You can contact the EMU regents with your concerns and suggestions.
Here is their page on the emich website: http://www.emich.edu/regents/
Here is their email address: emu.regents@emich.edu
My advice:
- keep it polite
- keep it short
- keep it specific
- identify yourself
- use good grammar/spelling (the lacksidaisical Web attitude toward spelling and grammar does not apply to an email to the regents)
Anyone have positive experiences with sharing your concerns with the Regents?
I sent them a letter once asking them to consider changing the Student Leadergroup to make sure that the Minority Group “Conservative” is included as a member.
Conservative Students at EMU are extremely rare and perhaps one of EMU’s smallest minority groups.
Course, in the end, I get sent back to me an “autoreply” style letter that never addresses my concerns.
I sent the regents a letter recently, but have heard no response from them. Has anyone else ever had a response?
I am pretty confident that folks on the BoR and in the upper administration read EMUtalk.org. So, if folks have letters/messages to send to the BoR that are not “crazy,” I’d be happy to post them here.
Thanks, Susan, for putting up this contact information. I am sure that the Regents appreciate hearing from EMU community members. This is a group of accomplished and intelligent Regents, and I think they value getting information from more sources than just the Administration.
Also, I’d add that it is not likely that the Regents will respond to individual communications. The Regents are a group of individuals, of course, but they cannot speak for the University unless they act as a group, in some official way. It is rare for members of such public governance boards to engage in dialog with individuals about the conerns of the Board; that’s the nature of the beast – to be effective on such a board, one must work as a board member, and that basically precludes taking individual stands on matters that may come before the board formally.
But effective board members certainly welcome information from the community.
In recent years, the higher ed community has seen a lot published research on the roles of oversight boards, and that literature is filled with insights.
Mark,
That’s actually very interesting. I had thought a BoR worked more like the United States Supreme Court where everyone is an individual taking their own stance on an issue… But the ultimate decision is based on a vote, with some room for the members who lose the vote to voice their grievances.
Nope, Jeff, boards of governance at public bodies like EMU are not courts in any way, shape or form. They are oversight bodies, policy-making bodies. Members of such boards are neither judges nor administrators – they set policy. At universities, they hire presidents, among other important duties. Their members serve on a voluntary basis, or in some cases, for a token compensation. Our Regents are not paid. They act on agenda items brought before the Board thru a formal administrative process and thru subcommittees of the board. They do not generally take up items of business suggested by members of the public at large.
There is absolutely no need to lobby the Board of Regents for a conservative student group on the Student Leader Group. SLG has no right-left political agenda; if we have a conservative organization, then we would have to have a liberal organization for balance. We don’t need to toxify SLG with political hustlers who’ll represent their own agendas – it should stay the non-partisan organization that it is. Period.
Besides, it’s very hypocritical of someone to push for affirmative action for those of a political disposition, when they railed against it for minorities, referring to the policy as “Jim Crow.”
So, ahhh, Jeff,
Have you ever considered that your perception of mistreatment stems NOT from your political leanings, but more from that collection of socio-pathologies and character disorders a more generous person would call your personality?
BTW, if you’re gonna keep announcing you have an EMU education, could you pay more attention to things like grammar and syntax? We have enough public embarrassments as it is.
I’m just sayin’…