TOURO UNIVERSITY – CALIFORNIA

MINUTES OF THE FACULTY SENATE MEETING, June 11, 2014

ATTENDANCE: Faculty-- Justin Heard, Evan Hermel, Kevin Ita, Gloria Klapstein, Denene Lofland, Trina Mackie, Alison McCormick, Karl Meszaros, Shin Murakami, Vanishree Rajagopalan, Pamela Redmond, Patricia Shane, Jacquelyn Ray

  1. Meeting called to order 12:09 p.m.
  2. Quorum was not met so we were unable to adopt an agenda or approve the minutes.
  1. Benefit subsidy by TUC for former HealthNet members– for 1 year only, and it is currently listed as income. P. Redmond plans to write a letter of thanks to President Kadish. Only 5 people took advantage of this subsidy. This may have been because the announcement came in very late, and there was the appearance that there would still be a one month lapse in benefits. There is a lot of room for advocacy on our part and we should build on this and build our relationship with administration. M. Hopkins is open to meeting with a small set of faculty regarding benefits. Next year is a target as changes required by the affordable care act will be due.

P. Redmond requests help identifying the 80 people who are paying more than 9 % of their salary on benefits.

There was very little cross communication between the conversations K. Lowe had with FBRC and those she had with administration (S. Berkley and M. Hopkins). The latter did not know about the report that our benefits are the worst in the state.

Benefits are critical for retention.

A lot of institutions do have the policy of providing reimbursement for those who opt out of institution benefits.

A. Stoltz has had significant challenges in her recruitment of new nursing faculty due to TUC’s benefit package. Basically the pool has been narrowed to those who get benefits elsewhere.

We really need the FBRC to be filled with strong leadership. Need to put a call-out for new members.

  1. Recap of FSEC meeting on May 28

-  Timesheet protocol came when we switched to LATS. The alternative to the paper system we use now is for all faculty to be in the LATS system as are staff where we have to physically be in our chairs on campus to mark time in and time out. All that is really needed is time taken for sick, personal or vacation, but some deans may have additional requirements in terms of documenting time worked off campus. The old form used by faculty was never negotiated by faculty senate according to M. Hopkins.

-  Advancement office status of work/endowments (see FSEC notes) – we need to have an ongoing conversation about role of S. Berkeley and how she fits in with the current. Want to turn Vallejo into college town.

-  Only TUC and TU-NV received a COLA ostensibly because we are such productive institutions. S. Berkeley agreed to not hire a new provost in NV until January.

-  Human resource responsiveness – some have seen long delays with getting responses from HR on critical issues. Institutions of this size have much larger HR and registrar. If you have any major issue that you need a response from HR, you should copy M. Hopkins. Someone suggested a vote of no confidence – a weapon to consider – but it is not necessary at this point.

-  We all need to be checking our requirements and making we sure are getting our match and that the correct contributions are being made. We need to find out how many people on campus are not getting their match.

-  Contracts are supposed to be in Marilyn’s hands by June 15. Send P. Redmond an email if you haven’t seen your contract, she’ll put a list together for the Provost.

-  Searches for assistant and associate deans: In faculty handbook it says that assistant deans are members of FS. All faculty and administrators are to go through a national search with a search committee. There is no distinction between assistant and associate deans.

-  Building 89 - design of the building was really tied to making sure that COM met accreditation, but President Kadish was concerned we are over building the clinical space with our need for classrooms and offices. Architectural plans are complete

-  The budget hasn’t been approved yet, but CA. and NV are the only campuses getting a COLA. This is seen as productivity compensation.

  1. Executive committee

-there is going to be a ferry to the south side of island, and a shuttle to Mare Island.

  1. FS committee updates
  2. Library committee met May 8. The revised interlibrary loan policy, especially for students and adjunct faculty. Students get more free (virtually unlimited), and there are unlimited interlibrary loans for adjunct faculty. The committee members have approved. After final approval is received from the provost’s office, the updated policy will be placed on website.

Copyright and plagiarism: Request for a small orientation or workshop for all faculty. Not everyone knows what can be distributed in classroom. This document is aimed to orient faculty. Is such a workshop something that all faculty are interested in. FS can sponsor an event, or use some of our meeting time.

Open educational resources. Hoping to add this, but will do it on a program by program basis.

  1. IPE – last event on April 30. If nothing else, we’ve been able to achieve more buy-in at higher levels and its link to accreditation for all colleges. We had more funding this time. Going forward, drafted new bi-laws. Bi-law language has changed over time, even though the FS approved an earlier version, the changes have meant that what the committee could do was drastically reduced. M. Hopkins agreed that representation on committee was more than would be productive. So they are going back to executive committee to get some of the changes removed, then will come back to FS.

Ultimately the feedback is that rather than the all campus-wide events everyone would like to imbed this more into the curriculum, and

A. Lin and A. McCormic both teach antibiotics to COM and COP students. They have created a curriculum for 1 hour brownbag lunch. Scheduling became unfeasible. Plan is to make it a 1 to 1 team (1 COP, 1 COM). They are going to try a voluntary participation on two lunches.

An all campus event is planned for November so we need to get membership up and running.

It was suggested that there be one IPE event per month on the schedule, so that it isn’t negotiable. Dean O’Connor expressed interest, and wants COEH to be included in this.