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by Mike Allen, Mathematics Division
Change is in the air on campus these days. While the
changes may seem trivial compared to the changes in the international
situation we are all thinking about, they do deserve at least some of
our attention. We have a radically redesigned (and still shifting)
academic calendar, newly-awarded grants, a state budget situation in
flux, and the possibility of floating a major construction bond soon for
the consideration of Glendale voters. In addition, after eight long
years, Sid Kolpas has decided to step aside as chair of the Governance
Review Committee.
During those eight years, Sid and the committee have repeatedly
revised the Governance document to streamline the process
and reflect current practices. They have also recently endorsed the
concept of "rotation" for service on a particular committee,
to discourage stagnation and encourage new voices to have a say in how
decisions are made on campus. This is one of the reasons I have become a
newly-minted member of Governance Review. Another reason is my belief
that, while the committee has done a good job of monitoring the flow of
decisions within the governance process, it has not been as diligent at
protesting "end runs" around the process, where decisions are
made on campus that are clearly supposed to be considered by various
governance committees first. In this article, I would like to discuss
briefly just one of those problem areas, and save others for the future.
A seemingly perpetual source of governance policy violations is in
the assignment of release time positions, which are supposed to be
reviewed by the Release Time/Extra Pay (RT/EP) committee.
Despite the fact that the mandatory use of the governance process has
been adopted into the administrative regulations of the campus, and is
further institutionalized in the Guild contract, the administration
persists in its practice of awarding or changing release time
assignments without properly involving the RT/EP committee.
A sampling of recent assignments not properly sent through the
governance process includes many of the positions funded by our Tutors
Today/Teachers Tomorrow and Title V grants, release time for
"assistants" to the college President, and assignments for (or
unauthorized increases for) the directors of Program Review, Academic
Computing, Cooperative Education, and the Alliance for Minority
Participation. A complication caused by this resistance to governance is
that the committee cannot perform one of its other functions, which is
to serve as a central registry for all of the RT/EP positions on campus.
In fact, hard as it may be to believe, no one on campus has a complete
list of faculty with release time! This prevents the administration from
performing some of its basic duties such as oversight of faculty
workloads, as well as accurately calculating whether the district is in
compliance with the requirement that at least 50 percent of the
"current expense of education" be spent on instructional
salaries.
We all want governance to work. So, what can you do about this
problem? If you have or are offered a release time assignment, check to
see if it has been reviewed by the RT/EP committee. Current assignments
should be posted under "Private Internal Links" on the http://www.glendale.cc.ca.us/staff.htm
website (you will have to enter your user name and password - the same
ones you use for campus e-mail). If your assignment has not been posted,
or you are aware of other release time positions that may not have been
authorized, please report them to the RT/EP and Governance Review
Committees. |