As an immediate response to this resolution, I encourage you to arrange a meeting between the administration and the affected faculty with all deliberate speed.

As background, I would like to inform you that on October 10, the Steering Committee and Finance and Administration hosted a one hour open meeting for interested parties at the McKnight Brain Institute. This meeting came together very rapidly under the able coordination of Carol Walker, and was well attended.

For the long term, I recommend that a participatory process be developed that is open and responsive to faculty and other concerned parties. This process should provide one of the sources of information for Facilities Planning during design and construction.

One possible process would be to have a person with public participation expertise (possibly a consultant) who would meet with all interested parties to discuss the future vision for a region of campus. Issues to be addressed include potential positive and negative impacts and how to build a consensus that would feed into the planning process. In such a process everyone would place their needs on the table for consideration during planning.

As we have seen from the situation that prompted the current resolution, it would be helpful if everybody understands the choice of site. Part of the function of our master plan is to make information available to the public about current buildings and future building sites. The additional step proposed above focuses on the needs and desires of a local community. A process led by a person skilled in evaluating those needs and desires would strengthen the planning process.

Vision 10/20 calls for partnerships across traditional units. Multidisciplinary facilities are one way to foster such partnerships. However, it is important to pay attention both to future relationships we want to foster and existing ones that may be negatively impacted by actions we take. In the discussion about the resolution, members of the Faculty Senate heard about the impact of past planning decisions. In particular, we should be aware that a faculty member located in a center or multidisciplinary facility may feel remote from or be perceived as remote by fellow department members housed at a distance, and that successful partnerships between groups in different departments may wither when one group moves a significant distance from the other. Such considerations affect not only current multidisciplinary research programs but can also impact the tenure decisions on junior faculty involved in such projects, if the distance causes their own departments not to fully appreciate their efforts.

Let us work together to strengthen our university: trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends.

With Best Regards,