New Business —

This meeting was devoted to discussion of the proposed resolution on freedom of expression and academic freedom. 

Faculty Senate President had reported in a meeting with Scioli that FacEx would be supportive of such a resolution and would look at our draft at an upcoming meeting.  He agreed that we would ultimately want feedback from SenEx as well, so that voices of students and staff could also contribute to the resolution.

The committee looked at the resolution on Freedom of Expression written by the Council of Faculty Senate Presidents and submitted to KBOR in 2020.  We also studied the template for a statement on academic freedom written and circulated by colleagues at the African American Policy Forum. 

The ensuing discussion focused on several aspects of the resolution, including

• Format of the document: whether to use the “whereas…be it resolved” formula, or something less formal
• Content of the document: whether the resolution should be broad, or should be specific to the use of Critical Race Theory in teaching and teaching about gender and sexuality, as these subjects were the focus of attacks in the Kansas legislature and across the country.
• Focus of the document: whether the central objection should be the challenge to and encroachment upon (primarily) faculty expertise in guiding course content.

We ended the meeting by agreeing that Scioli would reach out to Rémy Lequesne to share recent resolutions in order to make note of the format used.  Scioli agreed to draft a resolution to share with the committee for comments in advance of the subsequent meeting of the committee.