Updated: January 14, 2025, at 4:54 p.m.
Faculty senators Friday unanimously extended temporary changes made to the Code of Academic Integrity last year and pressed officials to be more active in finding and enlisting professors to sit on student disciplinary panels.
The Faculty Senate Educational Policy and Technology Committee co-chair Sarah Wagner and Office of Conflict Education & Student Accountability Director Christy Anthony proposed prolonging last year’s temporary reduction in the number of people required at student conduct panels and the elimination of the rule that panels must convene for proposed sanctions less severe than suspension. Faculty senators supported the extension and encouraged Provost Chris Bracey to recruit more faculty for the panels to address a backlog in student disciplinary cases.
Students who challenge academic integrity violations are required to attend a student conduct panel which includes one student and one faculty member selected from a pool of trained members, unless they receive a warning. Before last year’s panel reduction, a full panel consisted of two faculty and three students.
Last year, Anthony said artificial intelligence misuse, which is typically categorized as a cheating violation under the code, has contributed to the rise in cases because faculty are checking for AI use and reporting more students.
Cynthia Core, a faculty senator and a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences, suggested that the University should mandate serving on the panels as part of faculty member’s service requirements. She said she has served on panels previously and filed a recent grievance that took three semesters to resolve due to the lack of faculty serving on the panels.
“It was excruciating to me, to the students, it diminished their experience at the University,” Core said. “It created bitterness among the student group toward our faculty.”
Phil Wirtz, a faculty senator and a professor of decision sciences and psychological and brain sciences, said he’s heard from his colleagues that there’s a “general misunderstanding” among faculty members that the University is in need of professors to sit on the conduct panels.

Don Parsons, a faculty senator and a professor of economics, said some faculty may not like being obligated to serve on panels and suggested the University should instead identify incentives like monetary encouragement to persuade faculty to sit on the panels.
“As labor economists suggest, look the other way, look for incentives,” Parsons said. “If you’ve talked to deans and there are deans that don’t care about encouraging people to do that in salary or otherwise, then you talk to the provost and have him talk to the dean about incentive set-ups.”
Anthony — whose appearance on Friday marked her return from a leave of absence during the fall when she took a leadership position for the Semester at Sea program — said at the meeting that she has a “few concerns” with mandating faculty service because professors in the past have reneged on past promises to sit on the panels, which complicates scheduling.
She said faculty participation is also challenging because the panels typically take about two hours and the University prohibits adjunct faculty members from serving on the panels, shrinking the pool of eligible faculty.
In response to a question from Wirtz, University President Ellen Granberg said the University is working with Universal Health Services — which owns GW Hospital and has partnered with the District to open a medical care facility in Southwest D.C. — to renegotiate the University’s 2021 agreement with UHS regarding the number of physicians the University will provide to the hospital.
The University pledged in the original negotiation to staff the Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center GW Health with 160 Medical Faculty Associates physicians. The MFA is a group of physicians and faculty from the School of Medicine and Health Science and GW Hospital and has faced continuous financial losses in recent years, rounding out FY2024 with a deficit of more than $107 million.

SMHS Dean and former MFA CEO Barbara Bass claimed during the senate’s December meeting that the Washington Post’s reporting last month that the MFA’s past pledge to provide the hospital with 160 clinicians was an error and the staffing plan is “not complete.”
Granberg said on Friday that she isn’t aware of which specifics of the report Bass felt were incorrect, but she said some of the information that was quoted in the Post report about the staffing plan was “not the way” she understood it.
Granberg also responded to a question from Wirtz about the MFA’s current financial status by saying that there has been “progress” with getting the MFA’s finances back on track but said she can’t speak about the specific details.
“There is movement, and I do see that we’re going to be getting toward a resolution of some type in the next few months,” Granberg said. “I just can’t talk about the details of it right now.”
Chief Financial Officer Bruno Fernandes said officials are still “working through” the numbers regarding the results of the MFA’s FY2025 Quarter 1 and 2 performance and expect to provide an update at the March Faculty Senate meeting.
Fernandes delivered both the FY2024 MFA financial report and last year’s Q1 and Q2 financial report in executive session, meaning all non-senate and non-administrative attendees were required to leave during that segment of the meeting.
Wagner said the EPT Committee has for “several years” spoken with Vice Provost for Enrollment and Student Success Jay Goff about concerns that the University is unable to meet every student’s financial aid needs while the MFA is still losing millions of dollars that seems to be “amounting to nothing.”

She asked Granberg who is responsible for deciding when the MFA’s losses are “too much” and how officials are accounting for the losses’ potential impact on students’ financial situations.
Granberg responded that the MFA’s “senior leadership” and Board of Trustees are responsible for making that decision and added that “everyone” is in agreement that the MFA’s losses are “unsustainable.” She said the solution to resolving the losses is “not a quick one” but said officials are working as quickly as possible to get the MFA on stable footing.
She said finding stability and solving the MFA’s ongoing debt problems may not be the same task — in what appears to be the first time Granberg has publicly suggested that the MFA’s financial stability and GW’s solution to its losses may not be correlated.
“We are all in agreement that that is something that we all want to see happen, and so as soon as we can bring stability and resolution to the MFA, the two are not necessarily connected, but everybody agrees that we need to bring stability to the MFA without a question,” Granberg said.
Interim Vice Provost of Research Bob Miller also presented the University’s annual research report, which stated that GW ranked No. 26 in patents per research expenditure among U.S. universities and awarded $330,000 in new venture competition prizes.
The report also stated that there was a jump in non-federal expenditures as the University’s ranking in total expenditure rose from No. 106 in FY2022 to No. 88 in FY2023. Miller attributed the hike to a new reporting process where the University counted additional “institutional investments” as expenditures.
“In the past, we had undersold ourselves as an institution because we were not recording our institutional investment in graduate students, in tuitions, in a whole variety of activities,” Miller said. “So if you look at that big jump, that jump is as a consequence of counting and looking effectively at our institutional investments.”
The University’s federal research expenditures rose from about $161.87 million in FY2022 to about $162.89 million in FY2023, but GW dropped from No. 95 to No. 98 in the National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development Survey in FY2023, according to the report.
GW had previously dropped from No. 91 in FY2021, which drew concern from faculty senators last year, along with delays in research approvals. Miller said the University was able to “streamline” the approval and review process for human-subject research this year from 45 days to 15 days, which should address delays in research approval.
Miller also said there is “trepidation” among faculty about the status of federal funding sources with President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration and that research administrators must be “flexible.”
“It’s not clear what’s going to happen over the next four years,” Miller said. “There isn’t an impact in the next few months, but potentially we have to be ready to be able to respond to changes in the opportunities that are coming through our external funders.”
Faculty senators also unanimously voted to amend the senate’s bylaws in order to change the wording of a 2023 resolution that tweaked verbiage in the Faculty Organization Plan to be more inclusive and reflect the phrasing of a similar Faculty Assembly resolution.

Sachini Adikari and Tyler Iglesias contributed reporting.
This article was updated to correct the following:
The Hatchet initially reported Bob Miller’s title as interim provost for research, Miller is the interim vice provost for research at the University. The Hatchet also incorrectly reported that Miller said researchers must be “flexible” with federal research funding during the Trump administration, Miller said research administration must be flexible with this funding.
We regret these errors.
This article was updated to clarify the following:
Miller attributed the rise in non-federal expenditures to a new reporting process that counted additional institutional investments that had not previously been reported as expenditures, not overall institutional investments. The New Venture Competition at GW awards competition prizes, it does not earn them.