Jared Oates: Welcome everyone to our webinar revitalizing your library faculty Governance.
Jared Oates: I'm here with Ashley Hoffman. I'll introduce her in just a minute. My name is Jared Oates. I'm a Co. Founder at Niche Academy, and I'm here substituting for Julie Edwards to day.
Jared Oates: I wanted just to give you a little bit of just some housekeeping details as we get started, and then I'll I'll briefly introduce Ashley. And and we'll just dive in.
Jared Oates: So for those of you who are not familiar with niche Academy, we are an online learning platform, and we focus on the needs of libraries, both academic and public. We offer a range of
staff development, professional development and public facing tutorials and student facing tutorials. So we have information, literacy training in an academic context as well as
Jared Oates: introductions to electronic resources.
Jared Oates: and we deliver it on a platform that lets you put it in front of the right people at the right time and
track your impact as an academic librarian.
Jared Oates: So that's what niche Academy is.
Jared Oates: And through this webinar
Jared Oates: you have a couple of options for participating. Those of you who are live. You can use the the Webinar chat, and you can also
use the Q&A
Jared Oates: button, and I will monitor those and and help Ashley. Stay on top of those as she's doing her presentation. And then.
Jared Oates: yeah, any any questions that you have as you go along, please put them there, and we will save some time at the end for QA.
Jared Oates: And then for those of you who are watching this as a recorded tutorial you should have the ability to
to send questions to niche Academy
Jared Oates: in
Jared Oates: in the
Jared Oates: in the the platform.
Jared Oates: So
Jared Oates: all right without. Then I will just introduce Ashley. Ashley is an academic librarian and an editor. and she has over 10 years of experience
Jared Oates: in library public services. and her research interests
Ashley Hoffman: include instructional design, library leadership and faculty governance. And I think she's gonna do a short introduction to herself as well. So I'll just turn the time over.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. Everyone for attending as Jared mentioned, our presentation today is on revitalizing your library faculty governance, and I thought I should mention the reason behind the mountains on my theme of my Powerpoint today, it looks like I'm trying to say that this is gonna be a really difficult slog. But really I just finished reading fellowship of the ring, and I wanted to view some pretty mountains and my Powerpoint theme. So let's get into it. I'll start first
by talking about who I am and why I am talking about this topic with you today. So I've got spent 11 years in academic libraries. Currently, I am a full time, mom and part time editor. I took off some time to spend with my newborn son this past year but prior to that I was at Kennesaw State University for 10 years, including a year as the chair of our library Faculty Assembly.
which is the inspiration behind this topic today. My academic background is in political science and international studies which probably explains why I'm so interested in how people organize themselves and govern themselves in the workplace.
Ashley Hoffman: And that led me to write the article. That was the inspiration for this presentation. So now that you know a tiny bit about me. I would like to break the ice and get to know who you are. So let me launch this first question.
Ashley Hoffman: I'm curious to know if you are if you're a faculty librarian, are you tenure or tenure track? Are you? Non tenure track faculty librarian? Which is what I was at Kennesaw State University? Or are you a librarian or library worker that doesn't have faculty status? Or are you a curious interloper? And please comment in the chat who you are. If you're a public librarian, or you're a library student or something like that.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay? So I think if I end the poll, everyone will be able to see it, if that's correct. Can everybody see? Oh, share results? Here we go.
Ashley Hoffman: So it looks like we're pretty evenly split a third, our tenure track faculty, a third or non tenure track faculty, and a third are not faculty status. So that is interesting. I thought that there would be a predominance of one or the other. But well, that's interesting.
Ashley Hoffman: Alright! So moving on to our next slide here, the article, if you got a chance to read. It was published in 2020 Yay that was my bright spot of 2020 was seeing that get published even as I was stuck at home. But I wrote it because my first year as the chair of library Faculty governance was a little rocky for me. I had just been elected vice chair, and it actually turned out that the
former vice chair, who was supposed to move on to chair, decided not to. She just did not want to have that responsibility. So I actually had to skip that year of training and shadowing and assisting that I think, really would have prepared me better for the role, and instead, I had to kind of dive in, do some of my own research and and kind of feel my way out.
Ashley Hoffman: So in addition to that, we were having quite a bit of a rocky time in the library. We had a lot of reorganizations going on. Some challenges that the faculty were facing. So it was a little bit of a difficult learning year for me, and I wanted to share what I learned that year in this article where I I will talk about the 5 tips that I'm gonna be talking about today. So if you're interested in ring that article, that is the link there.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay, so my presentation is going to be basically divided in half. I'm gonna talk about what on earth is shared governance, anyway, so that we all have a working definition that we can talk about.
And then the second half of the presentation. I'm gonna talk about what you can do concretely to help get your faculty more involved with shared governance. And to really help affect better change and to be more effective at it. I also. Some of you may have seen. I put out a question on a couple of lists, serves last month trying to get some of your tips for library faculty governance. It's so different at every university. No institution is the same when it comes to what they're
shared. Governance looks like. So I thought maybe incorporating some of your advice would be worthwhile, too. And then, at the end, we have plenty of time for questions. Please add them to the Q&A. Or at the end of the session. You can also put them in the chat, too. But if they're in the Q. And a. Jared will be helping you monitor those.
