FAS Senate Voter’s Guide for 2020 Elections

2020 FAS SENATE VOTER’S GUIDE

Open Seats:
This year, there are 11 open FAS Senate seats:
   4 in the Humanities,  

   3 in the Sciences,
   1 in the Social Sciences, 
   3 at-large seats

Continuing Senators:
The following senators are continuing:
   Alexandrov, Sybil (Humanities)
   Erikson, Emily (Social Sciences)
   Fischel, Joseph (Humanities)
   Geanakoplos, John (Social Sciences)
   Gomez, Alessandro (Science and Engineering)
   Horsley, Valerie (Science and Engineering)
   Klein, Jennifer (Humanities)
   Landemore, Helene (Social Sciences)
   Newhouse, Timothy (Science and Engineering)
   Nordhaus, William (Social Sciences)
   Van Tassel, Paul (Science and Engineering)


                                                                  CANDIDATES

 

David Bercovici
Frederick William Beinecke Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

The coming years are going to be challenging for the university on many fronts.
It is imperative that Yale’s only democratically elected faculty body be engaged,
both constructively and in oversight, with the administration in many critical 
decisions to come.  However, it is also always important for the Senate not to
lose sight of promoting its own initiatives and measures for the benefit of faculty,
instructors, researchers and students.  I served on the FAS Senate and its Executive
Committee at its inception,  and would be honored to return to it to help during
an uncertain and, no doubt, difficult future. 

____________________________________________________________________________

Howard Bloch
Sterling Professor of French
HUMANITIES

If selected to serve again, I would continue to work to make Yale, given its extraordinary economic, human, and cultural resources, into all it might be—a place that attracts not only the best students, but that draws faculty who will delight in working and living here.  This takes money, of course, but more important than money, it takes a sense of common purpose in carrying out the core educational missions of the university. 

How, you might ask, might Yale, which is pretty grand already, become even better?

First, via dialogue—in departments, divisional committees, and the Senate—as to what such educational priorities should be.    Second, via communication via the Senate between administration and faculty on budgetary matters and especially on how educational priorities translate into budgetary ones.  Finally, via the building of intellectual community among Yale’s increasingly diverse student body; of scholarly community among tenured and untenured professors, the ladder and the instructional faculty; and of workday community among those who teach and conduct research and the staff who make it all happen.

I have long experience of public and private, small and large universities, and have served at Yale as DGS, Director of the Division of the Humanities, and departmental Chair.  I would marshal all I have learned here and elsewhere to bear upon articulating, communicating, and implementing a faculty-driven vision of the road ahead for faculty at all levels. 

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David Bromwich
Sterling Professor of English
HUMANITIES

I came to Yale in 1988, and have taught a range of courses on poetry, criticism, political ideas, and non-fiction writing. Co-taught lectures or seminars have been cross-listed in political science, history, film studies, and the law school. I served as director of the Whitney Humanities Center, 1991-1994, and as chair of the publications committee of Yale University Press, 2004-2009, but almost all my relevant local experience derives from contact with students and colleagues. Administrative heavy-handedness is something to guard against: in 2015, I urged the FAS senate to seek revision of the “faculty standards” of conduct, in order to assure fairness and a semblance of due process. Universities ought to tell students (with a candor we don’t typically show) what we think is worth knowing. Climate catastrophe should be both a curricular and an institutional concern at Yale.

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Nicholas Christakis
Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Sciences
SOCIAL SCIENCES

I am honored to have been nominated to the FAS Senate, and would welcome the chance to make myself useful to its work on our behalf.  I have been at Yale since 2013 and am also an alumnus; my primary appointment is in Sociology and have secondary appointments in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology;, Statistics and Data Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Medicine which allows me to interact broadly with colleagues throughout the University and obtain a ground-level view of the concerns of many faculty. I care deeply about Yale.

