These minutes reflect
discussion and debate at a meeting of a committee of the
Minutes
Present:
Richard Goldstein (chair), Josef Altholz, Carole
Bland, Carol Carrier, Daniel Feeney, Roland Guyotte, Darwin Hendel, Nan Kalke,
Cleon Melsa, Wade Savage, Tom Walsh, Carol Wells, Timothy Wiedmann
Absent:
[In these minutes: (1) statement on privacy; (2) report on
highly-research-productive departments; (3) reviews of administrators, waiting
periods, phased retirement; (4) faculty legal liability; (5) student
conduct/student evaluations of teaching]
1. Privacy
Statement
Professor Goldstein convened the meeting at
Professor Walsh highlighted several of the statements in
his draft.
"The Committee feels obligated to
warn faculty of a large legal gap in faculty privacy protection that neither
the Committee nor the Administration can fix. The gap arises from the State of
"In the view of the Committee, the Data Practices Act, at
http://www.revisor.leg.state.mn.us/stats/13/, in essence removes
almost all privacy protections for faculty.
"Outside requests for information go
to the General Counsel's Office. In the view of the Committee, this places the
General Counsel in the position of fulfilling an external information
request--effectively forced by law to act as agent for an interested outside
party.
"It is the General Counsel's Office
that decides what will be withheld from the outside requester as not pursuant
to the request. It is not up to the individual faculty member to decide this.
You will also not be free to decide how much time you can devote to fulfilling
the information request.
"It is clear that this can place both
an affected faculty member and the General Counsel's Office in a difficult
position. Requested information may be private by any reasonable judgment but
still have to be disclosed. If the General Counsel' Office, in reviewing data,
finds indications of illegal activity or of improper research conduct, it must
follow this up independent of the outside request. An outside requester can use
disclosed data to infer that additional data is being withheld or that improper
activities are taking place. The General Counsel's Office must follow up. It is
clear that this opens the door to both legitimate requests as well as
harassment by outside parties. From all appearances to the Committee, this
harassment can even be of a personal character and may involve inferences or
allegations based on disclosed data that can be used to force further
disclosures.
"Harassment of researchers by
interested outside parties appears to already have taken place, although on the
surface the actions were merely requests for information, allowed under the
Act."
Can someone look at your computer
files? Professor Walsh said someone
requesting information cannot look at everything; they must request files through
the Office of the General Counsel.
Professor Goldstein said he wanted
to be sure that the statements in the draft are correct, so it should be
reviewed by the appropriate offices. He
also wondered if, by sending out such a statement widely, the Committee will
not give people ideas, and perhaps unduly alarm the faculty. Professor Walsh agreed that it might be
sufficient to notify faculty that they might be required to turn over all of
their files to the General Counsel.
Professor Goldstein asked if
Professor Walsh had any data on the number of requests for information that the
General Counsel handles. Professor Walsh
said he did not; he wanted first to prepare a draft and then obtain information
about cases, descriptions, and an enumeration of the items that ARE private
data. Have there been that many cases,
Professor Goldstein wondered, and if not, will the Committee concern generate
more of them?
Professor Feeney said the issue
comes up about every five years, and at one point the General Counsel's office
was going to prepare a guide to the Data Practices Act and what it means for
the faculty. That would be a way to
defuse concerns about faculty over-reacting or giving people ideas. He maintained, however, that the people with
ideas about how to abuse the law already have those ideas. But the faculty may be laboring under false
impressions about their privacy, so it is important to inform them about the
provisions of the law.
Professor Hendel recalled that the
Data Practices Act has been under review for several years; he asked Professor
Walsh if he had any sense how close to the end that review
was. Professor Walsh said he did
not. The act appears, however, to
contain a series of qualifications that some groups have gotten written into
the law. Professor Hendel said his
understanding is that the law is a collection of exceptions and the review is
an attempt to make the statute more comprehensive and philosophically sound. Professor Walsh said he doubted the revisions
would have much effect unless the University itself were
granted an exception.
