Town Hall Meeting on Faculty Hiring
October 12, 2004
[This transcript was produced by Marc Becker and David Robinson. All the
people quoted here were asked to proofread the text, except for President
Dixon.]
Dave Robinson (AAUP chapter president) presented opening comments. About 28 faculty attended, including the university president, VPAA, and one division head.
Four announced categories for discussion:
1. Use of non-tenure-track (perhaps better: contingent) faculty
2. Sabbaticals (without funding for replacements)
3. Name change from Division Heads to Deans and hiring of administrators
4. Other issues of concern.
Robinson handed out two tables, supplied by Faculty Senators: (1) Temporary Faculty Goal for Fall 2006, and (2) Faculty Positions Fall 2003 - Fall 2004. Robinson acknowledged that the impulse to increase use of contingent faculty might reflect special concerns in recent years, e.g. dropping student enrollment, changes in student interests, etc.
Wolfgang Hoeschele: Are statistical methods supposed to determine how many temp positions there will be in each division (regardless of differing needs of different divisions), thus having a potentially negative impact on the quality of faculty who are actually hired in these temp positions?
Peter Rolnick (via Robinson): AAUP national standards recommend that “no more than a certain percentage” of faculty member should ever be non-tenure-track. That does NOT mean that AAUP recommends the maximum level, as some administrators have implied. Truman’s special mission would indicate that we should remain well below that maximum.
James Harmon: What is the relationship of temporary to permanent faculty?
Dan Mandell: How were these figures (on handout) reached?
Tom Marshall: The faculty handbook discusses the relationship of faculty to division heads and administration. What about the temps? Is there any faculty input into these figures (on handout)?
David Gruber: The old faculty handbook states that faculty will be involved in all faculty staffing matters, but that language has been deleted in the most recent version of the handbook. Previously, contingent faculty members were hired with the same care as full-time faculty; now it appears that we will take shortcuts.
Sally West: What does it mean to have lines revert to administration, if these are multi-year lines?
Hoeschele: I am only here because my position was advertised as tenure-track; otherwise, I would have searched for other jobs.
David Conner: Is there a connection between temporary lines and loss of tenure lines? In Social Science, do we have to lose five lines before we get any new hires?
Marshall: Would temporary people be subject to same process as tenure-track people?
Dennis Leavens: In Language & Literature Div., some of us are concerned that temps have more classes and students than those with tenure lines—the issue of inequitable workload.
West (via Robinson): In History, we have had one experience with a replacement who had a heavier work load. We all worked to help him, but felt cheated that it was that kind of situation. How does this work in other disciplines and divisions?
Chett Breed: The situation has changed from when we came in the 1980s. In Lang&Lit there was of course a two-tier system in which part-time faculty received reduced benefits, but they were full voting members and were thus fully empowered in our divisional deliberations. We are now going in the wrong direction in terms of how we treat our part-timers.
Conner: We need a long-time framework for predicting where the needs will be; it takes as many as two years to go from starting the process to getting a new person working on campus. And what does the new policy do to fill ongoing needs (as in Psychology)? Hiring decisions are difficult to do on such a short horizon (from June to August).
Gruber: Will contingent hires be eligible for tenure hires on same basis as everyone else?
Conner: I have questions about how the process will be implemented.
Gruber: I have questions about how we treat and socialize contingent faculty. If we factor in the hiring process every time, this can be a very expensive policy. How are we going to treat contingent faculty?
Robinson: How will the comings and goings of temporary faculty affect students, and how will students respond to temporary faculty?
Hoeschele: Teaching and research require long-term commitments. For a temp to teach a JINS course, for example, the governance process would need tweaking. Maybe we cannot expect temporary faculty to teach such a course. The use of temporary faculty can hurt the quality of instruction and commitment. Programs for undergraduate research require an understanding that research is an ongoing process and assists teaching, which is conducive to better research. We cannot ‘teach research’ to students if we don’t do it ourselves.
Terry Olson: What would be the expense of teaching such new faculty our process and the outcome statements if they only stay for one year?
Leavens: GTAs in English have not received a raise since 1988 (their stipend is $8000 annually). This was competitive then, but now GTAs often have to find other jobs to supplement income. They have provided a great service, but their abilities are now undermined, and this is an injustice.
Robinson: Yes, the situation of GTAs seems to be part of our part-time employment issues.
Harmon: The Guest Visiting Artist in Art provides unique and positive experiences.
