Outgoing Faculty Senate
Just over fifty years ago, the Academic Council at Stanford University created, for the first time, a Faculty Senate in order to more effectively carry out the Council’s governance mandates. Now with 56 elected members and 15 ex-officio ones (including three students), the Faculty Senate has grown, somewhat quietly, into one of the more powerful governing institutions on campus. It has the broad authority to way in on a host of University-wide issues, from general education requirements to policies for undergraduate admissions and financial aid.
In an attempt to understand this unique institution and the faculty’s role in governance at Stanford, Stanford Politics sat down with outgoing Faculty Senate chair Stephen Stedman. Stedman is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Democ- racy, Development, and the Rule of Law; a Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science; and a Resident Fellow in Crothers. In our conversation, we discussed issues ranging from the University’s Long-Range-Planning initiative to the faculty and student roles in University governance writ large.
What follows is a transcript of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.
You’re somewhat of a lifelong Stanford person. You did your undergrad and graduate work here and then came back to start teaching in the ’90s. You’ve served as a Resident Fellow in a freshman dorm and now as one in Croth- ers, and you run an undergraduate honors pro- gram. What has your experience in the Faculty Senate, and as its chair, taught you about this University that you did not get from your other perspectives and roles?
You know, I think I’m just coming to the realization of how huge of an enterprise it is to run Stanford. If you think about everything that goes into this institution and all the different mandates between education, research, and then having a hospital, and then having an athletics department, and then having real estate, and then having investments. They have to simultaneously try to keep an eye out for the big picture while making sure that all the details and the weeds are getting attention as well. It’s pretty staggering actually. It’s a huge endeavor.
I do have some worries right now, though, in part because of how long this long range planning process has taken. The long range plan has sort of become more of a long term planning exer- cise. I think my fear is that when long range planning takes so long, it creates a lot of uncertainty for people as to what direction our programs are going in. Like should we continue to do what we’re doing, or what? And some programs, like ResEd, just went completely on hold because of the ResX task force — they had a hiring freeze, nobody knew what was going to be coming, morale went down, and so a lot of people just left.
They’ve hollowed out the lower levels and their ability to do the weeds and implement things all because those people are waiting to find out from the higher ups what “the plan” is.
So I have this theory that, when too much emphasis is on planning, it creates an enormous amount of arbitrariness down below at those implementation levels. I don’t know; maybe it’s just me. But, over all the time that I’ve been at Stanford, it just seems like now I keep running into these kinds of moments where I think to myself: what are they thinking? And it’s not from the Provost or President’s office. Instead, it’s from a lot of people who now have a lot of authority making some really puzzling decisions because no one is paying attention.
Can you talk a little bit about the ways that the faculty senate has interacted with the long range plan? How are you all interfacing with University administrators to ensure that the input they’re getting for the long range plan is in accordance with what you all want to do regarding your mandates?
You know, it’s actually not working that way. When the long range plan started there was an enormous amount of excitement; there were all these suggestions from people coming in, and it seemed like the whole process generated some two thousand ideas and recommendations. Then we had to think: well what do you do with all that? So it got thrown into these working groups and stuff, and seriously, for the first two years, I found it incredibly frustrating at the Faculty Senate because we would hear these presentations where people would come in and say, “Well we don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve heard a lot of ideas and we still have to think through all these ideas.” Or, they would say, “Well we really can’t say much at this point. We don’t really want to reveal anything and don’t want to say anything because we don’t know exactly how this will proceed.”
So, when the Senate Steering Committee and I were setting the agenda for the upcoming Senate term, I was telling them as Chair that I don’t want anybody coming in the long range plan until they have real actionable stuff. It ended up being kind of weird because we were told ResX was going to be done fairly early, that they would have it together by October. So we put them on the Senate agenda, and then they couldn’t say anything about what their plan was— they couldn’t even say what they were discussing. I had senators looking at me like, what? Why are they here? So that’s where we are.
I mean we keep hearing that eventually the long range plan’s Committee on the First Year experience is supposed to report, and the Committee on the Majors are going to have really good ideas. We just haven’t seen them yet.
When they finally do have something to report, then it’s going to become interesting because it’s still not going to be a done deal. They’ll come in and present their ideas, but ultimately the Faculty Senate will have to vote on anything having to do with the curriculum, for example. And there are various committees we have that have an important role in these matters, like our Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy (CUSP). CUSP will have a huge say in what the final package of recommendations will look like.
