Senate Committees, Task Forces & Working Groups

  • Standing Committees

    Senators only on these committees

    • Academic Planing Committee
      • Chair, JEnnifer Campbell
    • Personnel Committee
      • Chair, Barb Hurtt
    • Student Relations Committee
      • Chair, Stephanie George
    • Nominations, Rules and Credentials Committee
      • Chair, John Hill
    • Financial Planning Committee
      • Chair, Kevin Lynch
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in General Education

    This committee was voted on as part of the reconciliation process for DU's General Education. This committee will make recommendations to the Senate about how to thoughtfully and feasibly include a DEI attribute for general education curriculum. The committee will work closely with the proposed Faculty Director of General Education, the VC of DEI, OTL, and other stakeholders to arrive at Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for this new attribute, define criteria for how syllabi qualify for this attribute, review course proposals, and facilitate professional development opportunities. The committee will also decide on the title and acronym of the new attribute. (*Note: The Reconciliation Committee received conflicting feedback regarding the name of the attribute and recognizes the importance of the Gen Ed DEI Committee taking this up in a thoughtful way with input from multiple
    stakeholders).

    The committee is to be seated under the leadership of the co-chairs and in consultation with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, the Office of DEI, and other relevant stakeholders.

    Those interested in joining should contact the co-chairs

    Co-Chairs:

    Renée Botta, renee.botta@du.edu

    Lisa Martinez, lisa.martinez@du.edu

  • Faculty Workload Equity Committee

    The Office of the Provost, the Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs, and Faculty Senate are continuing their partnership to strengthen equity outcomes within and across departments and units by bringing greater clarity and transparency to three interrelated areas:

    1. Faculty responsibilities and expectations,
    2. The decision-making processes by which department and unit heads assign faculty responsibilities and set faculty expectations, and
    3. The standards by which faculty responsibilities and expectations are measured, assessed, and rewarded. 

    The committee released its first report over the summer, which you can read here:

    https://duvpfa.du.edu/advancing-equity/university-of-denver-workload-equity-committee-report_2021-22/  

    2021-22 University of Denver Workload Equity Committee Report

    COMMITTEE Members. Brian Gearity, Graduate School of Professional Psychology Dean Saitta, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Hava Gordon, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Erin Elzi, University Libraries Michele Tyson, Morgridge College of Education Deb Ortega, Graduate School of Social Work Brian Majestic, College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

    duvpfa.du.edu

    Extending and building on the 2020-2022 workload equity committee’s work, the Senate created a multi-year workload equity committee and passed a new charge for a reconstituted committee to begin its work this fall.

     The committee will be a continuation of a multi-year process. Membership of the committee will be reviewed and refreshed every academic year. Existing committee members can extend their service on the committee for up to three years based on mutual agreement with the committee co-chairs. The overarching goal of the committee is to move the institution to university, school/college, and department or program towards policies, processes, practices and institutional “guardrails” to ensure workload equity and equitable faculty review for faculty. 

    The workload equity committee (WEC) is charged as follows: 