From what my colleagues have told me, here are some key issues that I hope the Senate might make progress on.  We are one of the richest universities in the world, in a place where real estate costs are low (unlike Cambridge or Palo Alto).  According to the Faculty Senate report, we are lagging in both the size and compensation of our faculty. Another report suggests that on a per capita basis, we have one of the largest numbers of administrative staff of any university. In my view, these facts should concern the faculty, and like other Senators, I would like to better understand university priorities in the allocation of resources. I want also to work with the Senate and the administration to understand how best to ensure that Yale remains at the forefront of research and teaching by its faculty.  In my view, the mission of a great university like ours is the “preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge,” and I would hope to help the administration keep its focus on this fundamental mission. 

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Aimee Cox
Associate Professor Anthropology and African American Studies (Untenured)
SOCIAL SCIENCES

I am thrilled to be nominated to the FAS Senate. My work in the academy and beyond has always been concerned with imagining transformative futures. I am invested in the belief that our radical imaginations are one significant way we can begin to enact new forms of living and thinking to unsettle the sedimentation of the colonializing past that shapes our present. The work of attending to possibility has the best chance of realizing change when it is done collectively; I see my dynamic participation as a member of the FAS Senate as an integral part of our collective work as scholars, educators, and global actors. I am thrilled by the idea of thinking with you about what the future means for our collective and how we approach that tense with a commitment to moving past anemic notions of inclusivity and diversity to the hard and brave work of changing the structural and ideological boundaries that have constrained our institution and the academy broadly speaking.

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Marta Figlerowicz
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English (Untenured)

HUMANITIES

The first general FAS meeting I attended at Yale was the one at which we established the Faculty Senate. On that occasion, I was moved by my new colleagues’ enthusiasm and hopefulness; over the past six years, I have watched the Senate fulfill and exceed these hopes. I am honored to be nominated to run in this election.

The Senate speaks forcefully on behalf of tenured and tenure-track faculty in ways that I would further if elected. Even more importantly, to my mind, it has been a powerful voice of support for more precarious members of our community, including lecturers and adjunct teachers. In the face of our current global crisis and the austerity measures it will trigger, these individuals’ precarity, and that of our graduate students and staff, will surely increase. As a member of the Senate, I would make it my priority to work in solidarity with all these groups and ensure that our transition into the new economic conditions we will collectively face–difficult as it may be–remains fair and transparent. I would also continue, as I have done for some years, to strive to make Yale more accommodating of trans and gender-non-conforming faculty, students, and staff.

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Daniel Harrison
Allen Forte Professor of Music Theory

HUMANITIES

I have been on the Yale faculty since 2003, chairing the Department of Music from 2007 to 2012 and the Theater and Performance Studies Program from 2014 to 2018. I’ve also served on several committees examining creative arts in FAS and their relationships with other parts of Yale. In 2013, I was co-chair of Peter Salovey’s presidential inauguration committee. I write this during the spring coronavirus outbreak, and the challenges facing Yale are immense, multi-faceted, and likely transformative. I would like the Senate to be a valuable central asset of faculty expertise and institutional dedication for the times ahead, and I am honored to be nominated for a seat in it.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Miki Havlíčková
Nathan Jacobson Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

I joined Yale faculty in 2008 as a research postdoc. I soon realized that my passion was teaching, and became a lecturer in 2012. My task is to support math teaching, partly as a coordinator of our dedicated lecturer team, and partly as the associate DUS. In these roles, I have assisted the department in hiring highly qualified lecturers, training and supporting graduate student instructors, improving the structure and coordination of large courses, and transforming our instruction to include a variety of student-centered teaching strategies in our classes. 

There are two related areas that I would work to improve were I elected to the FAS Senate. First, I will contribute more to providing outstanding education for Yale students. Second, I will assist the University in supporting its instructional faculty, because I believe that it is a critical factor in our teaching mission, and that we can improve on matters such as salary and meaningful career progression.

