A systemwide Academic Senate vote -- the Senate's first in almost 10 years -- will be conducted early next year in connection with in-residence faculty at UC.
The vote was set in motion when, on November 9, the UCLA Legislative Assembly became the third divisional governing body this year to approve submission of a "memorial" to the UC Regents on the subject of in-residence faculty. (UC San Diego approved the memorial in May and UC San Francisco followed suit in June; Irvine approved the memorial in November.) Senate Bylaws specify that when three divisions of a given size approve such a memorial, the proposition it contains must be put to mail-ballot vote of all Academic Senate members at the University. Academic Council Chair Arnold Leiman said in November that he expects ballots to be sent to all Senate members late in January. (See related story.)
At issue are the procedures that govern termination of employment for in-residence faculty, who are overwhelmingly concentrated in UC's medical schools and whose salaries are paid primarily from grant and clinical income. Given this source of funding, these faculty cannot be granted tenure, though some have security of employment in University-affiliated Veteran's Administration hospitals. Between 1,000 and 1,200 in-residence faculty are employed by the University.
The issue of in-residence termination procedures has arisen not so much because of actual terminations -- so far as supporters of the memorial know, the University has sought to dismiss only three associate or full professors in-residence in recent years. Rather the issue has been sparked by a fear among in-residence faculty that they will be subjected to job or income losses in the future because of the wrenching changes taking place in the U.S. health-care industry. Current UC regulations, these faculty feel, allow for arbitrary dismissal of in-residence faculty.
The statewide Academic Senate investigated these concerns last year and its University Committee on Academic Personnel (UCAP) produced a report containing a set of recommendations for changes in in-residence regulations. As approved by the Academic Council, this report was then sent to President Peltason, who forwarded it to the campuses for review. Proceeding in parallel with this action, however, was a separate divisional Senate response to the in-residence issue: the move to pass a memorial in connection with it.
The in-residence memorial language approved to date by all four Senate divisions is identical in substance. The UCSD-approved 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."
The Case For and Against
Supporters of the memorial maintain that, should this recommendation be put into effect, it would prevent arbitrary dismissals of in-residence faculty and insure that any separations from the University take place in a fair manner. The intent of the memorial, they say, is to give a push to such a change by providing the administration with a sense of faculty sentiment on this issue.
Those opposed to the memorial say that the complex issue of revamping in-residence regulations cannot be dealt with by an up-or-down vote on a one-sentence proposition. The Senate is proceeding to work on the in-residence issue, they note, and is committed to ensuring due process for in-residence faculty. Beyond this, they point out that the memorial will serve its proponents purposes only if it passes handily, which is not at all certain, while if it does not pass the entire process of considering the issue could be undercut.
Under Senate Bylaws, results of memorial votes are sent by the Senate leadership to the president for transmission to the UC Regents. The nominal purpose of a memorial, then, is the communication of faculty positions to the Regents, but supporters of the in-residence memorial say that this is not their purpose.
"We are not seeking to get anything to the UC Regents," says Carol MacLeod a professor in-residence at UCSD who last spring brought the first memorial resolution to the UCSD Representative Assembly. The Regents, she acknowledges, would be unlikely to take any action on the memorial, other than to recommend that the administration consider it. As such, MacLeod says the intended recipient of the memorial is President Atkinson and his staff. Divisional resolutions -- as opposed to memorials -- are available for communication with the president, but MacLeod notes that such resolutions are passed by representative assemblies, or at best in divisional meetings, instead of by vote of faculty across the system. "The memorial is a stronger statement," she says, and is the only means the Senate has of gathering the views of rank-and-file faculty on a given issue.
Alden Mosshammer is a professor of history at UCSD and former chair of the Senate's University Committee on Rules and Jurisdiction. He is a supporter of change in the rules governing in-residence employment, but thinks the memorial is a bad idea.
"This issue is too complex to be addressed in a memorial," he says, adding that the memorial "is potentially divisive" of faculty as well. Mosshammer's view is shared by most of the leadership of the Academic Senate. Beyond this, support for the memorial on campuses without medical schools is questionable. In October, both the Berkeley and Santa Cruz divisions of the Senate voted to "decline to act" on the memorial -- one of the options allowed by Senate Bylaws. Meanwhile, the Berkeley Divisional Council, wary that a vote to decline to act "could be interpreted as neutrality" toward the memorial voted on December 4 to oppose it and recommend "that the members of the Academic Senate at Berkeley vote against the Memorial in the forthcoming mail ballot".
