“At dusk, Husky Stadium looks so beautiful and purple,” said. It reminds her of all the potential the 91̽��affords students, staff and the faculty. “I think to myself, ‘All right, come on, this was not a terrible day, your university is a good place.’”

This year, as chair of the 91̽��Faculty Senate, Dougherty has prioritized faculty wellbeing, supporting her peers as they communicate across differences, and a list of policy goals to update parts of the faculty code.

Dougherty is a professor and  nurse practitioner who teaches and leads research in the 91̽��School of Nursing and the 91̽��School of Medicine. She also works with patients at the VA Puget Sound Medical Center, where she helps people who have had cardiac arrest return to healthy activities.

Her research has examined various ways having a cardiac event impacts not just the patients who recover, but the broader constellation of family members, caregivers and first responders.

She’s passionate about better health, often conducting meetings on walks across campus.

“I have one year as a faculty senate chair to get some things accomplished,” she said. “I want to focus on physical and mental health as well as helping us find ways to talk across differences.”

The Faculty Senate, along with President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Tricia Serio, make up the UW’s governing structure, dictating academic policy and rulemaking. Senators are elected representatives from the UW’s 24 colleges and schools.

Dougherty knows firsthand the toll that working through the pandemic had on the faculty.

“The faculty members are exhausted, burned out. They’re stressed out. They’re angry,” she said. Many faculty members feel like the university’s not paying attention to them.

Dougherty’s response is two pronged: First, she is working to convene a new Faculty Senate subcommittee focused on faculty well-being. That group is collecting data by listening to the faculty and conducting surveys to better inform interventions. Another facet of her first priority is tackling the opioid epidemic. When Naloxone, the opioid-overdose reversing nasal spray, became available without a prescription earlier this year, she advocated alongside student groups to make the medicine free on campus. Naloxone, known by the brand name Narcan, is in Odegaard Library and at Hall Health Center.

“I tell everybody about it,” Dougherty said. “But I’d like to see us run out of it. I’d like to see a huge demand for it, and a desire for people to get this medication, and keep it with them because they might be able to save someone’s life.”

Dougherty’s second priority is helping faculty better navigate conversations about difference. Students are demanding faculty members take positions on flashpoint issues, leaving little space for understanding and dialogue. Faculty members want to teach according to their expertise, honoring the UW’s principles of academic freedom.

“It’s a really, really difficult place, right now, to be a faculty member at any public university. It is just tough work,” Dougherty said. “And these eruptions in differences, in ideas and the way we express them are causing all kinds of stress and controversy.”

Dougherty, in partnership with Serio and Mike Townsend, secretary of the faculty, are working on ways to navigate these challenges. One approach is to adopt the , a framework that outlines an “aspirational journey toward campus wellbeing utilizing a comprehensive settings and systems-level approach.”  The team is evaluating the fit for the UW. Another approach, Dougherty said, is to offer faculty members small group workshops designed to help bring our faculty together to talk through difference.

“We should be able to have open dialogue and discourse about differences in ideas, philosophies, cultures, backgrounds, and not feel personally attacked or feel afraid,” she said.

In addition to her two personal priorities, Dougherty is leading the senators as they deliberate on several issues. Faculty Senate leadership this year is working on policy and legislative reforms to:

• Improve and update dispute resolution policies;
• Revise merit and promotion practices, connecting performance with compensation;
• Evaluate faculty compensation and add transparency to better support equity;
• Identify more ways to collaborate across all three 91̽��campuses; and
• Welcome and onboard Serio, the new provost.

For more information on the Faculty Senate, see its website. Reach Dougherty at cindyd@uw.edu.

The Faculty Senate is the legislative body made up of 133 elected faculty representatives from across all campuses. The chair, elected to serve a one-year term, sets the agenda for legislation and other priorities. Together, the Faculty Senate and faculty councils along with 91̽��President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Mark Richards, form the structure for shared governance.

Dr. Reddy is the 75th elected chair of the Faculty Senate, the third person of color to hold that seat in 91̽��history, and only the second person of color to serve in this leadership role in the past 60 years.

