Let's Talk UNLV

0:00:00
Alright, welcome to another segment of Let's Talk UNLV on KUNV. You with co-hosts Keith and Renee. Renee, how was your weekend? It was some weird weather, right?

0:00:17
It was weird weather, but I had one of my former students come to town for their birthday, the big, like 26, and we went and got a slingshot car.

0:00:28
What?

0:00:29
And we shared the driving and we drove all the way to the Hoover Dam. So from, you know, downtown Las Vegas Strip right by the fashion malls where you can pick up a slingshot. And so we did that. That was super cool.

0:00:43
Now the slingshot, like what you got to walk me through. What's the rental price?

0:00:46
Like do they rent for like an hour or a day or half a day? We did three hours. We did three hours but you can do all day. The price is quite different if you do all day versus three hours but we just need three hours and it was just you know super cool automatic and just to have the wind blowing through your hair and just enjoying the Sun and he had never seen the Hoover Dam so it was quite a treat. He's from Chicago so I had to show him how we do out here in desert life.

0:01:17
Yeah, that's an adjustment. And you know, the slingshot, I actually own a motorcycle. I had owned a motorcycle. I actually recently sold it. And I have a friend who has a slingshot. He was like, oh, man, you should get a slingshot. And he was trying to tempt me to purchase his slingshot. And I've been interested to test drive one and just maybe keep one for a few hours to see if it's practical to have one.

0:01:41
But you do say to yourself, other cars, please don't get close to me.

0:01:45
Well, see, I'm used to that on a motorcycle. And even on a motorcycle, you're always sort of, you're always to the far left or the far right, right? Giving yourself maximum options in case someone veers or something like that.

0:01:58
Because I said, you know, I'm going to meet my maker.

0:02:01
You know, it's like in the military, you make sure all your affairs are in order before

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you turn an ignition on.

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You need to make your affairs in order.

0:02:09
Absolutely. You don't want to take it on the freeway. Yeah, but the weekend for me, you know, my sister, you know, it's interesting you say you had a student come in town. My sister actually came in town for the weekend from Atlanta. So we just sort of low-key and I have other family members and we just sort of took it easy, had family dinner on Sunday as we do, and just sort of just caught up and talked. And, you know, because, you know, everyone's sort of getting more relaxed as we're getting vaccinated and coming out of the pandemic. So it was it was just a good, low key chill weekend.

0:02:39
Now, you just said family dinner. You need a pencil. Renee in.

0:02:44
Now, come on now. We've been working together too long now. I got you for the next one. Thank you. You know, so it's great to hear, you know, as we talked about Renee coming out of Closing out the semester and getting Prepared as for the summer and as a university is looking to reopen Come July 1 and didn't have everyone back by the fall And you know, there's it takes a lot to get to that point and you know, I and I'm excited to hear more from our guests Dr. Vicky Rosser, who's faculty senate chair and then also professor of education and education, psychology and higher education. Maybe to share a little bit about just from the faculty senate perspective, what goals, what all goes into the behind the scenes discussion and planning in order to get to those decisions. And I think also to demystify and help the university community better understand sort of what is in the wheelhouse of Faculty Senate and what's not. So Dr. Rosser, thank you for joining us today.

0:03:42
My pleasure, Keith and Renee. I'm thrilled to be here. I would say the Faculty Senate and the faculty are ready to go. I mean, they, first off, we have to commend them from last week, or last year, I'm sorry, last spring, where on a dime, they had a turn and take all those face-to-face classes and make them remote or online. And kudos to them to really rally and take care of their students and keep the process going, the educational process going for our students. So that was huge. Then they had a little summer to even improve upon that, because we were thinking, oh, it's only one semester, right? Well, no, it ended up being longer than that. They got better and better at it, and they were all pretty proud of their accomplishments and where they were and where they came to, but now getting ready to go back the other way, the face-to-face. And we're looking at that. The biggest relief was the social distancing. Since they relieved that spacing issue, because we would not have been able to come back full face-to-face if they maintained the social distancing of six feet. It would have been a tough challenge. But there's so many pieces and parts to this puzzle and this machine to make it all happen. And I would say probably the weekly incident management team that met every week that included faculty and representatives all across this campus from facilities, you name it. Renee was part of that too. It was a great way to communicate on how we take it down a notch, how we bring it up a notch, all that planning and promotion that goes into everything. And Vicki, if you could... We're getting ready to come back in the fall. There are many faculty who are thrilled. Some were suspect because were we going to be able to vaccinate everybody appropriately or those who chose to be vaccinated. And we not only met that goal, we exceeded that goal in terms of people getting vaccinated sooner than they thought they were going to be on the list to be vaccinated. So, so many moving parts. And then, Vicki, for our

