Advisory Committee Report to the Faculty

December 10, 2001

The Advisory Committee consisting of Professors Christopher Bailey, Waltraut Deinert (Chair), Beatrice Farnsworth, and Kent Klitgaard met one or more times a week throughout the semester.

We held the required open meeting early in the semester to discuss the concerns of the faculty. The minutes of that meeting, along with other reports and important documents, are posted on the Advisory Committee Website.

Professors Bailey and Klitgaard, as members of the President's ad hoc Committee on Faculty Salaries, participated in the Committee's discussions.

Members of the Advisory Committee met with the Early Retirement Subcommittee, Dean Ellen Hall and Vice President Hutchinson to review the draft program on early retirement for Wells College faculty members.

Professor Bailey attended the meeting of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board and together with Professor Carol Shilepsky, the representative of APPC, gave a report of the meeting to the Faculty. Professors Bailey and Shilepsky conferred with the President and the Dean on the topic for the Board/Faculty meeting.

We recommended a member of our Committee for appointment to the Bridge Committee. As of this date we have not received a response to this recommendation.

Professor Farnsworth distributed faculty travel funds. She and the Chair met with the Dean to ask for the return of funds which had been cut from the travel/research money as well as for an increase of the present travel and research budget administered by the Advisory committee. We also discussed the Committee's recommendation that a restricted capital endowment fund be established for Faculty research, development and travel to conferences.

The Advisory Committee addressed the issue of how to determine faculty membership of an interdisciplinary major field and we put our recommendation in writing for Dean Hall.

We reviewed the list of faculty who were due or overdue for the Seven Year Review as mandated by the Faculty Manual and established the subcommittees for each. The Advisory Committee conferred with the Dean and the Chair of the Evaluation Committee on the interpretation of the Faculty Manual regarding the addition of a substitute for a major chair to the Evaluation Subcommittee . We evaluated three colleagues for reappointment as well as one for promotion and conveyed our recommendations to the Dean.

We also reviewed six sabbatical requests and informed the Dean of our recommendations. We furthermore conferred with Dean Hall on the interpretation of the Faculty Manual regarding the granting of a special leave of absence.

We expressed our concern to the President and through the President to the Board of Trustees that the planned January Board retreat would delay decisions pertaining to Wells College's personnel and academic program. We requested that the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board conduct business within its purview during the winter meeting with the Dean of the College and the two faculty representatives present.

We wrote a letter to the President of the Board, Patricia Tyler Van Der Vorm, asking that she attend the current faculty meeting to explain to the Faculty the process by which the presidential salary is determined.

The letter has been forwarded by President Ryerson to President Van Der Vorm. The Committee met with Dean Hall and President Ryerson to discuss "campus culture" and related faculty concerns.

Respectfully submitted,

Waltraut vdE Deinert

Chair for the Advisory Committee on Faculty Personnel