Jared Oates: So just one of those Ashley there was a request for a link to the article, if possible. Oh, yes, I can. I think I can copy. If you don't have it right now we can. We can make it available afterwards. But
Ashley Hoffman: okay.
Ashley Hoffman: I think we'll have to do it after. Sorry, it's not letting me copy Paste in this present, this presentation format. So it takes over my whole screen.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay. alright, alright. So let's start first by defining shared faculty governance. What on earth is it? And why doesn't it work the way it's supposed to. Sometimes
I love this quote by Olsen, who says that shared governance is, quote a term so devoid of determinant meaning that it takes on whatever significance a particular speaker gives it at the time, which is basically my permission, slip to make everything up from this point on, and just tell you what I think it is. But I did a bit of research, some some background literature review to try to come up with a general idea what it is. It's again, as I said, so different in every institution.
But this article by ribaric that just came out this year talks a little bit about the basic crux of what shared governance means. It's a bicameral division between 2 functions, the management function of an organization which would be making sure that people get paid, the buildings open. What to do with money, and then the academic function, which would be how we do our work as librarians.
And so administration is traditionally responsible for the management half and faculty should have some input on how the academic function half is organized. And so that's what the shared governance is about those 2 halves of the types of power being shared.
Ashley Hoffman: This is a longer quote, but this is from Acrl and the American Association of University Professors. They put together this joint statement on what faculty status of college and university librarians should be, and I will not read it because it is very long, but you can read it here. But in general it's saying that same idea of sharing responsibility for determining which way the library goes.
Ashley Hoffman: and in matters of the internal governments, librarian faculty should be treated like other faculty on campus, so that relates to things like appointments, promotions. Tenure? So you should be looking to the other faculty on your campus, and that should be your comparison.
Ashley Hoffman: Oh, thank you so much for putting the article link in.
So to summarize at the bare minimum library faculty. Governance usually covers at the minimum promotion and tenure guidelines. workload guidelines which would be things like how much scholarship and how much service you are allowed to do during your workday, or you are even required to do during your work day. And it's also an opportunity to offer input on issues affecting the library. So that's that academic function portion of it. This varies quite a bit based on your library. So at my library we were able to offer input on things. But we didn't actually have power to change things
Ashley Hoffman: we would usually do things like we would write a letter to administration, either supporting a policy or expressing disapproval of something that the library did. But we weren't actually able to make that change right there. And I've noticed just by putting that call out on the Listserv asking for advice. That library faculty, governance looks completely different many different places. It could take the form of an internal council
within the library, where maybe you have elected representatives for the faculty. It's a smaller committee. My library at Ksu was a whole faculty assembly, so it was an assembly of the whole. We had 30 faculty at the time that I was chair. And then other people didn't have an internal body to the library, which I thought was interesting. They were faculty, but they didn't have some sort of shared governance within the library itself.
They just had a representation on a university-wide faculty Senate. So, knowing that this is so different for so many people. I do have a poll.
Ashley Hoffman: And I think I need to pull up the poll screen again.
Ashley Hoffman: Here it is.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay. You guys should all see this. What does share governance look like at your library? This is a multiple choice. So you are able to select more than one option. So the first thing would be, your library has its own shared governance body that could be a council committee or an assembly of the whole. Then I want to know. Does your library have a representative in the institutions Faculty Senate? I'm guessing for most of you that do have faculty status as librarians. That's you're at the bare minimum.
Ashley Hoffman: minimum, you will have that. And then finally, I do not know much about unions myself living in Georgia. They're not really encouraged here. So but if you are part of a union that absolutely is going to affect your level of participation, in faculty governance, so I would be curious to see if any of you are in that.
Ashley Hoffman: So
Ashley Hoffman: yeah, I think that pretty much everyone has participated that wants to. So let me in this poll and share the results with you.
Yes. So as I suspected, 85% of you at least have a representative in your institution's faculty, Senate. So I think that is the bare minimum you are supposed to be. According to that statement, by the aaup and Acrl have the same rights as the other faculty at the university. So that's make sense that you would be participating in the Faculty Senate. And then 60% of you great has you have your own shared governance body within the library. That's wonderful, because most of my tips are applicable to that type of shared faculty governance, although if you do not have that body, I'm
hoping that the other tips will be useful or informative as well.
Ashley Hoffman: So let me stop sharing that.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay. I have a next question, what does your what can your shared governance effect? So I mentioned that at my institution we were able to do promotion and tenure. We covered workload but we were not able to do effect. Policies. Necessarily. Some libraries that I have read about are actually able to offer input
Ashley Hoffman: on who gets tenure. So the faculty would actually vote on who's promotion or tenure application will be approved. One library that I read about. They were actually able to vote on which faculty members get hired. So that is a very powerful faculty. Governance. I would say that Kennesaw State University was probably one of the less powerful faculty governance since we were allowed to basically have a voice. But we weren't necessarily allowed to
Ashley Hoffman: carry out any of the things we were recommending.
