By any measure, the year 1968 at Stanford was a tumultuous one.

Throughout the year hundreds of students and faculty participated in protests against the Vietnam War. An overflow crowd of 2,400 attended a service in Memorial Church to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., the day after his assassination. A three-day sit-in was staged in May at Old Union to oppose the suspension of students who had demonstrated against campus recruiting by the CIA. On May 6, arson destroyed the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) building on campus, and two months later, the office of outgoing President J. E. Wallace Sterling was torched.

It was against this backdrop of unrest that the Stanford Faculty Senate held its first meeting at 3:15 p.m. on Sept. 12, 1968. Formed to address everything from curricular proposals and research policies to outside issues affecting the university, the senate held 30 more meetings in that first turbulent academic year.

This year, the Faculty Senate marks the passage of 50 years since its founding with a series of celebratory events and publications.

• The Stanford Historical Society will hold a symposium at 4 p.m. today reflecting on the first 50 years of the senate that features President Emeritus Gerhard Casper, Academic Secretary Emerita Susan W. Schofield, Professor of History Emeritus Peter Stansky and alumnus Ethan Ris, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno.

• A second symposium, “Looking Forward at 50: The Future of Faculty Governance in Higher Education,” will be held on May 17 as part of the annual meeting of the Academic Council. The focus will be on the challenges faculty governance faces in a time of shifting demographic, economic and political environments. The speakers are Jonathan Jansen, distinguished professor at Stellenbosch University; Nannerl Keohane, a Stanford faculty senate chair emerita; and Hans N. Weiler, professor emeritus of education and political science and academic secretary emeritus at Stanford.

• The Stanford Senate of the Academic Council: Reflections on Fifty Years of Faculty Governance, 1968 – 2018 – written  and compiled by Peter Stansky, Ethan W. Ris and Hans N. Weiler  and edited by Susan W. Schofield – has been published. The volume contains a brief history, a comparative study of models of faculty governance, and photographs and reflections by most of the past Faculty Senate chairs.

A full list of activities can be found on the Faculty Senate 50 ^th Anniversary website.

The senate is born

The Faculty Senate was the brainchild of the late Professor of Law Herbert Packer, who first proposed the idea in 1966 and later drafted the senate’s charter.

Before 1968, Stanford had two faculty governing bodies: the Academic Council, consisting of all tenured and tenure-line faculty, and a nine-member Executive Committee, which served as the primary faculty decision-making body.

By the mid-1960s, it was apparent that neither faculty body was structured in a way to manage both the expanding academic business of the university and the political disruptions taking place on campus.

“The Executive Committee itself had come to recognize that it was too small and not sufficiently representative to handle the growing complexity and size of the university,” said Peter Stansky, history professor emeritus and co-editor of The Stanford Senate of the Academic Council: Reflections on Fifty Years of Faculty Governance, 1968-2018.

The Academic Council was too large and unwieldy to be effective. In a memo outlining his vision for the Faculty Senate, Packer, then a member of the Executive Committee, noted that the meetings of the Academic Council “demonstrated the extraordinary difficulty of conducting rational discussions of complicated and emotionally charged issues in a group of its size and in the absence of adequate preparation.”

Packer’s proposal for a Faculty Senate called for the creation of “an elected, representative, deliberative group of about 50 members, meeting perhaps once a month, and more often if necessary.” The resulting charter allowed for the formation of committees and the election of a chair and a steering committee that would set the agenda for the meetings. This remains the basic structure of the senate.

The Faculty Senate was envisioned as serving two functions – decision-making and information sharing – which continue to shape its activities today. The senate oversees academic policies related to curriculum, research and the professoriate, including the creation of new degree programs and adoption of any university-wide educational requirements. Meetings also serve as forums for information exchange between university administrators and faculty representatives, with opportunities for input and questions.

Hans Weiler, who served on the Faculty Senate in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was academic secretary from 2014 to 2017, noted that from the beginning the university’s chief administrators were integrated into the senate as ex-officio members.

“One of the real strokes of genius of the founders was to seat the members alphabetically, including the president, provost, deans and vice provosts,” Weiler said. He credits this strategy with creating a more cooperative relationship between faculty and administration.

Memorable moments

Although the main role of the Faculty Senate was (and still is) to consider, advise and make decisions on the academic programs, many of the most dramatic times in its history involved outside forces that had implications on the university.

Stansky, who arrived at Stanford in 1968, recalled that in addition to frequent antiwar protests on campus, large issues of the time revolved around the fate of the ROTC programs and Stanford’s involvement in classified and war-related research.

In academic year 1968–69, after multiple campus protests and fierce debate in the Faculty Senate – including one session that lasted more than seven hours – the Stanford Board of Trustees took action on the classified research controversy by cutting ties with Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Faculty would no longer have a say about what transpired at SRI, which then sparked even more campus protests.

That year the senate also tackled the ROTC controversy and, finding the programs “incompatible with the university’s primary commitment to the unrestricted creation and dissemination of knowledge,” voted to eliminate them. (Stanford’s programs have evolved further in the intervening years, and Stanford students today may participate in ROTC through cross-enrollment agreements with other Bay Area universities.)

Over the years, the senate would address many difficult issues. In the 1980s, a proposal to locate the Reagan Library at Stanford met with opposition from the senate, as well as the local community, and the project was scrapped.

In recent times, important topics have included Title IX, diversity and long-range planning. Establishing and adjusting curricular requirements has always been the work of the senate. One of the largest changes to undergraduate education occurred in 2012, when the senate voted to adopt the recommendations from the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University , a comprehensive examination of teaching and learning that aimed to “prepare students to face the challenges and opportunities of an ever-changing world.”

Faculty Senate meetings have had their lighthearted moments. Many former senate members remember fondly the annual tradition of roasting the outgoing chair, a practice that continues today. These witty tributes are documented by Stansky in The Stanford Senate of the Academic Council.

Weiler said, “What I have found most rewarding from my years working with the senate was the quality of the people, their remarkable sense of professionalism and genuine concern for the well-being of the university.”

Current Faculty Senate chair Elizabeth Hadly, professor of biology, echoed that sentiment. “Our senate members care deeply about Stanford’s educational and research mission and, when leveraged as a democratic senate, provide thoughtful direction for navigating the big ship that is Stanford,” she said.