04-09-2008FacCaucusMin.htm

Faculty Caucus Minutes

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

(Approved)

Call to Order

Senate Chairperson Dan Holland called the Faculty Caucus to order.

Approval of Faculty Caucus Minutes of 3/26/08

The Faculty Caucus Minutes of March 26, 2008 will come before the Faculty Caucus for approval on April 23, 2008.

Academic Impact Fund Study Report (Kay Moss, Assistant Provost)
04.04.08.01 Review of Academic Impact Fund 1997-2008

04.04.08.02 AIF Data Dashboard (Statistical Summary)

Assistant Provost Kay Moss: When we first started working through this with the Provost staff, the first meeting walking through this took over an hour and a half. I have been at ISU for 20 years. My background is in education; I am tenured there. My tenure rests in the Curriculum and Instruction Department. My background is not in finance, so please forgive that as we are walking through this. I have been in my position for three years in the Provost’s Office and much of what I do is managing and planning for the Academic Impact Fund. It is a central fund for transferring dollars in and out to provide salary costs for tenure-track faculty members. The fund is about ten years old. About half us around the table were here when then Provost Urice proposed this. It was a fund that came to the Academic Senate for study and was endorsed by the Academic Senate at that time.

During my first two years in the role that I am in, like any first two years, you are just trying to learn the job. It is in this year that I was able to do a historical review of this very important fund to see if has done what it needs to do, what it set it out to do, and if we should make any adjustments. If you know the financial systems within Illinois State University, you know that there are not good tracking devices. To go back ten years was a huge undertaking. I started this in the fall and to help me get the information for all of these historical transfers that have been made, I brought in a person from the Research and Sponsored Programs Office, Kevin Wiand, who helped me with this. He worked with Bill Cummins and I worked very closely with Planning and Institutional Research to verify data. Without that, this never could have happened.

Let me talk about the uses of the Academic Impact Fund and how it operationalizes. When you have a colleague who resigns or retires in your department, the line and the funding get transferred into the central funding account and that transfer is permanent. Then when that line is reauthorized for hire, the money and the line is transferred back into your department. That is basically how that happens; so for resignations and retirements, the money flows into AIF, and for those rehires, the money flows out of AIF. When we have colleagues that are not reappointed or who are denied tenure, the dollars stay in the department and those are department-funded lines. That decision was probably made to not put that added complication into the decision making (process). We don’t want to be afraid that if someone is not reappointed, we would lose the line. So when you have a non-reappointment, those dollars stay there.

There are other uses for the dollars. When a faculty member becomes a chair, becomes a dean, dollars transfer back into the AIF. However, when that person returns to faculty, AIF funds the line. That is not insignificant. In this particular year, $744,000 was transferred to departments to re-fund the faculty positions for APs, meaning chairs mostly, who returned to faculty. Those are the basics of how the AIF works.

Before I go on to ‘what good has it done?’ or ‘where do we need to go?’, I would like to open for questions right now and ask if you see how transfers are being made.

Senator Gifford: When a faculty member moves up the chain, perhaps into administration, the funds for that position go with them or stay within the department?

Asst. Provost Moss: When a faculty member takes an acting position, the dollars remain in the department for that subsequent return. When the faculty member becomes a permanent chair, the dollars and the line get transferred back into the AIF.

Senator Holland: Who pays the chair?

Asst. Provost Moss: Chairs don’t become a part of this, so that permanent funding is always there for the chairs.

Let me talk about what has happened across the ten years of AIF. You have in the report, on page 2, the numbers of our tenure-track faculty. Within this last decade, we have mostly been pretty flat. Look at the trend line there that I give you for the numbers of tenure-track faculty. It’s not fluttering around too much; it is basically a flat line. The red line there is the mean. The mean of our tenure-track colleagues here on campus is 679. That’s the mean over this ten-year period. We are now at 668. I am going to put a parenthetical phrase in here because, to me, a faculty member means the faculty members who are affected by the AIF policy. That does not include chairs, but it does include tenure-track faculty and Milner. If you go out on the Planning and Institutional website, you are not going read that particular number. Their number includes chairs, but does not include Milner, but, to me, you are a faculty member if you are affected by the AIF. So it’s a little bit different from the university definition of a faculty member.

