AAUP Executive Board meeting, Wednesday 16 March 2016

3:00-5:00pm, UW Club Dial +1 (872) 240-3212 Access Code: 110-740-877

Members present:

Rob Wood, Atmospheric Sciences, President

Amy Hagopian, Public Health, Secretary

Abraham Flaxman, Global Health

Christoph Giebel, Jackson School

Jay Johnson, emeritus Environmental & Forest

Diane Morrison, School of Social Work

Libi Sundermann, UW Tacoma (phone)

Duane Storti, Engineering

Ann Mescher, Mechanical Engineering

Michael Honey, UW Tacoma (phone, starting at 4 pm)

Absent:

Jack Lee, Math

Max Lieblich, Math (phone)

Bert Stover, Family Medicine & EOHS, Treasurer

Dan Jacoby, UW Bothell Interdisciplinary, VP

Bruce Kochis, UW Bothell

Kari Lerum, UW Bothell

Jane Koenig, School of Public Health emerita

Dan Luchtel, School of Public Health

Guests:

Gordon Watts, physics since 1999 (Senator for 6 years or so, FCFA for 3 years, now chair)

Michael Laslett

Agenda:

1. Introductions

2. Announcements:

a. Regents Watch assignments and reports

i. March 10—UW Bothell

Rob reported the administration is moving a little on the Innovation Showcase, Professor Charlson. Margaret O’Mara in History is going to put together a “virtual showcase” with the library. Not much faculty involvement in the effort, though. Perhaps the location of this display could be the Nuclear Reactor building?

3. Faculty Senate issues

a. FCFA Work on Lecturers (guest Gordon Watts, Chair of Faculty Council for Faculty Affairs)

Gordon came to report on the work of FCFA. Complicated faculty-related issues generally go through FCFA first to process the details. During Gordon’s tenure as chair, they’ve focused on a number of Code issues (such as Salary policy, sexual misconduct, professor practice physician status, lecturer status). Minutes are up on the web. 11 members; Cheryl Cameron sits on it from Administration.

Part time lecturers have no status in the Code. This problem was a high priority for FCFA this year (after salary policy). Part time lecturers do a lot of work, including governance work, with very slim status in the Code. Public task force reports are on the web (eg., 6/7/14 report on lecturers). There is a list of rights and privileges in the Code; the question is should these be given to lecturers? Part time lecturers? Non-competitively hired lecturers? Should the status of lecturers be different if they also have administrative duties? Can they hold ranks? Are they tier eligible? Annual, multi-year appointment? Do they require student evaluations? Peer Review? Chair planning conference frequency? What notice should be required before you can be not renewed? Do you vote in departmental issues? Faculty reviews? Should there be a terminal degree required?

Q&A:

Can we answer some of these questions but not others? For example, allowing part-time lecturers to be promoted would be a high priority. No one wants to do it right now, though. We have one more meeting before the SEC agenda deadline for Code changes this year, so it is likely this will be postponed to next year.

Is there anything that must be different for part-time people than full time? The clock seems to be the most important issue—allowing the promotion clock to slide if you’re part time. Should there be a threshold of FTE allowing participation in governance?

How many lecturers are under 50% FTE? More than a third. How many people? Don’t know.

Competitive hiring is hard when we need to hire someone on short notice. We want the lecturers to be competitively hired, generally. There’s a transition issue—how do we get from here to there? The UW will probably eliminate the non-competitive hires over time by requiring a competitive search for the positions we’ve got now. Nothing shorter than a year-long contract is offered. These are better than quarter-to-quarter. Lecturers at less than 50% should probably not get tier increases. FCFA hasn’t yet asked for salary information on lecturers.

Christoph talked about the role of tenure in protecting academic freedom, and the importance of fair working conditions. Now the majority of faculty no longer have tenure. Gordon said one solution is to pay lecturers more, so that we are not avoiding tenure line positions simply to save money. Competitively hired people are typically higher quality, too.

