Faculty Senate

                                        

February 1, 2007                                                                                                                                                                                          325 Graff Main Hall

Vol. 41, No. 7                                                                                                                                                                                              3:30 p.m.

                                       

I.       Roll Call.

      Present:  Abler, Ahmed, Brokaw, Choy, Clow, Cravins, L. Dickmeyer, Galbraith, S. Grunwald, K. Hoar, Hunt, M. Jackson, S. Kelly, Knox, S. Krajewski

C. Miller, P. Miller, Olson, Senger, Shanks, S. Smith, Straker, C. Wilson

Absent:  Crutchfield 

 

II.  Faculty Senate Member Substitution.  M/S/P to approve Joyce Shanks as a one-semester replacement on faculty senate for Sarah Johnston-Rodriquez.

 

III.  Approval of Minutes.   

The minutes from November 2, 2006 and November 30, 2006 were approved as distributed.

 

IV.  Reports.

A.  Chair’s Report –

Growth & Access open forum:  Wilson reminded members of the Growth & Access open forum on February 2nd at 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in Graff Main Hall auditorium.  Provost Hitch will be providing a summary of the plan, and then teams will provide reports.  Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss their thoughts and concerns about the plan and provide feedback.  The draft planning timeline includes a deadline for feedback from governance groups on February 16.  There will be time scheduled at the February 15 faculty senate meeting for discussion. 

 

Equity Score Card open forums:  The Equity Score Card team will be hosting a series of open forums about each section of the report:  Access, Retention, Excellence, and Institutional Receptivity.  The first in the series of forums will cover the Access portion of the report.  Two sessions are scheduled for Monday, February 5.  The first will be from noon to 1:00 and the second from 4:00 to 5:00 both in 337 CC. 

 

Extra members for APR:  The Academic Program Review committee has requested two extra members to help with the large load of APR’s they are conducting this year.  The senate executive committee approved the request.  Billy Clow and Haixia Lan have agreed to serve on the committee.

 

Senate Task Force to investigate Part-Time Tenure Track positions:  The senate executive committee approved a motion to create a Task Force to investigate the possibility of creating procedures to allow for part-time tenure track positions as a recruitment tool.  The task force may include 5 to 7 faculty with diverse representation who will work with consultants from administration and human resources.  Volunteers are still needed. 

 

Committee on Faculty Committees:  The International Education Committee requested last year to have members serve 3 year terms.  Senate did not endorse that recommendation.  Instead, the senate passed a motion to charge the senate executive committee to evaluate the possibility of multi-year terms for all or some of the faculty committees.  The Committee on Faculty Committees is working on that charge. 

 

SEI revisions:  A handful of departments piloted the SEI items and procedures that faculty senate approved last semester.  Some very helpful feedback has been provided and minor changes have been made.  Wilson encouraged other departments to consider participating in the pilot of these items this spring. 

 

Evaluation of Administrative Offices:  The senate executive committee has implemented the first stage of the evaluation of administrative offices.  Wilson asked members to take a few minutes to respond to the survey as the themes identified in the comments will be used to create a rating scale to identify the importance of the concerns.  The deadline for responses is Monday, February 12.

 

General Education update:   The SEC met with Eric Kraemer, chair of the General Education Committee.  The discussion included the following points:

  1. The General Education Committee should attend to previous assessments and reports of the program and make decisions at least in part based on those data and report.
  2. Any proposed changes to the program that are forwarded to the senate should be supported with a literature review that provides adequate justification for making the changes.
  3. The General Education Committee proposed having discussions about any changes with individual departments.  The sec strongly supports this tactic to ensure wide support of whatever proposal senate might review.

We hope to have the General Education Committee report to senate on their activities and status soon.

 

Faculty Senate nominations:  Nominations for several open seats on faculty senate are currently being taken.

 

B.  Chancellor’s Report – Wilson welcomed Chancellor Gow to campus.  Gow stated that he appreciated the warm welcoming he has received thus far.  There are many challenges to face and he is excited to get to know everyone

 

C.  Faculty Representative Report – Georges Cravins, faculty representative, summarized key issues that the Board of Regents looked at in Fall 2006.  These included response to the LAB report regarding banking of sick leave and faculty vacation use, UWS 7, criminal background checks, role of technical colleges in regular college programs, the Growth & Access agenda, and the establishment of a School of Public Health at UW Milwaukee.  Other related items are the Wisconsin compact, free tuition for UW graduates, and the governor’s budget proposals.  The next faculty representative’s meeting will be on Friday, February 2nd.    

 

D.  Student Association Representative’s Report – Student association liaison, Jake Rome, updated senate on important student senate issues. 

