UNR Faculty Senate

The Faculty Senate of the University of Nevada, Reno supports the following recommendations for the Board of Regents:

1) We ask that the Board of Regents modify the current policy on furloughs, and extend exemption from mandatory furloughs to those professional employees paid with grants, contracts, fees or other non-state sources if the revenues lost are greater than the salary savings, as long as these revenues cannot be captured in other ways.

2) We ask that the Board of Regents delegate the implementation of this policy to the presidents. The presidents should then be required to report back to the Board of Regents on all such exemptions, detailing why their decisions to exempt certain faculty meet the above conditions.

This sense of the senate was adopted by unanimous vote.

Our rationale is as follows:

It is clear that the Legislature’s primary intent in SB 433 was to reduce Nevada’s general fund expenditures for the current biennium. As much as possible, the Legislature also wanted to be fair, to have the burden shared equally, to expect less work in return for less pay, and to save as many jobs for state employees as possible during the budget crisis.

Second, the Legislature clearly understood that the Nevada System of Higher Education was a special and complicated case, and gave the Board of Regents the flexibility to institute pay cuts in other ways if necessary. The Regents are doing their best to support the legislative intent while making adjustments for the differences in faculty contracts, tenure and notice requirements, and this is in the best interest of NSHE in the future.

Third, the Governor also made clear that part of the reason he thought higher education should receive the lion’s share of the budget cuts was because NSHE had more options for seeking outside funding, through tuition, grants and contracts. DRI is one example, but not the only one, of this entrepreneurial model. While the Governor’s budget proposal was not feasible in the short-run, we do agree with the long-run goal of becoming more reliant on grants and other non-state funds.

Thus, we support the current emergency policy of the Board of Regents as long as we remember that the first priority of furloughs is to save the state and the system money. Some furloughs, however, do not accomplish this goal.

We strongly oppose mandatory furloughs for faculty who are entirely grant-funded, unless the funds used to pay their salaries can be used for other purposes without putting the grant or contract at risk. We also oppose mandatory furloughs for other faculty who bring in direct revenues to the institution that at least equal the cost of their associated salaries, even if some portion of their salary is paid with state funds. Such furloughs cost us money that could be used for other purposes. We believe that such furloughs also undermine the goal of becoming less reliant on the state general fund.

The Regents have already agreed that grant-funded faculty at the Desert Research Institute should be exempted because furloughs would be costly to the institution and the system. The University of Nevada School of Medicine is also prepared to request their own exemption based on the health and welfare clause of SB 433, since a furlough means fewer patients will be seen, and lost practice plan revenues will far exceed any salary savings. The state’s universities both have units, and individuals, who work on the exact same business model as DRI and UNSOM. The best solution is to have one simple exemption that fits DRI, UNSOM, and all other cases, something that we can easily explain to the public and the legislature, instead of two or more different exemptions.

The principle is simple, and any citizen or legislator can understand it. The purpose of a furlough is to save the state money, and the budget crisis is driving it. If there are specific and defensible cases in which a furlough will actually cost the state money, then a furlough should not be required regardless. System presidents should be given the authority to make those calls, and be accountable to the Regents for making them.

[Note: The town hall was actually on July 23. I looked at the wrong week on my calendar. Summer is passing so quickly!]

When the Governor proposed cutting the university’s budget by more than a third, he also proposed a 6% pay cut for all state employees. The budget reductions the Legislature actually adopted are still painful, and have cost us good people, but they leave the university standing. The pay cuts are supposed to be in the form of 4% furloughs, though to leave our benefits intact these cuts actually work out to 4.6%, one day a month.

In essence, furloughs are the Legislature’s way of saying that state employees are worth what we pay them, and not overpaid, but we still can’t afford them right now. The taxpayers and the students have also been asked to pony up, so we are not bearing the cost alone.

There is no way to make the financial burdens placed upon us all seem less stressful. However, it may be helpful to remember that it could have been much worse here, and for some states it is much worse.

But the details of furloughs are hard to implement, and furloughs don’t make sense in all cases. The Legislature ordered them for those employees under their direct control, including those in the classified system, but they left it to the Regents to determine how to implement them for faculty.