The refusal of the administration to grandfather the non-competitively hired lecturers who have been in positions for many years wasn’t fair. There was a cadre at Bothell who were invited to interview positions, but none of the 8 even got interviews. They lost their jobs to inexperienced people with young PhDs or even those without finishing their dissertations. Libi chimed in that in UWT the IAS group has been working on conversion for a while; they’ve been careful to not include a requirement for research activities. Only one lecturer there wasn’t hired into the position they’d held over time.

The authorization of a search (and at what rank) must be approved by the Dean.

Gordon would like to see more traditional tenure-track hires.

What about tenure for lecturers? Principal lecturers would be a place to start, because scholarship is required for that status.

How about a Council populated by Principal lecturers? Nah, let’s have them more fully participate in the academic life of the university.

How about Jack’s proposal for a “Professor of Instruction” line? FCFA has it on the list. Gordon likes the idea of a career path structure. At UWT, lecturers are at 50% of the IAS faculty.

b. Salary Policy

The salary policy was drop-kicked out of the Faculty Senate meeting on March 3. An amendment to send it back failed. Two things needed to be fixed: 1) variable raises needed to reward merit to satisfy the business school and other sectors; 2) the desire for some schools to opt out of the tier policy. A committee was formed (Jack Lee, Gordon Watts, Paul Hopkins) to review the proposed changes. Some administration-proposed changes will be considered too. If you’re going to use merit to allocate a variable raise, it requires a review by your peers. Once opted out of the tier system, your school must still have some protections. Schedule: by this weekend, the committee will circulate a new version to the original committee and other influential. The dean wants to be able to arbitrarily decline a tier advancement for financial reasons. This seems too arbitrary in relation to individual situations, but there is sympathy to the financial situation. We decided to allow turning down early advancements (hot shots), but not normal (4-year) advancements.

Note: Gordon’s appointment is on a year-to-year basis, 3-year limit. The time commitment has been intense.

Duane noted Council membership is where the action is at, and appointments are being made now.

c. Research Misconduct policy: what are the federal regulations that required us to eliminate adjudication from UW policy?

We’ll monitor this ongoing disaster, which is now university policy. This is so germane to what we are doing in AAUP. Administration has never answered Duane’s question about where is the federal rule on which this new policy is based? The executive order was promulgated the day after the last meeting in the fall. There’s a new compliance office too, which has sweeping new authority.

d. Provost search

We object to President Cauce’s “right” to remove “interim” from the Provost’s title. Action: monitor.

e. Consecutive terms

Duane’s motion to allow 3 consecutive Senate terms (instead of the current 2) is to be voted on.

4. Fee-based graduate education (Hagopian)

We discussed the status of fee-based students at the UW.

GIX (Global Innovation Exchange) program to be handled through PCE, too.

Is this a trend at other universities in the state or the country?

What is AAUP national’s view on this?

5. Reports:

a. AAUP nominations for spring election: nominating committee report

b. AAUP annual meeting: May 9 with Rutgers team (David Hughes, Ann Gould, Karen Stubaus)

Michael offered that we live stream to the other campuses, which also creates a video. We agreed that was desirable. People could ask questions remotely that way. We could have an AAUP host in the other sites. Dinner to follow.

6. Next steps in union drive (Michael Laslett, guest)

We’re now at the one-year mark of launching the union drive. We’ve built a large following and raised some important issues. We’ve run into controversy, but the campaign is known and has done good work. An election and getting to a PERC vote is some time off. The next stage of the campaign should be to join the union now, see how a union functions, participate with elected officers and structure.

Things we didn’t get to:

a. Workers Memorial report (Hagopian) The event will be April 27, mid-day.

b. Legislative session 2016: recap of issues pertaining to UW

c. Academic Analytics (Rob Wood)

d. Harry Bridges Forum report (April 1: Lillian Taiz)

e. Treasurer’s report (Bert)

Meeting schedule 2015/2016 (3 pm to 5 pm)

Regents Watch assignments and reports

· April 14—Allen Library, Amy Hagopian

· May 12—Allen Library

· June 9—Allen Library

· July 14—Allen Center, CSE 691

· Aug 11—Allen Library (subject to cancelation)

· Sept 8—UW Spokane

· Oct 13—UW Tacoma

· Nov 10—HUB 334

· Dec 8—Allen Library (subject to cancelation)

RESOLUTIONS? This is lingering…

1. UW AAUP supports the Academic Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act

The University of Washington Chapter of the American Association of University Professors supports a Washington State version of the multi-state Academic Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, which clarifies that it is unlawful for a publicly operated institution of higher education to take adverse employment action, or otherwise retaliate against a faculty member or graduate student instructor for expression related to academic scholarship, academic research, or classroom instruction. We encourage lawmakers to adopt the legislation, which protects whistleblowers and any “expression related to any matter of institutional policy or action that is of public concern” and “public expression related any matter of social, political, economic, or other interest.”