Elaine McDuff: A grant program provided us with wonderful person in Sociology/Anthropology, and now we have a hole that she is gone. We wanted to keep her, but she needed a permanent position. That type of program is too demanding (McNair, advising, teaching), but it provided wonderful service. It was a positive experience, though, probably better than other plans for temporary faculty.
Robinson: We should have something like a Mellon Fellowship for Junior Faculty.
Gruber: I am not so sure; such programs can contribute to a process of slow erosion of the core faculty.
Marshall: Hiring temporary faculty should be purview of the faculty. My concern is that we already don’t do a good job of hiring temporary faculty (sometimes it is logistics—the middle of summer and no one is here).
Olson: We sometimes hear about how much damage a temp can do in one year.
Conner: The chart makes it look like there isn’t much change in other divisions, but only in Social Science.
Robinson: For some people, the big issue is that we haven’t talked about it this policy enough yet. It was simply announced, as a done deal.
Marshall: The Faculty Handbook says that temporary positions will be discussed with faculty, but that hasn’t always happened.
Breed: Faculty members have to have responsibility for hiring. I relate this issue to the current question of sabbatical replacements, also to the faculty governance process.
Robinson: Our current period of no sabbaticals, now to be followed by “sabbaticals with no funding,” means that we have a vicious backlog of demand for sabbaticals. There appears to be a missing step that should have been considered three to five years ago, i.e. we could have in the meantime have kept granting sabbaticals without funding them, couldn’t we?
Roger Festa: It may be a cultural thing in Chemistry–no one is motivated to apply for sabbaticals.
Leavens: It is difficult for some faculty to go on sabbatical because of demands of the workload in their discipline. Some will not apply for the “new sabbaticals” because of what it would mean for their colleagues, who must cover the classes.
McDuff: But this was not mentioned when the call first went out; our assumption was that there would be replacements. But without replacements in a small discipline, it would be impossible for anyone to take a leave. This question has not been answered.
Hoeschele: I applied assuming that there would be replacements. My Division Head Seymour Patterson told me that I should not be penalized because I am from a small discipline.
Gruber: The new AAUP policy on contingent faculty (authored by Gruber and others—ed.) takes up many of these issues. It addresses the integrity of the academic profession, provides guidelines and models, and calls for reducing dependency on contingent faculty.
Festa: What do you do when two-year temp slot comes to an end but faculty of the discipline want to renew the slot. Is it possible to renegotiate for a tenure slot?
President Barbara Dixon: If the person has come out of a temp search, that pool will be different than the one for a tenure-track search. That is why we normally do not convert a temp line directly to a tenure line.
Robinson: Usually there has to be an open search.
Dixon: But if the person is qualified, usually there is nothing to keep that person from applying during the new search.
Festa: What would it take to convert a temp to a tenure line?
Dixon: It would have to be requested in the normal budgeting procedure.
Gruber: There are inherent problems in converting positions from contingent to tenure-line.
Harmon: On the question of changing the title from Division Head to Dean, what does this imply?
Festa: I have already witnessed some confusion with the nomenclature.
Dixon: My perception is that the work of Division Heads here is the same as Deans elsewhere (budget, hiring, etc.). The title would reflect what other universities have. The primary consideration is the small pool of applicants when Truman recently searched for Division Heads. We may not be getting the quality that we should. We had only 18 applicants last time for Head of the Social Science Division; others have been in the single digits. Such jobs ads at my previous university would yield 80-90 applicants.
Robinson: Were the salary levels the same? (Answer: yes) Was advertising comparable? (No answer to that.)
McDuff: Can we clarify what role Deans had in Dixon’s previous institution?
Leavens: A Division Head should have good experience in research and grantsmanship.
Robinson: I certainly agree, especially with the latter.
Gruber: We also have a weak culture in terms of how faculty members are involved in hiring. The administration regularly overrides faculty recommendations.
Judi Misale: Is faculty input valued? The culture can be very different even across disciplines. Will faculty input be decided on a personal or divisional basis?
Leavens: Such discrepancies look odd.
Dixon: But it doesn’t look different to me whether we call them Deans or Division Heads.
Robinson: Is the title mostly to make the job look more attractive, without substance?
Lynn Rose: It could be worth it, just to get better candidates.
Dixon: My office is looking at getting together with faculty in small groups (taken across divisions, etc.) to discuss issues. Everyone will get an invitation. We anticipate that there will be three formal questions, and one of them will be on organizational structure. We will do this as soon as my office can get it organized.
Adjournment.