The UAA senate workload committee, having developed a white paper, is now in the process of pulling pieces out of policy documents from other institutions to create a first draft. Elements include a model from Georgia State, a preamble written by an Anchorage faculty member, some definitions of portions of the workload to get beyond just teaching productivity. It also relies heavily on the tentative numbers that were discussed within the Alliance last year. The committee will review the draft at its meeting next Thursday and if approved distribute it as a draft to other senates and the Alliance for further discussion. A consistent concern at UAA is that there needs to be a common way of measuring faculty productivity and a common set of expectations because the range of activities within a campus is greater than the differences in averages between the campuses.
Models have to encompass the full variability.
The UAA model will not deal with accountability because the committee believes accountability is a function of the university management information system and to what extent it takes information from workload agreements that are currently signed on different campuses, annual activity reports and to what extent does it attempt to assemble that in a way that is useful for monitoring the activities of the university. The discussion has now moved beyond philosophy statements toward the development of managerial tools to measure productivity. When defining workload it must be based on an individual faculty member basis, but that if you try to define it too tightly at the level of the individual, you significantly reduce flexibility on the part of the unit. The basic expectation of faculty would be adjusted, where pieces of it could be moved around so that the faculty member has a certain amount of work to be done based on what the unit needs and that there would be the discretion within the unit to do this. When looking at the issue of workload, you must recognize that the payscale and tenure issues are also important.