Faculty Senate Exec Council - Nov 1, 2021
President's Report

1. Thanks to all for your efforts on behalf of shared governance

2. The new Senate Admin Asst. Loretta Link has been getting up to speed on a host of Senate activities. Please do let me know if there is a specific task or set of tasks that your Committees would like her to be involved with. It is part of her main responsibilities to coordinate with the Faculty Affairs Committee and the Provosts Office on any Faculty Handbook changes and to set up a workflow associated with these. We will be developing protocols for emails to Senate leadership but until we do please do cc Loretta on any Senate correspondence to me or the past-pros and Pres- elect. 

3. Appointments since Senate meeting - Professor Jon Hathaway of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering will be serving this year as the Faculty Senate representative on the Campus Planning & Design Committee. Professor Randy Small of EEB has agreed to be the Faculty representative on the Classroom Upgrade Committee and will serve until summer 2023

4. The Senate leadership conversation with the Chancellor and Provost on issues regarding 9-month faculty expectations given the new academic calendar have in part led to a note to the Deans about faculty responsibilities during January - I assume the Provost will discuss that in his report. 

5. Regarding 9-month faculty and expectations, I have initiated correspondence with the Compliance folks on ORIED regarding how faculty can charge effort to external funding at an appropriate rate to meet compliance standards given that there are now one two months of June and July in the summer. I was promised a response on this from Kim McCullock but do not have one yet.  

6. Regarding clarity on current processes used when an external request is made to UT for release of information that involves an employee, I don't think we yet have agreement on any summary from the OGC. Related to liability protections in place for faculty acting as part of their employment I remind you that the UTK Chapter of AAUP is hosting an event with 3 speakers on the topic "Faculty: does UT have your back?" on Thursday Nov 4 from 5-6:30.

7. The Senate leadership had a discussion about course buy-out with the Chancellor and Provost and efforts by the Provost office to clarify the arrangements are in process. 

8. I gave a talk to the Graduate Student Senate and promised that we would work together to consider ways to better accommodate the way that graduate student fees are covered since it places a high burden on the limited stipends paid to GTA and GRAs. I made a formal request to the Dean of the Graduate School to determine under what circumstances fees other than tuition can be covered by external funding and to determine what constraints if any exist under the new Budget Model on Deans to allow them to use their funding to cover some of these fees. 

9. I am in process of calculating the relative costs and benefits to a College of hiring a NTT faculty member as compared to a graduate student given that the new BAM will require Deans to cover all costs for a student. I suspect Deans have already made this calculation. 

10. I have been attending ERP sessions with the two possibles vendors (There very few faculty members from the System attending). It appears that the system will not replace Cayuse and at least initially student systems are not included -  it is essentially HR and Finance. 

11. On the situation regarding former Professor Hu, I have purposely avoided further public comments since attending the meeting with the OGC and the Senate Faculty Affairs Committee on Oct13 though remarks I made prior to that have appeared in publications including the Chronicle. 

12. I gave a brief welcome at the Board of Trustees meeting - my remarks are posted on my website. 

13. I attended the TUFS meeting on Oct 23. 

Note - Bullying policy update will come from Faculty Affairs