UNF Faculty Association

Faculty Association

March 2001

QUESTIONS FORWARDED PENDING RESPONSES

QUESTIONER:	QUESTION SYNOPSIS	DATE ASKED	FORWARDED TO
There are no questions pending response.

WRITTEN RESPONSES

QUESTIONER:	DATE ASKED	WRITTEN RESPONSE:
Rama Murthi Rao	Feb 1, 2001	Tom Serwatka Graduate Dean and Associate Vice President for AA

QUESTION SYNOPSIS
Will alternative technology for teaching and/or research, developed by UNF faculty, be considered equally with commercial technology? How much money is the university spending on providing and supporting Blackboard? How many faculty members are using Blackboard, and how much do they like it?

QUESTIONER:	DATE ASKED	WRITTEN RESPONSE:
Bruce Fortado	Nov 2, 2000	Karen Stone, General Counsel

QUESTION SYNOPSIS

When are grievance materials open to public access and when are they not open?

When are EEOC charge materials open to public access and when are they not open?

When are litigation materials open to public access and when are they not open?

Is there any relation between these categories? For example, would grievance materials or EEOC charge materials not be open to the public if litigation on the matter was in progress?

QUESTIONER:	DATE ASKED	WRITTEN RESPONSE:
Kathleen Cohen	Nov 2, 2000	David Kline Provost & Vice President for AF

QUESTION SYNOPSIS

The Vice President for Academic Affairs has made several decisions that will impact faculty, especially new hires and those who will be going up for tenure and promotion. Some of these decisions were made with limited or no faculty input. Faculty, historically, have been actively involved in issues when it has to do with promotion, tenure, and the recruitment of new faculty.

Point (1): The addition to the hiring offer letter of the statement that contracts and grants are expected to be actively pursued.

Question:	What is meant by actively pursued? Does that mean application for one, two, three - how many - grants?
Question:	Applying for a grant may be as time consuming as publishing an article. Is a grant application, successful or unsuccessful, equivalent to a published article?
Question:	For the individual's academic success (promotion, tenure, and raises) should he/she pursue grants or publish articles?
Question:	Are grants from some funding agencies more prestigious, therefore better, than others, or are we looking at equal dollars (e.g., NSF grant the same as a grant from JCCI)?
Question:	Will the weight of a grant be relative to a published paper?
Question:	What happens to the individual who pursues one grant and is turned down, but has several articles published at P/T time? Has the individual fulfilled the actively pursued grants part of the administration's expectations when she/he reaches the promotion or tenure point?

Point (2): Time in rank.

Question:	Why is it assumed by the Vice President for Academic Affairs that when a candidate comes up for promotion to Full Professor at the required minimum time in rank as listed in the Faculty Handbook that the faculty member is actually coming up for promotion early and is likely to be turned down because the faculty member came up too early?
Question:	Is there a time frame that is not too early? Should that not be a faculty decision?

Point (3): Outside letters of reference.

Question:	Outside letters of references are used by some departments for P & T evaluation purposes. Are the departments that do not require outside references placing their candidates in jeopardy?
Question:	If outside letters are used then who selects the reviewer?
Question:	Given that we have reviewers and that our faculty evaluations are relative to their peers at UNF, how can an outside reviewer assess the quality of research based upon UNF criteria and their peers?
Question:	Along with the idea of reviewing research to see if it "hangs together" as a cohesive whole, do we then send all the research that the candidates' peers have done to the reviewer? Recall they are evaluated relative to their UNF peers.
Question:	What is a research program that "hangs together"? Who determines what "hangs together" means?

Point (4) Confidentiality of Reviews.
Question:	A candidate who agrees to outside reviews may not have the right to exclude those reviews from the dossier. A candidate should always have the right to see and respond to reviews (as he/she does for letters from inside the University). How can the administration deny this right of a candidate to see material in his/her own dossier and respond to it?