Faculty Council confronts
a heavy agenda

There's a full plate of new and important business for the Faculty Council this year -- a point Faculty Chair Sue Estroff made sure to emphasize during the group's first meeting of the new academic year on Sept. 6.

There is the reform of the student honor system, an important task that Chancellor James Moeser alluded to in his State of the University Address earlier in the week.

There is the review and approval of a new academic plan.
There is a curriculum review from the College of Arts and Sciences that must be completed as part of that plan.

There is the multi-year tuition plan that must be developed in time for the Board of Trustees to approve early in 2003. Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert Shelton, along with Student Body President Jen Daum, are co-chairing a task force on student tuition that held its first meeting last month.

There is a five-year transportation and parking plan as well, which a reconfigured advisory group, the Advisory Committee on Transportation, has begun working on.

There is a study looking at the connection between gender and faculty salaries that will attempt to gauge the progress, or lack of it, in closing the gap between what women make compared to their male counterparts.

All of these, in one way or another, must be received, reviewed, commented on, amended and approved.

In another matter, Estroff turned to Moeser and Shelton to thank them for their efforts in supporting academic freedom in response to criticism over the Summer Reading Program. They did, Estroff said, what faculty members expect them to do. Later in the meeting, the council approved the resolution that its Executive Committee had passed in support of academic freedom after the UNC Board of Governors failed to pass such a resolution last month. A board committee has since endorsed such a resolution that has yet to be considered by the full board.

Moeser, in his brief remarks, said there was no hard news to report about the state budget, but he expressed cautious optimism that the University's overhead receipts -- which legislators continue to eye each year as a possible revenue source -- would be left alone. Moeser also talked about the bipartisan support the University now has. It is important to have friends in the legislature from both sides of the aisle, Moeser said. Increasingly, he said, Carolina does.

At the same time, though, the House budget calls for funding campus salaries at 98 percent, which amounts to a not-so-hidden 2 percent cut in addition to the official 3 percent cut now being considered. That 2 percent would have to be absorbed with lapsed salary funds for vacant positions.

Perhaps the strongest moment of the meeting had less to do with official new business than old business that too many professors have literally left unattended.

Ron Hyatt, who serves as faculty marshal for commencement exercises, and Joseph Ferrell, secretary of the faculty; along with Moeser and Shelton, each made strong appeals to faculty members to participate in ceremonial exercises -- from spring commencement to the upcoming University Day that this year will fall on a Saturday, Oct. 12.

Moeser said the strong presence of faculty at University Day helps to enhance and preserve the culture of tradition here that has long been one of its strengths.

Hyatt said every attempt is being made to make participation at commencement easier -- from dedicated parking spaces to free coffee for people who come early.

It would ruin the meaning of the ceremony to make it mandatory, the four men argued, but yet it is still a duty that too many professors have chosen to ignore.

Ferrell, who as secretary is usually content to sit in the background, stood to appeal to the faculty to do a little more to participate in an event that means so much to students and their families.
Ferrell spoke particularly to professors who teach undergraduate students who do not participate in separate convocations conducted by and for the professional schools.

Ferrell said there are about 1,000 professors who fit this category. It would be nice, Ferrell said, to see at least 200 participate.
Ferrell said nobody is interested in doing anything that is coercive. "We want to appeal to your sense of history and to your sense of pride in this institution and your sense of pride in our graduates. It is probably the only occasion that many of our families will ever come onto this campus."

Ferrell related a story that retired Provost Richard "Dick" Richardson told to beat down a proposal to sell tickets limiting the number of family members who could attend commencement exercises in order to make it less unwieldy.

Richardson told of a graduate from West Virginia. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college, and the family chartered a bus full of aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents who felt they couldn't miss the day he graduated. "They were so proud they couldn't stand it."

Every year there are families like that, Ferrell said.

"If you haven't been, just watch the grandmothers who are wheeled onto the tarmac in their wheelchairs. They wouldn't have missed that event for the world. You need to see that -- and they need to see you."