AAUP Executive Board meeting, Wednesday 17 November 2016, 3:30-5:20pm, (ATG) conference room 406, University of Washington, Seattle. Dial in: 206-315-1785 (code 609912#, UW Global Net)

STRATEGIC PLANNING PLANKS

1. Improve conditions for lecturer faculty at the UW

2. Engage in advocating for better higher ed funding in Washington State; work in coalition with other stakeholders.

3. Faculty Senate Resolution to get faculty representatives on search committees for deans, provosts Board of Regents faculty representation

4. Partner with other universities for appeals to the legislature

5. Faculty unionization

6. Work to repair the UW’s faculty grievance adjudication system

7. Build faculty understanding of “Activity Based Budgeting.”

8. Involve the AAUP in the Faculty Council’s committee on intellectual property.

9. Work to increase the capacity of faculty to provide better oversight to unpaid internships.

10. Examine the shared governance issues associated with the UW’s move towards an on-line learning undergraduate degree completion program.

11. Monitor search process for open University administrative positions to ensure they are open.

Attendance: Rob Wood/past-president, Amy Hagopian/secretary, Bert Stover/treasurer, Abraham Flaxman/List server VP, Diane Morrison, Jay Johnson, Bruce Kochis, Hwasook Nam, Jim Gregory, Charlie Collins, Duane Storti.

Absent: Eva Cherniavsky, Christoph Giebel, Ann Mescher, Dan Jacoby/president, Michael Honey, Libi Sundermann, Jim Liner, Max Lieblich. (several were away at a conference)

1) Announcements: see next meetings; Rob will find a place for the retreat (UW Club?)

2) Regents meeting Rob Wood attended the Nov 10 Board of Regents meeting on the UW campus. Students made statements (SUPER, Black Lives Matter representatives discussed their fear post-election; urged divestments from prisons and fossil fuels; expressed concerns regarding the occupation of Palestine.) There will be a UW Regents lobbying day in Olympia this year, with a focus on the Population Health Initiative. Cauce reported they are moving ahead with a full legislative agenda, but faculty were not consulted about what it is and it’s not posted on the legislative affairs website. The Affordable Care Act will be a big national agenda item that matters a lot to the UW because so much of our financial activity is based in our hospitals. UW Impact will have a higher education policy event January 5 on campus; people should register, although there are precious few details available.

Next Regents meeting: Thursday, January 12, 2017, in Dempsey Hall, room 302, UW Seattle. Schedule and agendas available by noon on Friday, January 6, 2017.

3) Statement on election: Jim Liner, who is both an AAUP board member and a leader in the Faculty Forward movement (he’s at UW-Tacoma) drafted a statement on the election. There was a discussion of whether we would endorse this. We considered asking that it be reformulated as a UWFF/AAUP statement. We discussed whether a call to action might be appropriate, such as asking the UW to become a sanctuary university; another could be that UWPD be prohibited from asking for identity documents. Is the first part of the statement too alarmist? The AAUP national put out a statement on 11/09/2016: https://www.aaup.org/news/higher-education-after-2016-election#.WC5FEtxb-Pj

DECISION: We will defer to next meeting. Rob will draft another statement, separate from UWFF. We will focus on our concerns about statements made by the President-election in his platform, speeches, interviews, appointments to leadership positions and other statements concerning education policy and how immigration policy will affect our students.

4) Faculty Regent: UW and WSU are moving forward in partnership to pursue a bill for a faculty regent. The Faculty Senate Executive Committee has discussed it. The current Faculty Senate leadership consulted with past Senate chairs for guidance. A danger is that the faculty regent could be viewed as the representative of the faculty, when in fact the Senate Chair is the only elected representative of the faculty body. Ideally, the Senate would nominate 3 names to the Governor. Also, ideally, the faculty Regent would be someone with close ties to the Faculty Senate (e.g., former chair). Conclusion: if it’s done right, we certainly endorse having a faculty regent.

5) SCPB meeting schedule: Unfortunately, the meeting schedule of Senate Committee on Planning & Budgeting (SCPB) was changed by the 2015-2016 Faculty Senate Chair Beauchamp to be less frequent, which has undermined the power of the body.

6) List server: We’d like to add new faculty email addresses to the list server. Academic HR has not been forthcoming with a list of names. Jim Gregory suggested we invest time in getting new faculty names from the departments (in the absence of Academic HR assistance). Perhaps SEIU would share its list. Question: would we like to spend a few hundred dollars to pay a computer science student to retrieve the names from the department directories?

DECISION: Yes, we will allocate funds to secure the services of a computer science student to update our mailing list. Jim Gregory will work with Abie Flaxman to get this done.

