Assembly Highlights for November 2002

WCU's delegates to UNCs Faculty Assembly, Mary Adams, Kathy Wright, and Mary Anne Nixon, represent our faculty's concerns at the system level, reporting what they learn from system administrators and other delegates annually and making resolutions and recommendations. Because we believe the knowledge we gain in Chapel Hill to be potentially more powerful than our recommendations, we'd like to share our findings in report form as soon after meetings as possible. 

Below you'll find a short summary of discussions we thought of greatest concern for the WCU community at the last session, along with links to the web pages for the Faculty Senate and the Office of the President for you to read more.

These notes are not the official assembly minutes. You can read official Assembly minutes at the UNC main site.

Summary of Findings

Note: Some documents linked to this report are in PDF format and require Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don’t have it, download it here:

• Acrobat for Windows
• Acrobat for MacIntosh

printable version of these notes

• Microsoft Word
• Acrobat

Of Special Concern to WCU: Two Resolutions

The assembly passed three resolutions this session. One honored President Broad for her five years of service. The other two resolutions both came out of WCU:

1. a resolution in support of SPA Salary increases
2. a senate-sponsored resolution on the Retirement plan

The senate should now decide whether to ratify these resolutions.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND TENURE

• Betsy Brown, Associate VP for Academic Affairs, chairs the Faculty Work Life Committee. Her recent report on Performance Review (AKA Post-Tenure Review) indicates that of the 3,555 faculty reviewed since 1998, only 3% have been found deficient. Most of these were from NCA&T, NCSU, UNCC, and UNC-CH; FSU, UNCP, and WSSU found no faculty deficient, and WCU and the other schools found 1-4 faculty deficient.
  • Twenty department chairs reported they thought faculty entered retirement or phased retirement to avoid post-tenure review
  • Some complain this review is time consuming and redundant; however, others say it has led to “improved documentation about expectations for performance”
• The Academic Freedom and Tenure committee continues to investigate ratios of administrators to faculty, an issue that affects class size and academic freedom. New administrators not only limit faculty’s jurisdiction over their rightful domain—curriculum, grading, and tenure—but they erode public confidence. The committee talked about applying the United Way’s standard for public charities (no more than 5% of operating budget devoted to administrative overhead). Several UNC faculty complained of redundant administration, especially the duplication of dean’s functions at the associate vice chancellor level.

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NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR FACULTY

• In line with President Broad’s new Internationalization initiative, UNC has proposed new opportunities to collaborate with Monterey Tec in Mexico, including student exchange and study abroad programs. Of most interest to us:
  • UNC faculty would receive housing and stipends (above and beyond salary) to teach in Mexico for short courses or whole semesters (courses taught in English)
  • Teacher licensure students could participate in cross-cultural immersion experiences
  • NC Communities with large Mexican immigrant populations could receive Community Learning Centers, established by Monterey Tech. (NC Center for International Understanding will serve as liaison with Latino leaders in NC)

Read the memo and stay tuned for more information (no specifics yet)

• The TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) will host its 3rd annual conference in early April 2003. UNC faculty can submit papers and panel topics. Last time the TLT picked up the travel tab for participants. Check the TLT Site for details.
  
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SALARY, RETIREMENT, AND BENEFITS

• Faculty Salaries: Gretchen Bataille, VP for Academic Affairs, was asked for more detail about the Board of Governors Resolution on Salary Increases, which specified that raises this year should for equity only. She explained
  • By NC law, SPA staff could only be granted raises by the legislature; tuition-increase money cannot be used for it. She added that she and others will press very hard to influence the legislature to raise SPA salaries
  • The policy was recognition of serious inequities not only within departments but also between our departments and those of our peer institutions. The goal was to get all faculty within 80% of those institutions. However, it was a one-time policy, and was not meant to discourage the practice of merit raises.
  • Most faculty felt that the practice of assessing tuition increases to create raises sets a bad precedent for several reasons: it pits schools and employees against each other, it costs more for the students, and it doesn't encourage legislators to shoulder the responsibility for keeping schools competitive.
  • Decisions to distribute funds were to be "based on discussions of the criteria and the process by the faculty in the departments with the final criteria recommended by the chair and the dean.” This quote was from the memo she sent to Chancellors in October. The whole memo, which she invited us to share with other faculty, can be viewed here:

  Bataille's salary memo
  BOG resolution on salaries
  WCU faculty raise structure by department

  (Note: the raise structure table compares the average salary of WCU academic departments to those of comparable schools or "peer institutions." Because the Board of Governors said that raises were to be used only to correct salary inequities, departments are broken into three groups--considerably below the peer group, below the peer group, and near to or above the peer group. The far-right column shows the projected raise for eligible faculty in those departments. For a definition of "salary inequity," see VP Bataille's memo).

