University of Idaho Faculty Senate Chair Liz Brandt said at the start of the year, faculty expressed to her concerns about low faculty and staff morale.
At Tuesday’s meeting, members of Faculty Senate took a moment to address those concerns.
Brandt said Faculty Senate and the administration are trying to increase morale with the efforts to bring salaries up to market value, starting with the staff.
“For example, I personally have had since 2008 about 4 percent in raises,” Brandt said. “Most of us aren’t in it for the money, but you get to the point where that becomes demoralizing. It feels like the state is saying they don’t value what we’re doing, and I know that’s not the message the state intends to send.”
She said it becomes difficult for faculty maintain a high quality of work without being rewarded.
Brandt said another morale issue stems from the effort to increase enrollment. She said most faculty understand the need for higher enrollment and do not oppose it, but growing pains still exist.
“When we increase enrollment, we have to either increase class sizes or the number of sections, or both,” Brandt said. “For faculty, it’s a chicken-or-egg problem. Do we increase enrollment and then these things or the other way around?”
Another danger to morale, Brandt said, is the hiring process. She said getting permission to hire someone is painstaking.
She said there have already been changes to the hiring process, but it is not something individual faculty members go through every year, so many have not yet seen the changes.
Sen. Annette Folwell of the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences suggested additions to the Student Code of Conduct about how it is implemented.
Folwell said she is aware of at least one student who, though punished each time, was allowed to stay on campus despite making multiple discriminatory comments.
“After multiple times, there has to be some recourse,” Folwell said.
She said she would like to see the Code of Conduct or its implementation include online classes where such comments might not seem as obviously obstructive to the learning process.
Brandt said she could see the importance of protecting students and faculty from harm, but that implementing substantive policy might prove difficult at a public institution.
“The civil libertarian in me says that as a public institution, this is going to be really really tricky,” Brandt said.
Brandt said many concerns raised at Faculty Senate’s start-of-the-year retreat are concerns she has seen every year.
“Hopefully we’ll have a retreat next year where we won’t have as many repeats,” she said.
Nishant Mohan
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