Faculty Senate lays out priorities, including pay

Ohio University's Faculty Senate unanimously voted Monday night to approve a sense of the Senate resolution that outlines the body's current priorities.

The body's Executive Committee hopes this resolution will help guide Senate's decision-making throughout the upcoming budget cuts, another issue Faculty Senate dealt with Monday in a separate resolution calling for zero cuts to academic programs. That resolution is still pending, however.

The list of priorities includes faculty compensation and benefits, maintaining and enhancing tenure-track and continuing faculty, and maintaining and improving student quality, achievement, diversity and experience. It also includes supporting faculty research and creative activities and promoting shared governance.

"We need to protect instruction and instructional resources," Senate Chair Joe McLaughlin told senators. "One of the reasons we talked earlier in the year about doing this is to sort of make a public statement to try to communicate to our faculty colleagues around campus what we're working on and what we see as key priorities at the current time."

Before the unanimous vote, however, senators discussed a clause in the resolution that originally called for maintaining and enhancing tenure-track faculty, as some senators felt that this excluded the lower-level Group II, III and IV faculty members.

"I'd like to see myself identified in some of this," Luis Clemente, a Group IV instructor of political science, told McLaughlin. "At the end of the day, I depend on this job, and I want to keep this job. I want to make sure that my job is worth saving, worth sparing from the chopping block."

In committee meetings, the Executive Committee had debated this clause and chose to keep "tenure-track faculty" in the wording so as to represent Faculty Senate's displeasure in the decline of tenure-track faculty over the last few years, McLaughlin said.

Ultimately, though, Helaine Burnstein, Group II senator, offered an amendment to the resolution that added the wording "and continuing faculty" to the resolution.

The sense of the Senate resolution does not have to be signed by Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit in order for it to take effect.

"What we're really trying to say is that we want to hold the administration accountable during this economic period," said Joseph Slade, professor of media arts and studies. "What we're trying to do right now is to stop what's going on."

ALSO, AS OHIO UNIVERSITY looks to cut its budget by at least $10.5 million for fiscal year 2011, Faculty Senate discussed a resolution Monday night that would call for zero reductions to academic programs.

The Facilities and Finance Committee introduced the resolution for first reading after poring over the university's Budget Book. The resolution points out that while administrative expenditures have risen from 62.2 of the total Athens campus budget in 2000 to 63.9 percent in 2009, academic expenditures have declined from 37.9 percent of the budget in 2000 to 36.1 percent in 2009.

"The idea was that what we want is a simple statement that tries to establish some shared values with academics as a top priority of the university," explained Scott Titsworth, chair of facilities and finances and senator from the Scripps College of Communication. The resolution is intended to state a firm commitment to upholding the core values of academics, Titsworth said.

Budget reductions for academic units are inconsistent with the core academic mission of the university, the resolution states.

The university's administration has asked all units across the university plan for 10 percent budget cuts, and Benoit formed an ad hoc committee to examine how to begin to cut inactive academic programs. Monday, Benoit announced that the committee recommended that any cuts to academic programs fall in line with the Faculty Handbook.

If the administration were to follow Faculty Senate's proposed resolution barring cuts to academics, the cuts to non-academic units obviously would be much more severe than 10 percent.

Faculty Senate's resolution states that expenditures for academics "should" not be reduced to meet budget shortfalls, and one senator said he had a problem with the word should.

"Should is a weak verb," Joe Bernt, professor of journalism, declared. "It should say "will not" be decreased."

Bernt also suggested that the Senate tell faculty members across the university to not participate in producing any cuts to academic programs.

"We basically want to say, 'Don't cut academics,'" added Peter Jung, senator from the College of Arts and Sciences.

After writing the resolution, though, the Facilities and Finances Committee became aware of a second set of data called the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (IPEDS), provided by the National Center for Education Statistics. These numbers categorize university expenditures very differently from the budget book and allow for easier nationwide comparisons. The Facilities and Finances Committee wants to further examine these numbers before the vote on the budget priorities resolution to gain an understanding of where academics sits within the wider university framework, Titsworth said. The IPEDS numbers also reflect what the university actually spends in a budgeted year, whereas the university's Budget Book only reflects projected expenditures.

Titsworth said the committee's goal is to produce a resolution that all parties across the university can agree on - and one that Provost Benoit will sign.