YSU Academic Senate stays mum on DACA and Shared Governance

YOUNGSTOWN

Youngstown State University’s Academic Senate will not be issuing a statement regarding President Donald Trump’s decision to end DACA.

Chet Cooper, YSU Academic Senate chairman, said during Wednesday evening’s meeting that — despite faculty expressing at last month’s session an interest in providing a statement in opposition of Trump’s decision — he received many emails regarding faculty reservations.

DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program protecting undocumented youths from deportation that was passed in 2012 during Barack Obama’s presidency. It gave nearly 800,000 children of undocumented immigrants brought into the country by their parents the opportunity to work in the U.S., and it protected them from deportation if they were accepted into the program.

The Trump administration announced Sept. 5 the program will end in March 2018.

“The senate executive committee will re-look at that document and return to it at later date,” Cooper said simply.

Another item the Senate decided to further review is the much-debated Shared Governance document.

The Shared Governance document was drafted by the YSU Excellence Steering Committee – made up of faculty members, administration and trustees – in response to the 2016 Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Great Colleges to Work For” Campus Climate Survey results.

The 2016 results showed faculty surveyed have a distrust of their senior leadership and administration and cited poor communication and a lack of shared governance.

Shared governance is defined in the YES Committee’s draft as: “The transparent process by which the university community (i.e. faculty, staff, administrators, alumni and students) influences decisions on matters of policy and procedure, and/or to present alternatives on such matters.”

The document can be found at academicsenate.ysu.edu.

Despite months of drafting, reviewing and presenting the document, some Senate members are still displeased.

Some items of concern are specificity of the document to faculty and accountability.