Minutes of 12 March 2007 SACUA Meeting

Present: Combi, Frier, Giordani, MacAdam, Meerkov, Potter, Riles, Seabury, Smith (chair); Lehman; Carr, Schneider

Guests: Provost Sullivan, P. Norgren, C. Senneff, M. Kimball, T. Shumway, J. Lee, K. Brown, R. Fraser

2. Draft SACUA minutes of 5 March 2007 with corrections made by President Coleman

4. Presentation by Peggy Norgren, Assoc. VP for Finance, and Carol Senoff, Exec. Director of U Audits, University Compliance Hotline.

5. Sarbanes-Oxley - University of Michigan Detailed Discussion - Work Plan Updates, November 16, 2006.

Chair Smith convened the meeting at 2:30 P.M. The proposed agenda was approved with one addition.

1. The Faculty Undergraduate Scholarship Fund now has over $10,000 in assets, thanks to generous contributions from Professors Brown and Smith. SACUA members are urged to encourage broad faculty participation.

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Several members moved that SACUA use its internal funds to make a $1,000 contribution to the Faculty Undergraduate Scholarship Fund in lieu of paying for refreshments for the remaining Senate Assembly meetings of Winter Term.

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2. The chair followed SACUA’s instructions and sent a communication to the attorney representing the professor who had been the subject of a hearing under Regents' Bylaw 5.09. The attorney contacted Senate Office staff and expressed some objection to the content of the letter. Through his attorney, the professor has offered to teach a wide range of introductory undergraduate courses in his department.

3. SACUA may wish to send representatives to the May meeting of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics in Palo Alto.

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Professor Frier moved that the chair and vice-chair represent the U-M faculty at the May meeting of the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (Potter seconded).

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4. The chair and Professor Meerkov met with the provost for a regularly scheduled private meeting. The agenda consisted of several points:

a) The provost was surprised to learn that the EVPMA had turned back a tenure recommendation from the Medical School executive committee. She said she would look into the case.

b) A member of the provost's staff was preparing a final draft of a document about University shared governance, and it would be transmitted to the University Shared Governance Task Force, and then to SACUA.

c) The deputy general counsel is reported to have agreed that faculty grievance procedures are in need of serious revision, and sees merit in having the process operate outside individual units. Better grievance procedures would be more likely to result in more cases being settled through the ombuds system. The provost seemed amenable to the ideas.

d) The provost and Lester Monts will visit the Senate Assembly to present the final report from the Diversity Blueprints committee.

e) The provost said that she would accept the format followed by the Ross School of Business in regard to the "rule of two." The that unit, faculty are told the rank order of election results, but the tallies are withheld. Actual vote counts can be obtained through FOIA.

f) Professor Meerkov presented specific budget costs for the U-M Pre-college Academy.

Clinical Professors-

Professor Frier said that the Tenure Committee has been discussing the status of clinical faculty, of which there are nearly 1000 individuals, mainly in the Medical School. They are presently not represented in central governance, although many of them have voting rights in their units. There is some sense that the group will eventually unionize unless the members become included in the University Senate. Doing so, however, would dramatically alter voting composition of the institution. It could also have the long-term effect of eroding tenure itself. No consensus emerged within the committee. He asked the provost to share her own thinking about the subject. Provost Sullivan replied that the subject presented both abstract issues and practical issues. Professor Giordani said that awareness was raised when AEC evaluations were extended to Senate members but not to clinical faculty. Professor Smith noted that there is an absence of academic freedom among clinical faculty, including a fear to speak out about patient care. Professor Giordani added that the fear is not a rare concern.

EVPMA role in tenure appointments-

The provost reported that the Regents’ Bylaws give the EVPMA a role in some tenure decisions. By the same token, there is some lack of clarity about the role of the vice president for research in promotion of research professors. She stated that negative tenure recommendations should still come forward to the provost regardless of where the negative votes originate. She said that the roles of the various officers need to be clarified through improved communication.

Professor Riles asked about measures to increase transparency in executive committee elections. The provost said that she favors increased transparency, but that she favors the release of election rankings rather than tallies per se. She added that she does not think it is her role to endorse specific policies.

Professor Potter reported that his department has been told by the LSA college administration that GSIs are overworked, and that faculty have been told to cut back on course requirements. He said this was the first time faculty have been told to compromise academic standards based on budgets. The provost replied that it might be worth consulting with CRLT. She suggested that GSIs might be able to learn to improve the management of their time. She added that all tuition money is returned to the units, so she is already providing all the funding that she has. She also suggested that a faculty to faculty conversation might be appropriate.

Professor Meerkov stated that the bulk of the budget proposal was for graduate student support. He offered to drop that element from the budget. The provost replied that he needed to find out how much transportation will cost because it may be the major expense. Professor Meerkov said that he was not able to price out that figure, and that the College of Engineering told him that they would handle the issue.

