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The Arts and Sciences Council (ASC), 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm, Zoom

Representatives Present: Robert Rupert (PHIL), Julie Lundquist (ATOC), Sebastian Casalaina (MATH), Elspeth Dusinberre (CLAS), Paul Romatschke (PHYS), Mike Zerella (RAPS), Joe Bryan (GEOG), Andrew Cowell (LING), Annje Wiese (HUMN), William Taylor (ANTH), Juan Pablo Dabove (SPAN), Stephanie Su (AAH), Shelley Copley (MCDB), Matt Jones (PSYC), Kieran Murphy (FRIT), Cecilia Pang (THDN), David Paradis (HIST), Christina Meyers (SLHS), Christopher Osborn (CINE), Robert Parson (CHEM), Rebecca Flowers (GEOL), Svetoslav Derderyan (PSCI), Jennifer Schwartz (HONR), Doug Seals (IPHY), Robert Kuchta (BCHM), Aun Ali (RLST), Daniel Kaffine (ECON), Zachary Kilpatrick (APPM), Nicholas Villanueva (ETHN), Anastasiya Osipova (GSLL), Benjamin Brown (APS), Matthias Richter (ALC), Matthew Burgess (ENVS), Nichole Barger (EBIO)

Representatives not present: Rebecca Wartell (JWST), Anthony Abiragi (PWR), ), Liam Downey (SOCY), Lorraine Bayard de Volo (WGST), John Stevenson (ENGL)

Also in attendance: James White (Acting Dean), Anna Jensen (Dean’s Office), Bud Coleman (Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Initiatives), Amy Lavens (Vice Dean of Finance and Administration), Danielle Brunner (Assistant Vice Chancellor of Budget and Finance), Katrina Spencer (Associate Vice Chancellor of Budget and Finance)

The meeting is called to order at 3:32 pm.

Dean’s Remarks

Acting Dean White says there is an ongoing discussion happening regarding the mask mandate. Schools in PAC-12 and across the country have varied mask mandates. ���������� is keeping the mask mandate for now. White expects campus to have a look at the mask mandate again sometime around spring break. Their decision will depend on how COVID/Omicron behave.

Proposals for new Living and Learning Communities (LLC) are due June 6^th. There will be a Zoom listening session on Feb 11^th at 9 am, another Zoom session on Feb 25^th, and an in-person session on March 15^th. White says if you are not familiar with these communities, please familiarize yourself. These are a way for first year students living in dorms to form communities and A&S should be represented in the LLC universe.

The launching of interdisciplinary academies was postponed in order to give the Provost’s office enough time to continue looking for funding.

Rupert asks if White can say a bit more about the role of faculty in LLCs. White says anyone can put forward a proposal for an LLC. Cecilia Pang (THDN representative and Director of Libby RAP) can give someone an idea of what it is like working in that universe. Unlike RAPs, LLCs are not centered around a theme. If anyone has an interest in supporting first year students, White encourages them to have a look at the website.

A representative from ANTH asks if the campus has any mechanism for listing the breakdown of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) implementation. There are a lot of faculty with questions about the way it was implemented. In his unit, there are examples of faculty with the same exact metrics who came out with different implementations. White says faculty should speak with their chair. White’s understanding is that there is a document available that expands on the metrics used. If your department chair cannot find that, let your divisional dean or White know.

MCDB’s representative asks where the money for EPA salary adjustments came from. White says the money came from ���������� System.

PSYC’s representative says his department was told that, for people whose salary was below the result of the formula, adjustments were made only for women and people from underrepresented groups. White says that is true because that is who the EPA law applies to. White’s understanding is that campus is moving forward with the pay adjustment as a result of this (phase two). He does not know what parameters there are for that, but it may address market issues that were not addressed in the first phase.

ANTH’s representative says it is the case in which campus’s implementation has created a new pay gap that did not exist in the past. This seems to have caused some serious morale issues. White says this was mentioned frequently, but the law required them to take a look at salaries for women and people from underrepresented groups.

