The Board of Visitors gathers Friday in the Rotunda for another round of meetings. Of the items on the Board’s docket, two stand out: a meeting of the special committee on diversity, and a full Board meeting on the University’s strategic plan.
The diversity committee includes eight voting Board members and student representative Blake Blaze, a fourth year in the College. Rector George Martin serves as an ex-officio member. Law Prof. George Cohen, former chair of the Faculty Senate, sits on the committee as a faculty consulting member.
Friday’s session on diversity is significant because it provides a chance for students to speak directly to the University’s governing body. Six student leaders — the presidents of Student Council, Latino Student Alliance, Asian Student Union, Black Student Alliance and Queer Student Union — will discuss their organizations and field questions about what their groups do.
The session’s purpose is to keep the Board informed about student life and student diversity initiatives. The goal is education, not advocacy. But the student leaders speaking to the Board wouldn’t be remiss in mentioning the projects that are currently animating their organizations. Council, as well as many minority groups, has recently made responding to AccessUVa cuts a priority — as evidenced, for example, by a resolution Council passed Tuesday urging the Board to restore all-grant aid for low-income students. Friday’s diversity meeting would be incomplete if no one were to mention AccessUVa and the swirl of student opposition that has gained traction in the last three months. Indeed, for the Board to discuss diversity without mentioning the recent elimination of all-grant aid would strike us as tone-deaf and insufficiently self-aware.
Ignoring AccessUVa cuts will be made harder still by a silent protest scheduled to take place on the Rotunda steps at 2:30 p.m. Friday. Students and community members plan to dress in black and stand in solidarity against the elimination of all-grant aid.
So in order for the Board to avoid discussing the AccessUVa cuts Friday, it will have to be both tone-deaf and willfully blind.
The Board’s most important meeting of the week takes place at 3:15 p.m. in the Rotunda’s Board Room. University President Teresa Sullivan will present the University’s strategic plan. After Sullivan’s presentation, University Provost John Simon will discuss what is perhaps the strategic plan’s most crucial element: faculty hiring strategies that sustain a strong professoriate in the face of an expected wave of retirements.
The University hopes to implement a “continuous active recruiting” model for faculty recruitment and retention, which will involve cultivating long-term relationships with potential hires and increasing interdepartmental conversation about hiring choices. This model promises to fix some inefficiencies with current hiring practices. Right now, departments typically hire in isolation and in punctuated bursts. Yet, as we’ve said before, the model — continuous or sporadic — matters little if we can’t offer competitive salaries to potential faculty members.
The future direction of the University hinges on how the Board responds to Sullivan’s strategic plan Friday. For this reason, we encourage students to read, or at least skim, the strategic plan in its current draft. Students can access the report here: http://www.virginia.edu/bov/meetings/13nov/Full Board Session on Strategic Planning.pdf.
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