Facutly Senate Meeting Minutes

Faculty Senate Meeting Minutes

November 17, 2004

Attendance:

Dennis Reinhartz, Dan Formanowicz, James D. Spaniolo, Dana Dunn, Li-Chin Ho, Bill Crowder, Abdul Rasheed, Mark Peterson, Hanli Liu, Max Spindler, Ishfaq Ahmad, Kambiz Alavi, Marilyn Jolly, Elmer Polk, Tom Ingram, Laurie Porter, Johanna Smith, Stanley Palmer, Toni Sol, Scott Conklin, Carol Jessup, Charles Nussbaum, Robert Young, John Bacon, Rasika Dias, Merlynd Nestell, Minerva Cordero-Epperson, Christopher Kribs-Zaleta, Dan Levine, Harriett Amster, Judy Reinhartz, David Stader, Diane Wasson, Becky Boles, Mary Weber, Reni Courntey, Lorrie Hegstad, Catheleen Jordan, Joe Kongevick

Call to Order:

The meeting was called to order at 2:45 p.m. by Senate Chair Reinhartz.

Approval of Meeting Minutes

Senator Bacon moved to approve the October 6th meeting minutes as written and was seconded by Senator Judy Reinhartz.

Remarks by the Chair:

Dr. Reinhartz announced to the senate that a majority of the meeting would be devoted to the Provost’s and President’s presentation and discussion regarding Strategic Planning. The Strategic Planning portion of the meeting was closed to the media to allow for freer discussion.

Dr. Reinhartz also advised the senate that there would be no committee reports today either. Committee reports will be discussed at the next meeting on December 1, 2004.

Senator Amster’s committee of last year (standing committee) looking at administrative raises and perks for a period over a decade has been pulled to an ad hoc committee. Senator Amster needs volunteers. Senate Chair Reinhartz asked anyone interested to contact Professor Amster. If no one volunteers, Senate Chair Reinhartz will have to appoint members.

The Faculty Senate will begin a study of faculty turnover by college or school. The Operating Procedures Committee would normally do this research, but Senator Formanowicz, who also heads up not only Operating Procedures, but also Academic Freedom and Tenure, has a lot to do. Therefore, this issue will be moved to the Academic Liaison Committee which is chaired by Senator Kribs-Zaleta. He will be announcing what needs to be done soon.

1 Senator Sol discussed the Texas Council of Faculty Senates meeting. She was happy to report that everything is calm. The council members were assigned to talk to their respective senates about the following issues:

- The affect of the tuition increase. She was happy to report that faculty salaries increased from between 2 to 4.5% across the state depending on the institution. - The impact of the war on enrollment. Senator Sol reported that there was no impact on undergraduate institutions, but graduate institution enrollment was down 30% nationwide. - Enrollment is up all over except Midwestern Sstate University. - Texas A&M Kingsville’s Faculty Senate made a ”No Confidence” vote for the president and provost due to absence of trust.

Senate Chair Reinhartz: Senator Formanowicz and I are going to the FAC meeting in Austin to meet with the Chancellor on 12/2 and 12/3. We went down for one meeting in October, it was relatively passive as well due to some speakers who did not show or couldn’t make it. They will be present at the next meeting. We will make a report on the FAC meeting at the next Faculty Senate meeting.

Remarks by the President:

I want to mention that this is the last opportunity to provide input on the question of sports expansion. We recently completed a cost study and made it available with a comment period for 30 days without any firm deadline. Of the 150 responses, more were in favor of reinstating football than opposing it, but there was a pretty wide range of opinions and views. I would be hoping to make a decision and issue a statement before end of December and perhaps maybe before the end of the semester. If you would like to share your thoughts, I want to encourage you to do so. I met with the athletic alumni last week and heard their views. I have said to number of people that the judgment will not based on just cost, but on timing, priority, and our perception what’s in the best interest of the university. I will share my judgment in the next 30 days.

Remarks by the Provost:

(Provost Dunn brought 3 separate documents for each senator to review.)