One issue the Legislature did not consider is how to handle classified employees who work on grants or in revenue-producing activities. Furloughing those who are not paid out of state funds actually costs the state money instead of saving it.

In June, the Regents passed a policy to implement furloughs, as the Legislature intended, as fully as the Code and our contracts allow. But untenured faculty, whether academic or administrative, have annual contracts that, under the current Code, require a year’s notice to change. Tenured faculty have contracts that guarantee them their jobs and their current salaries, and these cannot be changed easily at all.

The result is that hourly employees who earn the least are having to take the biggest pay cuts, in percentage terms. Our untenured faculty are also having to take the cuts, though with a year’s notice. Many of our young tenure-track faculty are trying to manage very large student loan burdens. And our tenured faculty, who are most likely to have research and grant programs that generate non-state funds, are instead being asked to teach more under the current conditions.

The President and I are still trying to persuade the Chancellor and the Regents that we should not have mandatory furloughs for grant-funded faculty, or for any faculty if the furlough costs us more revenue than it saves us. I would make this argument for classified staff too, if the law allowed.

It is normal in times of extreme scarcity for people to turn on each other, as the Donner Party demonstrated. We should not fall into the same trap here. We are all important to the success of this university, academic faculty, administrative faculty, and classified staff together.

In the last month or two, a number of tenured faculty have expressed their great concern to me concerning how mandatory furloughs have been implemented, and the unintended unfairness of our least-paid employees take the biggest percentage cut. It is not what we would have chosen, had we had the choice. It is certainly not what the President, the Provost, or the Faculty Senate wanted (see our “Sense of the Senate,” http://facultysenate.blogs.unr.edu/2009/05/08/sense-of-the-university-of-nevada-reno-faculty-senate-regarding-pay-cuts-for-faculty-and-staff, on this blog).

For tenured faculty who are able, one suggestion is to donate to the Foundation. Last week, I went down to the Foundation to set up a monthly deduction equivalent to the pay cut I would have received had I not been tenured. It was pretty easy, and I will send the form to all faculty.

You can target your donations, to a great degree. The Foundation has a scholarship fund for classified staff to take courses for career development, for example, and they are looking into setting up a fund to help with scholarships for their dependents. You can donate to your department or college, if you prefer, and chairs can use these funds to help out with travel or research expenses for untenured faculty. Within some constraints the Foundation is happy to negotiate with you on how you would like the monies spent. There are rules we have to follow if we want these donations to be tax deductible, but there is flexibility there too.

Of course, these contributions are voluntary, and people can help in many ways. Some of us may prefer to give more to the homeless, or those who have lost their jobs in the current recession. Some of us may have been hurt too much in the current recession to give anything more.

But knowing and appreciating the faculty as I do, I fully expect that there are scores, even hundreds of people out there who are willing to step up to do things to help their colleagues and coworkers in these trying times. Our people will continue to be generous and creative.

Please feel free to contact me with any ideas or questions you might have, at facsenchair@unr.edu.

NSHE News
Las Vegas, Nevada - June 19, 2009

The Board of Regents took action today to implement legislatively required budget reductions through the use of an employee furlough program and temporary increases to student fees.

Based on recommendations from Board Chair Michael Wixom and Vice Chair Jason Geddes, the Nevada System of Higher Education will implement general professional personnel cost reduction measures in FY 2010, followed by a mandatory furlough program in FY 2011 to reduce professional staff and faculty salaries with an option for an increased workload for tenured faculty. The aim of the program is to meet the intent of Senate Bill 433 which calls for a four percent reduction each year of the biennium. This program will not affect part-time teaching faculty.

Classified staff have already received a legislatively mandated furlough program of one day per month for FY 2010 and FY 2011.

In addition, a five percent surcharge (as referenced in Option A of the Board agenda) will be added to student fees for each year of the biennium (five percent in FY 2010 and an additional five percent in FY 2011) starting with fall semester 2009.

The surcharge will not be effective until the spring semester of 2010 for Nevada’s four community colleges: College of Southern Nevada, Great Basin College, Truckee Meadows Community College and Western Nevada College.

All surcharges will sunset in 2011.

Regents heard testimony from faculty and student leaders about the proposed options, with students voicing strong support for Option A in the fee increase proposal.