 

V. Briefing.  Kenna Christians, UWL Foundation, updated senate on the status of the Comprehensive Campaign.  Approximately $10 million in pledges have been received.  There have been four $1 million pledges, one for the academic building and 3 for the stadium.  More work will be done in about 3-6 months on raising funds for the academic building, after the general architectural plan is complete because many donors want naming rites for rooms.  Work is also being done to secure several estate gifts in the $500,000 to $1 million range.  The total campaign is looking to raise $8 million for student scholarships, $16 million for capital projects, $6 million for academic building, $10 million for stadium, $6 million for faculty related funds such as research and professional development , $7 million for UG research, and $3 million to enhance annual fund.  Faculty at this point can to be involved in the campaign by letting the foundation know of alums and putting together stories.  Possibly in the fall there will be a campus campaign and then the public phase will start.

 

VI.  GCC:  Approval of name change of CSDA program.  Jodie Rindt, representative of the CSDA graduate program, presented a program name change from CSDA to Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education (SAA).  She stated that this is the terminology currently used both in the US and internationally for this type of program and will allow students to find this program when searching online. 

 

M/S/P to approve program name change from CSDA to Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education  (SAA). 

                     

VII.   PTS:  Report on merit pay procedures and salary compression.  Anne Galbraith, chair of PTS, presented this report.  The first issue addressed a charge to the PTS committee to “investigate departmental procedures for the distribution of merit pay, specifically investigating whether such procedures contribute to salary compression”.  The following recommendations regarding this issue were presented in the report:

  1. After investigating this issue, it is clear that merit pay distribution is a miniscule contributor to salary compression relative to other contributors. We recommend that the focus remain on other, more obvious contributors to salary compression (see recommendations below).  
  2. The main contributors to salary compression continue to be competitive starting salaries for new faculty, followed by small wage increases thereafter. The competitive starting salaries are necessary to attract good people to our institution, and we must continue this practice. However, the small wage increases that compound over time result in compressed salaries for those at higher ranks. We used a large portion of the pay package from the 2000 pay plan and the 2001–2003 pay plan to address salary compression across the ranks. In particular, in the 2001-2003 pay plan, 10% of the pay package was used to address compression across ranks (in addition to the Chancellor’s discretionary fund.) Of this money, 2/3 was given to Full Professors and 1/3 to Associates. In addition, promotion adjustments for faculty ranks were also increased by 2/3 of the compression adjustments. These “promotion bumps” must continue to increase with the pay plans as originally recommended by the PTS Committee.
  3. We recommend investigating the addition of a “longevity bump” to be considered as a method to formally address salary compression issues. In this scenario, for example, an automatic percentage pay increase would occur after a faculty member has been promoted to the rank of professor and has attained “X” number of years of service at UW-L.

 

Comments from the faculty senate included the issue of compression for faculty who are long term assistant or associate professors.  However, compression at those levels is not as much of a problem as the full professor level.

 

The other charge that the PTS committee addressed in the report was to “audit the faculty promotion and workload issues/concerns identified in the Campus Climate Survey”.  Three faculty issues of concern were workload, promotion and salary and collegial decision making.  Two instructional academic concerns were promotion and salary and career growth.  The committee also met with Beth Hartung, Campus Climate Office, who is planning on doing another survey.  They were also informed that in the past 5 years there has been a trend where a larger number of female faculty have left campus versus male faculty. 

 

The following recommendations regarding this issue were presented in the report:

  1. The CCC should do another survey, as planned. (The CCC should consider taking advantage of expertise on campus to help with the survey design as there are several courses that require student projects, such as designing surveys.) In this survey, faculty should be asked their rank so that responses can be sorted that way. We also suggest that the four issues for faculty and IAS that were identified from the first survey are probed more deeply to tease out any specific sources of discontent. We suggest having relevant committees review the survey before it goes out so that the CCC can receive feedback about its content.
  2. Although this seems obvious, it apparently is not. We recommend that campus climate survey data and exit interview data are analyzed and used to make changes on campus. There is really no point in doing these things if no one responds to the problems that are highlighted. The data need to be worked into a living document, much like the equity scorecard, and then used by the administration to invoke changes to fix problems rather than ignore them.     
  3. We recommend that the IAS Committee continue to work on the two PTS issues that were raised from the survey. (We understand that their committee was specifically charged with examining the career growth issue this year, and assume that the related promotion and salary issue will be addressed during their investigation into IAS career growth.)

 

Discussion on this issue included exit interviews and the variety of ways these have been tried on campus to obtain information on why people are leaving.  There was also a question regarding if expectations are not made clear to faculty when hired or if the expectations have changed.  It was stated that JPC has recently worked hard on making the promotion expectations more clear.  Another comment focused on the trouble of tracking who actually has left UWL and how this problem is due to records not being shared well between two offices. 

