April 5, 2000

From:     Loren Laine, President Medical Faculty Assembly

To    :     William G. Tierney, President Academic Senate

Re    :    Academic Senate Task Force Report on Faculty Contracts and Tenure

The MFA spent much of yesterday's meeting discussing the Contract and Tenure Task Force Report.  The MFA voted unanimously not to endorse the report (with 1 abstention).  The senators from the MFA will provide a brief list of the concerns expressed at the upcoming senate meeting, but the concerns included the following:

1.    Since all members on the medical school campus work 12 months, there were very strong feelings that there should be no reference to a 9-month year at the medical school.

2.    The MFA strongly endorsed the idea of having a task force evaluate the non-tenured faculty next year, since this is a large and increasing portion of the medical school faculty.  However, since the charge of the current task force was related to the tenured faculty, the MFA felt that sections on non-tenured faculty (Recommendations #2 and #4) should be removed from this document.

3.    The MFA felt that the financial "guarantees" should be related to the rank and department of the faculty member, and that the guarantees could be pegged to some national standard for a similar rank and department (e.g., AAMC).  For example, the MFA felt that the guarantee for someone in thoracic surgery would have to be higher than the guarantee for a member of a basic science department.  The MFA did not suggest that the guarantee had to be for their full salary, but just that the guarantee should be proportional to the standard salary of a specific faculty member's position.

4.    There also was a feeling that the document was overly long and detailed and that a simpler exposition might be more attractive.