Due to the timeline dictated by SB 433, the Board passed an emergency motion to implement the personnel cost reduction measures. The Board then has 120 days to make the reductions final and to make changes in the program if the need arises.

Specifics on the furlough and workload increase programs are expected to be communicated to NSHE employees in the next several days.

Below is the motion that was unanimously approved by the Board of Regents today:
1. The adoption of Option A–a temporary surcharge for registration fees as set forth in the tuition and fee increase reference materials;
2. The adoption of a Code amendment set forth below which is subject to the considerations numbered 1-7 set forth at pages 3-4 in the Memorandum of Chair Wixom and Vice Chair Geddes, dated June 17, 2009 to the NSHE Regents, entitled “Senate Bill 433″ Implementation Recommendation”; and
3. The adoption of an emergency amendment of the NSHE Code (requires 7 votes and is immediately effective for 120 days, to be made permanent by further Board action), in accordance with Title 2, Chapter 1, Sec. 1.3.3.b due to the 2009 Legislative budgetary action and NSHE faculty contract provisions. The proposed amendment to the Code is the adoption of a new Code provision added to Title 2, Ch. 5, as Section 5.5.7, as follows:

Notwithstanding Title 2, Section 5.4, as the 75th Session of the Nevada Legislature has explicitly appropriated a lower amount for NSHE salaries than would otherwise be authorized and appropriate according to the NSHE salary policies, the Board of Regents does hereby and for the 2009-2011 biennium only, temporarily reduce salaries through the use of unpaid leave in an amount equivalent to the amount of legislative salary cut for FY 2011. The Board shall, to the extent feasible, devise methods that protect base compensation and benefits and shall offer tenured faculty an alternative of unpaid teaching workload increases in lieu of unpaid leave. The various Presidents shall consult with their respective faculty senates regarding the implementation of this section. Unpaid leave or temporary workload increases required by this section are final and not subject to appeal, grievance or reconsideration. The provisions of this section shall constitute constructive notice to all faculty and no individual notice to any such faculty member shall be required hereunder to implement the foregoing. To the extent any conflict or inconsistency between this and any other section of the Code exists, the provisions of this section shall control. This section will terminate on June 30, 2011.

The faculty of UNR are grateful to the Legislature, the Board of Regents, and the citizens of this state for their efforts to defend higher education from a devastating budget reduction that would have effectively dismantled the NSHE system into the indefinite future. We also want to express our admiration for our students for recognizing that the education they receive is valuable, and appreciate that they are willing to pay more to help us keep providing it.

We recognize that this proposal represents serious work by many people, in an effort to balance what the Legislature wanted us to do with what we can legally do and what is wise to do. We know that the Regents are doing their best to balance these demands.

For legitimate legal reasons, this proposal gives tenured faculty the option to increase their work responsibilities instead of taking the pay cut, but this option is not given to others.

In the last several days as I have been getting input from my constituents, I have noticed a pattern. Those who were most concerned with the apparent unfairness of this – including myself – are themselves tenured. Those who were the least concerned about it are themselves untenured.

As I worry about the morale effects of separating out our faculty for differential treatment for legal reasons, it brings me great comfort to know that many of our people are so unselfish, and so concerned for their colleagues.

Still, in my opinion, it would be a good idea to give more people the option to do more, and not just require them to do less. Please consider whether the options this proposal makes available to tenured faculty might best be made available to others.

Faculty at my university are willing to do their part, and most of us are not opposed to temporary pay cuts if the Regents deem them necessary, but we want them to be done carefully because we are concerned with negative unintended consequences.

The Legislature recognized in SB 433 that NSHE was a special and complicated case, and gave the Regents the flexibility to institute pay cuts in other ways. We need to take this opportunity to make sure that we are taking the wisest path.

This proposal explicitly exempts DRI’s professional staff if they are entirely funded by grants. We strongly support this. What we would ask you to understand is that there are units at UNR that are exactly like DRI, and I assume these exist at UNLV too.

The Terawatt Facility and the Center for the Application of Substance Abuse Technologies, for example, both depend entirely on grants. There are also many research programs within departments that greatly augment their budgets and their support for students through extramural grant activities, and provide additional overhead for the university.

