Department By-laws

According to Article 4, Part B of the Laws of the Regents, all department rules, and consequently revisions to the rules, are "subject to the approval of the dean and chancellor." Any revision to departmental by-laws should take guidance from Robert's Rules of Order. The College maintains a notebook with all departmental by-laws that faculty may use for reference, located in Old Main 1-43.

In general, Robert's Rules recommends that the following sections be included:

  1. Content
  2. Name
  3. Objective
  4. Members
  5. Officers
  6. Meetings
  7. Executive Board
  8. Committees
  9. Parliamentary authority
  10. Amendment of by-laws

For the College's purposes, specifics you should also consider include:

  1. Who may vote on reappointment/promotion/tenure cases.
  2. Who may vote on hiring.
  3. Who may vote on appointments to the Graduate Faculty.
  4. Length of chair term. (College policy defines chair terms as 4 years or less, renewable once.)
  5. How grievances (grades, salary, etc.) are handled -- by standing or ad-hoc committees?
  6. Frequency of departmental meetings. How may special meetings be called and how? (By the chair? By a vote of the department's voting members?)
  7. What constitutes a quorum?
  8. Who may vote? On what?
  9. Do students get a vote? On what?
  10. How are policies (differentiated workloads, promotion and tenure, etc.) revised?
  11. Who takes minutes of departmental meetings and how are they recorded?
  12. Include a listing of the department's standing committees. Some possibilities are: faculty personnel committee, merit review, undergraduate program, graduate program, graduate admissions.
  13. How are standing committees constituted? What are their term lengths?