Minutes of the Council Meetings >>

MEDICAL SCHOOL FACULTY COUNCIL
Speaker's Meeting
TUESDAY, October 19, 2004
SCCC Room 1537

1. Call to Order
A quorum present, the meeting was called to order at 5:10 P.M.

2. Announcements:

- Senate Officers Outreach Meeting with Medical School Faculty
The next speaker’s meeting will be held on Tuesday, November 16, 5:00-6:30 pm: Mailman Center, 8 th floor auditorium. The Faculty Senate will be holding an outreach meeting for UMSM faculty members. This is an excellent opportunity for the faculty members to express the needs at the Medical School.

This meeting should be announced on the UMSM faculty listserv and posters should be placed outside the Mailman Center announcing the Town Hall meeting with the Senate.

- Senate Discussion of the Promotion and Tenure Process
Dr. Coombs received the letter from the Council suggesting that the Faculty Senate take this opportunity to review the promotion and tenure process at the University and create formal legislation to codify the process.

3. Benefits for Part-Time Faculty and Staff
Dr. Mechaber, Dr. Rosenthal, and Dr. Thurer updated the Council on the status of the benefits for part-time faculty and staff. Dr. Rosenthal provided a brief overview explaining the need for benefits for part-time faculty and staff at UM. A committee composed of Dr. Mechaber, Dr. Rosenthal, Dr. Thurer, Dr. Cantebury, Dr. Multach, Dr. Potter, and Dr. Sipski created the proposed guidelines for part-time faculty and staff that were presented to the Council’s review today. Benefits will only be available to part-time faculty members who dedicate full professional effort to UM. Employees who have other professional activities (i.e., work for another hospital or have their own private practice) will not be eligible for benefits. Benefits for part-time faculty members will be limited to those individuals whose work effort represents at least 50% of the effort of a full-time faculty member. They will receive prorated benefits according to their percent effort. Percent effort will be negotiated by the faculty member and the department chair.

Dr. Raskin questioned how this policy would apply to VA employees. Currently, if a faculty member is employed by both UM and the VA, they receive 100% benefits from both institutions. If an employee works at UM part-time and the VA part-time, could that employee receive a percentage of benefits from each institution according to their efforts (i.e., 50% benefits from UM and 50% benefits from the VA)? Dr. Rosenthal said that this might be an option.

This posed the question of what exactly defines 50% or any percent effort. Dr. Hilit noted that it is difficult to define “full-time” and “part-time” for faculty members and that both the faculty member and the chair need to determine what will be considered part-time. This policy was created with the intent of accommodation full-time faculty members who decide to step-down to part-time in order to accommodate family needs, etc. without having to leave the University.

There were concerns about hiring a faculty member as part-time and then having the faculty member take on a full-time workload. Dr. Awad suggested establishing an ad-hoc committee to investigate such allegations/situations. Dr. Lopez pointed out that it might be difficult for part-time faculty members to come forward with this type of allegation out of fear of severing ties with their department. Dr. Namias stated that the problem stems from the lack of a definition for workload. Faculty members have many roles and this creates the potential for the part-time faculty members to end up continuing to provide full-time effort. He suggested that a provision to monitor or prevent this from occurring would be a good idea. Dr. Hilit pointed out that many of the faculty members who this policy will apply to will be full-time faculty members who negotiate to work a certain number of hours to accommodate childrearing issues. She also thought that it would be good to have follow-up to see if this policy is working and being applied as expected. It was decided that the PT Benefits committee would adopt a policy for establishing an ad-hoc review and provide an annual report to the Council. It is important to establish a formalized mechanism for part-time faculty reporting.

Dr. Rosenthal will present the draft guidelines for part-time faculty and staff to the Committee on General Welfare tomorrow. Dr. Thurer pointed out that the voting issue might be a concern for some faculty members, especially at the Coral Gables campus. According to the faculty manual, part-time faculty members may not be able to vote. Dr. Thurer commented that if faculty members are providing full professional effort to UM, that they should be treated like part of the enterprise and able to vote. It may be possible to argue for voting rights for part-time faculty members without amending the faculty manual.

The Council unanimously passed the motion to approve the proposed guidelines for part-time faculty and staff. Dr. Lewis will communicate this information to the Dean.

4. Women and Minorities Report: Update
Dr. Ouellette was called into surgery prior to the beginning of the meeting and she asked Dr. Rosenthal to present this issue to the Council on her behalf. Dr. Rosenthal stated that the data collection for the Basic Science departments was complete and now work was being done on linking performance to compensation, developing a confidence limit graph, and look for outliers. For the most part, it appears that grant support is positively correlated with compensation. They are also analyzing variables such as teaching and service.

Dr. Rosenthal will track all outliers and check to see if a grievance was filed. Dr. Fletcher suggested that an unbiased person identify all underpaid faculty members, regardless of gender, race, etc. Dr. Rosenthal assured that this was already being done. For the Clinical departments, they are developing confidence limit graphs with work RVUs. Dr. Rosenthal explained that several factors go into determining levels of compensation: department, specialty, rank, etc. The AAMC provides national standards based on department, specialty, and rank, which are used as a comparison for UM compensation levels. The mean of the private, southern, and national compensation levels is used since all three of these means differ individually.

Dr. Young stated that the AAMC data should be made available to the faculty members. This information is publicly available. Dr. Arnold said that the data can be accessed via the web and will provide the access information to the Council to disseminate to the faculty.

5. Other Business

- There is a vacancy on the Faculty Senate and Dr. Ouellette has been nominated to fill this seat. Dr. Ouellette used to be a member of the Senate and regularly attended the meetings. The Council unanimously approved the motion to nominate Dr. Ouellette to serve on the Faculty Senate.

- Dr. Lopez has been appointed to serve on the NCI Advisory Committee. The Council congratulated her on this honorable achievement.

6. Adjournment
There being no further business to discuss, the meeting was adjourned at 6:30 P.M.