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As I conclude my first year as Chair of the UCSF Academic Senate, I want to focus on what shared governance continues to mean in this rapidly changing academic and healthcare environment. At the core of the Academic Senate is a commitment to open dialogue and freedom of expression. Faculty partner with campus leaders willing to hear concerns and work with said faculty towards developing productive solutions on complex issues. In recent years, the Senate has increasingly been called upon not simply to opine but to translate the new complicated institutional reality into actionable guidance.
The Senate’s work brings together diverse expertise across the pillars of education, research, clinical care, and campus infrastructure. These efforts are time-intensive for faculty but are essential to ensure that initiatives and recommendations remain informed by lived experience and aligned with UCSF’s mission and values. With increased career expectations -- be it research funding, education efforts, or clinician workload -- it is imperative that faculty discuss issues openly as well as encourage such frankness with students and postdoctoral fellows and clinical learners.
Along those lines, I want to highlight two Academic Senate task force final reports, both just released. One addresses long-standing faculty issues of burnout and workload, while the second examines a research issue UCSF is facing perhaps more so than other UC campuses, and on which UCSF can pioneer solutions.
Neither are simple topics and required deliberate ideation sessions, coupled with systematic literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, and faculty focus groups. Faculty and campus leaders brough the same analytical rigor to these discussions as they bring to the academic and clinical missions, resulting in specific and pilot program-ready recommendations.
The Academic Senate’s Faculty Time Use Study Task Force researched strategies to address faculty burnout associated with invisible work – mentoring, service, teaching, and administrative responsibilities – which are often unrecognized or uncompensated. The final report now being circulated to the Deans reflects months of collaborative analysis and demonstrates the critical role shared governance plays in surfacing new opportunities.
The report’s primary recommendation was the creation of Department-level incentive programs. In support of this, it further recommended development of a centralized dashboard to track faculty effort across teaching, service, mentoring, research, and clinical efforts. Faculty from all schools and efforts responded to the initial 2023 study conducted by the Senate’s Committee on Faculty Welfare. The Task Force was also rooted in a Gender Equity Round Table discussion with UC Regent Emerita Sherry Lansing and UC Davis Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Mary Croughan at the 2022 UCSF Academic Senate Spring Division meeting.
Separately, the Task Force on Research Data and Metadata Standardization (RDMS) spent more than a year assessing how UCSF can modernize the stewardship, discoverability, and interoperability of biomedical research data across the institution. It was organized in response to mounting national expectations around reproducibility, FAIR data principles, and NIH data management and sharing requirements. The task force partnered with Library experts and IT leaders at UCSF along with research stakeholders to examine the current campus research data ecosystem, its infrastructure, and faculty practices.
The resulting report demonstrates the level of interdisciplinary coordination necessary to position UCSF competitively in an increasingly data-driven scientific environment. The task force recognized that successful implementation will depend not only on infrastructure investments, but also on incentive alignment and governance reform. Further the task force hoped that data stewardship will be recognized as a meaningful scholarly contribution.
Across these efforts, a consistent theme has emerged: the freedom of expression must be guaranteed for shared governance to work. It must also be afforded to students whose training and scientific inquiries require freedom of thought, for academic instruction, and quality patient care too. The need for analysis grounded in the shared experiences of faculty, coupled with strong collaboration between Academic Senate and campus leaders can bring forth new ideas. The Senate’s work reflects the increasingly consultative role shared governance must play in advocating for faculty while seeking solutions that protect the integrity and accessibility of academic science and open dialogue.
I remain grateful to the faculty leaders and campus administrative partners who have contributed substantial time and thoughtfulness to these efforts. Their work reflects the best of shared governance: collaborative and evidence-based leadership in service of the institution and its future. Finally, I also want to encourage more faculty participation in the endeavors of the Academic Senate. We have a small cadre of faculty who remain continuously active in the Senate; however, we need new blood, new ideas and greater participation especially from younger faculty. Your voice is needed!
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