COLUMBIA COLLEGE
FACULTY ORGANIZATION (CCFO)

Report to the College Council
October 5th, 2007

Since the College Council meeting of May 4th of this year, CCFO met with the President and Provost on June 6th to discuss a variety of issues including, in part, on-line education, the state of the college’ s endowment and academic administration positions and searches.  On June 20th, a meeting was had with the Vice President for Academic Affairs to discuss such issues as faculty development grants, academic searches, the need to use academic search firms and the Art & Design Department.  The CCFO President and the Chair of the Chairs council met on July 3rd to discuss common issues including evaluation of teaching and rank/promotion.  CCFO also had a role in the New Faculty Orientation on August 18th and hosted a well-attended reception for new faculty on August 28th.  The CCFO President also had an opportunity to speak briefly at the Provost Forum on August 30th and we hope that there will be a time to do this again in the spring.

In September, CCFO met with the Dean of the F&PA School and Vice President for Academic Affairs.  Issues discussed at these meetings included: the Art & Design Department; the Audio Arts & Acoustics Department and the desire of CCFO for academic administration at our college to have full-time faculty status.  We have also met with PFAC leadership to discuss such issues as evaluation of teaching, compensation of full-time faculty who have retired and now teach part-time and clarification of PFAC policy on member remediation.

In October, CCFO has had a meeting with the VP of Finance to discuss both the “old” and “new” retirement plans, the impending move of college support services to 218 S. Wabash and the need for more staff in areas such as payroll and human resources.  We met yesterday with the CTE Director and Associate Director to look into programming additional events for the faculty.  We also co-sponsored a Town Hall Meeting on Rank/Promotion yesterday [there will be another Town Hall meeting on this subject next Wednesday].  A straw poll will be taken by CCFO of tenure-track and tenured faculty on the principle of rank later this month.  A tenure workshop will be held next Tuesday for tenure-track faculty in years 2-5 [a session for year 1 faculty will be held after Thanksgiving].  CCFO officers will meet with the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President/Provost on Tuesday, October 16th.

We have just finished our first electronic survey of full-time faculty issues.  This survey saw a 29% increase in the number of faculty who responded versus last year [flash drives were awarded as prizes to three faculty in each school who completed the survey earlier this morning].  Preliminary issues in order of importance from the survey are: increasing the base salary percentage raise; additional space/facilities in departments; challenges brought about by the growth of the college; more full-time faculty; recruitment and retention of minority students; transparent evaluation of deans and senior academic administration and additional staff support in the academic departments.

CCFO is also attempting to develop a “unified” listing of committees for the benefit of the college community.  We are grateful for those who have helped but we still need several pieces of information to complete this Herculean task.

In closing, we are very concerned about the state of the faculty handbook and the need for a significant edit of this “document”.

Submitted by
Keith Kostecka 

CCFO President