There were documents in the back of the room, one entitled, “Preparing for the Future,” which is a copy of the presentation we made a little over 2 weeks ago for core changes in our tuition structure to be effective Fall, 2005. The committee was asked to review and make a recommendation to the president by December 1. If you turn to the 3rd page, you can see the heart of the proposal that was made. You may have noted in the press that UT system made a commitment to the legislature that no UT System institution would increase its mandatory tuition and fees more than 5%. We have elected to go forward with the proposal of 5% to the committee. You can see the details in the bullets

2 presented. It’s a $9 per student credit hour increase in designated tuition which was one of the two components of tuition, and accounts for approximately 50% of our tuition. We also will be increasing the enhanced tuition at the graduate level in Nursing by $10 per credit hour. We will also continue our discount for on-time payment. The proposal details a new feature of a rebate of $250 per year for students who complete 30 hours in 2 long semesters. Students would be eligible for this rebate up to 4 times for a total of $1,000. We believe this could be a real incentive for on-time graduation. I think the committee has a general interest in it. We’ll see what the recommendation is in the coming weeks. Please share this document with others and news about it because we do want to disseminate this information to the campus.

Questions for the Provost:

Senator Smith: I’m wondering if there is any sense of how many students would benefit from the rebate. My sense is we don’t have many students taking 15 hours in both the fall/spring semesters.

Provost Dunn: We have a significant portion of students, but of course it’s the case that many of our students take fewer hours. One statistic I’d like to share is that over 70% of our students now take 12 or more hours. We are no longer a majority part-time campus. There is a difference between 12 and 15 hours per long semester. We think, however, students who take 12 hours which is technically fulltime enrollment many of them may take additional courses to get through more quickly. We are predicting that we will have many people change their behaviors as a result of this incentive. We have some suggestive data that students may limit the number of hours based on what they can afford to pay so this rebate will make it easier for them. We made a projection as to how many students might change their behavior, but it is merely a projection. The bottom line is that this is an experiment. We won’t know the results until the end of year one. We stated that with respect to both last year’s tuition restructuring and the proposal for next, that anything we do is an experiment. If it proves successful after we’ve evaluated it, as with the $3 discount for payment on-time did, then we will continue it. If it does not, then we’ll revise it or consider removing it from the following year’s tuition plan.

Senator Smith: The last time there was a tuition increase, there was an effort to match that with scholarship funds for students. Is anything of that sort part of this plan?

Provost Dunn: Yes it is. State law mandates that at the undergraduate level we set aside 20% of an increase and 15% at the graduate level to be used for need-based aid. We have also indicated that one of priorities we will earmark increased funds for would be merit-based scholarships for yet additional students.

3 Unknown: On the merit scholarships, could you say just a couple of words about what the rules are for awarding them or who awards them.

Provost Dunn: That has not yet been determined. The existing parameters for merit scholarships would be one possibly. Simply funnel more funds into the existing programs. I can assure you that we run out of funds before we’ve met all eligible, particularly when considering transfer scholarships. We might also ask the question: do we need to revisit the programs and alter the parameters? Two years ago, we upgraded the requirements for eligibility for scholarships as we were moving to upgrade our admission standards, but we feel with general enrollment growth at the university, if we do nothing other than sustain our existing programs, we need to periodically add to the funding of those programs so we can maintain the level and percentage of award.

Unknown: Some departments may not have a single merit scholarship for undergraduates. I was wondering if you hear that $250,000 may not fund any such thing where each department has one.

Provost Dunn: I see you’re asking about department-specific scholarships. These funds will go into the general admission scholarship fund. I suspect every department here has one or many students that are funded by general admission merit scholarships. The scholarships which reside solely in your department are scholarships which have been endowed through development and fundraising initiatives and gifts, specifically to your department. Heretofore, we have not been subsidized those centrally.

Senator Porter: I just want to add that I’m really excited about the rebate in terms of diminishing drops in classes and that kind of attrition. I understand that the undergraduate assembly is currently considering a revised drop policy. I think this will supplement that.

