Concerns about a lack of transparency and the University budget sparked debate during the January Faculty Senate meeting.
Faculty Senate President Therese McGuire delivered the Executive Committee’s response to the NU-AAUP report, which criticized several of the University’s academic decisions.
“We concur that there is room for improvement on the part of the administration, in terms of transparency consultation with the faculty in decision-making,” McGuire said. “However, we have a more tempered view of the situation than the authors of the report.”
McGuire cited both the difficulty of decision making during a pandemic and the existing routes of communication between the administration and the faculty as reasons for the committee’s more moderate response.
Six Northwestern political scientists signed a letter calling for President Donald Trump’s removal following the Capitol’s siege by Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.
The group included four political science professors, one postdoctoral fellow and one Pritzker School of Law professor, many of whom felt that the attack on democratic norms superseded both personal partisan beliefs and the need to remain nonpartisan as academics.
“While there was an armed assault on the heart of American democracy, then there can be no clearer example of complete incapacity to carry out the duties of president of the United States,” Pritzker Prof. Paul Gowder said. “It’s really that simple.”