Updates on several university initiatives and a scheduling change for the annual Faculty Assembly were featured at Friday’s meeting of the Faculty Senate, which included remarks from George Washington President Steven Knapp, Provost Steven Lerman and Charles Garris, chair of the Faculty Senate executive committee.
Faculty Assembly, usually held in October, has been scheduled for Nov. 10 at Lisner Auditorium to accommodate a larger crowd than in previous years. Of key importance at that event will be a vote on a proposed change to the Faculty Organization Plan.
The Board of Trustees passed three resolutions in June aimed at aligning shared governance with the university’s Vision 2021 strategic plan. The first of those resolutions concerns participation on the Faculty Senate. In September, the senate passed a separate resolution regarding participation on the Faculty Senate that differs from the resolution passed by the Board of Trustees.
Both resolutions represent a change from the current Faculty Organization Plan, which allows only full-time, tenured faculty to serve in the senate. Dr. Knapp was asked to delay calling the Faculty Assembly in an attempt to either create the appropriate parliamentary procedure to introduce two different resolutions or to allow time for one resolution to be withdrawn, Dr. Garris said Friday.
“The idea is to have the Faculty Assembly after the Board of Trustees meets,” said Dr. Garris, who will present to the board’s Committee on Academic Affairs on Oct. 15. “The Faculty Assembly agenda will clarify all of this and will include the actual resolution or resolutions. The Faculty Assembly is likely to be a very important meeting, which will have a large impact on the future of shared governance at GW.”
Vice President for Human Resources Sabrina Ellis addresses the senate during a discussion on university benefits. (William Atkins/GW Today)
Resolution on benefits
The senate passed a resolution Friday that calls on the university administration to increase spending on benefits.
The resolution comes amid a national trend of costs increases on employer sponsored benefit plans and stems from a long discussion on university efforts to benchmark, analyze and enhance benefits for employees, which includes GW’s benefits changes for 2016 and short-term recommendations outlined by the Benefits Task Force, created in January to review GW health, retirement and tuition benefits and compare them with those offered by peer institutions.
Friday’s resolution requests that the university increase funding to the benefit plans citing concerns that benefits have been reduced. Discussion focused on differences in methodology and findings between the short-term recommendations of the task force and those of a September benefits report prepared by Mercer, a global leader in consulting on human resources, on behalf of GW. The task force recommendations compared GW to seven peer institutions based on benefits spending. The Mercer report used a list of 18 peer schools and compared plans at those schools. Five schools—American University, Boston University, Georgetown University, New York University and Tufts University—appear on both lists.
The Mercer report allows GW to track its employee benefits with those of peer institutions over time, said Sabrina Ellis, vice president for human resources. Most if not all of GW’s peers are facing the same pressures related to rising healthcare costs, she said, and using the university’s market basket provides a consistent set of schools to make those comparisons.
“This list is used for endowment, financial aid, faculty pay and many other metrics that the university uses to track progress,” she said. “It’s very purposeful to have a consistent set of schools. That list of schools can change, but the challenge is, if we’re benchmarking our faculty pay or other very important metrics against that list, why would we take a different set of schools for which to benchmark the benefits? The goal here was to ensure we’re not switching schools every year and therefore creating more difficulty in really making comparisons.
Later, Ms. Ellis said, “We recognize that benefits are very important and we will continue to engage faculty and staff through the Benefits Task Force, the Benefits Advisory Committee, and other committees to broaden the conversation and seek input.”
A resolution introduced and passed Friday calls on the university administration to increase spending on benefits. (William Atkins/GW Today)
Update on university events
Dr. Lerman informed the senate that the university already is seeing a positive effect of its five-year budget cycle process for long-term financial planning. The new process makes it easier to forecast and create budgets on an annual basis, he said. Dr. Lerman also provided an update on Teaching Day, held Friday on the Foggy Bottom Campus and on finalizing changes to the Faculty Code approved over the summer. One of the adjustments to the code changes appointment, promotion and tenure criteria for faculty.
“The current proposal is to have a period of time for those coming up on tenure to operate under the old criteria of their schools and departments, so that those who have insufficient time to adapt to changes in the criteria are not subject to a code that changes too rapidly,” Dr. Lerman said. “There will be a period of time—we’re still trying to finalize that. It’s a work in progress, and it’s near a resolution.”
In his remarks to close the meeting, Dr. Knapp added several other updates, briefing the senate on the arrival of Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety II, on last month’s Alumni Weekend events and on several early October programs, including the third annual Rodham Institute Summit and the Friday screening of “Girl Rising.”
He also noted the university’s longstanding safety and security efforts in the wake of campus shootings in Oregon, Arizona and Texas over the past few weeks.
“We do a lot of work here with the local police jurisdictions in drills to prepare for what we all hope never happens, which is an active shooter scenario,” he said. “This is something we pay a lot of attention to. These are unpredictable events, and they seem to happen with great frequency. We have done a number of things here regarding safety and security including bringing on board this year RaShall Brackney as our new police chief.”
