Commendation in Honor of Senator Senator Keith Boyum

AS-2341-96/CSUF

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum was born in rural North Dakota and grew up smelling its dairy air; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum spent so much time hanging out around the grain elevator that his name became synonymous with “corn”; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum, as a student at the University of North Dakota having narrowly missed obtaining a Rhodes scholarship, took the nearest road out of town to Minnesota; and

WHEREAS, Keith––being less skillful than Bill Clinton or Dan Quayle––became a member of the US Army; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum specialized in the military tactic most used in the late 1960s and 1970s––retreat; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum is about to use that tactic in regard to the Senate; and

WHEREAS, Keith has been on the Senate for six highly productive years....and three reasonably productive years....and one year when he was merely meritorious; and

WHEREAS, Keith has served with tact, skill, diplomacy and uncommonly good wisdom on the Faculty Affairs, Academic Affairs and Governmental Affairs committees; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum has written countless resolutions as well as important papers on governance and PSSIs; and

WHEREAS, Keith has led legions of students, CSU senators, and education policy wonks to Sacramento; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum, as chair of the Governmental Affairs Committee, took on (apparently willingly) the task of getting legislators’ attention (presumably not too hard), getting them to listen (very difficult given their propensity for cherishing the sounds of their own voices), and persuading them to act in the best interests of the students, faculty, and staff of the CSU (virtually impossible––so Keith prayed a great deal in his best Lutheran style); and

WHEREAS, Keith’s delegation of CSU senators, when engaged in attempting to persuade legislators, probably set CSU governmental relations back a decade; and

WHEREAS, Keith, in a futile attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, has used his manifold talents to write the most detailed PSSI procedures of any CSU campus; and

WHEREAS, Keith is well on his way to becoming the world’s foremost expert on PSSI procedures, a status that will permit him to buy a cup of latte anywhere for $2.50 (a not insignificant percentage of the PSSI award that Keith as a former “outstanding professor” is sure to achieve); and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum has the remarkable ability to simultaneously do the NY Times crossword puzzle and miss not a single word of Senate debate; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum’s erudite argumentation techniques have many times held the Senate spellbound while providing almost no comprehensible reasons for supporting his position (whatever it may have been); and

WHEREAS, Keith is about to go on to a higher and more demanding calling––Chair of the Division of Political Science and Criminal Justice at Cal State University FU; and

WHEREAS, Keith Boyum’s repertoire of Norwegian jokes, told with true Norwegian (or at least North Dakotan) accent (challenged only by that of Harold Haak) will leave a serious deficit in the Senate’s humor bank; and

RESOLVED: That the Academic Senate of the California University commend Keith for his many years of service and express our genuine regret at his departure; and be it further

RESOLVED: That the Academic Senate CSU virtually award Keith an honorary PSSI...subject to any future bargaining agreement and contingent on funding being provided by the state legislature.