QUESTION 17 Other workload issue(s) important to you (Please specify):

Would like to see automatic 0.5 course reduction for external grant holders.

I would like to see the university grant course release for the development of international field courses.

None

There is the problem that some of the better or at least more academically active profs have course reductions due to their grants. At the same time, they are prevented from teaching "overloads." This makes sense but does not make sense. Most of us are not so interested in the extra $5,000 or so but would like a course less the following term, if we do an overload this term. The problem is the AVP says if you have a course reduction there are no overload teaching gigs. This prevent us from teaching a bigger range of courses...
or perhaps seminar courses.

With the(Management) Phd program, if someone has even one student who has passed his or her comps, the prof. receives a course reduction for up to several years for supervision of the dissertation. The problem is that we have so many faculty in this position, courses do not get taught -- esp. to the undergrads.

I believe that professors in the faculty of Science are undercompensated for teaching labs. Personally, I find dealing with labs more onerous than giving lectures, but in terms of our teaching load, they are only worth half as much (i.e., 0.25 vs 0.5 for a lab (vs lecture) associated with a 1 semester course). On top of this, we often have to teach a lab as an overload, simply because of the arithmetic involved when assigning 2.5 or 3.0 course loads. The flip side of the coin is this: students should get more than 3 credit hours for taking a course with a lab.

Also, I don't believe that much recognition is given for thesis supervision. A paltry taxable stipend of a few hundred dollars is offered for supervising Honours theses, and not much for a Masters. Peanuts...

Recognition for academic advising at the departmental level

enhanced opportunity to secure release time stipends for active researchers

Rather than receiving a "cheque" on my end of semester pay for thesis supervision (most of which gets taxed anyway), I would rather this money be put into a seperate "fund" for each person that they could access to help alleviate the cost of conferences (e.g. use it to pay for my hotel costs or airfare ticket, etc).

Provide more systematic support for teaching large classes (e.g. reduced teaching load, or better teaching assistant support)

The possibility of reducing to 2-2 as the normal teaching load.

setting limits or norms on service requirements

Budget to hire better quality teaching assistants/graders in senior courses.

Recognition for librarians seconded to administrative positions (e.g. stipend and/or administrative leave provisions following service); Increased compensation for librarians on one-year professional development leave; Increased vacation allotment for librarians after x years of service (10 or 15 years, perhaps);

In some departments, programs are sustained through the mandatory teaching of overload, in spite of the fact that overload is supposed to be voluntary. Overload sometimes falls to junior faculty whose obligations to produced published research and engage in service; such overload interferes with career progress and should be ended.

Core courses in a department should be taught by full-time faculty, and shared equally. If a department allots most introductory courses to part-time faculty, then ALL introductory courses should be taught by part-time faculty.

teaching assistants need to assist faculty in various capacity besides marking assignments.

-would be useful to have a teaching reduction for department/program undergraduate coordinators

I am in favour of teaching-only positions and I think that, realistically, they are what we need to move forward towards a more research-inclusive institution that the university is struggling to become.

I understand that there are concerns about the university using such positions to replace regular faculty positions. To combat this, I would suggest that there be a cap on the number of such positions: for example, it could be stipulated that no more than 10% of all faculty positions be teaching positions. I would also be in favour of limiting the availability of such positions to departments that can be identified as research-focused.

There needs to be a mechanism for recognizing that teaching five sections involving 200 to 300 students is worth more to the university than delivering five section totaling less than 100 students. There should also be a minimum number of students that a faculty member must work with regardless of course releases. A faculty member with multiple releases for grants, research, graduate thesis supervision, etc shouldn't be able to deliver two graduate seminars to a total of 10-20 students.

Service obligations are particularly heavy on some faculty, in part, because so many others shirk every serious aspect of service. I think research/service should not be seen as a trade-off. I believe, unless we want administration to continue to grow and increasingly dominate policy and decision-making on campus, we must begin to see responsible service as a meaningful requirement for all faculty members...more than a paper membership on a do-nothing committee. Many successful researchers are rewarded not only with course relief, but with a blind-eye about failure to provide minimal service. If we cannot find a way to ensure a more balanced involvement in service from faculty members, there should be some form of compensation to those who allocate their valuable time to service activities.

Additional provisions for course reductions, perhaps in combination with reductions for newer faculty (read: first 3-4 years, pretenure), e.g., application process for course reductions to prepare grant proposals / preliminary research. At present, one basically needs success in obtaining extramural funding in order to obtain a course reduction. Grant success can lead to opportunities for reduced teaching loads, but high teaching loads hamper research productivity which, in turn, reduces likelihood of success at obtaining grants. In other words, allowing for some additional opportunities for reduced teaching loads (esp for newer faculty) would likely result in higher likelihood of faculty success at obtaining grants and related research success facilitated by major funding.

Programme Coordinators are given very short schrift in the current CA. They deserve better recognition, given the multiple tasks for which they are responsible that are NOT listed in the CA.

If the Administrative Leave clause was intended as a big juicy carrot, it certainly appears to be made of paper-mache. It is poorly conceived and likely will not be used much, so it should be dropped in favor of something more appealing.

The 3-2 load is acceptable; very few have been made to teach 3-3 I think, and I think more should.

- clarification of "recognition for Coordinators" - this should extend to departmental "undergraduate coordinators/advisors" (currently, such a role has no recognition, but a Graduate Program Coordinator - dealing with only a handful of students - receives a teaching reduction!).

