Faculty Senate Chairs'
University Faculty Meeting
Speeches
Address
to the Faculty - January 8, 1998
Dr. Howard S. Neufeld,
Senate Chair
Good
Morning, and welcome to the General Faculty Meeting
for the spring semester, 1998. I hope you all
had a relaxing holiday season, and are ready for
another semester of classes. Today I
want to relate what the Senate has accomplished over
the past semester, and our plans for the rest of
this semester. After my comments, Sara Zimmerman,
Vice-Chair of the Senate, will discuss upcoming elections
for the Senate, and for college and university wide
committees.
During the past months the Senate
has been busy with a variety of issues. Let me first present our major
achievements, and then discuss briefly some issues that we will all face in the
ensuing years. First off, we have fixed the email problem. The Senate,
Chancellor, and Office of Academic Affairs will retain the right to send messages
and information to all faculty via the faculty list serve. However, the
list serve is now read only, and moderated so that only official Senate and Academic
affairs business can be posted to it. For those faculty who desire a conduit
for discussion, the Senate, in conjunction with Academic Computing Services (my
compliments to Dr. Doug May for facilitating this) will set up a new list serve,
entitled FacultyVoice, which you may voluntarily subscribe to, and which will
be moderated by Dr. Len Bliss. This should alleviate the annoyances that
we experienced earlier with the faculty-wide list serve.
Second,
the Faculty Voice will be resurrected this semester,
with Dr. Peter Villanova as the editor. The
first issue will be hard copy, but afterwards we
will make the transition to an electronic version,
posted to the Senate WEB page. We hope to make
this a regular feature, with about 2 issues per semester. If
any of you would like to contribute to the Voice,
please contact Dr. Villanova with your ideas. Although
we're still working on our WEB page, we are making
progress in our goal of having all the minutes
routinely posted to the WEB page for your perusal,
along with a compendium of resolutions, and their
status, that have been acted upon by the Senate.
The Senate recommendations for changes
to the Handbook were sent to the Board of Trustees in December, where they were
all approved. This now means that the terms for chairs clause, which I
inadvertently thought had been sent to the Board of Governors when I addressed
the faculty in August, is now truly at the Board of Governors. After discovering
that the clause had been sitting in Academic Affairs for several months, the
Senate passed a resolution stating that changes to the Handbook made in the fall
semester be brought before the Trustees at their December meeting, and those
made in the spring at their June meeting. This should help move changes
along and reduce the time needed for their ultimate approval.
The
grievance clause that was forced on the Senate in
the spring, and which was amended by the Senate,
has been found to provide satisfactorily for faculty
rights, according to an analysis performed by the
AAUP. Even though the Senate eventually got
a clause that preserved faculty rights, Senators
maintained their objections to the manner in which
the Board of Trustees brought the issue to the Senate. In
a follow-up, the Senate will be sending the Board
of Governors a letter detailing their objections,
and asking that in the future, the Senate be given
adequate time to fully discuss Handbook changes,
and to be able to convene faculty forums for wider
input on such changes.
In
another matter, the Senate has passed a resolution
asking that the Administration approve a new committee,
called the Faculty Grievance Assistance Committee,
whose charge is to assist faculty who are contemplating
bringing a grievance before the Faculty Grievance
Hearing Committee. This was done to help faculty
decide whether or not their grievance has sufficient
merit to proceed with formal hearings, and to assist
the faculty member in preparing his or her grievance. The
committee would be composed of former members of
the Grievance Hearing Committee. This was done
to avoid potential conflicts of interest between
the Committee Chair and the potential grievant. Academic
Affairs has indicated that it supports this measure.
The
Senate has also approved changes to the Handbook
regarding Chair evaluations. The changes now
mandate only one meeting a year, in the spring, (which
for most departments has been the de facto standard),
while for initial appointees, a follow-up meeting
should be held immediately after their first semester
of service for additional planning. The new
terminology allows for written replies to a Chair's
evaluation by a faculty member.
The
Senate is moving cautiously on DPC reforms, due to
their legal implications, but progress is being made. For
example, it is now clear that departments can form
search committees to assist in the hiring of new
faculty, as long as the search committee is either
elected or appointed in some official manner and
a record is kept of who serves on the committee. This
is a great improvement over past practices, which
allowed for only the chair and the DPC members to
evaluate prospective job candidates, and enables
a larger number of faculty to participate in the
hiring process.
Another
contentious issue is post-tenure review. A
post-tenure review committee has been formed here
at ASU, and as mandated by the GA, will be studying
ways to implement this procedure on our campus. The
Senate, of course, will follow the results of these
deliberations very closely.
And
now a few issues that the Senate will be addressing
this semester. An ad-hoc committee was formed
to study maternity leave/child care issues on campus
and to determine a possible campus-wide policy for
maternity/paternity leave. Some of you may
have received a survey form from the committee as
you came to this meeting, while everybody will eventually
get this same form via email in the next day or so. We
would appreciate it if you would take the time to
fill it out and either mail or email it to the Senate. If
you can't complete it here at this meeting, just
mail it back to the address on the form. This
is an extremely important issue, and we need your
valuable input in order to develop a working policy
for ASU.