I remember around 10 years ago we had a similar report come in from a University committee, and that went into CUSP. CUSP ended up altering the recommendations from that report before presenting them to the full Faculty Senate, and then one particular Senator, Russ Berman, altered them again through motion amongst the full Senate. So we ended up voting on something pretty differ- ent from what was in that initial report that was brought to us.
I think a similar back-and-forth is certainly within the realm of possibility with regard to the long range plan. Up to this point, the actual interaction with long range planning has been pretty minimal because we’re just in a waiting game. But, the decision to do long range planning outside of the Faculty Senate committees that deal with these matters means that there’s going to be a gap between what the University wants and what the faculty wants. That gap will have to be filled at some point, just like 10 years ago.
We’ve been talking a lot about committees, and, if I count correctly, there are eight committees on the Faculty Senate. On top of that you have University administration committees, and various task forces, and working groups. Do you have any general thoughts on the effec- tiveness of all these committees? I’m curious as to whether you think they work for running a University, and for dealing with the big ideas and the in the weeds stuff you’ve been talking about.
You know, there are several things that I would change, and it would really need some work. For instance, my feeling is that, as of right now, there are way too many committees at this University. There are just way too many committees. It’s not just Faculty Sen- ate committees. Each Vice Provost has committees too: there are VPSA committees, VPUE committees—the deans probably also have their own committees. It just seems like everyone has extra committees. On top of that, you have these special groups that are supposedly one-offs regarding long range planning. Then you have the occasional search committees and the occasional task forces and working groups. It’s a lot.
To me, the first issue is that it’s pulling faculty away from what they actually should be doing. They should be researching and teaching. They should be participating in university governance, too, but they should do it efficiently. What we have right now is not efficient.
For instance, when I was chair of the Committee on Committees in the Faculty Senate, which is the Committee in charge of placing faculty on the other Faculty Senate committees, we would often find that when we wanted to nominate somebody to be on one of the Faculty Senate committees, they would say they couldn’t because they were already on two or three other committees. We would respond by saying, you know, that’s weird, because you’re not on any of our committees. They would say, well, yeah, but I’m on these other University committees.
The Committee on Committees is responsible for putting faculty onto University committees, and I think that mandate should really be for all University committees above the department level. So, if VPUE or VPSA or the Dean has a search committee for a high-level position they want faculty input on, the Committee on Committees should be choosing the faculty to serve on that committee. The Provost or Vice Provost should not be able to cherry-pick the faculty that get to serve on that committee because if they’re smart — and they are smart individuals — they could just get the per- spective they want by choosing the right faculty member to be on the committee.
Here, there’s actually a good parallel to the ASSU. ASSU’s Nomi- nations Committee should also be responsible for placing students on any kind of University committee. Again, it doesn’t work that way right now; right now, there are tons of University committees with students on them that were not placed by the ASSU. But it shouldn’t work that way. ASSU should have sole authority to place students on committees because they represent the students.
The one thing about our influence at the Faculty Senate that’s important to note is that we have no real budgetary power. The shared governance concept you were talking about really works when the faculty keep to a fairly limited scope of issues and don’t make too many recommendations that involve unfunded mandates. In the past, the University had been very good when it comes to working with us on something like curriculum. We, the Faculty Senate, said we need a new Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) as a component of general education, that meant the University was going to have to go out and pay for a whole bunch of lecturers and other support systems that will have to go into that. And for those kinds of things, the University had always done that, so that works well.
So for curriculum type stuff, it works well, but one of the issues we’ve been dealing with at the Faculty Senate this year has to do with taking the burden off of professors and departments when it comes to OAE accommodations. Things with really big lecture courses like the natural sciences or computer science are really hit by this. It is amazing how much time it takes up for faculty, administrators, and sometimes graduate students to ensure that all of the OAE accommodations are met. We had this session at the Facul- ty Senate where everybody was speaking about how much time it adds to what they’re doing. That means less time teaching and less time researching.
To do anything about it, though, is going to take real, dedicated resources. One of the ideas put forward was to maybe have a testing center like the University of Michigan does. There, they have a testing building where all the accommodations are done in a centralized location with a dedicated staff. But if our University or Provost decide that’s not where they want to spend our resources, then nothing is going to happen.
