Dear Colleagues,
My double-speak O’Meter just went over the top. When shared governance is defined as a trustee-generated mandate i.e. the faculty will create a P4P plan, and the President says “As President, I intend to practice Shared Governance in letter and in spirit” and then on the front page of today’s Denver Post page 1 says “read my lips, I’ve made it very clear that should this thing not happen, I’m going to look at other needs in the college,” then the concept of respecting shared governance is a pure sham. By any other true definition of reality the vote on P4P is coercion (an offer that cannot be refused).
And for those of you who didn't read the Post today, voting on P4P supposedly starts today.
I will grant that after the Board of Trustees forced this plan on us, that dedicated faculty have worked hard to create a plan that doesn’t harm us too badly, but I’m sorry to say that plan is still full of so many holes, that if P4P was a ship, it would sink.
When you vote you should consider a variety of things in your decision, and not the coercion.
1) Will you benefit? Let’s assume the Post article is correct – you may get between $2000 and $10,000. Numbers previously thrown around range from 3K to 15K. So let’s assume you qualify for Level 1 and let’s be generous and give you $3000. In order to get your 3K, you have to earn your 3K from all 4 areas (teaching, scholarship, advising and service). Remember, it is expected that 90% of faculty will get some P4P award (P4P plan p1.). Let’s assume you are good and get the whole thing. Now standard payrole deductions kick in, so you lose about one third. You take home 2K, or over a 10 month contract, you get 200 per month. Have a nice dinner. Suppose instead you only get a Level 1 award in teaching (50%), because the document clearly states “‘exceeds expectations’ does not guarantee the faculty member will receive a P4P award.” Now you get $1500, less deductions. Enjoy you extra movies with a friend.
2) Do you qualify for P4P? Under most circumstances yes, BUT you don’t qualify if you have a “needs improvement” in any area. Here’s the double whammy. The way the plan is constructed, you can be qualified for Level 3 (maximum P4P award) in three areas, but if you let one area go, perhaps because you had to allocate time to a sick family member, you not only lose the opportunity to get your P4P award, by you also lose that percentage in your base salary. Suppose you allocated 10% to service and didn’t meet standards in that one area, you lose twice. You lose 10% from your base salary increase, and you cannot get P4P even if you won the Nobel Prize that year.
3) What’s it going to cost you? A lot. Supposedly, P4P will not generate more paperwork for faculty except the forms to apply for P4P. What’s hidden is your self-evaluation is the evidence for P4P, so now your self-evaluation is critical to your pay check. If we are logical human beings, and I believe we are, then it is in our own best interest to create a self-evaluation document that will qualify us for the maximum award possible, and that means a whole lot more paperwork justifying what we do. Faculty already spend far too much time on justifying themselves; this will only increase the work time not spent on what we should be doing – teaching, etc.
In addition, while the trustees have allocated money for P4P as a line item, P4P will not go in the handbook. So if the trustees decide to reduce the amount at some time in the future for P4P, then the paperwork will not go away, but faculty will be doing the same amount paper justification for less reward.
4) Are there other effects? Yes. Just because the P4P document says, “meets expectations” is enough to get tenure or promotion (P4P plan p1.) things at Metro have the tendency to not follow the plan. It’s called institutional creep. Someday, someone who applies for tenure or promotion will say, “during my time here I have exceed expectations, in all areas for the last 3 years.” Then someone else will write, “I received 6 Level 1 awards, and 2 Level 2 awards, and one Level 3 award.” And, once that happens, the competition has started and P4P creeps into tenure and promotion. But it won’t stop there because the same thing will happen in the area of retention.
5) College wide standards. If this doesn’t scare the heck out of you it should. “The college will develop a common set of guidelines that will be used as the “core” in departmental evaluation guidelines” (P4P plan p2). If you believe that I - as enlightened as I am, and my colleagues as enlightened as they are - can develop the standards for your department that you should live by, then you need to think carefully about what I may do to you through my own best intentions for the college. As Hal Nees in today’s Post (p16A) is attributed to have said, “the most difficult part … will be finding a standard evaluation across disciplines.” The P4P seems to mandate that Physics, Special Education, and Marketing have the same core guidelines in each of the four areas on which we are evaluated. If you want to see how badly the creation of college wide standards go, go to http://www.mscd.edu/facstaff/pfp/ and look at the draft Evaluation Guidelines. Dr. Curran has said these guidelines no longer apply, but these documents will give you an idea of the difficulty involved in creating meaningful, measurable, and reasonable college-wide guidelines. But no matter what the new guidelines are, they apply to all of us, irrespective of discipline.
6) Should you vote for P4P? Not having heard anything to the contrary regarding the ballot, the problem with the election is you can’t know what you are voting for. Because of the time crunch in order to force this plan through, two elections are combined as one. The first election should have been selection of an option. Once an option was chosen, then faculty could have made an informed decision as to whether they should vote for the P4P plan. Instead, you are going to vote for or against the plan as a whole, and vote on an option at the same time. You might support Option 2, but not Option 1 or Option 3. Given the nature of the ballot, you may vote for P4P and get it, but you may not end up with the option you want. Because of this, there no way to vote on the P4P plan as an informed member of the faculty.
Based on all this, is this shared governance? Only, if you believe in fantasy, otherwise this is coercion, and coercion such that you don’t even know what you are getting.
Sincerely,
Tadini Bacigalupi, Ph.D.
Professor, Sociology