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our listeners, could you level set everyone to just give us a broad overview of sort of what's Faculty Senate's role and what sort of the primary aims of the Faculty Senate? Well, you know, we talk about Faculty

0:06:41
Senate. It's a representative body from all the colleges across the campus. So you have elected representatives from each college or unit or administrative unit that are elected and become part of the faculty senate. And they are representative of the voices. So when we have senate meetings, we talk about issues. They bring issues up. We talk about them. And they go back and report those kinds of answers and resolutions if need be and seek their full college counsel. We also have within that body a group of senior senators who we meet with separately. I mean by we, it's an executive committee that's elected by the Senate body to represent the Senate with President and Provost meetings. So I hope I didn't get too complicated here, but those senior Senators would meet with the executive committee once a month and they specific issues that might be going on within their colleges. And then we take that and put it on the agenda and bring it to the President and Provost. It's about being in the decision-making process and having a structure to participate in decision-making. So I'm really excited about this particular segment.

0:08:20
We've been trying to put this together for a while. And so part of the decision-making process, let's even go back farther than just dealing with COVID. Talk about the decision-making process in your role in selecting a new president. I mean, you know, you had to be a part of that decision-making process. And, you know, talk about maybe some of the things that you can regarding that selection process and what was particularly important for the key, I guess, leadership qualities or accomplishments that you all were seeking in this new president that we now know as Dr. Whitfield. Yes, well that was the

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first time in our history we had some in-person presentations that were very restricted on who could attend. But so it was simultaneously attendance as well as being broadcast, you know, to people that wanted to join in on the links. The way the Senate handled our aspect of it is we consulted all the senators, what questions would you like to ask the candidates? And we tried to have five or six questions that we would ask all the candidates and then if we had time there were more questions posed. that not only in person, but I had a person from broadcasting who would hand me note cards and say, here's another question, here's another question, you know. So it was it was challenging. It was, I think the toughest part was the candidates had to keep their masks on and sometimes it was a little difficult to hear clarity in some of their answers, but for the most part it went really well and it was probably one of the best pool of candidates since I've been here for years. All the candidates were very high quality candidates and that's always exciting and it's a good problem to have is what I tell people. It's a good problem to have.

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Yes.

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So you know if you're selected, you know you've really done well because the candidate pool was so competitive.

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And I know that you were instrumental. Yes, I know that you're instrumental in working out the request and moving it up, the opportunity for us to have an ombudsman. So talk about your role in that effort and why did Faculty Senate believe that was a worthy investment of university resources to now have an ombudsman? I'm going to tell you, if there's anything that we got accomplished this year, that was

0:11:25
a major get. And we have processes in place with Title IX and discrimination areas, which is Title IX. But then there's also processes in terms of fairness and treatment and tenure and promotion and salary issues, things like that. And when faculty, how can I say this? But no, I'm just going to say it. Faculty and administrative, when I say faculty, I'm talking administrative faculty, too. There have been many years where they haven't been able to have pay raises or substantial ones. And sometimes other things get exacerbated because of that underlying treatment of not being able to have salaries, you know, increases. So those are, you know, I'm not saying that's the cause of all the issues, but it doesn't help, right? And those, we had probably more grievances and queries about the to grieve in this past year than we ever have. And sometimes if you have a person like an ombuds, they can actually facilitate a communication before it gets to the formal grievance process. And there were a few that I did informally where I would say, hey, how about if I put together a meeting between the three of us and we can try to work this out and because I didn't think it really rose to the real level of a heavy grievance but and that seemed to work and it just made me think that the ombuds is so important to have on this campus. I'm thrilled and I think it will eliminate a lot of potential

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grievances. And as the Faculty Senate Chair, what are some other prevailing priorities that the committee is working on or recommending be acted upon in the