At the Faculty Senate you have this committee called CUAFA, the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid. Its mandate says that CUAFA “shall establish the standards and policies by which applicants for admission and
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applicants for financial aid are to be selected and shall assure itself the University policies on un- dergraduate admission and financial aid are be- ing executed.”
This year the Faculty Senate, via work done by CUAFA, voted on a bill supporting need-blind admissions for international students. Can you talk a little bit about how this dilemma between University-controlled resources and the desires of the Faculty Senate plays out in this context?
Yeah, so I think there are two things going on related to the charge of CUAFA. Let’s take it one at a time.
First, a bunch of these mandates to the Faculty Senate were written in the 1960s and 1970s. They have all this language about faculty authority, preferences, oversight and all this stuff, right. But the fact of the matter is, today especially, we also have a lot of professional management from the University, and CUAFA is a great example of this.
We do have all this language about faculty authority in admissions, but the fact of the matter is we have Dean Shaw who is a real professional, does a terrific job, and has his own way of doing things. At any given moment, the ability of any one member of CUAFA to say you should do something different is extremely limited because anyone transitioning into CUAFA first has to take a lot of time to just figure out how all of admissions actually works, to learn the ropes, really. We meet once every six weeks, so it’s hard for a faculty member to just parachute into CUAFA and say, no, Dean Shaw, this is actually how you’re going to do your job. That’s just not going to happen right now.
That being said, CUAFA did have an incredibly important role early on in its existence because they were the ones that decided to end the quota on women being admitted into Stanford in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. The faculty on CUAFA told admissions that they had to get rid of the quota, that the faculty wouldn’t accept it, and that changed things. Since then though, CUAFA hasn’t done a heck of a lot.
And this is something that we’re actually going to try and rethink and just do a bit differently. There’s an institution tied to the Faculty Senate called the Policy and Planning Board (PPB). The PPB can be activated by a decision of the current chair and the past two senate chairs, so in my case right not the would be Deborah Satz, Elizabeth Hadley and myself. Activating the PPB creates yet another committee, an ad-hoc one, that is supposed to step away on an issue, do a separate deep dive on it, and come away with some big picture. We’re gonna use it for two issues starting this summer. One is on campus climate and how to, you know, promote and respect diversity while also being true to academic freedom. The second is on undergraduate admissions. We’re not just going to replicate what CUAFA is supposed to do. The PPB is intended to give faculty the opportunity to step back and ask, well, what are our preferences when it comes to undergraduate admission? What do we think?
Hopefully this will empower anybody in the future who is going to be on CUAFA to be able to know, right from the start of when they join, what the faculty generally wants when it comes to admissions. The faculty are really excited about this. The current chair of CUAFA, David Lobell, and next year’s chair, David Grusky, are both really enthusiastic. And this is really how it should go. The faculty need to come to their own minds and enter into a discussion on admissions at CUAFA in a somewhat educated and empowered manner. I don’t what the PPB will come up with, but everything should be on the table because all the stuff coming out of the scandal recently indicated that everything should really be on the table.
At the beginning of the year, you commended Stanford’s shared governance system in an interview, but you said it works only when the faculty senators are active. Do you think the past year has been particularly active in some respects? What more besides these ad-hoc committees and such could you all do moving forward to get back up to speed and be active?
I think it’s been a good year. I think we’ve had a lot of great debate and discussion this year. The President and Provost come to most if not all of our Senate meetings — I actually don’t think the Provost has missed a single one. They get to hear what the senators are saying, and we’ve dealt with some pretty tough issues this year. I made use of panel discussions as a way to try and bring several perspectives in on an issue at once and then have the faculty react to the range of perspectives that’s been put forward. Everybody has really jumped in, which I’ve been pleased by.
In past Senates I’ve been on, we’ve had sessions where nobody has any questions to ask. That’s not really been a problem this year. Everybody has been raising their hand and has had something to say or some question to ask. I think those respects it’s been quite good.
The other good thing is that we’ve had very active senators that have let me know what’s on their minds and what issues they want to see us discuss. One example is this recent Stanford University
Press decision. I must have had like 60 emails or something come in while it was all happening; it was incredible. All these people were doing whatever they had to do, and they all thought the Faculty Senate ought to know and do something about this. That suggests to me that faculty really see the Senate as a venue for putting forward objections, ideas and questions. I think that’s very good.
