The following is published in accordance with the Faculty Senate Rules. Among other purposes, the publication of SEC actions is intended to stimulate discussion among the constituencies and their representatives. Please communicate your comments to Patrick Walsh, executive assistant to the Senate Office, either by telephone at (215) 898-6943 or by email at senate@pobox.upenn.edu.

Faculty Senate Executive Committee Actions
Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Chair’s Report. Faculty Senate Chair Kathleen Hall Jamieson reported on several matters:

• The Senate Committee on Faculty and the Academic Mission (SCOF) will soon distribute a questionnaire on voting and hiring practices in departments to department chairs and will report its findings in May 2021.
• The Senate Committee on the Economic Status of the Faculty (SCESF) will soon be charged with examining salary compression and inversion issues, whether departments or schools face those issues, and how, if any exist, they might be addressed. SEC members were encouraged to query the relevant individuals in their departments and divisions about whether compression and inversion are issues of concern in them and to share any resulting information that they feel would be helpful to the tasked SEC committees with the Senate Office. Over time, market forces result in higher compensation for newer hires than faculty who have been at Penn for a longer term. In addition, persons who seek competing offers from other institutions will more often end up with greater compensation at Penn compared to those who do not do so. Gender-related issues will also be examined in this context.
• On March 17, 2021, at 3 p.m., the Standing Faculty will vote on proposed amendments to the Rules of the Faculty Senate. The proposed amendments do not include expanding the Senate membership but rather focus on reforming the committee structures and faculty appointments processes to allow for greater flexibility. They also include several clarifying and logistical changes. Separately, a “practices and procedures” document, which is in development, will be shared in draft form. Since the quorum for this meeting is 100 Standing Faculty, SEC members were asked to encourage their Standing Faculty colleagues to attend the meeting with them.  The vote will occur during the first 15 minutes of the meeting. The draft revisions appear in this issue of Almanac.

Past Chair’s Report. Past Chair Steve Kimbrough reviewed the proposed amendments to the Rules of the Faculty Senate and engaged SEC members in a discussion of them. He then yielded the floor to Chair-Elect Bill Braham, who reviewed key sections of the work-in-progress Practices and Procedures document. A newly proposed article to the Rules, Article 18, would formalize the document’s role in guiding the work of the Faculty Senate without prejudice to the Rules themselves.

In addition, at the March 17 full Faculty Senate meeting, deans of the four schools with the largest physical footprints have been invited to discuss school-level greening initiatives to be moderated by the leaders of the Senate Select Committee on the Institutional Response to the Climate Emergency (CIRCE).

Update from the Office of the President. President Amy Gutmann applauded the creativity of Penn faculty in addressing obstacles created by responses to the pandemic, and she expressed her admiration for the ways in which Penn faculty transformed the teaching and learning experience at Penn through use of online environments under extenuating circumstances. Penn continues to be guided by the best available public health data and expertise and national, state, and local guidelines. The Penn Cares program is keeping campus positivity rates below regional and national levels but is not without its challenges. It is still too early to decide on the status of upcoming major campus events, such as 2021 Commencement ceremonies, and several contingencies are included in those plans. 

Discussion of Course Evaluations, Engaged Scholarship, and Support for Junior Faculty. A discussion began on the status of requests made of departments or schools to address the Resolution on Engaged Scholarship, endorsed by SEC on October 14, 2020. The intent of the resolution is to encourage schools and departments to engage in deliberation designed to determine and memorialize the unit’s determination of whether engaged scholarship is an activity that should be considered in the hiring, tenure, promotion, and merit increase processes in that unit and, if so, how it is defined in that unit and what kinds of activities fall into and outside the bounds of that definition. In addition, departments and schools were asked to memorialize their understandings about increased demands placed on faculty during the pandemic, including any involving the changed nature of teaching, and to document their understanding of any ways in which the demands of dealing with the pandemic should be taken into account in tenure and promotion decisions. (SEC has not taken any formal position on how these terms are defined or counted but rather requests that each department provides clarity in its expectations.)

The final part of the meeting was reserved for discussion designed to begin SEC deliberations about the adequacy of the existing course evaluation structure. As part of the discussion, it was noted that the University Council Committee on Academic and Related Affairs also addressed course evaluations at length in its 2018-2019 report.