Amy:

Thank you for your follow up and good questions.

1) The American Center for Civil Liberties is not affiliated with the ACLU. It was founded a few years ago by David Demers, the former Washington State University Professor who was the plaintiff in Demers v. Austin, a key academic freedom case from the Ninth Circuit.

2) The bill is attracting Republican support because FIRE has spent the last few years targeting Republican legislators, in an attempt to change the political dynamic on the issue. Historically, many conservative legislators have been wary about academic freedom because of fears of the "liberal" professor brainwashing the students. FIRE has been arguing to those conservatives that all professors need academic freedom, regardless of their politics. We have shown them examples of professors from all parts of the political spectrum who have been fired for expressing their political views. Our theory was that if we can change the minds of opponents of academic freedom, and recruit them to be champions for the cause, the bills could actually succeed.

3) The draft bill has been vetted by the national AAUP. An earlier version of the bill was shared with Greg Scholtz, Associate Secretary and Director of the AAUP's Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. He informed us that the national AAUP no longer has a government relations program, but he suggested a pair of edits which we incorporated. He then reviewed the updated version and told the sponsor of our New Hampshire draft (substantively identical to the Washington State draft) and told our NH sponsor, "Your initial draft was good, but this one is excellent. The changes made to address Garcetti issues were especially impressive." Greg can be reached at: gscholtz@aaup.org.

I followed up with Greg and was told to reach out to Hank Reichman, who is AAUP’s first vice president and chair of our Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. While not taking an official position on the bill draft, Professor Reichman seemed very supportive. I would urge you to reach out to him to get his analysis directly. He can be reached at: hank.reichman@gmail.com.

I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance. Many thanks,

Joe Cohn

=================================

Hi Amy and Joe. I’ll answer the first question and let Joe answer the second and third. Below is the summary of the mission of ACFCL, taken from its website (www.acfcl.org). ACFCL has no legal or structural connection to AAUP, FIRE or ACLU, albeit we share many values and goals. ACLU also has a lot more resources and pursues many of its goals through legal action (Joe was an attorney there before joining FIRE, if I recall correctly). ACFCL doesn’t have many financial resources, but it has provided advice and support to three professors who have been the subjects of workplace mobbing at their universities (one from Idaho State University, one from Washington State University, and one from Kansas State). –Dave

The American Center for Civil Liberties is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting civil liberties articulated during the Age of Enlightenment and codified in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These liberties include freedom of expression, due process, democracy, freedom of religion, right to association, individualism, academic freedom, accountability in government, shared governance in universities, and social, political and economic equity. The Center accomplishes this mission through the dissemination of information and knowledge to the public and to university scholars. The Center does NOT accept donations and provides all services free of charge. ACFCL was founded by Dr. David Demers, a former journalist and journalism professor and author or editor of more than dozen books that have focused on civil liberties and mass communication issues.

American Center for Civil Liberties

16421 North 31st Avenue

Phoenix, Arizona 85053

509-290-9240 (phone) • 602-464-9675 (FAX)

info@acfcl.org • www.acfcl.org

From: Amy Hagopian

Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2016 12:50 PM

To: American Center for Civil Liberties

Cc: Joe Cohn

Subject: Re: Response to comments about academic freedom bill

Hi, Joe,

our team is still squeamish about the proposal. their questions:

1) what is the American Center for Civil Liberties? How is it different from ACLU?

2) why is this bill attracting Republican support but not Democrats? That seems intuitively odd.

3) what is the AAUP national saying about this bill? They have the resources to do proper vetting, we don’t.

Does that help?

Amy