The Senate Forum

Editor’s Note

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The first edition of the Senate Forum was published in September of 1986 with the stated purpose  “to let you, the faculty, know what the choices are which confront the university…we hope this publication may have a role to play in sustaining and increasing faculty involvement at C.S.U.F.” Its editors noted that the Senate was crucial but that most faculty had never served on it and as a result many didn’t truly know what it did.

That sentence was written at a time when the Academic Senate was in its first incantation, having immediately prior been a “Faculty Council.”  The campus had transformed from a time when “the faculty was small enough that a high proportion of them were directly involved in the governance of the campus” to one of greater fragmentation.  They feared that participation was declining and so too was interest in the body.  In particular, they saw that shared governance was tightly linked to quality, and losing the former would damage the latter: “A reliable generalization is that faculty have less authority in third-rate places than they do in first-rate ones.”

Over the years the Forum has evolved in both format and substance.  However, the growing campus of 1986 is even larger now, and the trends over the intervening years have made the original mission of the Forum even more urgent.  It is our hope that the following contributions will serve the purpose this journal’s founders laid out and help spark discussions of key issues, lay out the challenges honestly and openly, and improve the quality of the campus and the Senate by increasing the involvement of the faculty.