs.
Departing Faculty: A copy of the letter from the President’s Office sent to departing faculty with an offer to honor them was shared with the Senate by one of the departing faculty.The letter was relatively short, terse in tone and didn’t offer any option for recognition other than a lecture series. Several Senators noted that faculty members have approached them to share their unhappiness with the letter. A discussion about next steps for ensuring that those leaving at the end of the spring semester feel honored and respected followed.
Budget Update: Thor states that the fall enrollment numbers look okay, they are the same as they were for the last two years at this point. He notes that enrollment in GSIPM programs is going down while GSTILE programs are growing, especially TLM and Chinese T&I. Thor states that the savings achieved by Workforce Planning were largely mitigated by the increased healthcare cost and cost of living increases for those faculty who remain. We would have been in a worse financial position by far without Workforce Planning, but not as much savings as hoped was realized, Middlebury was projected to be in the black by fiscal year 2021, but the new projections are slightly in the red. Jeff Dayton-Johnson was asked about the possibility of taking contract non-renewals off the table this year. Jeff replied that although they are not planning on non-renewals this year they cannot promise it won’t happen.
Emeritus Status: The Senate has been asked to remind faculty that they need to be nominated by someone else and that the voting process is by secret ballot. We may want to be more lenient than in some years with the requirement that emeritus status be reserved for those who do not seek employment elsewhere. Several departing faculty this time may still desire to teach for a couple of more years, since they are departing earlier than they had planned.