Provost Dunn: The next item I would like to discuss is the faculty salary survey data. I know some of you have seen this previously as it was distributed to deans some time ago and an article was also published in Shorthorn. The first thing I would like to say about these data is that while they are very valuable and suggestive of patterns, they are not now perfect nor will they ever be. It is simply not possible to compile perfect data. These data represent one point in time, you can get information in the footnotes on the last page about that point in time, but certainly there are some errors and some under-reported and over- reported salaries. I think it’s safe to say that this is the best information we have available at this point and we will continually work to refine it.

4 What you have here are 3 sets of comparisons for faculty salaries. Faculty salaries by college and school, by professorial rank with the assistant professor broken into 2 categories because there has been some concern that we begin to have salary compression even as early as the later stages of the assistant professor rank. Clearly, we see that pattern has manifested, but we haven’t had time to study the data. We compared with 3 sets of institutions. The first category is all doctoral extensive public institutions. As you are aware, we are a doctoral extensive public institution. Many institutions in this category are more research-intensive than we, but we are technically a member of this category. The second category is a list of peer institutions developed with input from UT System. There are 10 institutions here; many in state, several out of state. The 10 institutions are divided into 2 categories: comparitor peers and aspirational peers. The notion being that we’re very much like our comparitor and may be aiming a little high with the aspirational. Any time you time you try to identify peer institutions for the university as a whole, you encounter difficulties because each unit is unique. These are valuable suggestive data. The 3rd category is the metropolitan university group. My own personal opinion is that this is the probably the least valuable for us, but because it was available we thought it would be useful to share with you as well. The only thing these institutions have in common is that they are all located in metropolitan areas. There’s been some thought that cost of living issues and the like might make this a valuable comparison. Given what we know about cost of living in this region, I’m not sure that is the case. The document is really a summary of all the ranks.

Senator Levine: Are all three of these that we’re being compared with pretty evenly distributed across the country or some have more regional biases than others?

Provost Dunn: If you look at doctoral extensive, they are located all around the country. I can safely say they are concentrated probably on the east coast, west coast and in certain parts of the Midwest. In terms of peer institutions, there’s a slight bias there for institutions within Texas though there are several outside the state of Texas. Metropolitans are around the country in population centers.

Senator Smith: Is it possible to get the names of these institutions? Is there some place we can find them?

Provost Dunn: Yes there is. First it’s the Carnegie Classification System that rates institutions and designates the doctoral extensives. You can simply go to their website and they’ll have a listing of all institutions across all categories. For peer institutions, I could send you the list or Pam Haws in Institutional Research can email that information. For metropolitan universities, I think Pam will also have that information.

5 Senator Weber: Are we having an institution-wide commitment to at least attain the salaries that are at least in the state?

Provost Dunn: One of our planning priorities for the past several years is to make progress on more competitive faculty salaries, although our progress has been limited. We are very committed to making this a high priority for the institution. I believe the need to do so is greater than ever if we are, indeed, committed to this trajectory of building excellence. It does not serve us well to go out and recruit high quality faculty when we’re having our outstanding existing faculty recruited away by other institutions. The reality, however, is that progress on this front will be incremental. It will depend upon availability of resources. I do think, again, making this a priority means that we will try to disproportionately direct funds to address this and having data such as these will help us target the areas of greatest need so that we can approach the issue systematically.

President Spaniolo: I would like to add for emphasis that, obviously, whatever we do will be done over a period of years. One of the things that has changed in the landscape in the last year or so is that we now have greater control over designated tuition. Even though we are limited by the UT System this time, and I think it’s fair to say just in the way of background, I think the reason why the 5% limitation is really intended to respond to some of political reaction to the tuition increases that occurred across the state not just in UT System, but across the state. Our hope is that we need to get through one legislative session to ingrain deregulated tuition as part of the Texas system and culture. I think in the future we certainly, in planning our priorities and how we’re going to allocate funds, we’re going to be looking at tuition as a means to address major institutional issues and certainly having competitive faculty salaries is a major institutional issue. I think it’s just worth saying if you look back on the tuition presentation document that the last page shows that we are (UTA) is a bargain compared to other institutions and peers. Given the fact that UT System is going to be limiting its increases of tuition to 5% this year, it’s not clear that’s not happening with other systems in the state. In fact, several universities are increasing tuition in the spring in addition to what they might do next fall. As long as we are in a competitive position even below our peers, we’re going to look to tuition as an opportunity to address major institutional issues.