We had a high in 2005; you will see that little peak. That was at 697, so we are off a bit by 29 faculty members from the 2005 high and it is trending downward a bit. You will see reasons why as we go through this.

New tenure track faculty lines—this number is pretty astounding because we only know, anecdotally, about one or two within our program areas getting a new line, so, basically we don’t think that there have been a lot of new lines. There have been. Over the course of these ten years, there have been 78 new lines allocated. Here is one extra consideration of this. We do not have evidence, in this ten-year period, of a line being reallocated from one college into another college appears that areas of growth were given new lines, rather than reallocated lines from areas of dropping enrollments. There is precious little evidence of any reallocation between departments, but within a department, we certainly do say, ‘we don’t really need this precise discipline’. Within a department, I think we are a lot more flexible than we have been within colleges and between colleges.

Senator Borg: I need to ask a question of clarification. You mentioned early on that when someone retires or resigns, the line and the salary revert to the AIF. If that particular expertise is authorized for rehire, is that a new hire or is that a replacement?

Asst. Provost Moss: That would not be called a new line. A new line is when a dean is saying, ‘I need a new line in this department. I don’t have any open lines, so can you put a new line there?’ That’s what we are calling an open line.

Senator Winter: Your report says that we have had 78 new tenure-tenure track lines since 1997, yet the total number of tenure-track positions is down. Does that mean we have also cut 89 positions during that time? Otherwise, that number would have to higher.

Asst. Provost Moss: You are exactly right; it would have to be higher if everything is held constant; and, yes, other things did happen. There were some lines that colleges chose to rescind during the rescission and there is a natural erosion, too, for example, when a line comes in lower than it’s going out. But most of these dollars are within this next area, Instructional Capacity, because, as those new lines are allocated to colleges and then they become empty, then, according to our policy, we would be providing some temporary instructional capacity dollars for that new line that has subsequently become empty. Instructional capacity is temporary dollars that pay for the non-tenure track faculty; when that line is unfunded and remaining empty, your chairs are getting

these $29,000-per-year expenses. So, you are exactly right; there are unfunded lines. Yes, we have put in 78

new lines, but we have over 100 empty, unfilled lines.

Senator Winter: I guess I would question the definition of “new” in that sense. I think that that is a little bit misleading.

Asst. Provost Moss: That is misleading, but every new allocation also led to that subsequent instructional capacity cost being funded when the person resigned out of a new line. But you are right; overall, we don’t have that many “new” lines. They were allocated as new and then, the way our policy is written, if that line becomes vacant, there will be an instructional capacity cost that has to be supplied toward the new line.

Senator Wang: The AIF, initially, when it was set up, was not intended to support NTT lines, but now we have 60%. In light of what you just said, that you have to support instructional capacity, does that mean that we need to revisit the AIF’s mission? Especially with 60%—that means that we need it, so shouldn’t we revisit and maybe change the mission?

Asst. Provost Moss: I want to direct your attention to this next section on Instructional Capacity. First of all, it’s 42%. I want to be clear on how that works, because your thinking is probably where my thinking is trying to lead us. We are not allocating new lines if, in fact, you can’t fund the lines that you have open. But that is not how that system had worked, so we would be allocating this “new” line, it’s subsequently empty, and now the AIF owes instructional capacity for that.

Take a look at that trend line (on the AIF Data Dashboard Chart). On average, the red line indicates $2.1 million; but look at the trend over that ten-year period. It is going up; we are at an all-time high of $3.2 million. It’s paying for 42% of all of the NTT costs on the campus and, this will be one of the most important sentences

in here: For every dollar we spend on a non-tenure track out of this fund, we spend 62 cents on a tenure-track. As these new lines become vacated, now the AIF owes the line that $29,000 per open line. Over time, if we continue to grant/authorize new lines, eventually the end game will be that we will have no dollars for tenure track because we will owe everything to the non-tenure track and that isn’t how that can go. So you are exactly right, Senator Wang.

Senator Holland: Isn’t the basic problem, then, is that there is just no phase-out of when you quit supporting that? Why would you support an NTT forever?

