JRB changes proposed

After two months of public turmoil that pit administrators against faculty, the newly elected Faculty Senate president said it will begin looking into reforming the Judicial Review Board's operating papers for next year.

In the senate's final report from the governance committee, the chairman said several ideas for reforming how the review board operates have been suggested but not acted upon. Those proposals range from extending the members' tenure on the board to making the unanimous recommendations of each panel binding to the chancellor.

"The JRB is the best example of shared governance on the campus because it is shared decision making," said Joan Friedenberg, a professor and review board member. "I think a single administrator is more apt to make a wrong decision than a committee that has spent hours and hours on each case."

Faculty broke their silence over Chancellor Walter Wendler's promotion and tenure decisions at the March meeting of the Board of Trustees. The faculty told the trustees they believed the chancellor had violated their trust by repeatedly denying the faculty's appeals of promotion and tenure rejections. The current Faculty Senate President James Duggan took the senate's similar concerns to the trustees at their meeting April 14.

Trustee Chairman Glenn Poshard handed the issue to SIU President James Walker after the meeting to investigate the procedure and if it was flawed. Walker met with the senate president and the chairwoman of the review board earlier this week but was on vacation Thursday and unavailable for comment.

Tenure-track faculty members come up for review for tenure during their sixth year at the University. Regardless of approval or rejection, all levels review the files. The department reviews the faculty members' files, and then their recommendations are sent to the chair. From there, the chairs make judgments, and then a college-level tenure committee reviews it. Once the deans receive the cases, they also give their opinions and forward it on to the provost. Those that are approved go on to the Board of Trustees, which puts the final stamps of approval.

If the cases are rejected, faculty have the option to take their grievances to the Judicial Review Board, which reviews the process to see if the procedures for tenure and promotion were followed. The board does not review whether the candidates are qualified. If the panel of one board member and a representative from both the administration and the faculty member finds that all procedures were followed, its recommendation about the grievant's claim goes on to the chancellor.

Since 2001, Wendler has rejected seven of 10 recommendations from review board panels. According to the report, in the 11 years before Wendler's arrival to SIUC, three chancellors combined rejected three of 19 appeals. Once the review board finds that the process was not flawed, the cases go on to the chancellor. Wendler turned down all four cases that went through the appeal process.

Wendler said on Wednesday that in each of those cases, there was a dissonance of opinion between the various levels of review.

"But if the process is fine and there are still these conflicting issues, then I have to make a decision," Wendler said. "None of these cases are easy." Michael Sullivan, an associate professor of mathematics, is the outgoing chairman of the senate's governance committee. In its final report of the year, the committee said the review board, which is an arm of the advisory body, needed to be examined in the coming year.

The chancellor and the Board of Trustees must approve any changes, but according to the committee's report, changes to the operating papers from 2003 are still waiting to be accepted by the chancellor.

To combat the adversarial perception of the board, the committee suggested all three panelists who review the cases be members of the board. Recently, the two parties have brought lawyers instead of a collegial representative. Another suggestion was a rule be passed forcing the chancellor to accept all unanimous panel recommendations from the panels.

Friedenberg said because the review board's panels consist of administration and faculty, the panels' recommendations should be shared governance and the final decision, not advisory. She said this idea is illustrated in the unanimous recommendations in the last year, which means the administrative representative did not find the process flawed.

Robert Benford, who was elected next fall's Faculty Senate president Tuesday, said the senate will follow up on this issue. "I hope we can come to a mutually agreeable decision before May 15," Benford said.

Robbie Lieberman, chairwoman of the review board, said it is too early to gauge whether these conversations will prove successful.

"It is progress that people are paying attention to the issue and that higher administration is looking into it, but I don't know what the outcome will be," Lieberman said.