The Chair Remarks on Senate Accomplishments and Initiatives
 

Dear Colleagues,
 

It’s that time of year again when the new Academic Senate Chair writes an article for the Fall issue of Voice of the Faculty. I’ve been in the position since September 1, long enough to have a sense of what the job entails, but too short to have accomplished much more than triage. I thought I’d list some of the issues which the Senate has recently addressed or which are currently under consideration, and follow that with one of my goals for the coming year.

The Legislative Assembly (the Senate body with departmental representation) voted unanimously in support of a proposal to merge the Communication Studies IDP with the Department of Speech and change its name to the Department of Communication Studies. This merger had been recommended by at least the last two Senate program reviews, and is now coming to fruition. The Chancellor’s Office has been notified of this development in order to advance the matter administratively. The merger will house the very popular and competitive Communication Studies undergraduate degree in a department and support the faculty (especially the junior faculty) in their efforts to introduce a Ph.D. program.

The UCLA Senate’s Committee on Committees has done its part to begin the search for a new chancellor for our campus by recommending a slate of faculty to serve on the Advisory Committee. From this slate, the Office of the President selected three UCLA faculty (Alfonso Cardenas, Professor of Computer Science; James Economou, Professor of Surgery; and Kathy Komar, Professor of Comparative Literature). The three UCLA faculty will be joined by two faculty from other UC campuses. The remainder of the committee consists of five Regents, one undergraduate and one graduate student representative, both from UCLA, one member each from the UCLA Foundation, UCLA Alumni Association, and UCLA Staff Association, and ex-officio members Regent Chairman Parsky and President Dynes. The five UC faculty form a subcommittee that will formulate the criteria for the chancellor and submit it for approval to the whole committee. The faculty will also be the ones to go through all the candidate dossiers and decide which ones to bring forward to the committee for further review. Therefore, their role is critical and powerful.

Our Committee on Academic Personnel recently reviewed the procedures for joint (0%) appointments and has recommended some changes (currently under review by Rules and Jurisdiction). This action was initiated by Kathleen Komar, Immediate Past Chair, who had discovered that the procedures for joint appointments were almost uniformly misunderstood by faculty across campus. Typically, candidates for a joint appointment inform the department in advance whether or not they will waive their rights to vote on personnel cases (and be voted upon). The department will then vote on the appointment based on this information. However, what most faculty did not realize is that a waiver is in effect for three years, after which time the 0% appointee can change to voting status without a new faculty vote. The procedural changes recommended by CAP would require (among other things) that both the appointee and the department approve any change in waiver status.

The Undergraduate and Graduate Councils are currently reviewing two proposed nursing degrees (at the baccalaureate and master’s levels, respectively), which would address the critical shortage of nurses in the state of California. The Senate is trying to respond expeditiously with the hopes of admitting students for Fall 2006, while at the same time carefully carrying out our duty to ensure the academic quality and viability of the degrees.

I hope this gives some idea of what the Senate does. But this brief list is hardly representative of the great variety of issues that crosses the Senate’s doorstep. Now let me turn my attention to one initiative that I will be working on this year: transparency with regard to the criteria and procedures for off-scale salaries.

If you’ve been on campus for fifteen years or more, you probably remember a time when most faculty were on scale – our academic rank and step determined our salary. That is no longer the case, and the majority of faculty on the general campus have at least some off-scale increment. This shift resulted from our efforts to be competitive in recruiting and retaining faculty while our salary scale lagged our competitors’. While the merit increase process has well-established criteria and procedures, our system of off-scale compensation has evolved more recently in a somewhat ad hoc manner. One consequence is a lack of complete understanding by faculty of what criteria and procedures are used for off-scale salary decisions. The UCLA CALL, Appendix 17 (http://www.apo.ucla.edu/call/append17.htm) provides a policy statement, including a list of criteria which justify off-scale salaries, but this document is not entirely consistent with current practice. I have embarked on a series of conversations, so far with CAP and the Dean’s Council, to determine what our current practices are in order to bring greater transparency to the process. Stay tuned for more as the year progresses.

With best wishes,
Adrienne Lavine

Chair, UCLA Academic Senate