Subject: Agenda for Faculty Senate Leadership Discussion Tuesday Feb 15 2:30PM Chancellor Plowman and Provost Zomchick, Thank you for arranging to meet with us on Tuesday February 15 at 2:30PM in the AHT 8th Floor Conference room. Below are some topics for possible discussion. We have not listed pandemic issues since, while there are still concerns we have been hearing from instructors about this, there is not much of anything else we can do about the situation due to the constraints. The below list starts with bigger picture issues and we suggest focusing on them at first. 1. Planning for effective utilization of new resources. Assuming the Governor's budget is passed with the wonderful increases in resources for UTK, we suggest that this is an opportunity to consider fiscally responsible ways to enhance faculty roles (as well as the roles of Heads). There is a constantly changing and increasing set of expectations of faculty regarding the host of IT systems and policies here. As Jay Whelan encouraged in the recent Town Hall, it would be great to find ways to help faculty have time to do what they are hired to do. It doesn't make financial sense to force all to learn and use the multitude of IT products around now when TT faculty cost so much more than the staff who could handle travel, assist with fiscal oversight of grants, etc. Heads are swamped with constant requests and do not have the operating resources for staff support to ease the load. 2. Faculty hiring. We have heard tremendously positive initiatives to hire large numbers of postdocs/research faculty through UTORII and for using the new recurring State resources for hiring TT faculty. We encourage coordination of these efforts and formal programs to diversity our faculty associated with each. For example, instituting a postdoc program (partially supported by UTORII for ORNL-connected areas and by other funds for other fields) with a path established from the start for TT faculty positions. This will assist recruitment of the diverse faculty we would like. UTK has a tremendous opportunity here to coordinate TT, postdoc and grad student recruiting but it is not clear how this opportunity is being communicated to Deans and to faculty who have ideas about building and maintaining initiatives in which UTK is or could be a world-leader. It would be helpful to broadly request major initiative proposals once coordination plans are in place. 3. Academic Structure Review. We appreciate the posting of the timeline and examples we developed. We suggest clarifying the process moving forward, including whether the timeline we suggested is the one being followed at this point and whether the structure of the examples we suggested (e.g. brief description followed by "benefits" and "challenges") is a format that might be used to obtain a wide array of additional suggestions. To avoid duplication in the process for obtaining input this term, establishing a careful, collated means to archiving input would be helpful. What do you view as the role formally of the Senate in obtaining and publicizing suggestions from the community? If the Working Group will be continuing then we need to replace the Senate rep who is retiring. 4. Calendar and term options. The various new options in the calendar make scheduling challenging and assigning equitable workloads for GTAs, NTT and TT faculty without guidance could be a problem. What guidance is provided to Deans on handling this? 5. BAM. It is far from clear that this process is as "transparent" as the original intent was since it appears that College budgets are only known within the Colleges and we have heard through the grapevine that there have been tremendous increases in requests from support units. Can we publicize the guidance sent to the Deans regarding budget planning? It is still not clear how the Senate Budget and Planning Committee is going to be able to provide input nor what information they will b getting. 6. Announcement of grad student stipend increases. We have heard about these plans through Heads but the grad students are mostly unaware. We suggest it would be helpful to make the campus aware of these efforts and highlight it, even if it cannot be definite until budgets are approved by the State and Board. This is a tremendous positive that will assist our current and incoming grad students. 7. Support for the Senate leadership. We have sent a suggested plan and would be happy to discuss. Stay well, Lou