(Photo by Jeff Carrion/DePaul University)DePaul President Rob Manuel appointed three faculty members to serve as Shared Governance Presidential Fellows for the 2023-24 academic year. Dana Hall, professor in the School of Music; Gregory Mark, professor in the College of Law; and Bamshad Mobasher, professor in the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media, will work closely with senior leadership across two projects during a one-year term beginning this month.
“When I joined the DePaul community last year, Faculty Council recommended we launch a fellowship program to advance shared governance within our institution," says President Rob Manuel. “I was happy to support their recommendation and immediately moved forward to fund and create this new program. I'm grateful to Dana, Greg and Bamshad for serving as our inaugural shared governance fellows and I look forward to the work we will do together."
Faculty Council President Sonia Soltero notes how the fellows underscore Manuel's commitment to shared governance and how the fellows will strengthen it at DePaul.
"The appointment of the inaugural Shared Governance Presidential Fellows highlights Rob’s strong commitment to shared governance and sets DePaul University as a pioneer in this arena for other institutions of higher education to follow," Soltero says. "The three inaugural fellows will provide welcomed insights and recommendations to Faculty Council, faculty at large and university administrators. Their work will help strengthen tenants of shared and faculty governance by examining how these are enacted across the university as well as identifying areas that require recalibration to be more in line with shared governance principles, including budgeting processes and strategic planning."
Dana Hall (Photo by Jeff Carrion/DePaul University)Dana Hall and Gregory Mark will work together during their fellowship year to develop a plan to improve the transparency of communication between DePaul administration and faculty regarding university budgets.
Mark pulls inspiration for the project from a collaborative discussion with colleague Sanjay Deshmukh, professor and director of the MS in Finance program at DePaul, where they held an open discussion with Faculty Council regarding the university transition from the financial services company TIAA to Fidelity. Mark plans to expand the discussion by addressing specific misconceived understandings of financial topics in the university's budget plans, such as gross revenue, endowments and raised money.
Hall plans to ameliorate the channel of communication between staff and faculty by deconstructing the top-down method of communication and developing clearer definitions of the university's gross revenue, endowments and raised money.
Gregory Mark (Photo by Jeff Carrion/DePaul University)Mark has taught as a professor of law at DePaul University since 2011, served as the dean of the College of Law from 2011 to 2014, and specializes in corporate governance and finance. From 1996 to 2011 he was a vice dean, professor of law, center director and Justice Nathan L. Jacobs Scholar at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey.
Hall served as the director of Jazz Studies at DePaul University from 2014 until 2022, when he was appointed as interim dean for the School of Music. He was appointed associate dean July of this summer. Since 2016, Hall has served on DePaul's Faculty Council and the School of Music's DEI executive committee council and DEI taskforce.
Both Hall and Mark have also served together as co-chairs of the university board on promotion and tenure.
“Nothing says more about institutional governance than where and how its money is spent," Mark and Hall share. “The opportunity to engage collaboratively as presidential fellows, working beside President Manuel and others in DePaul's leadership to improve communication, relationships and understanding about financial governance is particularly gratifying to us."
Bamshad Mobasher (Photo by Jeff Carrion/DePaul University) Mobasher plans to use his fellowship to improve the strategy of university budgeting through the development of a new process focusing on both short- and long-term goals for the university and its colleges. Refining the Strategic Resource Allocation Committee's communication between faculty and analyzing budgeting structures at the local level are among the topics Mobasher will address in his new plan.
Mobasher has been with DePaul for 25 years and has been a professor in the School of Computing since 2008. He served as the director of the Center for Data Science at DePaul from 2014 to 2018, and is currently the chair of the AI program at the School of Computing. His strategic planning experiences include previous presidency of DePaul's Faculty Council as well as previous membership in DePaul's strategic planning task force, university strategic resource allocation committee and financial performance strategic planning team.
“I strongly believe shared governance is a strong value that permeates all aspects of an educational institution. Shared governance, at its best, can help promote trust and respect among different constituencies," said Mobasher.