The University of Michigan’s Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs met Monday afternoon in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building to continue the conversation surrounding current challenges to higher education and to speak with guests Chris Kolb, vice president for government relations, and University President Santa Ono.
In an email to The Michigan Daily, SACUA Chair Rebekah Modrak wrote Ono was supposed to come to the meeting from 3:30-4 p.m. but did not show up. According to Modrak’s email, SACUA planned to ask him what protections the University would be providing for both students and faculty members currently on visas and travel recommendations, especially when they are leaving the country.
“U-M faculty on work visas are worried about leaving the U.S. to travel for conferences and research after seeing the French scientist denied entry because he had criticized President Trump’s research funding cuts,” Modrak wrote. “We’re concerned about our students after watching videos of permanent residents or students with visas being detained or abducted by federal agents, presumably because they participated in protest activities.”
Modrak wrote SACUA had also planned to ask Ono about a comment he had made at the Senate Assembly regarding the monitoring of faculty and student personal social media accounts.
“He had mentioned that there were committees reviewing faculty social media posts,” Modrak wrote. “Additionally, we would like to know if the University of Michigan is currently monitoring student or faculty personal social media posts for content.”
SACUA also prepared a series of questions for Ono about a budget model followed by the U-M Dearborn. Modrak wrote SACUA had concerns about the inequality and competition created between the four colleges — the College of Business, College of Education, Health and Human Services, College of Engineering and Computer Science, College of Arts, Sciences and Letters — within U-M Dearborn in recent years.
“These issues reflect a troubling pattern of governance violations in which guidelines and bylaws are not followed, which is undermining faculty governance and the faculty’s ability to effectively fulfill their academic and professional responsibilities,” Modrak wrote. “We were hoping President Ono could speak to how he will help resolve these issues.”
Next, SACUA discussed the error on a survey that is sent out by deans, presidents and provosts that evaluates administrators annually. SACUA member Vilma Mesa said the Educational Studies Program had the wrong chair and questioned if this error could be fixed. Luke McCarthy, director of the Faculty Senate Office, said this issue could not be fixed this year, but efforts to prevent this mistake from reoccurring in the future should be taken.
“Everybody had been emailed, that’s in the survey, and we never heard about it until it went live,” McCarthy said. “And there’s many, many, many units of the University so we can’t go through and check all of them. (We should) re-examine how the School of Education reports things so that they can try to avoid this mistake in the future.”
At the meeting, Modrak congratulated SACUA member Craig Smith and organizers of the Trans* Day of Visibility event, which had occurred earlier in the day. Smith said he was pleased with the high turnout, while also emphasizing his desire to create more awareness for the transgender community on campus.
“(The speakers) still feel kind of siloed to me and I feel like in some ways, we need a bit more of a central coalition that starts to grow, that’s kind of what gets (the community’s) attention,” Smith said. “I think (the administration) can still easily dismiss things like what happened today, which is really sad.”
Daily News Contributor Sophie Cloutier can be reached at sophiecl@umich.edu.
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