Last academic year, all five Ohio University senate bodies informally came together for the first time in recent years to create the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. This year, the task force is up for renewal, and senate chairs plan to increase collaboration.
OU’s senate bodies include Classified Senate, Faculty Senate, Administrative Senate, Graduate Student Senate and Student Senate. The senates gathered twice last year in response to the “national views and issues” that arose as a result of the immigration ban and the case against Roger Ailes and building names, Graduate Student Senate President Maria Modayil said.
“(The five senate bodies) insisted on and were granted a meeting in which all of the stakeholders that were being consulted got around a table and had to have a conversation,” Faculty Senate Chair Joe McLaughlin said. “In the typical process, if I say something and I have a concern and the Administrative Senate has a concern too, I never know what their concern is and maybe sometimes we share the same concern or maybe their concern is something we haven’t thought of. I think that is a flaw in the process.”
Typically, when the administration is tasked with initiating or reviewing a policy, the person in charge reaches out to the senates separately, depending on which constituencies the policy relates to.
“Whether it’s a senate leader, or it’s a senator, or it’s an administrative employee serving on a standing committee, any time that there is that service, it is the hope and the expectation, I dare say, that those individuals serving on those committees are representing their constituent groups,” Administrative Senate Chair Jessica Wingett said.
The only continuous, formal collaboration between senates is a committee of all the senate chairs and the Dean’s Council, called the Committee on Committees. They come together to review the president’s standing committees as well as university policy. There are 20 standing committees, however, not all of the senates are represented on each one.
“GSS is not represented on two committees,” Modayil said. “That’s a conversation that I plan to bring to (the Committee of Committees).”
Many administrative leaders, senate chairs and senators sit on or even lead multiple standing committees.
“The Committee on Committees doesn’t really drive communication with the senates at all, so (that’s) more among the senate leadership,” Wingett said.
Student Senate President Landen Lama has ambitions to increase information sharing among senates in the wake of the new administration by creating a more formalized, unified system of collaboration among the senates.
“It’s just a lot of different units on campus that have their own shared government guidelines,” Lama said. “You have five people doing different things in regards to shared governance. There’s no centralized voice, and I’m hopeful that we can come together more on things.”
Although each senate represents different constituents of the university and is granted different roles of advising the administration, everything is a student issue on campus, Lama said.
“When you look at the whole line of the bureaucracy of the university, you might have a really good committee with 50 people on it, but that’s the end resort before (the university administration),” Lama said. “As a student representative, I shouldn’t be giving my opinion at the last moment on an issue because then it won’t get fixed … I want senate to be involved from the beginning, middle, to end.”
