(The text of this article formed the basis for my chair’s remarks at the June 1, 2021 Faculty Meeting.)

Over the past year, a few members of the FEC took a deep dive into the Faculty Rules and Regulations, that long and cumbersome document that serves as Brown’s handbook of faculty governance and which we vote to tweak at nearly every faculty meeting. The project arose from an initiative begun last year by then-FEC Chair Jim Morgan: the FRR has grown rather too long and cumbersome, and Jim initiated a process of its full revision.

That effort was suspended last spring when more urgent matters suddenly demanded our attention. Yet as we worked to confront those matters, we came better to understand just how important the FRR really is. And so this year a small group of us met several times with a resolve to take a more mindful and philosophical approach to revising the rules. We invited guests to provide us with historical context for the document, we debated what ought to go in a preamble, and we considered how the FRR as a whole might best articulate and enshrine the robust tradition of shared governance that is a hallmark of Brown.

In the course of that work, or what I think of fondly as our “Faculty Governance GISP,” some of us visited the John Hay Library to examine the faculty governance archives: old meeting agendas, minutes, memos and versions of the FRR. (The earliest version is from 1895, and it is a considerably shorter document...) When I had a turn rifling through the materials, I soon found myself enthralled by the voices, discussions, and debates whose traces are preserved in those yellowing papers.

Here in this space, I want to mention just one of many things that struck me, namely the minutes of the September 1968 faculty meeting. They weren’t so much minutes as notice of a cancellation: a single sheet in the file laconically announces that, due to a lack of business, the meeting—what ought to have been the first of the '68-'69 academic year—had been cancelled.

The historical irony is thick. That year was surely one of the most tumultuous that Brown has ever seen. On December 5, sixty-five of the University’s eighty-five Black students walked out—they assembled and marched down College Hill to the Baptist Church on Congdon Street—in protest of how few Black students and faculty members there were at Brown and how little support they received. A few months later, after several protests to abolish ROTC programming at Brown, the faculty voted in March of ’69 to pass resolutions that limited military influence in instruction. Those resolutions ultimately led to the elimination of ROTC’s presence on campus for more than four decades.

Then, over three long days in May of 1969, the faculty held a series of “marathon debates” about whether the University should, in light of the student-produced Maxwell-Magaziner Report, adopt a radical new curriculum—the Open Curriculum that today lies at the heart of this university. Many years later, William Crossgrove, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature (who passed away in 2018), told the Brown Daily Herald: “I don’t think faculty meetings were ever as exciting as they were those three days.” On May 8, the faculty finally voted to adopt the New Curriculum; on May 9, Brown’s thirteenth president, Ray Heffner, tendered his resignation. “I have simply reached the conclusion,” he explained, “that I do not enjoy being a University president.”

And all that in a year for which the first faculty meeting had been cancelled—for a lack of business.

I had initially planned in these remarks to offer a roundup of faculty governance over the past year. I could've gone on at length accounting for the intensive work of the Covid-19 and Faculty Advancement Committee (a committee that, as far as I know, had no parallel at any peer institution). I might have spent more time stressing the importance of the national faculty governance consortium (which Ross Cheit discusses in his article), or praising CFED and its chair Ruth Colwill for their tireless work to improve faculty equity and diversity (some of which Ruth discusses in her own contribution to this issue), or thanking the Committee on Nominations and its chair Leigh Tarentino for being so thoughtful and determined about putting together the slate for the faculty committee elections whose results have just been announced.

Yet I think what I most want to emphasize now, at the close of this academic year like no other, is just how important the work of faculty governance remains. For the last fifteen months, and as the pandemic completely upended our lives, we were constantly reminded of the importance of our shared governance values and structures: of how critical it is that the faculty participate in the decision making that shapes the University as a whole. And while some of the work that ensures that participation is very public, most of it happens behind the scenes, quietly and with little notice or thanks rendered.

It is a real testament to our colleagues that, amid an annus horribilis, our faculty community has grown tighter and stronger. Participation in governance has skyrocketed. This year hundreds attended our town halls; hundreds now log onto our monthly faculty meetings. Many scores participated in listening sessions sponsored by the FEC, CFED, and the Covid-19 and Faculty Advancement Committee. Some of our FEC flash surveys—an innovation born of the crisis—saw more than six hundred faculty members weigh in on the most pressing of issues, from the temporary three-semester calendar to vaccine acceptance.

When it comes to our faculty community, in some ways we have seen the geographical divide between faculty on the hill, on the river, and in the Jewelry District start to close. From that perspective, at least, it is a propitious and appropriate time to relaunch this Bulletin, which I hope will draw the entire faculty together even more closely.

And so, as we enter a phase in which we begin to contemplate the lessons of the last year or so, I want to thank all my colleagues for having brought about this collective revitalization of faculty governance and of our faculty community.

I also want to thank the members of the senior administration, particularly President Paxson and Provost Locke, for having recognized that true shared governance makes the University stronger. In spring 2020, when Brown transitioned to remote learning, they immediately extended an offer to meet regularly with the FEC officers as a means of opening lines of communication with the faculty. The conversations at those meetings, which continued until May of this year, were often frank. Some were not easy. But they proved an immensely important means of shaping faculty support, and I am grateful for them.

After such an extraordinary and challenging year, it is bittersweet now to step down, and to step back, from the position of FEC Chair. I am nevertheless comforted in knowing that I am passing the baton to Govind Menon, who has been an exceptional Vice Chair this past year and who will do a remarkable job in the role. I also want to thank Jim Morgan, this year's Past Chair, for all his service over the past three years to the FEC, and to the faculty and the University.

And by way of a farewell, I would simply urge that we all continue nurturing the spirit and tending to the structures of shared governance here at Brown. The modern FEC, which began life as the “Committee on Committees,” emerged directly from the tumult of 1968. It was born of the recognition that faculty must have a strong hand—and take a strong interest—in defining Brown’s values and shaping policy here as a whole.

I certainly hope that, by the fall, we'll find ourselves back, or nearly so, to business as usual. And I very much hope to raise a glass with all of you at 55 Power Street (if the President will have us!) after the first faculty meeting of the year. But it is also my sincere wish that, going forward, we take with us the lesson of September 1968 and the faculty-meeting-that-wasn’t: namely, that moments of calm also demand our vigilance, for we never know what the future might bring.