Responsibilities and Rewards Committee Report

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Responsibilities and Rewards Committee Report

The Provost’s ad hoc Committee on Faculty Responsibilities and Rewards recommended that current “best practices” in departments on the three UW campuses be adopted as a model for a University-wide policy on faculty responsibilities, reviews and rewards. Several committee recommendations relate to post-tenure review and faculty morale.

The committee, chaired by John M. Wallace, submitted its report to Provost Lee L. Huntsman earlier this month.

The procedures would align the responsibilities of departmental units with the mission of the University and the duties of individual faculty members through a process of negotiation. The committee also recommended that each department and college council review its criteria for promotion and tenure, “with a view toward ensuring balance and flexibility, and avoiding unrealistic expectations of junior faculty.

“Interdisciplinary activities should be encouraged and extraordinary responsibilities for mentoring of students and institution-building should be taken into account,” the report stated.

“Many of our recommendations are worded in quite general terms at this point and would require elaboration before they could be considered for formal adoption,” Wallace wrote in his cover letter accompanying the report. “Some repackaging may also be in order, as you attempt to reconcile our recommendations with those of the Committee on Faculty Salaries.”

The following model was proposed:

  • Every few years the unit would review the current status of its own programs and determine how they should evolve in response to the needs of students, projected funding levels, and other external influences. The unit would also keep abreast of the plans of other departments and interdepartmental programs, with a view toward making the whole University curriculum greater than the sum of the parts.
  • Faculty members in the unit would meet periodically (once a year for junior faculty and once every two years for senior faculty) with the chair to negotiate their teaching, research, and service duties, both within and outside the unit. These negotiations would take into account the changing needs of the unit and the university as a whole, as well as the changing interests and abilities of the faculty member.
  • These periodic meetings with the chair would also be used for assessing the faculty member’s progress toward meeting the expectations and achieving the goals agreed to at the previous meeting.
  • Ordinarily, the most recent of these assessments would serve as the basis for allocating merit salary increases at the times the state appropriates funding for them. ¶

    Nedra Floyd Pautler


    University Week
    The faculty and staff publication of the University of Washington
    uweek@u.washington.edu
    June 25, 1998