Ashley Hoffman: so looks like people are still answering. Oh, right, this is a multiple choice as well. So you can offer more than one answer here. So I believe I can end the poll now and share.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay, so it looks like the majority of you. Are able to affect changes on library initiatives and services at least offer input and the second most popular answer was promotion and tenure. I believe this is one of the bare functions of shared governance. You're doing it right. This is what your shared governance is able to do. That's awesome to a lesser extent. Position, descriptions workload. Those are not things that were covered.
Ashley Hoffman: And to be honest, workload wasn't something that we had a lot of control over until about 5 years ago, when we were asked to create workload guidelines. So these are changing and depending on your institution. It's going to be very different.
Ashley Hoffman: all right.
So why are some reasons that shared governance may not be as effective as it can or should be. The first one would be challenged or incomplete faculty status. Quite a few of you mentioned that you do not have faculty status. I don't know if that means you're in a position where you're working as staff and not as library faculty. Or if that means that the librarians at your library do not have faculty status and are just all of them classified as staff. Regardless
challenged or incomplete faculty status is going to make it difficult for your library and faculty to have that voice and to have that impact. Another shade of this would be, perhaps. How my! My librarian faculty at my library were not tenure track.
Ashley Hoffman: so they may not have all of the same rights as the other faculty on campus, because they're kind of a separate class of faculty. So these are all things that are obviously worth mentioning here that are, gonna make it so that you are not as as capable of faculty governance as you could be.
Ashley Hoffman: But some more practical things that we can talk about, and things that we can change mo more would be lack of awareness. Especially where I was at a lot of faculty were new. Many people were just coming from library school. Or they were first generation academics. They weren't familiar with what shared governance was. And so that was not something they were gonna be able to jump into right from the get, go on their first day on the job.
Another reason, maybe some of your more seasoned librarians may not be participating in faculty. Governance is maybe the current body is so ineffective it's turned them off.
Ashley Hoffman: It could have really poor communication and collaboration. It could be way. Too many committees, maybe every time they've tried to suggest a change it had to go through 5 different committees before library administration could even consider it. So those are reasons that people might be turned off from participating. Finally, next would be distrust of the process in general. Perhaps they used to be active, and then
nothing happened, and administration didn't take up their recommendations, or even seem to listen to them. So those are reasons that people might be jaded about the idea of shared governance. And finally, I think, do not underestimate
Ashley Hoffman: that how much, how boring this is, could have an impact on whether or not people want to participate.
I don't think it's boring, but there is definitely a healthy amount of document maintenance that has to go on with faculty governance. You're all constantly having to update by laws or change requirements for promotion and tenure. Maybe the university updated the name of one committee, and now you have to vote on the language change and your bylaws and on all your forms. This happens all the time. In addition to that our faculty governance used to use Roberts rules of
to run a meeting, so it was very much powdered with gavel kind of things. It was very hard for somebody who was new to it to want to participate, because it seems so foreign, so close off, and and frankly boring. So these are all things. I hope that we're going to talk about ways to change, and how you can overcome some of these barriers.
Ashley Hoffman: So when I sent out the listserve asking for your input, I did come up with some other barriers that I hadn't thought of, and one is imposter syndrome. So Amy Parsons, from Columbus State University told me. If librarians are reluctant to participate, parentheses, imposter syndrome remind them that they have their terminal degree, and they are information experts. And their input is just as important as any other faculty department's input on campus.
This goes back to what I just briefly touched on. If you are not fully tenured or tenured track faculty, you may think that you're a second class citizen as faculty member, and that perhaps nothing's gonna happen if you try to participate. That is definitely a barrier
Ashley Hoffman: next. I also had a quote from somebody who wish to remain anonymous. Who was part of a library where their librarian faculty lost their faculty status. And so she wrote, when we lost our faculty status. Other faculty objected to administration. I think I think she means other faculty on campus and other departments.
Ashley Hoffman: Not only had we been their librarians, but we had served alongside them in the House of Delegates. Sometimes in leadership roles. I would encourage academic librarians who are still faculty to participate in faculty, governance its work, but the connections you build over time are rewarding.
Ashley Hoffman: So yes, this just reminds us that while it is a right of faculty to participate in shared faculty, governance being a librarian, faculty member is not a granted right. So if you are able to be active in your faculty governance, please do so. It may make the difference, and whether or not university administration decides to declassify or not declassify, change the classification of librarians.
Oh, I'm sorry I didn't share this poll. That is the results of the poll in case you're interested to see that visually
Ashley Hoffman: okay, I'll stop sharing that and move on to our next slide. So our next poll
Ashley Hoffman: is, what would you say is the biggest barrier to participation at your institution? This is a single choice answer. But would you say ignorance is why most people aren't participating. The ineffectiveness of your current governance, body, distrust, disinterest, or other. And please comment in the chat.
Ashley Hoffman: Everybody is busy. Patricia says, yeah, that is a that is not something that I included. But you're right
Ashley Hoffman: canvas is asking, did I miss the definition of shared governance? And Jared is right that there is no universally acknowledged definition. But the basic one that I've come up with is sharing power, and how the organization is run with administration, with administration, taking on the management side of things and library and faculty, hopefully, having the most input in academic function.