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Matthew Frye Jacobson
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History
HUMANITIES

It has been my honor to serve on the FAS Senate since its inaugural year, including serving as Chair in 2017-18.  In addition to its advocacy work on behalf of Yale faculty at all ranks, the Senate performs the unique and crucial function of speaking to every question, proposal, or challenge at the university as educators.  Not, “What would it cost?” or “What would the alumni or donors think?” but “What is the right thing for the university’s research and teaching mission?” I believe the Senate has fulfilled this obligation with terrific energy, creativity, and seriousness of purpose.  My own committee work has been largely devoted to questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, including participation in the Senate’s landmark study of diversity at Yale five years ago—a detailed, interdisciplinary study that continues to be the gold standard among documents of this kind, and still directs the university in terms of the challenges and aspirations it articulated—and, this year, a “Best Practices” document for graduate admissions and faculty search committees, based on the principles laid down by the units and offices on campus that have had the greatest success in this area.  If reelected, I would carry this work forward and would continue my more general efforts in prodding Yale towards its better angels. 

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Angela Lee-Smith
Senior Lector II, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
HUMANITIES

I am Angela Lee-Smith, Senior Lector II of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures since 2003. (Lector-track faculty refer to those engaged in the teaching of foreign languages at Yale.)

First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the Senate for their foresight, compassion, and selfless efforts in the building of one inclusive faculty body. I have carefully read the Report on the Status, Pay, and Conditions of Non-Ladder Faculty in FAS (2017) that the Senate disseminated, which spurred discussion among myself as well as other language instructors. After consulting with one another we learned that we share many issues in common that have long been kept in our hearts but not expressed out loud. I am glad to know that I am not the only one who has harbored these concerns about the status of instructional faculty. I thank the Senate for creating space for this discussion and drawing us into conversations over faculty governance at Yale.

I know that no one has a magic wand. However, I believe that positive change is not possible without action, and for this reason I have decided to run for Yale Faculty Senate. As a representative for Yale faculty I will strive to keep lines of communication open between various segments of the faculty and to make sure the voices of all our colleagues are heard.

To paraphrase Director Bong Joon-ho’s (Parasite, 2019) Golden Globes acceptance speech: “Once we overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of” communication, “we will be introduced to so many more amazing” changes.

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Alka Menon
Assistant Professor, Sociology (Untenured)
SOCIAL SCIENCES

I am honored to be nominated to serve on the FAS Senate. Since starting at Yale in 2018, I have valued the Faculty Senate’s efforts to shape the future of the university. If elected, I will advocate for all my colleagues, especially early-stage faculty members who are often the most directly impacted by these initiatives.

I will continue to promote greater transparency and inclusivity at Yale. In addition, I will build on efforts to incorporate faculty input as a valued voice in planning and decision-making for the university. I am committed to strengthening racial and gender diversity and devoting resources to recruitment and retention. The FAS Faculty Senate is more vital than ever in maintaining and strengthening the Yale community during our current rapidly changing times.

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Mark Mooseker
Ross Granville Harrison Professor of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

It is an honor to be nominated.  As a member of the Senate during its first three years, I was proud of the impactful voice the Senate established on a broad range of issues.  This includes the Senate’s in-depth assessment of the status of Instructional faculty and its successful efforts to seek improved budget transparency from the University administration. I was particularly impressed and informed by the remarkable wisdom and breadth of perspectives my Senate colleagues brought to our deliberations.  I believe that maintaining this scope of wisdom and expertise across disciplines is crucial to the impact and structural integrity of the Senate going forward.

As a returning member of the Senate I would be committed to contributing to the Senate’s ongoing efforts to engage FAS faculty and members of the administration on key issues such as the concerns raised in its Report on Faculty Excellence and its ongoing efforts to expand faculty involvement in University governance decisions.  

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Ruzica Piskac
Assistant Professor of Computer Science

SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

I have been serving on the FAS Senate for nearly two years - it has been an amazing experience and I am honored to be nominated for another term. During those two years, I met and interacted with an incredible group of people - FAS senators, who are working tirelessly on improving the role of faculty in university governance. Being themselves members of the Yale faculty, FAS senators are aware of the problems and challenges that Yale faculty members are facing daily. The FAS senate is an active body and we work many hours on creating reports documenting these issues and providing guidelines on how to address them. In particular, I am proud to have been a part of the team that was working on the Faculty Excellence Report, which contained a number of recommendations on how to make Yale a better place for everyone. 

