University of Puget Sound
Faculty Meeting Minutes
February 1, 2001
President Susan Pierce called the meeting to order at 4:03 p.m. in McIntyre 103. Fifty-two voting members of the faculty were present.
Minutes of the December 7, 2000 faculty meeting were approved as distributed.
President Pierce announced that her sabbatical will begin February 9 after the meeting of the trustees although she said that later this month she will spend a week in New York visiting foundations.
We turned to the main agenda item, a report from the faculty representatives to the code revision conference committee. President Pierce vacated the chair and appointed Grace Kirchner chair pro tem for this meeting. Professor Kirchner called on members of the conference committee to deliver their report.
Bruce Mann reminded us of the process that had led to the creation of the code revision conference committee and the selection by the faculty of representatives Bill Beardsley, Sarah
Moore, and Bruce Mann. He reported that the faculty and trustee representatives met last
November but that the conference committee did not conclude its business. He said that rather than adjourn, which would have ended the current code revision effort, the conference committee suspended its meeting to give the faculty representatives the opportunity to report back to the faculty and to receive further instructions.
Bill Beardsley reported that it became clear early in the conference committee meeting that, while there was little apparent disagreement over most of the code revisions proposed by the faculty, the trustees did not want to proceed with them without also addressing the three issues the faculty had proposed be deferred to Phase Two of the code revision process. The three issues were (1) eliminating or altering Appendix A, (2) initial appointment procedures in Chapter II, Section 4, and
(3) evaluation procedures in Chapter III. Beardsley said that the trustees feel these three issues are so important they do not want to put off a resolution of them.
Sarah Moore suggested there are three ways to proceed: (1) we can do nothing and live with the current code the way it is; (2) we can continue the code revision effort and address the three problem issues; or (3) we can start from scratch and attempt a complete overhaul of the code, based on what we want it to do for us, and perhaps streamline the code and create a guidelines handbook containing specific procedural details. She suggested that discussion proceed with a one-minute time limit for each speaker until all had spoken, with a formal vote to be taken at the end of the meeting.
Ted Taranovski asked if the first six items (in the faculty’s Informal Response of the Faculty to
Ideas Expressed by Trustees in May 2000 Regarding The Faculty Code of the University of Puget
Sound , dated October 4, 2000) were settled. Beardsley responded they are not settled because they were not specifically discussed once it became clear the trustees wanted the last three items to be addressed also. But he said there would probably be no problems with the first six items.
President Pierce agreed.
George Tomlin asked if we were close enough to the trustees’ positions on the three items to continue working on them or would a complete overhaul be required. Moore responded that the difference is that we are trying to be more specific in the code than the trustees would like.
Beardsley said he thought we could fix the first two issues but that there was no easy fix for the third issue. Bill Breitenbach asked why the trustees would not act on the first six items since the proposal took no position at all on the other three. Beardsley responded that the trustees don’t

University of Puget Sound Faculty Meeting Minutes
February 1, 2001, Page 2 want to let the three issues stand as they are. He said the trustees consider them to be so important that they want them addressed now. Mann added that the meeting of the conference committee was quite friendly, and that the trustees consider some problems to be more important than we do and vice versa.
Taranovski said he favored pursuing a resolution on the three issues rather than leaving the code as is or starting from scratch. Walter Lowrie suggested bringing in an independent, neutral legal arbiter to propose new language. He said he wasn’t sure we could finesse our way through the ambiguities ourselves. What, for example, is the real difference between a code and a handbook? Paul Loeb suggested as an alternative reconvening our code revision committee to look at what the trustees want as well as our own faculty meeting minutes to see what we can come up with ourselves before bringing in someone from the outside. Barry Goldstein said he thought an outside person could help us identify what the issues and implications really are and thereby create useful information for us.
Keith Ward asked if the problem might not be that the existing code is inherently flawed. He said that maybe we need a code that expresses the roles and rights of faculty, with an accompanying handbook that contains procedures. He said we might not have to start from scratch, but perhaps could take a look at the code from a different perspective.