Ashley Hoffman: are Jennifer saying she wasn't able to attend the meetings. Have I got a tip for you? Then when we get to that half of the portion? Okay, I see people have stopped answering, so I will share the results.
Ashley Hoffman: It looks like 35% of you say disinterest is the biggest barrier. Absolutely. I think it's true. I mean, if it's boring. If it seems like a completely foreign language, people are gonna tune out and not be interested. So that is your job as the leader of the share fact governance. If that is your role, to try to build some of this interest. And and I'm gonna go over some tips for that. Let's see 20%, said ineffectiveness sadly.
Ashley Hoffman: That could also turn a lot of people off. And then we're shared with the other ones.
Ashley Hoffman: Let's see, Ron says our faculty are currently still in a limbo like State right? With a non voting presence in the campus faculty Senate.
Ashley Hoffman: That yes, that is very sad about the challenged faculty status can definitely make it so that you can't actually participate fully in faculty governance.
Ashley Hoffman: All right. So we've talked about
Ashley Hoffman: why, it doesn't work. Sometimes let's talk about how we can make it work better, how we can reenergize and revitalize your library faculty governance. I've got my 5 tips here.
Ashley Hoffman: the first being get them in the door. So to Jennifer's question about comment that she was unable to attend the meetings. Here's some tips for that. Tell them what it is. Give them a voice.
Ashley Hoffman: give them something to do and tell them what's going on. So I'm gonna go through all of these in depth, and please continue to comment or ask questions. Wanna hear your side of the story, too. All right. So the first barrier. Obviously no one's going to participate if they aren't physically or virtually in the meetings. Right? So the first tip I have is limiting service desks during this meeting.
This was not something that happened during my term as the chair. It happened later, but library administration came to see the value of our governance body, and we did have quite a few faculty members. We had 30 while I was chair, and then we had 45 when I was when I left Ksu. So quite a few people and we had several service desk points.
So we were able to schedule the meetings later in the afternoon on an off day of the week.
Ashley Hoffman: and we would have student assistance to the desk, and with a sign explaining that the librarians were in a meeting, and I think that was a really positive thing that library administration did to show that they supported shared governance, that they wanted to make a point to allow as many people to attend as they could. And then, like, I said, I wrote this article early, 2020, late, 2019. I thought this was such a hot. Take convert it to a virtual meeting.
I'm sure most of you have been having exclusively virtual meetings for quite a few years but I will continue to sing the praises of a virtual meeting. We had 2 campuses in one offsite work location. So getting all the faculty together in one room for a meeting, and especially since there were 30, and then 45 of them finding a room big enough
that was just impossible. So we had started converting, even before the pandemic to hybrid meetings. At the very least. But I think virtual meetings can be a great option as well. They allow for recording and an interesting benefit that I noticed as well was that having to wait your turn to talk on the microphone slows the conversation a little bit. It prevents people from talking over one another that way. You don't just have the extroverts shouting out things and talking over the introverts, and the more soft spoken people.
And because you're waiting for your turn to talk on the microphone, you have more time to think through your comment. So you get more thoughtful, actionable suggestions from people rather than just.
Ashley Hoffman: and observation they felt like sharing. So those are great reasons for virtual meeting. I will argue, however, in favor of a hybrid meeting. If you are able to do that, I have found that hybrid meetings, at least the in portion in person portion produces more lively conversation. People can see each other's body language. People are more creative together. You get more participation in a in person meeting.
because I can look people in the eye and say, What do you think about that? And they'll actually know I'm talking to them and not just to their cameras. So it is challenging to run a hybrid meeting, but I would suggest it. I think it is a bit more effective. Something that we did to try to alleviate the challenge of a hybrid meeting is we would have 2 people running, each meeting. Basically. So we would have one person that would be walking around the room with the microphone, helping keep track of who's next that kind of thing, making sure people are talking in the microphone and not just shouting things out
Ashley Hoffman: and then somebody else would be controlling the computer at the front. They would be putting the slides up or the sharing the virtual handout, and then also sharing questions from the chat from the people who are attending. Virtually so. It is a bit more of a challenge, but I do think that it could work for larger organizations. If you're a smaller organization, you might be having all in person, anyway, so that may be moved for you. But
Ashley Hoffman: either way, even if you were having in person meetings, I recommend making sure that electronic voting is allowed by your bylaws. There's quite a few reasons for this, I think. The first is that I don't know if any of you have had to do proxy voting before, but, as I mentioned before. We did Roberts rules of orders, and if people couldn't be present for the meeting, and we still had to have a quorum in order to vote on something. People had to literally write little permission
slips and give them to people so they could come to the meeting and vote on some amendment to the bylaws or some initiative.
Ashley Hoffman: It was a hassle trying to keep track of all of the proxies and people to remember to do them. So electronic voting is just a lot more EA lot easier that way. Every faculty member who can vote can then vote electronic voting also prevents people from just raising their hand because the person next to them is doing it, they'll have a chance to actually consider what they're voting on. Read the language changes more closely and then have a more thoughtful response. So I highly recommend electronic voting.
