The PSU Faculty Constitution specifies that, within each senate division, there should be one faculty senate representative for every twenty members of the full faculty. The constitution, however, provides no means for any given faculty member to determine which senator is their representative. Nor is there a means for any given senator to determine which faculty they are expected to represent.
This web page provides materials that have been developed as part of an effort to close these gaps and strengthen the connection between the Senate and the Faculty.
Specifically, the documents on this page provide a list of senate districts, one for each sitting senator, that identifies a specific group of faculty members in that senator's division. This list has been produced by a mechanical process that assigns faculty to districts using a round-robin algorithm to ensure uniform distribution within each division. Although these districts have no official or formal standing, the executive committee hopes that, by publishing this list, we will bring a more personal component to the work of the Senate, allowing individual senators to get a better sense of who they might be representing, and providing a default point of contact with senate for all members of the faculty. (Note, however, that faculty are always welcome to bring issues to the attention of Senate through any sitting senator, regardless of whether that senator is part of their district.)
This district lists shown here were generated from data resulting from the Senate election in Spring 2012, including the list of people that were certified as members of the faculty at that time. This is the second edition of the districts list; going forward, we expect to produce a new list of districts after each election process. As a side-effect of publishing this list, we also expect that it will be easier to identify and correct information that is out of date, including, for example, cases where faculty members have been placed in the wrong division.
The steering committee intends to monitor, evaluate, and evolve the use of senate districts over a period of several years so as to determine how they can be most useful and effective. We warmly invite any feedback and suggestions that might contribute to this process via the Secretary to the Faculty, or on the web at http://www.pdx.edu/faculty-senate/contact.
The Spring 2012 Draft list of Senate Districts is available as a pdf file.
A summary of the Senate District list, showing the number of faculty members in each district, is available as a plain text file.
Some graphics that allow a quick visual inspection of the allocation of Faculty to Senators are available to browse. Three different layout methods have been used to produce different views of the data: circles, radial, and clusters. These diagrams are mostly for fun, but do provide some quick ways to understand the distribution of Faculty to Senators and to divisions. Note that these diagrams have been scaled so that they can easily be printed or viewed on screen. Full scale versions of the diagrams are also available (again, using the circles, radial, and clusters layouts), but these documents are much larger than a standard page size. Be prepared to zoom in and out of the diagrams as necessary, either to find individual names or divisions, or to see the full structure.