UNH Faculty Senate
Summary Minutes from 6 December 1999
UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
FACULTY SENATE
DECEMBER 6, 1999 MINUTES SUMMARY
I. Roll - The following Faculty Senate members were absent: de la
Torre, Macieski, and VonDamm. Absent as work to rule were
Barretto, Carr, Christie, Echt, Garland, Kaye, Planalp, Reardon, Roh,
Stine and Turner. Excused were Lamb and Williams.
II. Communications with the President - The president said that the
Board of Trustees has approved domestic partner benefits. Regarding
land acquisition and disposal, the president said that she does not
believe there is a problem with the policy but rather with its
implementation. The policy requires that a number of issues be
considered including current uses, the environment, appraised value
and donor wishes. Properties can be sold under certain conditions,
and the municipalities concerned must be informed. The university
is working on improving documentation of its external properties,
which include approximately 3400 acres in fifty parcels; and some
were originally donated with conditions which curtail any disposal.
The Board of Trustees has given approval to start the steps required
by the policy before any possible disposal of twelve parcels of land
totaling about 286 acres.
Continuing ownership of those twelve parcels costs the university
money. The dean of COLSA was asked to document the academic
uses of these lands. However, there is no list of that use; and it has
been hard to discover who all the users are. The president said that
we need to put in place a structure which can answer these questions
and that perhaps we should expand the charge of the Woodlands
Commission to include lands which are not wooded. We now have
a university committee to assess whether land gifts will be more
costly than they are worth, and another possibility is to expand the
charge of this committee to include keeping track of the academic use
of land. A professor said that there has been no assurance that the
proceeds of property sale would go to the university, and the
president replied that this issue is no longer a worry and that the
money from any such sale would belong to the university.
A faculty member said that, during the recent contract mediation, the
mediator offered to bring a possible solution forward but the Board
of Trustees refused to hear the proposal. The president replied that
the trustees had asked if there was a chance that the faculty would
accept the proposal, and the mediator responded that he was not
optimistic. A professor said that, regarding retroactive pay, the
system negotiators had said that a three percent pay increase was the
limit because that was all that had been budgeted. If those monies
were budgeted, why withhold them from the faculty, except to be
punitive? The president responded that those issues have to be
bargained and that she hopes the sides will come together soon.
III. Minutes - The minutes of the last Faculty Senate meeting were
approved unanimously.
IV. Disposal of Property - The Campus Planning Committee,
through its chair, presented a motion on property disposal as follows:
Many UNH properties, both in the vicinity of the UNH
campus and across the state, are classrooms of the university.
They are used as teaching tools and as sites for both graduate
and undergraduate research (and sometimes in collaborative
usage with UNH Cooperative Extension). This often
involved long-term research which cannot be readily carried
out on other lands not controlled by the university. As such,
these properties should not be considered for disposal or
change of status in any way without faculty assessment of the
affected properties. The senate acknowledges that a policy to
assess the impact of a sale of property exists; however, the
implementation of that policy is deficient. The senate calls
for a revision of the policy's implementation structure,
ensuring consultation with affected departments and faculty
and continuing to require an academic impact statement prior
to any action being taken to dispose or change the status of
any university property.
The committee chair said that there is a current policy on land
disposal but that there have been problems with the implementation
of the policy. Also, closer collaboration among the Resources
Committee, the Woodlands Commission, and the Land Acquisitions
Policy Committee is needed. A professor said that the chairs and the
faculty of the Natural Resources Department and the Animal Science
Department were not aware of the plans to sell the lands and that
these are lands which are used for teaching and research especially
by those departments and also by the Plant Biology Department and
the Thompson School. Faculty want to be consulted early in the
process. The Campus Planning Committee has discussed the
possibility of having a member of their committee also be a member
of the committee which will be modified to deal with better
implementation of the land disposal policy. The chair of the Campus
Planning Committee said that the president has confirmed that no
land sales are imminent.
Suggestions were made to change the last sentence of the motion to
say "The senate calls for a clear, written statement of the policy's
implementation structure, ensuring consultation with affected
departments and faculty and continuing to require an academic
impact statement prior to any action being taken to dispose or change
the status of any university property." This change was accepted as
a friendly amendment.
Jim Farrell moved and Bob Connors seconded alternate wording for
the motion as follows:
The university shall conduct an academic impact study prior
to the disposal or sale of any university property. An
academic impact report shall be submitted to the Faculty
Senate Campus Planning Committee, with copies to the
Faculty Senate Academic Affairs Committee. Such study
shall evaluate the importance of the property for current or
future teaching or research. Academic departments and
individual faculty, whose work would be affected by the sale
or disposal of university property, shall be given the
opportunity to respond to the academic impact report. The
Faculty Senate shall offer a recommendation to the president
on the sale or disposal of the property within 30 days of
receiving the academic impact study (or, if the university is
not in session, at the first full meeting of the senate
subsequent to the issuance of the report).