Making them take furloughs out of a sense of fairness simply hurts our budgets and our state economy, with no savings to NSHE or the state budget. Some may lose grants or contracts they can no longer fulfill, and most will reduce the amount of overhead that they bring to the university.

Some of you work for law firms, or other similar professional firms. Suppose the office manager has reduced the wages of the secretarial staff because of budget problems. To be fair, your office manager tells you that you must also work less and reduce your billable hours. It seems to me that that would only make the firm’s budget problem worse.

The UNR faculty senate overwhelmingly supported a resolution to apply reductions in state support only to state-funded salaries. At least, we should allow our Presidents to exempt some of our people from salary cuts if no savings would result. The principle that exempts DRI is equally applicable to similarly-generated funds at any of the NSHE institutions.

One part of the rationale for making higher education absorb most of the state’s budget reduction was that higher education should and could be more entrepreneurial, more like DRI, and less dependent on state funding.

Thus, I think we may be missing out on an opportunity. There are potential outside resources now available to many of our people. Now is the time to develop creative policy that empowers and incentivizes faculty seeking these resources, but we have rules that undermine some of the incentive to go after them, and these salary cuts will make it worse. Let us take this time of crisis to encourage our people to apply for more grants and contracts, to allow them the opportunity to make up for the reduction in their state funding, and to encourage more entrepreneurship by our faculty.

These changes should be left to individual institutions that can best understand and balance their missions and opportunities to meet the budget challenges. The Board can and should frame the parameters to consider, but ultimately our response to SB 433 should be measured by how thoughtfully we meet our missions within the budget constraints we face rather than following a literal reading of the bill.

During this fiscal crisis the Board of Regents has continued to respect the leadership and autonomy of the NSHE institutions in meeting the extraordinary budgetary challenges of the past year. The Faculty Senate of the University of Nevada, Reno urges the Board to continue to allow each institution the opportunity to approach these challenges in ways that preserve the primary missions of the institutions with the least possible impact on faculty, students, and staff.

The Faculty Senate of the University of Nevada, Reno opposes financial exigency as both unnecessary and damaging to the reputation of the system. We similarly oppose either suspending or hastily modifying the Code.

In meeting these economic challenges, it is the shared value of our faculty that salaries should not be reduced if these cuts do not result in real savings for NSHE. In particular, salaries funded from many non-state sources should be exempted from reductions that may be deemed necessary to meet budgetary goals. Such reductions would be harmful to the research and economic diversification goals of the NSHE institutions, and harmful to the economy of the state.

In 2008, the Faculty Senate’s Executive Board charged one of its committees, the Administrative Faculty Personnel Policies & Procedures (AFP^3) committee, with the following charges, among others:

6. Consider issues related to the creation of a new employment category for professional or technical staff, and review the policies and categories of peer institutions. Make recommendations to the Senate.

7. UNR Bylaws require that all faculty, academic and administrative, should have the protection of bylaws at the major unit (e.g., college) or below, but many administrative faculty work in divisions and units without bylaws. What bylaws are appropriate and necessary for administrative faculty, and what current examples exist? Make recommendations to the Senate, as appropriate.

What was our thinking in developing this charge? I am happy to tell you some of my own thoughts. But you must take them with a grain of salt, as I do not know if they are close to the opinion of the executive board, the senate, or the administration. They do seem not be be very close to the opinion of the AFP^3 Committee.

This question came up last year because we learned that many people report difficulties in hiring the people they need, when what they need does not fall correctly into either the “faculty” camp or the “classified” camp. There are folks who need to hire professionals who do not necessarily have a college education, but who need to work by the job, not by the hour. The hiring process can be slow, and the classified staff system has an elaborate system of bumping rights. Many are currently concerned that this will make it hard for them to compete for grants. Some grant-funded work has to be done by hiring subcontractors, which is more expensive but more flexible. I think that it is dumb and parochial for the university not to fix.

State law defines us all as professional staff, and only the Code and UNR Bylaws limit us to “faculty.” This stems for historical reasons to our old unitary faculty model, in which you could be tenured as a professor of buildings and grounds. Somebody was apparently Solomonaic a couple of decades ago and separated faculty into two types, administrative and academic, but there are other needs that these two types do not meet. UNLV has changed their bylaws to use different terminology, but they are still bound by a badly-written Code. DRI also does it very differently than we do.

