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Writing this column yet again, I feel like a DJ who plays the same song over and over again: The governance of this College is broken. If we needed any further proof, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) provided it last Tuesday when it failed to achieve quorum at its most recent meeting. Over the past four years, votes at a third of FAS’s meetings have been meaningless because our rotating deans could not gather a sixth of the Faculty’s 700-or-so members—the minimum threshold for votes to become...
...Last Tuesday, FAS Dean Michael D. Smith hoped to lower that threshold to an eighth for future meetings. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get a sixth that one last time to make the change official. FAS meetings may become a farce if this trend continues: 70 to 100 faculty members will meet for afternoon tea in University Hall, discuss a few agenda items, raise their hands to vote, and then realize that nothing they have said or done has any power because quorum has not been reached...
...Students and faculty members are busy, clearly, but I doubt that they weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s when HoCos were a “big” event and FAS rarely missed quorum. Randomization has obviously hurt House life, but I don’t think that gets to the root of changes either. Mather HoCo, the major anomaly in House life, frequently has 60-80 people at its meetings...
After failing to draw the numbers necessary to conduct official votes at almost a third of its meetings in the past four years, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) considered lowering its standards for attendance yesterday. Too bad old habits die hard. Not enough professors turned out to yesterday’s meeting to take a binding vote on the new measure, which would have lowered the quorum—the number of attendees required for an official Faculty vote—from one sixth of the professoriate’s approximately 700 members to one eighth. The development...
Boasting an economist, a statistician, two psychologists, and a Government professor, the 18-member governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is well-versed in the science of human behavior. But with the full Faculty set to discuss today the possibility of lowering the attendance required for an official vote at its general meetings, many of the professoriate’s own public policy and behavioral experts appeared torn about the effect that the proposal’s adoption might have. “If...Faculty members would only show up if there?...