[Uosenate] comments on Admin Hiring guidelines

[William Harbaugh]

Dear Senators -

I’m out of town and will miss today’s meeting. Jane Cramer (Poli Sci) will substitute for me. I know that we’re not voting on the Admin Hiring guidelines until a future meeting, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there since I won’t be part of today’s discussion.

First. I want to thank Elizabeth and Elliot for moving this forward and getting what I understand is preliminary agreement from the Administration on this. I have failed for many years and through several presidents and provosts to get agreement on strong policies on hiring and review of academic administrators, I know how difficult this is and my comments below are not a criticism of Elizabeth or Ellliot.

Second, I want to say how disappointed I am that President Schill and Provost Phillips still have so little trust in UO's elected University Senate that they will not allow the Senate to elect or the Senate Leadership to appoint even a single member of the search committees for university-wide administrator positions. Similarly, they have so little faith in the faculty of the colleges that they will not allow them to elect even one of their members for search comittees for deans. In both cases they want the complete power to pick the members themselves, except for one member, whom they will select from a list of several selected or elected by the Senate Leadership or College Faculty. Additionally, theere is no requirement that there be any representation from the Senate for these search committees.

President Schill and Provost Phillips's distrust apparently extends even to the search committees, even though they will be composed entirely of their own appointees. From these proposed guidelines:

The hiring official should meet with the committee to deliver the charge to the committee and to provide information and guidance specific to the search. The general charge to all search committees is to identify qualified candidates.
The hiring official also should describe what kind of evaluation of the candidates the committee should provide.

For example, the hiring official may want a verbal report on behalf of the full convened committee detailing each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, along with an overall rating of highly acceptable, acceptable, or unacceptable.

So there is no requirement of a written report discussing the pros and cons of the candidates and making a recommendation. No requirement that the president or provost come back to the committee and explain their decision.

Keep in mind that these hiring committees don’t even make decisions, just recommendations - at best.

I’m hoping that our President and Provost can explain why they are insisting on these limitations.

Thanks,

Bill Harbaugh
UO Economics
harbaugh at uoregon.edu<mailto:harbaugh at uoregon.edu>


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.uoregon.edu/pipermail/uosenate/attachments/20200212/f2168d39/attachment.html>