Provost Dunn: I might add if you look at the prior page, that merit increases are listed as one of our pressing issues. Finally, I would like to add when we requested that these data be compiled by Institutional Research and Planning and when we began to share this information initially with some of the deans, we got some rather shocked and surprised looks. I was asked if I was sure we wanted to share this information because it would just upset people. My response was, yes, we want the pressure to be on to do all we can. There is no magic fix for the problem, but certainly coming to terms with this is the first critical step to fixing it.

6 Senate Chair Reinhartz: I might add that I attended the last part of the last Regents Meeting. They are aware of the problem. We had a meeting with Regent Barnholt who is one of the newer regents. He came right out and said that his highest commitment was to getting and keeping good faculty at whatever cost necessary. There is an awareness, but the problem is money. Where is it going to come from? It is not going to come from the legislature because they’re dealing with the education reform of K-12. There is an awareness of the issue at every meeting with the Chancellor, the issue always comes up. Also, the issue of compression and matching national and regional salaries is discussed. He is also committed and aware, but again, the issue is where do we get the money from? Deregulated tuition seems to be one of those areas where we might do that.

President Spaniolo: It’s not the only one, but it is one way we didn’t have available before. In fact, the tuition increase that went into effect this fall, a significant amount went to new faculty and merit salary increases.

Senator Liu: Have we done this before previous to 8 years ago? I have never seen this. What is the motivation? Why now?

Provost Dunn: There was a faculty salary survey done several years ago by Michael Moore, who at the time was in a senate leadership role, was involved in that. I believe it was commissioned partially by senate and partly because System required it on periodic review. There has not been such a survey since that time. President Spaniolo and I called for this specifically again because we want to better understand the patterns and also because we became aware of the availability of a data set that I don’t believe has been in existence for very long. We subscribe to a service called Data On-Demand and all institutions that report to CUPA. We can anonymously access data for comparison purposes. Now that those data are available, and that we subscribe, it is very easy for us to do this on an annual basis. It is safe to say that we plan to do so.

Senator Liu: When I look at the average here it seems that we’re not much different from other universities. I feel better.

President Spaniolo: At least we’re dealing with facts and not dealing with speculation or rumor or what people think might be the case.

Unknown: How do you think the faculty senate could work with you most productively in a partnership to address the issue of increasing faculty salaries?

7 President Spaniolo: I think the mere fact that we’ve brought it to you suggests that we welcome and invite your comments. I don’t think anyone believes that there is a single magic answer or response that will solve the problem, but we’re looking for creative ways to address the issue. When are we going to make progress? It is important to make progress every year, and then over a period of years you can look back and say that we’ve moved the needle forward. We may not have gotten as far as we wanted, but we’ve made progress. In thinking about ways to do that, the Provost and I talked about different ways to approach this and maybe non-traditional ways of trying to address faculty salary issues. We welcome your ideas.

Provost Dunn: I would say that it is very valuable any time any faculty member wants to share information on prioritization of needs. There are many needs I think we can all agree. They range from additional faculty lines, higher faculty salaries, increased graduate student stipends, to more scholarship dollars. Any information you have or want to share on how to prioritize those is always a value.

Senator Amster: How about the overhead situation? Have you been able to change how much we get and can that money be allocated toward bonuses or salaries or something like that?

President Spaniolo: I think if that’s a source of funding that it’s great to have it and after about ½ hour at looking at it, you can figure about 20 different ways to spend it. I think that’s one of those additional sources of funds. Also, we have to address the whole issue of startup costs for new faculty. It’s great to have it and there are competing priorities for how to use it. We need every incremental revenue pool we can use to address a whole series of issues like that.

