Among the issues confronting the Academic Senate this year is the question of changes in the policies governing the employment of UC's in-residence faculty. Within the statewide Senate there is general agreement that a revision of these policies should be considered and a process has been initiated that may bring change about. Running in parallel with this process, however, is a movement to bring this issue to the attention of the UC Regents via the mechanism of a systemwide Senate vote. This latter activity is at best unnecessary and may actually work against progress on the issues at hand.
The title "in-residence" may not be familiar to Senate members from campuses without health sciences programs, but on the five UC campuses with such programs, in-residence faculty play a vital role in helping the University carry out its research and teaching missions. More than 1,000 in-residence faculty currently are employed at UC, the vast majority paid from grants or from clinical income.
One clear dividing line between and regular ranks and in-residence faculty is that in-residence faculty must be paid primarily from non-state funds. A second difference follows from this, which is that in-residence faculty cannot be granted tenure, since the University cannot make a lifetime employment commitment to someone whose source of employment funding lies outside the University's control. Some in-residence faculty have appointments with fixed ending dates -- meaning a built-in day of termination, unless reappointment occurs. Others are given indefinite appointments, which can be terminated for budgetary reasons, programmatic reasons, or "lack of work."
The procedures that govern the termination of in-residence appointments lie at the heart of the University's current discussion over in-residence faculty. This issue has taken on greater practical significance in light of the momentous changes taking place in the U.S. health care industry. Sources of funding for medical researchers and practitioners are unstable, and this has engendered increasing concern over UC's termination procedures.
The Senate's Academic Council has taken these concerns seriously and, this past June, endorsed it a report on in-residence issues prepared by the University Committee on Academic Personnel (UCAP). This report, which proposes a series of changes to UC's Academic Personnel Manual, was subsequently forwarded to President Peltason, who distributed it to the chancellors. The report makes a specific set of recommendations about the termination of in-residence appointments. If the report's provisions were implemented, all associate and full professors in-residence whose positions are proposed to be terminated would have the right to request a hearing before their campus Privilege and Tenure Committees and all termination decisions would be subject to a multi-party review, the nature of which would be decided upon by each campus. In addition, the report calls for all terminations to be given with one-year's notice, with terminated professors continuing to receive their program's base salary and "negotiated compensation" during this period.
Most of the constituencies within the University that have an interest in these proposals have yet to express their views on them. Chancellors, campus Senate members and UCOP officers presumably all will be commenting on these recommendations in the near future. Some of the proposals -- for example, the continuation of salary for terminated faculty -- are likely to be controversial. (The report does not specify what the funding sources would be for these salary continuations.) Nevertheless, the statewide Senate has put these recommendations on the table, and the process of debating them has begun.
This process stands to be affected, however, by actions that have now gone forward on two campuses and threaten to go forward on more. The San Diego and San Francisco divisions of the Academic Senate have voted to submit a "memorial" on the subject of in-residence terminations to the UC Regents. As specified by Senate Bylaws, a memorial is a declaration or petition addressed to the UC's president for transmission to the Regents. Memorials do not go directly from a division to the president, however. Passage of a memorial by a single Senate division initiates a process under which the memorial is sent to all Senate divisions for their consideration, after which each division has a set amount of time to vote upon it (though divisions may "decline to act," in the words of the Bylaws). In general, if three divisions approve the memorial, the declaration it contains must be submitted to a mail ballot of all voting members of the Senate.
This, then, is where the matter stands currently: should one more Senate division approve the memorial, it is likely we will have a systemwide vote on it. The question is: to what end? The UCSD version of the proposed memorial reads: "The San Diego Division of the Academic Senate supports the right of Professor and Associate Professor In-Residence Faculty who are facing termination to a full Privilege and Tenure hearing if requested." This is, of course, the right that would be conferred upon in-residence faculty by the Senate's proposed revisions to the APM. What purpose, then, is served by submitting this question to the UC Regents -- assuming the memorial makes it to that stage? Given past practice, it seems extremely unlikely that the Regents would do anything with such a declaration other than turn it over to the administration and Senate for consideration. To the degree that regental action is being sought, the memorial is likely to have no effect.
One might nevertheless ask what harm could come from such an exercise? Here, the answers aren't hard to come by. A systemwide mail-ballot vote on any issue would be time-consuming and very expensive. Apart from this, during a period in which the concept of shared governance is being strained within the University, why would the Senate want to invite the Regents to weigh in on a matter that normally would be decided upon by the administration in consultation with the faculty? The message such a declaration conveys is of a faculty that cannot take care of its own affairs.
Supporters of the memorial have noted that the memorial process is the only means the Senate has to garner the views of rank-and-file faculty on all campuses regarding a given issue. This is true enough, but consider the possible outcomes to a systemwide vote on the in-residence issue. If it were positive, the statewide Senate would merely have a mandate to lobby for a position it has already taken. If it were negative, is the Senate to regard this as a mandate to oppose any change in in-residence regulations? The wisest course would be to let the Senate's deliberative process proceed without the expensive distraction of a memorial to the Regents.