    1. Starting September 2022, the WEC will convene (with the process for its composition as described above) to begin work, with the goal of moving forward the 2021-22 Workload Equity Committee Report findings.By Spring 2023, WEC will curate resources for the department or programs to use as they take steps toward creating norms/guidelines/policies/bylaws and/or credit systems around workload equity. This includes concrete measurement of change in workload inequities within and across departments 
    2. Review the results of the 2022 COACHE faculty exit survey and make recommendations on the next steps for improving faculty satisfaction based on the data. 
    3. Also, by Spring 2023, WEC will support academic leaders and schools and colleges to develop unit level policies, guidelines, practices, and accountability mechanisms, and curate these resources to share with the campus community, and identify models of success, including concrete action from Chairs and Deans for addressing workload inequities that have been recognized. 
    4. The WEC will develop a shared governance process with critical votes and reporting structures designed in advance and share those specifications and that structure/process with the Faculty Senate by May 2023 for approval. This WEC must create structures/processes to work with stakeholders without committee member representation and share that structure/process with the Faculty Senate by May 2023 for approval. 
    5. As necessary, survey or otherwise investigate workload equity questions at DU, including ongoing efforts detailed in the 2020-2022 committee’s report, and the Department Equity Action Planning teams. Work to advance DU data and tracking concerning workload equity including concrete measurement of change in workload inequities within and across departments/programs and within schools and colleges. 
    6. Each year the WEC will document findings and create recommendations for moving forward--both the next year of committee work and recommend a multi-year approach, including Faculty Senate votes, and an iterative process to make achievable, incremental changes to practice. 
    7. The end goal is a robust, rigorous, and evidence-based set of tools for improving workload equity, including but not limited to department-based practices and policies (like dashboards and establishing guidelines for service expectations for all series and ranks), unit-level commitments (i.e. robust toolbox for credit system, “service sabbaticals,” etc.), and campus-level “guardrails” to help provide consistency without uniformity for faculty workload. 

    Those interested in joining the committee for AY 2023-24 should send an email to the co-chairs,  indicating your interest, along with a few sentences about why you’d like to be on the committee and what you would like to contribute. If you are nominating someone, please do the same in terms of what the person nominated would contribute.

    renee.botta@du.edu

    jenn.bellamy@du.edu

  • Teaching Excellence Committee

    Teaching Excellence Committee

    The Faculty Senate, in partnership with the Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs, seeks to improve DU’s methods of course evaluation and teaching review for the purpose of annual reviews, promotion, and reappointment. This initiative will involve a multi-year and multi-committee process to have a robust, rigorous, and evidence-based set of methods to assess teaching performance holistically, and that allows units flexibility of practice in a way that best aligns with their faculty and academic programs.

    https://duvpfa.du.edu/advancing-equity/teaching-excellence/

    Those interested in joining the committee for AY 2022-23 should send an email to the co-chairs,  indicating your interest, along with a few sentences about why you’d like to be on the committee and what you would like to contribute. If you are nominating someone, please do the same in terms of what the person nominated would contribute.

    Co-chairs:

    leslie.alvarez@du.edu

    richard.colby@du.edu

  • Teaching and Professional Track Faculty Committee

    Teaching and Professional Track Faculty Committee

    •Chair:
    •Rachael Liberman, Teaching Series, rachael.liberman@du.edu
     
    The Senate, in partnership with the Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs, seeks to improve faculty success, governance representation, and professional development for faculty in the Teaching and Professional (TPF) series. In September, 2022, the Faculty Senate voted to create a multi-year TPF committee, with membership and duration to be determined by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC), which will include creating anomination and application process that allows for the appointment of any appointed faculty member in a TPF line to the committee (Professorial Series in University Libraries, Teaching Professorial Series, Clinical Professorial Series, Professor of the Practice Series, Research Professorial Series, Visiting Professorial Series, In-Residence Series). The committee shall aspire to include faculty from each full-time appointed TPF series, if possible, across various ranks, and with attention to compositional diversity and representation from different units. It
    will partner with stakeholders from the faculty and administration, and when appropriate other offices and units. The Committee will be faculty-driven but may also engage staff with subject matter expertise and administrators (such as Associate Deans) with oversight or job responsibilities in these areas. The FSEC will consult with the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on this process. Committee members will serve one-year appointments. The committee will have discrete annual charges. The Resident Scholar for TPF will co-chair the committee as a designee of the VP Faculty Affairs along with the Faculty Senate President or their designee.
     
    Those interested in joining the committee for AY 2022-23 should send an email to the co-chairs,  indicating your interest, along with a few sentences about why you’d like to be on the committee and what you would like to contribute. If you are nominating someone, please do the same in terms of what the person nominated would contribute.
     
