Additional Information Submitted by Senator Leslie Fishbein
in Support of a Recommended Charge on Revising Form 1-A:
Investigate how best to revise Form 1a to make it
more user-friendly in terms of both input and ultimate use and to
insure that all faculty members, particularly those newly appointed,
are aware of how to maintain a curriculum vitae with the kinds
of information about their teaching, scholarship, and service that the
form requires.
To that end the subcommittee should consider using focus groups among
both administrative assistants who have supervised the completion of
the form and faculty members of differing situations: those seeking
promotion and tenure, those seeking only promotion, and those involved
in expedited tenure and promotion procedures to gain their perspectives
on how to improve the usage of Form 1a. The subcommittee also should
consider interviewing Richard Tedesco, Application Developer in the
Office of Institutional Research and Academic Planning, and developing
a questionnaire to be distributed among those who have completed the
Form 1a themselves and the administrative assistants who have aided
them in the process. The subcommittee should examine the technical
problems involved in the formatting of the form to see if those can be
eliminated, including the problems inherent in transposing the original
working document to Form 1a itself, and should examine how the forms
used for promotion and/or tenure by other universities that might be
more user-friendly to see if any of those other forms might suggest
improvements in our own.