Asst. Provost Moss: There was a sunset in the very beginning in the way that the policy was written. I don’t see evidence of that ever happening, however. I think there were a couple of years where AIF simply ran out of instructional capacity dollars and maybe it was during some rescissions, but the instructional capacity allocation doesn’t ever sunset now. So I am going to invite us to consider that we simply have a policy in which decisions about that $29,000 per line, which adds up, are nearly $3.3 million in this fiscal year. Rather than those decisions being made in Hovey regarding which lines will receive instructional capacity, I think that the decisions about instructional capacity dollars need to be pushed out into colleges so that they are applied in areas of student need and growth, rather than by a policy-based decision on the $29,000.

I do want to bring to your attention to some other very, very good things that the AIF has provided.

Senator Alferink: What have been the changes in lines for instructional capacity over that ten-year period? Have the FTEs changed over that period of time? Is that line comparable to the cost line?

Asst. Provost Moss: The answer is yes; the NTT numbers are going up. If you will look at the trend lines on what I am calling the Data Dashboard, I am just giving you the averages and the highs.

Senator Holland: What you will notice is that student numbers are about the same, tenure-track is about the same, and non-tenure track is about 100 more.

Senator Campbell: Would the end result be any different if we continue to add these new lines or would that continue what we primarily have been doing, which is not to return the lost lines? The lost lines remain in NTT dollars, so it sounds like either way we go, we are going to continue to increasingly be using more dollars out of the Academic Impact Fund on non-tenure track.

Asst. Provost Moss: I don’t think that we have to if we think of expending the instructional capacity dollars in different ways than those in our current policy. For example, the $29,000 for open lines; what if those decisions are made at a more local level based on student needs and we are able to then shift those dollars into tenure-track hires?

Senator Campbell: I was inferring that, based on the current approach, we will be end up with most of our dollars being used for non-tenure track lines, whether we call them new or old.

Asst. Provost Moss: That’s exactly right. If we continue to allocate new line after new line and have the policy in which every vacant line gets $29,000, all of a sudden all of the money in AIF is shifted over into non-tenure track. So I am trying to help us think about two things. Should any of those dollars for tenure-tenure track hires be used for non-tenure track hires and what is our appropriate goal for tenure-track to non-tenure track?

When I took these data to President Bowman in December, we were right in the middle of the provost-transition time. You are getting a very important point, I think, and that is ‘what should our ratio be here at Illinois State?’

There is a line that I would want to direct your attention to in the very bottom set of rows called “Analysis” (on the AIF Data Dashboard Chart). If you look at line three in that bottom set of rows, you get a percentage of our tenure-track to the total FTE. Tenure-track to non-tenure track is another way of thinking about that. In the fall of 1997, we were about 81% tenure-track. If you follow that line across, you are going to flutter around in the 70s. However, in the last four fiscal years, we have gone from 77 to 74 to 73 to 72 and here’s where we need to go with that. I am going to say this pretty precisely. In light of no other data from our comparators indicating hat percent of our faculty should be tenure track versus non-tenure track, and I think that that is a good conversation that we need to begin to have, I suggested to the President, and he agreed, let’s not let the tenure track percent drop any lower than 72%.

Senator Kalter: My first question has to do with the 15 non-tenure track permanent lines that are mentioned, I think, on the third page (of A Review of the Academic Impact Fund 1997-2008). It appears that this is related to the fact that so-called temporary non-tenure track lines have been increasing. I am concerned about whether or not those permanently funded lines for the non-tenure track would be considered under the original guidelines of the fund. If not, how does the fund go about recouping those monies? It seems like that then starts down a slippery slope: we have not been authorizing tenure-track hires; those then become at risk for becoming unlabeled, permanently funded non-tenure track lines. One of the things that I observed is that the trend of reauthorization of tenure-track lines has not exactly followed our rescissions—that we are beginning to get a backlog, even though we are not in an under-funded situation. So I wondered if you could address that, particularly, starting with those permanently-funded lines that came out of the AIF, though the AIF was actually designed for tenure-track.