On the other hand, I think faculty, again, do have to be realistic if their ideas involve a price tag. Even if the faculty think something is a good idea, you often need more than just a Faculty Senate decision to make that thing happen, and international financial aid is a good example of this. We can say we want this to happen, that it’s really high priority for the faculty, and that we really believe in it. In the end, though, the budgetary decision is going to be made separate from the sense of the Senate.
And that’s not usually how governance works, right?
Right. But I actually do think this year has been a good one for the Senators doing their homework and showing a willingness to engage in debate, discussion, and dialogue.
I guess my next question is, if you just had a resolution coming from the debate/dialogue that was simple and said the faculty wants X with respect to issue Y, do you all do any sort of follow-through once it’s in the hands of University administrators?
Oftentimes when things happen, people’s concerns are addressed, and they’re happy, and all is good. But, they’re not all happy endings. One of the professors who presented on that OAE accommodations issue said he came forward three years ago with recommendations and nothing got done. He complained that the issue wasn’t just going away, and he’d rather not just put forward concerns and recommendations if nothing is going to be done with them. So that’s one example of an area that needs more follow through.
You know if you’re running a university, there is all the big vision, big initiative, transformational stuff you have to think about, but you also have to figure out how this place works on a day-to-day basis. You have to make that day-to-day work hopefully not just arbitrary. That’s again what I keep coming back to. I really worry because I’m seeing a lot of inefficiencies and arbitrariness in the day-to-day running of things. With this OAE thing, for example, the University has heard the same complaints about this large burden twice in the last four years, and they still have not done anything.
If you read the Stanford Daily or Stanford News Service coverage of the Faculty Senate, it really centers around these debates and discussion. You read a lot about stuff like, well, today the Faculty Senate heard about this report or from this panel, then this Senator said this in response and this other Senator joined in or disagreed. That’s usually how the articles end, though. Sometimes they talk about votes on resolutions, but I think from the student perspective it would be helpful to better understand the faculty’s “legislative process” or whatever the parallel is. What’s the next step after a discussion or a debate? What happens after that?
So sometimes it is just a resolution or policy vote. Other times it actually goes back down to a committee for them to put forward what the eventual resolution will be. For instance, there was recently this ad-hoc committee or task force on the plight of lecturers at Stanford. This is a big deal; we use lecturers for all kinds of key courses. The play an instrumental role in this university, but they’re not academic council members, so they don’t get any housing benefits or stuff like that. Affordability is obviously awful in the Bay Area. How do we make sure that these people can be here, survive, and feel like they’re valued parts of the community? Really important issue.
So we hear this task force’s report, and they have a couple of recommendations having to do with the status of a particular professor line of teaching. For us be to able to take action on that recommendation, though, we have to involve the Committee on the Professoriate, they have to be the ones to first weigh in on all of this, then come forward with their own recommendation. So that’s what happening right now with that, and you can tell that it really just varies a lot by issue.
We spent a lot of time, for example, on issues of diversity, academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the eventual resolution that came from all that was that we want the PPB to spend another year on this and come up with actual concrete recommendations about how we further these goals at Stanford. So with this issue it’s going to be up to the PPB to come up with the actionable recommendations.
Do you find that what seems like an omnipresent focus on long range planning from the University is impeding their ability to follow through on some of the more day-to-day concerns that just aren’t getting addressed?
Well, yes, because attention is finite, right? I mean, I’ll just give you some of examples of really small things that just make me scratch my head and wonder why this is happening. One of them has to do with the Office of Student Activities and Leadership (SAL) under the Vice Provost for Student Affairs (VPSA). The decisions SAL makes seem to me oftentimes incredibly arbitrary.
Recently, they had a new student group on global poverty and development trying to get started. These kids did everything they needed to do, filled out all the forms and went through every hoop imaginable, then were told no by SAL. SAL said that it needed to merge with the student group on global public health. Well, global development and poverty alleviation is not the same as global public health. They can look at different tiers of countries — global poverty and development look at the lowest income countries, while global public health looks at all sort of countries. They’re also looking at pretty different things in general, so why do they have to merge? It’s like, okay, “global” is in both names, that’s good, I guess, but is that the decision rule? I just don’t know, it’s a head-scratcher.