Curt Mehlhaff said that the code came into existence to require procedural due process and that we have no rights at all without that. He said there is an inherent tension between our wanting procedural rights and the trustees feeling procedures are minor issues. He said the tension wouldn’t be resolved unless we were to give up some procedural rights, which he did not think we should do. Ward responded that he did not think we should give up any procedural rights. He said that he is simply asking if we need to reconceptualize the code while protecting rights.
Dean Terry Cooney said that everyone, including trustees, want good procedures, but that there were ways to think about this without denying faculty rights. He said that many participants in the review process believe that some existing procedures are quite awkward. He suggested the code could be revised to continue to guarantee rights of procedure with more specific details contained in a book of guidelines that the faculty and the president could together amend without having to resort to the cumbersome code revision process. He said that currently it is very hard to change the code to reduce some of the burdens in the review process.
Breitenbach agreed that no one wants to retain the “creaky” parts of the code. But, he asked, is the main issue for the trustees their objective of no legal challenges to evaluation decisions on technical procedural grounds? Moore responded that that notion was put to rest early in the
November meeting of the conference committee; that the trustees are not insisting on that.
Keith Maxwell asked: so where are we? Mann responded that either the conference committee adjourns or it doesn’t adjourn. If it doesn’t adjourn it’s because the faculty say either that they would like to continue to work on the three problem issues or that the trustees must “take it or leave it.” President Pierce added that the conference committee has suspended for the moment and that it could remain suspended for a period of time if the faculty wanted to work on Chapter III, for example, and then resubmit something for consideration by the current conference committee.
Taranovski asked: who is empowered to negotiate for the faculty if the conference committee representatives are not? Mann said that the current conference committee faculty representatives were not recruited to negotiate. He suggested that both the faculty and the trustees assemble a committee empowered to negotiate. Loeb suggested having the original code revision committee or others work on Chapter III with the conference committee suspended, and then send the

University of Puget Sound Faculty Meeting Minutes
February 1, 2001, Page 3 results of their work to the Faculty Senate and to the full faculty before going back to the conference committee.
David Droge, who was a member of the original code revision committee, said the faculty were asked by the trustees to go through the entire code to eliminate ambiguities and to send all of these changes to the trustees as one revision. He said that some clashes of interest will inevitably emerge every time we try to do this. Can, he asked, the trustees’ interest in limiting liability be reconciled with faculty interest in rights? Maybe, he suggested, an extra-code revision process is required to amend the code. Dean Cooney disagreed this was necessary, arguing that there is opportunity at just this stage in the revision process to make further changes. For example, a committee working on just Chapter III might be able to come up with policies for the code and procedures for a handbook.
Taranovski M/S/vote reported later “that the Senate officers in consultation with PSC appoint a committee with the objective of working on the remaining differences in amending the existing code and reporting back to appropriate faculty bodies.”
Mehlhaff said he liked this idea. Martin Jackson asked why it was necessary to keep the conference committee suspended. Beardsley responded that functionally it would probably come out the same whether the conference committee was suspended or adjourned, but that politically it would be good not to force the trustees to reject our current proposal.
Dean Kris Bartanen, a member of the original code revision committee, said that committee tried to do too much in its effort to both clarify ambiguities and streamline the code. She said what’s needed now is to revise the code in a way that retains our fundamental rights while delegating procedural details to a handbook of guidelines.
Bill Barry M/S/P to close debate. The motion to close debate passed on a unanimous voice vote. The Taranovski motion then passed on a voice vote.
Faculty Senate Chair Bill Haltom croaked (he had a cold) his view of how this needs to go forward from this point. He said that in order for any changes (to the code revision proposal we have already sent to the trustees) to exist within the life of the current conference committee, those changes would have to formally come from the conference committee back to the faculty as a suggested compromise that we then vote on. He said that whatever the committee we just created comes up with has to be considered to be the result of the work of the conference committee which then passes it back to the faculty for a vote. Otherwise the work of the committee we just created would be a new code revision proposal to the trustees, existing outside the current conference committee.
We adjourned at 5:22 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
John M. Finney
Secretary of the Faculty