Word: quorums
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...most important thing about this give-and-take between Faculty and students is that it takes time, effort, and dedication. Everyone involved must value the deliberative process of coming to decisions democratically. So when I read in The Crimson that Dean Smith viewed the lowering of quorum as a “streamlining” procedure, I got a little worried. I became even more worried by his statement that he cares about the reasons why faculty members do not attend meetings, “but I think we have to be very careful to not allow the business...
...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 was perhaps a first in the nearly two-century history of the Faculty: a failure to achieve quorum in a vote on quorum. Chair of the Economics Department James H. Stock presented yesterday’s legislation, which, in addition to lowering the quorum threshold, would have provided new regulations for clarifying whether a quorum has been reached before business is considered. Currently, members of the Faculty have...