Chair of the Faculty Senate Council discusses increased interest in faculty governance among other things

| Editor-In-Chief

Dennis Barbour talks about the role faculty play at WashU and the importance of the Faculty Senate. (Sam Powers | Managing Photo Editor)

On Friday, Biomedical Engineering (BME) professor Dennis Barbour sat down with Student Life for an interview about his role as Chair of the Faculty Senate Council (FSC). Barbour first became the chair in 2023 and will step down at the end of this year because he is going on academic leave next year.

Every faculty member at WashU is part of the Faculty Senate. The FSC is made up of faculty from each of the seven WashU schools, including both tenure and teaching- track faculty, and governs the entire Faculty Senate.

Barbour started working at WashU in 2004 as a BME professor, and from 2015-2019 he lived in Park-Mudd with his family as a faculty fellow. He discussed the evolving role of faculty, the FSC’s perspective on last year’s Israel-Hamas war protests, the process of getting tenure, and the upcoming challenges faculty might be facing at WashU. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Student Life (SL): What is the FSC and why should undergraduate students care about it? 

Dennis Barbour (DB): It is the executive committee of the Faculty Senate, which means we set the agendas for the Faculty Senate meetings. We run the day-to-day business of the faculty. Yesterday, for example, Dean Sandro Galea came and explained what his vision is for the School of Public Health, the eighth school in the university, which needs representation on the FSC, so we’re going to have to amend the constitution. Probably the most boring part of governance is what this group has to do, and keeping the Faculty Senate appropriately representative. We have a direct representation model where every faculty member has a vote.

SL: Why did you choose to become chair?

DB: This is not really the kind of role I aspire to, but I have found myself in this kind of role at every institution I’ve ever been in. I was asked by the chair at the time if I would consider putting my name forward to be chair. So I thought about it for a couple of months, and I felt that we had a system that I could plug into while still being able to run a lab, and I was elected. 

SL: Since you have been on FSC, how has it changed the most? 

DB: The biggest change is the interest in the goings-on of faculty governance. Our attendance at some recent meetings eclipses any other meeting I’ve seen in the records going back 50 years. To the degree of my awareness, the interest in faculty governance in the past 12 months has been dramatically higher than is typical, and that’s across the board. There’s still plenty of faculty who are doing their thing and are not as concerned about faculty governance, but definitely more widespread than in the past.

SL: Why do you think that is? 

DB: It’s primarily because of the protests in April and the University response and the incomplete information about those things. The Faculty Senate [which consists of all full-time faculty] is a community with a wide variety of perspectives, and most of the records I have don’t show a lot of internal disagreement. But I feel that we saw a very clear representation of disagreement among the WashU community in the past year. I mean, we had very contentious meetings among faculty where not everyone agreed, and I don’t think we had that in the recent past, at least in my experience at WashU.

SL: What was the attendance for the spring meetings and the fall meetings?

DB: 600-700 was the attendance on May 8. I don’t remember the one after that. It wasn’t quite that large but it was around 350. Then we had about 100 in the September meeting. There were two resolutions that we voted on on June 3. One about a committee to investigate the April 27 protest and one about rescinding students’ punishments. I thought it critically important to ensure that those resolutions went to ballot, which means that we send out a ballot to everyone’s university email. Ballots open for a week and 3,700 faculty senators have a chance to vote even if they’re away from campus. We enabled the bulk of the faculty senators to weigh in on those resolutions.

SL: What has been the Faculty Senate’s relationship with the WashU Board of Trustees and how has that changed and evolved? 

DB: It hasn’t changed since I’ve been a member of Faculty Senate Council, but sometime in the recent past, a second member of the FSC has become a regular attendee of Board meetings. The chair and the secretary are invited to all the Board meetings and the Board social events. Board members were all college students at one point, and a large fraction were actually students at WashU. I mean, they automatically then have a perspective on what it’s like to be a student, but it’s harder for them to have a perspective on what it’s like to be faculty. FSC members aim to provide that perspective to the Board.

