UWeek Vol.16, No.26 May 6, 1999

Faculty Senate

Salaries, roles, responsibilities policy comes to a faculty vote

On April 29, the Faculty Senate deliberated for two and a half hours. By the end of the meeting, the Senate had overwhelmingly approved a series of additions and alterations to the Faculty Code, pertaining to new policies on faculty salaries, rewards, and responsibilities. The Senate Code Committee and President McCormick will review the proposed additions and changes and transmit them back to the senate with any comments or corrections they might make. At its May 27 meeting, the senate will vote up or down on the proposed legislation as a single package. If the senate votes to approve the package, then the entire faculty will be asked, through mail ballot, to vote for or against it.

The ideas behind the legislation have been actively discussed, developed and reported for well over a year. The proposals themselves trace back to ad hoc committees formed in the spring of 1998 that were commissioned to study and make recommendations about faculty salaries, and about faculty rewards and responsibilities. Following the reports of these committees, new and revised code language was written in the summer of 1998. And since the fall of 1998, the proposed changes have been reported extensively to the faculty, revised repeatedly in response to faculty and administration comments on multiple drafts, and discussed thoroughly and repeatedly in all of the appropriate councils and committees. After several meetings conducted over several months by the Senate Committee on Planning & Budgeting, the Faculty Council on Faculty Affairs, and the Senate Executive Committee, the legislation was discussed in the senate meetings of April 22 and 29.

In addition to the meetings described above, Senate Chair Ted Kaltsounis and I held open discussions about these matters throughout the year with the chairs or faculty of some 50 departments, the president’s cabinet, the board of deans, and several other groups. In all of these discussions we sought as much advice as we could get, from as diverse an array of faculty as we could find. Now, the faculty has before it an impressive body of legislation that reflects the work of hundreds of faculty members and administrators at the University.

We have reported the details of the legislation in University Week and on the Faculty Home Page, as they have become available during the past year. The complete text of the current legislation is now available on the Home Page (www.weber.u.washington.edu/~fachome).

Now, it appears as though the senate in its May 27 meeting and, then, the faculty as a whole will have the opportunity to express its will about this potentially historic legislation. As someone who has watched this legislation being made, from its beginning to the present time, I am convinced that it is in the best interests of the University and its faculty.

The new legislation provides, among other things, codification of the following:

increased and substantial commitment to predictable annual merit increases for all meritorious faculty, thus providing a way to check the salary compression that has hurt so badly the continuing faculty;

provision for additional merit increases, when available;

a commitment to substantial raises attending promotions in rank;

commitment to regularly reviewing the funding of salary floors (minimum salary for each rank);

provision for raises tied to unit-level “market” adjustments and responses to outside offers;

systematic participation by faculty committees in decisions regarding allocation of new faculty salary monies;

a mechanism whereby faculty who are judged “non-meritorious” will be provided an opportunity for collegial, non-punitive, constructive reviews, with all current rights to appeal preserved;

a commitment to the principle that a faculty member should be allowed, over the course of a career, to negotiate a variable weighting in the balance of teaching, research, and service, at different points during that faculty member’s career;

regular conferences between each faculty member and the chair to negotiate responsibilities and expectations during a given period of work (every year for assistant professors, every two years for associate professors, and every three years for full professors).

The proposed changes, if approved by the president, the senate, and the faculty will not solve every problem the University might have. But they will, I believe, help to make us a better faculty. I ask each member of the faculty to study the proposals in detail and communicate your suggestions and opinions to your senator(s). Over the past few months I have had conversations with several faculty members about the proposal. I have found that, after reading and discussing the proposal, every faculty member I have talked to has agreed that, on balance, the package makes us a better faculty and thus, by extension, makes this a better university.

I have no doubt that if each member of this faculty was to write her or his own code each one would be different. If we were all lone scholars and artists we would each create our own form of self-government. But we are a faculty and we must govern ourselves with a code that represents our best collective effort at discussing and deciding how we are to govern ourselves. We now have an opportunity to achieve a substantial improvement in our common code and I urge all faculty members first to study the proposed legislation and then work to enact it. ¶

Gerry Philipsen, Faculty Senate Vice-Chair

University Week
The faculty and staff publication of the University of Washington
uweek@u.washington.edu
May 6, 1999