Faculty Senate Chairs'
University Faculty Meeting
Speeches
Speech
to the Faculty -
January
7, 1999
Howard
S. Neufeld, Senate Chair
Good
Morning, and Happy New Year to you
all. I hope everyone had a wonderful
holiday break, despite the ice and
snow. The climate forecasters
said it would be a warm and dry winter,
and up to the middle of December, it
looked like they were right on the
mark. But now, if this stuff
keeps up, it will only reinforce my
perception that forecasting the weather
is as much art as it is science.
I have
several things I want to discuss this
morning that pertain to Senate business. We
have a full agenda for the spring,
and, we will be conducting elections
for various university and college
committees, as well as the Senate itself. Gayle
Weitz, Vice-Chair of the Senate, will
talk about the elections process in
just a minute.
1999
marks the beginning of ASU's 100th
year, and its 28th as a member institution
in the UNC system. This is a
time not only to reflect back on what
has been accomplished over the past
century, but to look ahead to what
can be, and how we should get there. Since
ASU became a part of the UNC system,
the faculty has grown from 350 full-time
members to nearly 600. The student
population has increased from 7500
to 12,600. And the support staff
has also shown tremendous increases
over this same time period. ASU
is now the largest employer in NW North
Carolina, and the economic engine of
this part of the state. Suffice
it to say, were ASU not here, Boone
and the surrounding community would
be but a small to modest ski resort
town, with few of the cultural and
intellectual amenities afforded by
the presence of a
major comprehensive university. I say this to make a
point: what's good for ASU is also good for the entire region. Thus,
as ASU grows, Boone, Watauga and nearby surrounding counties benefit, through
increased jobs, more taxes from new arrivals, and better schools. ASU's
future is tightly linked to that of Boone and Watauga County. Working
together we can achieve a sense of harmony and balance that benefits everyone.
As an
example of the interdependence of town
and gown, the Chancellor has recognized
that the increase in student population
suggested for ASU by the GA (a nearly
5000 student increase) simply can not
be absorbed by the present infrastructure
of either the University or the town
of Boone. Mayor Velma Burnley
also has expressed her concern about
such an increase and the burden it
would put on city services. The
Faculty Senate recently sent a resolution
to the GA, the Board of Governors,
and the Board of Trustees, stating
that such an increase is not in the
best interests of this university,
or, the surrounding community. GA
officials now seem to be backtracking
on this issue, and although we will
have to grow some, the
final size will hopefully be way under
the 17,000 that the GA initially wanted.
Last
year we received only modest wage increases. These
were not as high as either the GA or
ASU had hoped. President Molly
Broad has vowed to go back to the legislature
to obtain further raises, but there
is substantial resistance within the
legislature to such requests, particularly
when the state's coffers are hit up
to pay back the $1B it owes to retirees
who were illegally taxed. However,
President Broad, hearing the groundswell
of discontent from the faculty at this
and other institutions in the UNC system,
has convened a task force to study
ways to increase the benefits
package offered to faculty
members in the state. Len
Johnson, from Human
Resources, is our representative on that committee. They
expect to have a completed report to the GA by the end of this month.
As you
might suspect, our benefits package
compares poorly to other states, and
even to our peer institutions. Consider
the following comparison with Utah
State University. The per capita
income in Utah in 1997 was $17,320,
compared to $19,957 for North Carolina,
yet in Utah, the state pays 100% of
your retirement and 100% of your insurance
and medical premiums. If you
were a faculty member there, making
$45,000, that would mean $10,800 in
benefits, or an equivalent salary of
$55,800. In North Carolina your
equivalent salary would be $47,152! Its
easy to see then, that North Carolina
has fallen behind in its compensation
to faculty, and both
established and newly
incoming faculty are disappointed at
such a poor benefits package. This is why President Broad is making
this a major item in her agenda for the coming year.
But to
obtain such an increase in our benefits
will require the approval of legislators
from across the state. And
although the budget for the next few
years will be tight, I nonetheless
believe this is an issue they must
tackle. I therefore challenge
our state senator, Virginia Foxx, to
work to increase our benefits, and
for the first time in her life as an
elected representative, to do something
positive for Appalachian State University,
the largest employer in her district. From
my example above, it is clear
that the legislature
has failed in its responsibility to
keep our benefits comparable with those
of the surrounding states. Because
of this, we risk not being able to attract the best faculty to North Carolina,
and, the very real possibility that our most talented faculty will go elsewhere,
where the financial rewards are more lucrative. It is time to stop
all this bickering between Republicans and Democrats down in Raleigh, and
to work in a bipartisan manner to improve the benefits for faculty all across
this state. And the same challenge goes out to our House representative,
Gene Wilson.
Both our representatives should remember that universities,
and their reputations, are made by the faculty they attract and keep.
Back
in the fall, at the Senate's retreat,
the Faculty Senate voted to hold a
forum on the pros and cons of unionizing
the faculty. This arose from
a frustration with low salary increases
and other related items. I would
like to announce that this forum will
be held on Friday, March 26 in I.G.
Greer Auditorium from 2-4 pm. We
hope many of you can make it. Pat
Shaw, from the AAUP will be there,
along with Dr. Tim Perri, from the
Business School. Some of the
items up for discussion are salary
schedules, merit raises, collective
bargaining, and outside binding arbitration
for grievance issues.
The evaluation
of the Chancellor that you all filled
out last fall has now been approved
by the Board of Trustees and the GA,
and will be distributed to everybody
in the next few days.
