Letters to Notice: More on the In-Residence Memorial Vote

To the Editor:

All members of the Academic Senate will be asked to vote by mail ballot for or against a Memorial that seeks to obtain for Professor and Associate Professor In-Residence (IR) Faculty a fundamental due process right that is unavailable to them but available to virtually all other employees of the University. We urge that you vote yes.

A Memorial is the only UC mechanism available for a direct vote by Senate members on an issue. The central reason for this Memorial is to rectify a lack of due process for the over 1,200 In-Residence (IR) faculty who are full members of the Academic Senate. The pending Memorial requests the right to a full Privilege and Tenure (P&T) hearing, if requested, for senior IR faculty facing termination to ensure a fair, orderly, and objective termination procedure that avoids arbitrary or improper dismissals. The right to a hearing is a basic academic right that is currently enjoyed by essentially all other UC faculty: non-Senate Clinical and Adjunct Faculty under APM140, tenured Ladder Rank (LR) faculty under Regental Order 103.9, and virtually all other professional classifications under Personnel Department Policy A&PS190. Even Lecturers and day-care nursery school teachers have such a right. Only IR faculty lack this fundamental right. Thus, Professor and Associate Professor IR Faculty can be terminated by the mere expiration of their appointment. This fundamental unfairness was and remains our motivation for initiating this Memorial.

The following points, subordinate to this due process issue, are responses to arguments against the Memorial.

1. Opponents have offered only tangential administrative arguments against the Memorial, not that IR should be denied the basic right the Memorial seeks. No anti-Memorial arguments directly address correcting this fundamental inequity. It is the injustice that results from the absence of this hearing right, not changes in the health care system, that caused us to bring this issue forward.

2. The contribution of IR faculty to teaching, research, and clinical practice provides important service to the University that generates substantial indirect cost funds to support non-medical as well as medical campuses. The IR Faculty are judged for appointment and promotion by the same criteria as LR Faculty. They should have equivalent protection against arbitrary termination.

3. The Memorial seeks no financial support for terminees.

4. P&T committees are appropriate to determine whether a termination was arbitrary, an issue they have already addressed. If necessary, subcommittees could serve this purpose, but this would seem unnecessary, since few hearings have been requested for corresponding issues by either IR Faculty or the many Adjunct and Clinical Faculty.

5. Pending UCAP proposals to change the regulations regarding IR faculty have not expressly addressed the full hearing right requested by the Memorial.

We agree with the letter authored by Professor Alden Mosshammer (History, UCSD) which stated in the February Notice: "For the Senate to defeat the Memorial or to adopt it by only a slim majority would be a disaster."

-- Leonard Deftos, UCSD; Carol MacLeod, UCSD; Henry Hulter, UCSF