College Board improvements

Since my last post in May, the College Board has made progress in addressing some of the concerns about how we conduct business and the tension that the Board was causing through some of our actions.

Finally, after many months of discussion through Board meetings and committee meetings, we have a new policy governing our meetings. Among the important changes are:

• The President of the Board of Trustees now authorizes the distribution of the agenda for Board meetings, and committee chairs have this authorization for their committee meetings. While agenda preparation will continue to be done collaboratively with the Chancellor, the Board now has final say.
• There is now a formally adopted process for introduction of resolutions, for referral to committees, and for consideration of items by committee before they must be returned to the full Board for action. The goal is to enable Shared Governance and other interests to comment on proposed action by the Board in a timely manner (by the second Board meeting after referral to a committee or 45 days, whichever is longer).
• Resolutions by Board members must be submitted to the Chancellor no later than 21 days before their consideration, and draft agendas will be ready for review by the Board President no later than 14 days before the meeting and by the committee chair no later than 7 days before the meeting. Again, this is intended to establish a process that feels less rushed and more deliberate than we have had to date.

We will have more, important changes following our meeting on September 24th where, I hope, our Sunshine Policy will be adopted by the Board. I will report on those changes in another post.