Inside Iowa State
October 22, 1999
Letter
To the editor:
The Faculty Senate's Executive Board is working its way toward relieving the faculty -- for its own good and on its behalf -- of any voice it might have left. The new constitution and bylaws will be the mechanism. The Exec wants to "legislate" without direct consent of the faculty, but Provost Rollin Richmond has made clear to the Exec that faculty decide nothing except at the pleasure of the regents (i.e., the royals).
The Exec is ready to trade the faculty's right to a say in university governance in exchange for becoming the only voice of the faculty within the university. The group wants to become an empowered elite with no responsibility to hear anything other than voices from above and their own. They will call it "creating a sense of community," but it is a community --like the administration it emulates --that will feel no obligation to respond to those excluded from its enclave.
Virginia Allen
Graduate College
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10/21/99
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