The first priority in nominations and elections should be to build (creative, unexpected) connections across colleges, disciplines, and areas of study, so as to fully activate the self-governing capacities of the university faculty as a whole. Recent initiatives by the Dean of Faculty to increase access to nominations are encouraging and should be expanded, in particular by means of more direct messaging. For context: during my term as President of BSANA, we moved from a model in which outgoing members of the Managing Board recruited friends and colleagues to stand for election, to one in which we wrote directly to our full membership list to request nominations and self-nominations. This model has been a resounding success, resulting in a greater breadth of nominees’ institutional affiliations, career stages, and specializations. 

 

 

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Kenneth Roberts, Professor, Government (College of Arts and Sciences)

Kenneth M. Roberts is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government, with a specialization in the study of comparative and Latin American politics. He has been a member of the Cornell faculty since 2005. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and taught for 13 years at the University of New Mexico before coming to Cornell. His teaching and research interests focus on democratic representation and the political economy of development, in particular the politics of inequality. Much of his published work explores the intersection of political parties, social movements, and populism, in Latin America and beyond. His most recent book is the co-edited Democratic Resilience: Can the United States Withstand Rising Polarization (Cambridge University Press). Other publications include Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era (Cambridge University Press), Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford University Press), and the co-edited volumes The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Johns Hopkins University Press) and The Diffusion of Social Movements (Cambridge University Press). 
   
   Roberts served as the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences from 2012-2015. He has also served as a department chair, the Director of Cornell’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, and the Director of Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences. He currently serves on the editorial boards of World Politics and Latin American Politics and Society, and he has held leadership roles in the American Political Science Association and the Latin American Studies Association. He has been a Fulbright scholar at the Universidad Carlos III-Instituto Juan March in Madrid, Spain and the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Santiago, Chile. He has also been a visiting fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Centre on Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy, the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His current research projects examine polarization and democracy in contemporary Latin America, and crises of democracy in the global arena. 

 

I have long sought to balance my teaching and research activities with a commitment to service in my department, the university, and the profession at large. I believe faculty can and should play an active role in university governance, and my own experience in administrative positions—as a senior associate dean, center director, program director, and department chair—has repeatedly pressed on me the importance of having an engaged faculty to help shape the university’s academic goals, priorities, and resource allocations. I have been active in a number of inter-disciplinary and cross-college initiatives, and I believe it is imperative that our governing structures provide voice and representation to the full range of academic programs on campus. The Nominations and Elections Committee plays an important role in ensuring that broad representation and identifying strong faculty voices to participate in university governance. I will work to achieve those goals if selected to serve on this committee.