Jared Oates: Actually, there was a question that thinks Jermaine here, whether chat, if it's a virtual meeting, whether chat is allowed, whether you encourage people to allow chat during the meeting?
Ashley Hoffman: Oh, yes, absolutely there is I will talk about in a later slide some occasions where we would discourage chat and that would be for for private conversations. But definitely, we would encourage people to make comments on chat, and the person standing in front of the computer would interrupt the meeting with a hand, raise and say so and so says this. And then, as we got more comfortable with virtual meetings, people might have microphones on their computer, and they might raise their hand, and they would be
on to speak over the loudspeaker end of the room. So it was a production. It may not be for everybody, but for us it was. It was better than an all virtual option. Because.
I have found when we have all virtual people just tend to tune out check their email. You may be checking your email right now. But if we were in the room together we probably wouldn't be that is, that is my plug for hybrid meetings.
Ashley Hoffman: But
Ashley Hoffman: okay, thank you for that comment. So a quote that I received this was a leadership team. They were all current or former leaders of faculty governance at Penn State University, they said, use zoom for your faculty org meetings. It was essential for us as a multi-campus institution, but we believe going completely virtual for faculty meetings would work for any type of institution. It really broadens participation by lowering the barrier to entry
Ashley Hoffman: definitely. If people don't have an excuse not to come. You can definitely use that to your advantage as the leader. And it can really make a difference for people who can't travel all the time. It's really not fair to make people have to, especially if you have multi campuses to have to travel just for one meeting.
Ashley Hoffman: So alright! My next tip is, tell them what it is. This is probably the most important tip, and maybe why some of you are here today. What on earth is shared. Faculty, governance. What am I supposed to be doing? It's probably going to be foreign to most librarian faculty members when they start an institution, because, first of all.
Ashley Hoffman: shared faculty governance is not taught in library school. It certainly wasn't at mine. How to be a faculty member in general wasn't taught at my library school. So that's gonna be new for a lot of people. Remember that many librarians. It's a profession that has a lot of first generation academics in it. There aren't generations of academic librarians, as far as I know. So this is not something that is, it's it's not ingrained in your culture to know what this is
Ashley Hoffman: when you first come to work. So you might be aware that faculty librarians have to write things, maybe do scholarship. But you're not aware of what it means to be a faculty member in the campus community or as someone who has some power to effect change in your organization. And beyond that, even if you have an experienced faculty librarian if they're coming from another institution, they're gonna find what's happening at your institution.
Ashley Hoffman: Much different from what they left because shared governance is highly localized to an institution's unique culture. Whatever the norms are at your in university, whatever is allowed by your State law. So I mentioned that unions are not really something that are allowed in Georgia. So that's never really been an option for us. So that's gonna be very different from place to place.
Ashley Hoffman: The bottom line is that it really behooves you to have a primer on shared governance regularly and especially for people who are new to your organization.
So for us we invited our local university representative to the Au. P. Which, again, is the American Association of University Professors. And he was able to talk to us about the power of shared governance. What it was we could do. He helped us interpret some bylaws that to us just sounded like
Ashley Hoffman: legalese. We didn't really know what it meant and so he was able to put a lot of stuff that we were doing into contacts, and really empowered us to feel like we had the ability to voice our voice, our opinions, and object to some decisions that were being made that impacted us. If you don't have a local au P representative, or that's not something available to you you could consider inviting a faculty member from another department.
Ashley Hoffman: So I mentioned that according to the aup and acrl you are supposed to have your your rights are supposed to be on par with the other faculty at your institution it may be a little bit different if you're not tenure track, but they are, but in general you should have many of the same rights that they do. So, maybe getting a representative from another department to come, talk to you about how shared governance works for them.
could help put it in contact for some of the librarians, and it also might be useful for them to hear it from somebody else. Just to reinforce the message, hearing it from different people, can really help.
Ashley Hoffman: And of course, please break down all the acronyms and define terms. We had the craziest committee abbreviations that people would just go around saying, like Fnac, FNEC. Which was our faculty Nominations and Elections committee. I never would have guessed what that was. So my first meeting, I was completely baffled. I would recommend on your agenda, spelling out the names of the committees. Even if you talk about them with the abbreviations.
Ashley Hoffman: I would spell them out just to have it on the record what you're talking about. A lot of this stuff can go over people's heads and really turn people off.
Ashley Hoffman: So break down all of those terms.
Ashley Hoffman: And so my quote was actually from my former colleague, Rosemary Humphrey. She said, we had breakout sessions after our department meeting last year that covered various topics, general government, governance, promotion, etc. It was well received, since so many people didn't really understand why and what governance is, and why they should care
Ashley Hoffman: absolutely. So most of you said that people had no interest in participating in faculty governance. Perhaps if they attended one of these sessions, and they understood what was at stake, that if you don't participate in faculty governance, perhaps when they talk about faculty pay, perhaps when they do salary studies, perhaps when they talk about how much scholarship you can do, or what could be considered scholarship if you aren't at the table for those conversations, and you don't understand.
and why
Ashley Hoffman: why these are important. You might just get what comes down the bike to you. You might just get what they hand you, and that may not always be the best deal for you. so absolutely. Tell them what it is
my next tip is to give them a way to have input when I
Ashley Hoffman: was of starting as a faculty member at Kennesaw, State, my first couple of meetings for the faculty governance. It was really kind of a an announcement meeting library administration would give announcements to the faculty, and perhaps we might discuss promotion guidelines.
