We make an earnest call to U-M leadership — our Regents, President, and Executive Officers — to recommit to consultative governance, whereby decisions that affect the faculty broadly are made with meaningful input from us. We ask for consultative governance because it is no longer the norm. Decisions with serious impact to our research, teaching, and clinical practice are now routinely made with little or no input from those of us who ultimately carry out the university’s mission. 

For example, on Aug. 13, 2025, we received a formal notification from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation indicating it would be “closing the Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research [CSCAR] unit later this year.” This decades-old unit provides essential 1-to-1 statistical guidance to students, staff, and faculty. Clients can sign up for 1-hour meetings with statistics experts or walk in to receive help from statistics-savvy graduate students. In 2024, CSCAR fielded about 2,400 requests with a 97% satisfaction rate. Much of the research conducted at UM requires statistical analysis, but few researchers are expert statisticians. The 3.5 full-time staff equivalents on CSCAR’s payroll thus support U-M’s world-class research, the quality of which is the main reason grant funding flows our way. Arguably, it is exactly resources like CSCAR that make U-M great. 

Even before the formal announcement of CSCAR’s closure, faculty and Ph.D. students contacted SACUA to ask if rumors of CSCAR’s demise were true, and if something could be done to prevent it. We made inquiries with the Office of the Vice President for Research, but by that time, the matter was closed. A decision affecting many faculty and their students had been made without consulting us. We urge OVPR to reconsider. 

A similarly top-down decision was made with respect to OVPR block grants, without which many faculty cannot accomplish work required for tenure and promotion. Last summer, deans were informed that the Stamps School of Art & Design, the School of Music, Theatre, & Dance, and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning will no longer receive these block grants, which support individual faculty’s scholarly research and creative work in the arts. For the affected departments, which have few options for federal funding, the block grants represent the lifeblood of their work. They are a miniscule part of the university’s budget — OVPR used to provide Stamps $100,000 and SMTD $150,000 annually, funds that were matched by the units. While the centralized Arts Initiative supports programming art experiences at the university and in the state of Michigan, it does not support the research mission of faculty in these units. If faculty had been consulted, it would have been made clear that this initiative will leave many colleagues without essential support.

A third example: on July 1, 2025, the Chief Financial Officer’s office imposed, again without meaningful consultation with faculty, the requirement to use a single travel agency and its online system, radically reducing the range of options available for travel bookings. Those of us using the new system have been presented with prices higher than alternatives, clunky booking interfaces, a range of additional inconveniences, and a new fee applied per booking, which is paid for now by “the university” but that could eventually be passed onto the faculty and our grants. We are heartened that the finance office has agreed to share data and monitor usage in future meetings, but that does not obviate the need for advance consultation. 

We recognize that U-M is experiencing great fiscal uncertainty, and that some programmatic cuts may be necessary. And though we as faculty might resist cuts, we can understand hard realities, especially if constraints and options are transparently communicated to us. Through consultation, we might suggest alternate solutions. 

The larger value of meaningful consultation should be clear, whether for the sake of enlightened leadership, greater campus unity, basic courtesy, or a brighter future for the university. As to what we mean by “meaningful consultation,” it is not 10 minutes in a large committee meeting in which a faculty member or two are given a few minutes to digest and respond to a late-stage proposal. Nor is it a faceless online form to collect comments that can be read (or not!). 

We hope for true, representative consultation. Ideally, leaders would ask deans and chairs to discuss issues in some depth with their units, with comments propagating back up to be incorporated into any plans. Meanwhile, SACUA and the Senate Assembly — bodies elected by the full Faculty Senate — should also be consulted for direct, expert faculty opinion, unadulterated by layers of administrative interpretation. True consultation may mean that decision-making takes more time, to be sure, but in return, there would be more buy-in from faculty.

— Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs (SACUA)

— Faculty Perspective is provided by The University Record as a forum for U-M faculty representatives to comment on university issues. Opinions presented are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the Record or the University of Michigan. Submissions are coordinated through the Faculty Senate Office.