But Sandison “found the right spot” in education and became the first in his family to go to college, at the University of Manchester. That’s where a lifelong love of physics blossomed. Today, Sandison is a vice chair of the Radiation Oncology Department in the 91̽��School of Medicine and leads the Division of Medical Physics.

Since arriving at the university in 2008, Sandison has become increasingly interested and involved in shared governance. He’ll chair his first senate meeting tonight.

Sandison sat down with 91̽��News for a broad-ranging conversation about his priorities and views before his upcoming one-year term as chair of the Faculty Senate.

What are the most important issues facing the Faculty Senate this year?

The senate and its leadership will deal with many important issues this year, as it does every year, but we set out six issues as priorities. I will mention just a few.

Faculty compensation is always a priority at the beginning of a state legislative budget biennium. The real issue is to convince legislators to fully support 91̽��as the flagship higher education institution for the state. The Legislature hasn’t given 91̽��the support it needs to meet its faculty and staff compensation bills. The last biennium, the Legislature approved a pay increase for 91̽��faculty but state funding and tuition dollars were not enough to implement the approved increase. Approving a pay increase and actually providing all the funds necessary to deliver an increase are two different things. It was a shock to be faced with this issue the last biennium. Hard lobbying in the second half of the biennium convinced legislators of the fairness to correct the funding gap but it was only a one time measure. We will be working diligently to ensure this situation is not repeated. Legislators must hear a consistent message from faculty, staff and administration about the support our university requires.

Improving the faculty diversity profile is another priority. As a university, we have made good progress over the past few years on improving student diversity, equity and inclusion. This has been a major initiative of President Cauce. However, faculty feel they have not made an equivalent improvement with their own diversity profile. We will be looking to implement strategies to accomplish rapid change in this respect. It would be a great stimulus to that effort if the remaining years of the Be Boundless campaign could, in part, assist in promoting increased faculty diversity.

Another issue is ensuring that outstanding new faculty are not lost to 91̽��due to the high cost of living in the Seattle region. Affordability of housing in this region is an increasing obstacle to recruitment.  I’m looking forward to working with President Cauce and Provost Richards on new initiatives to assist faculty with housing. This is something we need to push hard.

I’ll end my answer with one of the priorities we have addressed for some years now. That is improvement to conditions of employment for lecturing faculty. Positive change and progress have been made. We had success last year with changes to the Faculty Code and we hope to make more changes this year.

What’s been your experience with the new Provost?

Provost Mark Richards is a remarkably talented man with whom I enjoy working. He is a big-picture thinker but also very practical. He has a clear priority for fiscal stability and desire for raising 91̽��to the next level of academic excellence. He is a geophysicist, and as a physicist myself, I appreciate how logically he thinks. One of the many things I like is his commitment to shared governance with faculty. Although it works a bit differently at the UW, he has had previous positive experience with shared governance at Berkeley and is encouraging of the Faculty Senate to be a greater driver of initiatives for the University. I believe that together our new Provost and Faculty Senate — with the support of President Cauce — will make a terrific team. This is what shared governance is all about. We must work together in harmony. My experience with Mark and Ana Mari so far is that achieving harmony is not difficult at all.

In her Spring address, President Cauce called on the faculty to be engaged with the community. What are your views on community engagement?

In reality, as university faculty, we are already highly engaged with the greater community. Half the faculty serve in the School of Medicine. How much closer to the community can you get than to directly provide outstanding health service? Other faculty in social work, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy and law, all the professional schools, reach out to the community. In fact I cannot think of a single department that is not engaged with our greater community. Just think, education, music, athletics, all the sciences and engineering, everyone reaches out.

I feel it is more to the point that university faculty are not recognized for their community service by the average citizen, or other faculty themselves when it comes to promotion and tenure evaluation criteria. If community service and engagement by faculty were better recognized, more faculty would engage in it as a component of their job. What President Cauce may be encouraging us to do is to formally recognize faculty who are already doing this work.

It is clear to me that involvement of faculty in communities needs to be advertised in a way that brings home, to citizens and legislators, the great benefits the University and its faculty provide to the citizens of this state. Most citizens are ignorant of the contributions faculty make to their state because people don’t even know if an individual faculty member goes and does a bit of research that ends up serving the community. Much of it is hidden from the public view.

Having said that, the ability to raise $5 billion so far for the university’s Be Boundless campaign tells me that many people recognize our university’s importance. The many citizens of Washington who donate know the valuable asset it is. Maybe the legislature should more strongly reflect that support.

Please describe your views on higher education.

I know that some regard the word “transformative” as hackneyed, but higher education is transformative and life-changing. I am an example beneficiary of higher education. Greater understanding of the world and humanity, rewarding careers and success in many fields requires higher education.

I think on the national level, higher education is being scapegoated for political purposes. The attitude that it’s not valuable to have a higher education or that it’s outrageously expensive is nonsense. One of the most important ways to transform society is to democratize the educational process. Democracy is strengthened by an educated population who discriminate truth from non-truth using critical thinking.

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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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