- strongly encourage inclusion of full-time teaching faculty (at least, in the Faculty of Science, where there seems to be across-the-board support for such positions); such teaching faculty could provide a very valuable contribution to the university, and to our students. To avoid "abuse" of such positions (and/or the people hired into such positions), the number of such appointments per department should be limited, and the number of courses taught by limited to no more than 3-3 (plus a pre-determined percentage of administrative/service contribution to a department). Note (referring to the questions to follow below): teaching 5-5 is much, much too high ... it is very difficult for any faculty (whether they do research or not!) to teach effectively at more than 3 courses per semester; administrative/service duties could be assigned to such faculty, as long as the total amount of time spent on such activities was clearly defined/limited.

I would like to see clarification in the new CA of individual faculty members' obligations for administrative service within 1) their Departments first 2) the university and 3) the community at large. There has to be a minimum amount of work that Dept. members can be legitimately asked to do in Departmental governance - otherwise administrative workload becomes very unequally distributed when Dept. members literally "walk out" of administrative duties.

the current CA ties course release to numbers of majors in a program for coordinators - this should change - course releases for program coordinators should not be tied to numbers of students majoring in the program.

the definition of "program faculty" for interdisciplinary programs is problematic (dysfunctional) especially for small programs - this definition should not be tied to faculty teaching in the program - a more inclusive definition would also include faculty active in the administration of the program and teaching over a longer period than 1 year. Some interdisciplinary programs have their own definition of "program faculty" and this should be legitimized in the CA.

the "senate" and registrar requirement that 2 1/2 hour seminar courses can only be scheduled for 4:00 (4-6:00) or later is problematic for faculty and students. This leads to imbalances in course scheduling and limits choices for course availability to individual students.

If you study the CAUT Bulletin annual survey, SMU has a poor faculty-student ratio compared to other universities that are the same size or larger, while at the same time SMU faculty also have lower salary that faculty in those universities. This is especially true of several disciplines in the Arts. This needs to be addressed.
The definition of and remuneration for program coordination absolutely must be addressed in this round. It is a problem that affects workload, morale, the sense of collegiality and fairness on campus, research productivity, the health and well being of faculty, and student recruitment and retention. Again, the Faculty of Arts is particularly egregious on this issue. Coordination requires a tremendous amount of time and work that should be adequately compensated with a teaching release (0.5 FCE per year) and an appropriate honorarium based on the real number of students in a program (i.e., make sure students have declared Majors and Minors by the end of the first year). This issue has caused problems for Women's & Gender Studies, Atlantic Canada Studies, and Irish Studies. The definition of coordination must be extended to embrace our colleagues in Modern Languages. For decades the language programs have been coordinated by faculty in addition to their load without any recognition in pay or time. The language program coordinators carry out all of the duties of a Coordinator or Chair, except budget and promotion applications. (Thus in Modern Languages, the Chair receives an honorarium for work--student advising, policy, course and program development, section coordination, outreach, etc.--that is in large part completed by others!)

Course reduction for coordination of multi-section courses

n/a

Inequity in teaching between Arts and Science. "Contact time" is not an equitable division of workload. For example, over a 3 year period, in Arts an instructor would teach a total of 15 different courses (in some departments this also includes a lab component which is still counted as one course since 2 hrs lecture and 2 hrs lab) whereas in Science it would amount to only 10 courses. Separate courses requires additional time and energy regardless of the actual time spent in a classroom (e.g. course and assignment prep, marking, keeping current). The increased contact time in Science (with 3 courses per year) does not equal the increased workload that 2 extra courses per year places on Arts faculty. Another system must be developped. Even if the Arts load were to decrease to 2/2 it would be more equitable.

no

I think that focusing only on teaching reductions in exchange for service devalues teaching in favour of research. Teaching and research should be two equal pillars of activity and I think that professors should be able to engage in their full complement of teaching and also participate in other service activities, but have an understanding that the expectations for their research output are lessened during that time. This is harder to measure and quantify but it is something that could be codified in our culture and in the decision making process at promotion, tenure, review time. So research output would be accepted as lower if the person is taking on a high number of teaching duties and service activities.

I feel that increasing full time faculty complements is very important. Currently section 4.7 a) of the CA states that the teaching allotment of full-time faculty be greater than 70% of the FCEs offered by the university. Recent data from my Dept (Mgmt) shows that we are not reaching that number. Indeed, part-time faculty are teaching about 50% of our courses. This is unacceptable for a variety of reasons. 1) We are not able to offer advanced courses in some of our core areas (Human resources and industrial relations); 2) We are creating a two-tier system of part-timers versus full-timers - the part-timers make up half of our dept teaching load yet they are rarely on campus, they do not participate in departmental decision-making, they have limited office space, their working conditions are inferior, there is no consistency in instructors across courses over the years which reduces the quality for our students, they are not contributing to the university in terms of research or service; 3) Our class sizes are being raised (often without our notice) and we are being pressured to offer on-line courses taught by part-time faculty in order to keep up with the increasing enrollments. All of this causes the teaching quality and the collegiality of our department to suffer.
I feel that in this round of bargaining SMUFU should change the wording in s 4.7 to represent a per faculty assessment at the very least. A university wide average of this does no good.

I also think the union needs to address the changing philosophy of the administration from a teaching university to a research university and all sides need to be clear about the underlying implications of this.