Right now I am a member of several different committees and I am seeking reelection to continue working on those committees. Additionally, as a woman in STEM, I am also aware of the importance of having representation for under-represented groups in the Senate. Representation in the senate directly impacts our efforts in retaining and recruiting both students and faculty from underrepresented groups in STEM, which will be especially important to commit to during challenging times. I am asking for your support to allow me the opportunity to continue to work on improving Yale on your behalf.

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Charles Schmuttenmaer
Professor of Chemistry
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

I am a Professor of Chemistry and I began my independent career at Yale in 1994.  I have served on FAS Senate (FASS) for the last five years.  It has been rewarding.  Issues that are important to the faculty have been brought to the administration’s attention.  A faculty senate provides a mechanism for a two-way dialog between the faculty and the administration.  It is important to note that the administration has been quite supportive of the FASS.  This is a relationship that we want to foster.

If reelected, I will enthusiastically advocate for key issues on behalf of my colleagues, broadly speaking, as defined by them.  My role would be to represent them. I am happy to have been on the FASS committees for Diversity and Equity, on Standards and Procedures, for the Yale College Expansion, and on the Committee that wrote the Report on the Status, Pay, Conditions of Non-Ladder Faculty in FAS, Nominations, Elections, and the Committee on Committees.  I also hope to serve on the Science and Engineering Committee next year at a time when Yale is devoting significant resources to the Sciences and Engineering.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Constance Sherak
Senior Lector I, Department of French
HUMANITIES

I am delighted to be nominated to the FAS Senate.  I am grateful for the Senate’s work on our behalf as a voice for articulating and communicating faculty concerns to the administration.  My colleagues in languages already serve as senators, and I hope to advocate as they do for our faculty.

In the thirteen years that I have taught French at Yale, I have been increasingly involved in collaborative initiatives in the languages that focus on undergraduate teaching as well as support for instructional faculty who play an important role in educating our undergraduate students.  While this support has brought welcome changes to our ranks, including placement on committees and research and conference travel support, instructional faculty contributions to the university’s educational mission could be more sufficiently recognized.  If elected, I would do my best to enthusiastically advocate for ways to improve that recognition surrounding issues of compensation, parental leave, and participation in the admissions process, among others.  I am also interested in finding ways in which to introduce more transparency and accountability in university governance for all faculty.

____________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Slanski
Lecturer, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
and Humanities
HUMANITIES

I’ve been impressed from the start by the issues and concerns that the FAS Senate has prioritized. In just a few years, the FAS Senate has emerged as a sober and thoughtful voice for the best interests of the whole Yale Community, and I’m honored to stand for election.

I’ve been a member of the instructional faculty at Yale since 2005: first as a post-doc, later on as an adjunct, then full-time lecturer, and now senior lecturer, jointly appointed in Humanities and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. I served six years as DUS of Directed Studies, where I sought to revitalize the program while maintaining its key strengths, including working with faculty from different fields across the university to study more women and authors of color, and with Admissions to increase the number FG/LI students in our cohort. Together with the Academic Strategies program, I designed a series of workshops geared specifically toward such students to help support them during their first year in college. This year, I chair the NELC curriculum committee and sit on advisory board for the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. I’m committed to providing undergraduates with excellent teaching and a coherent academic experience, to mentoring graduate students to prepare for an increasingly competitive academic world, and to cultivating ways for Yale to share its resources with New Haven, particularly its public school students. I co-founded and for five years co-led Citizens–Thinkers–Writers, a seminar-based reading and writing-intensive summer residential Humanities program for New Haven high school students, and I’m now working with the Office of New Haven and State Affairs to develop new humanities programming.

My service as DUS exposed me to many sides of the university. One of my greatest strengths, I believe, is seeing openings for collaboration and fostering synergy among disparate actors. Yale is facing unprecedented challenges in the next few years, and we will need imagination, nimble thinking, and a tireless spirit of cooperation to address them. Yale is stronger because of the Senate’s work, and I hope to ensure that instructional faculty continue to have a strong voice in the Senate and to contribute my energy and experience to help sustain the vital role the Senate has established.

