Disputes between professors and the University will soon be mediated by a third-party intermediary thanks to the creation of a new faculty ombudsman position.
Although members of the faculty and administration are still negotiating the details of the ombudsman's job description, both sides "are eager" to have an ombudsman on campus, said Robert Pelcovits, professor of physics and chair of the Faculty Executive Committee.
The primary unresolved issue is the extent of the ombudsman's authority, said Associate Provost and Director of Institutional Diversity Brenda Allen. The two sides are still debating whether graduate students who serve as teaching assistants will be able to seek the ombudsman's counsel, Allen said, and similar questions have been raised about medical students. The two sides have yet to determine whether the ombudsman will be hired from inside or outside of the faculty, she said.
Both Pelcovits and Allen emphasized that the ombudsman will be an impartial party in future University affairs and conflicts. However, the ombudsman will not replace dispute resolution committees already in place, such as the Faculty Grievance Committee.
Pelcovits and Allen are currently heading a joint committee in charge of the ombudsman hiring process. At the November faculty meeting, Pelcovits announced that the committee would include Allen, Associate Dean of the Faculty Carolyn Dean and four faculty members to be chosen at the next meeting of the FEC.
The ombudsman position will begin as a one-year pilot program and will be a half-time job, Pelcovits said. The ombudsman will report to the office of President Ruth Simmons, which will be responsible for funding and monitoring the program.
Concerns have also been raised about the extent of the ombudsman's independence. "An ombudsperson needs as much independence as possible. He should not need to worry about pleasing an institution and he cannot be partisan in favor of his employer," said P. Terrence Hopmann, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science.
However, it would be potentially dangerous for Brown to hire an outsider for the position, Hopmann said. "In that case, the University would be giving up its autonomy," he said.
The University of Pennsylva-nia established an ombudsman office in 1971. Its Web site explains that the Office of the Ombudsman is open to "students, faculty, staff, and administrators."
Harvard University founded an office of the ombudsman in 2003. Like Penn, Harvard gives access to the ombudsman to "faculty, students, post-docs, research personnel, and staff of all kinds," according to its Web site.
Brown's current plan does not make the ombudsman accessible to students. "Our current model has the ombudsman serving the faculty only," Allen said, though she suggested that the office could be expanded in the following years.
Creating the position has been an issue at Brown for more than a decade. While serving as chair of the FEC 10 years ago, Hopmann proposed the idea of hiring an ombudsman. FEC meeting minutes from Septem-ber 2004 show that hiring an ombudsman was addressed again in connection to debate about the University's controversial proposed new intellectual property policy, which was adopted May 2005. Since then, Brown has established a dispute mechanism regarding intellectual property, an issue that will not be under the ombudsman's jurisdiction in the future.
