Charter Bylaws Amendment re: Proportional Representation on the Senate:
This year we have the anomalous situation of nearly half of the Senate committee/council chairs
coming from CNSE. This does not follow the spirit of Bylaws, Article II, 2.3.2 which advocates
proportional representation in the Senate. (“The 44 Senators shall be allocated to the schools
and colleges in proportion to the numbers of voting faculty members in each school or college;
however, each school or college shall have at least one Senator and the School of Public Health
shall have two Senators. A school or college shall not be deprived of a Senator because of
shifting faculty ratios until the term of the Senator would normally have expired. Thus, the
number of school or college Senators may be above 44 in some years.”). I suggest that we
need an addition to the Charter or Bylaws that will prevent similar imbalances in the future.
The addition could, for example, stipulate that without counting the positions of Chair of the
Senate and the two officers who are ex-officio council chairs, no school or college may have
members chairing Senate committees in excess of the smallest integer greater than or equal to
its proportion of allocated senators plus one (to allow smaller units to have a chance at more
than one chair).