“I think of myself as a faculty member first, not just as a person of color,” Dr. Reddy said. “But I feel that DEI considerations do need to become more important and should be a priority.”

Work already is underway to recruit a more diverse group to serve on Faculty Senate committees and university councils, with attention paid to how people identify by race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and ability. Other key considerations include campus and academic unit affiliation — as well as scholarly discipline, with an aim to include more faculty from the arts and humanities.

“We’re trying to become more diverse and inclusive in shared governance. And I think the Senate leadership team has done a better job over the last several years,” he said.

This year the Senate will consider whether to continue its practice of holding meetings online — begun by necessity due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“One of the advantages of online or hybrid meetings is that they are more inclusive of people who aren’t based near Gerberding Hall, where in-person meetings have been held in the past,” Dr. Reddy said. Holding meetings online or offering a virtual option allows greater participation from representatives at 91̽��Bothell, 91̽��Tacoma and medical center locations.

Dr. Reddy also hopes to complete a five-year effort to reform the faculty conduct and grievance policies. The existing policies can seem outdated, overly formal and can lead to university-wide adjudication when issues may be better solved within an academic unit, he said.

Draft legislation to bring about change is in discussion among the Senate, President Cauce, Provost Richards and the Board of Deans and Chancellors. The goal is to make the process less rigid and more locally based, while reserving university-level procedures for specific circumstances, such as intractable situations and egregious allegations, including those related to harassment or discrimination. In addition, a new group of faculty liaisons would be available to support colleagues as they go through the process.

Ultimately the outcome should be that the 91̽��is a place where students and faculty members can raise areas of concern and resolve problems, Dr. Reddy said.

“We want people to bring forward issues that will help improve the climate,” Dr. Reddy said.

Other Faculty Senate priorities include:

• Changes for clinical faculty. Clinical faculty, most of whom work in the School of Medicine, work alongside other faculty teaching and caring for patients but must renew their employment contracts annually. Clinical faculty do not have voting rights for promotion or Senate legislation and cannot serve in the Senate. The plan is to introduce legislation that would allow for multi-year contracts and voting rights.
• Expand merit and promotion qualifications to include community-engaged activities as elements of scholarship for promotion and tenure. Work also is underway with the Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs to reenvision the merit process.
• Revive conversations about how to remove bias from teaching evaluations.
• Support faculty as course formats include more asynchronous and online teaching.
• Work with the State Legislature to secure funding for faculty and staff salaries and shore up finances for 91̽��Medicine, which annually provides more than $700 million in uncompensated care.
• Discuss campus safety concerns with Interim Vice President for Campus Community Safety Sally Clark and 91̽��Police Chief Craig Wilson.
• Raise the profile of sustainability issues in the university’s practices and policies.

Today, the same body leads the 91̽��faculty in shared governance, advocating for faculty and academic freedom, as well as for how the university makes good as a public good.

It wasn’t always that way.

“Eighty years ago we didn’t actually have the clear mandate for these important missions” said , professor of landscape architecture and chair of the Faculty Senate. “And 80 years isn’t that long.”

On May 18, 1938, 91̽��President called the first meeting of the Faculty Senate to order. In the two decades that followed, the Faculty Senate rapidly evolved and, in 1947, the university president was replaced as chair with an elected faculty member.

In 1956, the Faculty Senate emerged with a “constitution” in the form of the Faculty Code, the framework for shared governance that remains in effect to this day. The accord affirmed the ideals of shared governance at the 91̽��and was instrumental in cementing trust between the university faculty and the administration.

“A university is a community of scholars contributing, each according to his own talents and interests, to the transmission and advancement of knowledge,” the Faculty Code says. “A university administration must seek wisely and diligently to advance the common effort, and the strength of a university is greatest when its faculty and administration join for the advancement of common objectives.”

During the past 80 years, the Faculty Senate has solidified academic freedom as a core value, Way said.