Provost Dunn: We did receive full indirect recovery in the last session and, heretofore, we’ve used those additional dollars primary for startup costs associated with hiring 50 new faculty. I think I can say fairly safely that the first time in about a decade we were able to offer reasonably competitive startup packages to faculty in fields where that is the norm. That is one of the reasons we had such a successful round of hiring this year, but that used up all the funds. One problem with committing those funds for continuing needs is that while we hope we do not see a reversal in the trend toward increases in research grants and contracts. Should we do so, then we’re in a situation where we have committed ourselves to a fixed cost salary base and the source of income begins to go in the wrong direction. There is quite a bit of risk in taking what we really need to consider one-time funds and using it for continuing fees.

8 Senator Young: Short of getting more of a commitment from the state legislature and from higher education in general, I can’t be at all optimistic that despite your heroic efforts that you can do very much about this. Can you say anything that would make me more optimistic about this.

President Spaniolo: I would like to say that one of the things, and this may sound “pollyanna-ish,” is you have to believe in our capacity to make progress. The fact that the challenges are great, I don’t think is an adequate reason not to make the effort. I think one of the challenges is to try to be creative in how we do it and have a strategy and have different ways to address issues like salary problems.

Provost Dunn: I would like to add if I could that I’m rather optimistic that in the coming years, several institutions will make significant progress because the state increasingly recognizes that we lag behind in terms of research level institutions that can fuel economic development. As soon as more funds are available, state budgets fluctuate, they’re going to have the commitment and desire to invest disproportionately in higher ed at least in a select group of institutions. I would add that we are one of eight emerging research institutions in the state. There’s only one category above us of research institutions and there are 2 of those. So I think we are very well situated to be the beneficiary of those resources when and if clearly they flow, but I sense through the legislature that concerns about Texas’ economic future are very much seen as tied with higher education.

President Spaniolo: I think we need to take the longer term view of things. It isn’t something we can do over night. I just got back from a conference that included university presidents from around the country. Certainly, Texas is not unique. The stories that I heard about Colorado and other states are much more draconian than in Texas. I think the key is that we not be pessimistic nor be anything but relentless in making the case for higher education, particularly, when we have a strong story to tell. There are things we can show in the connections between what universities do and economic development, how research fuels economic development, and the overall prestige of the state. We just have to do that. We are in a position from a geographic standpoint where that is an opportunity. You look at things on the political landscape, and I am very encouraged that we have a US senator that is thinking about running for governor who is very strongly committed to higher education. In fact, I don’t know how many of you have seen the Texas Monthly interview with Kay Bailey Hutchison, but I don’t know a public official who is speaking publicly about commitment either in the senate or state house who is speaking as strongly about the need for investment in higher education. I think there are some things that we can be encouraged about.

9 Senate Chair Reinhartz: I have one question on the indirect cost. Do we follow a percentage on the indirects of what goes back to the researcher and the researcher’s unit? Are we thinking of altering that system to meet other needs?

Provost Dunn: We have a formula that’s been in place for some time, and we modified it when we got full indirect cost recovery so that we sent somewhat more funds back to the units both to the dean’s offices and at the departmental level. I can’t tell you that formula from memory. I believe the portion that flows to units increased from about 33% to 45% or something on that order. We elected to hold the rest of the funds centrally. Again, the funds were used to provide for startup costs and a few other select things such as expansion, slight expansion of the research enhancement program that provides the small seed grants here, and also the faculty development leaves.

Senate Chair Reinhartz: Do we have a percentage that goes back to the person who is literally earning the overhead?

Provost Dunn: One unit to my knowledge, heretofore, has experimented with that and I believe is moving away from it. It’s not common practice at research universities to do so. The notion is that these funds need to be plowed back into the infrastructure to support research and not flow directly to the PI as a form of revenue. It’s safe to say that it’s not best practice at research universities. Our College of Engineering experimented with it a little bit, and I think they’re concluding that if they jointly develop priorities and choose as a unit to invest the funds in that fashion, it would help move the institution further in a much more meaningful way.

Senate Chair Reinhartz: At the meeting I was at in Austin, we talked about the University of Virginia. Certainly a great state institution which is getting so little funding from the state, their new president is trying to move them totally into the private sector. He’s trying to pull totally from under state funding which is creating some interesting issues. Some of his people have said that if they do this, they will go back to affirmative action which the state, of course, forbids, but if the state has no input anymore monetarily, they have no input [period]. It’s an interesting concept. I’ve heard President Sigeroa from San Antonio’s medical campus state , that all he’s basically getting out of the state funding is enough to pay the light bills. This kind of thing might, in fact, be something we’ll see more of the in future. It may also be a way of waking up legislators to their public responsibilities.