0:13:50
decision-making process as you described? Well, we had some great accomplishments in terms of diversity. We were very, very pleased on some of the accomplishments there. We did a sense of the Senate on Black Lives Matter and that that was a nice statement that was supported by the faculty and the Executive Committee wrote that up during the summer and we presented it at the first Senate meeting and it was approved. The other things we did and I have to give Janice McKay, my colleague, who started an ad hoc committee of diversity, equity, inclusion Senate members to interview the different affinity groups across campus and find out what their wants and needs or challenges or issues were. And that report, and there were some tough parts to that report to swallow, believe me, but that's where you begin. And we just start chipping away at all those issues. Now we still have more groups to be interviewed and that's going to happen in the fall. But that was a very powerful thing. We also, the last Senate meeting, the Senate approved to make a permanent committee called Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. And this is a permanent Senate committee that will have representation of all the colleges that will participate in that committee. And that ad hoc committee and getting the bylaws situated and all of that was really spearheaded by Doris Watson. So she gets a lot of kudos for that. In addition, we did a, every senator had to take a cultural inventory assessment and to find out how they were in terms of cultural sensitivity and that was huge. A lot of faculty and Barbie Oaks came and presented to the Senate and it was, you know, And a few of us sat there and went, wow, we thought we were better than with the shows. And again, that's where things start. If you recognize things, you admit to it, and then you find out ways to improve. And it was a great experience. Many faculty even asked to set up individual appointments with Barbie to find out their specific ways that they could improve. And he and I, we were pleased with that. So there's been some great things that we did get approved. We've also proposed to the Provost's Office, and this came out to put together a cluster hire of faculty that sort of investigate the same broad topical area and it might be on black issues or cultural issues or whatever that happens to be, but create a cluster hire of a topical theme that could be important to the university. And the faculty said it was fully behind that as well. So we asked for reports from the administration on finding out the status of faculty in terms of faculty rank and tenure and who are by race, gender, and ethnicity. And we had that report that was presented last October. We had a salary report that was presented by Brent Drake and his group. I mean, we've had some great reporting to know where we stand and created a lot of benchmarks. Now where do we go from here? And we've been very pleased with how receptive the president and the provost has been to all of these initiatives.

0:18:05
Yeah, I'm glad to hear that our former Chief Diversity Officer, Barbie Oaks, was involved in, has kind of created a map for either the interim Chief Diversity Officer or the one that will be permanently hired to begin to pick up from that work. Talk about the role of legislation. There's been some diversity initiatives and movement there too that you were involved in heavily this past year?

0:18:30
Yes. I, matter of fact, on my other laptop here, I'm waiting for the Assembly and the Senate to convene. I'm watching some bills that are very important to not only the system but UNLV, and then to some of our students where, you know, the proposal to have students who are the previously named DACA students who can't apply for federal funding but to potentially have them allow to apply for grants here in the state or locally that previously they weren't able to do because we mirrored the federal requirements. But the federal funding is one thing, but state and local funding is another. And if we can help them out with grants and, you know, I always tell people, so what's the alternative? If you take undocumented students and you don't help them get educated or provide support mechanisms in place to obtain an education, what's the alternative? And the alternative isn't good. So why not engage them and have them be a part of this whole system? So that and the tribal communities, that as well, they're looking at that legislation. We're looking at that legislation and we've been doing testimonies and if the line was too long we would just submit it, you know, to the different legislators. And that has been very big too. The key issue there is Nevada residents. And what I mean by key, it's that's the tricky part of it being passed is that if somebody leaves the state and then they come back, do they automatically get it or do they have to wait for in-state? As I said, I don't make that decision, but that's the tricky part of the legislation that seems to be that they're working on to resolve that issue or challenge.

0:20:52
And another key piece of legislation and debate is about UNLV's potential to become a public land grant institution. Maybe talk about why that's an important feat for us to achieve.

0:21:06
Yes, I got into a little trouble with my testimony on that from my colleagues of the North. the north, but land grant status is huge, particularly in the science areas where it would allow them to apply for federal monies if they have the land grant status. And, you know, when you think of the history of higher education, which I used to teach that course a lot, is, you know, historically black colleges and universities were established in 1890 because quite frankly, white institutions wouldn't let blacks attend their institutions. So that's why they were historically developed. And I sort of did a little testimony and said, listen, here we are again. We're a minority serving institution. We're aspiring for land grant status and we have a predominantly white institution in the north, you know, trying to put their thumb on us and disagree. Well what came of that was they were worried that we were going to go into their extension service area, which was predominantly agriculture. And that, since then, that bill has been amended. So I see it is probably going through now at this point. And I had to bring that to some people's attention because they use the one out at 215 and Windmill there, they use that as a major recruiting center to recruit Vegas students to go to UNR. So that's not purely land grant in terms So, and I'm not trying to perpetuate the North-South divide. I'm not by any means. But, you know, let's be real and realistic about, you know, what is happening today. The RASA fact check. I like it. And, you know, I know when I testified at the Board of Regents meeting, boy did that, I was watching on Zoom and oh my goodness, did that raise some eyebrows when I and I gave us some interesting conversation allowing us to equitably apply for federal money that we weren't allowed to apply for before. And I know we greatly appreciate all the advocacy