Today, the Faculty Senate does much more than oversee the curriculum. It contributes to leading the university on many fronts, Way said. The chair joins the Provost and the President in decision making that impacts the wellbeing of the university as a whole.

“UW’s Faculty Senate is part of that leadership group,” Way said. “The Faculty Senate here said, ‘Yes, we’re in charge of curriculum, we’re in charge of our discipline, we are the ones who pursue academics,’ but if we’re not also part of the discussion around finances of the institution as a whole, around our relationship with the state and the legislature, all of this, we can’t really do what we do as teachers and scholars.”

The 91̽��Faculty Senate is a great example of the role faculty should — and can — play in shared governance, said Provost .

“The Faculty Senate is thoughtful, analytical and devoted to the institution — and willing to work with administration in identifying, pursuing and achieving important 91̽��goals,” Baldasty said. “As provost, I’ve found the Faculty Senate to be an important partner in this work.”

The Faculty Senate is a democratic institution with 143 elected members and a chair who serves a one-year term. Way’s term ends on July 31, 2018. She’ll be replaced by Dr. , a professor of radiation oncology who served as vice chair for the 2017-18 academic year. , a professor at the Information School, has been elected to replace Sandison as vice chair.

“One of the remarkable things about our system of shared governance is its breadth and comprehensiveness. Faculty from all three campuses are represented in the Faculty Senate and serve on our university faculty councils,” said , an associate professor at 91̽��Tacoma and former chair of the Faculty Senate. “Most important, just as we have federal, state and local government, faculty at the 91̽��benefit from the opportunity to help govern the affairs of their own academic units, their school, college or campus, and the university as a whole.”

Faculty enjoy certain rights and privileges, but also have collective responsibility for the stewardship of the institution in collaboration with the administration, at all levels, in our departments, in all schools and colleges and across each distinctive campus, Barsness said.

“We’re a big, complex institution. If academics are going to be our mission, then the faculty — the academics — need to play a role in shared governance,” Way said. “We need to have a voice and we need to have a strong contributing role.”

Still, the institution isn’t static. The senate’s focus and work has evolved in many ways and continues to change to meet the needs of today’s students and faculty, Way said.

For example, the senate recently voted to require the tenure and promotion committee to recognize faculty who incorporate diversity into their scholarship. As a result, tenure panels will consider such scholarship when it is submitted in the evaluation of their peers.

“What we can’t say is how you consider it or what the metrics are because that’s up to the disciplines,” Way said. “What diversity scholarship looks like in the College of Education is going to be different than what it looks like in the School of Law.”

And, like diversity, community-engaged scholarship is increasingly important at the UW, Way said. Shared governance also has catalyzed opportunities for both President to call on the faculty to be more engaged and for disciplines to develop relevant standards. In the middle is the Faculty Senate, which will establish guidelines, similar to diversity, for how faculty should be measured.

Today, the Faculty Senate works to strengthen the university’s role as a public good, as part of a belief that higher education serves the broader community as does the scholarship and knowledge produced.

“Our code and culture is going to have to better articulate our role as a public good and our role as having a real impact on our communities,” Way said. “That’s going to change how we do things.”

Way believes the future for academics will be less governed by departmental rules and more focused on what problem the faculty member is trying to solve, be it an equation, social issue or disease. The same holds for students. For students, college will be less about choosing a major, and more about what big issue they’re trying to address, she said.

That shift brings new challenges to the Faculty Senate as it manages faculty, since they still teach in traditionally structured departments but are engaged in interdisciplinary endeavors to solve broader challenges like population health, homelessness and other complex problems.

“Shared governance is going to be part of figuring out what the university of the future looks like,” Way said.

Faculty governance is evidence that the 91̽��has been changing the way scholarship is passed along from one generation to the next. Looking back at 80 years of shared investment in the UW’s mission is similar to looking back at careers of faculty and thinking about how it’s very different to be a faculty today than it was in 1952, Way said.

“It will continue to change,” Way said. “Our careers are changing. The way we do things is changing. Faculty governance is changing.”

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