Agenda for Faculty Senate Meeting
April 20, 2022, 3:30-5:00PM
Physical location: Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall
Zoom location: Contact your department Faculty Senator for the zoom link.
Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ Land Acknowledgement
Senate Speaker Jonathan Ochshorn, Architecture [1 minute]
Call to order
Senate Speaker Jonathan Ochshorn, Architecture [1 minute]
Approval of Minutes: March 9
Senate Speaker Jonathan Ochshorn, Architecture [2 minutes]
Senate Announcements and Updates
Eve De Rosa, Dean of Faculty, Psychology [5 minutes]
Neema Kudva, Chair of the Nominations and Elections Committee, Associate Dean of Faculty, City and Regional Planning [5 minutes]
Q&A [5 minutes]
Proposal Presentations
Prospective Part-time Bachelor’s Degree for Non-Traditional Students
Resolution Presentation — Senator David Lee, University Faculty Committee, Applied Economics and Management [5 minutes]
Motion for an Amendment – Senator Ken Birman, Computer Science [5 minutes]
Senate Discussion [15 minutes]
Award of Honors and Distinctions to Cornell’s Undergraduate Students
Presentation — Lisa Nishii, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education [10 minutes]
Senate Discussion [10 minutes]
Increasing the Transparency and Effectiveness of Faculty Senate Proceedings
Resolution Presentation — Senator Risa Lieberwitz, Industrial and Labor Relations [5 minutes]
Dean of Faculty Response [5 minutes]
Senate Discussion [15 minutes]
Adjournment [1 minute]
Senate Speaker Jonathan Ochshorn, Architecture
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 lead 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)
Eve and Jill: if this comment is misplaced, much obliged if you could put it where it belongs
Would you please post a link to the presidents response to the resolution re. natatorium? Thank you.
Response to comment from Dean of Faculty Office:
The President’s response to Resolution 180 is posted on the resolution page in the Resolution archives. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/3/6798/files/2022/04/Res180response.pdf
The proposal on Latin Honors strikes me as solving the wrong problem…which is that GPA is all that anyone seems to talk about in the student population. Rather than asking that students take challenging courses and broaden their horizons, this proposal challenges them to find the “easy A” courses as are listed in the google doc listing our courses and their median grades so as to pump themselves up for Latin Honors.
I think it far more sensible to continue to allow the departments to assess whether students have taken low-stress less rigorous pathways through our majors; our department meeting today was to discuss the awards we mete out to seniors and prominently displayed in the record was not only GPA but also whether they were in what we call the “honors curriculum” and if/with whom they did research, so that we can also hear what their contributions in research might have been. Why would we want to reduce that assessment to measuring the GPA–which they will already have displayed on their CV anyway? That adds confusion, not clarity.