Planning Ahead

Senate Discusses Long-Term Goals and Governance at Monthly Meeting

NewsAdam Kovac — Published October 11, 2011

The Concordia Board of Governors might be done, but Senate is just getting warmed up.

When the highest academic body at the university met on Oct. 7, discussion focused on the latest revisions to the school’s academic plan, which was issued in August. However, as with all things at Concordia so far this year, the discussion eventually veered into talking about governance, as several Senators questioned whether the plan should be completed before a new president is found.

“Is this going to be the academic plan for the next five years, or will it be an interim draft awaiting the arrival of the new president, as was clearly recommended in the report of the external governance review committee?” asked Engineering and Computer Science faculty member Ted Stathopolous, referring to the document written by a team led by former McGill Principal Bernard Shapiro that outlined recommended reforms to Concordia governance.

Concordia President Frederick Lowy replied that the committee made that recommendation because it didn’t think the plan would be ready by the time a new president was found.

“They thought we weren’t able to do it before the next president came,” he said. “I don’t believe it was in any sense that the plan should await the next president, but that they felt it would take the next president to do it. The hundreds of people involved in preparing this plan were able to do it fairly fast.”

Provost David Graham, Concordia’s chief academic officer, pointed out that the report contradicted itself by saying that the school should move forward without delay on the plan, but also that the plan should be the first job of a new president.

Graduate student Senator Holly Nazar pointed out that, while a large part of the plan deals with attracting new graduate students, the plan fails to meet concerns of existing students, particularly in terms of financial needs.

“It speaks to a group of graduate students that are not here. I cannot see how any undergraduates can be happy with this document,” she said. “It means reducing programs that are important to undergraduate students and larger classes.”

In his opening remarks on the subject, Graham admitted that there had been reservations about the academic plan from various members of the faculty and administration, but that he thought a good compromise had been met.

“The overall message that we’ve been getting has been very consistent,” he said. “First, people view the plan as being considerably improved. Second, overall I’m getting the sense that people are very happy with what they see in it. Third, there is no doubt that there are some irritants that remain for all of us.

“All of us are going to have things in the plan that make us uneasy,” he continued. “Having said that, I have determined that there is nothing in the plan that I cannot live with.” He then noted that the plan is not final, but will be revised over the next month to be voted on at the next Senate meeting.

Senate also discussed the review committee’s recommendation to allow two members of the school’s administrative and support staff to gain seats on Senate, while still keeping the same proportion of representation for other constituencies. Lowy pointed out that this could be hard to do, due to the sheer size of Senate, and the amount of tampering with its makeup that would be necessary to make this possible.

“I think, even though I haven’t heard from any students on this point, it would make sense to respect the proportional representation of students [on Senate],” said Lowy.

The vote came a week after members of Concordia’s Board of Governors voted overwhelmingly to reduce the undergraduate representation on BoG from 10 per cent to four per cent.

This article originally appeared in Volume 32, Issue 07, published October 11, 2011.