Dear Colleagues,
I’d like to take this opportunity in our first Voice
of the Faculty newsletter of the year to welcome
everyone back. This year, although difficult in terms
of budget, is at least not as bleak as the last
few. We will spend less time this year trying to come
up with painful ideas for additional cuts and have a few
more moments to concentrate on what we can do to improve
the teaching, research and working conditions on
campus.
As you
can see from the titles of articles listed to the left,
a number of new initiatives are underway.
The
Academic Senate Office has been reorganized in order to
make the budget cuts that were mandated for this year
while trying to preserve the excellent level of
assistance the staff has provided for many years. New
staff assignments are listed in this newsletter.
Additionally, we are working in the Senate to make more
visible the progress of specific proposals through our
various senate committees. We are designing an
electronic log that will allow faculty members to track
their new degree program or name change or other request
through the various committees. The date an item
arrives at and leaves the committee will be posted, as
will the committee’s action and where the item was then
sent. Staff contact information will be listed with
each committee. We hope this new tracking system will
allow the faculty to follow the progress of any item
under consideration and to be able to ask questions
should they need to. One such issue for this year is the
diversity requirement.
The
faculty of the College will soon be voting on a
diversity requirement, and the faculties of Arts &
Architecture and Theater, Film and Television will soon
follow with their own votes. The issue of a diversity
requirement has been carefully considered over several
months by a group of faculty and students working
together to arrive at the plan that we will vote on. I
urge you to cast your ballot when you receive it.
Speaking entirely personally, I feel the group has
successfully managed to design a serious diversity
requirement that will be possible to carry out even
given our resource constraints.
Three
major initiatives that will affect the entire campus are
also underway. The first is an experiment by the
Committees on Research and Faculty Research Grants to
revise the way in which we assign faculty research
grants. In the last two rounds of directed cuts
mandated by the state legislature, research funds were
hit very hard. Given the reduced funding available and
the enormous input of faculty time in reviewing the
grants (each of which required two separate readings for
increasingly small sums of money), the committee has
decided to try a new approach that is outlined in this
issue.
The
second initiative is a plan to study the ways in which
we use information technology on campus to see if we
might gain some efficiency in order to invest our IT
funds more wisely. (See Jim Davis’s article in this
issue.) I emphasize that this year’s activities are a
study to see what we could and should do, not merely an
attempt to consolidate. We may well not need 50
different email systems on campus—but we may well need
more than one. This study is designed to see what we
could do that would retain or improve the current level
of service while achieving greater efficiency. We will
be calling directly for faculty input on this issue
soon.
The
third initiative is a reorganization of the Internal
Review Boards on campus in order to improve their
efficiency in dealing with faculty grants. (See
Vice-Chancellor Peccei’s article in this issue.) This
new system will be evaluated by an outside group this
year as well as by faculty on campus. All of this
activity is part of our ongoing effort to do the best
job of research and teaching that we possibly can with
the resources we have. Many faculty members across
campus have been and will continue to be involved in
these efforts. We would welcome any feedback you might
have on either initiative.
Finally, let me invite you to attend the first
Legislative Assembly meeting of the 2004-05 academic
year. The meeting will take place on November 16, 2-4
p.m. in the California Room of the Faculty Center and
will feature Chancellor Albert Carnesale who will give
us his outlook for the university for the coming year.
I urge Legislative Assembly representative as well as
the faculty at large to attend this meeting and have the
opportunity to speak with the Chancellor.
I look
forward to a very busy and productive year. I
appreciate the opportunity to work with my colleagues
across campus and with the Chancellor and Executive
Vice-Chancellor to see what we can accomplish.
With
best wishes,
Kathleen Komar
Chair, UCLA Academic Senate
