The University Senate held its second meeting of the semester Wednesday afternoon in Maxwell Auditorium. The hour-and-20-minute session began with a moment of silence for junior Matt Wanetik, who died Friday while studying in France through the SU Abroad Strasbourg Center. Chancellor Nancy Cantor had been in Strasbourg at the time, and asked the Senate for the moment.

Academic Affairs committeeThe academic affairs committee wrote a paper attempting to define Cantor’s mission statement of Scholarship in Action.

‘There is no common understanding yet of what it is,’ said professor Larry Elin, Academic Affairs committee chair.

The committee also analyzed the Vice Chancellor’s Statement on Tenure, issued last year by Eric Spina, SU’s vice chancellor and provost. The statement said ‘publicly engaged scholarship’ should be valued and used in tenure decisions.

Elin said the problem was a range of varied understandings as to what these terms mean – what the definition of ‘publicly engaged scholarship’ is and its distinction from Scholarship in Action. Elin reported that his committee was almost prepared to offer a definition of publicly engaged scholarship.

Cantor said that publicly engaged scholarship – most broadly, academic work that involves or includes community interaction – is not the only focus of Scholarship in Action. Any kind of academic work is part of Scholarship in Action as long as it has some indirect effect on the public, however distant, she said.

‘There isn’t a single kind of Scholarship in Action,’ Cantor said. ‘Publicly engaged scholarship is not synonymous with a broad vision of Scholarship in Action.’

Letters of Expectation, the term for a tenure candidate’s recommendation letters, have been at the crux of the debate. Under Spina’s proposed language in his Statement on Tenure, the majority of such letters could come from non-academics. Critics question how reliable those sources can be.

Agenda Committee’s Ad Hoc Committee to Evaluate the ChancellorBruce Carter made a statement regarding the upcoming review of the chancellor. Carter, the committee chair, said they would be using a similar system of interviews and surveys that were used during the reviews of Chancellor Buzz Shaw in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Senate bylaws call for a review of the chancellor every five years. The report attempts to gauge the university community’s opinion of the chancellor’s performance, though it is never made public. The report is officially handed to the chairman of the board of trustees who shares it with the chancellor.

Committee on Women’s ConcernsCommittee co-chair Martha Hanson discussed research that has been conducted regarding a women’s center on campus, during her report on the Committee on Women’s Concerns. She said the committee plans to send out student surveys in the near future.

Committee on Athletic PolicyChair Kathleen Hinchman shared her committee’s initiatives with the Senate.

The first initiative was to reduce the committee’s scope. The committee wants to limit its mandate to solely cover NCAA intercollegiate sports. Currently, intramural and club sports fall under its jurisdiction, but often fall to the wayside in the shadow of the SU Athletics programs. When the change is made, the Student Life Committee will absorb oversight of intramural and club sports.

Hinchman also proposed a central advising center for student athletes to use when making academic decisions that exceed the expertise of one faculty member, like switching majors. The proposal was part of a greater look at the welfare of student athletes. The concern was rooted in the financial struggles of the Athletic Department in recent years.

The committee also worked with the Office of Admissions to learn more about the interaction between coaches and the office when admitting recruits and selecting their majors.

Cantor also unveiled some details behind the hiring strategy being implemented at Manley Field House. She discussed the concentrated effort to hire top-notch women to serve as assistant coaches on women’s teams. The idea is to cultivate a strong crop of qualified women to coach the rapidly increasing number of female teams popping up across the country.

The next University Senate meeting will be held Nov. 5.

msreilly@syr.edu

Published on October 9, 2008 at 12:00 pm