14 years later: A new faculty handbook

A lot has changed in the past fourteen years. The rise of Google, Facebook, and iTunes, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crash, and election of the first black United States president. But for the faculty on the campus of NC Central University, time seems to have  been at a standstill.

The faculty handbook currently in use was last revised in 1997. Of the 17 schools in the UNC system, only NCCU, UNC-Chapel Hill and Fayetteville State University still work from faculty governance documents that date before 2003.

Of these three, NCCU's is the only that is unavailable online in its entirety. For several years, the Faculty Handbook Committee has been rewriting and working to get approval for a new edition.

The past two years have seen the bulk of the forward movement, and the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate, led by Vicki Lamb, sociology professor and Chair of the Handbook Committee, have been working non-stop to get it through the many drafts and approval processes.

Online Document

The handbook, which will be published as an electronic document, will be available to the public through Eagles Online which has helped to garner support for the update.

"When I was hired five years ago," says Lamb, "I asked to see the handbook and it was not available because they were not publishing new copies every year."

"There was nothing there before except the hard copy," adds Minnie Sangster, French professor and Chair of the NCCU Faculty Senate, "and it was very difficult to get those made because they were 266 pages, just huge."

The handbook that is currently in process will be 115 pages. Much of the reduction is due to the elimination of pages that are now covered by the hot links, and the removal of information in the 1997 edition that applied to staff, such as facilities services and administrative assistants, that was unnecessary to include in a faculty-specific document.

The online document will also be searchable, which will make for greater ease of use.

"This one is going to be a living document, and it is going to be possible for it to be revised every year." says Sangster.

In fact, written into the handbook is the stipulation that it be reviewed annually, at the beginning of the Fall semester and that all links are checked to ensure that they are still operational and applicable.

"Changes, suggestions and updates will be suggested in the fall of every semester."

The changes will then go through the standard approval process and, if the changes gain approval at all stops, they would be enacted on July 1 of the following year after the UNC Board of Governors' June meeting. 

No Easy Task

"I think it's important for our faculty to know, and students as well," says Sangster, "what a long and difficult process this has been and how hard the faculty who have been working on this have worked to come to this point."

The partial PDF of the 1997 handbook, which is available online, was only put into place after 2007, when the initial idea of a revision was voiced by the Board of Trustees.

The document was not published in editable form, so library science graduate students were enlisted by Deborah Swain, to help type the information.

There was a set back in the process when an early draft left campus with a professor who is no longer with the university. Additionally, a portion of the handbook that addresses the revision of the constitution of the faculty senate and a revision of the bylaws that are attached to that constitution had to go through a separate process for approval in order to be included.

Tenure/Promotion

"One of the reasons we have pushed so hard to get it done this year is that the Board of Trustees insisted that the handbook be updated," says Lamb, "14 years is a long time."

For the most part, the revised handbook will be putting into place a direct statement of practices which most professors have already been adhering.

"This has just codified things that have been in practice for a very long time," states Lamb.

There are, of course, the inevitable edits that have caused some rumbling among the faculty.

One such change involves the process of promotion and tenure, for which Chancellor Nelms has suggested university-wide minimum criteria.

"Currently the department or the school where a person is hired," says Sangster, "sets the criteria for tenure and promotion."

With the change, each department would have a minimal requirements, such as publishing two peer-reviewed publications while working at NCCU, but each department would also be expected to place additional expectations on top of these baseline guides.     There is a dispensation for those faculty members who are, or will be, employed before the final approval of the new handbook.

These persons will continue to be sheltered under the tenure guidelines as outlined in the handbook that was in place upon their initial employment with NCCU. Anyone hired after July 1, 2011 would be held to the new requirements as stated in the revised handbook.

With the exception of the promotion exemption, policies in the  new handbook would apply to all faculty. 

What's Next?

The latest draft of the document was passed at 84 percent  approval at the last faculty meeting on April 14. The handbook will next be presented at the Board of Trustees meeting on Wednesday, April 27.

After that, it will go before the Board of Governors meeting in June. If it passes all of theses hurdles, the new handbook will go into effect on July 1.