The Faculty Consultative Committee issued a statement late Friday supporting the Board of Regents on its recent tenure code revisions for the University Law School.
“We commend the Board for incorporating, in the version of the tenure code adopted for the Law School faculty, elements that protect academic freedom and provide due process, the two key principles underlying tenure,” members of the consultative committee said in the statement.
The consultative committee met in a closed meeting Thursday to discuss the regents’ actions and what their stand on those actions would be.
The committee’s actions come in response to an emergency meeting held last Thursday by the regents. During that meeting, the board implemented tenure revisions on the Law School after discovering the school wasn’t covered by a labor freeze order. The revisions excluded the controversial language regarding layoff provisions that initially outraged faculty.
The Law School changes, which many faculty members felt were positive, could be a sign of possible changes to the tenure code for the rest of the faculty. However, Virginia Gray, chair of the consultative committee, said the letter is not meant to convince faculty members to support the revisions.
Instead, the statement, which was sent to faculty via e-mail, expressed the importance of rebuilding relationships between faculty and regents that have been shredded in the past few months over the tenure issue.
“What the FCC will do now is work to bring the regents and the faculty back into the shared governance model,” Gray said.
But Gray said this won’t be easy. “We have to do a lot more work on the relationship between the two before it looks good,” she said.