Rupert says he has sent out the announcement from the Provost’s office for nominations for the phase two committee. This is a separate process that is meant to address questions about compression and keeping up with our AAU peers. This committee will be called “The Faculty Salary Procedures Working Group.” It will also review merit review processes with an eye toward developing best practices. This is a matter the ASFS may be talking more about.

White says there is a website where one can nominate people to the phase two committee.
Chair of the Grievance Committee asks if anything with salary adjustment affects the existing salary equity policies already in place. White says they still have an appeals process and are still working off of the department’s procedures. The EPA was intended to identify structural problems that were relatable to gender and protected class.

Rupert says revisions are being proposed to . These seem to be specifically in connection with expectations about salary equity and ways of getting rid of salary inequity.

Chair’s comments

Rupert welcomes new representatives.

ASFS Chair elections are coming up in April and Rupert encourages anyone who is interested to self-nominate; more information about the process will be provided at the March ASFS meeting.

Boulder Faculty Assembly (BFA) is working to populate the faculty salary process working group. ASFS is not in a position to nominate people directly. Talk to a BFA representative if you want input into the formation of the committee.

In general, Rupert encourages communicating with colleagues on faculty governance business. The documents that Rupert sends out can be shared with departments, unless it comes with a clarification stating otherwise.

Divisional councils are slowly but surely getting up and running. The ASFS executive committee will double in size with the six chairs and directors from the divisional councils, who will also be members of the ASFS.

Cecilia Pang, Diversity Committee

Tomorrow, Pang will send out two posters to ASFS members. One is a call for nominations for the ASCEND Awards. Prior submissions are welcome. The other is a call for nominations for the DEI Passion Project.

Please help nominate fellow faculty, staff and students or self-nominate your unit.

Katrina Spencer, Budget Model Redesign

Spencer says that Danielle Brunner, Senior Budget Director and Amy Lavens, Vice Dean of Finance and Administration are also in attendance.

Spencer shares screen with slides, which were also shared at last week’s BFA meeting.

When this project started years ago, the question was: is the current budget model correct? The current budget model is an incremental model. While that provides stability, it is not flexible. They wanted to think about how to build a flexible model that can respond to the rapidly changing higher education landscape. There is no known time period where we did not have this incremental budget model in place. They needed a model that gets away from legacy decisions and responds to declines, ensures accountability and increases transparency.

When talking about redesigning the budget model, they’re referring specifically to the allocation from central campus to college.

The following design parameters were set by the Executive Sponsors: focusing on the allocation of net tuition, re-evaluating legacy revenue sharing agreements, not including indirect cost recovery distributions in the new allocation, the proportionate allocation of net tuition to academic schools/colleges vs. academic and administrative support units remaining at roughly 65% to schools/colleges and 35% to academic/administrative support units, and including a strategic fund to provide pooled funds for strategic investment.

There are three phases to the budget model redesign: diagnostic, solution design and implementation readiness. They are currently in the Solution Design phase, which determines organizational structure of the budget model, collects data to build a prototype model, reviews decision points, further designs the model, customized the model and continues campus engagement.

Efforts to date include the Diagnostic Phase (interviewed 114 academic and administrative leaders) and the Solution Design Phase (listening sessions, coffee and campus budget sessions, the strategic alignment committee has met 21 times). Moving forward, they will visit every school/college to discuss the prototype in more detail.

Preliminary recommendations include a 65/35 split between campus and college, with a graduate/undergraduate portion for each college. Student Credit Hours/enrollment allocation takes up to 90% of the undergraduate portion, which then gets divided between two different components of record at 30% and college of instruction at 70%. If a student from the College of Engineering takes a MATH class offered by A&S, 70% goes to A&S and 30% to Engineering.

On the graduate side, 100% of SCH is split 50/50 between the college of record and the college of instruction. There is a much higher correlation between college of record & instruction on the graduate side.

Next steps include flushing out a supplemental, strategic investment fund, college of record/college of instruction allocations for cross-college minors and majors, program in exploratory studies and DEI priorities.

