We, the tenured faculty at UTC, are being hornswoggled once again. After the
decisive defeat of our handbook revision, plans are afoot to revive it
again. We are urged to read before voting, but I have much more interesting
reading.

Curious about why my friends in Knoxville are not concerned with what is now
called "performance review" lest we think this duck might really be a term
contract system, I made a few calls over the weekend and obtained some
documents.  I have discovered that while we at UTC are entering a civil war
in a downward spiral of denunciations, UTK is going to come out of this
smelling like roses and all the richer for it.

Did you know that faculty up there will be rewarded $5,000 a year permanent
salary increments if they do well on review?  Next year $320,000 has ALREADY
been set aside for this purpose, and word is that 64 faculty high-fliers
will rush to grab their share in case future years are less generous. Do you
realize that this will address the problem we all face of salary compression
and even inversion? Do some quick calculations: UTK has about 1500 faculty,
about five times UTC. Assuming an equal ratio of tenured/probationary
faculty, we can just divide the total incentives by five, or $64,000 for
this campus, enough to award 13 of our best, or slightly more since $5,000
would be a higher percentage rate here given our much lower salaries.

UTC has an implementation plan that is based on fear: "they will do worse if
we don't do as we are told," has no carrot, and is all stick, as in "the
short end of..."
Given the current budget crisis, there is no hope excellent faculty will be
rewarded, even though the trustees statement clearly calls for it: "Each
campus must seek to reward faculty members who maintain outstanding
performance..."

Did you know that up there the Faculty Senate was proactive and by September
had drafted seven resolutions which were passed on February 1 that provide
considerable protection, including that established due process be retained
in their new Faculty Handbook. Their seven resolutions are detailed and
ignore the wording of the June 18 Trustee statement, taking that document as
normative and not prescriptive.

The UTC implementation plan simply adds additional requirements as
admendments.  It includes some good ideas, but also bad ones, like making
the five years retroactive.

Did you know that the Knoxville plan actually incorporates some of the
protective wording of the AAUP Policy Documents & Reports to define service,
something they have traditional not been formally evaluated?

At UTC we have in place a formal, annual evaluation (EDO) that has included
service to the community, but for some time there has been no money to
reward merit.

Did you know that the UTK implementation resolution (page 2) says:
"...faculty members who have earned tenure shall have continuous employment
with a presumption of competence until relinquishment or forfeiture of
tenure or until financial exigency or academic program discontinuance, or
until the institution has carried its burden of proving by CLEAR AND
CONVINCING EVIDENCE that the presumption of competence is not longer valid
or that the faculty member has engaged in serious misconduct;..."?

At UTC we may be compromising actionable legal grounds by individuals or
class action if we do not assert our belief that the pre June 18 handbook
was an actionable contract for all employed at that time. Knoxville faculty
clearly are not giving it up so easily.

Did you know that their plan allows for little teaching in cases where the
unit mission is defined largely by research?

AT UTC we teach 12 hours, most of us three classes of lower division courses
with our students numbering anywhere from 100 to nearly 160 (four full
sections), without graduate assistants.

Did you know that in their document, UTK stresses the purpose of review in
positive terms: "to promote faculty development, to ensure professional
vitality, and to enable fair personnel decisions."

At UTC we are asked simply to include the mandated four reasons for
unsatisfactory performance and five categories of misconduct.  Added to the
existing list of termination causes, UTC has a lot of ways to get rid of the
"dead wood."

Did you know that up there they have anticipated our concern about rogue
administrators and rapid policy changes by including a resolution on
Accountability of Administrators, which charges the Standing Committee for
Evaluation of Administrators comment on the thoroughness, fairness, and
timeliness of actions by administrators in evaluation of faculty performance?

AT UTC we have no such protection from the inevitable vagaries of
personality problems.
We are expected to trust the good intentions of the current administration,
and I have no reason not to do so, in fact I am one of the many faculty who
are impressed with the frank discussion of our long-term budget problems,
which obviously preclude resources for merit awards.  However, in the last 5
year or so we have had -- counting current incumbents -- two Chancellors,
three Provosts and one Acting Provost, and in our largest college, two Deans
and one Acting Dean. For the same reason the country needs our constitution,
we need a Faculty Handbook and a resolutions statement that will give us
continuity of policy and implementation.

So, what does this all mean for UTC?  Here's the disturbing semi-fictional
scenario I have pieced together from various sources. Joe Johnson (god bless
his retirement) tells of a riverboat trip with Trustees and students, who
complained of four years of college without EVER having a real professor
teach them. Profscam thinking probably infiltrated suggestible minds of
certain Trustees. We only work twelve (less in Knoxville) hours a week and
still get these swell vacations in the summer, and we goof off because of
lifetime employment...So we at UTC, less guilty of the above than UTK, end
up with a system that infringes on our academic freedom while Knoxville
comes up with a system that requires dynamite to dislodge a non-performing
professor. I knew some.  And for reasons I do not understand, some of our
campus "leaders" have bought ownership of the trustee plan, to the point of
patronizing those of us who hold opposing views.

