THE
FACULTY
SENATE
Senate
Document Number 7908S
Date
of Senate Approval 04/24/08
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Statement
of Faculty Senate Action:
FWDC
6: Proposal to revise the University
Service Council
(Replaces SD5204S
and SD5304S; Faculty Handbook 10.3.7 and 10.4.1.2)
Effective Date: Immediately
1. Delete in Faculty Handbook
Section 10.3.7 on University Service Council (SD5204S)
Section 10.4.1.2 on How Members Are Selected (SD5304S)
2. Replace
with Section 10.3.7: [exception do not
include rationale in Handbook]
Purpose
Because
faculty service is integral to every aspect of our campus operations, and
because it complements teaching and research in the overall development of
individual faculty members and the faculty as a whole, the University Service
Council (USC) will promote an appreciation of service appropriate to the
mission of the university.
USC
will support and facilitate faculty, staff, administration, and student service
activities on and off campus. The
Council will assess the role and effectiveness of service appropriate for the
institution. The Council will annually
select members of the faculty, the university staff or administration who will
receive grants to support either domestic or international service. Priority
will be placed on faculty service activities, particularly those that clearly
enhance student learning. The Council will serve to advise, develop, and review
policy with regard to service activities and the appropriate role of service in
professional portfolios as well as student learning experiences.
Membership
Rationale
The University Service Council will serve to facilitate service by all members
of the institution. Thus it should be
composed of individuals representing the full range of campus constituencies.
The Director of the Key Center is a particularly important addition to the
Council as that person is central to facilitating the integration of learning
with service, on and off campus.
Duties:
1. The Council will serve as the institution’s
policy, assessment, and facilitating voice in matters relating to service on
and off campus.
2. The Council will review the institutional
committee structure and periodically make recommendations with regard to
number, purpose, and function of all institutional committees.
3. The Council will assume responsibility for
recommending policy with regard to the role of service in the professional life
and portfolio of faculty, administration, and staff.
4. The council will assume responsibility for
recommending policy with regard to the role of service in the student’s
academic and non-academic experience(s) while at the University.
5. Each year the Council will select recipients
of grants to support appropriate service activities. These grants will be $250 to $1,000 for
formal service activities approved by the Key Center for either service on or
off campus including international service.
Emphasis will be placed on service that contributes to student learning
and the professional development of the recipients.
6. Two members of the Council will sit on the
Faculty Scholarship and Service Awards Committee that determines the recipient
of the annual Distinguished Service Award.
The recipient will receive a certificate and $1,000. This award is to go to a person who has
demonstrated exceptional service in support of the institution’s mission within
the most recent five years.
7. The council will consult with the appropriate
office(s) to ensure that every five years (beginning in AY 2008-2009) a summary
of significant service activities by faculty will be published and on file in
the Library.
8. The council will be consulted in the annual
selection of the Reynolds and the William and Ida Friday service awards given
to deserving graduating seniors.
Rationale
The Service Council is to become a
mechanism whereby service is recognized as an integral part of the
institution’s mission, life, and function.
As such the Council should have representatives from all major campus constituencies,
and be able to tangibly support and recognize quality service in a formal
manner.
Budget
The Service Council will have an
operating budget equivalent to those received by the University Research
Council (URC) and the University Teaching Council (UTC) for purposes of funding
grants in the amount of no less than $250 to a maximum of $1000 to faculty,
staff, or administration who meet criteria set by the council. Priority will be given to faculty led off
campus projects which clearly enhance student learning or professional
development. These funds will not
compete with the grant associated with the Annual Distinguished Service Award.
Recommendations and
reports to:
FWDC and the Provost.
At the end of each year the Council will also give an annual report on the
State of Service for the Institution to the Chair of the Faculty Senate and to
the Chancellor.
Rationale
Service is an institutional
responsibility on and off campus. As
noted in the accompanying document it can be seen as the institution’s “Moral
Heart.” Another way to understand the
value of service is to understand “service builds community.” As such the Service Council should reflect
this importance and serve the institution in significant ways to facilitate
meeting this responsibility in substantive fashion.
Journal of College & Character VOLUME VII, NO. 2, February 2006
Service: The
Moral Heart of Higher Education
E. Thomas
Moran,
Abstract
This essay explores
the distinctive but often unacknowledged role of service in the experience of
American higher education. It argues
that service must inform a pervasive set of values that orient us to social and
communal life.
The idea of Service is
commonplace in contemporary higher education. It is an often-noted element of
the trinity of purposes that also includes teaching and research. But unlike
these latter, apparently more robust commitments, service receives less
attention. In the implicit view of many
in the academy, it lacks either a clear conceptualization or inspiring vision
to support it. If the role of service is to receive the attention its nominal
centrality suggests it should, this situation needs to be rectified. To begin
that process, academicians need to appreciate conclusively that service should
not only extend to the way those in the academy relate to the broader
community, but also that higher education should explicitly promote an
understanding of our lives in relation to others and a concomitant sense of
responsibility for the character of our public life and our common well-being.
Seen from this perspective, service is the moral heart of the enterprise.
Moreover, such a conceptualization of service is a unique contribution of
American higher education. It extends and complements the historic missions of
teaching and scholarship in relationship to establishing the foundations for
democratic life.
The idea that service should
have a seminal role in the academy arose early in the establishment of the
Republic and was accompanied by the recognition that successful democracy would
require a pervasive commitment to responsibility for the life of the
society. As Jefferson observed, “In a
democracy, we get the kind of government we deserve.” Education, including higher
education, was seen as the principle vehicle for engendering in students the
capabilities and commitments of democratic character. As time passed, colleges and universities
came to be seen not only as having an obligation to inculcate civic responsibility
but to exhibit it. This responsibility, it was believed, should be manifested
in sharing openly and generously their intellectual resources with the broader
society.