But it wasn't really a discussion. It was more of a here's what we're voting on, and it didn't feel like there was any of Forum for us to bring up issues that were bothering us, or to talk more generally generally about things on campus and the climate. So I highly recommend introducing a general discussion section to your meeting. It can be just 10 min, but perhaps there's something that somebody would bring up
Ashley Hoffman: and and that will be their only forum for that.
Ashley Hoffman: In addition to that, I do recommend limiting announcements. If there are announcements that can be made through an email, or if there, if there's another meeting. So for us, we had an all staff meeting. In addition to this meeting, where it wasn't just library and faculty, it was also library staff.
Ashley Hoffman: Ask administration and anyone else to share those announcements in that venue, and to leave this meeting for just matters for faculty. And so also, if you are able to. My next tip is to make space for faculty only discussion.
Ashley Hoffman: So our aup representative actually clued us into what executive sessions were. So for us, executive sessions were included in our bylaws, which meant we were allowed to ask administration to leave for a portion of the meeting in order to discuss issues. In a safer environment where people might be perhaps not intimidated. They would be intimidated if library administration were there.
And so to go back to our thing about the virtual meetings. During virtual meetings. We highly encourage everybody. We remind them multiple times not to use the chat, because library administration would still be able to read what they wrote in the chat because they had attended the meeting, so that would be the exception to the using the chat as opposed to the microphone, so we would ask people to raise their hands and to say things there.
So I hope you were able to have these faculty only discussions, and if you are, there are some things you should be aware of as the leader of this group, or as a highly invested member of this group is that it is important to keep the conversation in those spaces civil and productive. You need to focus on things that you can actually change. So an example of that is
Ashley Hoffman: so. We had quite a few people bringing up in our executive sessions that they felt there was some unfairness with how professional travel funds were allocated, and it came up a couple of times. And so finally, I was able to draft a letter to library administration. So that was our action was, we were able to draft a letter saying what we thought was unfair, and we had some suggestions for changing it. And so library administration actually received this pretty favorable.
and they gave us the Go ahead to form a ad hoc task force to come together and create new guidelines for how professional travel was divvied up. So that was a really positive result that we had, and that was not just us complaining. And then, just not having a plan, we came up with some suggestions and put them into writing and presented them.
Ashley Hoffman: So complaining I would avoid just complaining. Obviously, we're all humans. Faculty need a space to be able to vent as well. That's not what this Forum is for. And I do wanna caution you if you have too much of that negative energy when new faculty come in and they see that that's going to turn them off from faculty governance as well, it's gonna create kind of a negative, hostile environment. And so it's much better if you were able to see
steer that into productive conversation about what actions. You can propose to library administration to change those things. So we had an example of faculty complaining a lot about
Ashley Hoffman: If several of you might have gone through a similar thing where Elsevier had raised their prices quite a bit. And so our library Dean decided unilaterally to cancel all of our subscriptions to Elsevier without any discussion or mention of it, and this was hugely unpopular with our faculty. They were having teaching faculty, complaining to them all the time. Some of our subject areas really didn't have collection support
Ashley Hoffman: without else of your resources. So this was hugely unpopular. But so there was a lot of complaining during the session, and we were able to channel that into a letter again. But our power was limited. We were not able to actually do anything about it, but we were able to at least close the chapter on that discussion and move forward to other topics because we had done what we could, and so, as a leader being able to channel the complaints, and just to an action that can give some closure to the issue, is really helpful.
Ashley Hoffman: and then, of course, never use this space to bash individuals, just because administration is not in the room. This is never acceptable to, you know. to insult them as humans, or to talk about other faculty or individuals in general. So it's just you are going to be while you are opening the gates for people to have a confidential discussion. It's your responsibility as the leader to keep that focused civil and productive
Ashley Hoffman: and finally, there's gonna be people, even when you have given them this opportunity to kind of speak freely, they're not gonna feel comfortable doing it. So you do need to have a venue for confidential concerns
Ashley Hoffman: that could be. Maybe you have an an office hour. People can drop by your office or they can email you, or you could even have like a virtual suggestion box where people can write concerns that they have. In the virtual suggestion box. And that actually happened not in my term but in another chairs term, because one of the complaints was related to her. So somebody was trying to find a way to to
Ashley Hoffman: bring up this issue with her without risking a conflict with them. So it had to do with conflict of interest. So having that virtual suggestion box was really key in in that situation.
Jared Oates: Actually, there's a question that I think yes, is a good time to raise in making space for faculty. Only discussion.
Jared Oates: Ron asks when asking library administration to leave for executive sessions. Does that include department chairs in the faculty? Are they allowed to remain as faculty, or are they also asked to leave as part of the administration?
Ashley Hoffman: That is a really excellent question. And we actually went through that conversation as well. Part of our reorganization took so department chairs were always considered administrators, but managers of the individual units were not considered administration, so we had to have that conversation and draw that line. So in the end it was our Dean associate, Dean and the department chairs, because we did have 2 different departments in the library at the time. Wild times. So those 4 people were asked to leave but the library
unit managers! Were allowed to stay.
