The University Academic Senate is responsible for advising the senior administration and board of trustees on matters crucial to the success of Marquette University’s academic mission. It is co-chaired by the Provost and a chair elected from the UAS faculty senators, and its membership includes elected faculty senators, undergraduate and graduate students representatives, and appointed and ex officio deans and vice provosts.
The UAS came into being in 2007 as the result of recommendations from the Shared Governance Task Force, which were approved by the Academic Senate and Committee on Faculty (both of which it supersedes), as well as the Provost, President, and Board of Trustees. The statutes, bylaws, and committee structure of the UAS aim to improve university governance with increased representative decision-making on key academic policies, for a for timely consultation, and opportunities to raise issues of concern.
The UAS meets the third Monday of each month while classes are in session. Meetings are open to all members of the Marquette community. The UAS Executive Board, comprised of the Provost, the chair, vice chair and secretary of the UAS, faculty council chair, two elected senators, and a dean from the UAS, sets agendas, which are linked on the UAS website one week prior to meetings. Issues coming before the UAS range from new academic programs, to policies on contingent faculty, to appointments of deans, to promotion and tenure procedures. Minutes of UAS and UAS standing committee meetings are posted to Teams.
The standing committees of the UAS are:
In addition, these committees jointly report to UAS and the Office of the Provost:
Dr. Elaine Spiller is chair of the University Academic Senate (UAS) and Clare Boothe Luce (CBL) Professor of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences. In addition to UAS, she has served Marquette as a member of the Marquette Core Curriculum Implementation Committee, a member of the Sabbatical Review Committee, and through her CBL work as Special Advisor to the Provost’s Office of Faculty Affairs.
She believes that Marquette is so special because of its people — the students, faculty and staff ARE Marquette. She is committed to shared governance as a mechanism to strengthen Marquette and maintain its niche as a place where students learn from and work with world class teacher-scholars who care deeply about them as people. She believes that transparency in both communication and processes is critical to effective shared governance.
Spiller received her bachelor’s degree in Applied Math from the University of Colorado, and her MS and Ph.D. in Applied Math from Northwestern University. She spent a year as a visiting professor at the University at Buffalo, followed by two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute and Duke University. She joined Marquette’s faculty in 2008. Her research has been continuously funded as PI or co-PI by 14 awards from the NSF, ONR, FEMA, and NERC. She was awarded Marquette’s Way Klingler Sabbatical Fellowship and Way Klingler Fellowship in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Her research is at the interface of applied math and statistics in a field called uncertainty quantification. Methodology developed by Spiller has led to innovations in probabilistic hazard assessment and forecasting for volcanic and debris flow hazards. She teaches courses from first semester calculus to graduate-level simulation methods.