Professor Altholz said that in his
work as a grievance officer, those involved in the process came to conclude
that the Data Practices Act was totally unhelpful, because both sides of a case
could cite different provisions to reach opposite conclusions.
It was agreed that Professor Walsh's
draft should be circulated to a number of administrative offices as well as to
the Senate Research Committee and the Faculty Consultative Committee for comment. Any final statement should be on the web, Dr.
Carrier suggested. Professor Goldstein
suggested that he and Professors Altholz and Walsh collect responses and
prepare a statement for final action at the next meeting of the Committee. The document would be a statement of the
Committee's views on University policy, given the state law. It was also agreed that the statement should
go to the Faculty Consultative Committee and eventually to the Senate.
Professor Altholz said he would also
like to see, as a separate policy statement, a declaration that the General
Counsel would not INITIATE investigations.
That would lead to the odd result that the General Counsel would have
less power than the average citizen to make requests for information, Professor
Wells observed. But it would put the
General Counsel in a less adversarial relationship with the faculty, Professor
Walsh pointed out; right now the office is pushed into an adversarial
relationship by the law. Professor
Wiedmann said he did not think such a statement is necessary; the General
Counsel will not look for things to do and any faculty member being targeted
would already be the subject of suspicion.
Professor Feeney said he disagreed; if the University had the wrong
administration, such searches could be used as a crowbar on faculty it did not
like.
Such a declaration would not
eliminate the proviso that the General Counsel would investigate cases of
suspected criminal activity, Professor Savage observed. It is clear that if the General Counsel is
aware of criminal activity, it MUST act, Professor Walsh said. The question is whether the General Counsel's
Office will turn up "out of the blue" and ask for files. It could, Professor Savage said; there was a
time at universities when administrations did so. And it can affect both teaching and research,
Professor Altholz, because someone can come after a faculty member because of
what they are saying the classroom as well as for their research. The most recent example of that, Professor
Savage said, is the actions taken against faculty because of statements made
after the events of last September 11.
2. Faculty
Development Working Group
Professor Goldstein turned next to
Professor Bland for an update from the Faculty Development Working Group.
Professor Bland recalled for the
Committee that the working group had been charged by Professor Goldstein and
Vice Provost Jones to look at faculty productivity and vitality. The working group narrowed its charge to
examining ways to facilitate faculty research productivity because there are
already units and initiatives that help faculty increase their teaching
effectiveness. There is less support for
increasing research effectiveness.
One way they decided to approach
this question was to look at the practices in highly-research-productive
departments. They also surveyed faculty
members who left the University about what affected their satisfaction level
(and it turned out that the most significant factors were at the department
level). IN terms of research practices,
there will be a report describing what the highly-productive departments do in
fifteen different areas.
Professor Bland reviewed with the
Committee a tentative table of contents for the report as well as a draft of
one of the chapters. The report will be
designed to provide departments with concrete strategies to increase research
productivity, with ideas for implementing "common" strategies, with
an overview of research on characteristics associated with research productivity,
and a "framework for thinking about and attending to the many
variables" that have an impact on research productivity. The final report is not ready because a
couple of the chapters have not been written and final permission to use some
of the quotes has not been obtained; Professor Bland said she hopes the final
report will be ready by June.
The primary audience for the report
is department heads. Professor Goldstein
said he expected that many faculty will want to read
it--if for no other reason than to find out what department heads said about
research productivity. Professor Bland
agreed that the findings rely heavily on what the department heads told the
working group in interviews.
In top departments, is one of the
motivations to be productive to help society, Professor Goldstein asked? It is, Professor Bland said. Professor Wells wondered if that was not
something people said because they knew they might be quoted by name, and if
they might have said something different in other circumstances. Not all department heads cited helping
society, Professor Bland said; some also identified aligning with college
priorities or doing what funding agencies require. The units that were most clear about the
social good motivation were those part of the traditional land-grant mission.
Who was interviewed, Professor
Savage asked? The deans were asked to
identify three highly-research-productive departments in the college; the heads
of those units were then interviewed, Professor Bland explained.