 

No Action Items.

 

VIII.  Comprehensive Admissions Review Workgroup & CAPS:  Comprehensive Admissions plan.  Kathy Kiefer and Diane Schumacher presented the Comprehensive Admissions Review Report.  The report includes the eight action steps for campuses that were identified by a systemwide admissions advisory group.  It includes six recommendations formed by the UWL workgroup that was formed to consider the action steps and review UWL’s admission process.  The recommendations include: 

  1. Phase out the admissions priority categories as they currently exist. In a holistic admission environment, both quantitative and qualitative factors are weighed to make a decision.
  2. Use the academic profile of the previous and current years’ freshman classes (high school class rank, GPA, ACT/SAT scores) to determine guidelines for admission of the next year’s class. Use comparable appropriate data (e.g. prior institution GPA) to determine guidelines for admission of next year’s transfer class.
  3. Charge CAPS with the responsibility to create a matrix showing the likelihood of admission using trend data and data from the most recent classes. CAPS will review the matrix each year and update it as necessary.
  4. Prepare a “Freshman Admission Guidelines/Expectations” document each year that provides the admission criteria, the academic profile of the most recent freshman class, and the matrix to help gauge the likelihood of admission based on the primary factors. This document will be prepared by the admissions staff as part of the university’s recruitment materials. (Appendix B)
  5. Allocate additional resources for the admissions office as the number of applications increases, particularly if the Growth and Access Plan is adopted.
  6. Establish an enrollment council with representation from areas such as CAPS, JMAC, Joint Planning and Budget, the budget office, and enrollment services (admissions). Its charge would be to make recommendations about the composition of the university student population (numbers and profile) and identify the priorities for recruitment and retention. The group could also serve in an advisory capacity to the admissions office regarding recruitment initiatives. It would make recommendations regarding policy changes to the appropriate standing committees.

 

Questions included if there had been interaction with admissions at Madison.  It was stated that admissions offices from all system schools have been communicating regarding this issue.  Also system legal has been consulted.  Another question asked about the additional support that would be needed in admissions to implement this new evaluation system.  It was stated that we will receive over 7000 applications for 1700 positions and  now there will be an additional open-ended essay question, “how can you contribute to diversity on this campus”, on that will need to be evaluated on student applications.  Possibly one additional position may be needed in admissions to deal with the current workload and this additional workload.  There was concern noted on using non-academic information to evaluate a student for admission to UWL in that it is hard to assess if this is beneficial in the long run. 

 

CAPS and JMAC have supported these recommendations. 

 

M/S/P to support this comprehensive admissions workgroup proposal.    

  

IX.  Discussion of pay plan.  The Board of Regents is proposing a pay plan of 5.23% each year of the biennium.  If the pay plan is above 2%, then 10% of the pay plan is earmarked as a Chancellor’s discretionary fund.  There was discussion on what recommendation should be given to the chancellor for use of this portion of the pay plan.  Comments were that this money cannot be used for IAS salary adjustments.  Also it was noted that IAS who’s positions are not listed in the red book do not automatically get any pay increase, instead the deans would need to address this issue.

 

M/S/P that it be recommended that the 10% discretionary fund be included in the regular pay plan and not be targeted in any way. 

 

Furthermore if the pay plan is over 2%, then 1/3 must go for merit, 1/3 must go for solid performance.  The use of the remaining 1/3 was discussed.  Comments included that even though salary compression needs to be addressed in the near future, it has been quite awhile since there has been a pay increase and thus this is not the time for money to be used to address compression. 

 

M/S/P that for the first year of the biennium, it be recommended that 2/3’s of the pay plan be dedicated to solid performance and 1/3 to merit. 

 

By consensus it was determined that PTS will evaluate how the pay plan in the second year of the biennium be used.

 

X.  Study day recommendations – SEC was asked by the Provost’s Office to look at the current guidelines for study day.  SEC is recommending that the guidelines be changed to read: 

 

“No final examination shall be given to any student on Study Day. Study Day is a day to prepare for the final examination period. No student activities of any sort, with the exception of optional review sessions for final examinations, shall be scheduled on Study Day. This includes make-up classes or tests, committee meetings involving students and athletic practices or events.”

 

Comments included that it should be made clear the “optional review session” phrase means that it is optional for a student to attend any review session.  Furthermore this would not allow for forums or seminars, which students would be interested in attending, to be held on study day.

 

M/S/P to approve the presented guidelines. 

 

XI.   Adjournment.

The meeting adjourned at 5:05 p.m.

 

Respectfully Submitted,

Sandy Grunwald, Secretary