By Northwest College Faculty Senate President Adam Aguirre
The Executive Faculty Council will solve all of your problems. Okay…okay. Maybe that is overstating it some. To understand the EFC, you first have to understand what it is not.
For some time now the Northwest Vista College Faculty Senate President has been part of the Faculty Super Senate (FSS) which is a group comprised of all of the Faculty Senate Presidents from the five colleges in addition to the Chair of Chairs. While this group communicates consistently among themselves, they also regularly meet with the Chancellor, Vice-chancellors, and select college Presidents to discuss district-wide issues. Effectively the FSS and what I loving call the SSVC (Super Senate, Vice-chancellors, Chancellor) are largely deliberative groups, and their meetings rarely result in actionable items but instead in information collaboration and strategy building. The Executive Faculty Council is a different animal entirely.
The development of the EFC started when Viviane Marioneaux was NVC’s Faculty Senate President and San Antonio College’s Faculty Senate President (Dawn Elmore, at the time) was the FSS President. They handed the work to a new FSS in 2015 who under the leadership of Dr. Mike Flores (Palo Alto’s President) formed a team of faculty and administrators tasked with designing a new model for how district-wide decisions get made and implemented. This team spent a year training with specialists, harvesting feedback from faculty, analyzing inputs from stakeholders and eventually built the Executive Faculty Council that has been operating since August 2016. So how does it work?
The EFC, led by a “Faculty Fellow,” is comprised of the five Faculty Senate Presidents, the five Faculty Senate Vice-Presidents, the Chair of Chairs, one college President, one college Vice-President of Academic Success, one college Vice-President of Student Success, the Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor of Academic Success, the Associate Vice-Chancellor of Human Resources, and the Unified Staff Council President. In other words the EFC enjoys much more robust faculty representation AND direct access to district-level administrators. The EFC has three functions. The first (and most vital) is they address issues that originate either from the Board of Trustees, the PVC (a group comprised of the college Presidents, the Vice-Chancellors, and the Chancellor), or any of the Faculty Senates. Second, the EFC communicates with the Board of Trustees via a standing agenda item during the BoT’s Committee of the Whole meeting once a month. Lastly, a rotating faculty EFC representative is present at PVC meetings during faculty-related agenda items.
One of the guiding values early on in the development of the EFC was that we wanted to design something that put the voices of the people affected by a decision at the table when that decision was being made. One of the ways the EFC achieves this goal is through its use of ad-hoc teams. Currently the EFC has empowered two ad-hoc teams. The first is the Early Alert Ad-Hoc Team, tasked with investigating the effectiveness and value of the Early Alert System and how (if at all) it can be approved. The second is the Faculty Development Advisory Board. This team is charged with evaluating current Faculty Development systems across the district, researching best practices, and helping to steer the creation of district-led faculty development so that current and historic efforts are preserved and faculty can best benefit from all faculty development opportunities. Both of these teams are comprised of faculty and relevant stakeholders and are charged with using data and deliberation to make final recommendations to the EFC who will in turn make recommendations to the Board of Trustees and PVC.
The Executive Faculty Council is really just starting to pick up steam and we still have a lot to learn. This Spring we will be hiring a new Faculty Fellow to lead the EFC starting in the Fall. Similarly, there will be a whole new round of Faculty Senate Presidents taking up the mantle in August. Transparency has been another guiding value since the beginning. To that end, we have been working with the District Communications office to design an outward facing website where anyone can check up on the issues that matter to them, see who is on the ad-hoc team dealing with that issue, and find out where that team is at in their process. (Side note: the communications team has been very busy fixing the district’s…ahem…branding issues, so work on the website has slowed down, but we are expecting to have something together by the end of April.) For now, the EFC continues to vigilantly ensure faculty involvement in non-curricular district-wide decisions, keeping those affected by a decision involved with the development of the decision and not just the consequences.
If you would like more information on the Executive Faculty Council, you can always check out the NVC Faculty Senate Canvas page where the EFC has their own module or you can just get a hold of me at [email protected]
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Laura Lawrence