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Rebecca Toseland
Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics;
Director of Research Support, Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale
SOCIAL SCIENCES

I am honored to be nominated for the FAS Senate. There are two issues that particularly motivated me to run, informed by my position as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics and my role as the Director of Research Support in the Tobin Center for Economic Policy. First, as a Yale College alum, I am heartened that the Administration has prioritized making the College more accessible to first-generation low-income (FGLI) students. We can and should make further gains in this area both in the percentage of FGLI students admitted to Yale College and in the resources the University provides to support their academic and personal success. Our graduate programs deserve similar attention in this area. Second, I am interested in identifying ways that we can accelerate the pace of FAS Faculty research by addressing inefficiencies in research administration and expanding research support. I anticipate that addressing these, and other issues of importance to the FAS Faculty, will be challenging in the months and years ahead given financial consequences of COVID-19. This fact further fuels my desire to serve on the FAS Senate.

____________________________________________________________________________

Meg Urry
Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy

SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Now more than ever, the FAS Senate is an essential voice for Yale faculty. Twenty years ago, when I came to Yale, other conversations between faculty and administration seemed sufficient, but the Great Recession of 2008, which brought big changes on a fast time scale, highlighted the value of collective faculty action. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic drastically changes how we teach and interact, even bigger changes are surely on the way. Faculty must influence those decisions and the FAS Senate should play a major role, as indeed it has already done in addressing important issues such as research and scholarly excellence, parental policies, faculty conduct standards, diversity and inclusivity, and faculty compensation. I would be honored to do my part.

A little bit about me: my research is on the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies over billions of years of cosmic time. I have been Chair of the Physics Department, a member of the Steering Committee of the Women Faculty Forum, and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I teach mainly undergraduate classes and run a research group of graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates. Several years ago, I created the annual Granville Academy for summer undergraduate science students, which addresses challenges and strategies for under-represented groups (named in honor of Evelyn Boyd Granville, Yale PhD ’49, the second African-American woman ever to get a PhD in Mathematics in the US). I believe we must continually strive to improve excellence in teaching and research, which requires broadening the spectrum of talent among our community of scholars.

____________________________________________________________________________

Karen von Kunes
Senior Lector I
, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
HUMANITIES

I am honored to be nominated for the FAS Senate. I greatly appreciate the Senate’s progress in resolving a number of issues pertinent to the well-being of Yale faculty, students and staff. As a member of the senior lector rank in the Slavic Department and a JE Fellow for over two decades, I have taught Czech language, literature and film courses and served on Jonathan Edwards College award committees, as well as national and international committees. If elected, my priority­ would be improving the integration of instructional and untenured faculty within departments and the university at large by articulating their accomplishments and concerns to the Yale faculty and administration, and by fostering their pursuits of academic excellence, both pedagogical and intellectual. I would ensure that teaching faculty­, who exert a significant influence on undergraduate students, receive greater recognition of their academic contributions, status and conditions.

I am fully aware that the FAS Senate and the university in general will face new challenges in the post-Covid-19 environment that will require new adaptability to many facets of academia. I will advocate for humanities, including the significance of learning languages, culture, literature and history, because the current Covid-19 crisis has proven that understanding of human behavior and science must go hand in hand in resolving societal difficulties.

____________________________________________________________________________

Steven Wilkinson
Nilekani Professor of India and South Asia,
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

SOCIAL SCIENCES

I am pleased to be nominated to the FAS Senate. If elected I would like to focus on two issues in particular. First, that the FAS has the financial and human resources it needs to sustain and build its research and teaching excellence across all its disciplines. Second, I would like us to advocate for more to be done, within the FAS and across the university, to attract two career couples to Yale and the New Haven area, and to ensure that both partners have good, meaningful and well compensated positions. As chair of Political Science for five years, I saw firsthand how important this could be to successfully attracting top talent from across the world to Yale. I have found New Haven a great place to live and work, but I think we are still at a significant disadvantage compared to some of our peers in major metropolitan areas on this dimension. I think there are some good models in other universities that we could adopt that would significantly improve our ability to attract talented couples to Yale.

This is a very challenging time for the world, and for all of us at Yale and in the New Haven area. I hope that the FAS senate will be able to play a significant role in helping the FAS navigate the challenges on the road ahead, at a time of great uncertainty for our students, colleagues and staff.