Mānoa Faculty Senate Executive Committee
Minutes of September 8, 2009

Present: David Ross, Susan Hippensteele, Halina Zaleski, Martin Rayner, Shirley Daniel

The meeting commenced at 3:15 p.m.

Several members of the CAB remained to meet with the SEC. The group discussed follow-on steps from the general faculty meeting on Sept 2, and the appropriate role for the MFS. The group agreed that we should come up with our own suggestions and discussion to address the budget cuts.

We also need to address the comments and suggestions made at the general faculty meeting last week.

We need more information about how much of our costs are administration. How much has it increased over the years, and how do we compare to other institutions?

Most of the CAB members left.

Guests remaining included several faculty currently sitting on the joint prioritization/budget committee, who were there to help the SEC understand the structure, history, and activity of the committee.

The group continued to discuss the role of the MFS in the budget/prioritization committee and processes.

The group decided to draft a memo to the Chancellor, to be broadly distributed, to address the need for greater and more effective shared governance.

Other important points that need to be conveyed to the Administration include:

• The UHM faculty are very concerned that other campuses of the UH System are not being cut. It seems that the UHM Administration is not advocating effectively for our campus. The SEC also notes that the AAUP has not supported arguments of exigency at mainland campuses that have been hiring administrative personnel as UH has.

• The SEC is concerned that the combination of the budget and prioritization committees has confused short- and long-term problems and solutions. We should ask the administration to provide more transparent and accurate information about the problems and proposed solutions both in these meetings and to the faculty in general.

• Now that the faculty are back on duty, we should ask the administration to work through our faculty governance processes. The administration should know that

having a few faculty sitting on an ad hoc or advisory committee does not

constitute either faculty consent to the decisions made by that committee, nor

does it substitute for appropriate consultation processes.

1. Specifically, the CAB stands ready to work with the administration to develop and discuss solutions to the budget issues that have been brought up. As agreed last spring, there is also a reorganization process that should be followed with regard to merging of units and other similar reorganization proposals.

2. In addition, the CAPP is the appropriate body to address issues with regard to academic majors, programs, course offerings and consolidation of academic programs. There is also an enrollment management committee that has faculty representation that should be used to address issues of student recruitment and discussions about the appropriate size of the student body of the UHM campus.

3. The CPM should be involved in any discussions about retrenchment.

The SEC also discussed whether it might be advisable to convene a task force to consider whether to re-integrate UHM and the UH System. The SEC also proposed a number of other potential solutions for balancing the UHM budget that can only be addressed at the Regents level, including: Retirements, tuition increases, and having UHM manage West Oahu as a division rather than proceed with a separate administration at UHWO.

The SEC also discussed how we might involve our students in some of the issues that are being discussed. The SEC agreed to set up a joint meeting with the student government officers to discuss concerns.

The committee discussed representation on the enrollment management committee.

The meeting adjourned at 5:30 p.m.