The faculty appeared split on whether to vote no confidence in President David Schmidly and Executive Vice President David Harris at its meeting in Popejoy Hall on Wednesday.
The Faculty Governance Committee said it will announce the results of the vote by noon today.
Sociology professor Philip May supported the no-confidence vote in Harris. He said instituting business models for educational purposes hurts the University's core mission.
"I think the most pernicious influence on this University for the past five years has been the adoption of a corporate model," May said. "I think that our last three presidents are the ones who promoted this, and Mr. Harris was our preceding president. In that sense, I'm inclined to vote for this motion."
Chemistry professor Stephen Cabaniss was against the vote of no confidence in Harris. He said there wasn't enough evidence to warrant such a drastic motion and that the faculty was unfair in its assessment of the vice president.
"Undisclosed budget shortfalls? Well, that's bad," Cabaniss said of an allegation in the faculty petition. "But I was on the Faculty Senate not too long ago, and I remember . there were also unexpected funds being recovered.. But nobody seems to have mentioned that. I really think, if we're going to do something as serious as a vote of no confidence in somebody, we ought to have better evidence for it."
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May said Harris is not the only one to blame for UNM's state of affairs. Rather, Harris is following the example of many administrators before him, he said.
"I'm not in any way supporting Mr. Harris. What I'm saying is I think we've had the wrong model, and he's been active in supporting that particular movement," May said. "And I would say the same thing about our next motion as well."
In Topic No. 5, a motion of no confidence was brought against President David Schmidly.
Physics Professor Carlton Caves said Schmidly's corporate management structure of governance didn't fit with the administration's efforts toward accountability and dialogue.
"You can take 'shared governance'; you can take 'openness'; you can take 'transparency'; you can take 'collaborative effort of decision making'; and you can try and paste them on the corporate executive management structure of decision making - and they will just fall off. That's the problem," he said.
Biology professor Maggie Werner-Washburne didn't support the no-confidence vote in UNM's president and warned of the instability such a decision might cause.
"I think that Dr. Schmidly has heard exactly what we've said in conversations just with faculty. I think there is sensitivity to the number and disproportionate quantity of upper administrators," she said. "I'm hoping that, for the stability of UNM, we need to think about whether this is something we want to work with."
Faculty Senate President Howard Snell suggested that the faculty table the no-confidence motions for eight weeks in hopes the University administration would adopt the changes proposed in previous motions.
"I think we've made great progress in suggesting things that would really change our opinion of the administration of UNM," Snell said. "If those things changed within the next eight weeks, my opinion would change, and I would perhaps vote differently on this motion than I would vote at this moment."
