Dear Colleagues:

The Faculty Senate welcomes you to the ’09-10 academic year and invites you to help us as we work with the administration to shape the direction of the University. We expect this year to be unusually full of challenges, some of which will require new legislation and others that will demand an extraordinary degree of cooperation and collegiality to define our path forward.

Much of the work of the Faculty Senate is done behind-the-scenes by the fourteen Faculty Councils and the Senate Committees. Over the coming academic year, I would expect to see significant progress on both new and on-going issues currently under consideration by those Councils and Committees. A small sampling of these include:

• Working to ensure that students on all three campuses continue to be well-served through collaboration with administration on funding models that effectively respond to the evolving budget crisis.
• Continuing to monitor the evolving State economic situation and how it relates to the President’s Executive Order from last spring, temporarily suspending the Faculty Salary Policy.
• Maintaining momentum on a much-needed proposal, initiated in Spring of 2007, to streamline the profile and complexity of operations required to run the Faculty Senate, made even more timely and pressing by recent financial exigencies.
• Preparing for a new spectrum of student applicants in the next ten years by accurately anticipating the evolving needs of that new community of scholars, whose diverse profile may be significantly different than that of the past decade.
• Entering into discussions on how best to relate a newly revised Student Conduct Code to the Bothell and Tacoma campuses.
• Working closely with the Advisory Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics to ensure that student athletes receive a balanced, quality education.
• Finding ways to offer research opportunities to students interested in reducing the UW’s carbon footprint, thereby engaging the student community in a common purpose.
• Exploring ways to further diversify faculty retirement investment options.

These specific tasks will keep us very busy. They are best understood, however, against the backdrop of a longer-term effort to strengthen the role of faculty governance in addressing the issues and opportunities facing us. We have now come to the beginning of several years of declining state support for our academic programs. Thus we face difficult struggles over the allocation of decreasing academic and administrative resources. What role will the mechanisms of faculty governance play in decisions about what to pursue, principles for allocating our tuition and state revenues, and plans to best maintain our equilibrium as a premier learning and research university?

In moving forward we stand on the shoulders of our past Senate chairs, especially David Lovell and Dan Luchtel, who chaired the SCPB last year after serving as Senate chair the previous year. They have helped us to find common principles for our immediate funding decisions that simultaneously address the key needs of our students, our diverse departments and colleges, and the highest interests of our community — all the while maintaining and even nurturing working relations with the Regents, the President, and the Provost. This is an especially critical time to work harmoniously, and the past twelve months have demonstrated our commitment to sharing in making high-level decisions. Our joint work will assure that the UW maintains its place as the flagship regional university – a place where our diversity and our talents can be brought to bear on many of the key issues of our region and the times.

Five, ten, and twenty years forward the UW will still be the most highly esteemed institution, poised to pursue a broadly informed understanding of the human prospect and to make sense of our natural world and the processes that govern the amazing Universe in which we find ourselves.

Your participation in faculty governance will help us ensure that your values as well as your interests are consequential in this conversation.