3 November2006

Dear USM Tenured Faculty Members,

On August 25, 2005 USMGC held a new faculty member orientation that welcomed over 20 new faculty members to the institution. Four days later, hurricane Katrina ravaged our beach front campus that had drawn these talented young academics to this wonderful place of potential. This group, along with approximately 45 faculty hires in the previous five years had the potential to significantly raise the quality of teaching, learning, and research at this campus and university.

On behalf of the Coastal faculty members, the Gulf Coast Faculty Council (GCFC) would like to acknowledge that University administrators, faculty, and staff have done a remarkable job in providing services for students on the Gulf Coast despite tremendous and unpredictable barriers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, it is amazing that student enrollment on the Coast is now above pre-Katrina numbers. To be able to continue to serve this fast growing student body and plans for future expansion, we need to maintain the talented faculty we worked so hard to amass over the past five years. As the elected representative body for the faculty on the Gulf Coast campus, the GCFC respectfully proposes the following procedures for this year’s evaluations.

1. Every coastal faculty member begins with 2 points in each of the three areas of evaluation:Teaching, Service, and Research to compensate for the coastal working conditions. Currently faculty members are sharing crowded office space (see pictures below), the library is a hallway with computers and two offices, the laboratory space is also crowded and available only for teaching not research, and typical campus services are non existent.

2. In many coastal departments there are no tenured faculty members who will sit on
evaluation committees. We strongly suggest that in these cases junior coastal faculty
members be asked for their input about their peers during the evaluation process. Although junior, these colleagues have a clear understanding of the reality of available resources and the daily workday on the coast.

This is a critical time of limbo and impending growth that requires sensitivity and fairness from senior faculty and personnel committees. Once the university and the faculty can overcome the numerous obstacles, the coastal campus will be a better more efficient facility able to draw talent worldwide. But in the meantime we need to maintain the talented new faculty we have recently hired so that when we rebuild, and build state of the art facilities, we have faculty poised to teach our students and positioned to engage in productive cutting edge research again.

Essentially we are in a holding pattern and the GCFC is asking that tenured faculty look at the long term impacts of overly critical evaluations at this time. Hiring new faculty members in almost any department given the overall living conditions, housing shortage, rising housing costs, lack of faculty office space, lack of a university campus and campus life will be challenging for the next few years. We have already lost coastal faculty members in business, psychology, biology, mathematics, world languages, history, and education. In some cases these faculty members left for personal reasons: loss of home, spouse employment, better job offers, etc. But we need not, as a campus in crisis, create a more stressful situation for a young faculty that was growing and improving with every hire pre-Katrina.

Attached to this document are pictures of the spaces that are being used for offices by coastal faculty members since Katrina. (http://www.usm.edu/fsenate/misc/GCFC_Fall06Letter.pdf) Thank you for your reflection, consideration, and exercise of fairness in these most unusual circumstances.

Respectfully,
The Gulf Coast Faculty Council

-- Edited by Reporter at 12:47, 2006-11-20

-- Edited by Reporter at 12:51, 2006-11-20