As we
move into ASU's second century, a number
of significant changes are on the horizon. Let
me address but a few in my time here
this morning. In a few weeks,
the committee studying the possibility
of moving to Division I-A football
will meet and discuss the report of
the hired consultant. Then, the
report will be made public and the
faculty will have the opportunity to
make their opinions known. Let
me simply say this - You all already
know my opinion about this issue, and
although my opinion should not be construed
as that of the entire faculty, I am
confident that most faculty are opposed
to this. The Senate will, of
course, conduct a poll after the report
comes out to make sure, and should
the faculty be overwhelmingly in opposition
to the move, I would hope that the
administration, and the Board of Trustees,
listen carefully to their faculty's
wishes and to consider the consequences
of their actions if they lean in favor
of transition. Would it be worth
it to lose the support of the faculty
simply to play football at a higher
level?
The Senate
will be working to implement the recommendations
of the Departmental Personnel Committee
Report, which was issued and approved
by the Senate back in 1995. First
and foremost, we will be discussing
the issue of separating search and
hire from promotion and tenure. While
some departments do create search committees
to assist with the hiring process,
those decisions still have to be approved
by departmental DPCs. The DPC
report recommends that these processes
be done by completely separate committees. In
other words, search recommendations
would not go through the DPC, but instead
would come from the department and
Chair and go directly to the Dean.
The Senate
will also look into the structure and
composition of DPCs and search committees. For
example, ASU appears unique in its
closed door approach to faculty searches,
by limiting who can and can not see
applications. It is a restrictive
and secretive process. Yet the
Law School at Chapel Hill lets all
faculty members see all applications! Certainly
if the Law School there can do it,
what need we fear here? It
is time for the administration
to trust its faculty to do the job
in the best way possible, with full
faculty involvement at all stages. We
need a more open policy, one that is designed to bring in the best faculty,
not one geared simply to avoid litigation.
In 1995,
nearly 53% of you stated that it is
appropriate for non- tenured faculty
to make personnel decisions on tenured
faculty, yet in the next question in
the report, almost the same percentage
said they thought non-tenured faculty
might not provide unbiased input when
it came to reviewing tenured faculty. These
conflicting notions are intriguing,
and the reasons behind them unclear. A
majority of those polled (73%) did
not agree with the statement that only
tenured faculty should serve on DPCs. Yet
the recommendation of the report, interestingly,
was to restrict DPCs
to only the tenured faculty. Certainly there is role
conflict when non-tenured faculty evaluate tenured faculty, who themselves
will be making decisions on their tenure in the future. But perhaps
this is not a problem at ASU, and we should leave well enough alone. Or
perhaps it is a case of protecting a few who do feel threatened when placed
in this position. In any case, it promises to be a contentious issue,
and one that will be dealt with very carefully. A number of other DPC
issues will also be addressed, and if you would like a copy of the DPC report,
simply contact the Senate
Office.
Finally,
we have been asked to review the Bookstore
Rental Policy. Yes, we know it's
a money saver, but is it in the best
educational interests of our students? Does
it promote a lifelong love of books
and learning, or does it send the message
that learning is ephemeral, and non-lasting,
something to be crammed into one's
head for the current semester, and
then forgotten once the next semester
starts? How many of us have wondered
(however facetiously) if our students
truly take anything with them intellectually
from one semester to the next? Would
making students purchase their textbooks,
rather than rent them, reverse the
trend toward disposable knowledge? In
1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote this in
a letter to former
President James Madison:
"Books
constitute capital. A library
book lasts as long as a house,
for
hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere
consumption but
fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional
men, setting out
in life, it is their only capital."
Perhaps
its time we motivated our students
to obtain some capital.
Let me
conclude with the following: the
future of higher education promises
to be transformed by new technological
innovations, by distance learning,
and by a trend toward for- profit universities
that may compete for students at traditional
schools. While some of these
trends may turn out to be ill-advised,
others may significantly improve our
ability to impart knowledge and skills
to our students. It is we, the
faculty, who must experiment and determine
which changes are for the better, and
discard those that do not work. We
may also have to rethink the notion
that all qualified students must obtain
a college degree in order to be successful. We
like to point out that a college degree
increases a student's lifetime income,
but recent
studies reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education appear
to contradict that paradigm. When students are separated by their GPA,
only those students who perform above average appear to significantly increase
their earnings potential. Students who perform less well would often
have been better going straight into the job market. How we will deal
with these facts is unclear, especially in a situation where funding is so
closely tied to the FTE. But it does make one question whether we should
always be going after all the students we can get, or whether we should raise
our standards, and concomitantly our academic expectations, to deal with
fewer, but better students. Only time will tell how this plays out.
As this
is my last speech to you as Chair of
the Faculty Senate, let me conclude
by saying that it has been an honor
and a privilege to have served you,
and I want to thank Senate Members
for putting up with my sometimes brusque
style, and my impatience with seemingly
endless debate. And I want to
thank all of you here today for supporting
your Faculty Senate. This is
your representative organization on
campus - so make good use of it.
Have
a great semester!!
Dr. Howard
S. Neufeld, Professor
Department of Biology
Appalachian State University
P.O. Box 32027
Boone, NC 28608-2027 USA
-----------------------------
Tel. 828-262-2683
FAX 828-262-2127
Email: neufeldhs@appstate.edu
WEBSITE: http://www.biology.appstate.edu
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