SEC Chair’s Report for SEC meeting of September 1, 2021
Timothy D. Sergay, Chair
Introductory remarks: I do not presume that all members of the Senate Executive Committee
(SEC) and the Senate itself already know me. I stress the teamwork aspect of the new Senate
leadership circle, which operationally I regard as made up of four people, not three, not just the
immediate past chair, the current chair, and the current vice chair (Sean Rafferty, Timothy
Sergay, Sydney Faught)—I also consult closely and all but constantly with the Senate secretary
Chris Poehlmann, whom I regard as something like a radio producer in the studio for whoever
happens to be sitting behind the microphone.
The difficulty and humanness of all politics for me is reflected in a famous bon mot by the
Russian prime minister who served under Boris Yeltsin, Viktor Chernomyrdin: “We wanted
things to work out for the best, but they worked out the way they always do…” His accidental
wisdom is not necessarily that politics always fails, but that it’s always skirting failure. Jacob
Bronowski made very similar remarks about the progress of science in his famous essay series of
the mid-1970s The Ascent of Man.
I remind SEC members of the function of the SEC under Charter VII.5. The Executive Committee
shall review proposals and agenda items and may recommend for or against them. The Executive
Committee shall either refer a proposal to an appropriate Council or place it on the Senate agenda.
The Executive Committee may not prevent such items from appearing on the Senate Agenda. My first
two priorities as chair are this year’s staffing-up effort, still in progress, and the overall improvement
of the Senate’s communicative functions.
Filling Senate vacancies: I report coordinated email nudges from Senate leadership to various deans
of schools and colleges to beat the bushes for more senators.
Secretary Poehlmann notes that council chairs need to be reminded of their monthly and annual
reporting duties and the need to update their respective web pages at
https://www.albany.edu/universitysenate/councils-and-committees.php.
Arranging a new administrative support person under Charter VI.1.7 for both SEC and
Senate, to be “designated by the President.” We are on track to define duties for Judy Lasher, the
officer manager at ITLAL, who will inherit this role from Elizabeth Gray, who departed last
year.
The degree of stenographic burden on the “recorder” at SEC and Senate functions depends on
the model we establish for the minutes of the Senate as a whole and all its councils and
committees. Recalling that the Senate is a “Robert-governed” deliberative body under Bylaws
II.7.6, Senate leadership is in agreement that we should strive toward the model of minutes
prescribed in Robert’s Rules of Order (RONR) §48 “Minutes and Reports of Officers”: “In an
ordinary society, the minutes should contain mainly a record of what was done at the meeting,
not what was said by the members” (468).
Discussion of the problematic aspects of maintaining, during Zoom sessions of the full Senate,
the “everyone to everyone” mode of the Zoom chat area concluded in a clear consensus
within SEC in favor of disabling that feature for the first and subsequent meetings of the Senate.
SEC’s specific responsibility for such measures is clear under Bylaws II.4.2: “The Executive
Committee shall be responsible for the general operation of the Senate by making
recommendations for improving the operation and maintaining the orderly process of the
Senate.”
Previewing of coming administrative/political issues for the Senate turned to the expected
migration of the SUNY system from one learning management system, Blackboard, to
Desire2Learn’s Brightspace, and briefly, in my chair’s report, to the need to process in some way
or other the report of the chair of the 2021-22 Shared Governance Task Force, which is now
posted to the Senate website
(https://www.albany.edu/universitysenate/assets/Shared%20Governance%20Task%20Force%20
Report%20Final%20Draft%2009%2006%202021.pdf).
