Since we have been asked for input, and our committee preferences are due today, may I suggest to the various committees working on our implemention draft that they consider writing in two new faculty committees that will address some of your concerns. If you have already sent your form in to Tom Bibiler, you can send him a note, and this can constitute kind of a straw vote. 1. Termination Committee (rarely meets) In the event that the review committee in our implementation remains loaded (it includes the head who gave an "below merit" rating in the first place and two administrative appointees...three out of five) against the faculty member whose continuation is being challenged (so much for the burden of proof being on the university), we need a committee like the one called for in our yet to be approved resolution that will represent the faculty. I am not sure at what stage in the process it should be inserted (probably after the review committee affirms the head's negative rating), but it should exist to ensure that due process is followed. Whether or not it is advisory can be debated. We could call it the "due process" committee, but we might as well be honest and call it the termination committee. At the last Faculty Council Meeting many issues of implementation were touched upon, but most discussion was about the composition of the review committee. When you eventually get the minutes, you will see that no one at the meeting, faculty or admistration, thought that including the department head was a good or fair idea. I cannot imagine any court upholding this situation in the event a faculty member seeks legal recourse in the future, but maybe the "Knoville lawyers" know what they are doing. Provost Barry promised to check this out with Bob Levy, Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. Marilyn Helms repeatedly emphasized that termination will be a "rare and unusual event," so I volunteer to be the first chair of this committee. We all look for committees that do not meet, so this is the ideal assignment. Please write in this committee if you have procrastinated in sending the form to Tom Bibler. 2. Parental Leave Committee Since we notice that there is a policy at UTK, now is an opportune time to write this into our implementation as well. The policy can be worked out later: the first charge of this committee would be to look at UTK and other policies around and define our own. I nominate Kristin Switala to be the first head. Such a clause in our implementatino is not a problem, because we are being asked to hold off on EDO revision because it would be too complicated and time consuming now to reconsider it, so the exact nature of a policy is not the issue. You can add this to your write-in or again tell Tom Bibler that this will be a good idea. His committee has asked for input, and you can support the idea of both these committees without actually wanting to be on them simply by writing them in or sending a note if you have already sent in the form. The above suggestions, if adopted by the PRC and the Handbook Committee, will obviously be approved, because the UTK implementation we all have seen includes such bodies.