Blog Update - Shared Governance

At the May 2, 2023 Board of Trustees meeting, the Dallas College Trustees will be presented with a first reading of updated policy drafts related to academics and faculty.  One of these is an entirely new policy concerning Shared Governance.  The DCFA Council wanted to bring to the attention of the Faculty Association membership the developmental process of the new policy being presented.

As many of you know, Dallas College currently has no formal Shared Governance policy codified by the Board of Trustees. The DCFA Council became aware that the SACS Leadership Team intended to write one; the Provost, the DCFA Council President, and General Counsel were listed as “policy owners” on this task.  Thus, the DCFA Instructional Goals & Shared Governance Committee (IGAF) took the lead on drafting one. IGAF based its draft on Shared Governance policies across Texas public higher education institutions and shared governance practices across accreditation bodies.  The IGAF committee and the DCFA Council reviewed and edited the draft on a very tight timeline, as the meeting when these policy drafts would be discussed between the DCFA Council and the Provost was scheduled for Friday, April 21. You can read the final policy we (IGAF/DCFA) drafted at this Google Doc.

Considering the April 21 discussion was to be about these revised policy drafts, including the new Shared Governance draft, the DCFA Council and IGAF were surprised to discover that Provost Floyd was not provided a draft of the internal Shared Governance policy (the separately conceived draft written by Dallas College’s Legal Department) until hours before the meeting.  This meant that Provost Floyd was unable to provide the DCFA Council with the draft until the meeting itself; this was exacerbated by the DCFA Council not being allowed to take draft copies out of the meeting (and we received no digital version).  DCFA President Andrew Tolle noted he was keeping his  copy of Legal’s draft  since he is serving on the SACS Accreditation Review committee. This single physical copy was all the DCFA had to use for review of the policy to see how it compared with our own.

Additionally, Legal only gave the DCFA until end-of-business, Tuesday, April 25 to provide comments, after the Provost requested the Faculty Association have time to review.. Considering we received this on a Friday morning, with meetings booked through the afternoon, the expectation was rather stark that we were only being provided less than two full working days to gather DCFA constituents and provide comments on a Shared Governance policy. The DCFA  also requested  the same timeframe for comments by Legal on our own IGAF draft policy as well; no follow-up or comments were ever provided on our draft.

Suffice to say, the draft going before the Board today has a few additions based on the feedback IGAF and the DCFA provided, but in the spirit of “shared governance,” we wanted Faculty Association members to be able to look at what IGAF and the DCFA Council produced and be able to compare to what was being presented to the Trustees so you could decide for yourselves how they are similar or different.