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Opening
Don Langford indicated that the intention of the meeting is to further identify issues, concerns, and potential resolutions related to the Faculty-Staff Data Area. He invited campus representatives to participate in the pilot project to continue the work of identifying items within files, defining data elements, and determining the periodicity of reporting. During the pilot project, participants will also submit data. The pilot project will culminate in the creation of a draft of a data submissions document that will be made available for comments from all of the college and university representatives before a second statewide consultation.
Matt Filipic, Vice Chancellor for Administration, stated that the information system must answer the question of accountability. "I'm confident that we do have a story to tell and that we will be advantaged by telling as complete a story as possible. Yet we are sensitive to the fact that information costs money, and we need your help in defining the least costly way of collecting data for the campuses."
Access to Information
Daryl Wright described three potential levels of access:
Filipic noted that the information system has to have unit record data. He observed that while there may not be a need to publish data at an individual level about salary, for example, the state has an obligation to report something about what faculty do and how they're doing it.
One participant noted that faculty have expressed more reservations about the use of Social Security Numbers in the system than about using workload data. Filipic indicated that the only reason that the Social Security Number would be needed as an identifier for faculty would be "to permit an analysis of the movement of faculty from one institution to another." However, there has not been a need or interest expressed about tracking faculty, and Regents can mask identification numbers submitted by colleges and universities.
FTE Faculty
In a discussion about the value of continuing to use FTE (full-time-equivalent) for faculty, one campus representative said, "An FTE for us means nothing, and yet so much of the current information system is based on an FTE." Others noted that a classification of faculty as full time or part time would be desirable.
Regents staff noted the importance of focusing on individuals-on headcount-and not on FTEs, in the faculty reports.
Faculty Research
Langford referred to his recent interview with Bill Massy from Stanford, who indicates that recordkeeping systems on campuses have records of the principal investigator, and that should be a way to indicate research activity. Langford noted that it is more difficult to find objective measures for what is currently self reported in terms of research and public service.
Participants pointed out that information about a grant will indicate the money spent, but it doesn't reflect the buy out of faculty time. In addition, the award schedule of grants and service data is not necessarily coincident with academic calendars or fiscal years.
Filipic asked whether it would it be useful to identify researchers as principal investigators and report the amounts of the contracts for which they are the principal investigators. Not only would this provide a sense of faculty involvement in sponsored research, it would also move away from self-reported activity data. Some self-reported data may be needed, but it's likely that state needs could be met through a faculty sample survey.
Faculty Workload Reporting
Howard Gauthier, Executive Associate to the Chancellor for Planning, stated that faculty workload guidelines, approved by the Board and by the individual campus Boards of Trustees, focused responsibility not on individual faculty members, but on the department or its equivalent unit for making sure that the guidelines were followed. Each department, based upon its mission, should be held accountable for its commitment to instruction, research, service, etc.
Langford noted that if departmental compliance with workload and mission can be accomplished through a sample survey rather than every faculty member completing a quarterly activity report, then the sample survey may serve as a useful complement to other data collection methods.
Resource Analysis Recommendations
Andy Lechler described the importance of Resource Analysis, the cost allocation process that the Board of Regents does each year. The recommendations from the Resource Analysis subcommittee currently call for using data that reflect which faculty are teaching which courses and what they are paid. Resource Analysis needs to know for faculty what courses they're teaching during the year and their annual compensation for instructional purposes. Resource Analysis is restricted to I & G (Instruction and General) costs.
Faculty Employment Information
A participant asked if there is a State need to collect information on "State of Birth," "College of First Degree" and "Highest Degree Earned." There was no interest expressed in continuing to collect "State of Birth." When asked whether campuses would otherwise collect "College of First Degree," and how they use it now, one representative indicated that faculty were normally categorized in terms of their discipline and instruction rather than their degree. There was no indication of state interest in "College of the First Degree." Filipic noted, "It's probably not worth the cost involved in gathering information about the 'Program of Highest Degree' since, although some campuses are interested, others appear not to be, and wouldn't be gathering it themselves."
