Welcome back to campus

January 27, 2025

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome back to campus for the Spring semester of 2025! First and foremost, before I share any other announcements, it must be acknowledged that the changing landscape of federal research and for diversity, equity, and inclusion work will be among our most formidable challenges to navigate for the foreseeable future. Your Faculty Senate is here to advocate for our collective ability to do our teaching and research work both effectively and safely. The more we approach these efforts together, the more impactful our advocacy will be.

The Academic Standards Committee (ASC) has spent years engaging with a campus-wide overhaul of our academic integrity policies and a restructuring of how we evaluate teaching. We have formed an ad hoc committee to revise University Administrative Manual (UAM) 6,502 to align more closely with the academic integrity violation charging processes used by our peer universities. In response to a Request for Action (RFA) from the ASC in 2023, we have worked with cooperation and funding from the Provost's Office to create a Faculty Liaison for Academic Standards position. Following an internal search for this role, we are delighted to announce that Dr. Lyndsay Munro from the College of Science will be starting in this position this semester. She will be available to assist all course instructors in the academic charging process, and, as part of her work this semester, will create training materials for the current policy and for the future as we roll out our policy revisions.  Dr. Munro has the added qualification of expertise in navigating artificial intelligence in academic courses, whether use of it is prohibited, limited, or endorsed. The Provost’s office will be announcing details on her role to the campus soon. The ASC also did significant work overhauling our course evaluation system into a more holistic set of student experience surveys that we will begin rolling out this spring. 

Our Bylaws and Code Committee (BCC), in collaboration with the Senate office and Vice Provost, Faculty Affairs, has been tasked this year with implementing a TeamDynamix ticketing platform to transparently track the status of new bylaws and proposed revisions throughout the approval process. In the fall, the committee proposed updates to the major unit bylaws process, introducing timelines and additional communication steps to increase transparency and engagement with unit faculty. These updates were approved by both the Senate and the President. View the Jan. 4, 2025 updates.

The ad hoc Committee to Review Campus Hiring Practices has completed provisional work on best practices for leadership hiring and their draft recommendations on research integrity checks by faculty will be implemented in the ongoing search for the Dean of the College of Engineering. To illustrate the impact of this work and the work of our nine standing committees, the Faculty Senate office now houses a tracking document of every RFA for the past five years and its progress towards implementation. You can see the ongoing impact of our committees.

Much of the work we do in the Faculty Senate is confidential, advocating for faculty undergoing highly sensitive employment processes. We have developed brochures detailing our role in rejoinders, reconsiderations, and grievances to protect faculty rights. If you would like to request a copy of the brochure or schedule a confidential meeting to discuss your options, please contact Faculty Senate Manager Heather Kemmelmeier at hkemmelmeier@unr.edu.

This year's legislative session will be pivotal for our university's support from the state. While the Governor's proposed budget more fully funds our cost of living adjustments (COLA) and many of our university’s requests, our legislature must also agree to prioritize higher education in the final budget for the proposed budget to become a reality. I will be active with VP Michael Flores' legislative engagement team. If you would like to give public comment during pertinent meetings of legislative committees or to lobby individual legislators, please keep us in the loop so we can do this work as a coordinated team. When engaging, please also be very aware of ethics and communicate whether you are speaking as a private citizen or as a representative of the University. Our stories are often more compelling than charts, so your contributions will be valuable to communicate the impact of our work on the public good to the elected officials who fund us. 

If this e-mail that could have been a meeting leaves you wanting to contribute to the work we do across campus, please fill out your service interest surveys that will be emailed to all faculty this spring. In my five years of service on the Faculty Senate, I've found that most of our university's policies are crafted by a few people who are willing to do the work, mobilized by a desire to make a difference and correct issues they've experienced.

I wish all of you the best for this semester and Go Pack!

Aaron Hill, D.M.A. (he/him)
facsenchair@unr.edu
2024-25 Chair, Faculty Senate
University of Nevada, Reno