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The Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs met in the Alexander G. Ruthven Building Monday afternoon to hear reports from the chairs of various SACUA subcommittees, including the Medical Affairs Committee, General Counsel Advisory Committee and the Committee for Fairness, Equity and Inclusion.
Tom Braun, professor of biostatistics and SACUA chair, opened the meeting with a discussion of a proposed resolution to an amendment that will be discussed at the upcoming special University Senate meeting on May 25. This resolution would expand the Senate to include medical faculty.
“There is one additional resolution that was submitted to us that we will be discussing on May 25,” Braun said. “This is an amendment as submitted by the authors to the original resolution to now include lecturers as well in our expansion of the Senate.”
The meeting then transitioned to hearing reports from various subcommittees. Analisa DiFeo, associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Obstetrics & Gynecology and chair of the Medical Affairs Committee, provided a report on issues the committee raised with Michigan Medicine CEO Marschall Runge, including faculty and staff burnout. DiFeo said faculty and staff burnout arises when physicians are not satisfied with the work they are tasked with doing.
“The stress and burnout really comes from the physicians feeling like they’re not actually getting to do the job that they’re supposed to be doing, because they’re doing a lot more administrative work, (as well as) the issues of lack of staff and inability to fill vacant positions,” DiFeo said.
DiFeo said though there are many wellness initiatives across campus, it would be helpful if they were centralized and easier for faculty and staff experiencing burnout to find.
“We should better coordinate a way to inform faculty of where (wellness initiatives) are (and) how they can access them,” DiFeo said. “It should not be siloed in various places or various departments. There should be a location where (staff) should be able to find them all in one place.”
Braun said he believes the committee should discuss DiFeo’s report and findings on faculty burnout when they speak with University Provost Laurie McCauley at a future meeting.
“When we first met with the provost, she said one of her major initiatives was faculty well-being (and) mental health, and I haven’t heard much since,” Braun said. “I think what you’re learning is useful for us to inform the Provost moving forward.”
Yasmina Laouar, associate professor of microbiology and immunology and chair of the Committee on the Economic and Social Well-Being of the Faculty, reported on the committee’s goal of producing a study on faculty salary by gender and race.
“The goal is, once we have this data within two years, we can identify whether discrepancy happened in (the) unit, and then at the level of SACUA we could reach out to chairs or deans to point to some discrepancy in salary,” Laouar said. “We agreed that the University is investing a lot of effort in diversity. Hopefully, in the next year we will have a more diverse cohort. Now what are we doing in terms of salary?”
Laouar said the committee raised the idea to McCauley, but they were told the study could not be completed by her office.
“We sent this letter through the former SACUA chair Allen Liu to Provost McCauley, and the answer came back negative,” Laouar said. “(It is a) complex subject (and) a little bit difficult to manage, (so) it will not be done at her level.”
Luke McCarthy, director of the Faculty Senate, told Laouar that the Faculty Senate would work on the salary study.
“In SACUA, there’s a lot of interest to go ahead, and if the provost isn’t going to do this, then this is something that the Faculty Senate can push through,” McCarthy said. “We’ve communicated to the provost our intention of ‘if you’re not going to do a salary study, then the faculty might run with this ball.’ ”
Yulia Sevryugina, chemistry librarian and chair of the Research Advisory Committee, said the committee focused on learning about a variety of research initiatives by the University.
“We learned about (the) Research Data Stewardship Initiative, (the) opioid epidemic initiative (in the) Opioid Research Institute, about research halls on campus and some issues (and) concerns,” Sevryugina said.
Nicolai Lehnert, professor of chemistry and biophysics and chair of the Committee for Fairness, Equity and Inclusion, said the committee had put forward ideas to analyze campus climate.
“In terms of tracking campus climate, there were two major things that we came up with,” Lehnert said. “We wanted to see if (the Equity, Civil Rights, and Title IX Office) could release a report on race-based misconduct … and then analyze the data. The other idea that we had was looking at exit interviews….if you look at the (ADVANCE Program) report, 40 to 50 percent of the faculty that they interviewed mentioned that campus climate was an important issue why they were leaving.”
However, Lehnert said it would be difficult to obtain data to research exit interviews because they are done by local departments rather than the University’s Department of Human Resources.
“This is more complicated than we had thought,” Lehnert. “When faculty decide to leave, this is all handled by the HR Department in their units and the University’s HR doesn’t even know about this until faculty have already left, so it’s very difficult to interview faculty when they’re already gone.”
Rogério Pinto, associate dean for research and innovation at the School of Social Work and chair of the General Counsel’s Advisory Committee, said the committee discussed how to handle student complaints such as emails about changing final grades, and the possibility of raising this issue to the Board of Regents.
“We were all very moved by how people described what they’re perceiving in the classroom, and the (General) Counsel was very open to us trying to create a statement which would then be used by the Regents that would in some ways not be legally binding but a statement of solidarity with faculty,” Pinto said.
Daily Staff Reporter Joshua Nicholson can be reached at joshuni@umich.edu.