10 President Spaniolo: In fact in Colorado, the president of the University of Colorado reported in a meeting I attended, that they are down to 8% of state funding, and the governor is now changing his position on higher education in terms of no more cutting in response to the election where the Democrats took over both houses of the legislature. This is exceptional from what is typical around the country. There is a belief in Colorado that when they finally reached a crisis point, it turned elected officials around on higher education, but at what a price to pay.

Senator Liu: When are we getting any indirect costs returned back to us this year. We’ve been told the money is coming, but not until the end of the semester and we haven’t got it.

Provost Dunn: The transfers are in process, and I’ve been told they should be completed by Monday. It’s possible that could slip a day depending on what emergencies arise between now and then. You certainly will have the funds by mid-week next week.

Senator Liu: Could you make a quick comment about your view about tech transfer funds or faculty members getting involved with some kind of business startup and what you think about that type of direction?

President Spaniolo: We have a technology incubator now and there is gradually more interest and more participation in that from our faculty. It’s still in a very formative stage, but I think that the incubator is designed as a vehicle that our faculty can take advantage of. Ron Elsenbaumer, who is our vice president for research, is very much involved in that and encouraging faculty and is available for consultation. We have a director of the center, Geoffrey Grant, as well. It’s not something that is huge in the beginning, but it is beginning to grow. We have an infrastructure that is increasingly in place now.

Provost Dunn: The UT System is very progressive compared to other universities around the country in terms of trying to facilitate tech transfer. Many of the candidates were positions in science and engineering, who interviewed here that I visited with, have been quite pleased at the relatively streamlined process here and the tools available to manage conflicts of interest and other things and these are provided to us by System. I think the state is encouraging this because they recognize that this is one of the indirect paths that higher education uses to contribute to economic development in the state.

11 Senator Palmer: I find this a fascinating document because it is a snapshot of the result of policies for 20 to 30 years. We have been told for a long time around here that the leading sector on campus and the historical part of the university is engineering, yet engineers are relatively underpaid compared to their peers. As far as I can see, the College of Business comes out OK – at average or even above average, which at a glance seems to be the only unit. Some units are severely behind. The heart of major public universities are colleges of science and colleges of liberal arts. That is the heart of the university education. The column that has percentages of how much behind they are is very useful column.

Provost Dunn: I would like to make a comment in response to your comment about the College of Business. If there is any one college where I have greater concerns about the validity of the data it is for business. I have multiple reasons for concern. First, is our own experience over the last several years attempting to recruit faculty and learning that our salaries were far from competitive. In fact, this is impressionistic, but I would say the college of business is one of the two most difficult colleges currently, in terms of attracting faculty with the salaries. We have some pressing concerns because we have an accreditation interview coming up. Why then do we see these data? One of the things we know is that it is common practice in the colleges of business to have many, many endowed and partially endowed chairs and various forms of supplemental funding for business faculty; everything from the “Florsheim Professor” to the “Kentucky Fried Chicken Professor.” On many campuses, virtually every faculty member with tenure and sometimes without has some title attached. Those kinds of supplements are variously reported here and we’re very concerned about the inability to get as reliable and valid comparison data. I mention that as a problem. We don’t know the solution. We’ve talked about it with business. They’re looking within the profession to see if there is some business-specific salary surveys that we might use to supplement this, but I don’t think we’ve found a resolution for that yet.

Senator Palmer: That is very helpful. As this goes forward, that kind of discussion can assuage feelings of other units.

Senator Nussbaum: In reference to the merit raise mentioned on page 4 of the “Preparing for the Future” document, can you get into specifics as to what the criteria will be for awarding those and at what level or levels of the university will these decisions be made? Obviously, they will have to be made on a higher level. For example, will the decisions begin at the departmental level or will they begin at higher levels?

