New Faculty Senate leaders look ahead to year’s issues

Ted Kaltsounis

Kaltsounis’ love affair with faculty governance

“Working with faculty governance,” says Ted Kaltsounis, “isn’t love at first sight. You have to know it to love it.”

And that’s probably why his first brush with the Faculty Senate, back in the 70s, didn’t take. Preoccupied with his own career objectives, he served a term and then didn’t return until the 90s, when he decided to apply for the Special Committee on Legislative Matters. That led to a stint as deputy legislative representative and then legislative representative. “I found that the more I got into it, the more I found it to be fascinating, useful and challenging work,” Kaltsounis says.

So it is that this fall he became chair of the senate, after serving a year as vice chair. And he has some ambitious plans on the agenda. By the time his term is over, he hopes to make progress toward new incentives for faculty, a new salary structure and even the reclaiming of an old University mission.

The incentives issue comes out of the ad hoc Committee on Faculty Responsibilities and Rewards on which Kaltsounis served last year. The committee came up with 20 recommendations, not all of which require approval of the faculty. But for those that do, a senate committee has been drafting new language for the Faculty Code that will come before the senate. Kaltsounis describes what is being proposed this way:

“Basically, strategic planning is being established for the University. There will be an overall mission of the institution; then each unit will need to come up with a plan that fits within the larger plan. This will go all the way down to individual departments and to faculty within those departments.

“What we’re suggesting is that chairs meet with faculty on a regular basis to discuss their plans. We think they should meet with assistant professors every year, associate and full professors somewhat less often. At this meeting, the faculty member would say what he or she intended to concentrate on for the coming year and would then be evaluated based on the plan.”

Kaltsounis believes such meetings are a new way to approach the issue of accountability—one that is more flexible and more positive. Faculty members could, for example, elect to concentrate on teaching for a few years and be evaluated on that basis rather than only on research.

But what if the faculty member and the department chair can’t agree on a plan? Then, Kaltsounis says, the faculty member would have the right to call for a collegial committee to review the matter. The committee could then make one of three decisions: that the department chair is wrong and should be overruled; that the faculty member needs to have a different assignment; or that the faculty member needs a development program in order to get to the place where he or she can contribute. “All of the possible outcomes are positive for the faculty member,” Kaltsounis says.

The salary issue is also one that has been studied by an ad hoc committee. The University has long lamented that its faculty is underpaid by national standards and that market forces are creating situations of inequity within the institution and even within departments. Although the Faculty Senate can’t address problems of that magnitude, it can take aim at something Kaltsounis considers to be basic. “We say we distribute salary increases according to merit, but we have not clearly defined what we mean by merit,” he says. “Every time we get a raise we have to hustle to try to decide what will count as merit, and it’s applied differently in different units.”

Kaltsounis hopes the senate will work at such a definition, and furthermore, it plans to propose salary grades for faculty within the ranks of assistant, associate and full professor. “We’re proposing three for assistant professors, four for associate professors and—because of the longer time span—eight for full professors.”

Faculty would move through the grades based on performance reviews, using the newly clarified definition of merit.

Of course, instituting salary grades requires funding. Kaltsounis says a special committee is currently working on developing a model of such a structure so that it will be possible to determine how much it would cost. “We’ll take that model to the administration, and then we’ll know how to proceed.”

If the first two issues he’s taking on have come out of work by others, the third is quite specifically Kaltsounis’ own brain child. He wants nothing less than to resurrect what he calls the “public mission” of the University. In other words, “preparing students to make a contribution to maintaining and enhancing our democratic way of life.”

How can that be done? Kaltsounis is proposing that the University use its general education requirement to achieve this goal. Each undergraduate student who graduates from the UW must earn 20 credits in the sciences, 20 in the social sciences and 20 in the humanities. But there is no requirement that any of these courses have a particular focus or relate to each other in any way. “Why not focus the general education requirement in this direction?” Kaltsounis says. He says many courses already in existence would fit within such a focus and that departments could be challenged to develop additional ones.

“This is not a new idea,” Kaltsounis says. “This public mission has simply been neglected by higher education since World War II, but there are many voices now around the country calling for it to come back.”

It’s not surprising that Kaltsounis’ should be one of them. He was raised in Albania under a dictatorship, escaping in 1945 when he was a teenager. And ever since Albania was finally freed in 1991, he has been working to teach Albanian youth about democracy—through textbooks, teacher guides and visits in both directions. Clearly this is a personal passion.

