Members of Faculty Senate disagreed on required feedback for promotions this past Tuesday. Difficulties in staff retention and preserving university archives were also highlighted.
Feedback on faculty
Feedback from faculty, staff and students is required for professors seeking promotion and tenure.
Torrey Lawrence, provost and executive vice president, said getting feedback is one piece of many requirements for promotion or tenure.
Faculty Senator Dave Paul questioned the need for this requirement
“The feedback isn’t really useful and it’s a burden that’s put on the staff to administer,” Paul said. “The information you get back is more related to collegiality and things like that you can’t use anyway.”
Russell Meeuf, Faculty Senate chair, defended the practice.
“Working through this process as well, while they are onerous, my perspective is that has always been a release valve,” Meeuf said. “If there is something that the committee doesn’t know is happening and someone doesn’t want to share publicly; it’s an opportunity to for anonymous comment to come forward.”
Faculty Senator Amin Ahmadzadeh found issues of the related committee last year. All except one sitting member was not on campus.
“Those faculty had no clue whatsoever what’s happening here on campus,” Ahmadzadeh said.
Another issue is that there is no way to verify if student feedback comes from those who have actually taken a course through the professor under review.
“One student can take the initiative and there is no way to verify,” Ahmadzadeh said. “It could be instances of students who have not taken your class or my class (who) then make a comment and that could be problematic.”
Retention
“A huge concern right now is retention of employees, it’s just amazing the difference in the labor markets and the pool of people that are interested in working in our different types of jobs,” Lawrence said. “A lot has changed around work, the issue of remote work, pay… it’s a complicated question.”
The 2021 Great Colleges to Work For survey results for UI will be coming in. Higher education institutions can opt in. The results will help the university make plans to improve workplace climate and help with retention.
University archives
In 2006 the university created a task force to look into preserving the university’s history. But now, such a task force no longer exists.
“No similar group is presently active, so archives are concerned that vital, perhaps irreplaceable, documents are ending up in dumpsters,” Faculty Secretary Francesca Sammarruca said. “It would bring awareness that they exist.”
This brought up a conversation about what happens to any documents being stored in digital drives. Meeuf suggested contacting university ITS to ask about any digital archiving process that is in place.
Faculty Senator Jean-Marc Gauthier asked about archiving artwork.
“If the archive includes the artwork that are at the university and if there was a catalog of all the artworks,” Gauthier said. “If yes or no it would be interesting to think about virtual documentation of all of that.”
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @DVR_Tweets