President Ruth Simmons laid out a timeline for an official response to the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice report during Tuesday's faculty meeting. Administrators also updated the faculty on a host of issues, including plans to enhance the faculty leave policy.
Simmons spoke briefly on the slavery and justice report, which was released in October, outlining the mechanisms the University has employed to gather feedback. In addition to a public forum held last month, she said possible responses have been discussed in other forums, such as her cabinet meeting last week, at a Brown University Community Council meeting, within the Wayland Collegium and by the Advisory Council on Admission.
Feedback has also been gathered from mail sent to the University and through its Web site. "There have been some responses, but not nearly as many as I would have expected," Simmons said of the Web site, which she said has received approximately 150 comments.
Simmons will present Brown's experience in addressing its ties to slavery during a February visit to the University of Cambridge, and members of the committee have been asked to speak at universities about their work, she said.
After Simmons opened up the floor to questions, a long pause ensued. After one professor finally asked for clarification on one of the recommendations, another questioned whether community discussion might have been more extensive had the report been distributed widely in print format. He noted reading the report online takes considerable effort, especially because of its length.
"We imagined we would distribute this widely, but we didn't realize how long it would be," Simmons said. The report may be distributed widely in print format once a University response to its recommendations has been adopted, so that "the whole package" can be read together, she added.
Simmons said she expects to have a University response to the committee's recommendations drafted by the middle of January and that any plans will be announced after they are adopted during the Brown Corporation's February meeting.
Faculty leave policy addressedFaculty Executive Committee Chair Ann Dill, associate professor of sociology, briefed the faculty on plans for an enhanced leave policy. "We're still considering what an enhanced faculty leave policy should look like," Dill said, adding that the FEC currently favors a policy in which professors receive 75 percent of full pay while on sabbatical, which they could take every six semesters. At the November faculty meeting, this option was less popular than a plan that would provide full pay for a semester's sabbatical every nine semesters.
Under the current policy, faculty may take a semester's sabbatical at full pay after 12 semesters of teaching or a full-year's leave at half pay, according to a September 2005 letter from Dean of the Faculty Rajiv Vohra P'07 to professors that was posted on his office's Web site.
Some faculty members at the November meeting expressed concern that humanities faculty are less apt to receive external funding for their research and thus need fully funded sabbaticals. Dill reviewed some statistics from Williams College and New York University, which both offer 75 percent pay for a sabbatical every six semesters, which she said suggests concerns about equity are unfounded.
One faculty member who was formerly a visiting professor at Williams said the college was "one of the most generous institutions I've ever been associated with" and suggested that higher pay makes it easier for Williams professors to tolerate the proposed 25-percent pay reduction that a sabbatical requires.
Vohra noted faculty pay at the top liberal arts colleges is about 9 percent lower than the group of schools to which Brown generally compares itself.
Several faculty questioned what options are being considered to allow research faculty to take advantage of the leave policy. Research faculty currently pay approximately 3 percent of their benefits into a pool that is used to fund sabbaticals, though the University does not fund their sabbaticals.
Dill said a committee has been created, but not staffed, to examine leave options for research faculty. "We have barely learned who research faculty are, and they are a diverse group, so one size certainly does not fit all here," she said, noting more than once that funding sabbaticals may not be the best option and that more investigation is required.
At the November faculty meeting, several professors questioned whether the curriculum could withstand the shock of faculty going on sabbatical more frequently. Dill said yesterday the FEC is considering proposing a pool of post-doctoral students and international fellows be created so that replacement teachers are readily available.
"We recognize (the leave policies being discussed) are an interim step, so that as soon as the operating budget will support it, we will move to 100-percent coverage for whatever amount of time we're looking at," Dill said.
