Council Approves Major Revision
Of In-Residence Regulations

The Academic Senate has completed work on a proposal that, if enacted, would extensively revise the regulations governing the employment of In-Residence faculty at the University of California. The Academic Council, which approved the proposal in April, has forwarded it to President Atkinson, who is now expected to send it out for administrative review. The proposal's recommendations are so wide-ranging that enactment of them would require modification of the Senate's Bylaws, the administration's Academic Personnel Manual and the UC Regents' Standing Orders.

Completion of work on the proposal comes just as faculty across the UC system are beginning to vote on a "memorial," or sense-of-the-Senate resolution on In-Residence faculty. Ballots for the memorial went out in April; the deadline for campuses to report results of the voting is May 17th.

The Senate's proposal on In-Residence faculty deals with the issue raised by the memorial - termination procedures for In-Residence faculty - but goes on to address a host of issues outside the scope of the memorial, such as the nature of In-Residence (IR) appointments and financial support for faculty whose positions are eliminated. The proposal was crafted by a nine-person task force appointed by the Senate's University Committee on Academic Personnel (UCAP), chaired by Afaf Meleis of UC San Francisco.

In-Residence faculty are Academic Senate members whose salaries generally come from grants or clinical income. Some 1,200 are employed at UC, the vast majority of them in UC's medical schools. Given the source of their salaries, IR faculty may not be granted tenure at UC, a condition of employment that no one has suggested changing. The issue of termination procedures for IR faculty arose last year, in one sense as the result of a proposal for elimination of a single IR faculty position. The issue was also fueled, however, by the momentous changes taking place in the U.S. health care industry - changes that may bring about a significant downsizing of UC's medical centers. In addition, most Senate members felt that changes in IR termination regulations were desirable simply as a matter of providing as much procedural fairness as possible to all Senate members.

Building on the work of an earlier UCAP report, the UCAP task force believed that it was not only IR termination procedures that needed to be revamped, but IR employment regulations in general. Accordingly, the task force proposed a broad-based set of changes. The task force has therefore called for:

• Uniform IR faculty appointment policies across the campuses with "indefinite" appointments made in every case for faculty at the full and associate level. Currently, UC's campuses vary in the kinds of IR appointments they make. Some offer nothing but fixed-period IR appointments; one offers nothing but indefinite appointments (which carry no ending date), and still others offer a mixture of the two. The UCAP task force recommends doing away with fixed-period appointments altogether.

• A "full search" to be conducted for all IR appointments. On some campuses, department chairs now may offer new IR appointments after seeking only the approval of the campus Academic Personnel Committee. The UCAP proposal is aimed at ensuring that academic departments, deans and campus Senate committees join department chairs in reviewing any proposal for a new IR position.

• Associate and full professors whose positions are terminated to be granted 90 days termination notice for each year of employment, during which time they would continue to receive their "covered compensation" salary. Such salary would be provided for a maximum of up to a year, beyond which individual continuation arrangements could be made. These provisions could be modified in instances of a campus "fiscal emergency," in which case less support could be provided.

• An "adequate reserve covered compensation account" to be established to the extent possible for every new IR appointment made. Such reserve accounts would help provide terminated faculty with salary for the period of continued support noted above. In addition, a requirement to set aside such funding, the task force felt, would result in greater departmental deliberation in connection with any decision to create an IR position.

• A multi-step review process to be carried out in connection with the termination of any associate or full IR appointment. This process would begin with a departmental chair's notification of an IR faculty member of an intent to terminate and would continue through the chair's consultation with departmental faculty and dean, after which a recommendation would go to the chancellor. Should the chancellor agree with the decision to terminate, the IR faculty member would have the right to request a Senate hearing on the action. Such hearings would be conducted by a new Senate body the task force called for: the Early Termination Committee, which would be a subcommittee of the Privilege and Tenure Committee and advisory to the Chancellor. The ETC would hold an evidentiary hearing on the proposed termination to make sure it was being carried out for proper reasons. Its decision could not be appealed.