On the issue of collecting information on ethnicity, Langford indicated that internal consultations at the Board of Regents concluded that the new system should include ethnicity data. Participants agreed that institutions and the state should collect data on ethnicity, using current federal definitions.
A question was asked about the current definition of "Year of Appointment." Langford stated that the definition from the current Faculty Inventory reads, "The year during which the faculty member was first appointed to a regular faculty position by the reporting institution. Should not reflect appointment as a graduate assistant." Another member pointed out that "Year of Appointment" doesn't track promotion.
Adjunct Status
Langford indicated that there was some question about what "adjunct" means, asking representatives to describe how they use the term in their own campus reports. How is the term adjunct distinguished from part time?
A campus representative stated, "When someone is awarded adjunct status on our campus, it means they have a more formal relationship with the teaching department, and it may be ongoing. A part-time person is someone that's just a casual hire for a particular term. An adjunct can be somebody who teaches in a department over a long period of time but is not eligible for tenure because of credentials or whatever. Another category of adjuncts on our campus are people who teach particularly in English or foreign language who have three-quarter-time positions, and all they do is teach; they don't participate on committees or that sort of thing, but they're at our campus over a long period of time. And they teach a lot of credit hours."
Another representative added, "We've got two official categories of adjunct, and that's those who have been there less than five terms and those that have been there more. There's a differential pay scale for those two groups, but adjuncts, generally, are recognized as those part-time faculty members who are teaching 10 credits or less per term, unless they're "clinical" and then they can be teaching 25 credits. Any retired members who qualify for emeritus status are paid at the overload rate rather than the adjunct rate because they constitute another group of adjunct professors, so we're all over the board."
Another participant offered a further variation: "We have actually two categories of adjunct: we have the "special adjunct," which is a person who is working at a full-time, 15 pay load hour rate for a term; but the contract is for a term, so even though they are theoretically term-to-term, by contract, their actual course load and pay load is reflective of a full-time individual. On the other hand, we have our "regular adjuncts," who are, again, not tenured, nor are they tenure-track, but they are contracted for a full nine-month period. Again, they work at that 15 hour or more pay load hour each term."
Filipic pointed out that there are various ways the institutions are using to describe certain key differences of status, such as temporary/permanent, full time/part time, "and that's what we ought to be gathering in the information system, and to be more obvious to the users of the system, particularly users from some place other than your campus, to understand what the information system is describing."
Tenure
In addressing the topic of tenure, one participant pointed out that "this does not apply to my institution," and that a number of institutions do not tenure faculty; in addition, some campuses do not even rank faculty.
Wright suggested the potential for having a portion of the database describe whether the institution ranks faculty or grants tenure.
A participant indicated that it makes a difference what those terms mean, "because in some institutions tenure and rank are related to salary. In other institutions, tenure and/or rank are not related to salary or other issues."
Filipic noted that the other reason for gathering that information "is to have some sense of the degree of financial commitment made by institutions to their teaching staffs. . . . And it's not at all uncommon to do analyses of different campuses describing the degree to which their faculty are tenured-percent tenured, by rank, whatever-just to get a sense of how fixed their faculty costs are. I think that would be the reason we'd gather it."
Another participant suggested that, given the different definitions of "tenure," it may be preferable not to use a term like "guaranteed employment."
Another representative noted that "the political reality is that regardless of the actual meaning on our campus of the word 'tenure'-which on our campus has less meaning than at a university-the political meaning of it is very important to faculty, and if we would ever report anywhere that they were not tenured-by whatever definition-that would not be politically acceptable."
Faculty Sample Survey
A participant described an example of the benefit of a sample survey: "With a survey you can cull out some important factors that are hard to arrive at unless you go to the extent of extensive training and an elaborate data collection effort-such things as teaching nine credits. Nine credits is not the same for every faculty member if those are three three-credit sections of the same course, versus three different courses-one of them graduate. It's not the same if one of those is the very first time a course is taught; and those kinds of things you really want to capture. . . . If you do it in a survey, your chances of capturing that and really describing in a general sense what is it Ohio's faculty are doing, I think you can get a little closer there."
