Academic Staff Executive Committee Minutes 02-01-18

Approved 2-8-18

ASEC Minutes
2:00 – 4:30 p.m. Thursday, February 1, 2018
53 Bascom Hall


Members Present:  Bruno Browning; Aaron Crandall; Jenny Dahlberg; Beth Giles; Kevin Niemi, chair; Jim Rogers; Deb Shapiro; Lindsey Stoddard Cameron

Guest: Michael Bernard-Donals, Matthew Call, Catharine DeRubeis, Ron Harris, Sarah Mangelsdorf, Meghan Owens, Jake Smith

The meeting was called to order at 2:02 p.m.

The minutes of January 25, 2018, were approved.

General Reports
ASEC Chair Kevin Niemi encouraged ASEC to read the Chancellor’s blog on sexual harassment policies.  Ray Cross will be attending the UW System Representatives meeting tomorrow.  Stephen Beers is the academic staff representative on the Extension/Colleges reorganization committee at UW System.  Stephen shared a draft policy on shared governance participation on restructuring activities.  He was given one day to give feedback.  The policy would limit participation to those who received supervisor’s permission to participate.  Kevin pointed out to Stephen that this policy would be more restrictive than most campus practices for academic staff governance participation.  The feedback Stephen sent to UW System asked for academic staff to be removed completely from this policy.

Secretary of the Academic Staff Heather Daniels reported that the shared governance committee for Cooperative Extension’s transition to UW-Madison met for the first time.  It is being co-chaired by Steve Ventura, faculty at UW-Madison, and Matt Cogger, an academic staff member from UW-Extension.  This group will meet at least once a month.  It is expected that this group will identify shared governance issues related to the transition and decide how these issues will be handled. 

A current member of the Nominating Committee has resigned so ASEC will need to nominate one or two academic staff members for election by the Assembly.  Heather has also been talking with ASM about including students in the Shared Governance Reception in the fall.  ASEC did not have objections to this change.

Guest: Sarah Mangelsdorf, Provost
The Provost responded to a question from ASEC regarding to what extent UW System was pursuing the idea of common courses across UW System for the first two undergraduate years.  The Provost indicated that there was a desire to make course transfer easy across UW System.  It wouldn’t necessarily mean similar teaching/curriculum for the courses.  She indicated one of the biggest concerns is with math curriculum and remedial math.  This is a bigger problem at other campuses around the system.  She will keep ASEC posted on this issue. 

Guest: Catharine DeRubeis and Meghan Owens, Office of Human Resources
Catharine and Meghan presented the data from the annual promotional review.  Schools/Colleges/Divisions were not required to return data back to the Office of Human Resources (OHR) this year.  Instead OHR ran a report following the exercise deadline.  Minority women received the largest percentage of promotions and minority men received the lowest percentage of promotions.  The data indicated that academic staff may not have received promotions and instead received another type of salary increase.  They are hoping to see additional promotional increases this year.  Catharine agreed to provide school/college/division breakouts of the data.

Guest: Michael Bernard-Donals, Vice Provost for Faculty and Staff
Vice Provost Bernard-Donals reported that the Hostile and Intimidating Behavior website is live and has been advertised.  There are workshops regarding Hostile and Intimidating Behavior that are being finalized.  They are 90 minutes long and designed around case studies.  The purpose of the workshops is to explain the policy, create a culture to prevent this behavior from happening and provide information on how to deal with it when it happens.  The workshops will also provide information on campus resources.  

The workshops are being coordinated by Learning and Talent Development in OHR.  Michael is contacting the offices in Bascom as well as leadership in schools/colleges/divisions to take the workshop first.  Following that, the workshops will be open to the university community at large.  The responses to the pilot workshops this spring have been very positive.  

Another project he is working on with several others is to identify the type of complaints that come from faculty and staff and understand the policies that are in effect and the offices that handle these policies.  They want to identify blind spots in the process with the goal of developing best practices and guidance.  They have developed a set of guiding principles, which are as follows:
1)    Action-Report requires that matter be taken seriously.
2)    Consult-Consult immediately
3)    Notify and Inform-talk to supervisor and HR about what’s happening
4)    Personal Response-create remedy that addresses the issue at hand
5)    Questions-talk to OHR

Business
•    Resolution Regarding Title and Total Compensation Study Families, Sub-Families, Careers and Levels
ASEC made two additional edits to the resolution and asked that the revised resolution be sent to the Assembly for consideration.
•    Motion to approve the February Assembly Agenda (Dahlberg). Seconded. Approved.

Meeting adjourned at 4:26 p.m.

Minutes submitted by Heather Daniels, Secretary of the Academic Staff