Commentary from a UVA Senior Tenured Faculty Member
The would-be labor unionists of the UVA chapter of the AAUP claim that the UVA Faculty Senate is more representative than the AAUP itself, and naturally the officers of the Faculty Senate concur. But to anyone who knows how the UVA Faculty Senate operates, this is hilarious. Some units have such contempt for the Faculty Senate that they don’t bother to select their member or members. Most of the members outside the Education School are not elected by their units, but are unwilling persons drafted by their own chairs and deans. They represent only themselves, if they can even be bothered to: many senators simply ignore their senatorial duties. The one unit that seems genuinely to care about the Senate, actually holds contested elections for Senate, and whose members seek office within the Senate, is the Education School, which is— outside the members of that school—generally felt, in point of intellect, to be the weakest units in the University. Few faculty outside Education are inclined to regard any organization dominated by the Education School as representative of the faculty as a whole!
The kind of person drafted to serve on the UVA Faculty Senate is usually a person deemed unsuitable to perform any responsible University function, sit on any responsible University committee, or serve in any administrative capacity, however humble, in his or her own department. The UVA Faculty Senate is a dumping ground for the mad and the sad. For the most part, senators understand this about themselves; self-loathing is both their most realistic and their most attractive quality. But recently the Senate has been given to the collective fantasies of its own importance: such was the case during the anti-Israel demonstrations of last year, and such is the case now with respect to Board of Visitors and the presidential search.
Jim Ryan and Ian Baucom offered a tutorial in contempt for the Faculty Senate. They would agree to appear before that body for a specific brief time period, and then fill that period to bursting with their won orotund words. Strangely, there was never any time for questions, and at the end of the agreed period Ryan or Baucom would be released to go about their business with toadying exclamations by the chair of the Senate. Paul Mahoney’s frequent visits to the Senate, his willingness to take questions, and his frank attempts to answer them, are a refreshing contrast, which will however never be admitted by the senators, because they fear that he might be a Republican.