Ashley Hoffman: Yes, and I will say that this did not go over completely, smoothly at the beginning. I think administration was really offended at first that we were asking for these, because this had not been a practice that we had done before.
And at 1 point the Dean even wondered if it was legal. So he had talked to university legal affairs, and we talked to university legal affairs. There were some tense discussions about whether we were just using this session to bash him. Which is why I mentioned Terry. You should, of course, never use those space to do that. So, after negotiating those conflicts and those misgivings by library administration.
Ashley Hoffman: they came around. And so these, this is still a practice that is being going on at Ksu today. So it may not be allowed by your bylaws at your university, but it is worth investigating if it is
Ashley Hoffman: any other questions on that topic.
Ashley Hoffman: Alright. So the quote I have from this is from one of the articles that I will share in my references is that people need some sense of whom to take ideas to, and at each point in the process they should have some confidence that there will be a logical next step. People should not feel like they are just shouting into a paper bag. You should be able to tell them I'm going to take your concerns. I'm going to put them into a letter, or I'm going to bring them up at the next library leadership meeting.
Ashley Hoffman: I'm going to take it to somebody who can do something about it. And that is part of your role, too, is to give people that confidence that their concerns are being taken care of.
Ashley Hoffman: Alright. So my next tip for you is, give the faculty something to do. Many of you, if you do have a shared faculty, governance body and the library probably have some standing committees that are always there for us. We had the Bylaws Committee, the Promotions Committee and our Nominations and Elections Committee.
Ashley Hoffman: but they're very limited in scope of what they can do. They have very, very small missions and scopes, and they're also limited about who can serve on them and how long those terms are like. For example, our promotion committee you had to have a certain library and faculty rank to be on it, and then you couldn't serve consecutive terms. So we were always struggling to find people to serve. So with that in mind, if you want to be able to actually do more with your library faculty governance.
Ashley Hoffman: and to do more than just keep up your bylaws. I recommend trying ad hoc task forces. They allow a lot more agility, and they give people more opportunities to participate. They don't have to sign up for 2 years on a standing committee if you just allow them to join one of these ad hoc task forces. So an example for us. At the beginning of my term we got a project to rewrite our faculty performance, agreement, document.
and I. We had no mechanism for rewriting this, so it was just me as the chair and my vice chair, working for 8 h one day on drafting this thing and then presenting it to the faculty. And that was a waste of our time. And it wasn't allowing other people to have input on the process.
Ashley Hoffman: So the next time we had to write a document like that we were asked to write the library faculty workload guidelines which would define it sort of give scope to what librarian work looked like and what scholarship meant, and what percentage of our time it should be, and what service meant, and what percentage of our time it should be so it was a very complicated document we had to write. It had to encompass quite a lot of definitions.
So we created an ad hoc task force for that, and that allowed a few people who weren't that interested in faculty governance. But they were very interested in how they were going to be evaluated on their job. So they signed up for this task force, and they were able to write the first draft, which then we took to faculty for revision and then to library administration. So if you have projects like that, or if you have initiatives like the travel fund
Ashley Hoffman: task force that I mentioned earlier, where it's just a one time thing. Those are great opportunities to get people to participate that wouldn't normally do so, knowing that they have a short term commitment in the bottom line is that if people have something at stake, if they're involved in a committee. If they're involved in a task force, they're gonna be more invested in the future. They're gonna come to meetings and have input on other things. So I highly recommend giving them something to do besides, just show up at meetings.
Ashley Hoffman: and my quote from that is from Laurel Littrell, from Kansas State University, who says, ad hoc. Committees are much more effective as you have people who bring up an issue and are motivated to work out a solution definitely, especially if they were the one that suggested the idea. You can help them form a task force and then set them on their way. And that's a wonderful way to get people involved.
Ashley Hoffman: Alright. My final tip for you is once you hopefully have gotten people a little bit more engaged. They're informed they're showing up to meetings. You do need to keep that momentum going, and the best way to do that is to keep them in the loop. Tell them what's going on with everything. It's really imperative that you keep regular meetings, even if nothing new has developed, or you don't have any bylaws to vote on having that regular space to check in with the faculty
and to give them that open discussion space. So they have something to bring up. They can. It's really important. And it helps build trust in the in the
Ashley Hoffman: in the. It's healthy organization in the governance body, I guess, is what I will say and so it's a best practice to begin meetings with a summary of the last meeting, especially any things that were voted on or agreed upon. You might even consider a regular email update. Maybe your governance body only meets once a semester. And so maybe things happen throughout the semester that you want to keep people in the loop about. That would be a great idea.
Ashley Hoffman: and keep in mind that even though nothing new has happened, no news is still news. So when we made our faculty workload guidelines, it took quite a while for the Provost to get around to signing it. But Faculty were still wondering what was gonna happen because those workload guidelines were gonna impact, how we were evaluated. So I made sure to tell people every month what the status was, even if the status was still. It's just sitting on the provost desk.