SPAN’s representative recalls Spencer saying it was important for the new budget model to be flexible and not be bound by legacy decisions. However, this 65/35 distribution between the campus and college is maintained because of a historical pattern. This seems contradictory. Spencer says that as they move into a new model, they want to build a flexible model. They do not want to have knee jerk reactions and over or under-fund a unit. They need to go through and do a bottom-up assessment of all departments. This current budget model will allow them the metrics to do that.

PHYS representative agrees that changing the budget model drastically would be bad. However, that does not mean they shouldn’t be working towards finding out what the appropriate distribution should be. Perhaps later, it should be 70/30 or something else. Spencer says they are trying to do the best they can to build a model that works for the campus. This will never be completely finished. They will re-visit this in three to five years to see what the consequences are.

ASFS chair says he has been hearing a lot about how little money there is to hire tenure-track faculty. That seems to not be a priority for the institution. This 65/35 split might not reflect the values of this institution. Spencer says they will need to be continually looking at this split.

Brunner says she does not want there to be a perception that they do not support faculty hiring in schools and college. While there are not enough resources to go around, hopefully there will be a more direct allocation to schools and colleges to help support that in their units.

APS’s representative asks Spencer to briefly describe the “Hold Harmless” year and how that is intended to work. Spencer explains that this ensures the funding they would have in FY22 plus whatever increases needed would be funded that way in FY23. No school, college, support unit would go below their FY22 funding levels.

A representative asks if the 35/65 split will be automatic. Spencer confirms that it will be automatic.

MCDB’s representative asks what that split looks like at peer institutions. Spencer says she would be happy to send that data over. The same representative asks if ���������� is spending more on administrative support. Spencer says that generally, peer institutions are spending more on the administrative side.

Possible creation of teaching professor/clinical faculty personnel committee

Rupert points out that the creation of a new standing committee will require an amendment of the bylaws. The Planning Committee would bring a proposal to ASFS. ASFS would be voting to put that proposal to a vote of the faculty of Arts & Sciences. In addition, the Planning Committee has also been talking about guidelines for the operation of this committee.

A few years back, there was an instructor task force who submitted a recommendation. That report was endorsed by the ASFS’s predecessor (the ASC). There is now a second stage of taking this report and evaluating what the policy surrounding its recommendations might look like.

Copley, chair of the Planning Committee, says the proposal to create a teaching and clinical faculty personnel committee came to the Planning Committee from the new dean’s advisory group which morphed out of the previous instructor task force. The advisory group proposed a personnel committee to handle promotions within the teaching faculty track. The working titles are now: teaching assistant professor, teaching associate professor and teaching full professor. This personnel committee would handle promotions within these ranks. They would also handle non-reappointments and appointments for less than the standard three-year term. This committee would parallel the existing personnel committee: 7-9 members from all three divisions. Members would be primarily, but not exclusively, teaching faculty. The members would serve 2-year terms and they would be staggered to keep some continuity. The purpose of this discussion is to solicit feedback/opinions on the idea of constituting this committee before the Planning Committee comes up with an official motion. Part of the point of this is to make the promotion within teaching faculty ranks more rigorous in the sense of having input from faculty outside the unit in which the candidate is rostered. For promotion to teaching full professor, there would be a requirement for outside letters along with evaluations of teaching from faculty outside the primary unit.

EBIO’s representative asks if there was a discussion about having one personnel committee for instructors and another tenure track personnel committee. Copley says the reason for proposing a separate committee is that the current personnel committee has its hands full and it doesn’t seem feasible to have one committee review both tenure track and instructional faculty. There is no philosophical reason for separating the committees, it’s just a practical issue.

Chair of the Personnel Committee says he feels uncomfortable with the fact that he doesn’t recall the Personnel Committee being asked if they have too much work to handle this. Given the current structure and lack of teaching releases, he does not think the current personnel committee can handle the additional burden of dealing with non-tenure track cases. But he does feel they are the only existing Personnel Committee, so if a decision is to be made along the lines of creating a parallel committee, they should have been consulted. He does support the work that the planning committee is doing.
Copley says when she was chair of Personnel Committee, she remembers it being a large undertaking and couldn’t imagine adding extra work to that committee.

