Author: aadam02

Council deliberates taking on Faculty Handbook

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Council chair Gray Crouse announced the beginning of “a process of really looking at the Faculty Handbook,” anticipating that the council will eventually take “joint ownership” along with other stakeholders in the document. He encouraged council members to look through the document and identify issues “you think we ought to grapple with.” He added that the transfer of the Faculty Handbook to the domain of the Faculty Council will be a gradual process, but one that will signify increasing shared responsibility for university governance with the faculty. Provost Claire Sterk added, “The Faculty Handbook in many ways really shapes what the university is about. There are some challenges here, but it’s going to lay the groundwork for what we are. It’s going to help build the university.” The current version of the handbook is available on the Office of the Provost’s website (click here).

 

Grassroots Group Tackles Funding

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The Emory Sponsor-Investigator Association (ESIA) was founded in 2012 by Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology Jacques Galipeau. Galipeau spoke at the January 15 Faculty Council meeting about his efforts to engage faculty who pursue translational research—that is, science aimed to go “from bench-top to bedside.” “Industry and NIH sponsored clinical trials here at Emory have declined,” he said. “This is a trend nationally, and it is a real threat. Clinicial trials are the meat and potatoes of Emory’s translational research enterprise. Everybody’s been dumped on Survivor Island.” In response, he founded the ESIA to serve as an advocate for Emory investigators who do sponsored research, to coordinate efforts and share resources, and to facilitate communication. The ESIA now boasts 146 members and has hosted three workshops. “I think the great untapped resource is scholarly engagement,” he said. Council President Gray Crouse commended the grass- roots-style faculty initiative, saying, “I would hope to see this emulated in other areas of the university, where people can get together and actually do things they couldn’t individually.”

 

 Online courses and intellectual property

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In the January meeting, Alan Cattier, director of academic technology services, described to the Faculty Council new questions about intellectual property ownership taking shape with the quickly developing array of online courses and classroom capture technology. As knowledge and what Cattier termed “micro-lessons,” salient points or material conveyed in class, become increasingly available and distributable through online technologies at Emory and elsewhere, “faculty are shopping content that not only they create but maybe others have created that illustrate a point or an idea better than they’ve ever been able to illustrate in their content,” Cattier said. “There’s a marketplace emerging.” He outlined three major questions: “Who owns the rights to an online course? Who owns the rights to a class recording? Who owns the rights to a learning object? There isn’t a large body of evidence or discussion around these questions yet because we are all on this incredibly quick treadmill of change in the educational environment.” Faculty representatives from the Instructional Subcommittee for IT Governance will be looking at these questions of intellectual property and digital objects and reporting back to the Council.

 

Around Campus: Training Medical Residents

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Associate Professor of Neurology Jaffar Khan spoke to the Council in January about efforts in the School of Medicine to prepare for training medical residents in a new, rapidly changing healthcare practice environment. The combination of rising healthcare costs and the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have resulted in transformations already beginning to occur. “In the future landscape of healthcare, the practice of medicine is going to change dramatically as we go forward in the next five years,” Khan said. He outlined a strategic planning initiative coordinated by Emory’s Graduate Medical Education office to address issues associated with traning new physicians. Task forces are probing a broad range of topics, including assuring Emory’s compliance with training requirements and guidelines regulating residency education, healthcare safety, and physician practices based on quality.

 

Travel, Expense, Charge Card Changes

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Representatives from Emory’s Business Practice Improvement team presented forthcoming coming adjustments to travel, expense, and charge card policies at the November 20 meeting of the Faculty Council. On February 14, 2013, applications for new VISA corporate cards, as well as changes aimed to make these processes easier and more efficient, will roll out. Bill Dracos, chief business practice improvement officer, said, “We heard several things from faculty and staff: trust us, value our time, don’t chase us for every little receipt, and give us a card accepted everywhere.” Among the key changes: corporate card receipts for less than $75 charges no longer required; automated currency conversion on the cards; a simplified travel meal reimbursement and per diem policy; reimbursed GPS on rental cars; and direct-bill airfare to go to the corporate card instead of smartkeys. “Right now we only have a 20 percent adoption rate of the corporate cards for charges,” Dracos added. “If that moved to nearly 100 percent, it would save about $1.6 to $1.8 million in people’s time at the university.” More information about the coming adjustments is available at howtopay.emory.edu.