The Code actually defines administrative faculty as administrators, as faculty in “executive, supervisory, or support” roles. Department chairs are supervisors, but they are academic faculty. There is a great deal of variation. Some administrative faculty were once classified staff who were given additional responsibilities. Some administrative faculty were once academic faculty, and still hold tenure in their home academic department. Some administrative faculty have Ph.D.s, some don’t even have a bachelors. Some are fully qualified to teach, and do. Some aren’t, and don’t.

What a mess.

Webster’s dictionary defines faculty as the teachers and instructors within any of the divisions or comprehensive branches of learning at a college or university, or alternatively, as the members of a learned profession. When regents, legislators, or members of the public learn we apply the word to all professional staff, regardless of whether they are qualified to teach or not, they are very puzzled. Why do we do this? Why are we so wedded to this?

I personally think that some administrative faculty truly are that. I think some are not, and we make things both confusing and difficult by insisting on lumping everybody together in the same definition.

If I could have my way, I would advocate creating new categories of professional staff, without eliminating the current category. I have tossed out the terms “technical staff” and “administrative professionals” but am not wedded to anything so specific. Current administrative faculty might choose to retain their place in that category, or might choose an alternative category if it held advantages. New hires could be made into any category the university thought appropriate.

In addition to the grandfathering issue, there are several other questions raised by the creation of new categories of professional staff. In particular, how could we best protect faculty rights, even if we no longer call some of them faculty? What rights and privileges really matter to them? We need to consider how they would best be represented, if not by the faculty senate, or how to make sure they continue to receive the benefits that matter to them. We would also need to reassure them that they were not being put at any additional risk, a difficult thing in this budgetary climate, where administrative faculty positions have been cut more than for academic faculty.

In addition to hiring flexibility and linguistic clarity, there are other reasons to consider. For more than a decade, I have been very concerned with improving and enforcing bylaws. It is very clear to me that most of the bylaws are really written for academic faculty. For decades we have shoehorned administrative faculty into them, but they just don’t really fit. For example, nowhere in the bylaws does it accurately describe the annual evaluation process for administrative faculty, and that is pretty basic in terms of rights. Instead, we talk about personnel committees and the recommendations of chairs and deans. This is just ignored for administrative faculty, but I think this is a bad idea. Bylaws become useless when they are ignored in some cases. How do you protect rights when everybody knows the rules do not apply?

Some administrative faculty like the title, but others find it problematic. Some complain that being lumped in with academic faculty puts them at a disadvantage, since they must compete for benefits (e.g., sabbaticals, awards) that are really tailor-made for academic faculty. They are rarely ever recognized for what their jobs are, and are almost always outvoted by academic faculty even on matters that aren’t academic in nature.

Some work with students and find the title of faculty helps get their respect. Otherwise, I am not sure why anyone would care as long as it does not affect your rights. “Call me anything you like,” my father used to say, “just don’t call me late for dinner.” Some just like having the title, or just being part of the larger group. Some of my friends who are administrative faculty who came from other universities think it is a little silly, and have never understood why we do it this way. Others have never been at any other university, and assume that we do it the way it should be done.

There are, however, practical differences. In the Senate, we sometimes have a difficult time getting administrative faculty to serve to the extent academic faculty are expected to serve. Academic faculty are evaluated by their peers on teaching, research, and service, but many administrative faculty are evaluated by their direct superiors on the performance of specific duties, which does not always include significant service. We once tried to appoint a committee chair who had to get his supervisor’s permission to serve on a committee. This is antithetical to the independent nature of academic faculty. Last year, the AFP^3 Committee failed to even report because everybody on it was too busy with other duties to even meet.

Regarding representation on the Faculty Senate, I have mixed feelings. I value the contributions of our administrative faculty to the debate, and they bring a fresh perspective to the table. I like and respect them individually. On the other hand, I’m not sure they really ever get their concerns heard, and there are practical problems too. There is a strong tradition in the Senate that the Chair should be already tenured, since this allows the Chair the independence to speak for the faculty, to stand up to the administration, the Regents, and even the Governor when it is necessary. This tradition makes the Senate stronger. But with administrative faculty making up a third of the Senate, we have a relatively small pool to choose from in nominating the Chair-elect (especially if there are other characteristics we want in a Chair).

