The Urbana-Champaign Senate, a legislative body of students and faculty that monitors university policy, has passed a resolution sharply criticizing the administration's Support Services Strategy (called "S3," see "Consultant's report a concern for academic professionals" in the February issue of the AAP Advocate.) The resolution calls for a more inclusive process for reviewing and implementing S3 so that its "attacks on the values of "shared governance, unit autonomy and decentralization" can be addressed.
According to the resolution, passed at the February 15 Senate meeting, "the [S3] project has been developed without the participation of the academic community, with virtually no faculty and absolutely no student participation in the teams that developed the report."
Tony Graziano, special assistant to President Stukel charged with implementing S3, pointed out in an interview with the Advocate last December that several administrative-level academic professionals were key players in developing the report together with consultants from Arthur Andersen. But academic professionals, like faculty and students, were not consulted in any representative fashion. The Professional Advisory Committee, which advises Chancellor Aiken on some policy matters relating to academic professional employees, played no role in developing S3.
The Senate resolution also states that "the report's recommendations have been severely criticized by the Campus Advisory Teams representing each of the three campuses of the University of Illinois" and that "there is at present no support in the academic community on the UIUC campus for the recommendations and approach of the S3 team."
Senate president Richard Schacht told the Advocate in December that the Senate was specifically concerned with the report's recommendation of a university-wide Chief Information Officer (CIO) who would report directly to Stukel. The CIO is indeed the most salient single proposal offered in the report, but Graziano downplayed its importance. The final Senate resolution does not explicitly mention the CIO, but cites the report's recommended "series of actions whose implementation will lead to a centralization of the organization of support services."
The S3 report is on the web at s3.ua.uillinois.edu. The Senate resolution is at www.uiuc.edu/providers/senate/gp9904.html.