Asst. Provost Moss: I can tell you that I don’t have evidence of those non-tenure track lines or dollars ever flowing back into AIF. I believe that they were permanent allocations and never were treated as “AIF citizens”. They were permanent and to recoup it would be by permanent rescissions from the colleges that received them. I don’t know that that would be in the best interest of the colleges right now.

Provost Murphy: I think your question is a good one, but I am not sure that I know the administrative philosophy behind those permanent allocations. I think that that is a very good question, though.

Asst. Provost Moss: I really want to make sure you understand that there are some really good things that are going on here. Starting salaries of new assistant professors are at 105% of our CUPA; I think that’s awesome. I think that is a perfect place for us to be. I think that we should have highly competitive searches and that means highly competitive prices; I don’t quibble about that. I talk with the deans, too, as the searches are progressing, because, at best, we are making a good estimate in August for negotiations in March. I have told the deans that I don’t want to hear later that you lost your number one person for $2,000; I think that’s criminal. So this is a good thing.

When you have the flexibility of some centralization here, I don’t have to pay attention to: ‘How much was the funding in the line when it came into AIF? What was the transfer in? How many dollars were transferred in versus how much is transferred out?’ This decision almost has nothing to do with that decision. There’s a transfer in alright, but how much we need to make a good, competitive hire is a unique decision that doesn’t have to, and should not, relate to this. For example, this year a transfer into AIF of $72,000 was reauthorized for hire at $78,000. Another example is that a transfer into AIF at $53,000 transferred out at $60,000. That does erode the number of lines. However, there was also a transfer into AIF at $76,000 and a transfer out at $52,000. The numbers of the transfers out are based on what you tell me is the competitive rate to hire your colleagues. So that is a very good thing that AIF has done.

Secondly, we have supplements to those department-funded lines. Remember, when you have a colleague who was not reappointed or denied tenure, the monies stay in your departments. However, I can tell you that those lines are no longer competitive. Your colleagues were not getting lots of merit money, so to make a rehire, your chair is short dollars in that line. In this search year, I can tell you ten out of ten of our lines that are department funded are getting supplements from the AIF. Over the course of the ten years, it has provided almost $700,000 in supplements to the department-funded lines. That, of course, is at the cost of reauthorized lines. We are choosing to hire well and there is erosion from that. It’s still a good decision, but there is a cost.

The next item on that page (page 3 of A Review of the Academic Impact Fund 1997-2008), is “Payouts of Unused Sick Leave”. This has a lot to do with why AIF was created. Over the course of this ten-year period, this year we will have hit the $8 million mark for unused sick leave paid to faculty. There is a little bit of unused vacation in there; it’s insignificant because faculty don’t earn vacation time, but when a faculty member steps off and becomes a chair or a dean for awhile, they are earning vacation time. In the whole of things, it’s not an awful lot. The trend line there of the unused sick leave is trending downward. The average is $700,000 a year. There will be a little spike in that. We have a number of Baby Boomers getting ready to retire. They have pretty large sick leaves if they have been here ten or twenty years, so they are going to cause a bump. Once we get on the other side of the Baby Boomers, that’s going to drop off pretty fast.

I am anticipating that we will be over our average this year, over the $700,000 mark. In some years, it’s up over $1 million. That would just totally cripple a college because faculty can let us know late that they are retiring. You can let us know on June 30^th and you will get your dollars in that fiscal year. So that actually was a very good thing that this fund has been able to address.

The next couple things are some counter offers. In the whole, we are in the place that deans can say, ‘I have a faculty of excellence. She has an offer out there. I need to counter.’ The AIF is the account where these dollars have come from. Overall, it’s an insignificant number of dollars; however, it would be significant to deans to have to come up with those permanent dollars for those salaries, so the AIF is the place that deans have been able to come for counter offers. Finally, Distinguished Professor comes with a permanent raise in base pay of $5,000 a year and the AIF is where these funds are taken from.

That’s kind of the end of where we are after a ten-year period. I think you have hit on a lot of the considerations that we need to be making in our way forward. The way the policy is stated right now, we have an ongoing obligation for instructional capacity. I want to invite a conversation on instructional capacity dollars being thought of in a different way—being thought of in ways that are data based, where there are student needs, where there is student demand, where there are programs of growth, where there are new programs, and how we can get instructional capacity dollars into those areas.

