Present: Dean Swartz, Associate Deans H. Scott and P. Smith, E. Dobbs, R. Grey, M. Pillado-Miller, L. Sinnett, D. Smith, and B. Voyles

The Dean called the meeting to order at 4:22 p.m. in Nollen House.

Remarks by the Dean

The NCA Evaluation Team will be on campus Sunday, November 15 through Wednesday, November 18. Executive Council has been invited to the introductory and exit meetings (Monday November 16 and Wednesday, November 18) with President Osgood and the Self-Study Steering Committee. The Council minus the administrators will meet with the team at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday, November 17.

The Faculty Support and Dean's Office Review from the Pappas Consulting Group has been posted on the Web. It is a good report with significant recommendations for change which are being considered by the Dean's Office. In order to provide better support and to eliminate inefficiencies, the Dean has started by looking for time consuming support staff tasks which do not serve a useful purpose. For example, he has asked academic departments to use a single copier code rather than individual codes for each department member thus saving the faculty support secretaries significant time in accounting at the end of each month.

Discussion of Proposed Salary Policy

The Board of Trustees at their meeting last spring asked the administration to develop a policy on faculty salaries and a policy on tuition. The Dean asked the faculty Budget Committee (a subcommittee of Executive Council) to recommend to him a faculty salary policy. Council discussed the policy which has been proposed by the faculty Budget Committee and which will go to the campus budget committee. After examining several different models, the faculty Budget Committee recommends establishing a long-term salary policy for setting annual faculty salary increases at 105% of the average salary at each rank of our comparison group of colleges. Such a long-term policy would lessen some of the uncertainty that has surrounded the Committee's work in the past and would also make possible a reduction in the department chairs' and the Budget Committee's burdens in reviewing all faculty for salary, because it would allow us to consider those reviews on a multiple, rather than a single, year cycle. Don Smith stressed the importance of maintaining the same standard of comparison with respect to the salaries of newly appointed instructors and assistant professors. If the Dean should allow these to lag behind those at our comparison group of colleges, successive Budget Committees in recommending continuing salaries will have the unwelcome and perhaps controversial task of trying to 'play catch-up' with salaries at the other colleges.

Discussion of Draft Statement on Faculty Allocation

Council discussed a draft document from the Dean on faculty allocation procedures. The document makes it clear that, as the long-range planning and policy body of the faculty, the Executive Council should be centrally involved in providing advice on allocation of faculty resources. It is critically important that any policy and procedure about the allocation of faculty resources deal not only with how faculty additions are approved/allocated but how reductions or reassignments of faculty positions are handled.

The document sets out guidelines for departmental requests for replacements or additional faculty positions. Council agreed that we need procedures for faculty allocations and that these procedures need to be made public. The Dean will bring to Council for endorsement a second draft of this document next week incorporating suggestions from this discussion.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:50 p.m.

Helen Scott
Secretary