But then, Kaltsounis is not in general a low-key leader. “I will not take on something unless I think I can move it somewhere,” he says. “I don’t like the status quo. So when I became chair of the senate I chose a few issues to zero in on. I hope by the end of the term we’ll have made significant progress on those issues. I want to make a difference, however small it may be.”

Gerry Philipsen

Philipsen sees time of great change coming

When Speech Communication Professor Gerry Philipsen was approached about becoming the vice-chair of the Faculty Senate, he decided to throw his hat in the ring because he sees the University plunging into a time of change and believes the senate will play a vital role in how those changes play out.

“There are pressures both outside and within the institution calling for change,” Philipsen says, “and I feel the leadership of the faculty should aggressively represent their interests as decisions are made.”

Philipsen is no stranger to the senate. As an assistant professor, he was a senator representing his department, and he later returned to chair the Faculty Council on Instructional Quality and sit on the Senate Executive Committee for two years. Now he’ll spend a year as vice-chair before becoming the chair in 1999­2000.

The vice-chair job, Philipsen says, has two aspects. First, he’ll be assisting the chair and learning that job. And second, he’ll chair the senate’s Planning and Budgeting Committee, one of its most active and influential. On the budget side, that’s the committee that gives input on matters such as the University’s budget proposal to the legislature and how salary increases are to be managed. And as part of its planning function, the committee deals with such hot issues as program review and elimination and targeted initiatives. The idea for the University Initiatives Fund originated in the senate’s Planning and Budgeting Committee, Philipsen says.

In addition to chairing this important committee, the vice-chair also represents the senate on the University Budget Committee, serves on the Three Campus Committee and chairs the committee that selects the Faculty Lecturer

The change Philipsen sees coming is in the form of two major issues before the senate. One is accountability, which has been a hot topic statewide and nationally. The Higher Education Coordinating Board is, he says, “sharpening and systematizing” the way state institutions of higher learning account for themselves to the state.

“I think it’s appropriate and important for someone outside the University to hold us accountable, but the devil is in the details,” Philipsen says. “I think the consensus view of the administration and the senate leadership is that each state institution of higher education should be given a great deal of freedom to establish its own criteria for accountability that are sensitive to the unique mission of that institution.”

The HEC Board, Philipsen says, is interested in measures such as number of degrees, time to degree and student satisfaction. “We have to be aggressively and doggedly committed to something in the formula that would take into account the University’s missions of excellence in teaching, research and community service. It must go beyond efficiency and student satisfaction,” he says.

The other major issue that is current is the role of the faculty, and that includes the delicate question of tenure. Philipsen believes there will be “increasing pressure” for some kind of post-tenure review. Although officially such review already exists at the University, there has been concern about how formalized it is. The matter was discussed last year by the Provost’s Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Responsibilities and Rewards , and some senate legis-lation has grown out of that committee’s proposals.

“Both these issues are things that affect the faculty directly,” Philipsen says, “and I think instead of waiting for other people to impose something on us, we should take the lead in designing our own proposals on accountability and the faculty role.”

That’s why he believes the senate itself is so important. Although the vast majority of the faculty are involved in their regular roles and never serve in the senate, Philipsen feels there must be some members of the faculty who spend a portion of their careers “working on the common good” with their peers. “As a 20-year member of the faculty, I was willing to lend my efforts to the cause when I was asked,” he says.

A native of Portland, Philipsen earned his doctorate at Northwestern University in Chicago and taught at the University California at Santa Barbara before coming to the UW in 1978. He was the recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984.

As a senate leader, Philipsen believes he has several things to offer. “First of all I spent four years as a college debater,” he says, “and one of the things you learn in debate is to see a situation from multiple points of view. That’s an ability that’s useful in any sort of decision making or leadership situation.”

As a faculty member, Philipsen has also pursued studies that are related to what he’ll be doing in the senate. One of his research interests within speech communication has been small group discussion, and he has looked at the kind of leadership that helps a group to use its time productively and to make decisions “in a vigilant and reasoned manner.” Because senate leaders spend much of their time participating in and leading groups that are deliberating issues, Philipsen believes this experience will be helpful to him.

But beyond these specific skills is “a real interest and passion for the traditional ideals of the university as a place where inquiry and the search for truth are valorized and facilitated and protected,” Philipsen says. He believes this is a time when those ideals are under attack and that it is up to the faculty and administration to defend them. “I do feel that the faculty, for all its imperfections, is the greatest source of wisdom for governing the academic work of the university.” ¶

Nancy Wick