Letter to the UC Faculty
From Council Chair Mellichamp

September 30, 1996

Senate Colleagues:

As the new academic year begins, I wanted to take some time to write to you about some of the issues that now confront the University and the Universitywide Academic Senate's response to them.

Many faculty have told me in the past year that they think of the Universitywide Senate as an organization distant from their activities and concerns. This is inevitable to a certain extent; faculty are, and should be primarily concerned with their own departments, their own teaching and their own research programs, while the Universitywide Senate must be concerned with departments, teaching, and research in the aggregate, which is to say, across nine campuses.

I would argue, however, that while the Universitywide Senate does not focus on local issues, the results of its work are intensely local, in that its mission is to enhance the working environment that exists in each classroom and laboratory. It's obvious that the University's budget, its newly adopted budgeting initiative, affirmative action, shared governance, and other such topics do affect faculty directly and in important ways. One challenge to the Universitywide Senate and its executive committee, the Academic Council, is to keep you abreast of what the Senate is doing in connection with these important issues. This letter is a step in that direction. More communication is in the works, however: Over the course of this year we intend to enhance our existing site on the World Wide Web (http://www.ucop.edu/senate) so as to provide not only more types of information to Senate members, but also some electronic means by which campus faculty can easily communicate with Universitywide Senate leaders.

For now, what I'd like to provide is a brief summary of several of the more important issues facing the University. If you have suggestions, please send them to us at either of the addresses listed on the back page of Notice. And bear with us as we move toward less traditional but more efficient ways to keep in touch.

• On the fiscal state of the University: Faculty are well aware that we are coming out of the worst fiscal experience in living memory at the University. Things have improved, but much remains to be done. With respect to faculty salaries, there are two faculty representatives on the Board of Regents, Sandra Weiss and myself, and we will be urging the Board to accelerate the timetable under which UC's faculty salaries are scheduled to catch up with faculty at our "comparison-eight" institutions. UC salaries are projected to lag comparison-eight salaries by 5-6 percent after this year's 5-percent merit and parity increases take effect. Our argument will be that it is critical to return UC to its former competitive position as quickly as possible. There is much sympathy for this position on the Board; the challenge is to find a way to turn support into action. One topic about which faculty should expect to hear more is the developing crisis in the capital budget. In a nutshell, it is difficult at present to see how UC's capital needs can be funded in the years ahead of us.

• On the new budgeting method: Many concepts we have held onto for years are being eliminated or radically altered by UC's move to a new decentralized resource allocation process. Under President Atkinson's budget initiative, partly put in place as of July 1, campuses will receive block grants consisting of their "base budget" and an increment related to growth in enrollments above the base values. An example of just one result of these changes will be in the definition of "faculty FTE" that all faculty have worked under for decades. FTE no longer will represent hard positions allocated to a campus by the Office of the President which, when filled, become fixed commitments of state resources to as many persons. FTE now is simply a measure of the number of faculty employed at any time. Thus chancellors have been given a mechanism by which faculty positions can be created, eliminated, or "mothballed." There are many potential advantages to be derived from this change, including the possibility of supporting faculty from non-traditional sources, such as student fees and endowments. However, many potential abuses can flow from such a change as we have learned from the use of in-residence positions within clinical departments. The Senate will continue to concentrate much attention this year on the new budgeting process.

• On affirmative action: The Regents' actions of July 1995 on affirmative action have yet to be resolved, to say the least. If there has been any benefit from the ensuing events, it is that we are taking a more sophisticated look at diversity. And there has been a complete reassessment of the role that factors outside of grades and test scores should play in undergraduate admissions. The admissions guidelines released this summer by the President and the Chair of the Academic Council will ensure that candidates are evaluated on a broader range of qualifications than has been the case in the past.

• On shared governance: It is my intent, and that of the Academic Council, that the Senate be fully engaged in all decisions affecting our academic mission. Last winter, in the wake of the Regents' decisions on affirmative action, the Academic Council convened a special task force that had two missions: to investigate all aspects of governance, including how shared governance has worked in the past and is now working; and to invigorate the role of the Senate and faculty more generally in management of the University. As part of its work, this panel is developing a number of case studies -- looking, for example, at the issue of faculty rewards, which came up several years ago -- and it will report on how the Senate functioned in these instances. One early product of this work is a research paper on the history of faculty's participation in the undergraduate admissions process developed by Dr. John Douglass, director of the Santa Barbara Senate. Now out for review, it firmly establishes the faculty's historical authority over all aspects of the admissions process, subject, as are all aspects of University governance, to Regental approval. It also reveals how faculty, over time, have passed on to the administration virtually all responsibility for the mechanics of admissions and, further, how anything other than a collaborative effort between faculty and administration in this important area would be virtually impossible because of the huge number of applicants to UC and the complexity of the admissions process.

  At the meeting of the Board of Regents held last month (September 20), President Atkinson presented a strong statement affirming his own commitment to shared governance and his personal belief that Regents have not wavered from their historic commitments to it. In this statement, he also informed Regents of his request for a review of shared governance by the Senate's task force and of his intention to provide the results of this study to the Board when it is completed. Given all this, my own view is that we are off to a strong start in coming to grips with this difficult issue: The president has confirmed his commitment to shared governance, the Regents have heard this - and have not dissented from it - and all parties await a Senate report on the subject.

• On the crisis in the medical centers: Faculty on the medical school campuses are well aware of the fiscal crisis now facing our hospitals and the potential effects that mergers with private interests may have on their ability to teach and do research. The Academic Council is forming a special committee to deal with issues of importance to health sciences faculty and the Council has changed its traditional meeting schedule so faculty representatives can attend special Regents meetings called to deal with medical issues. It's fair to say that UC's medical centers have never faced a crisis of this magnitude; the Senate must be intimately involved in the response to it, so as to ensure that academic values are preserved in the face of pressing financial exigencies.

These topics represent only some of the issues the Universitywide Senate will be working on in the coming months. As we begin to deal with them, I'd like to encourage all of my faculty colleagues to make their views known to the Senate leadership and to be as personally involved in Senate work as time and energy permit. The University is only as strong as its faculty and the voice of the faculty is the Senate.

Duncan Mellichamp

Chair, Academic Council