Some have suggested that a different governance structure might make sense. I am agnostic on this, but I do think somebody ought to at least think about it. If we do create new categories of professional staff, the issue will have to be dealt with because these new folks will need some sort of representation.

There are also academic faculty who are concerned with voting rights. Some academic faculty do not like the idea of having people who do not have the degree, who do not teach or research, voting on curricular issues or tenure-track hires. It’s never been an issue for me personally, but some faculty are really concerned with this.

Another reason the issue remains a concern for me is that issues come up every so often with the Executive Board that appear to result from this aggregation of professional staff into one catch-all category. For example, one issue we have been trying to resolve is whether or not “A contract” faculty are allowed to consult. These faculty are required to take leave before they consult. This may make sense for administrative faculty who are expected to keep regular hours, and this makes sense for academic faculty who are funded entirely by grants. But what about state-funded “A contract” academic faculty? Faculty on “B contracts” do not have to take leave, but are instead only expected to report their consulting and keep it under an average of one day per week. Try explaining this difference to the Board of Regents, however.

We are concerned that if these issues are so obvious to us, then eventually they will be obvious to somebody else with the power to dictate change. We know some regents and legislators think the university is a little nuts on issues like this. If we are going to have change, we need to get in front of it to make sure it is done right and reasonably, to make sure it is done carefully and with full consideration by both academic and administrative faculty, to make sure rights and privileges are protected as best they can be.

Finally, I must admit to being in disagreement with the belief that Nevada is inherently different. I love Nevada and I love this university, but I want more of us to open our eyes and see what others do. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel or make change for the sheer love of change, but I think we should study the best practice of our peers, and adopt what works best. We should be willing to make changes that make sense, and not fear change.

Dear Senators:

The budget for higher education finally closed yesterday evening, with a 12.5% reduction overall for NSHE’s state-funded operating budgets. This is relative to our budgets for 2008-2009, which were set by the previous Legislature. This cut is only a third of what the Governor requested, and it will require that the Legislature find the offsetting revenues, that they pass the budget by May 21, and they are able to override the Governor’s probable veto.

There is a Regents meeting tomorrow, which Milt and I will participate in, and we will give you more information once we know more. In the meanwhile, here are some things you should know.

First, the university is already much of the way there already, because the Governor already requested budget cuts this past year, and because we have been preparing for this. It also should include any pay cuts or furloughs, though there are constitutional issues regarding whether or not NSHE can be forced by the Legislature to cut pay, and legal/contractual issues regarding whether NSHE can cut our paychecks unilaterally without a notice period.

Second, there are some tuition increases that are being planned, but these are not dramatic in nature relative to those we have already had, and these tuition increases will be allowed to offset some of the budget cuts for us, rather than just going back to the Legislature as is usual.

Third, it is a complicated matter, using enrollments, the formula, and raw politics, to determine how much of a cut each institution will receive. UNLV has experienced a fall in enrollments recently, from which they will mostly be held harmless, and CSN has grown considerably more than we have. I can’t yet say exactly how much we will need to cut for a couple of days, though we have a good idea already.

Finally, you should know that we have been working with the President and the Provost to prepare for this decision, so if we need to have a curricular review to consider cuts to academic programs and tenured positions, you should feel confident that faculty governance and the Senate will play a key role in any decisions.

By the way, if budget discussions leave you a bit bewildered, Bruce and I wrote up two documents to explain them, which I have linked on my website and you might want to peruse:

University Budgets: A Guide for the Perplexed (Mar. 23, 2009).

Funding, Fairness, and the Formula: The University of Nevada, Reno, in the System of Higher Education (Apr. 17, 2009).

Best regards,

Elliott Parker, Ph.D
Faculty Senate Chair
Professor of Economics /0030
University of Nevada, Reno
Reno, NV 89557-0027 U.S.A.
http://www.business.unr.edu/faculty/parker

The university has a unique governance structure that many do not understand well. On budgetary matters, universities follow a traditional, hierarchical top-down model. On curricular and research issues, universities follow a bottom-up approach, in which administrators act as the agents of the faculty. On policy matters, the two share governance, sometimes uneasily.