Filipic suggested that "we would want to have the sample large enough to describe differences among sectors, and certainly aggregations of disciplines. We'd want to know if being a physics professor is different from being a history professor, but I'm not sure we would want to have the ability to describe differences between institutions at that level."
One suggestion offered for administering a sample survey included contacting the faculty within a number of selected departments in a number of institutions in a given year.
Filipic stated that a sample survey "could meet our needs for reporting to the legislature and the Governor's office about what faculty do."
A participant noted that in current reporting there tends to be a reliance on time spent as the only productivity measure. In developing a survey, it would be possible to include "other measures of accountability related to instruction, curriculum building, and those kinds of things that would be useful when you're dealing with legislators and people that are interested in knowing about government productivity."
Another participant added, "We haven't really captured how much time you are spending in developing courses; we haven't captured how much time you are spending in learning and/or in facilitating use of multimedia. We're not capturing that, and yet that's what faculty members-at least at our campus-are spending a great deal of time doing, and so that's one of those issues that maybe this survey could better capture."
Academic and Non-academic Personnel Inventory (ANAPI)
When asked about the ANAPI and whether fewer measures could be considered, Langford replied, "It's fair to say that all of this is up for question. What kind of data is needed at the statewide level and at your own institutional level? We'll examine individual data elements and arrive at something that's completely different than these three reports, although in the end it may turn out that 75 percent of the data items currently collected will continue to be collected. But, this will be part of the pilot project assignment-to go through in the kind of detail that we've only begun to scratch the surface of today."
Filipic stated that we ought to be thinking about the kinds of information about faculty that we want to gather, "and then think about the appropriate reports to generate them, rather than to think about the current reporting structures and think about how they might be tinkered with and modified, because I think we might find that if we take a fresh look, we are going to want very different kinds of reports, and it will be easier to see how a very different report might serve our needs better . . . than the existing report structure."
Salary and Total Compensation
Lechler described the work being done by the Resource Analysis subcommittee: "I think that the thinking associated with [the issue of compensation] is primarily driven by Resource Analysis at this stage. We needed to know what individual faculty were paid for instructional compensation, and our first choice was to use compensation rather than salary. . . If we don't include fee waivers for GTAs, we're understating the cost of their participation in instruction. We have seen, as a result of our simulations, some of the institutions have difficulty driving the fringe benefits down to the individual faculty. In some of the accounting systems, they just don't do it, and so some of the people were taking the salary and adding a percentage to arrive at an approximate total compensation. So, the question is what should we do now, based on the assumption that we don't want to collect two representations of pay-one for Resource Analysis and another for the rest of the faculty data. I think the closer we can get to total compensation, the more accurate picture we'll have, but I don't think that means everybody is going to change their accounting systems to drive all the fringe benefits down to the individual level.
Filipic said, "From a State perspective, I can't see why the State would need a level of precision in allocating fringe costs that you don't feel the need to have on your own campuses. . . . It seems that some reasonable allocation of total fringe costs-and I presume that total fringe costs, campus-wide, are known; it's a question of allocating back to individuals. I cannot imagine why we would see a need for more precise allocation to an individual level."
Wright noted, "We live in a world that pays attention to salary, not to total compensation."
Filipic agreed. "Most people have no idea what their total compensation is; they know what their salary is."
Pilot Project
Langford briefly indicated that the end product of the pilot project will be a draft of the Data Submissions document. Following the initial discussions that establish the structure of input files and the data elements within them, there will be an active phase of working with the data. Then there will be a second statewide consultation to discuss the draft of the Data Submissions document.
Langford concluded the meeting by noting that the World Wide Web will
be used in ways that are now in the early stages of development. The movement
toward a new system will bring with it more effective and efficient reporting
practices. He encouraged as many representatives as possible to participate
in the pilot project.
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Last updated June 1, 1998