Shared governance leaders discuss plans for year

Shared governance groups on campus will again focus their energy and attention on a wide range of issues, including the reorganization of the university’s research enterprise, academic staff job security and compensation, and funding, say UW–Madison’s shared governance leaders.

Judith Burstyn, professor of chemistry and pharmacology and the new chair of the University Committee, and Heather Daniels, starting her second year as chair of the Academic Staff Executive Committee, talked with Wisconsin Week to look ahead to the academic year and their organization’s priorities.

University Committee/Faculty Senate

During the last academic year, a proposed reorganization of the university’s research enterprise dominated much of the debate in the Faculty Senate.

A resolution passed by the Faculty Senate in its final meeting of the year set the stage for the reorganization, and ensuring its implementation will be a priority for the faculty, Burstyn says.

“There’s legislation that needs to be written and adopted to put in place elements of the plan,” she says.

In the past, faculty have felt that the administration has been slow to respond to concerns regarding support for research, Burstyn says, and hopes the process will work better under the reorganization.

“We want mechanisms for faculty input into the research process,” she says. “And it’s extremely important to faculty that we have a strong relationship between research and graduate education.”

Faculty will also work with Chancellor Biddy Martin on her initiative to gain more administrative autonomy for UW–Madison, Burstyn says.

“Another area of focus will be to continue our work with (Vice Chancellor for Administration) Darrell Bazzell, and system administration to push forward initiatives to help fund graduate students,” Burstyn says. “There are some structural problems with graduate student funding and we’re really trying to work to find permanent solutions to a long-term problem.”

On the issue of compensation, last year the University Committee worked collaboratively with university administrators to boost promotional salary increases for faculty, as well as a structure for pay increases as part of the post-tenure review process, Burstyn says.

“This year we want to ensure that there’s an effective indexing system put in place so that future promotional increases will not fall behind,” she says.

Academic Staff Assembly/Academic Staff Executive Committee

Academic staff leaders will continue working with university administrators on an effort to find ways of rewarding academic staff with things other than merit pay increases, such as job security, Daniels says.

Job security measures include giving employees multi-year or rolling horizon appointments, Daniels says, adding that other benefits include professional development grants for instructors to take time off from teaching to revamp courses or do fieldwork.

“The idea is we have other tools available to us that we control that we could use to reward academic staff,” she says. “It doesn’t cost us anything to give a long-term excellent employee a rolling horizon.”

The academic staff report on the research reorganization proposal identified several ways to improve processes used in the research enterprise, and Daniels says she and the committee will continue to push those for consideration.

“Once there is a vice chancellor for research in place at the Graduate School, we’ll make sure the report gets looked at again and make sure issues are addressed,” Daniels says. “We kind of got into the pickle we were in because we grew and grew and the infrastructure didn’t change, and there was no plan for it to change. We’re going to be there again unless we start planning for the future.”

The Academic Staff Assembly also asked its compensation and benefits committee to look at transportation issues, especially the discussion about charging employees something for bus passes, which are now provided free.

“In the midst of increased health care, furloughs, no merit, to have yet another expense that people would have to pay for leaves a sour taste in folks’ mouths,” Daniels says, adding that the free passes have worked well in encouraging people to not park on campus.