Professor Savage related that he and
Professor Altholz had talked about the two cultures at the University (there
are probably more), prompted by learning that some departments require faculty
to bring in external research funding in order to get tenure and be
promoted. In their departments, faculty bring in few dollars (because there are few dollars
that can be obtained). There are
probably several subcultures at the University, he told Professor Bland, and
what works in one may not work in another.
Professor Bland said that they interviewed department heads in a
lot of departments where faculty are not expected to bring in external research
funding. The report will have major themes, some of which will be applicable in
one subculture but not another. But most of the themes will apply to all
departments because these departments focused on many of the same areas to
facilitate research productivity, such as recruitment and reward systems, she
said. Where these departments differed the most was on the emphasis
placed on obtaining external research funds and amount of internally-funded
time provided to faculty to do research. She agreed that there are
differences, but added that departments can also learn from the differences.
Professor Bland reported that there were a few surprises in the
findings, beyond what would have been expected, given the literature.
-- Highly-research-productive
departments emphasize quality teaching (the working group did not ask anything
about teaching). The unit heads said
they had to have the very best researchers but also people who were very good
teachers, and that they would not put money into a researcher who was not also
a good teacher.
-- Collaboration
is very important; departments give it a lot of weight and do a lot to
facilitate it. Some go as far as giving
more weight to jointly-published materials.
Some units make joint or cross-unit appointments at time of initial
hire, to emphasize collaboration.
-- People
place a high value on climate/culture.
It is not that faculty have to be all alike,
but in departments with a productive culture, people work together.
-- They
started the interviews with the department heads with a global question about
the factors that make a unit research-productive; the factors mentioned most
frequently were:
-- recruitment
(how done and how well it is done)
-- having clear goals about where the
unit will be research leaders
-- a positive culture
-- mentoring
-- collaboration
Were there differences across
colleges, Professor Savage asked?
Professor Bland said they had not looked at the data that way but they
will. In some departments the faculty are lonely, Professor Savage said, and have little
collaboration. This work is important,
he said, because some departments are too solitary, unsupportive, and not
encouraging for people, especially new faculty.
It is very important that departments see other models. Professor Bland agreed.
Do the highly-productive departments
use an external metric, Professor Walsh asked?
They do track their national rankings, Professor Bland said. The highest-ranked departments have mentoring
programs--but they all do them differently.
Mentoring is more systematic in larger departments, more informal in
smaller ones. Some are very vigorous
about this--they have lunch together and teach courses together.
How much consciousness is there of
the rankings, Professor Altholz asked?
Do they set out to do better?
Some are quite explicit about doing so, Professor Bland said. Deans can be serious about rankings,
Professor Altholz said; he said he did not know if departments are. The department leadership certainly can be,
Professor Goldstein said. Departments
that recruit "from below" (that is, young scholars) will be at a
disadvantage in national rankings, Professor Altholz observed.
In terms of recruitment, Professor
Bland said, highly-productive departments that want to be world leaders look
for driven, obsessive, passionate researchers. An example of this from another study is a
recent survey of faculty in the University's
Did they learn anything about how
these units embrace new people, such as women or faculty of color, Dr. Carrier
asked? The interview asked about
diversity by evaluating diversity in research, Professor Bland said, rather
than diversity in terms of ethnicity or gender.
However, several departments discussed their strategies to promote the
research productivity of diverse faculty (e.g., gender and ethnicity). This information has not yet been summarized
so she could not provide an answer.
This information about
highly-productive departments could be very useful to Ph.D. students who are
CHOOSING departments, Professor Hendel observed. This could make them quite savvy, Professor
Bland agreed.
Professor Goldstein noted, apropos
the results of surveys of faculty who left the University, that it was
interesting to see that a major factor they were unhappy about was the lack of
a tuition reimbursement policy.
Dr. Carrier asked that the working
group conduct this survey, Professor Bland said, in the case of faculty who
left for another academic institution (but not for those who, for example, left
the University for the private sector).
