Provost stresses enforcing policies
University Provost Raymond Coward informed Faculty Senate members Monday of the university’s noncompliance with its own policy regarding faculty overtime.
The current policy was adopted 15 years ago and has not changed since 2004, however, faculty taking too much overtime may cause future problems for the university, he said.
“We’re bringing attention to it because the reality is that we’re out of compliance with our own policy,” Coward said. “It is one thing to not have a policy, and then if you’re audited you’re often told to create a policy; it’s quite something different if you have a policy and not be in compliance with your own policy.”
Coward said about $6 million is being spent per year on overtime but believes hiring more teachers would compensate.
“For years we’ve responded that the lower teaching loads that we have are because of the quality of what it takes to be a good instructor in the class,” Coward said. “Lower teaching loads are consistent with the expectations of our faculty to be active scholars.”
Until the rules are changed, he said, university administrators are required to enforce them.
“We have policies — they’re on the record. We have an obligation and responsibility to move forward with them or to change them,” Coward said.
Also during the meeting, associate librarian Flora Shrode proposed an addition to USU policy. The new policy will ask published researchers to request permission from their publisher to post their article online in USU’s digital commons, Schrode said. If the publisher declines, however, the researcher can still publish the article, Shrode said.
“We absolutely do not mean to control your publishing by any means,” Shrode said. “We just want to make your work as broadly accessible as possible.”
Schrode said the digital commons allows free access to the articles for everyone, and the easy access to articles provided by the digital commons fulfills part of the USU mission statement. She said giving people access to research is part of serving the public.
Andy Wesolek, scholarly communications librarian, helped present the proposal. He said the digital commons, located on the library website, is a repository of information for USU and gives people access to much of the intellectual content of the university.
Materials such as scholarly journal articles, conferences and other publications are available online via the digital commons.
Many universities struggle with their digital commons, Wesolek said, but USU’s commons has nearly reached a total of 500,000 downloads since it started three years ago. The commons averaged 26,000 downloads per month in the last year, Wesolek said..
“Within the past year we’ve had 125,000 visitors,” Wesolek said. “Those visitors are not just affiliated with the university or even in this country. One-third of those 125,000 visitors came from overseas.”
People who would not be able to access research contained in a subscription-based journal are able to access the information online in the commons for free, Wesolek said.
Another Faculty Senate agenda item included the newly implemented student-faculty evaluation form, IDEA. Vice Provost Michelle B. Larson presented the online form’s completion data, which ranked similarly compared to the previous form.
Of the 1,690 total courses evaluated containing 60,277 students, 70.5 percent completed the evaluation form, compared to slightly greater completion rates in previous years. Larson said the percentage is in a “healthy range,” considering it’s a new administration method.
“One of the things we gain from the IDEA evaluation is that we now can compare how we rank to national norms,” Larson said. “Everybody in the country that uses the IDEA forms puts their results into the database.”
Larson also said the results from the new form show more than 50 percent of USU courses rank within the top 30 percent of courses offered at national schools for student satisfaction.
— l.nemelka@aggiemail.usu.edu
—chris.w.lee@aggiemail.usu.edu