Campus News

April 5, 2010

University governance roundup

Employee Council
The March meeting is the Employee Council’s annual Employee Town Hall where employees across the University get their questions answered and get a reading on the pulse of the University.

President Jim Wagner, Provost Earl Lewis, Executive Vice President for Health Affairs Fred Sanfilippo and Vice President for Finance and Administration Mike Mandl answered questions about transportation, a salary program, how the graduate student programs are funded.

Wagner said,  “We’ve also decided Emory will have fewer resources and perhaps needs to be doing fewer activities.  This is an ethical issue. If you ask people to do a hundred things but you only have 90 percent of the money going forward, can you really ask them to more with less or the same with less? Wouldn’t it be more ethical to do 90 things with 100 percent of the sources? And that’s what we’ve chosen to do.”

Visit Emory and Economy to watch a video replay of the 2010 Employee Town Hall.

Faculty Council
The Faculty Council will edit the final document on the council’s and University Senate’s Metric for Excellence and Distinction initiative.

“We talked about the possibility of using the document and distributing it more widely and in a broad way to continue the conversation of what makes Emory excellent and ways we can learn from our own excellence,” council President Ken Carter said, adding the council plans also distribute it to department and programs “to begin their own conversations about excellence. We want to encourage its use around campus.”

Working on the initiative has had a two-fold effect and has been “a good use of our time. … It got the Faculty Council and the University Senate to start talking about issues in their departments and programs and highlighting the best of the departments and programs.

“In a time when there’s not a lot of good news, it’s great to see some of the great things going on at Emory, to celebrate them and to see if we can find ways to connect that and increase our overall strengths.”

The council also heard a presentation from Cheryl Ritchie, director, insurance and loss control program and Associate General Counsel Melinda Simon on International SOS, which offers travel and medical service for Emory faculty, staff and students traveling abroad.

University Senate
University Senate President Ken Carter is having the senate’s committees take a different tack on reporting their activities this year. Instead of having chairs or representatives talk about what their committees did during the year, Carter is asking members to review their activities, then talk about the state of their charge, whether or not the structure of the committee lets them meet their charge and how it is working.

At the March meeting, elections were held with Jonetta James, program administrative assistant in educational studies, elected for a second term as secretary of the senate. Erica Brownfield, associate professor of medicine, is the senate’s president-elect. The current president-elect, music professor Steve Everett, takes over as president next year.

The senate also heard an update on the MyEmory and the project to craft a document “using language to describe the Emory community that can be consistent across the schools and programs,” Carter said. The senate’s final roundtable discussion of excellence for the year focused on the Transforming Community Project, which has been recognized by the Ford Foundation. Carter noted that leaders of the program, which is “unique to Emory,” are looking at ways to replicate at other campuses and even businesses and organizations to have some of the same conversations the program has here.


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