Some wanted this information, Dr. Carrier said, while others saw it as
airing dirty laundry. If she were
running a unit, she commented, she would want to know what those who left
thought. Professor Feeney asked what was
wrong with collecting the information; the University has its head in the sand
if it does NOT collect it. Others on the
Committee agreed; the question, Professor Goldstein said, is how to use the
information.
Would it help to have Senate support
for the effort, Professor Bland asked Dr. Carrier? She said it would. The question is what the Committee or the
administration wants to do on climate or satisfaction or productivity issues,
she said. Professor Bland said she would
have something written for the next meeting.
Professor Goldstein thanked
Professor Bland for her report.
3. Other
Committee Business
Professor Goldstein noted a letter
to the deans that would be going out in his name asks for information about
reviews of department heads and college administrators. The Faculty Consultative Committee asked the
Committee to look into this issue, to be sure reviews
are done fairly and regularly.
The question about eliminating the
30-day waiting period for health care is waiting, Dr. Carrier said in response
to a question from Professor Goldstein.
Professor Goldstein said he could not understand why. He said he would not mind if the
administration said "no, it can't make the change," but the Committee
should have reasons. There are three
items pending:
-- the waiting
period for health care
-- the two-year
waiting period for the faculty retirement plan for new faculty
-- tuition remission for dependents of University staff (this
may carry a cost, but it should not be ignored).
How long can a phased retirement
agreement last? The maximum is five
years; what is the minimum, Professor Goldstein asked? One year, Dr. Carrier said, although it is
not explicitly in the policy. That is
the practice they follow, and will continue to do so; they do not want people
to have a two-hour phased retirement in order that the individual can obtain
the health care benefits.
4. Faculty Legal
Liability
Professor Goldstein distributed
copies of a message from Professor Feeney, who had raised questions about
faculty legal liability (as, for example, when a faculty member uses his or her
own car to pick up job candidates at the airport: the University's position, reportedly, is
that any liability from an accident rests with the faculty member, not the
University). As a result of this
University position, Professor Feeney said, in a recent dean search the college
arranged for University vehicles to be used for transporting candidates. His concern, he said, is that people are
putting themselves in harm's way by using their own cars. People trying to be collegial are putting
themselves in jeopardy.
The Committee also discussed whether
individuals who rent cars while traveling on University business should take
out extra insurance. The University will
not cover someone driving a rented car on University business--the University
is not renting the car, the individual is.
If a person takes candidates or
visitors to seminars or dinner, it is their problem if there is an
accident. Most people do not have enough
insurance coverage for a catastrophic accident, Professor Feeney said; where
would that leave a faculty member in case of an accident? This kind of activity on behalf of the
University should be covered, Professor Goldstein said, and if they use their
own vehicles for University business, the University should cover them.
Dr. Carrier said she would speak
with people in Purchasing and the General Counsel's office and see if they
could not attend the next meeting of the Committee.
Professor Savage said he thought the
University would reasonably be very reluctant to cover someone driving their own
vehicle. Professor Feeney said the
University would have to decide something; either it should fund an umbrella
policy for people doing the University's work or there should be cars provided. What would the difference in cost be? In any event, Dr. Carrier agreed, people
should know about the risk if they use their own vehicle.
5. Student
Conduct
Professor Goldstein distributed
copies of the Student Conduct Code and recalled the earlier discussion about
harassment of female faculty members, either in the classroom or through
student evaluations. He said he has
heard too many stories not to be concerned.
Does the EEO office hear these kinds of concerns, he asked? It does, Dr. Carrier said.
The language of the code did not
seem to speak much, or very strongly, to the issue of harassment of
faculty. The code does note that the
University's sexual harassment policy covers students as well, but that policy
language is not in the code. Professor
Walsh said he found this very confusing; it appears from the language that
copying a University key elicits a penalty under the code provisions while
harassing faculty does not.
It was agreed that the Committee
would look at the sexual harassment policy.
One Committee member noted that sometimes people receive pornographic
emails that have a @umn.edu address. If
one asks about the source, one is told that nothing can be done about it and
that such emails cannot be blocked.
The Committee agreed to revisit this
issue.
Professor Goldstein adjourned the meeting
at
--
Gary Engstrand