This may not be as related to the Faculty Sen- ate per se, but as the Chair of the Senate it seems like you’ve really been immersed in these weedy issues that come to your atten- tion through various avenues. I think, on these kinds of issues, a lot of students are pretty frustrated with the lack of transparency on the University’s part. We get these arbitrary decisions from administrators and hear little reasons as to why they occurred, or if we do hear a reason it’s one that was never made properly clear beforehand. How do you think the University can go about being more clear about how their administrative decisions get made?
For me, actually, a lot of hearing about these issues come from being in the dorms as a resident fellow for as long as my wife and I have been. The benefit of being a faculty member, and of being on Senate in particular, is that the Faculty Senate allows us to ask the same questions you’re asking to administrators. As part of the Senate, we have question time with the President and Provost, and one of the big frustrations I still have with our Senate is that they don’t use that question time productively. There are times when nobody has any questions for the President or Provost when they really should. Do you really have nothing you can ask them? Nothing on your mind? Nobody has been suggesting to you that there is an issue that you may want to have a better understanding of the decision calculus behind that issue? We have this venue to ask those tough questions, but we don’t use it.
Your ASSU presidents are ex-officio members of the Faculty Senate; they could ask those questions there too if they wanted, but they don’t.
So you’re clearly someone who’s been in the dorms here as both a student and an RF, which I’m sure makes you especially partial to the student experience. I’m curious how you think the Faculty Senate balances advocating directly for the students versus for themselves?
I think there there are a lot of faculty here who care a lot about students, and ultimately I think that’s what this really rests on.
For something to be of the purview of the Faculty Senate it’s supposed to be related to faculty — surprise surprise. But, it’s pretty easy to make the argument that much of the student experience does relate to the faculty and is something that matters to them. Sometimes, though, people don’t see that connection.
Several years ago, when President Hennessy and Provost Etchemendy wanted to ban hard alcohol in all residences, I wrote a long eight to 10-page memo to every Faculty Senators explaining why this was a bad idea. The issue was not brought up in the actual Faculty Senate meeting because the agenda was already kind of full, but some people did write back to me. They asked if this was really a concern of the Faculty Senate. My answer was yes, because you care about the safety of your students. You care about their performance in your classroom, and, really, there are bunch of reasons why we, as the Faculty Senators, should actually have a say in this decision. It’s not a slam dunk to say this relates to student affairs and student life only. It certainly has lots of implications for faculty members. It undermines the role of resident fellows, for example, if you simply impose something like this and expect them to just implement and enforce it. There’s all sorts of stuff there, and this is just one example of how this unfolds.
It’s actually much better if students advocate for students. I mean, for all kinds of reasons, students should speak for students. But we also run into issues here. A couple years ago when the Who’s Teaching Us movement was happening, there were some people in the Faculty Senate that wanted the students from that movement to come speak. My feeling at the time though was that the students already had representatives they voted on, called ASSU Presidents and Senators, that could do that. Why would we give the students from this movement a specific channel to speak when in fact it should the elected representatives of the student body that should be speaking?
For me, one of the ways you can empower the ASSU is to give them an enhanced role. Give them a role in these sorts of discussion instead of bypassing them because other student groups get created and make a lot of noise. I think if you really wanted to improve the student voice at Stanford, you would really want to strengthen the ASSU.
What do you think are the best ways to do that?
That’s tough, I think I’m way out of my league on that one.
Guess it’s the question of the time.
Yeah, you know, I remember all kinds of different ideas that have come about at different times. One was actually going to an election system that prioritizes some sort of constituency where people live, like make representation dorm-based, or something like that. I don’t know, there’s lots to talk about there.
I will say this, though: I think one thing that we had to watch at the Faculty Senate was opining on things that are happening in the world. That’s not why we get chosen, We don’t get voted on to pass resolutions that say what’s happening in Washington D.C. is awful. We shouldn’t be doing that unless there is a direct connection to what the University does, and sometimes this happens, like the travel ban or funding for the sciences. In cases like those, it’s absolutely essential that we come out and say something, but we should really try to focus on what’s happening at Stanford.
Lucas Rodriguez, a senior studying political science, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics.