By Alexandra Salerno
Advisory Editor
“Aristotle once said, ‘politics is the art of the possible,’” Barry Gan, professor of philosophy and St. Bonaventure faculty senate chair said. “People don’t think of the senate as being art, but I think there is some art involved in trying to find out what’s possible.”
The faculty senate is a representative body of St. Bonaventure’s faculty that has responsibility for the legislation of general policies on academic matters concerning the undergraduate schools. Within the senate are standing committees responsible for monitoring aspects of the university. Committees include academic affairs, faculty status, student life, finance, constitution, faculty grievances, curriculum, enrollment management and technology.
The process for faculty joining the senate committees is an election process. However, according to Gan, who has been involved in faculty senate almost every semester since arriving at Bonaventure 30 years ago. The seats have not been contested for years meaning faculty who volunteer are elected by default because nobody runs against them. There is one senator for every 11 faculty in each school.
“Faculty Senate is a governing body of the university,” Gan said. “It makes policy and I think when you work at some place you should be helping to formulate the policy of the places you work at. I don’t see the point of belonging to something if you’re not involved in it.”
According to Gan, the majority of the faculty does not participate in the faculty senate.
“If we send out an email asking how do you think the faculty is doing, we probably get two-fifths or half of the faculty responding to that,” he said.
Gan said meetings involve discussing policy and ways to improve how the university functions for faculty and on occasion, students. Gan cites the faculty senate as reasoning for the class scheduling change a few years ago that remedied an overcrowding problem in the dining hall.
“We were in a position to change that, and we did,” Gan said. “That was at the request of students. An interesting side note to that is that we have one less hour of meeting time for faculty as a result. So there’s a trade-off there.”
As faculty chair, Gan’s role is to facilitate meetings and insure business moves through committees efficiently. At the end of each year, Gan makes a list of issues to be addressed the following year and assigns committees to work on each and have the senate approve a list of tasks.
“We’re working on some major overhauls on the faculty contract, but separate from that, the main things I’d like to see us accomplishing are things I think that are very difficult to accomplish,” Gan said.
This includes tenure track faculty getting their teaching load reduced so that they can concentrate on research and subsequently receive tenure and promotion. Other goals include seeing faculty loads equalized, Clare College structural changes and a more coordinated effort to improve enrollment by the faculty being involved more in the admissions process.
