EDITORIAL: Governance for the future

Ending full-body meetings of the Faculty Senate is a wise move, since they are impractical and inefficient. Instituting a representative form of faculty governance -- and making official the proxy role the Senate Executive Committee already plays -- makes sense in this era when professors are expected to teach well, make ground-breaking research discoveries and publish at a rapid pace. It's depressing that Senate participation has dipped to 10 percent of Penn's faculty members; that's worse than student participation rates in recent student government elections. But we'd rather have professors chatting casually with students in office hours or engaged in scholarly work, rather than helping to increase the clutter within the University's bureaucratic maze by attending Faculty Senate meetings to rubber-stamp decisions reached in advance by the SEC. Still, by eliminating the once-a-year "town meeting" format, the Faculty Senate will deprive the University community of its only opportunity to request public accountability from professors. As a result, students, staff and other faculty members must take extra steps to be vigilant about how professors are spending their time, who is paying for their research and what demands the University is making of them.