The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/college-of-business/page/3/)
The priorities of the faculty governance committee include continuing the schools’ separate missions and programs, faculty expectations, cohesion of the college and fairness of process and outcomes.
“Right now faculty are isolated,” Verma said. “They are focused on their own schools, but once they start integrating across in the long run you will imagine they will develop new collaborative curricula. Right now there is no formal collaboration.”
Members of the Cornell College of Business leadership team and planning committees will hold two additional town hall meetings on campus next week, in order to hear feedback and questions about the college from the Cornell community, according to the University.
“The plan is to try and assemble a search committee for the new president and have the committee consult broadly with the campus,” Kotlikoff said.
“I told the SHA community last spring that this would be my final year at Cornell, long before I knew there would be a CCB,” said Johnson
The resolution claims that administrators violated University bylaws by failing to work with the Faculty Senate in making a decision which was a “question of educational policy which concern[s] more than one college, school or separate academic unit.”
The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly passed a resolution on Monday expressing dissatisfaction with the decision process undertaken in approving the College of Business. Students were disappointed with the administration’s decision process in approving the business college.
Faculty and staff emphasized the need for increased involvement in administrative decisions when discussing the College of Business initiative at an open forum Wednesday. Provost Michael Kotlikoff moderated deliberations about the administrative rationale for the decision at the forum. Although many have characterized the decision as sudden and surprising, Kotlikoff said discussion of the College of Business actually began in 2008. The provost called the creation of the College of Business a politically difficult initiative, explaining that this made the administration choose to bypass the faculty senate when making the decision to merge the colleges. “If we had entered an extended debate with faculty and alumni, it would have been tremendously resisted,” he said.
Prof. Richard Bensel, government, said that the creation of the business college was in violation of Article XIII of the University’s bylaws, which state that, “The function of the University Faculty shall be to consider questions of educational policy which concern more than one college, school or separate academic unit, or are general in nature.”
To the Editor:
Is the broader Cornell community seriously surprised by the decision of the trustees, including elected representative trustees and President Elizabeth Garrett, to approve the new Cornell College of Business and completely ignore Cornell’s representative assemblies? This decision has ample precedent at Cornell in the failed attempt of the provost in summer 2002 to dismantle an entire college without consulting faculty. More importantly, though, our campus needs to actually engage in dissent outside of shared governance bodies lacking actual impact on university decision-making: It is time to stop feeling ashamed of dissenting in ways that circumvent “the usual channels.”
After approving the new college at a meeting in New York City — over 200 miles away from the campus which these decisions would actually impact — President Garrett emailed to say that the vote “marks the beginning of an inclusive and crucial process” to “more fully define” the new college’s structure. Given the usual administrative lag for anything at Cornell, it seems likely that the true “beginning” of this process was months ago. President Garrett and Provost Michael Kotlikoff still aren’t concerned with our collective disapproval of this undemocratic process; rather, they simply wanted to rush their questionable agenda through to approval.