The State is facing a substantial budget gap. The Governor's proposal was rejected by the State Legislature. The range being discussed is +3 to -9%, but these are just guesses. In budget discussions, the provost has asked deans to present options for 3 scenarios: +3%, 0, -3%.

The provost said that her office is allocating $1 million per year for 3 years from unrestricted gift funds to enable hiring some Pfizer employees at the U-M. She said that she is asking deans who make proposals to describe their plans for matching her funds, which may include equipment, etc. She said that she thought that Pharmacy may hire some Pfizer employees into the tenure track. She added that Dean Ball from Education has met with 175 employees who are interested in becoming certified in math and science. Professor Potter said that it was admirable for the state university to help.

Professor Frier asked the provost whether her office was aware if there were problems with faculty retention in reaction to the court decree regarding partner benefits. The provost replied that she is aware of no concrete examples regarding retention, but there were recruiting concerns. She said that the university administration has the intent to deal with the issue.

Professor Giordani asked whether there are many students who need to enter a 6^th year because of credit deficiencies. He said there is a particular problem for students with double majors within the same department. The provost replied that the Registrar's office is working very hard on a computerized audit system that students can access any time. They hope to couple this audit system with on-line course registration, and then to make sure this is the same software that the auditors use.

The guests arrived at 4:00 P.M. The guests made a presentation about the University Compliance Hotline that closely paralleled distributed items 4. Members expressed concerns about the degree to which whistleblowers would indeed be protected. Ms. Senneff explained that when allegations are made, her office typically looks at processes rather than individual people. Hence, if an allegation of P-Card fraud is made, practices across an entire department would be audited. She said that her office operates in some ways similar to Offices of Inspectors General; she said that she receives 30 to 60 complaints each year. Professor MacAdam asked how long the database of tips and reports is maintained, or if it is periodically purged. Ms. Norgren replied that the decision was up to them because it is the U-M's database. She said they have not defined a purge date, but that MacAdam made a good point. Professor Potter suggested that a purge should be instantaneous if there is a baseless charge. He noted that such data can easily be misused. Professor Frier suggested that under some circumstances it might be good to have a record that there was a baseless complaint.

The guests arrived at 4:29 P.M. Professor Kimball said that he and Professor Shumway have been doing some research about investment behavior by people. He said there is lots of evidence that people are often confused. He said that the things they had learned might be usefully communicated to their university colleagues, cast in a different perspective from that of financial planners. He proposed a committee drawn from economists, the finance department, and ISR. He said the committee could offer some useful strategies for portfolio choices. Professor Shumway said that there is a new field of behavioral finance. Its practitioners study how behavior deviates from rational models. He said there is good evidence that people make simple mistakes that are easy to correct.

Professor Meerkov asked for more detail about the proposed committee. Professor Kimball suggested a membership of about eight. He said the group could produce a document that would lay out principles, and which could be distributed to all faculty with the approval of the Senate Assembly. He said the committee could do its work over the summer. He said that if people like the report, in the longer term the group could do more ambitious things, including looking at some data. He said that the report would articulate general principles that should not change over time. Professor Riles encouraged the guests to tackle even more ambitious goals, including creation of a discussion forum. The guests suggested that they would take a more modest approach.

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Professor Meerkov moved that SACUA forms an ad hoc Faculty Investment Committee with Professors Kimball and Shumway as charter members, and gives the committee the charge of preparing a report to the Senate Assembly by Fall Term 2007 (MacAdam seconded).

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SACUA convened as committee of the whole to serve as nominating committee for the Senate Secretary. The committee nominated Professor Lehman.

Committee for a Multicultural University-

Professor Seabury reported that seven members of COMU met for the latest meeting. Monts and Ortega briefly described what was transpiring with the Blueprint Task group report. The group received over 150 recommendations which were distilled in a draft report that went to President Coleman for review. Most of the report focused on issues that related to students, and there were not many recommendations targeting faculty and staff.

Most of the COMU meeting was devoted to reviewing numerous tables that had been created regarding faculty composition comparing three time periods: 1994, 2000, and 2006. The committee decided to focus its presentation to Senate Assembly on selected data that had clear patterns evident. At the end of April a more comprehensive report will be issued to SACUA on these data and the changes in faculty composition.

The committee asked SACUA to support the forum on 5 April 2007 titled "Voices of the Staff."

Professor Seabury announced that he would be resigning from SACUA effective 1 May 2007.

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In each school, college, or degree granting division of the University, including those at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and at the University of Michigan-Flint, the governing faculty shall be in charge of the affairs of the school, college, or division, except as delegated to the executive committee, if any, and except that in the School of Graduate Studies the governing board shall be the executive board, and in the Medical School shall be the executive faculty.