A key to understanding the substance of the memorial is that associate- and full-professor in-residence (IR) appointments come in two varieties: those with fixed ending dates and those that are "indefinite." The rules governing these appointments are contained in the Academic Personnel Manual's Section 270, whose sub-section 17.b.2 recommends that indefinite appointments be granted "only when there is a reasonable expectation of long-term funding," (through, for example, extramural grant support).
These provisions notwithstanding, UC's campuses vary greatly in the IR appointments they actually make. At UCSD, MacLeod says, all associate and full IR appointments are indefinite; meanwhile at UC San Francisco all such IR appointments carry fixed ending dates, according to Dorothy Bainton, UCSF's vice chancellor of academic affairs. Conversely, at UCLA 37 percent of IR appointments are indefinite, the rest fixed, according to UCLA Senate Chair Charles Lewis.
Further complicating this matter is the question of what understanding department chairs and IR faculty have of the rules governing IR appointments. At UCSF, for example, a Senate committee looking into IR issues found, through a survey, that better than 90 percent of IR faculty were unaware that they were working under fixed appointments.
The distinction between fixed and indefinite appointments is relevant to the issue the memorial addresses -- Privilege and Tenure hearings -- in the following way. Setting aside disciplinary inquiries, campus P&T committees are empowered to deal with two kinds of cases: those involving grievances and those involving early termination. Under current rules, IR faculty with fixed appointments would not seem to have standing to request an early-termination hearing from P&T if they are let go as of their appointment's expiration date.
These faculty presumably have the right to request a grievance hearing upon notice of termination, but such hearings are not the same as early-termination hearings: in cases involving reappointment (or the lack of it) grievance hearings may deal only with the question of whether proper procedures were followed. For fixed-appointment IR faculty, however, the presumption is that their appointment ends unless it is renewed. Thus "proper procedure" could amount to simply letting an appointment lapse, with no reasons stated for this course of action. Given this, IR faculty say, they are at risk of arbitrary dismissal.
Conversely, an early-termination P&T hearing is conducted "to determine whether . . . the proposed early termination is for good cause" according to Senate Bylaw 335, meaning that reasons have to be set forth for the termination. Such a hearing is thus the "full" Privilege and Tenure hearing referred to in the language of the proposed memorial. Adequate reasons for ending indefinite IR appointments are, according to the current Academic Personnel Manual, budgetary reasons (i.e., loss of grant or clinical support), "lack of work," or programmatic changes within an academic unit.
In the view of some Senate members, the question of ensuring due process for IR faculty hinges on making all IR appointments indefinite. The view of former Rules and Jurisdiction Chair Mosshammer, for example, is that any proposal to terminate an indefinite appointment would amount to an "early termination" action and thus would bring with it the right to an early-termination P&T hearing. Academic Council Chair Arnold Leiman has asked UCR&J to provide an opinion on this question and committee Chair James Sims says that this work is "in process."
At least three proposals have now been set forth to revamp IR regulations, and two of them -- the UCAP report and a UCLA Senate task force report -- recommend that all associate and full IR professors receive indefinite appointments; meanwhile a third proposal, drawn up by UCSD's Mosshammer, recommends that these faculty "normally" be given indefinite appointments. In the case of the UCAP and UCLA reports, these recommendations come within the context of a complex set of proposals dealing with a host of IR issues, including continued salary support for IR faculty who have lost funding; Mosshammer's recommendation would involve a detailed revamping of the Academic Personnel Manual.
These recommendations stand in decided contrast to the proposed memorial. It specifies an end -- a "full Privilege and Tenure hearing" -- without specifying a means to it, and it says nothing about how such a change would be integrated with other IR issues. As such, in the view of its opponents, it stands to confound the process of revamping IR regulations. This would particularly be the case, memorial opponents say, if the memorial fails to win a majority of Senate votes. In an editorial in the October issue of Notice, Academic Council Chair Leiman asked: "If [the memorial vote] were negative, is the Senate to regard this as a mandate to oppose any change in in-residence regulations?"