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The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs met in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building Monday afternoon to hear reports from the chairs of various subcommittees, including the Information Technology Committee, Financial Affairs Advisory Committee and Committee on Anti-Racism.
Tom Braun, biostatistics professor and SACUA chair, opened the meeting with a brief discussion on nominating new members to head SACUA’s subcommittees for the 2023-2024 academic year and a resolution to expand the membership of the University Senate, which will be discussed at SACUA’s May 25 meeting.
“We’re going to discuss a resolution for expanding the senate membership,” Braun said. “We have enough people registered right now that we would have a quorum if they all end up showing on that day, but we certainly would like more people there.”
Braun then opened the floor for committee reports. Heather O’Malley, assistant research scientist in the Department of Pharmacology and chair of the Information Technology Committee, provided a report on the committee’s work during the 2022-2023 academic year. This included the University-wide implementation of CrowdStrike Falcon, a cybersecurity platform, across about 100,000 devices.
“It’s intended as a platform that will prevent breaches, so it should keep out threat actors — things like malware (and) ransomware,” O’Malley said. “I think the security value is very clear … as ransomware and threat actors from foreign entities are happening, we can’t afford to have the University compromised.”
According to O’Malley, the CrowdStrike Falcon’s platform has access to all data on devices where it is installed. She said some faculty have expressed concern over the capability of the program to access to their personal documents, citing the release of former University President Mark Schlissel’s emails following his dismissal in January 2022.
“The biggest issue surrounding this right now is faculty trust,” O’Malley said. “I think the incident where past president Schlissel’s emails were released to the public, in a very overt way, did not help with faculty trust, so people were concerned about files such as student information (and) … health information.”
Rebekah Modrak, professor in the School of Art & Design and SACUA member, said she believes the data access required by this software is unacceptable and voiced support for further inquiry.
“I think having software on our computers that essentially monitors every keystroke we make and can monitor every file is highly problematic,” Modrak said. “I hope that the committee pursues this (issue) further, and I hope that there’s more information and a vote amongst the faculty, about our confidence in the software.”
Karen Downing, librarian and chair of the Development Advisory Committee, highlighted supporting the Office of University Development and improving knowledge of the fundraising process as two of the committee’s tasks for the 2022-2023 academic year.
“The committee has been collaborating with OUD to repurpose a presentation they’ve put together called ‘Demystifying Fundraising’ and to adapt it to a faculty audience so that people have a firmer understanding of what fundraising entails and how to get involved again.” Downing said.
James Gulvas, acquisition librarian and chair of the Financial Affairs Advisory Committee, then reviewed the committee’s work during the 2022-2023 academic year. Gulvas said their role was primarily informational and educational.
“We didn’t actually do a lot of advising or have a lot of deliverables, which I think is hard to do when you don’t have the foundational aspect of finance or the University’s structure with budget,” Gulvas said. “I think it would be beneficial that we have an educational session to onboard new (committee) members so that we can get to the meat of advising the Chief Financial Officer.”
The meeting concluded with a report by Dinesh Pal, associate professor of anesthesiology and chair of the Committee on Anti-Racism. Pal discussed two resolutions the committee proposed and passed by the Faculty Senate during the 2022-2023 academic year, including a statement calling on the University to condemn racism toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and a resolution to create a new land acknowledgment memorial.
Pal also discussed SACUA’s push to include protections against caste discrimination in the University’s non-discrimination policy. He said while the University has since included the category in its official policy, he believes they should take further action beyond changing its language.
“The most that we could get out of the administration was that they included (caste) in their non-discrimination statement, which kind of falls short,” Pal said. “It’s not a big ask…it’s just providing safeguards (and) preventing bullying in the context of caste, because there are a lot of microaggressions that happen.”
The subcommittees will continue their work throughout the 2023-2024 academic year.
Daily Staff Reporter Joshua Nicholson can be reached at joshuni@umich.edu.