    For more information on the development of the appointed faculty series:
    https://duvpfa.du.edu/teaching-and-professional-faculty/
  • Freedom of Expression Task Force

    In 2017, Faculty Senate adopted a Freedom of Expression Statement, which was later adopted by the Board of Trustees to apply to the University as a whole (all faculty, staff and students).

    FSEC has decided to bring together a task force to revisit the policy and make any necessary recommendations.

    We are looking for senators interested to sit on the committee.

    This committee is not to be confused with the University Committee for the Promotion of Freedom of Expression, as outlined in the FOE statement/policy. That committee consists of the following members:

    • Provost
    • President of the Faculty Senate
    • Past President of the Faculty Senate
    • President of the Undergraduate Student Government
    • President of the Graduate Student Government
    • Vice Provost for Student Affairs
    • Vice Chancellor of Diversity Equity and Inclusion
    • President of the Staff Advisory Council
    • 2 freedom of expression experts from the DU campus

     

     

  • Graduate Student Task Force

    Looking for those interested in chairing this Task Force!

    Contact: renee.botta@du.edu

    Members:

    Michele Tyson; Michelle Knowles; Jillian Blueford; Renee Botta; Erin Elzi

 

Below are recent committees that are currently inactive

  • COVID-19 Accommodation Committee

    This was a joint committee of APC and Personnel co-chaired by the two Chairs of those committees. It is not currently active.

    Members:

    • Apryl Alexander, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Professional Psychology
    • Norma Hafenstein, Daniel L. Ritchie Endowed Chair in Gifted Education, Morgridge College of Education
    • Barb Hurtt, Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences
    • Mike Keables, Associate Professor, Department of Geography
    • Viva Moffat, Professor, Sturm College of Law
    • Deb Ortega, Professor and Director of the University of Denver Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship, Graduate School of Social Work
    • Chip Reichardt, Professor, Department of Psychology (Co-Chair) Chip.Reichardt@du.edu
    • Derigan Silver, Associate Professor, Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies (Co-Chair) Derigan.Silver@du.edu
    • Robert Urquhart, Associate Professor, Department of Economics
    • Kate Willink, Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs
  • Reconciliation Committee

    Part of a process of reviewing general education curriculum at DU, this committee was created to reconcile the recommendations from Senate about the general education curriculum that was proposed by the GERI committee and which was met with a divied Senate and faculty-wide response. This committee completed its work in AY 2021-22

    Members:

    • Sarah Pessin
    • Renée Botta
    • Darrin Hicks
    • Mohammed Albow
    • Jennifer Campbell
    • Alejandro Ceron
    • Frederique Chevillot
    • Brian Gearity
    • Michelle Kruse-Crocker
    • Kris Kuzera
    • Brian Majestic
    • Lisa Martinez
    • Nancy Sasaki
    • Derigan Silver
    • Kate Tennis
    • John Tiedemann
    • Michele Tyson
    • Greg Ungar

COVID-19 Task Forces (Started in Spring, 2020)

Early on in the crisis, there were a number of Task Forces formed by the Chancellor with leadership from the Chancellor and the Provost. Faculty Senate has ensured a robust process for involving faculty. In summary, Senate has worked with our Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI) and the Chancellor to ensure that at least 25% of each committee is made up of Senate nominated faculty, including Senators, members of the Senate Executive Committee (FSEC), and other faculty.

To ensure transparency, see below for the list of faculty on task forces who were appointed based on a nomination process led by Senate in consultation with ODEI:

* [PLEASE NOTE: THERE WERE ALSO ADDITIONAL FACULTY ON THE TASK FORCES WHO WERE APPOINTED BY UPPER ADMIN SEPARATELY FROM THE SENATE-LED PROCESS]

COVID-19 Steering Committee

Scenarios & Financial Solutions

Fall Logistics Taskforce

Digital & Online Strategy

Academic Program/Unit Assessment

Opportunity & Strategy Task Force

HealthCare Working Group

  • Advisory Committees

    Faculty Review Committee

    Faculty Athletic Committee

    University Budget Advisory Committee

Contact

 

Faculty Senate President