Faculty Assembly Minutes

Thursday, January 17, 2008

M. Adams called the meeting to order at 3:00pm.

W. Hixon raised a concern about the workload of PTS. Also, the size of the institution does not lend itself to people being reviewed by people who know them. Moving to the college level would address these concerns. He had two questions for the assembly: 1) Do we want to do this? 2) What would the mechanics be? He added that this would be a change to the faculty handbook and so ideally any changes would be done by the April Board of Directors meeting.

It was noted that parliamentary procedure requires that this be made as a motion. W. Hixon moved that PTS would become a college-level committee rather than university-level. J. Barr seconded the motion.

C. Stevens asked if moving the five-year review process from PTS would alleviate the workload. W. Hixon responded that it would not do enough and that it does not address the concern that people do not know each other. He added that if this change were made, all colleges would still use the same criteria but could apply different weights. C. Stevens questioned if we have given enough time to the new evaluation criteria before making a change like this.

D. Ebener asked what the cons to this suggestion were. W. Hixon responded that there could be a lack of consistency and that the college-level committee might be less objective than the university-level committee is.

K. Van Blair asked if you have to be a full professor to be on PTS. M. Adams asked if you have to be tenured.

T. Schuster-Matlock asked what other work the PTS does. W. Hixon responded that they cover promotions, review of second and third year faculty.

A. Aji said a decision should not be made about this based on work load because there are benefits to moving to the college-level. He noted that the faculty handbook must be a living document and so there would be constant review of procedure and this would lead to the review process being more engaged.

L. Rodrigues-Fisher said that it is different to assess or give feedback to new faculty when you don’t know them. How can you encourage success without familiarity with the people?

M. Adams asked if this resolves the problem of familiarity. A. Swift noted that moving it do the college-level does not resolve the problem of familiarity because a faculty member could be most familiar with colleagues in another college.

C. Stevens suggested that the tenure decision could be made at the university-level, while probationary assessment up to that point could be done at the college-level. R. Richards added that the college-level committee could do reviews until tenure and make a recommendation to PTS about tenure. W. Hixon noted that PTS is currently university-level, this would be creating a new committee at the college-level. A. Aji asked what the benefit would be to making the tenure decision at the university-level. K. Soko said that people would know each other better at the point of early assessment and feedback. M. Adams said that dividing the two would address the issue of fairness. A. Swift said that then making feedback a college-level decision but tenure a university-level decision loses the familiarity at the most crucial point. Wherever the assessments are done, he said, they should both be done by the same body. L. Rodrigues-Fisher asked if the issue was about objectivity, and would the college-level not be objective. Is this the reason why tenure should be maintained at the university-level? C. Stevens said she did not think the college-level committee would fail to be objective but if there was concern for bias, there would be less concern at the higher level. J. Correa-Kaiser said that PTS now relies on letters from the candidate, chair and dean and these would continue to be the primary sources of information whether at the college-level or not so the question of bias would not be resolved.

K. Farrell asked if we were talking about performance familiarity as a means to more feedback. W. Hixon said that there was a better chance of knowing the individuals on the college-level.

K. Hickerson said that consistency could be achieved by a regular review process.

R. Richards asked what would happen at the college-level that is not happening now. W. Hixon said that now voting and discussion seems to fall along college lines because different colleges have different expectations and interpretations of criteria. R. Richards said this suggests that each college would be evolving different standards. A. Preston asked if there would be different PTS standards for each college. W. Hixon answered no, they would use the same criteria. A. Aji pointed out that different standards would not be an inevitable outcome. R. Richards noted that because we have different certifications and accreditations, we have different requirements and expectations, etc. The separate college-level standards would make sense and this will only continue to be true.

P. Hall said the amount of paperwork being submitted to the PTS is now to the point that the members are not reading the materials.

R. Stephens said that implementing a new system should happen before our new evaluation system goes into effect.

K. Van Blair said that talking about familiarity of disciplines is appropriate, but if we are talking about social familiarity this would be a new criterion.

C. Shoemaker said that the colleges are the best judge of requirements for their faculty.

C. Johnson said lack of familiarity with a discipline can lead to blind decisions.

J. Correa-Kaiser said the world load burns people out who are conscientiously doing all the reading. The peers who judge a person and write letters are supposed to be the best judge of someone based on the expectations of that college/department and that is why they are relied upon to make PTS decisions.

A. Swift said that all the paperwork being requested by PTS should be essential reading and worthy of the PTS committee members’ time. This would make the workload more manageable. There is no reason to proceed quickly to change the structure because this change won’t address all these concerns. W. Hixon said including more people will alleviate the workload. R. Richards said this spreads out the workload, which makes less work per person but maybe more work overall, system-wide this may not be such a good idea. Rather than change the system, we should first reduce the workload. Maybe we should be more selective about the paperwork that is submitted. Perhaps what is submitted for each evaluation should be specific to what is being evaluated.

P. Koch said that under current development are better tools to evaluate performance. This will lend itself to more local decisions where mentoring should be happening. The process will change then anyway.

M. Adams asked if a course release for PTS committee members would resolve the problem. L. Rodrigues-Fisher said no, the time released would not be commensurate to the work required.

A. Aji said that some people, because of a lack of clarity in the requirements, submit everything. This could be resolved if it were done at the college-level.

P. Hall called the question.

M. Adams and C. Shoemaker counted the vote at 28 ayes, 25 nays. The motion carried.