Senator Campbell: I was wondering, as we have this large number non-tenure line positions, what the union policy is in regards to the length of time a person works or the number of hours a person works that comes out to the equivalent of making them permanent. If a department uses someone as a non-tenure track line for an extended period of time or uses them for more than so much of a percentage of a line, they have some rights to some stability. I am fairly sure about that. Then, if that’s the case, how many of these non-tenure track line positions that we have created are we really already committed to maintaining across time?

Provost Murphy: I don’t have the answer in terms of numbers. That’s a very good question about how many of our non-tenure track colleagues truly are longstanding, full-time members of this faculty.

Senator Campbell: And we can’t eliminate them.

Provost Murphy: I want to think a little bit differently about this. I want to think about funding as it goes into those positions and not necessarily think about specific faculty, because you are right, we have a responsibility to our colleagues. Those colleagues that have been full-time members of this faculty as non-tenure track faculty long enough to have status are probably in areas where they are necessary members of our faculty, too. I don’t think that they are being funded in these positions that we have just kept open for a number of years. I hear what you are saying; I don’t know the number.

Senator Campbell: I was wondering if they might represent that group of, I am not sure how it was worded, permanently-funded temporary lines. If they are in a permanent position and their dollars always flow out of the Academic Impact Fund…

Provost Murphy: We do have permanent non-tenure track lines, but that’s different from having open tenure-track lines funded by instructional capacity money. So, outside of the whole AIF process, we have permanent non-tenure track lines in a variety of places on campus.

Senator Campbell: So those dollars that fund those positions do not flow through the Academic Impact Fund?

Provost Murphy: (Correct.) I made the mistake of saying 60% instead of 42%; it’s actually 58% that are permanent non-tenure track lines.

Senator Holland: If a person has status, doesn’t that just mean if a position is available that they are given priority for that or if they have status, they are guaranteed a job whether there is anything for them to do or not?

Provost Murphy: I honestly don’t know.

Senator Fazel: I have a question about instructional capacity. I see that the numbers here are in dollars rather than how many students we could serve. It seems to me that the tenure-track lines are about the same, NTT lines have been increasing, and the number of students has been almost stable. So why is it that we are still short, in terms of instructional capacity, in accommodating our students?

Provost Murphy: One answer may be to note that the number of students taught per non-tenure track has gone down considerably.

Senator Fazel: So there are smaller class sizes?

Provost Murphy: Look at the “Instructional Capacity per Student” under “Analysis” (on the AIF Data Dashboard). The cost per student has gone up.

Senator Fazel: What is the “cost per student”? Is it per hour?

Asst. Provost Moss: In the first two lines in the “Analysis”, I am providing the simple math of the number of instructional capacity dollars that were transferred out and how many students were on the campus. It was just a way of holding those two things constant across the ten-year period to show, overall, that over that ten-year period of time, we have provided more dollars per student in instructional capacity.

Senator Fazel: From the Academic Impact Fund or just in general?

Asst. Provost Moss: From the AIF. You are right; there are permanent dollars in non-tenure track lines in every college on this campus, but I am not talking about those. I am talking about in terms of the transfers from the AIF. The trend I would want you to look at is in the second line under “Analysis”, the “Instructional Capacity Per NTT”. Looking at the FTEs of non-tenure tracks across time, what was originally just a supplement of, for example, $3,000 per non-tenure track has grown to $12,000 per non-tenure track.

Senator Fazel: For how many courses?

Asst. Provost Moss: No, that’s per FTE of non-tenure tracks over time. All I am trying to get at is that we used to provide, for example, 5% of a chair’s non-tenure track cost and now the AIF is providing 42% of the non-tenure track costs. It’s another way of saying that we have turned these dollars into temporary non-tenure track funding. We have shifted the use of this fund. Perhaps in some ways, over time and with planning, we will move toward tenure-track use. I want to say that carefully, because it’s not ‘Tomorrow, we are not sending out this $3 million in instructional capacity.’ We wouldn’t do that to departments.