SL: This year, what has been the biggest issue or topic that has come up in the Faculty Senate and/or the FSC?

DB: We have multiple issues that are occupying us right now. I’d say the School of Public Health is a big one, because it’s the first school in 100 years, and what does governance look like for a new school? We’re going to have to amend the constitution, so we’re now going through it and deciding what is in there that’s anachronistic or should be revised.

SL: At the end of last semester, we published an article about Professor Jonathan Barnes and allegations against him. I’m curious as to how the FSC reacts when something like that is published?

DB: I would say that the working climate, especially for female members of our community, is something we talk about a lot in FSC. There are multiple factors in that story. There is a power imbalance, there is a gender mismatch, and those in combination occur throughout the University, but there are other combinations where concerns can arise, working relationships, peer relationships, et cetera. We bring issues to the attention of the administration where we have concerns. There are climate surveys at different places within the university that aim to uncover concerns. So the Faculty Senate and Faculty Senate Council haven’t taken recent official action because we generally feel the administration is taking action where needed. Nothing in my time in FSC has risen to the level that the faculty felt it needed to be emphasized significantly further than the administration was emphasizing it. But it is a common conversation that FSC has with each other and the administration. We’re concerned about the working environment, the relationships we have on campus with each other.  

SL: A lot has been written about President Trump’s approach toward higher education.How has that approach impacted the FSC and the work the FSC does? 

DB: That’s a really complex problem. I don’t think this is a mystery, but there are many aspects of the current administration that are negative for higher education. Part of the reason that we know this at WashU is because our chancellor has, from the beginning of his time, been very active at engaging politicians at the local, state, and national level. So for the faculty to engage very purposefully with elected government officials, I think, is being viewed among faculty leadership as a positive in this environment, because we feel that our voice needs to get out there. There’s concern among faculty leadership that we’re in a situation where there are headwinds against higher education as it has operated, generally. On the other hand, there are likely members of our faculty who are fine with the current situation. I am confident  that we have the full range of opinions represented in our faculty. There’s not one voice that we’re gonna speak with. There are going to be many voices, but the idea is to try to elevate those voices in a way that can be effective in the current political climate.

SL: The Atlantic ran an article earlier this year about business professors falsifying data in their papers, and I was curious: What measures do faculty take so that the data put forth in their papers is legitimate?

DB: Universities are not double-checking what faculty put out. That’s the role of readers, peer reviewers, and ultimately, journal editors. If I had real concerns about a WashU faculty member falsifying information, the place I would probably go would be our hotline system, and then it would have to get routed to the proper place internally, and I don’t know what that looks like. If sanctions are being considered by the administration for a faculty member, they have appeal options to fellow faculty. It doesn’t automatically go there, but most faculty will appeal a major sanction. The ultimate role of faculty governance is peer governance. The administration could try to make a decision on some sanction, such as for falsifying data, but that decision is not final until it has gone through this process. There are occasions where a process of that sort is started and a faculty member resigns.

SL: Looking back on your time as Chair of the FSC, how do you think that has impacted you? Do you think you were able to accomplish what you hoped to?

DB: We are a really decentralized university. So many things are just isolated in schools. It’s the way that we operate, and it’s been that way for 100 years or longer, and there are real problems with that. What I see as an opportunity is to find out what the faculty’s pain points are for administering grants, for maintaining consistent academic policies, for managing the end of the semester — but without centralization it is difficult. I lived with students for four years as a faculty fellow, so I felt a broad connection to students already. When I sit back and look at where most faculty sit, they tend to focus primarily on their scholarship, which is what they have to do for promotion and success in their discipline. So I felt I had a somewhat unusual perspective that could pull across different disciplines and University groups. I’ve talked to hundreds of faculty in the past year with all their different perspectives. I feel like I’ve been able to manage that, because I think I can have an effective conversation with any of them. I didn’t specifically work toward any of that, but I do think that was possible for me partly because I see the value and possibility of pulling together from our different corners toward a more cohesive campus community.

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