Faculty Meeting Minutes
May 2, 2000
President Pierce called the meeting to order at 4:05 p.m. Fifty-five voting members of the faculty
were present by 4:15 p.m.
Minutes of the April 4, 2000 faculty meeting were approved as distributed.
There were no announcements.
President Pierce said that the special May 8 faculty meeting she has called is not a regular faculty
meeting at which business will be conducted, but is an opportunity for sharing information and
soliciting input prior to the meeting of the Board of Trustees. She reported that the trustees will be
asked to approve the new residence hall project in principle. President Pierce said that this
project should be self-financing so it would not impact other projects. She said also that the
trustees would be involved in a workshop on the relationship between teaching and scholarship
and their impact on students. Finally, President Pierce reported that the dedicatory celebration of
Wyatt Hall would take place on Sunday, August 27. It will include tours, a ceremony on Ferguson
Plaza, and an all-campus picnic.
Curt Mehlhaff asked if the location for the new residence hall had been selected. President Pierce
responded that the new hall will form the north leg of the “U-shape” created by Seward, Regester,
Phibbs, and Todd Halls. She said this location was consistent with the original design plan
created by campus architect Albert Sutton in the 1920’s and with our recently developed master
plan.
Dean Terry Cooney had no report except to say that faculty contracts were in the works and, with
few exceptions, should be received within a few days.
Faculty Senate Chair Bill Haltom had no report except to say, in response to questions received,
that the reason junior faculty were not eliminated from the ballot for Faculty Advancement
Committee (FAC) membership was that there are no rules or guidelines in the Faculty Code or
elsewhere that preclude junior faculty from serving on the FAC.
Associate Dean Bill Barry then gave a report on work in progress to develop new core guidelines.
He said that the eight task forces have been meeting weekly during the past month, and that
several are almost finished with their work. He reported that proposals from the task forces will be
referred to the Curriculum Committee. After due deliberation the Curriculum Committee will
forward the proposals to the Faculty Senate. The proposals will ultimately come to the full faculty
for approval. He said that that the task forces, taking their cue from discussion in faculty
meetings, are working toward a “leaner” set of guidelines with less specificity than in the past. He
added that the proposed guidelines are also likely to have a stronger interdisciplinary flavor. Barry
concluded by saying the exercise “has been exciting and a lot of fun,” with 64 faculty involved in
the core guideline-development process.
Mehlhaff suggested that the pros and cons surrounding the issues that have been addressed in
the task forces “be memorialized” somehow so that the full faculty “won’t have to reinvent the
wheel” when the proposed core guidelines come before them. Barry agreed this was a good idea.
Juli McGruder asked if there had yet been discussion in the task forces about how transfer
students would fulfill the freshman seminar requirements. Barry responded no, not yet, and Dean
Cooney pointed out that there are all kinds of issues like this that are involved in shaping the new
core.
President Pierce called on Mott Greene, who asked that the body consider agenda item nine
ahead of agenda item eight. There being no objection, Greene distributed hard copies of a
University of Puget Sound Faculty Meeting Minutes
May 2, 2000, Page 2
motion he planned to make to revise section III.3.a. of the Faculty Code dealing with evaluation of
tenure-line faculty.
Greene also distributed and reviewed briefly the document “A Thumbnail Sketch of some
Implications of Revising Chapter III, Section 3, Subsection a of the Code” (attached to these
minutes). Greene explained that the purpose of the proposal is to shorten post-tenure faculty
evaluation procedures in ways that will reduce paperwork and curtail redundancy without affecting
the solid core of the process. He said that the dean or the head officer or the faculty member
could trigger a full review if that was preferred over the shorter review.
Greene M/S/motion withdrawn “to revise Chapter III, section 3, subsection a of the Faculty
Code as follows:
a. Evaluation begins at the department, school, or program level (Chapter III,
Section 4 - p.11) and proceeds through the Faculty Advancement
Committee and the dean (Chapter III, Section 5 - p.13) to the president.
