Faculty Senate debates
tenure, tuition remission

The Faculty Senate came to a decision on the hotly debated issue of post-tenure review at its Oct. 18 meeting, just as another contentious issue – tuition remission for graduate students – was being introduced.

Two weeks after the entire senate body was called into committee to hammer out details on the issue of post-tenure review, the group voted unanimously – with one abstention – to throw its support behind a policy that calls for all tenured faculty of equal or higher rank in a department to vote on a given review. This idea would put the Faculty Senate at odds with many department heads, who generally prefer that the departments set their own policy on who votes, and who felt – particularly in large departments – that involving the entire faculty would create too large a workload.

The policy will now be forwarded to the provost for further action.

In new business, Dr. John Gilligan, vice chancellor for research and graduate studies, shared with the group that researchers with contracts and grants will soon be called upon to help offset the costs of tuition remission.

“We ran out of money in the tuition remission budget three years ago,” Gilligan said. “It has been supplemented by (my budget), by the provost’s office, by another pot of money from the university as a whole, to the tune of over $4 million per year … It’s an investment we’ve made to make sure that that program is of the highest quality.

“We’ve hit the wall, ladies and gentlemen, in terms of our ability to grow. We need another way to grow the graduate programs that support the research on this campus. We can’t rely on those that have contributed so far because they’re tapped out.”

Gilligan said he is calling on the colleges where there are supported research assistants to build into their contracts and grants tuition remission funding for out-of-state students totaling approximately $3,000, which would then be matched dollar for dollar from the various revenue pools. He said some colleges had already been doing this, and it had allowed those colleges to grow beyond their limits.

“This will help us make sure that the researchers are supplied with the ability to go after the very best graduate students.”

Several senators said such a scenario would instead prevent them from going after graduate students.

“This will cost our department $45,000 (for 15 graduate students),” said Dr. Linda Hanley-Bowdoin, a professor in molecular and structural biochemistry. “That money has to come out of existing grant, and is money we will not have to spend for research … The consequences of this for us in our department is that we are re-evaluating whether we could afford to bring in an international student. … This is basically a tax on international students.”

“If you have a certain amount that you are going to have to spend on a graduate student, for basically the same amount of money you could have a post-doc come in who would be productive from day one,” added Dr. Nina Allen, chair of the faculty.

Gilligan warned that if the plan was not adopted, the colleges could ultimately be stuck paying the entire $12,000 tuition instead of the $3,000 he’s requesting. He also appealed to the senators to remember the university’s mission.

“We are an academic institution,” he said. “Academics and research go together at the graduate level, and we want to encourage that and make sure it has the ability to grow.”

Gilligan said he had appointed a faculty committee to come up with alternative sources of funding for graduate tuition remission, other than the matching proposals, and was also continuing to push the legislature for more state funding.

Posted Oct. 28, 2005

Return to the Bulletin homepage