 

President leads discussion on faculty governance

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In the November meeting, University President James Wagner encouraged the Faculty Council to consider “reinvigorating and even growing what we do around faculty governance.” He observed that the increasingly utilitarian social value placed on education over many decades and the more recent economic pressures have changed the circumstances of universities broadly. “We should understand and search for the opportunities in these changes, rather than understand them always to be threats,” he said.

Wagner went on to suggest that faculty must take a leading role in formulating, owning, and implementing Emory’s response to these changes, especially as the university approaches the end of its strategic planning cycle in 2015. “it should be guided with faculty engagement,” he said, “all managed, owned, and implemented at the deepest levels of our institution.” To foster strong, creative, and progressive faculty governance, he concluded, questions of structure, policy, participation, and responsibility need to be examined.

 

Around Campus: Workload Policy in Business School

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In keeping with the practice of Council members reporting regularly on key issues from individual schools, Jeffrey Busse spoke to the Council about the Goizueta Business School’s newly adopted “Workload Policy” for tenured associate professors. Implemented beginning fall 2013, the policy formalizes the expectation that within ten years of their promotion to associate, tenured business professors will progress toward full professor. “If an individual does not get there within ten years, then the school would expect that person to contribute to the school in ways beyond research,” Busse explained. “[The assumption is that] if you don’t reach full tenure within ten years in most cases it’s because your research has not met a level associated with full tenure, so you would be expected to contribute with additional teaching and/or service.” The policy is presented in full in the Goizueta online faculty handbook.

 

Calls to Strengthen Faculty Governance

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A recurring theme resounded at the October Faculty Council from five representatives from Emory College and the Laney Graduate School who, in keeping with the practice of Council members reporting regularly on key issues from individual schools, summarized colleagues’ various responses to the restructuring recently announced in the two schools. “Many faculty understand that [Dean Robin Forman] was working within existing structures, and they want faculty governance strengthened, so that they have more input about decisions,” said Pamela Scully, representing Emory College colleagues. “It’s galvanized us,” added Kristin Wendland, representing lecture-track faculty. “I see of wave of energy for all the college faculty to be more active in governance.” Speaking as a member of the Executive Council of the Graduate School, Associate Professor of Political Science Jeff Staton raised a question about the lack of consultation with the Executive Council on decisions to suspend graduate programs in economics and Spanish. “The question for a number of members of the Council is, were we anything other than a curriculum committee?” he said. “Really, what were we doing there if we weren’t part of that process?”

 

Faculty Participation in Research Administration

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David Wynes, vice president for research administration, presented to the Council in October about encouraging more faculty to participate in research administration. Research committees include Confict of Interest Review, Institutional Animal Care and Use (IACUC), the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and a number of health and safety committees. “We believe strongly that these committees should comprise members of the faculty peer groups,” Wynes said. “For example, animal care committees should be composed of people who use animals in research, and the IRB should be composed of people who use human subjects in research.” Wynes also noted that IACUC has some 760 active protocols at any time, and the IRB has some 3,000.

Council members offered two general recommendations: that the Office of Research Administration work through existing faculty governance bodies around campus to recruit new members to these committees, and that the office draft a core set of principles delin- eating how each of the committees should be composed, according to research activity.

 

A Provost’s Parting Thoughts

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Earl Lewis addressed the Faculty Council for the final time as Emory provost, before his departure to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lewis identified several “macro-trends” he thinks will rise in significance in higher education in the next ten to thirty years—the durability of tenure and a shift in the profile of types of faculty appointments, the development of diverse leadership, dependence on philanthropy, and the articulation of the university’s value proposition to the broader community. “The overall ways we do business have been called into question,” he said. “I predict that the most selective, elite institutions in the United States may be changed in some fundamental way, but they will survive. What’s going to happen, however, is a whole tier of liberal arts colleges will disappear, and we probably will see mergers of some state institutions as a result of trying to find new ways of delivering education that is ‘affordable.’”