Annual Report
University of Oregon Faculty Advisory Council,
2006-2007
Council
Membership
Terms expiring in June 2007: Stephanie Bosnyk
(Business), W. Andrew Marcus (Geography), Michael Moffitt (Law), Anne McLucas
(Music and Dance), Naomi Zack (Philosophy).
Terms expiring in June 2008: Kathy Cashman
(Geological Sciences), Donald Corner (Architecture), Julianne Newton
(Journalism/Communication), Steve Pickett (Disability Services), Brad Shelton
(Mathematics).
Ex Officio: Senate Presidents Jeff Hurwit (Art History), Suzanne Clark (English), and W. Andrew Marcus (Geography) and the Senate Vice President Gordon Sayre (English).
Administration: President Dave Frohnmayer, Senior Vice President and Provost Linda Brady, Vice Provost Russ Tomlin.
The FAC also invited non-members to participate periodically, when the agenda suggested that our conversations would be better informed with the assistance of others.
Meetings
The FAC met regularly throughout the academic year (Mondays 11am-1pm and in supplemental meetings, as needed) to provide senior University administrators with advice on the most pressing issues facing the University of Oregon.
Agendas
and Issues
We constructed the agendas for our meetings jointly, with the President, the Provost, the Vice Provost, the Chair of the FAC, and various members of the FAC each initiating significant conversations at various points in the year.
As in previous years, members of the FAC treated the meetings as confidential deliberations. A shared understanding of the confidentiality of the proceedings served at least three purposes. First, we hoped that it would encourage members (including administrators) to raise pressing issues or agenda items at the earliest possible stage—when advice would be most likely to have an impact. Second, we hoped that confidentiality would encourage individual members to voice their unvarnished beliefs without fear of external attribution. Third, we hoped that confidentiality would promote a higher degree of productive informality than one could reasonably expect of a body engaged in more public deliberations. As far as I can tell, the contents of FAC deliberations remained entirely confidentiality this year, except when the FAC made the explicit decision to permit members to talk about particular agenda items.
Consistent with the considerations driving the confidentiality of the FAC’s deliberations, the list below captures only a portion of the topics we discussed over the year. The considerable breadth of even this partial list illustrates the range of topics on which the FAC provided advice.