Faculty Meeting: Work-Study Support, Staffed Against Sabbatical Proposals, and Changes to the Faculty Handbook Discussed

This Monday, March 4, the second faculty meeting of the semester took place. Discussions mainly centered around a new proposed model for Staffed Against Sabbatical (SAS), an urge to help students with work-study get jobs, and proposed changes to the faculty handbook.

PRES & DEANS REPORT 

First on the agenda was the Pres Report, in which President Audrey Bilger sought to get the minutes from March 20, 2023 and Jan 23, 2024 approved. Both motions passed, and with that, the Deans Report then began. Kathy Oleson, Dean of the Faculty began with announcements that Director for Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) applications were due that day. She then announced that Suzy Renn, current Professor in the Biology Department, will be the next Associate Dean of Faculty starting this summer. 

AFAC REPORT

Following this, Milyon Trulove, Vice President and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, spoke on behalf of Kat Buckspan, Associate to the Vice President & Dean of Admission & Financial Aid, who was not present at this meeting. He announced that Buckspan is now the new Student Coordinator, and he then went on to speak about the work that the student work office does with student supervisors and urged faculty to help/support students on financial aid through work-study jobs. He asked that faculty who hire students post job listings on Handshake in order to advertise positions, as some students have been having challenges finding jobs on campus, and then encouraged faculty to consider “more students rather than more hours,” in order to ensure an equitable work experience for students, in which there are more jobs for more students, rather than fewer jobs with long hours for few students. 

Again, he spoke about the student work supervisors, saying that the student work listserv and the office spends a lot of time helping advisors with best practices how to hire, “if you have students that are not showing up, how best to handle those policies, making a system across campus…or if you have to have difficult conversations with students…how you have to construct those.” Then, the student work supervisory training program was mentioned, as well as a student work job fair, both of which give students an opportunity to have a better understanding of how they might utilize their talents here on campus. 

CAPP REPORT

Then, Meg Scharle, Professor of Philosophy, came up to the podium with the CAPP (Committee on Academic Policy and Planning) Report. First up, new course approvals. While the Quest could not write down what all of these proposals entailed in time, they included: A proposed change to the French minor requirement; a proposed change to HUM 220; a proposed change to the physics major requirement; and a proposed change to the religion major and ad-hoc interdisciplinary religion major. Following this, an off-campus study abroad program was announced – a new math program in Guanajuato, Mexico. All motions carried with “AYES,” which led the motions to pass.

This is when Scharle brought up the Staffed Against Sabbatical (SAS). If you are not familiar with this acronym, part of it is the process of adding a tenured/tenure track faculty member to a department in order to avoid staffing sabbatical replacements with visitors. Reed essentially wants to do this in order to maintain the faculty size, while replacing visitors with tenure-track professors. As of right now, Reed has a lot fewer faculty visitors (16%) as compared to other liberal arts schools, with Bowdoin, Pomona, Claremont McKenna, and others like it all having around 25-30% of professors as visiting. 

Scharle then began, explaining the process of this new proposal, “Generally, you need seven members in order to fully staff workers for sabbaticals. So you can imagine you have six FTE (full-time equivalent, or full-time staff/faculty), you have six people teaching in any given year. And instead of getting a substitute for each of those six people, every time they go on sabbatical, if you introduce the seventh person, unless you pick that person aside, they are in fact, doing their own stuff. So the idea is you introduce the seventh tenure-track line, and you just cycle in and out.”

She then went over the original goals of SAS, which began in 2008, the initial goal being, how to reduce faculty workload for searches, and how to maintain the faculty size while still having visiting professors. According to her, the original goal was indeed achieved, and as a result, as of this year, just 16% of faculty were visitors, again a much lower number of visitors than a lot of other liberal arts colleges. 

She then brought up the challenges to this program in the current environment. “Because we have this heavy investment in tenure track positions, it has made our annual stacking less flexible…And so as a result, we have this visiting stream, where every year if we have a position that's not protected by this set static, you put that sabbatical replacement in the visit along with these other positions.” She closed the explanation by saying that this can become an issue because there can begin tension between; how to staff departments appropriately, ones that might be drowning in numbers of students, while still observing the curricular needs of the departments. She closed this explanation by saying that CAPP is in a tough situation where they want to address all the needs of the college, but cannot.

She then moved on; “We're inviting you to be part of this conversation. We don't want to eliminate staffed against sabbatical. It's not like we're looking to get rid of staff. But we want to be really thoughtful about what it looks like in this environment, what is the appropriate size for it, what's the kind of placement for staff to consider.” She then addressed the audience, “So the question on the table at the moment here is what do you think of the pros and cons of such a plan for increasing flexibility in total college FTE by reducing the size of the statutes above the program and increasing the number of this person?”

Many faculty members had questions, the first one being; How does it work practically? Kathy Oleson then chimed in, saying, “In general, the department is asked to try to line them up so that we have one person on sabbatical each year, so you can do that work comes around, doesn't always work out perfectly that that happens. But CAPP, certainly every year, see some proposals, or someone says, I'm gonna go in here early so that I can help my department…So that is certainly in practice at this point.” Michael Faletra from the English department then asked, “Has CAPP thought about the cons?” Scharle then explained that the cons were the ones that had been spoken about at the meeting…but it would decrease faculty workload, and add an emphasis to having good faculty advising. Kristin Scheible, Professor of Religion and Humanities, spoke next, saying, “I feel like this disproportionately impacts smaller departments, it creates a real problem for continuity…this raises all kinds of red flags…we are not putting our students first.” She continued, “There is ultimate flexibility for midsize departments…there is a mechanism for departments to be small…I think there needs to be some really important conversation around smaller departments.”

After a bit more discussion about the pros and cons of this addition and faculty questions about it, Scharle closed out, saying, “CAPP is very aware of the downsides and potential struggles and are working to fix them. If you have more comments on this, email me or any other CAPP members.”

CAT REPORT

Finally, Paul Silverstein came to the podium to speak on CAT, Committee of Advancement and Tenure. “We have a motion that we made last meeting…we want to take this off the table and talk about it.” Then Bilger chimed in, explaining that this was in regard to a conversation about changes in the faculty constitution, announcing that a ballot would be sent out over email to faculty members regarding this issue. While the Quest was not allowed to take pictures, so could not solidify information about what the exact changes in the faculty constitution were, the gist of it seemed to be proposed updated language, which would also be updated in the faculty handbook. Further, it had something to do with the idea of scholarship, and what professors are expected to be publishing during their time at Reed. 

From the faculty handbook; “Scholarship, defined as active engagement in one's field of scholarly inquiry, as evidenced by the production and dissemination of original work,” is proposed to be changed. As a result of this proposed change, questions were fielded from the audience. Michael Faletra, Professor of English and Humanities chimed in, saying, “I have two objections…this whole policy…it changes the culture of the college…it changes what a teacher/scholar is…it’s disturbing to me…I am opposed to that on that ground.” Paul Silverstein responded, saying, “I was trying to recognize the ways we do scholarship in the past 30 years have changed… there's all sort of ways we think of research, work, offering it out to the public…” Nicole James from the Chemistry department then asked, “I'm not sure I understand the distinction between the proposed framing in the handbook; what's the difference, and is there a difference?” After some discussion about the differences, Margot Minardi of the History department then explained, “You have to be putting something out there…it does not necessarily have to be for external review… people should not just produce journal articles…” explaining that faculty should aim to have some externally reviewed material published, but not everything that counts as scholarship needs to be externally reviewed.

With this, the meeting came to a close.