The University of Michigan’s Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs met in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building Monday afternoon to discuss the formation of a surveillance and security committee, a resolution concerning the Presidential Search Advisory Committee and the launch of the SACUA vacancy process.
SACUA Chair Derek Peterson commenced the meeting with chair updates, including announcing Jonathan Brennan, associate professor of linguistics, as the new chair of the Rules, Practices and Policies Committee. Peterson also noted the Faculty Senate Office staff’s presidential search town hall meeting last Wednesday yielded a notable turnout, with 80 people attending the event in-person and 200 who joined through Zoom.
“Glad to have a good turnout from the faculty government, there were about 200 people on Zoom, with about 80 people in the room,” Peterson said. “Thank you also to the Faculty Senate office staff, who put the whole event together so capably and professionally as we’d expect. I know that at least one, two regents were listening actively, and several have asked that we would send them notes arising out of the meeting.”
During the meeting, Peterson said SACUA approved six nominees for a committee focused on surveillance and security on campus since their last meeting. According to Peterson, the committee will be made up of three faculty members, two deans, two students and two staff members.
“(The committee) will be responsible for looking after and making sure that the security cameras that are proliferating in number are being installed and used according to the best interests of us at the University, with an eye particularly toward maintaining space for academic freedom and dissent on campus,” Peterson said.
Peterson then led a discussion about the University’s newest version of the annual Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities that was created without faculty input and took effect Monday. Last year, the Student Relations Advisory Committee put forth 19 amendments to the SSRR in response to revisions made by the University’s Board of Regents, also without faculty input.
“There’s one (amendment) that remains under discussion, but in bulk, revisions offered by the faculty government to the SSR in this last round of discussions were not accepted,” Peterson said.
Rebekah Modrak, former SACUA chair and Art & Design professor, said one of the amendments was rejected because the University claims that it would improperly overturn a change made by the regents in 2024. However, the 2024 vote excluded the input from faculty governance. Modrak read the reason for the rejection and explained the controversy around it.
“This amendment is rejected as it would impermissibly overturn a 2024 modification of the statement adopted by a regental vote,” Modrak said. “I mean, that regental vote was made outside of the guidelines, without faculty governance or Central Student Government input.”
The members then began discussing the resolution concerning the Presidential Search Advisory Committee. The resolution expressed that the faculty of the University disapproves of the exclusion of elected faculty representatives from the committee, and feel faculty representatives ought to be included in the selection of the next University president.
The second topic of discussion was the open letter SACUA has been working on regarding consultative decision-making and more faculty involvement in the University’s decisions.
Near the end of the meeting, SACUA members initiated the SACUA vacancy process in order to fill a seat that was formerly taken up by Alex Yasha Yi, professor of electrical engineering, who is no longer on the committee. Luke McCarthy, the director of the Faculty Senate Office, explained the process of filling vacant positions in the Senate Assembly.
“The existing practices are that vacancies need to be filled from somebody in the Senate Assembly,” McCarthy said. “I think the process is for three weeks and we would entertain nominations and receive candidate statements, which can be video ones or written ones, and once we receive those it would go to a mode of Senate Assembly which we can do electronically.”
McCarthy concluded by giving a rough timeline of the vacancy process and when a candidate pool is expected to be formed.
“The nomination process would be continued through the next Senate Assembly meeting and sometime between the September and October meeting,” McCarthy said. “We should at that point have a candidate pool and then move forward to have a person elected,” McCarthy said.
Daily Staff Reporter Halle Pratt can be reached at hallehap@umich.edu.
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