Dear Martha:

          At the Faculty Caucus meeting I raised three suggestions for future action by the University Senate.

            1)  The first (and the response from Dick McCormick) involves faculty reporting and Form 1a.  I believe that it is essential that all faculty reporting of teaching, scholarship, and service be requested and completed in a format compatible with Form 1a.  When I attempted to fill out the faculty service survey, I could not cut and paste material from my Annual Faculty Survey into the new survey and had to retype information about every public lecture and other form of community service that I did despite the fact that it appeared online in my Annual Faculty Survey.  That is a complete waste of faculty time.

             I believe that the University Senate should go on record asking for a simpler and more efficient form of faculty reporting that can be employed as well in the promotion and tenure process as well as for FASIP awards if necessary. If Rutgers wants faculty to both perform and report service, reporting should not be more difficult than performing it.  I would suggest that faculty be able to update their annual faculty survey information throughout the year as they perform the service so that they do not forget what they have done, that it be possible to cut-and-paste from or otherwise copy or reference other forms on which the university requires the reporting of service, and that ultimately the Annual Faculty Survey and Form 1a be completely compatible so that faculty can assemble the information that they will need for consideration for promotion and/or tenure from the time of their initial appointment instead of scurrying to assemble this information from disparate places, thereby robbing vital time from teaching, research, and service when they do so.  I also recommend that the information collected be capable of being edited and reassembled for a variety of purposes: faculty home pages, departmental web sites, undergraduate and graduate recruitment efforts, etc.  If faculty are to be productive, they should not be needlessly duplicating work they already have performed or spending time trying to document work that they already have documented in another format.

             2)  We need to review the current University code as it deals with academic integrity.  We process far too few cases, and thus the punishments inflicted seem capricious and arbitrary.  We also need to make the punishments less draconian because there are faculty who do not report infractions because they find the punishments too severe.  We need to make sure that students in different departments and in different faculties do not fare very differently in the outcome of comparable cases because of differences in local academic cultures with respect to academic integrity.  We also need to insure that we educate our students properly and thoroughly about academic integrity and seek to prevent it rather than rely primarily on surveillance methods like turnitin.com and punishment as deterrents.  We also need to make sure that there is centralized reporting of all offenses so that repeat offenders face harsher penalties than first time offenders.

             3)  We need to work to create guidelines and perhaps special deanships for dealing with jointly appointed faculty.  We have substantially increased the number of joint appointments, and many of these new faculty are being overworked by taking on committee and administrative responsibilities in two or more departments or programs only to find themselves being evaluated for promotion and tenure by conflicting and often unclear standards.  If we are to continue making such appointments, we should figure out how to nurture these faculty rather than simply how to exploit them.

               I hope that you will consider these issues for the agenda of the University Senate and its committees.  Thanks for thinking about them.

Sincerely,
Leslie