NFA statement to Board of Regents on SB433 implementation proposal

The following statement was given to the Board of Regents at today's meeting:

The Nevada Faculty Alliance has been taken great interest in the development of this proposal over the past few weeks, our members have been actively involved in its development, and we to express our appreciation for the work of all of those who developed and refined the proposal, and we express our support for the statement of the Faculty Senate chairs – and by extension, for the proposal.

Id like to take a moment to explain, on behalf of faculty, why we support and to ask you to consider a change suggested by the FS chairs.

In the course of developing the proposal, The Faculty Alliance developed jointly with many Faculty senates, a set of “general principles” and we appreciate that this proposal by and large conforms with those principles. We are particularly supportive of the effort to minimize intrusions in the Code and the effort to preserve the integrity of faculty rights and protections under the code.

We also asked that the use of any savings achieved from adjustments to our compensation be demonstrated – ie, is this money going to protect classes for students. We’re very gratififed that this proposal does this by focusing on a workload adjustment, which will ensure that our personal contribution to solving the budget crisis will go directly towards keeping sections open and students enrolled.

The modification that we ask you to consider concerns one category of faculty which is rather small but very important – those on tenure track but not yet tenured, what we call “junior faculty.” There are fewer than 500 such faculty Systemwide, and they are the newest hires and by definition at the lower end of the salary scale.

We urge you to allow campus administrations to include them in the part of the proposal that discusses tenured faculty. This we feel will not only help us tremendously with retention of junior faculty who are the most likely to receive outside job offers or to respond to a pay cut by looking elsewhere.

We also believe that including the junior faculty in the part of the proposal dealing with tenured faculty will be more practical because the implementation of workload adjustments will take place at the unit level – units (departments) are where curriculums are made, courses are scheduled, course load policies are set, and where we collaboratively supervise students. Junior faculty will therefore, de facto, be impacted by and included in the course load adjustments and we think it will be more efficient, more useful to students and in the long term interest of the System to allow junior faculty to be included in the workload adjustment and the calculation of that workload as the financial equivalent of a furlough.