Senator Kalter: You invited us to participate in a conversation about this and I think that that is a really good idea, but I feel like I need more information in order to do that. For example, what is it that is keeping so many tenure-track lines sewn up so that they can’t get authorized for search? Where are the tenure-track lines going to—sort of a college-by- college or department and school break down? Also, what percentage of the fund each year is being used for each item, like hiring tenure-track, hiring non-tenure track, sick leave? It seems like I have enough information on one side, but I can’t connect the dots until I have more. For example, the question that Senator Winter brought up was that we have these new lines, but we have more that have not been reallocated. That speaks to the line in the report that says, ‘Although new lines have been authorized, there is no evidence that lines were reallocated from one college to another.’ Has there been any effective reallocation, even if the lines, themselves, have not been reallocated? Is there a change in a college’s capacity? Are some colleges getting fewer reauthorizations, while others have both reallocations and new? Are there some departments in which that is happening? I feel like we need more information.

Asst. Provost Moss: I was not doing a college-by-college review on this. I am looking at Academic Affairs. This is an Academic Affairs policy, so a college-by-college (report) is a totally different sort of study. It’s a breakdown of all of these numbers by colleges and it’s a different set of questions. I hear you asking, ‘why are we sitting on these one hundred open lines for which we are paying instructional capacity costs?’ I am saying that we are sitting on the one hundred open lines because we are paying the instructional costs. This $3.3 million that is being sent out in instructional capacity is where the policy directs us to send it. So I am obligated

to the send the $29,000 times one hundred open lines, based on this policy. So part of that $3.3 million, with a different policy or a rethinking of this policy, could be shifted to a tenure-track hire. Now, having said that, you have also had Jonathan Rosenthal here talking about the need for increased numbers of majors and increased instructional capacity. I am saying that, in terms of the number of seats, and no one is suggesting that we would eliminate this $3.3 million and just fund tenure-track hires, the reason we can’t fund the tenure-track lines is because we owe instructional capacity costs at $29,000 per open line.

Senator Borg: I am a little confused about that because, in my experience, I was told that if someone leaves or retires, you cannot hire the next year. The line is gone and you have to request it again. So the $29,000 that you are talking about is a temporary thing until you can get the line approved. Is that not true? Then, at some point, when the line is authorized, that $29,000 goes back. The question I guess we are asking is ‘why does it seem to accumulate instead of going back to the lines?’

Asst. Provost Moss: There are temporary funds transferred every year while the line is open. That is exactly right. Over the course of this ten-year period, as 78 new lines become “new lines”, that also leaves us with 78 new sets of obligations for when that line is vacated.

Senator Borg: But those 78 potentially could be tenured and then part of the process and not part of this, correct? Of these new lines, how many are lines for which a faculty member comes in and only stays for two years? That doesn’t speak well for the hiring practice.

Asst. Provost Moss: I understand what you are saying, but over the course of this ten-year period, we are now paying instructional capacity on over 100 open lines.

Senator Kalter: Perhaps part of my confusion comes from the 100 increase in NTT FTE. What I am confused about is if we have that much of an increase in NTT faculty, how is it that all of those are committed $29,000 if we are basically stable in the number of tenure-track faculty? So one way or another, we are increasing non-tenure tracks, while tenure-tracks are staying at around the same number.

Senator Crowley: May I propose clarification of the many questions and revisiting this at another Faculty Caucus meeting due to the hour?

Senator Holland: Would you be available to come back and visit with us?

Asst. Provost Moss: Absolutely.

Senator Campbell: This discussion is in caucus. Are we at liberty to talk about this information outside of here?

Senator Holland: Yes, we are not in Executive Session; this is an open meeting.

Provost Murphy: Yes, this is not a confidential document. Please share it. Your chairs will have seen it in the last few days also.

Action Items:

Election of IBHE-FAC Representative: Term 2008-2009

Professor Lane Crothers was elected by ballot as the Illinois Board of Higher Education Faculty Advisory Council Representative for the term 2008-2009. The Faculty Caucus will hold an election for a four-year term in the spring of 2009.

Election of Faculty Members to External Committees of the Senate (Rules Committee)

The Faculty Caucus elected the following faculty members to the External Committee of the Senate by slate: