Forty-­‐seven faculty having requested it, this special meeting of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate is now in session. We are meeting to deliberate and reach conclusions upon a specific topic: The role of protest at Berkeley, the protests of November 2011 and events surrounding them including police and administration responses, and related policies. Note that the issues underlying those protests are not in order for this meeting. Protest and free speech should be considered on right and principle, irrespective of our agreement or disagreement with the content of the speech and our opinions on the underlying issues. I'll be chairing this meeting with the help of my colleagues. Our role, along with Robert's Rules, is to facilitate discussion & decisions. Your role as the members of this meeting is have a thoughtful discussion worthy of Berkeley's intellectual reputation, to attempt to craft a motion or motions expressing the will of the faculty, and after we succeed in that, to vote on whether to adopt them. The seats in the front are reserved for Senate members. Please sit forward of the aisle if you are a Senate member to make it easier for us to count votes. Please use the rear door if have to exit early. Please silence your phones & laptops, or better yet put them away entirely. Now, a discussion of procedure for the meeting. The motion in the notice is not automatically on the floor. Motions must be moved and seconded. Under Robert's Rules, any member who has the floor has the right to move any motion so long as it is in order. Motions that fall within the scope of the meeting may be adopted by a simple majority. Professor Butler has indicated that she will move an updated version of the motion contained in the notice. The division parliamentarian has advised that the updated motion falls within the scope of the meeting. Thus, Professor Butler may move the updated version of the motion, it may be considered, and if the meeting is favorably included, adopted by a simple majority. Any member may then move amendments to the resolution on the floor, including completely replacing it with another. To move a motion or amendment, you must take your turn as a speaker. Shouting out motions from your seat while others are waiting to speak is disrespectful to one's colleagues, and will not be recognized. Several faculty members have provided additional resolutions for your consideration which may be moved as replacements or as additional motions after the first has been considered. We've provided two packets of these. One is the motions received before the Thanksgiving break, and the other is revised motions received during the break. I expect their proponents will describe each of these during the discussion. Robert's Rules require that discussion be limited to the motion or amendment currently before the meeting. This makes it difficult to discuss in depth issues such as those before us today. Therefore, I propose that we set aside the first half of the meeting for general discussion as a committee of the whole. During that time, all discussion on the meeting topic will be in order, but there will be no motions or votes on motions. For the second half, we will return to the usual Robert's Rules and work through motions, possible amendments to motions, and votes as needed. Except for a small number of preliminary speakers, all speakers will be limited to three minutes, which is a long-­‐standing tradition in meetings like this, and no speaker will have the floor a second time while anyone waits their first chance to speak. I have consulted with the Divisional Council and the authors of the original resolution, as representatives of the faculty who requested the meeting. They agree to this proposal, with some concern about whether a three minute time limit is too long. After Professor Butler moves her motion, I expect we will vote on this plan via a procedural resolution. Copies of that proposed motion were available as you came in. I expect that someone will move that we use a two minute time limit. If so, we'll do a show-­‐of-­‐hands vote on that. We'll then vote on the procedural motion, and proceed based on that decision. Finally, the question of time. The meeting is scheduled to run until 5PM. I hope that our proposed discussion plan will make our deliberations converge more quickly, and that we'll be able to rapidly decide on amendments to motions and other procedural issues. We will use straw polls as appropriate to give the meeting a feel for whether a consensus exists on an amendment or substitution. Where it does, I'll encourage us to vote on those quickly rather than debate them extensively. But for all that, we're likely to run short of time. Although the meeting may vote to extend the time past 5PM, we rapidly get into conflicts with people's child care and other arrangements, and there is a hard limit to our time in this room. As we draw close to the end, I'll ask for somebody to move the question, and we'll vote on whether to bring discussion to a close and vote on the main motion as it then stands. A motion for a mail ballot may also be appropriate at some point, as we are discussing important issues at a special meeting and it would be best for entire faculty to be given the opportunity to vote on the final resolution or resolutions that we craft here today. The parliamentarian has ruled that a mail ballot may be called for and passed with a simple majority either before or after the actual vote on the measure. If a mail ballot is adopted before a vote, discussion will continue and a vote will still be taken here. With all that said, I now recognize Professor Butler.