UW’s Faculty Senate introduced a new pair of bills in advance of discussion and voting during its March 26 meeting, progressing along the course of extensive rewrites of existing UW regulations and the proposals of new regulations by the Board of Trustees and General Counsel Tara Evans.
In his opening chair’s report, Faculty Senate Chair Michael Barker briefly recapped matters covered in the Board of Trustees meeting the previous week, including one pertaining to salaries for staff and faculty—which has been a topic of concern in previous Faculty Senate meetings.
“The Board of Trustees also approved a faculty policy which really deals mainly with faculty raises, and staff raises,” Barker said. “The board was shown data on how our staff are going to be behind in market value, and it was also shown faculty status compared to our competitors.”
Barker said he encouraged the board to make raises a priority in the upcoming year, and that the board and administration will be collaborating to devise such a plan with considerations for general market adjustments as well as raises based on individual merit.
The two bills, FS 341 and FS 342, were introduced by Faculty Academic Standards, Rights & Responsibilities Committee Chair Claudia Thompson and pertained to regulations affecting UW faculty in general and faculty senate in particular. Thompson’s committee examined four regulations that contained many redundant details and crafted two resolutions aimed to distinguish the regulations’ significant themes—the duties and governing authority of the general faculty and the structure of faculty senate.
The outcomes of the bills introduced to the senate are intended to adjust current regulations and bylaws to grant adequate and more clarified authority to faculty senate to adjust certain matters, as well to better establish the ‘order of operations’ for ongoing regulation revisions and their ability to properly conduct them.
“The purpose of this is to not have to go to the Board of Trustees anytime we want to make a small change to a committee or a small change to an induction rule, but yet keeping the regulation for the powers and authority for the senate itself,” Barker said.
Senator Kim Buckner, associate lecturer of computer science, zeroed in on language in Regulation 700, one of the new bills’ areas of significance, regarding voting members of faculty which “explicitly excludes academic professionals.” Barker responded that no such exclusion exists.
“I’ll guaran-dang-tee you it does,” Bucker said.
Discussion continued, examining connections between regulations and the language used in current and upcoming, updated regulations and highlighting the importance of the revisions and amendments of the versions introduced to faculty senate. Certain sentences were isolated and marked for adjustments to resolve the issue.
“This is why we have you in the senate,” Barker said. “We need this kind of critique because we took existing regulations and modified them, and this is our time to make it right. As Secretary [Janet] Dewey said, several brains have looked at it but we need the whole senate.”