A professor said that she would like an opportunity to read the
current policy. A faculty member added that we should emphasize
that the Faculty Senate's roll is critical regardless of what is in the
policy. Also there should be a provision in the policy to deal with
conflicting desires for land use among faculty. Tim Ashwell moved
and John Pokoski seconded that the motion should be tabled
until the January 24 meeting of the Faculty Senate. The motion
to table passed with 24 ayes, 2 nays and 2 abstentions. A senator
asked the Campus Planning Committee chair to stay in touch with the
provost on this issue, and she agreed to do that and also to see if there
is a policy on change of land use in addition to the policy on land
sales. She repeated that she has been assured that there will be no
land sales in the near future. A professor expressed concern about
damage done to university fields when a jeep was driven over them
for a survey. A faculty member suggested that any motion should
explicitly include leasing and not just sale of lands.
V. Responsibility-Center Management - The chair of the Finance and
Administration Committee said that his committee wrote part one of
the first motion on the RCM handout and that the Agenda Committee
wrote parts two and three of that motion. Then both committees
agreed on the entire motion one. In addition, his committee provided
a second motion to be voted on if the first motion does not pass. The
Finance and Administration Committee, through its chair, moved
motion one, including parts two and three as friendly amendments
which have been accepted. A professor said that motion one has been
worded so that the provost would see to it that the deans
communicate with the faculty on how the deans will implement RCM
and also so that there will be continued consultation with and
participation of faculty at the department level under RCM. Concern
was expressed that all revenues generated by faculty will flow
through the dean's office and that we should ensure that faculty and
departments which take extra steps of grant seeking and
entrepreneurial efforts will receive some or all of the resulting funds.
The Academic Affairs Committee chair presented a different RCM
motion which included requests for reassurance on the basic
principles of maintaining academic quality, preserving the faculty's
role, and showing administrative support. This motion concluded by
urging that academic reviews be conducted each year by the provost
and representatives of the senate for the first three years and every
three years thereafter. These reviews should consider both
quantitative benchmarks and qualitative considerations which were
named in the motion, and the review results should be reported to the
senate. A professor said that the motion should address checks and
balances and recourses. After much debate and considering the
president's intention to make her decision on RCM in December, a
proposal was made to take the Academic Affairs Committee motion,
up until the sentence before the word "therefore" near the bottom of
page two, and attach those paragraphs to the beginning of the Finance
and Administration Committee's motion as adjusted by a number of
wording changes which had been proposed from the floor.
The combined motion read as follows:
In its consideration of the proposed budgeting system
change to the more decentralized budgeting system,
known as RCM, the University of New Hampshire
Faculty Senate requests reassurance on the following
basic principles.
Principle 1: Academic quality must be maintained.
We seek reassurance that, if the new budgeting system
harms academic quality, this will be discovered and
changes will be made to ameliorate immediate problems
and prevent them from recurring. We recognize that
oversight mechanisms are in place: the University
Curriculum and Academic Policy Committee and the
Vice President for Academic Affairs/Provost will act to
support the academic integrity and quality. But we
need to know on an ongoing basis that the oversight is
effective.
Principle 2: The Faculty's role must be preserved.
Decentralized budgeting is intended to be a "daylight
process," with all concerned having full access to "user
friendly" and meaningful budget information. Deans
have been given the power to determine how they will
implement the new budget system within their colleges.
Because it is ultimately the faculty who are responsible
for academic policy, we ask that deans include faculty
in these planning and priority-setting activities.
Furthermore, if the pressure is going to be on faculty to
act in ways that increase college revenues, faculty
should also benefit directly from those increases in their
own teaching, programs, departments, and scholarship;
unless they have agreed to forego those benefits so that
common goals, on which they have agreed, can be
achieved.
Principle 3: Administrative commitment.
Most faculty do not want to become accountants nor
should they have to; they have neither the time nor the
interest. But the new system requires timely and
accurate information about and awareness of budgets
on a regular basis. We seek assurance that the support
structures will be in place and that, if the current
Business Service Centers are not able to provide the
information and record keeping needed for this system
to work as intended, the VPFA office will fill in while
upgrading the BSCs as required. Ideally, the system
should be transparent, at work without our awareness.
Consequently, in response to the administration's
request for consultation with the Faculty Senate on the
proposed Responsibility-Center Management plan, the
Faculty Senate strongly advises that RCM should not be
implemented unless and until:
(1) the President reaches agreement with the Chancellor
and the Trustees, as required, to permit units to carry
forward funds, maintain Educational and General fund
balances, and transfer funds between salary and non-
salary categories.
(2) The Provost requests and receives from the Deans
their plans for implementing Responsibility-Center
Management in their units, and these plans are
communicated to the faculty for comment and college-
wide approval.
(3) The Provost ensures that in the future the following
concerns continue to be addressed:
(a) the compatibility of RCM with the overall mission of
the university,
(b) the involvement of the departments in RCM
decisions and implementation,
(c) the comprehensive evaluation of administrators
including their handling of RCM issues in their units.
A motion to table the motion failed, with four ayes. The original
motion first moved by the chair of the Finance and Administration
Committee failed, with seven favorable votes. The combined
motion passed with fourteen ayes, three nays and eight
abstentions.
VI. Adjournment - The meeting was adjourned.