Roberts hopes to streamline senate proceedings, striving for debate
One of Roberts’ first acts as senate chair was to convince the president and provost to allow the chair to sit on the university cabinet as a way to ensure good communication between faculty and the administration.
BY RAY DELGADO
Even before picking up the gavel wielded by the chair of the Faculty Senate, Computer Science Professor Eric Roberts has managed to move the position up the ladder of university governance.
Last month, as he was preparing to take the reins from outgoing Chair Rob Polhemus, Roberts decided to ask the president and provost if the Faculty Senate chair could serve on the university cabinet. They agreed, and with that one request the lines of communication between the faculty and the administration expanded significantly.
"It's mostly to emphasize that we're all on the same side," said Roberts, 53, who will chair his first senate meeting on Thursday. "The university's faculty-elected representatives in the senate have a voice and have a responsibility to help guide the directions of the university. Everyone should know that the decisions that are made are not made in some smoke-filled room."
Roberts hopes to bring that same level of transparency to the senate this year by streamlining some of its formalities so that senators have even more time to engage in substantive debates and discussions of the various issues they will tackle throughout the year. Too much time is often spent discussing renewals of interdisciplinary programs that are assured unanimous approvals when the same discussions can be had at lower committee levels, Roberts said.
"The idea that this body of senators could spend half an hour talking about [a program renewal] might not be the best use of time," Roberts said. "We'll try to handle more things administratively. One of the things that is important is to try and let the community of senators set the debate."
He said he will ask the senate's steering committee to experiment with using time limits for specific discussion items while still allowing senators to vote on extending a discussion period, if warranted. There are a number of substantive items that the senate will tackle this academic year, including discussions of the environmental and international initiatives, the report of the Commission on Graduate Education, the university's disaster preparedness plans and a more comprehensive review of undergraduate requirements.
"I have a lot of experience running meetings," Roberts said. "I think I've learned how to make them efficient rather than heavy-handed."
Although his heavy beard, ponytail and 1972 Volkswagen van may suggest a casualness more common for a Santa Cruz organic farmer, don't let the appearance fool you. In his 15 years at the Farm, Roberts has established deep roots that have touched nearly every corner of the university. He has served on countless committees, boards and governing bodies during his academic career. For 12 years, he was the director of undergraduate studies for computer science, where he was the principal architect of the university's introductory programming sequence. Partly due to his Quaker upbringing, Roberts said he felt it was his obligation to participate in university governance almost from the beginning.
"There's a smaller group of faculty that are the university's citizens," he said. "You just work very hard. We're all type-A personalities. I tend to fool people because I don't look like one, however."
The rewards of his hard work and extracurricular activities are many, he said. Roberts said he enjoys working with faculty from other disciplines who care about the same interests that he does. He also has formed lasting friendships with people outside of his department, an experience that, to him, emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary endeavors and opportunities throughout the university.
Roberts devotes just as much energy to his students, and he has been recognized with just about every teaching award that is given out at the university, including the Bing Fellowship, established "to recognize excellence in teaching and a committed interest to the teaching of undergraduates"; the Dinkelspiel Award, which recognizes "distinctive and exceptional contributions to undergraduate education"; and the Hoagland Prize, which honors excellence in undergraduate teaching. In January 2002, Roberts was named the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, taking on one of the first eight endowed University Fellow positions designed "to reward faculty who make truly outstanding contributions to Stanford's undergraduate experience."
Roberts is one of the rare people who as a kid always knew what he wanted to be and learned to love it even more than he expected. He grew up in Reno, Nev., during the Sputnik era of U.S. education and was always fascinated with science. He is the son of a political science professor and decided he also wanted to teach as his profession.
Roberts received his undergraduate degree in applied mathematics in 1973 and his doctorate in applied mathematics in 1980, both from Harvard University. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 1990, Roberts founded and chaired the Computer Science Department at Wellesley College and spent five years as a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corp.'s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto.
Roberts said he has most enjoyed teaching the introductory programming courses he helped design while at Stanford because they provide him with the opportunity to convey the excitement that he had for science as a youth and see it reflected in some of the students who enroll in the course. He designed the class in a way that presents a level playing field for all but provides elaborate extra-credit assignments for students who want to stretch their muscles. Those are the kinds of students, he said, who get so wrapped up in a project that "the sun starts to come up and they don't even realize that it had set yet."
Roberts has had many of those moments over his lifetime, and although it's doubtful that there will be any Faculty Senate matters that produce such sleepless nights, he remains enthusiastic about the upcoming year.
"So much of new knowledge and new applications and ideas come when people from different disciplines combine their expertise or their ways of thinking and looking at problems to discover new solutions," Roberts said. "If we could begin to do that kind of thing and foster the collective growth in many different fields that we are involved in, I think it would be a lot more fun, as well as a lot more productive."
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