Ashley Hoffman: So just keeping people informed. Let them know that you are on top of it so they don't have to worry about it. And the bonus tip I got this from somebody from the list. Serve was, if you're developing relationships with your fellow faculty developing a rapport communicating with them outside of meetings. It's gonna make involvement communication that much easier. They're gonna know that you are trustworthy, and they can come to you with their concerns, and they're gonna wanna help you out because you've built that social capital with them.
Ashley Hoffman: So my quote from that again, the Penn State University team, they said organization leaders should reach out individually to other faculty members. Whether this means for consideration for a committee or running for an office or a reminder that a vote is coming up. People really respond to this. I don't know if it's flattery or social pressure, or something else entirely, but it seems to work. One of our group refers to this as arm twisting, but the rest of us have a more positive take Smiley face.
Ashley Hoffman: Yes, definitely. And if you're in a very large organization, I suggest this definitely as well because people need to get to know you, to be able to feel safe, to confide in you and to want to participate in the group.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay? So in conclusion, we're wrapping up
Ashley Hoffman: faculty is powered solely by faculty, faculty. Governance is powered solely by faculty participation, so faculty have to be informed, aware, and able to participate and able to make shared governance succeed, and your job as faculty leader. Or if you're just a really invested supportive member of faculty, governance is to help lower those barriers and engage faculty to participate.
Ashley Hoffman: So I hope that my tips have helped with that. I would like to know what has worked for you. If you will have worked to improve your faculty, governance, so please answer in the comments as as other people put questions in the QA.
Ashley Hoffman: And I will leave you with my references in case you were interested.
Ashley Hoffman: And so now I will see if there's anything in the Q. And A. If I can open that.
Jared Oates: There aren't any any open. There aren't any. There was one looking for that citation from Rabbaric.
Jared Oates: So oh, yes, for for providing that.
Ashley Hoffman: Okay, Rabart, that is the last one. So that one was actually, I found the Pre print online. So
Ashley Hoffman: yes, I'm sorry I don't have the link here.
Ashley Hoffman: I can get that to you with the recording, if that would be helpful. I think someone did post a link to it. Let me grab that really quick. Oh, excellent!
Jared Oates: And then there's a comment. Just
Jared Oates: that. Austina says that they're in the early stages of forming faculty guidelines around governance. So this was helpful.
Ashley Hoffman: Good. I am glad my advice to you then definitely. Yes, okay. I was about to say, are you the same Austin Jordan that I know from Georgia? Yes, I reach out to other universities and your university system, if you're a public university, and that will be a really good way to kind of model. But you're gonna have to go based on what your faculty on your campus do as well. So 2 different ways. To get inspiration there.
Ashley Hoffman: Any other comments? Does anyone want to tell me about difficulties they've had with their shared governance.
Ashley Hoffman: I want to respond again to Candace, who was saying I was hoping that there was some insight I had missed from all my research for the definition of shared governance. No, it's very vague, it's incredibly vague. I was very frustrated by that as well.
Ashley Hoffman: oh, Astina is asking how or if case you give Staff a voice. Wonderful question that did come up so in the my last year at Ksu they actually had created a staff. There was already a staff senate on campus, so the staff had a representative there, but they created a body within
Ashley Hoffman: within the library, because they weren't faculty. They were not legally, according to the university, allowed to have a shared governance body. But what we did was, we made a forum for each of the 2 departments, which was unofficially like the staff, Forum and Faculty were invited to attend as well, but it was a forum for them to be able to comment on policies in libraries, trends on campus things they were concerned about.
So it wasn't a perfect solution because they were staff. They couldn't do exactly the same for faculty. As for staff, as for faculty, but it was a nice gesture, I think, from administration to try to include them in that.
Ashley Hoffman: And the staff on our campus are actually eligible to join the United Campus Workers Union, which again, it being Georgia. They don't have collective bargaining, but it is another forum for them to be able to coordinate together and to write angry letters and to protest things, and to have a a bigger voice.
Ashley Hoffman: Yes, seen as right, that libraries are unique because it's got a lot more staff than the other departments, and so they didn't seem to take that into account when they were
Ashley Hoffman: when they were designing that
Ashley Hoffman: I am sorry that I do not have the Remarque article Link. I will find that.
Jared Oates: And that's something that we should be able to provide with the materials in the recording. Look for that. So if you can maybe send that my way, I'll make sure it gets included.
Ashley Hoffman: Yes, I will do that.
Ashley Hoffman: That one was very interesting especially because it was from Canada. So seeing perspectives from Canada is very different, because they have a lot more unions so they have quite a bit of difference.
Jared Oates: All right. Well, if that it looks like those are the questions that we have. So
Jared Oates: I will go ahead and and wrap up at this point. Give people just a minute more to to poster question if they have one. But.
Ashley, thank you so much for the for sharing your expertise and your experience.
Jared Oates: and for an engaging and thought provoking presentation.
Ashley Hoffman: Thank you so much for attending everyone, and I will make sure to get that link and send out the slides for you as well.
Jared Oates: Alright, yes, and we'll make sure that everyone who registered receives a link to the recording.
Jared Oates: and we hope to see you again before too long. Thanks, everyone.