Message from 2025.26 FAS-SEAS Senate Chair Marijeta Bozovic
Dear colleagues,
It gives me great pleasure to announce the new Yale FAS-SEAS Senate leadership for AY 2026-2027:
- Michael Farina, chair
- David Post, deputy chair
- Other members of the Executive Council:
- Marijeta Bozovic
- Sonam Kachru
- Michael Loewenberg
- Rourke O’Brien
- Mark Solomon
You can find the full list of this year’s senators on the newly redesigned Senate website.
It has been a very full year for the Senate. I am beyond grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Maria Piñango as Deputy Chair, and for the guidance and camaraderie of the outgoing Executive Council. Indeed it speaks to the dedication and grit of this year’s Senate that we have an extremely large number of returning Senators and returning members of the EC – ready to keep the work going over the summer and to carry forward a number of multi-year initiatives.
The 2025-2026 year began with the announcement from the Yale administration that the university would be hiring its first-ever ombudsperson – a tremendous win for the Senate and other groups that had been advocating for such a position at Yale for years. FAS-SEAS Senators served on the search committee and participated in campus interviews for finalists. We will be delighted to work closely with Yale’s first Ombudswoman, Dawn Osborne-Adams, starting this fall.
We then opened with a Senate report to the administration, working collaboratively with the Yale AAUP, asking for a statement on Academic Freedom to be added to the Faculty Handbook. We met with university leadership in several fora to discuss the faculty position on this issue and were pleased with the resulting formation of a committee, again with Senators in the mix, to write a substantive report on Academic Freedom at Yale. May it serve as a counterpart to the Woodward report on freedom of expression, and strengthen a second pillar of academic integrity and autonomy.
Members of the FAS-SEAS Senate served on – and Senator Beverly Gage co-chaired – the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. The resulting report, which made 20 recommendations – including lowering costs of tuition, strengthening faculty governance, and opening the gates of Yale to the broader New Haven community and to the public at large, among others – drew national news coverage and sparked widespread public debate.
We also finalized a many-year initiative to develop an Author’s Rights Policy at Yale, working in collaboration with the university library, to move Yale’s knowledge production dramatically toward an open access model. While this push was the subject of less fanfare and scrutiny than some of the other efforts listed above, it may well have the most profound consequences.
The over-arching theme of the FAS-SEAS Senate’s efforts in 2025-2026 has been to articulate, model, and insist on increased faculty governance and input into all manner of decision-making at Yale – particularly decisions with profound consequences for research and teaching.
We have broached the subject of a University-wide Senate with fellow faculty, with university administration, with AAUP leadership – and we invited representatives of the faculty leadership of the Yale Medical school, the Faculty Advisory Council, to present at a FAS-SEAS Senate meeting as a first step toward the creation of some kind of more broadly representative elected university faculty body. We hope this work will continue in the future.
In the last months of spring 2026, we then turned to specific examples of decision-making at Yale and concluded the year with three open letters to the university leadership.
- In an open letter to the President, Provost, and Deans of FAS and SEAS, the Senate voiced its concerns with the cuts made to instructional faculty at Yale this past academic year. We asked for earlier notice, clearer lines of communication, and advance consultation with faculty, to weather ongoing and future budget cuts in the most humane, strategic, and effective way possible.
- In an open letter to the Dean of Yale College, the Senate turned to the example of the recent decision to eliminate the Director position for the Yale Sustainable Food Program (YSFP) and to likely sunset the Food, Agriculture, and Climate Change (FACC) Certificate. Again, we asked for consultation with impacted faculty and students, and for a more consultative decision-making process going forward.
- Finally, anticipating more changes to come and learning from bumps in the road to graduate student unionization, the Senate wrote to the Dean of the Graduate School in advance to ask for a faculty advisory committee to be consulted with during negotiations with Local 33 over contract terms for Postdoctoral researchers at Yale.
It has been an honor and privilege to serve as FAS-SEAS Senate Chair in a year of turmoil and occasional triumph. I am grateful to all outgoing and incoming Senators for their dedication, to the university administration for taking seriously our constructive critiques, and to all the many who have bled hours of unseen labor into quietly (and sometimes loudly) building the vision of Yale that we believe in.
Onward –
Marijeta Bozovic
Outgoing Chair of the FAS-SEAS Senate for 2025-26