April 26, 2016

Provost Britz joined us and we continued to discuss faculty workload policy. There is a UWM policy, Faculty Document 2027 (passed by the Senate in 2007), prescribing metrics for teaching, research, and service workload for faculty. We would like to see an evaluation of how the campus and the deans evaluate compliance with the existing policy before discussion of other models, for example the University of Texas System’s 18 credit per year “teaching workload policy.”

We had a long discussion about the Regents meeting last month where the Regents passed the Madison tenure policy with significant edits which, it is now clear, were not adequately vetted with the Madison Senate or University Committee. As a result, there is now an open discussion by the Madison faculty of a vote of no confidence in President Cross and the Board of Regents at their May 2 Senate meeting. The Madison Senate agenda and documents are here. (Current draft of the resolution is here.) We expect a similar motion will be proposed in many campuses in the system, including at UWM for the May 12 Senate meeting. The Rules Committee, which sets the meeting agenda, meets April 28. Documents and the agenda will be posted here. There is already considerable media coverage of the issue; we expect more.

UC member Aurora reported on discussion on the Research policy advisory R1 subcommittee; a major focus is to increase TA salaries to a competitive level. We encouraged a re-evaluation of this issue and estimated it could be between 3 and 6 million dollars to bring TA salaries up to a competitive level.