Committee on Professional Governance - Committees - LAUC

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Report to the 2005 LAUC Spring Assembly

Report to the Spring Assembly

April 15, 2005

TO: Terry Huwe, LAUC President

FROM: Rob Melton, Chair, Committee on Professional Governance

RE: Report to the Spring Assembly

The Committee on Professional Governance (CPG) has 3 standing charges, plus the additional standing charge of addressing other subjects at the request of the President. These three charges are (briefly):

Advise the President and the Executive Board on various issues, including APM revisions that affect librarians, peer review, and other issues not covered by the other standing committees;
Serve as a review body for Divisions who may request evaluation of local peer-review procedures;
Maintain access to campus peer-review documents on the Web or in electronic format and review those peer-review materials on the Web site biennially in order to ensure adequacy and currency of materials.

At the beginning of the year, CPG was also given two Additional or Special charges. Briefly, they are:

Compile information from each campus on efforts to define emeritus status for librarians, including the criteria used;
Review and discuss the status and effectiveness of the Assistant and Associate ranks. (Three specific suggested questions were included.)

In addition, in late January, the President exercised his prerogative by presenting the Committee with an additional special charge, namely:

Gather information on the relations on each campus between the divisional LAUC and the campus Academic Senate; in particular, what is the extent of involvement by LAUC members and library administrators in Academic Senate committees. (Four specific questions were included.)

Summary of Activity on Each Charge to Date:

We first reviewed our standing charges, and determined that it was time to perform Charge #3 (see above). This became our first task. The chair asked each member to be responsible for reviewing the accuracy andcurrency of his or her campus's Web pages regarding peer-review processes. In most cases, the CPG member consulted with either the LAUC President, the entire executive board, and/or the chair of the peer review committee at his or her division to verify the accuracy of the information. In order to give an additional, objective opinion, the chair directed each member also to examine the peer review documents at another division and make an independent assessment of their readability . A separate report on this activity, which summarizes inaccuracies found and actions taken to remedy them, is attached. The chair asked a few members to update their information just a few days before this report was completed, so it is accurate and up-to-date.

As for our other two standing charges, we have not felt it necessary so far to advise the President and Executive Board on any additional issues (charge #1), nor have we been asked by any division to evaluate its local peer review procedures (charge #2).

In November, we then turned our attention to Special Charge #1. Although the bulk of this information was gathered between December and February, information has continued to dribble in to us on issues regarding emeritus status at our respective divisions. We went slightly beyond the wording of the charge, in that we also attempted to determine the actual number of librarians who have been granted emeritus status on each campus, and have commented upon the extent to which information on emeritus status is readily available at the Web site (either LAUC or Library Human Resources or both) at each division. Information is accurate as of today (April 14th). This report, with an executive summary and information broken down by each campus, is attached.

Our efforts in mid-February and March turned to the "additional additional" charge on LAUC relations with Academic Senate committees. (Preliminary information was needed very quickly by the President.) Information on this topic has also continued to come in right up until this report is being written, so the report which is attached is as accurate as possible. It also has a summary of the overall situation, and then specific information for each campus.

Finally, as of April 13th, we have begun to turn our attention to the original second special charge, dealing with various issues regarding the Assistant and Associate ranks of the Librarian Series. Although we have nothing to report on this charge at this time, the Chair will include a progress report at the Spring Assembly on June 2nd in Santa Barbara.

The chair would like to report that all of the committee members, listed below, have responded quickly and diligently to his attempts to keep us on track. Many of them have gone to great lengths to obtain information from sources that are not always "easy to crack." He speaks for all of them in hoping that our efforts so far, as well as those to come, will provide you with accurate and useful information, and thanks them for their hard work.

The committee members are:

Michaelyn Burnette ( Berkeley )
Marcia Meister ( Davis )
Collette Ford ( Irvine )
Louise Ratliff ( Los Angeles )
John Bloomberg- Rissman ( Riverside )
Min-Lin Fang ( San Francisco )
Sherry DeDecker ( Santa Barbara )
Kerry Scott ( Santa Cruz )

Respectfully submitted,

Rob Melton ( San Diego )

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