Faculty insecurities result in lost student representation

Guest Commentator D. Mike Bauer

That the student voice in University politics will be reduced by the newly approved governance proposal is a given. That said, it is important to look at the issue from more than just the student perspective. We students must not get bogged down in thinking that this new governance structure was created expressly to limit student representation. I've said it before, but it needs repeating: Any reduction of student representation (or anything else otherwise considered political power) is simply an occasion of the governance proposal, and certainly not at the root of the thing.

Now, let's look at what happened in the Senate on Tuesday, though. It was thought that perhaps some of the problems concerning the student voice were mere oversights that the ad hoc committee, what with no student members (a separate problem itself), may have committed due to a lack of our perspective. No problem there; nothing a couple of well-placed amendments couldn't fix. So we thought. The faculty overwhelmingly rejected worthy attempts by the students to remedy the proposal's shortcomings, and with a 3-to-1 faculty-to-student ratio in the senate, any vote along party-lines will result in the faculty prevailing.

I have tried to reconcile my immediate response to Tuesday's senate session, which was that the faculty betrayed their insecurity about students' participation in campus politics. I really tried to find another logical reason for faculty to vote against Senator Josh Stegeman's amendments, but fear and insecurity seem to be the only things I can settle on.

Why isn't there a logical reason? Because the amendments made damn good sense. For instance, at least one student belongs on the steering committee (even the Bylaws and Rules committee, which has a faculty majority, agreed with that). The steering committee makes decisions that affect the University Assembly as a whole, not just the faculty, and when a clause like C.4.b.iv is included in its charge: "[It shall be the responsibility of the steering committee] to maintain avenues of communication with the faculty and student body", the argument could be made that the existence of the steering committee mandates at least one student voice. Professor Gail Ratcliff's argument that putting a student on the steering committee would violate certain lofty principals of the document dealing with the faculty remaining in charge, is pretty ludicrous in light of the committee's charge, and considering that one student on a committee otherwise made up of faculty would pose zero threat to any faculty decisions.

The rejection of the other amendment, which would have moved the Committee on Curriculum and Instruction out of the Faculty Senate and into the University Assembly, is equally illogical. To say that students have no business voting on issues like course proposals, changes in degree requirements, the grading system or the University's calendar, which the Committee would regularly bring to the larger body, is tantamount to saying that students don't belong on the Assembly at all. These are among the very issues that students should be most concerned with, and regardless of whether students are on the committee (which the faculty figure ought to appease us), the fact that students won't get to vote on the committee's issues is at the heart of the matter.

The newly approved governance proposal is not without merit. It is an excellent vehicle to streamline university governance and to clarify a lot of misconceptions about who is really in charge (it's the faculty, and they have no shame in asserting that, as we saw on Tuesday). It is flawed, however, particularly in areas of student representation, and as long as the faculty continues to refuse to grant even the smallest concessions to the deserving students, it will remain flawed. That is why the document is unacceptable to the students of UM-St. Louis.