Abstract:
The purposes of this study were to investigate and compare the perception and the expectation of university personnel towards the roles of the Faculty Senate (FS) in Autonomous Universities. Four main aspects were examined; namely, provision of consultation to university executives, being representative of personnel, being neutral agency and good governance mechanism, personnel ethics and cooperation promotion. The informants of this study were 653 personnel in 6 autonomous universities. Those informants included executives, FS members, and university staff. Questionnaires were used to collect the data. Basic statistics and One-way ANOVA were employed to analyze the data. It was found as a whole that all personnel perceived the roles of Faculty Senate at a moderate level. They knew the best that it promoted ethics, cooperation, and relationship among personnel. The detailed investigation revealed that the university executives perceived the roles of the Faculty Senate at a moderate level. They knew that it acted as a neutral agency and good governance mechanism while the FS members perceived its roles at a high level; they recognized its role of representative the most. As for the staff, they perceived the FS roles at a moderate level; they knew that it promoted ethics, cooperation and relationship among personnel as its first priority. Regarding expectation, all personnel expected all aspects of the FS roles at a high level. Their priority wish on FS roles was that it should act as their representative. Every group of
the personnel had similar view on this agency which was that it should best play a role of their
representative. The comparison of perception and expectation of the roles of the Faculty Senate among different groups of personnel revealed differences at the statistical significance level of .05.
That is, the perception and the expectation of the staff were lower than those of the executives and
FS members while the executives and the FS members shared similar level of perception and
expectation.