When Board action is required, the president forwards his recommendation
and all material to the Instruction Committee of the Board of Trustees
(Chapter III, Section 6 - p.14). Tenured faculty, at the time of the three-year
associate professor review, and at all five-year reviews past promotion to
full professor, shall be reviewed by the head officer (rather than by the full
department, school, or program) and by the dean (rather than by the full
Faculty Advancement Committee) unless the faculty member, the head
officer, or the dean requests a full review to be performed.”
President Pierce pointed out that code changes require a first reading, and Haltom
reminded us that no motion is allowed during a first reading, so Greene withdrew his
motion. He expressed his intention of having a formal first reading at the first fall faculty
meeting. Dean Cooney pointed out that the faculty approved an earlier revision to this
section of the code that was sent to the trustees. Greene responded that he used the
current version as his starting point, and assumed that his revision could be integrated
with the earlier revision as appropriate.
Michel Rocchi asked if the proposal would have any effect on instructors’ merit pay, which
comes currently out of FAC reviews. Greene responded that his proposal would have no
effect on instructors or assistant professors.
Suzanne Holland asked whether classroom visits could be requested of colleagues by the
faculty member under the short review proposal. Greene responded that the motion
doesn’t speak to this and he agreed with President Pierce who said that there has to be a
mechanism for requesting a full or a short review. Michele Birnbaum said that if the
proposal were enacted she would miss the normative structure that the current full review
process creates within a department. Greene responded that some faculty would miss
this and some would not.
Grace Kirchner asked how the proposal might be affected by the accreditation standard
for faculty evaluation. Dean Cooney responded that the standard requires evaluation of
all faculty every three years. He said that in our recent self-study we made a strong case
for our five-year evaluations of full professors, and that the Commission on Colleges
agreed these were very thorough. He said the Commission would review the standard in
a year or so and we will decide after that how to respond to whatever emerges from the
review. President Pierce added that one argument made to the Commission was that
University of Puget Sound Faculty Meeting Minutes
May 2, 2000, Page 3
requiring reviews every three years rather than every five might lead to watered-down
reviews, given the expenditure of time and energy we put into them currently.
Barry Goldstein asked if our options might not be restricted if the accreditation standard
continues to require evaluations every three years. Dean Cooney responded that if the
standard is sustained after review by the Commission we would have to comply with it
somehow. He suggested that if three-year reviews are retained, one possibility for us
would be to have a full review every six years and a short review in the third year.
Mehlhaff argued that the proposed short reviews are what we had in place here before we
created the current system. He said we changed from an administrative review process
to a peer review process. He said we would be going backwards to return to an
administrative review process, despite the greater efficiencies that might be gained.
Dean Cooney said that in the experience of the FAC the first post-tenure review typically
produces the least amount of new information. He suggested that perhaps this review in
particular might a candidate for labor-reducing attention. He added that he is concerned
about pressure that may fall on the dean or the department chair not to call a full review
because of the implication, even though unwarranted, that there must be some problem.
He suggested that perhaps there needs to be the opportunity for the dean or the
department chair to call for a full review after seeing the file produced during a short
review as issues are raised.
McGruder suggested that one possibility for reducing the evaluation burden would be to
impose a word limit on statements of educational philosophy. This suggested was met by
a round of applause. Haltom commented that he would be writing his own statement next
year and would attempt to keep it to one page. Haltom gave Dean Cooney permission to
report to the faculty whether or not he had been successful in this regard.
Rocchi asked how one’s disagreement with the summary of a short review would be
expressed. Greene responded that this and all similar issues would have to be worked
out.
Kirchner wondered if three-year reviews of long-term, highly-regarded instructors could be
revisited. Dean Cooney suggested there might be ideas that could be explored in this
regard.