Those of us who spoke out against adoption are still here,  since this is
still a university and not a corporation.  And that is the point.  If we
love students and want to teach them to at least entertain heterodox ideas,
it makes sense to maintain a system where faculty can speak out on issues of
great consequence without fear of administrative or community reprisals. If
that seems too far-fetched and paranoid,  remember some of the examples I
mentioned at our meeting; they are true stories. Maybe you have wanted to
speak out on something but feared reprisals: we all have families,
mortgages, dreams of a secure retirement. Yet we would like to "profess" and
maybe even annoy the powers that be, sometimes challenging their ideas. If
the university is not such place, then where?

We are not immune to outside pressure. Just a few years ago the legislature
considered posting the Ten Commandments in every K-12 classroom. They also
terrified science teachers with an idea (not adopted) to require the
teaching of creationism along with evolution in the classroom. Academic
freedom should not be taken for granted.

At the Faculty Meeting, we excercised our right to vote nearly two to one
against adoption of the Helms report, reverse the ratio in Faculty Council.
Some claim that most of the faculty did not read the entire document, or
that we were ignorant of what we were voting on. Since the document arrived
just a few days in advance, and minutes of the Faculty Council debate were
not yet out, that might be the case. I think more would have voted against
the document if they read all of it. I know I was more concerned the more I
read, and now that I have the Knoxville resolutions, I know we can do far
better.

The process we are being subjected to was called "democratic centralism" in
Maoist China, where the masses were told what to do, and sure enough, they
do it for fear of something worse. But some of us do not respond well to
threats.

I am not sure that the Trustees are not well-meaning and in general decent
folks, and that "Knoxville lawyers" are not strawmen. One of our two
administrators who spoke in favor of the proposal repeated the mantra that
there could only be worse things down the road. This will be the case if we
do not make a proactive statement as Knoxville has. Not all of their issues
are ones we face since we already have annual review in place and we do
count service, but in the name of time I suggest we use their document as a
model and ignore the mandated wording of June 18th, since it is "chiseled in
stone." This is not strictly true, but I have gone on enough as it is, so I
won't give examples where implementation policy can modify the trustee
statements. Think of the implementation policy as a prenuptial agreement to
a shotgun wedding.

So where do we go from here?  I suggest the Faculty Council and
administration gracefully accept defeat on the present proposal and not
attempt an end-run (remember the vote on the Freshperson Seminar). We should
not burden the Helms Committee with more work.  Instead, because ON THIS
ISSUE our elected representatives (except the ten that voted against in the
council) do not represent us, I am calling for an open meeting after the
break (I will announce the time and place) to adopt a version of the
Knoxville faculty resolution, incorporating the best features of the Helms
report, and including a disclaimer like: "While we the faculty of UTC
believe that the Faculty Handbook existing on June 18, 1998 constitutes a
binding and actionable contract, we recognize the need to act in a
constructive manner to implement certain policies mandated by the Board of
Trustees."

I am as busy as you are and do not intend to reinvent the wheel, so I intend
to bring overheads so we can quickly accept, delete, or amend the Knoxville
document. Since time is now important, I suggest we try to come up with a
UTC document in one two-hour meeting, or at a second meeting if necessary.
To facilitate the task, I am placing a copy of the Knoxville resolution in
the library for you to copy (remember the budget?), and I am sending at my
own cost a copy to department heads and also to individuals who might be
interested in solving this impasse. Your head will soon have a copy of the
Knoxville resolution and I hope they will agree to share it with you.

In addition, I want to include anyone who wants to offer constructive input,
including Verbie Prevost and her supporters, who I know are very concerned
that we have not adopted an implementation plan.  It is an open meeting
since these issue are too important not to have a hearing, so please attend
if you want to have a say. But I do intend to move along as fast as
possible, working with the Knoxville document as a starting point. If you do
not belive in this method, suggest a better way. You can always debate,
amend, or vote against it in a future Faculty Meeting, because I do intend
to offer, with your assistance, an alternative to a re-vote on the last
proposal. Today I am circulating a petition to send to Verbie asking that
the results of the above process be presented to a future Faculty Meeting. I
too would like to return to teaching and research, but it was the Trustees
who rolled this grenade (sorry Tom Ware) into our tent.

I apologize for the length of this document.  If you have stayed with me
thus far, I offer AS A REWARD, for FREE, to the first Email, a $25 heavy
iron fireplace lograck if you pick it up at my carport. Honest. It works
well with wood logs and can be also used as a weight for heavy objects
dropped in the river; you decide.

Richard Rice
History