ANTH’s representative received a lot of feedback from his department over the last few months. Some of the teaching faculty in his department feel negatively about the title change component. There is a feeling as though this attempt will result in demotions or increased difficulty of promotions for a category of faculty that are already stretched to their limits. There are some concerns about the idea of making non-tenure track faculty, who have far less security, go through the same obstacles of tenure track faculty.

Copley says the proposal came from dean’s working group, which was primarily made up of instructors with 2-3 tenured faculty. She doesn’t believe anyone intends to demote anyone. In respect to the titles, these are system-wide titles. This will not make things more onerous for teaching faculty, but may make it more onerous for chairs. The motivation is to provide more respect for teaching faculty, not to make things more difficult.

APS representative says he heard similar comments from his department. Getting external letters for faculty spending most of their time teaching is difficult. There are huge pay discrepancies between what we pay tenure versus non-tenure track faculty. To potentially put additional barriers in the way of promotion seems unnecessary.

Copley says the external letters would not have to be from outside the university, they could be from teaching faculty outside the candidate’s department. The candidate would not be the person arranging for someone to come visit their class- this would be done by either a PUEC or department chair. In terms of reappointment, the committee would not be handling reappointments. She doesn’t believe a lot would change for the individual teaching professors.

ALC’s representative says that external letters from a different department still raises problems. It adds work for people. We should think through the process in very concrete terms, asking the department in what way these letters can be meaningful, before adding more work that keeps us away from our core mission. The college hires brilliant teaching professors, so if they now have to go through this process, they might want to do things that would increase promotion chances. A lot of our teaching professors do research, but don’t get paid for it. He would caution against adding more pressure on teaching professors to do things they don’t get paid for. He hopes all the details are thought through in a concrete way before instilling processes that might backfire.

Copley says there are two distinctions that would be new. Promotions would be discussed by teaching faculty from other units (rather than just staying within the unit). Copley doesn’t see how this makes it more difficult for the instructor. The other new distinction is including letters from faculty from other units. This brings it closer to the tenure track personnel committee. This brings more prestige and respect to those being promoted.

CINE’S representative is curious about how disagreements would be handled. If committee disagrees with the unit, what happens? Copley says if they disagree, the case would go back to the unit to make their case again. It would be similar to what happens in the tenure track personnel committee.

Rupert clarifies that the creation of the Personnel Committee being discussed would have a charge of 3-4 sentences. All of these details (letters, denials) are important, but wouldn’t be part of the proposal to create the committee. This is a separate issue to some extent.

CINE’s representative wants to know what problem this new personnel committee would solve.
Copley says this idea came from the instructor task force. This did not come from the Planning Committee.

HIST’s representative says he was interviewed by the instructor task force and he finds this to be a welcome change. He recognizes that some have devoted their lives to teaching and are on a different tier from tenure track faculty. This attempt to create titles that are respectful to their focus on teaching recognizes that. He is grateful for what they’re doing here and thinks it helps heal some wounds.

SPAN’s representative says one of the incentives to create the task force was that departments treated instructors in different ways.

White says there is currently a PUEC for teaching professor reappointments/promotions, and a sign-off at the divisional dean level, but there is no review at the college level. His sense is that the idea is not to add to teaching professors’ workload. The college level review would codify what we already know: the college’s Teaching Professors are excellent. This review process would put them more on par with the tenure track faculty while adding a level of gravitas. He doesn’t believe any of that is a bad thing, but he is grateful for the discussion.

ANTH’s representative says he has appreciated hearing the responses. It would be helpful to produce a short FAQ/summary document. It would be good for this to be laid out in a formal manner that can be circulated in the departments. This might give people a chance to understand the motivations and calm some of the fears.

Copley says this discussion relates more to the procedures than to the proposal itself. The Planning Committee hasn’t had a chance to discuss the procedures. This will be coming at a future meeting.

Rupert thanks the Planning Committee for doing this work. The meeting is adjourned at 5:01 pm.