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work that you know that comes through the Faculty Senate and just sort of improving opportunities and the livelihood of all of us who benefit from UNLV being here in Southern Nevada. Vicki, could you talk a little bit about, what would you say to, when that call comes out for nominations for new faculty members to join the ranks, what would you say to those who are apprehensive about submitting their names or nominating others for these important positions? I'm going to tell you, faculty governance is the most important thing you can have at a vibrant institution.

0:24:35
And the best part is I teach academic governance, and I've had a lot of students that took that class from me actually become members of the Senate because they saw the value of participating in the governance process, the decision making process. And I tell people probably the most powerful position you can get in, in terms of influencing decision making and processes is to get on committees. Committees that really speak to you because that's where you can change not only policies but guidelines and thinking and then you bring that to the executive committee and the executive committee then brings it to the Senate. So it depends at what part you want to be in the decision-making levels too. But I'm a strong advocate. I'm probably, I'm one of the strongest advocates of faculty, senate. And when I say faculty again, I'm talking administrative faculty too. They're very good and when you have a good, robust senate, you have great decision-making going back and forth and back and forth to the President and Provost, to us and to them, back and forth to the Chancellor and the Regents, back and forth. I mean to really have a say and try to influence decision-making to me is the best reward you can have. So last question in one minute or less, what

0:26:23
nuggets of wisdom would you give your successor?

0:26:27
Well to tell you the truth, my successor has already been a chair twice before me. So this is her third time at this rodeo.

0:26:36
So let me add it, I'm ready again.

0:26:38
So you're not leaving the letter in the drawer like the presidents do?

0:26:43
Let me tell you, you know what you're getting into?

0:26:46
I stay on the executive committee as past chair because in case some little things come up I can give her clarity and you know history on a particular scenario and a grievance or things of that nature. So it's about transitioning and being a good colleague

0:27:05
and helping your predecessor out. Well I think that you know Dr. Rosser thank you for joining us today and certainly enlightening us on you know all the important work that that comes through the faculty Senate. And I know, Renee, for me, it was very informed. You know, you you think, you know, but you really don't know. Right. And, you know, some of some of my key takeaways was just hearing firsthand from Dr. Rosser in terms of. Some of the initiatives that they have been successful in and some of the salary challenges that we're having, and then also just the work in diversity, inclusion, diversity, equity, and inclusion, that they're playing a vital role behind the scenes and at the forefront with influencing what happens at the institution. And then the last part for me is really just emphasizing what Dr. I said in terms of just the value of participating in the academic governance and the importance of being on different committees that both align with your passion and interests that allow you really to influence change and decision making. Renee, what were some of your key takeaways?

0:28:16
Well, I think she really shared how all these things are interconnected. Specifically, you know, you've got to have the right president, right? You've got to have a visionary. You've got to, you know, know what's happening with legislation. You got to know what's happening in terms of the planning and coordinating so we can make good decisions that make faculty feel like their interests are being addressed, that they're going to be safe, and that they're going to be able to disseminate and work with students to provide the subject expertise in the classroom setting. to be savvy in these spaces, which it sounds like Dr. Rosser has had a very successful year at doing that. But to me, I was really able to see how all these pieces are interconnected. And again, to say kudos to the work that she's done, because I mean, who could have imagined that this would have been the year that she would be the faculty chair during COVID. I mean, that alone adds so much work than the normal traditional year. So I've enjoyed working with her and this is just a great segment for us to really figure out all the pieces that work together for an effective Faculty Senate. Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of KUNV Let's Talk UNLV. For my co-host Keith, I'm Renee. Tune in next week, Wednesday at 12, on KUNV 91.5 Jazz and More. Tune in next week, Wednesday at 12, on KUNV 91.5 Jazz and More. That's a wrap.

Transcribed with Cockatoo