CWRU's Faculty Senate has taken another step toward redefining membership in the University faculty.

At its March meeting, the senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution incorporating modifications—including renaming categories of faculty, clarifying voting rights, articulating procedures for appointments and promotions and expounding on protections for tenure—to the Faculty Handbook.

With input from the senate executive and bylaws committees, various deans, constituent faculties, University administration and the Academic Affairs Committee of the CWRU Board of Trustees, the Faculty Senate's personnel committee spent the past year developing the language to implement recommendations from a report by the senate's Ad Hoc Committee to Define Membership in the CWRU Faculty. The senate adopted the committee report at its April 2002 meeting.

The proposed changes to the Faculty Handbook must be voted on by the entire University faculty and then the Board of Trustees, which has final approval at its May 19 meeting.

All faculty will be receiving a copy of the handbook revisions to review and a ballot to be returned to the secretary of the senate.A special meeting to discuss the proposed changes will be at 4:15 p.m. April 15 in Strosacker Auditorium. All faculty are welcome.

One of the main revisions recommended is to drop the term regular faculty in favor of three more specific categories: tenure/tenure track; non-tenure track; and special, which includes clinical, research, adjunct, visiting, part-time and a number of other titles. Currently, only full-time faculty are covered by the handbook.

In addition, classification of faculty would be determined by academic activities—teaching, scholarship and service—instead of source of income.

The recommendations also make it clear for tenure to reside at the constituent faculty (school) level and not at the department level.

In the current handbook, where tenure resides is ambiguous and has been interpreted in the past to be at the department level. According to the committee report, it is not realistic for tenure to reside at the University level at CWRU given the management center budget process.

The proposed handbook revisions also include a number of significant protections created for tenured faculty.

As for voting rights, the proposed modifications indicate tenure/tenure track and nontenure track faculty vote on all University-wide matters.

In addition to attending the April 15 meeting, faculty can contact their senate representatives or senate leadership to learn more about the proposed changes to the Faculty Handbook. For a list of members and other information on the Faculty Senate, go to http://www.cwru.edu/president/facsen/facsen.htm.

In other business at its March meeting, the Faculty Senate unanimously approved a proposal endorsing a systematic three-year replacement cycle for faculty personal computers and a resolution supporting the action of the University in becoming a signatory partner to the amicus brief filed in the University of Michigan's admission policy case. The brief supports a university's right to select who it invites to be part of its scholarly community and, therefore, to use diversity as one of many factors among admission criteria if it so chooses.