Ad hoc University Senate Task Force on Status of the Productivity Plan
 
In responses to questions that were asked at the University Senate during the October meeting, Senate President Ann Tedards appointed Senators M. Paris and P. Gilkey as the Senate Task Force on Productivity. The charge to the task force was threefold: (1) Investigate and try to determine the current status of the "productivity plan", (2) Depending on your findings, make alternative suggestions for assessing and rewarding productivity AND/OR suggest a process through which the Senate might propose an alternative `plan', and (3) Report your work to the Senate at either the Nov. 12 or the Dec. 3 Senate meeting."
 
The task force met with C. Wright (chair of the Productivity Planning Committee in 1993/4), with Dean Stone, and with Vice Provost Davis; the Office of Academic Affairs has provided us with a document we append to this report, which is a useful discussion of the issues involved.
 
The Productivity Plan, produced by the committee which was chaired by Professor Wright, had as main goals: ``1) Serve the increasing numbers of Oregonians who are qualified for and need university educations, 2) Retain and build upon the University of Oregon's educational assets as a research intensive AAU university, while enhancing its `traditional college' environment and 3) Establish financial stability.'' Professor Wright provided the committee with a very useful discussion of the process the campus went through to create the Productivity Plan and the main recommendations the committee made; the documents created in 1993/4 are available on the web at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/$\sim$wright and there seems no point in duplicating this material here.
 
The Task Force feels the infrastructure of the University has been improved. Many of the specific productivity initiatives in the report have been implemented. Most improvements are incremental and are now regarded as ``the way to do things'' rather than as part of a productivity plan. The University is obtaining significant cost savings as well as better outcomes for students.
 
The senate raised two specific areas of concern at the October meeting. The first was the ``faculty rewards structure''. The Productivity Plan refers to the need for ``changes in the way faculty teach'' and notes that `` the University's reward structure must take account of the substantial amount of energy that goes into redesigning courses and revising teaching strategies.'' Furthermore ``institutional policies must be flexible enough to encourage faculty shifts in activities... The University's faculty reward structure must have clear policies that encourage such time commitments.'' Dean Stone and Vice Provost Davis noted that the criteria regarding teaching used in promotion and tenure cases were revised 3 years ago; there is added flexibility to give appropriate weight for achievements in teaching. The post tenure review policy has been redrafted based on suggestions from the Faculty Rewards and Development Committee and the Accreditation Review report. It is currently being reviewed by the Faculty Advisory Council. Dean Stone reported that there are experiments being conducted with permitting individual departments to explore greater variability in defining tenured faculty efforts. The task force concludes significant progress has been made in this area.
 
The second area of concern the Senate expressed concerned the budgetary implications of the productivity plan. The plan anticipated that on campus resident enrollment would increase by 1,200 students in 1997/8 and that in 2002 there would be 12,000 Oregon and 7,000 out of state students on campus. This would require shifts in budgetary allocations across campus. Clearly recent enrollment figures do not show this growth and there are corresponding financial implications. The reimbursement to Schools and Colleges for student credit hours produced beyond a targeted number that was in place for one year is "dead"(to use the words of Dean Stone) and plans for the budgeting for any potential discretionary dollars is on hold (since there are none currently). The document provided by the Office of Academic Affairs deals with this in greater detail.
 
Conclusion. We were charged to ``suggest a process through which the Senate might propose an alternative plan." First, we feel the present issue discussion and solution process to be an excellent forum for the senate. We suggest the desirability of looking at resource allocation used at other comparator universities. Second, we feel the Senate Budget Committee is the appropriate venue for continuing and regular faculty input into the budgeting process.
 
We felt the process of looking at the status of the Productivity Plan to be a useful one and hope this document and the document provided by the Office of Academic Affairs are of service to the Senate. We think task forces which are information gathering in nature, such as this one, and which have a short time duration to be very useful. We question the wisdom of creating a multitude of ad hoc committees that are supposed to create policy. Thus we have limited our task to information gathering.
 
Respectfully submitted,
 
M. Paris (Chair, Law) and P. Gilkey (Mathematics)