Building on Our Commitment to Listen and Learn
Dear members of the Columbia community:
One thing has become abundantly clear to me since I stepped into the role of Acting President last month: To navigate this moment successfully, we need to activate and mobilize the remarkable wisdom and talent of the entire Columbia community.
By training perhaps, and certainly by temperament, I am a listener. I am doing a lot of that now, and I am learning a lot quickly. I’ve heard from faculty and students in all parts of the University who have insights and perspectives into the challenges we face. You are not only asking me hard questions, which I welcome, but also offering creative and workable ideas on how we can move forward as a University. I am especially grateful for the concern members of our community consistently are showing, not only for themselves and their own priorities, but for others—other students, other colleagues. Your insistence that all parts of our community be heard at this time is inspiring, and it guides my decision making.
To focus more strategically and benefit from our community’s perspectives and insights, I’m launching a number of initiatives that I hope will help our community immediately and better position Columbia to thrive in the coming decades and centuries.
I’m eager to create more channels for input. I’m currently guided by several student and faculty groups, and I will continue to work with them on a wide range of academic and policy matters. I meet with all bodies frequently, and, as I told students this week, I need to hear from them more often, especially regarding the critical challenges facing our international student community.
In addition, I plan to establish two additional working groups made up of faculty, researchers, and staff. One will focus on how Columbia can best communicate our values, our mission, and impact more effectively, both internally and to a public increasingly skeptical of higher education. Both within and beyond our campuses, we need to understand the sources of discontent with Columbia and identify what we can do to rebuild credibility and confidence with different stakeholders. The second working group will focus on strategic resilience and explore the ways in which Columbia can reimagine its financial model and institutional autonomy and how we might advocate collectively for a more sustainable future for higher education.
Finally, let me turn to the critical issue of shared governance. A consistent theme that has emerged from the many conversations I’ve had in recent weeks, indeed, even the last few years, is the nature of shared governance at our University—how we work together, and how essential that is.
To be clear: I am deeply committed to shared governance and the values that represents, which manifest themselves in many ways across the University, from our faculty-led hiring, promotion, and tenure processes to the many committees charged with academic reviews, policy, and planning. Our model does not always make sense to those outside Columbia, but we know it is the essential characteristic that makes American research universities—this University—the envy of the world.
The University Senate has long played a key role for many in this University. I have benefitted from its guidance. I have heard for years, however, from many across our institution—and certainly since moving into Low Library—that the Senate’s systems need support, especially in meeting moments of crisis. Many express concerns that the Senate is not as representative of the whole community as we need it to be. Many also believe the election process does not provide adequate opportunities for fresh perspectives. Like almost all of our University bodies, the Senate was not built to function efficiently and effectively in intensely challenging moments like this.
We need to have an open conversation about how to create a Senate model that represents the complexity of our institution while enabling us to respond to the demands of the moment. In the next few weeks, I plan to consult across the University, to prepare for a review of the University Senate, to support, preserve and strengthen our shared governance model.
I have asked our leadership team, senators, key faculty members, deans, and members of the board to join me in this work, to ensure that we gather input from the entire community in this process. I have heard repeatedly that our University, and our leadership, would benefit from being less siloed. I am hoping this can be a start to that process. If the Senate is to fulfill its original mission, everyone at Columbia must participate in this moment of introspection.
The point of this exercise is to seek diverse perspectives and thoughtful input to ensure our shared governance structure best serves our community now and for the future, and to create a review process that will take place this summer with recommendations before the start of the fall semester.
It is moments like this, where our systems, habits, practices, and ideas are tested and sometimes strained, that can produce the most creative and innovative results. As has happened multiple times in our history, moments of struggle can create healthy change.
The University Senate’s role in our governance system, developed more than 50 years ago, was meant to help the University recover from an earlier moment of stress and strife. Columbia President Michael Sovern, who, as a faculty member, proposed the creation of the Senate, said this about its mission: “The Senate allowed for a representative forum where all issues could be fairly heard.” We need that forum more than ever today, and I would like to ask the community to engage in constructive dialogue about what best practices could look like, and how this very process, rather than dividing, might start to move us forward together.
Sincerely,
Claire Shipman
Acting President, Columbia University in the City of New York