Faculty voted at the Faculty Assembly meeting Tuesday to allow non-tenured faculty in two schools to serve in the Faculty Senate.
In a 156–1 vote, faculty approved the resolution to provide the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and the School of Nursing with an exception to a rule that prohibits non-tenured faculty members from serving on the Faculty Senate. Now, no more than half of the representatives to the Faculty Senate from the medical school and the nursing school can be non-tenured.
For the medical school, two of five members can be non-tenured, and one of two members from the nursing school can be non-tenured. Representatives from these schools must have worked full-time for three years and be ranked as associate professors or higher, according to the resolution passed.
In January, the Faculty Senate approved the resolution that all faculty could vote on at this year’s assembly. A similar resolution permitting full-time faculty from any school to become members of the Faculty Senate failed to pass at last year’s Faculty Assembly meeting.
Charles Garris, the chair of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee, said during the meeting that because few faculty members in the two schools are tenured, it’s fair to allow non-tenured members to join the decision-making body.
“Because of the unique problems of having tenured faculty in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and due to the initial growth phase of the School of Nursing the Faculty Senate felt that an exception should be made in these two schools,” Garris said.
Arthur Wilmarth, a law professor and the chair of the Faculty Senate’s professional ethics and academic freedom committee, presented the resolution and said that about 75 percent of faculty in the medical school cannot obtain tenured positions due to an agreement between the Medical Faculty Associates and the University.
“Over time, how the assembly resolution indicates, that entire group would become disenfranchised, and the Faculty Senate believes that is a serious problem,” Wilmarth said.
The six-year-old nursing school will be allowed to have non-tenured members in the senate for three years, as the school becomes more established, Wilmarth said.
“We think this is very much needed to help the school make the transition to the point where they’ll have adequate numbers of tenured faculty to provide good service to the school,” he said.
Faculty on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus cast their votes during the meeting via a simulcast. The meeting marked the first time faculty could participate remotely.
