[phas-faculty_staff_others] Senate meeting 04/03

[Carlos Bertulani]

Faculty,

This is my own minutes of the senate meeting yesterday. As always, nothing to do with the official account.

1- The Provost discussed:

(a) SACS found 5 areas of insufficiency at Tamuc, none of then in core ares. But hiring new faculty is a poorly developed area. The number of full term faculty is defined by our university as 60%. SACS asked to justify this number. Tamuc conceded this is an arbitrary number, no proper justification exists.

(b) She refused discussing why the 30% increase in salary of  some upper administrators and why the university is creating numerous positions as VP, more vice-provosts, etc. She said we should ask the president (see minutes of the previous senate meeting).  

- Instead, she said the university will conduct a faculty salary audit. I’ve asked her why. She said that this is one step forward find out where funds can be sought to increase other faculty salary. I’ve asked an hypothetical question: what if you find that a faculty (as if they don’t know!) makes 130k, whereas another same level, same duties, same output, makes only 80k. She said salaries cannot be decreased. 

- I’ve asked why there is no administrator salary audit. She said that she could do it. But that was not what the senate asked the president to do in the senate meeting last month.

- I’ve asked if she wanted to bet a bottle of wine with me that this so-called faulty scary audit will lead to nothing and that in two years from now all will be the same. She did not answer. I’ve asked if my senate colleagues would like to bet the same with me. Nobody said yes. I told the provost this faculty salary audit is just to show that they are doing something to please the faculty, but nothing useful for them will arise.

- She said the university will also make a space audit. Some offices do not have windows, some faculty are sharing offices. She said this is unacceptable. I’ve asked her what she would do with the agriculture building, as offices have no windows. She said there is nothing she can do.

- She told us about many searchers, mainly upper administrators.

- There will also be another study about merit and workload, she said.

- she left.

2- The senate discussed department head policy. There is a committee in the senate writing these rules. Many discussions arose about yearly evaluations, term duration (5 years + another 5?), etc.

3- A heated discussion arose about the 
(a) faculty salary audit, 
(b) that senators are afraid of saying anything about the administrators because they fear an obvious retaliation,  
(c) faculty do not understand their rights, 
(d) too many administrators, specially highly paid ones just by comparing with 10-15 years ago when the university had more students, etc.

I liked that part of the meeting a lot. 
- Julia Ballenger complained that in some department groups of friends recycle in key positions and we should fight to prevent that. She said this friend recycling occurs also among deans and VP positions. I was surprised because she is usually very careful with what she says.
- Some said that we should have more internal searchers for heads and deans. I said that whenever we hire an external head or dean we get an additional position in the department. But the person said, well, yes, but we have to find courses for them to teach. I said I can easily find courses for anyone to teach. Level of discussion was very high.
- The senate president holds us we should be more vocal against friends recycling in power and we should stay strong together in fighting upper abuses of high administrators.

At this point, an extremely quite colleague sitting side-by-side with me told us that he felt uncomfortable bashing administrators. I told him I would make him feel more comfortable, and I left the room. 
It was 1 hour and 45 minutes of meeting when I left and I missed many other issues to be discussed. But do not worry, I will forward the official minutes to you, in about one month.  Probably nothing like this will be written on it.

Carlos