• Role Call and Quorum Check (Keith Woodbury)
• Approval/Corrections to the Minutes for August 21 (Keith Woodbury)
• Action Items
  • Discussion with SGA Officers on Posting of Student Evaluations
  • Contingency Plan and Position based on Fall Rush Outcome
  • Appointments to the Quality Council
  • Proposals on how to spend the end of the year money
  • Resolution Creating a System of Faculty Feedback for Deans and Chairs
• President’s Report (Norm Baldwin)
  • Senate Priorities
  • Co-chair for Faculty Life Committee
• Vice President’s Report (Steve Miller)
• Secretary’s Report (Keith Woodbury)
• Reports from Senate Committees
  • Academic Affairs (Don Desmet and Beth Macauley)
  • Student Pictures and Class Roles
  • Posting (on the web) of student evaluations
  • Inconsistent tenure and promotion standards between departments and colleges
• Faculty Life (Jerry Rosiek and Jimmy Williams)
  • Employment statement that includes gender and sexual orientation
  • Maternity leave policy for the Faculty Handbook
  • Emeritus College
• Financial Affairs (Terry Royed and)
  • Intellectual Property Rights proposal
  • Health insurance for graduate students
  • Joining the Worker’s Rights Consortium (moving from the FLA)
  • Test Services and other units passing on expenses to the academic side of the University
• Planning and Operations (Bill Keel and John Mason)
  • Final Exams: Tuesday due date for final exam grades; Saturday finals when Test Services are closed; Move Saturday finals up a week.
  • Fall break
  • ACHE data presentation (instructional/non-instructional split; TA data)
  • Environmental Audit—should we do one?
• Research and Service (Bing Blewitt)
  • Library fines and book replacement policy for faculty
• Student Affairs (Dexter Gordon and Alvin Winters)
• Senate Operations (Steve Miller and Harry Price)
  • Mediation Document
  • Ombudsman language for the Bylaws
  • Implementation of "Shared Governance Document" principles
  • Clarification of Senate Eligibility and Senate Reapportionment (before next election)
• Reports from University Standing and Other Committees
• New Business
• Old Business
• Announcements

We can make four appointments to the Quality Council. What should be the decision criteria—expertise; college/school; random selection; diversity considerations; or don’t bother me, you decide?

Mike Adams—Assoc.Professor of Management Science and Statistics

Bruce Berger—Assoc. Professor of Communications

Rahim El-Keib—Professor of Electrical and computer engineering

Mary Alice Fields—Music Librarian

Tom Lee—Endowed Chair of Accountancy

Gary Mankey—Assistant Professor of Physics

Ali Iran-Nejad—dept. and rank unknown

R. K. Pandy—Prof. Electrical and Computer Engineering

Pat Rafferty—Assoc. Professor of Music

Ken Wright—Professor of Health Sciences and Athletic Training Education

Whereas this proposal was drafted with input from five University’s experts in performance evaluation. And all of these experts agree that annual systematic feedback for deans and chairs is a better approach than our current system of evaluating deans and chairs, and

Whereas annual systematic feedback reduces the bias in the unsystematic feedback that most deans and chairs currently receive, and

Whereas annual feedback helps deans and chairs determine what to start doing, what to stop doing, and what to continue doing. In other words, it helps improve performance, and

Whereas evaluating deans and chairs once every five years does not provide frequent enough feedback to ensure a timely response to faculty concerns and a positive evaluation by faculty, and

Whereas three hundred and sixty degree feedback and evaluation is the preferred practice in contemporary public and private organizations. That is, securing feedback from the top, bottom, and equivalent levels in organizations is a contemporary "best practice" of management. And whereas, a system of faculty feedback for administrators at UA is an essential element in a system of 360 degree feedback, and

Whereas allowing faculty to provide feedback to chairs and deans, who they have usually known for years, is only fair because we allow teenagers to evaluate faculty based on a one-semester exposure to a professor. In other words, failing to allow faculty to provide annual feedback to deans and chairs, while requiring faculty to allow students to evaluate their classes, is a demoralizing inconsistency that is far too top-down management for an institution whose primary service provider typically holds a Ph.D., and

Whereas the system of annual performance evaluation that was proposed by the Faculty Senate in October of 2000 was rejected by the Council of Deans and the Provost because it was perceived to be threatening and an undue administrative burden, and

Whereas the proposed system of faculty feedback is nonthreatening to deans and chairs because it is for private use. One’s superior will not see the feedback, and

Whereas a system of faculty feedback for deans and chairs would not be an administrative burden. It would add roughly 1 percent to the 150,000 student evaluations that are already circulated each year and, if administered on-line, would be even less an administrative burden.

Therefore be it resolved that the Faculty Senate proposes the following system of faculty feedback for deans and department chairs:

1. The consensus of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Evaluation of Deans and Department Chairs is to propose a system of faculty feedback for the purpose of professional development, or to help deans and chairs improve their performance. This system will not be used as a system of performance evaluation for the purpose of determining retention or salary raises. As such, deans or chairs will have exclusive rights to their faculty feedback.
2. We propose that a base, or core, feedback instruments be developed by the experts serving on the Ad Hoc Committee. This includes experts in public sector performance evaluation, private sector performance evaluation, continuous quality improvement, and psychometrics. These experts will develop instruments with the input and insights of the Provost, deans, chairs, and faculty. To tailor the instruments to the unique nature of different dean and chair positions, deans and chairs will be invited and encouraged to make additions and modifications to the base instruments.
3. The consensus of our committee is that the system of faculty feedback should be administered annually to all faculty. However, to reduce the administrative burden of processing enormous volumes of written comments for the dean of Arts and Sciences (A&S), a random sample of A&S faculty should be surveyed or all A&S faculty should be surveyed and a random sample of their written comments word processed.
4. We further propose that feedback instruments be administered in one of two ways: (1) on-line or (2) according to the administrative mechanisms currently used to administer over 150,000 annual student evaluation instruments. We feel that a pilot study should determine which mechanism yields the highest response rate. A pilot study should also be administered in order to determine the questions that will ultimately be used in the base instruments (i.e., questions that provide deans and chairs the most meaningful information).
5. Finally, our committee recommends that faculty feedback surveys should be administered in the spring or, to reduce administrative burden and overloading faculty with surveys, should be administered in the fall and spring (e.g., deans in fall, chairs in spring). However, we also feel that the issue of when to administer a faculty feedback survey should not stand in the way of acceptance of the feedback system. Hence, we propose that the deans and chairs can decide when during the year that they would like to have their faculty feedback surveys administered.

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C. Faculty provide deans and chairs feedback every two years.

(for the purpose of documenting administrative burden in only the College of A&S)

*Not represented in the Faculty Senate.