12 President Spaniolo: I think we have, at this point, listed that at a fairly high level of generality indicating a commitment to try to do merit raises. We have not tried to implement a comprehensive system here. It seems to me that if you’re looking for guidance in terms of a general approach, I would suspect that the best guide is what we just did. We just went through a merit process within the last year with the merit pool. I think that’s where you begin. It could be some tweaking or some different structures, but obviously, you can’t do merit salary increases from the top down. It starts at the department level.

Provost Dunn: My recommendation would certainly be that it feeds up from peer review process through deans to central administration. We will be having some discussion about whether whatever pool of funds we have available should be partitioned into two pieces. One piece for more standard merit raises. All the criteria would be eligible. And the other portion would be for compression and sometimes inversion that we see in salaries. What we might call structural adjustments. My own thinking at this point is that would be recommended but it depends upon the size of the pool. Whether that is viable, we don’t know yet. We’d be interested in your thoughts.

President Spaniolo: Whatever we do with merit raises, I’m convinced that we’ve got to be creative. We’d obviously start with peer review, but in terms in how you divide up the pool of money; we’d like to have the maximum impact that would begin to address some of these larger issues on salaries.

Provost Dunn: May I ask a creative, potentially controversial question tied to this? I’d be very interested in your views if funds were limited and we did limited merit raises but we had some one time funds available, how would you feel about a system of merit bonuses which could be truly one-time bonuses because of our ability to amass funds from one-time sources. We know that’s not the same kind of thing as a continuing increase, but if we could do that in addition to whatever we might do on merit. Would you be supportive of that? Why or why not? We don’t need to necessarily discuss it right now, but your thinking on that would be valuable.

Senator Smith: I would like to say very briefly in response that I think that one of the things that we should also keep in mind is equity raises. If merit raises and one-time bonuses are in the hopper, I think that equity raises should be considered.

Provost Dunn: That’s what I meant by structural to address inversion.

13 Senator Liu: I would like to add one thought for the one-time bonus. Could you use that money to give this particular person the money to decide either that he or she wants to use that for their research versus their own money? Because sometimes the one-time money is not that significant in some way but that could add to research or for a student worker.

Provost Dunn: That’s a very interesting suggestion. The tax consequences would be important.

President Spaniolo: Another example of a one-time payment would be to create a faculty development account that would give the faculty member the full flexibility and discretion on how to use that within the academic mission, but it wouldn’t have the same tax consequences.

Senator Young: One flaw with using a bonus system that occurs intermittently because of the availability of funds would be if they were based on performance in the current year. It then becomes somewhat arbitrary. If you happened to have a good year this year and it happens to be a year where there is not bonus money available, then you’re not going to benefit from it. That would be one drawback that I would see using it that way. If we’re going to do it based on faculty performance, then we should look at a longer period of time or put the money into different uses as been suggested.

President Spaniolo: I think the question is it assumes that if we were to try something like this, and it seemed to be a positive thing, that we would also try to do it more than just once. It might become an ongoing part of the compensation system. It would give some flexibility and it would also be a way of addressing some systemic problems in a way that would be difficult to address by making recurring salary increases just cause of the dimension of the cost on a recurring basis.

Senator Nestell: One way these increases could be applied is to apply them to people up for post-tenure review. I like the idea of at least having some discretionary money to spend on maybe projects that you want to work on. If you’re a professor, for example, you have less opportunity to just have small projects to work on. That would be one way to reward someone for having gone through the post-tenure review process.

Provost Dunn: My only concern is that post-tenure review is constructed as a minimum standards review and if we have limited funds available, I would think they might be better served by directing them towards some higher level of accomplishment than the minimum standards.

14 Senator Nestell: I wasn’t implying that everybody going through it should get something. I’m just saying that would be an opportunity to evaluate and look at that group of people.

President Spaniolo: To look at that group of people who are particularly meritorious.

Unknown: I think Dana’s point is a good one that it may unconsciously raise the bar on post-tenure review.

Provost Dunn: We annually review faculty so we will always have the review data to use to make decisions.

Senator Amster: Many times we’ve had the issue come up here in the Senate that during the summer many of us supervise graduates students, but we don’t get paid at all.

