Academic Staff Executive Committee Minutes 04-04-19

Members Present: Donna Cole; Jenny Dahlberg; Tim Dalby; Beth Giles; Mallory Musolf; Kevin Niemi, chair; Deb Shapiro; Lindsey Stoddard Cameron

Guests: Michael Bernard-Donals, Diane Blaskowski, Ron Harris, Casey Nagy, Shana Ullsvik, Mark Walters

The meeting was called to order at 2:04 p.m.

The minutes of March 28, 2019, were approved with one correction.

General Reports

Mallory Musolf, vice chair, reported that the Faculty Senate passed resolutions granting the use of the titles of Teaching Professor and Research Professor at its last meeting. Further consideration of the Professor of Practice title was postponed to the next meeting. ASEC discussed sending a thank you letter to the ad hoc committees who worked on the teaching and research titles. ASEC asked Jake to put together a draft for review at the next meeting.

Jake Smith, Deputy Secretary of the Academic Staff, reported that the group putting together the newest edition of the Academic Staff Worklife Survey is finalizing the questions for the survey and hopes to distribute it in the near future. He also confirmed that the Shared Governance Reception will go forward in the fall as planned. 

Beth Giles reported that she went to the Education Committee meeting of the Board of Regents. Topics of discussion included associate degrees, shared degrees, and teacher shortages.

Tim Dalby and Deb Shapiro both attended the L&S Dean’s chat, which was more focused on academic staff issues than usual. 

The transition steering team met and inventoried where things are at with respect to planning. Everything is still on track. The budget and finance working groups also reported that everything in those areas is on pace. Items like NetID activation, Office 365 migration, and email migration are all proceeding. With respect to facilities, Facilities Planning and Management is still organizing its model for Extension and how it will impact management of individual facilities. Extension recently lost its facilities director, so UW-Madison FPM is working to manage this. The tenure home proposal continues to move forward, although it has been met with significant concerns. It is unclear what the trajectory is for the proposal at this point, though an intermediary structure will be necessary if the proposal does not go through the UAPC. Conference centers and bulk mailing are already transitioned, but they are working through issues related to IT and accounts receivable.

ASEC congratulated Mark on being hired as the new Chief Human Resources Officer. The team reported that they were on the last leg of the review process for the standard job descriptions. There was a kickoff meeting on March 26. There are 2 subject matter experts from Madison and 2 from System campuses on each team, and all teams are considered full as of March 29. Concerns were discussed about how important it was for necessary differences in job descriptions for Madison and other campuses should be reported as part of the review process. The teams are expected to begin their work the week of April 8. There was also a kickoff meeting for the QA team (UW-Madison Comp & Title Team), and they will meet weekly.

On the outreach front, there are three forums scheduled for April 16, 17, and 23. These forums will consist of an overview of the TTC project—its goals, the purpose of standard job descriptions, and some discussion of benefits. More forums are planned for July and October, which will be more in-depth than the April forums. OHR hopes to put these forums online, and they will be at Showcase as well. They also reported that they felt like they had a good showing at this year’s Academic Staff Institute.

The benefits value analysis is being finalized currently. OHR plans to meet on April 30 with Mercer to see the first round of survey results. There may be some benefits that campus might be able to move forward on sooner than others.

They also discussed the TTC Professional Outreach Network, which consists of about 80 people at the division level who are meeting with people to provide updates on TTC to spread that information in their respective areas. OHR is also looking to start the UW-Madison TTC Governance Advisory Group at the end of April. Deb Shapiro and Lisa Jansen are the academic staff appointees to this group.

Michael Bernard-Donals reported on the chat on ageism.  It was a very rich conversation that included the idea of a committee for mid-late career employees. 

They discussed possible things to consider in the implementation of the Teaching and Research Professor titles including executive committee approval, framework/guidelines for implementation, whether these titles could include a waiver of open recruitment, and a mentoring program. The suggestion to look at peer universities was also raised.

•Appointment-for vote

Motion to appoint Kurt Rose to the Staff Target of Opportunity Working Group (Dalby). Seconded. Approved.

•Assembly Preparation

Deb will move the resolution on the Professor titles. 

•Topics for Provost

Professor Titles Implementation

Transition Plans

Accreditation

Meeting adjourned at 4:18 p.m.