A
recent survey of most of the comprehensive schools
in the UNC system revealed, not too surprisingly,
that ASU is near or at the bottom when it comes to
rewarding faculty for promotion and tenure. Currently,
the policy at ASU is $300 for tenure and promotion
to associate from assistant, and $400 for promotion
to full professor. This pales in comparison
to the $2,000 offered for promotion to full professor
at NC Central, or the $1500 offered at UNC- Wilmington,
or even the $1000 at WCU. The budget committee
of the Senate has studied the issue and will be recommending
that tenure and promotion be separated in terms of
their rewards; that the amounts be upped substantially,
and that promotion to full professor be increased
to levels competitive with other UNC institutions. Dr.
Durham has indicated that he has the flexibility
to increase the reward structure, and we will keep
you posted as to how this comes out.
Selected
faculty, staff and students will be attending a workshop
on January 24th to discuss the strategic planning
report for ASU. This is a follow-up meeting
to the Leadership conference convened last semester,
but which will focus on internal inputs from the
ASU community, in contrast to the previous one which
solicited mainly outside opinions. While the
workshop can not accommodate all 650 faculty now
on board here at ASU, we do welcome additional interested
faculty who would like to attend. If you'd
like to participate, please contact me at the Senate
office. Because space is limited, we'll handle
this on a first come, first serve basis.
Finally,
a few words on two issues of concern as we approach
the new millennium, if I may use what is rapidly
becoming a worn out cliché. The first
issue is distance learning. As new technologies
come into use, as financial support for colleges
continues to be tight, and the number of potential
students continues to grow, there is increasing pressure
to expand our reach to the non-traditional student,
and to offer courses off-campus for those who can
not make the journey here. In addition, new "virtual
universities" are springing up all around us, offering
courses and degrees either via videotaped lectures,
or the Internet. Just this week I received
a brochure from an internet university offering canned
lectures from Harvard, and other notable colleges. Will
the professoriate become outmoded? Will the
traditional lecture/laboratory experience be surpassed
by computer simulations, and internet connectivity? How
will public universities compete with these new private,
online universities? Is the traditional university
experience a thing of the past?
My
feelings on this are ambivalent to some degree. On
the one hand, as Tevye the milkman would say, I can
see the benefit of trying to reach out to a greater
audience and of making use of new technologies. On
the other hand, too great an investment in distance
technologies, given our limited resources, could
be a detriment to our ability to provide the traditional
resident student with a quality educational experience.
Part
and parcel to getting a diploma comes the intellectual
stimulation of interpersonal contact, whether it
be student-to-student, or professor-to-student. Classroom
interactions offer personal collaboration on a scale
and intimacy not attainable with today's technology. There
is simply no substitute for the on-campus experience. What
kind of student will be produced that has worked
in the isolation of their home for four years, compared
to a student who has engaged in extra-curricular
activities, laboratories in the sciences, and projects
in the humanities. How will a cyberspace student
take a field trip?
I
think it is inevitable that distance learning will
grow and expand in importance, and even fulfill,
as it is doing to a small extent now, certain vital
needs for students in surrounding communities. But
the initial euphoria over the potential of distance
learning is, I think, over hyped. Questions
about its economic costs, its temporal costs, and
the social consequences of learning at home are yet
to be resolved. Currently, a large number
of faculty, staff and administrators here at ASU,
and at other campuses in the UNC system, are working
on the challenges of distance learning. My
gut feeling is that the traditional university student
is going to be around for the foreseeable future. But
to stay competitive in the changing milieu of educational
opportunity, we must be prepared to carve out our
special niche and to find new ways to enrich the
on-campus intellectual experience.
The
second issue is tenure. We've seen attacks
on the tenure system increase over the past decade,
with no let up in sight. In Massachusetts,
former Governor Weld's appointment as head of the
Board of Higher Education, James Carlin, a business
person, has met with great disdain among faculty
at the state colleges, particularly after he called
for the abolition of tenure at all state institutions. His
disparaging remarks about the professoriate reveal
a fundamental lack of understanding of the role of
higher education, and the means by which it should
be achieved. We should all count our blessings
that North Carolina has been spared such despotic
leadership. But we can not let our guard down. The
effort to do away with tenure is based on very flimsy
data (it encourages lazy professors, keeps incompetent
ones around too long, and so on). In actuality,
incompetent professors are estimated to make up less
than 2% of the total population of faculty, which
to me says that 98% of us are doing a great job. I
can think of no other industry that can claim such
a high competency rating.
Tenure
is the hallmark of academic freedom, and we must
be vigilant in our efforts to preserve it. I
think you are all aware of the phenomenon of the
red tides, which kill thousands of fish, and the
fact that Dr. Joanne Burkholder at NC State has been
instrumental in its discovery. Her findings
led her to conclude that the Neuse River was not
safe for people at certain times. Some mid-level
beauracrat wanted her fired from NC State for her
remarks, because it would hurt tourism. But
tenure prevented that from happening, and the beauracrat
I understand was himself fired. Examples like
these, and others, serve as all the justification
we need to keep the tenure system in place. The
Senate will be watching very closely to see that
post-tenure review does not open to the door to eventual
elimination of tenure in North Carolina.
Well,
that brings me to the end of my comments. In
conclusion, the current Senate has accomplished a
great deal over these past few months, and I want
to thank each and every Senator for their hard work
and long hours. I hope that we, your Faculty
Senate, have done well in your eyes, and for us to
be as productive this coming semester as the past
one. When I think of all that we have done
these past few months, I am reminded of one of my
favorite phrases from the poem Maud Muller, by John
Greenleaf Whittier:"For all sad words of tongue
and pen, The saddest are these:
,' it might have been.'" I am confident that this
Senate will have very few "might have beens"!!
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