• SPA salaries. Assembly passed a resolution, authored at WCU and sponsored by the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee, asking President Broad and the Board of Governors to support raises for SPA staff at the legislature and requesting that campus faculty work to publicize the problem of low SPA staff salaries. VP Bataille said that it remained a priority, adding that legislators, not UNC administrators, control SPA salaries.

  Resolution supporting SPA staff raises

• The Benefits committee sponsored a motion, authored at WCU, asking that moneys withheld from the State Employees retirement system be returned. This motion passed unanimously.

  Resolution on State Retirement Plan

• Retirement: Betsy Brown’s study of the Phased Retirement program so far suggests faculty consider it a benefit and so it will continue. In the year 2000, when 23 WCU faculty entered phased retirement, we established a record for all 16 campuses that we still hold.
• More than half of all UNC faculty are over 50. This would bode ill for our retirement system if anyone could afford to retire.

  Table on Age Structure of UNC Faculty

BUDGET AND ENROLLMENT

• Budget. We saw the 2003-5 Budget Request, which will be online soon
  • The proposed budget includes 6% raises for EPA personnel (I didn’t see a distinction between teaching and non-teaching) and, since SPA salaries are controlled by the legislature, no mention of SPA salaries.
  • The proposed budget includes a list of expansion requests categorized by UNC Priorities (Access, Intellectual Capital Formation, K-16 Initiatives, Creation and Transfer of Knowledge, Internationalization, and Transformation and Change). It includes money for a WCU Biotechnology/ Genomics Laboratory and the Highlands Biological Station.
  • However, we were warned that, compared to next year’s budget battle with the legislature, this year’s budget process was a “walk in the park.” The UNC VP for Budget, Jeff Davies, and VP for Public Affairs, J.B. Milliken, said that democratic losses in the house and senate don’t bode well for us. We can expect a less sympathetic audience eager to go after vacant and lapsed salary money (see the BD-119 under Academic Affairs for numbers), overhead receipts, and graduate assistantships. Many faculty positions are now kept vacant to fund graduate assistantships.
  • Though UNC enrollment is at an all-time high, the percentage of UNC high school graduates who enrolled at UNC schools dropped this year, perhaps due to larger graduating classes. Some legislators may use this statistic as grounds to take back bond funds.

The UNC Budget Advocacy Notebook explains how faculty can help by contacting legislators, writing to the media, and enlisting the support of local businesses.



• Enrollment. President Broad's Assessment Office gave us the Fall 2002 Enrollment Report, which gives comparative numbers for enrollment, demographics (age, race, etc.), SAT scores, etc. The whole report will be soon be available on the UNC Assessment Reports page.
  
  In the mean time, I've attached a few revealing graphs:
  

• The university as a whole saw huge increases in distance education (people enrolled from off campus) and resident credit (people enrolled in distance ed courses while on campus) this year (Figure 8)
• In terms of demographics, the larges enrollment gains were for women, minorities, returning students, and older students (especially students over 36). If this is a statewide trend, we might see how best to appeal to those populations (Figure 4).
• Historically black institutions experienced the greatest minority-student-enrollment growth--by far.
• The enrollment news is mixed. The bad news is that WCU had the lowest growth of any focused-growth institution (that is, one given special funding to grow).(Figure 2). The good news is that, though other schools raised their SAT scores more than we did, we were the only focused growth institution that raised SAT scores for both in-state and out-of-state students. Winston Salem State, a focused-growth institution that grew rapidly last year, raised its in-state student SAT scores but not its out-of-state student scores.

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FACULTY GOVERNANCE CONCERNS

The Governance committee is working on a resolution to establish a standard for good practices of shared governance on the campuses. Such a resolution will probably incorporate AAUP standards; it would also define what constitutes faculty involvement (the term could not be used to refer to committees appointed by administrators) and specify sanctions or censure for those administrators who don’t observe the standard.

Read more about the proposed standard

For more information and the full minutes, please go to the link for the faculty assembly.