Senate Chair Reinhartz: I might say that Professor Rasheed’s committee is working on this. Professor Liu has prepared a sort of interim beginning report which we’ll probably not hear today. You can look at what the committee has done so far. In other words, Professor Rasheed’s committee is dedicated this year to dealing with the issue of the summer. We will get more and more involved in this as the year goes on.

Senator Liu: We haven’t gotten any replies from Liberal Arts, Architecture, Nursing, and Social Work. Every other unit is coming back and not having any big problems. Please send your records to either me or Dr. Rasheed.

Senator Young: Can you tell us who these inquiries for information are being directed to? Are they being sent to the dean’s office or the chair?

Senator Liu: Dr. Rasheed has sent several reminders.

Senate Chair Reinhartz: The committee has a representative from each unit on it. He has gone through those representatives. So the ones that Professor Liu has mentioned that haven’t responded is because their representative hasn’t either come across with it or hasn’t begun the process yet.

15 Provost Dunn: A dean introduced this topic for the last Dean’s Forum. There was lengthy discussion of it and the views were very divided. The majority of the opinion was that it would be best to direct the resources otherwise. There were a couple of deans who were strongly in favor of working out some form of compensation.

Senator Amster: The issue of summer school is more broad that patching up this one problem. It seems to me that one possibility would be to consider the trimester system which some universities have used which allows people to take their vacations, for instance, in any quarter they wish or to maintain the same level of instruction in the summer that they do in the regular year and receive a comparable amount of reimbursement from the state. So the trimester system is one kind of way of fixing the problem in a different way. There is also another way that occurs to me and that would be privatization of summer school. We’ve heard that it is a possibility to have some type of at least shared investment in education. Is it illegal to do such a thing?

President Spaniolo: What is privatization of summer school? How do you define that?

Senator Amster: Summer school is really separate from the rest of the school year because the budgeting situation is different. Perhaps the corporation of UTA could pay rent to UTA as we know it and support summer school. Collect the revenues and pay the instructors who wish to participate.

Provost Dunn: That would be illegal. First we don’t have a university corporation and secondly that would be using state resources for purposes of gain. We could not approach it in that way. I do think we face some real obstacles in trying to make significant changes to summer if there was any potential that it would impact student’s ability to make progress towards graduation. Any look at summer we make, probably needs to consider how we can use it as a vehicle to move students through faster.

Senator Amster: How about the trimester system? Is that illegal?

Provost Dunn: Not to my knowledge.

President Spaniolo: The resources and whether you’re doing summer session or trimester, you still have the same set of resources you’re working with.

16 Senator Smith: In relation not just to summer, but to do with the lack of compensation for work with graduate students: working with graduate students is not paid in the same way as teaching undergrads.

Provost Dunn: I think it really hinges on how you look at the issue. If you look at the faculty teaching load policy and Regents Rules in the HOP, you see that state actually requires you teach 12 teaching credits per semester. In many units, what we do is then formally count the teaching load credits generated from .1 per credit hour at the masters level to .2 at the doctoral level toward the teaching load requirements because we don’t have a research active faculty here for teaching 12 organized courses of teaching load credits per semester. We do report those to the state when we show our faculty load and its one of the things that keeps the state from coming back to us and saying your faculty are not teaching enough. While that’s not a direct form of compensation, it is counting it toward the contributions that a faculty member makes. I’ll also say I don’t know of any institution that compensates directly faculty for supervision of graduate students. On some level payment per head so to speak would be at odds with professional norms.

Senator Epperson-Cordero: If you had some money to give it should be for travel funds. I don’t know if it’s the norm in other departments, but we (Math) are allowed one trip per year. So if we actually had funds for additional trips than those budgeted by the department that would be very beneficial to the faculty.

Senate Chair Reinhartz: I’m glad that the statistics have already provoked this kind of discussion. Please study the documents and we’ll come back to this again. We can come to it on the President’s Advisory Committee and so on. These are important issues. Look at what’s been handed out and we’ll deal with it again.

(At this time, the Faculty Senate meeting ended, and the Strategic Planning Meeting started.)