7) Faculty Senate items:

Draft executive orders 64 and 54 are open for comment. Duane has submitted comments. Executive Order 64 makes small tweaks to the salary policy, most noticeably the increase in promotion salary. Executive Order 54 sets rules on relationships among and between faculty and students. Duane has pointed out inconsistences and illogical aspects of the rules.

We have made no progress on ensuring faculty are protected by a requirement for adjudication in cases of conflict with administration.

The Dental School bailout plan was approved by a subcommittee of the regents, subject to the approval of the Faculty Council. The Provost consulted individually with the subcommittee members without convening a meeting. This could be interpreted as both a subterfuge of the open meetings Act and a way around the fact the Dental Faculty Council voted down the plan. Have the Dental School Faculty Senate members complained? There are general faculty governance concerns here.

Action: Duane will check with Dental Faculty representatives.

Executive Order 59 puts a 25% limit on how much you can be paid as excess compensation; does this include administrative bump or can there be administrative supplements beyond that? This arose in the dental school.

8) Tenure question: We discussed the new proposed tenure policy in Health Services, which offers 50% tenure.

The proposed policy states:

“Tenure has financial implications, for individual faculty members and for the Department as a whole. In alignment with a policy voted in by the faculty of the School of Public Health in the 1980s, tenure in the Department is generally granted at the 50% level. By granting tenure, the Department and its faculty commit to covering up to 50% of the salary of tenured faculty, if the tenured faculty member’s funding from teaching and research falls short of 100%.” And also, “Length of appointment in the Department in a non-tenured status will NOT be the determining factor prioritizing faculty nomination for tenure.” When advertising new professorial positions, the following language (or similar) shall be used in the job advertisement when WOT (Without Tenure) titles are included:

WOT denotes positions that do not confer tenure automatically upon appointment to the faculty. WOT faculty members have the same rights, responsibilities, and obligations as tenure-track and tenured faculty members at those ranks. Such a faculty member holds his or her appointment on a continuing basis. WOT faculty are eligible for tenure contingent upon meeting the Department’s criteria for tenure, as well as the availability of resources.

Process:

1. If tenure is requested for a new hire, the candidate needs to be presented to the full faculty and a recommendation will be made to the Chair.

2. The Awards, Appointments and Promotions (AAP) Committee will make tenure recommendations to the Chair, generally, but not exclusively tied to the Annual Review process. The AAP Committee will use the foregoing criteria and the historical number of tenure slots to inform their recommendations. Some slots should remain open for recruitment.

3. The Chair will review those candidates recommended, in light of the criteria above, the Faculty Handbook requirements and available resources to grant tenure.

4. The Chair will present to the eligible voting faculty those candidates recommended by the AAP Committee. The Chair will forward to the Dean the results of the faculty vote, as well as his/her own recommendation, along with a package of tenure materials to be presented to Faculty Council in accordance with the SPH Handbook. If a faculty member is proposed for tenure but does not receive a favorable vote from the faculty, he/she will continue in their current position with their WOT title. Per the UW Policy Directory, all regular Associate and Full Professors will vote on tenure decisions.

5. To convert a current faculty member from WOT to tenured, the tenured position must be included on the annual hiring plan and approved by the Provost. A new national search is not required. A tenure promotion packet will be prepared following University and School guidelines.

6. During the annual meeting with the Chair, progress towards tenure will be discussed.

Duane suggested we ask the Secretary of the Faculty to provide a code ruling. Another question, from the Dental School: Can you be tenured without promotion? Who votes on that?

9) In response to an enquiry from Cheryl Nyberg in the Law School, we learned there are no copies in campus libraries of the AAUP’s “Red Book,” aka “AAUP Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” President Cauce’s office told Cheryl it didn’t have a copy either (although we did present her with one when we gave her an award a couple of years ago). We agreed to purchase six copies of the 2015 edition (the most recent) of the AAUP Red Book to donate to the Suzzallo Library and the Law Library and a new copy to Ana Mari. That will give us three copies in reserve for future use.

*Board membership in 2015/2016 includes: Christoph Giebel, Michael Honey, Jay Johnson, Bruce Kochis, Max Lieblich, Ann Mescher, Diane Morrison, Duane Storti, and Libi Sundermann. Five new board members join us: Hwasook Nam, Charlie Collins, James Liner, Eva Cherniavsky, and Jim Gregory. Officers are Dan Jacoby/president, Amy Hagopian/secretary, Bert Stover/treasurer, Abraham Flaxman/VP for mailing list, and Rob Wood/past-president.

AAUP Meeting schedule 2015/2016 (3:30 pm to 5 pm)