The Senate represents the faculty, but it is not a union like the NFA. It is, in a way, like an equivalent branch of government, almost but not quite entirely unlike the Legislative and Executive functions. Whether it equal and effective depends on the people involved, and how they choose to behave.

As the new chair, my major goals are:
1. To recognize that to be effective, shared faculty governance requires a greater responsibility of faculty to look out for the long-run interests of the university, and to make reasonable and well thought-out recommendations for change.
2. To make the senate as effective as possible in working with university administration, by working cooperatively with the administration while remaining independent of it.
3. To try to turn over as much control to the senate as is practical, while doing as much with the executive board, the senate office, or on my own to be effective and responsive.
4. To make sure that shared faculty governance plays its proper role in both the development of the ISP and in any curricular review that takes place in response to the budget crisis.
5. To help shepherd through changes that will help the university continue to grow up, to learn from best practice at other universities instead of continuing to believe that UNR is somehow unique.
6. To try to fix long-standing problems in our Code, Bylaws, Manual, and practice, to make them all accurately reflect what we can and should do, to make them workable, and to make them in the university’s long-run interests.
7. To be responsive to suggestions and proposals from the senate in particular and the faculty in general, to represent them as best as I can.

I will rely on the Executive Board to make sure that my efforts are consistent with these principles. The Senate Office staff are also not shy about letting me know when I go too far or make an error in judgment.

I will also try to stay engaged with those outside the university – System Administration, the Regents, the Legislature, and the Public – to better advocate for the faculty.

I will be contacting senators through the Senate Blog – which we don’t use near as often as we should – to get input from them on what problems the senate needs to address, and to keep working on making senators know they can make a difference.

The Nevada State Legislature is currently proposing that pay cuts for state employees be part of budget reductions for the 2009-2011 Biennium. On May 6, 2009, the Faculty Senate of the University of Nevada, Reno passed the following three resolutions regarding the sense of the senate, should there be a mandate to cut wages and salaries due to budgetary constraints.

1. While some have suggested that all employees be subject to a uniform policy for symbolic or historical reasons, it is the strong sense of this senate that any portion of faculty salary and benefits from non-state funded sources should be immune from reductions to state-funded salaries. Faculty and staff who are funded entirely from sources other than state funds, such as grant-funded researchers, should be exempt from reductions in pay if they are able to maintain current or projected salaries using such funds. We believe that it hurts the university and the state if we turn away income that costs Nevada taxpayers nothing. We also believe that any policy that reduces the incentive for seeking extramural funding is antithetical to the long-run goals of the university.

2. Next, it is the sense of this senate that reductions in full-time equivalency (FTE) or other similar approaches are strongly preferred to reductions in the base rate of pay. Reducing FTE makes it easier for some faculty to make up lost income through other sources such as grants and contracts, it ties pay to performance expectations, and it allows incomes to be more quickly restored once revenues recover.

3. Finally, it is the sense of this senate that the Legislature and the Nevada System of Higher Education should allow the university to determine how funds are cut, and if wages and salaries must be cut then the university should be allowed to reduce average pay, rather than requiring uniform reductions across the board. Such flexibility should strive both to protect lower-salaried faculty and staff and to serve the long-run goals of the university.

Dear Senators:

This summer, the executive board and I will start putting charges and members for the various Faculty Senate committees. Half of our committees will operate on the academic year, and half will be on the calendar year. Once we draft charges, they will come to the senate for possible modification and approval.

We get some charges from problems we run into in the prior year or new problems we anticipate, and other charges are suggested by the prior committees. But we also get charges from you, the representatives of the faculty.

We would be grateful if each of you could give us a problem or two that you think the Faculty Senate needs to address this next year, so we can debate and prioritize them in order to have our committees be most productive. Putting them here on this blog would not only be more transparent, it would help other senators better consider their own suggestions.

We greatly look forward to hearing your ideas.

Best Regards,
Elliott Parker
Faculty Senate Chair (facsenchair@unr.edu)