Hence, a new expectation was
added to faculty life --
a willingness to share one’s professionally relevant capabilities and knowledge
through an engagement with the community beyond the campus. These values were affirmed in the Land Grant
movement in the latter half of the 19th century. They are central to the integration of higher
education into the social fabric of society and the role higher education plays
in the vital formula that makes democracy work. Thus, service is a palpable
means by which the university helps to create healthy communities. In this
respect, service operates in three realms: 1) the transference to the broader
society of the fruits of research, scholarship and creative activities; 2) the
sharing of the capabilities and expertise of individual faculty in directly
addressing societal concerns; and 3) the preparation of students with the
skills, commitment and character to act as competent citizens and leaders in a
democracy.
To have anything worth
sharing with the broader society, however, presupposes a healthy and dynamic
life within the academy. The academy, known historically as a collegium,
is a unique form of self-governing community in which the generation of
knowledge and human development ideally occur through inquiry and dialog,
unencumbered by the dictates and controls characteristic of other kinds of
organizations. To maintain the collegium,
and the free exchange of ideas it promotes and protects, requires that its
members devote considerable time and effort to tasks related to its core
functions: developing curriculum, evaluating the expertise of colleagues,
establishing policies and practices for teaching and student performance,
reviewing and commenting on the scholarly products of others, and interacting
with the broad cosmopolitan networks of national and international scholars,
which act as a source of new ideas and creative stimulation. These quotidian tasks of service are essential
to sustaining the academy. They constitute an inevitable fourth realm of
service for faculty that must be included with those others noted earlier.
Beyond its functions in the
academy, however, service rests on a larger foundation of significance, which
is often left unexamined and unspoken in academic life. It is this vitalizing
sense of the spirit of service that is the subject of the remainder of this
essay.
Service generates meaning and
purpose in life. It creates bonds with those others who, as Joseph Conrad put
it, “…share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.”
Moreover, it reflects a personal choice to answer what existentialists call
“the absurd” -- or the resounding indifference of the universe to our
intentions --with a determination not to yield to despair or callousness, but
to make an active choice for hope, for compassion, and for community. These values must be affirmed even if our actions
do not alter reality or make any difference to the outcome of events in the
world. Such values and the connection to others they engender quite simply
reflect a better way to live than their opposite or their absence offer.
Service, however, should not
only be anchored in psychic rewards or personal meaning. To limit service to
such terms runs the risk of making it merely therapeutic. And to that extent infuses it with a
self-oriented, even self-indulgent, quality.
Service should arise from a commitment to actually have a positive benefit
for those who share life in a community, especially those who most require the
care of others. Robert Kennedy exemplified this view, when he said to a
colleague about his own efforts to support better conditions for the children
of migrant workers, “…I want to do something that will last longer than your
words or mine.”
Ultimately, the benefits of
service accrue not only to those at whom they are directed. Service also
creates community. It nourishes what the
philosopher Hannah Arendt called “our common life.” Active service evidences not just that we
care, but defines what we care about and how we express that care. Because service is a form of caring that is
not simply private and intimate but public as well, its role in creating a
foundational set of values for a community is decisive. A manifest, widespread
commitment to service creates a flourishing community. Such communities are
characterized by among other qualities, caring, trust, reciprocity, and a high
degree of civic engagement. Flourishing communities also evince a determination
to avoid turning inward and becoming narrow, closed and exclusive. Instead they
strive to cultivate in their members a capacity for imagining the world from
the perspective of the “other” and to extend to them sympathy, generosity of
spirit and respect.
Without this expansive view of
community to orient us, human beings become self-centered, and social life
becomes atomistic and, potentially, chaotic and dysfunctional. In such conditions, there is a diminished
understanding of what human beings hold in common and how to pursue what we hold in common and make it good. An ethos
of service presents a counterbalancing force to insularity. When we make service a compelling commitment,
we create hope that we can forge a positive sense of how we must relate to one
another and what we must create together.
Leaders play a special
role in creating this ethos of service and stewardship. To insure flourishing
communities and organizations, service must be pervasive in the values of
leadership. But when leaders exhibit a self-interested careerism they undermine
commitment to the larger purposes that service embodies. Irrespective of the
role one plays in an organization, however, authentic service must self
consciously honor the purposes of a worthy organization and view work in such
an organization as ennobling, precisely because
it contributes to those purposes.
When a commitment to service
is pronounced community flourishes; and paradoxically when community flourishes
individuals thrive. Our private destinies cannot be conceived as separable from
the well-being of our public life. If we doubt this insight, we need only to
look to those societies ravaged by war, corruption or injustice to understand
how difficult it would be for even the most fortunate member of such a society
to live a truly satisfying life.
If
the concept of community is to be fully meaningful, we must live with a
personal sense of the consequences of what happens in our communities. A
transient, impermanent connection to place mitigates against an enduring
solidarity with those with whom we share that place. Put simply, if we want to
flourish, we must live, not only in common faith with others, but in common
fate with them as well. When we grasp this, the justification for service snaps
to life. We then realize that service prepares the future and, to use Maya
Angelou’s radiant phrase, “strengthens the foundations of the Universe.” In less metaphysical terms, an understanding
of service is at the moral heart of what should emerge from the experience of
higher education, which is, fundamentally, a commitment to those values that
enable human beings to live together well.
References
Conrad, J. (1963).
Lord Jim. New York: Doubleday Bantam Books, p. 115.
Coles, R. (2000). Lives of Moral Leadership. New York: Random House, p.
20.
Angelou, M. (1993). Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now. New York:
Random House, p. 16.