Welcome Back from the Faculty Senate Chair: Welcome! And Our Year Ahead

As chair of the Faculty Senate, it is my distinct pleasure and honor to welcome the Penn faculty, staff, and students to our beautiful campus and to a new academic year. In this brief letter, I want to highlight the main achievements of the Faculty Senate in 2022-2023 and share some of our priorities for the new academic year.

Let me start by noting that our Faculty Senate is led by the tri-chairs. It has been a privilege to work closely with William Braham (outgoing tri-chair) and with Vivian Gadsden (immediate past chair) for the last year and to welcome Eric Feldman (chair-elect) to our-team. The tri-chairs are completed in “quartet” fashion by our admirable and highly efficient executive assistant, Patrick Walsh. I am highly indebted to all of them.

Moreover, our Faculty Senate is in fact an extensive network of brilliant colleagues (as our Nominating Committee very well knows) who generously give their valued time and talents to become leaders and members of our Senate Executive Committee (SEC), other Faculty Senate Committees, and University Council Committees.

During the 2022-2023 academic year our Faculty Senate committees have reviewed:

They have therefore proposed measures such as:

Future analysis of all forms of faculty compensation;

I invite you to read the full reports and recommendations of our Faculty Senate Committees, as well as those of the University Council Committees, where our faculty has worked side by side with students and staff members.

Moreover, under the instrumental leadership of William Braham (chair in 2021-22), the Committee on the Institutional Response to the Climate Emergency (CIRCE) and its four subcommittees continued to work with the schools and develop policy recommendations, and under the steady leadership of Vivian Gadsden (chair in 2022-23), the Faculty Senate convened two outstanding and public-facing roundtables: one centered on the role of Penn regarding public education in Philadelphia, and another one focused on a system’s approach to supporting Philadelphia’s children and families (link to videos here).

This year, we look forward to working with President Liz Magill, Provost John Jackson, Jr., and our colleagues in SEC and on other Faculty Senate and University Council Committees to, among other goals:

If you have thoughts on any of these topics or otherwise wish to participate in shared governance at Penn, please write to us at [email protected]. We welcome your input and look forward to representing the interests of our faculty in this upcoming year.

—Tulia G. Falleti,Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political ScienceDirector of the Center for Latin American and Latinx StudiesSenior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics