February 2, 2011

January was a busy month for the MRFA Executive and there are several things to report.

Tenure Celebration

The 2010 Tenure Celebration was held on Monday, January 31. A total of 39 faculty received tenure this year. Our Social Events Committee did a fabulous job of organizing the ceremony and helping with the reception that followed. Our tenure celebration has become so important that a Dean, in whose Faculty several members were unable to attend because they were teaching, asked me how the time and date were set. The reason for the Monday date this year was to accommodate Dave Marshall’s schedule.

Executive Elections

Elections for the following positions on the MRFA Executive Board will be held as part of the Annual General Meeting on Friday, May 13:

·         First Vice-President

·         Secretary

·         Board of Governors Representative

·         Academic Liaison Officer (subject to a position review by the Executive)

·         Member at Large

All terms are two years except for Member at Large, which is one year. Tenure is a requirement for First Vice-President, Board Representative and Member at Large, but any full-time or part-time member of the Association is eligible to run for Secretary and Academic Liaison Officer. Many faculty have been hired in the past three years and it would be helpful if they were represented on the Executive.

The duties of these positions are outlined in Article 9 of the MRFA Bylaws, which you can find under Documents on our web site mfra.net. There is 48 SICH of release time for each position and additional release time for the First Vice President in negotiating years.

Please consider being a candidate or nominating a colleague. Contact me if you have any questions about these positions.

MRFA Vision Statement Review Committee

The charter for this committee appears separately in the Monthly Report. Please consider volunteering for it by e-mailing me no later than Thursday, February 10.

Scheduling Grievance

The Association filed a policy grievance against the Infosilem scheduling software and the Academic Scheduling Policy (POL 516-1) in December. On January 17, the Provost and I signed an interim Step 2 resolution which acknowledges that the fundamental reasons for the grievance are dissatisfaction with how the course scheduling system has been implemented and that the real resolution will be implementing the system in a way that better serves the needs of faculty, students and the University. We agreed that:

·         An augmented Academic Scheduling Committee shall be charged with the mandate below and shall report back to Step 2 of the grievance process.

·         The violations of the Collective Agreement alleged in the grievance shall be set aside until this report is received.

Mandate of the augmented Academic Scheduling Committee

1)      The Committee shall prepare recommendations with respect to implementation of the scheduling system and evaluate the success of resulting changes.

2)      An additional Chair and the President of the MRFA shall be appointed to the Committee until the end of the 2011-2012 academic year to assist in this work.

3)      A representative of Information Technology Services with technical knowledge of the Infosilem scheduling software shall be appointed to the committee as a resource until the end of the 2011-2012 academic year.

4)      The committee shall identify the principle issues related to course scheduling and propose solutions, consulting as necessary in this work.

5)      In considering proposed solutions, the committee shall identify the cause of each issue – for example, a limitation of the software, the Academic Scheduling Policy, or an implementation issue such as training.

6)      A report with recommendations on proposed solutions for the principle issues shall be prepared by 30 April 2011.

Eligibility for Part-time Benefits

As a consequence of an issue regarding interpretation of the “average teaching load per semester” in Article 16.8.1.1 that was brought to the Executive by a part-time member, the MRFA and the University will be signing a Memorandum of Understanding reducing the eligibility requirements to the continuation requirements of 96 SICH (during each of the Fall and Winter semesters in a continuous 12 month period). This change is effective immediately and will make approximately 30 more part-time faculty eligible for benefits.

Other Part-time Issues

There have been a number of concerns with respect to part-time reappointment, allocation of workload, and payroll errors for faculty on fixed-term part-time appointments. Two grievances have been resolved at Step 1, two more are still at Step 1, and one has been resolved at Step 2. I am working with Human Resources on developing procedures intended to provide Payroll with the information required to correctly pay faculty on fixed-term part-time appointments.

Intellectual Property/Copyright

The current Collective Agreement established a joint committee to develop a proposed new copyright/intellectual property article. The committee, which is co-chaired by David Hyttenrauch, Past President of the MRFA, and Carol Shepstone, the University Librarian, has prepared a preliminary report that outlines underlying principles such as creator ownership of intellectual property, ownership among multiple creators, an MRU open access repository, licensing a work to the University, and dispute resolution. The committee will make recommendations to the MRFA and the Board negotiating committees by 31 March for their consideration in revising Article 19 of the Collective Agreement.

The committee’s preliminary report was discussed at the January General Meeting and is on the MRFA web site with the materials for that meeting. Any additional feedback should be sent to David Hyttenrauch by February 14.

MRFA Committee Work

Please do not ask members of the support staff to do Association work. I recently received an anonymous complaint about a departmental administrative assistant who was asked by a member of an MRFA committee to do some work for the committee. She did not think this was proper, but felt an obligation to comply with a request from a faculty member.

PhD Completion Leaves

On January 18, Robin Fisher announced that, because he anticipated there would be money left in the Academic Affairs reserve fund for degree development, a decision had been made to allocate some of that money to ten PhD completion grants that will provide a semester of leave to assist faculty members to complete PhDs.

The general provisions of the PhD Completion Leaves are here. The deadline for the first round of applications is Friday 25 February. Application is made to the Faculty Leave Committee using a form that is available from Diane Carpenter in Robin’s office.

CAUT

As External Vice-President of ACIFA, I am the ACIFA delegate to CAUT and attended the Senior Grievance Officers Workshop in Ottawa December 10-12. It was a valuable experience, both because of workshops on topics such as member-to-member grievances and denial of tenure grievances and because it was an opportunity to share experiences with colleagues from other universities. I reported briefly on the workshop at the January General Meeting and have prepared a report for the ACIFA Presidents’ Council which you can read here.

Department Visits

The Executive is continuing to work on the outstanding issues from our meetings with departments during the last half of the fall semester and will be reporting on them in future Monthly Reports.

Gerry

Dr. Gerry Cross

President,

Mount Royal Faculty Association

Ph.  (403) 440-6191