Suzanne Barnett said she was concerned about the “academic politics” that might be
involved in requesting a full review rather than a short review. She worried that
requesting a full review might cause ill will among one’s colleagues who would be put to
more work as a result. Haltom responded he thought it was a good thing to acknowledge
in this way that there are costs involved in a full review. Barnett said that the reviews she
has been involved with have been “exciting and sustaining.” She said that full professors
do change in five years, and that she valued the process of reciprocity whereby junior
faculty participate in the reviews of senior colleagues and vice versa. Ray Preiss
suggested that “the advantages of full reviews can get lost during a year when you have
six of them.”
President Pierce said she has worked at schools that have both kinds of evaluation systems and
that she agreed there are real advantages to a system where senior colleagues are reviewed by
junior colleagues. Rob Garratt said that full reviews take a lot of time, especially for those
involved in reviews outside one’s department. He added that it is important nevertheless to keep
University of Puget Sound Faculty Meeting Minutes
May 2, 2000, Page 4
“the efficacy of the current system intact.” Doug Cannon acknowledged that the evaluation
burdens are greater in some departments, such as English and mathematics, than in others.
Mehlhaff said that the proposal transfers the evaluation job from department members to the
chair. He said that currently the chair is simply a colleague who writes the summary letter, but
that this might change. Greene responded that the evaluation process should be shorter and
should involve less work. He said that chairs would simply read the file and write a letter. David
Droge said he could envision the extra burden on chairs being not necessarily more work, but “the
bad consequences of a less than satisfactory review.” He worried that if the full burden of this
falls on just the dean and the chair the reviews might become less rigorous. Greene said that
under the proposal the chair or the dean could trigger a full review so that the consequences of a
less than satisfactory review would be shared.
In response to President Pierce’s statement that the proposal needs to be clearer on the details of
a shorter evaluation process, Greene argued that this might put more detail into the Faculty Code
than is usually the case. Haltom responded that the Faculty Code already contains many details
concerning, for example, letter writing and class visitation, so that any proposal for change would
have to address in terms of the existing code language of full reviews, just how these details
would be handled.
Bill Breitenbach suggested that perhaps more faculty would be willing to serve on the FAC under
the proposed review process. He said we need to make FAC service “a less onerous task.”
Because of the lateness of the hour, Greene declined President Pierce’s offer of the floor for the
purpose of initiating discussion of the remaining agenda item. We therefore adjourned at 5:07
p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
John M. Finney
Secretary of the Faculty
University of Puget Sound Faculty Meeting Minutes
May 2, 2000, Page 5
A Thumbnail Sketch of some Implications of Revising Chapter III, Section 3, Subsection a
of the Code:
What Remains the Same in the “Short-Form” Review:
1. The faculty member still prepares a file.
2. In the year before the evaluation, all her/his courses are still evaluated by the students.
3. If colleagues wish to visit his/her classes, they may.
4. If colleagues wish to write letters to the chair or dean, they may.
5. Deadlines stay the same.
6. The file goes to the head officer, then forward to the dean of the university.
What Changes in the “Short Form” Review:
1. Individual letters and composite departmental letters are no longer required.
2. No departmental, school, or program meeting need take place.
3. Class visits are no longer mandatory.
4. The completed file goes forward to the dean, not to the Faculty Advancement Committee.
5. In lieu of the Faculty Advancement Committee, the head officer of the department, school, or
program and the dean confer and perform the review.
Some Obvious Points:
1. This change somewhat strengthens the authority of the head officers and the dean (though only
where a faculty member wishes to allow it in her/his own case).
2. This creates a sharp difference between the common extent of a pre-tenure and post-tenure
review (except in the case of a promotion to full professor, where a full review is mandated).
3. This may be interpreted as either increasing or decreasing the vulnerability of untenured faculty
in the review process. Untenured faculty who elected to submit a critical letter to an open file in a
“short review” would seem to be more vulnerable. On the other hand, untenured faculty no longer
obligated to submit letters to open files in the same review would be less vulnerable.