A long-delayed Senate vote concerning In-Residence faculty will go forward in April. With concerns over the wording of ballot materials settled to the satisfaction the Academic Council, Arnold Leiman, the chair of the Council, decided late in March that voting ballots and supporting materials will be sent on April 8 to campus Senate offices. Those offices will in turn distribute voting packets to all Academic Senate members throughout the system.
In the balloting, Senate faculty will be asked to vote for or against sending a "memorial," or sense-of-the-Senate statement, to UC President Richard Atkinson for transmission to the UC Regents. The memorial concerns the question of what procedural rights In-Residence faculty should have in the event that their positions are scheduled for elimination. Though In-Residence faculty are Senate members -- most with long records of service at the University -- they cannot be granted tenure, since their salaries come largely from grants or clinical income, rather than from state funds. The vast majority of In-Residence faculty serve in UC's medical schools.
The heart of the Memorial is a single sentence that reads: "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."
Supporters of the memorial argue that institution of such a right is necessary to correct what they regard as a fundamental inequity in the treatment of Senate faculty: that regular-ranks associate and full professors have the right to an "early-termination" hearing under which Senate P&T committees pass judgment on the fairness of any proposed termination, while In-Residence faculty have no such right.
Opponents of the memorial agree that In-Residence faculty need greater procedural protection; they argue, however, that the solution proposed in the memorial is probably unworkable and that it deals with only one In-Residence issue out of several the Senate is attempting to address.