At one of the largest meetings of the Representative Assembly in recent history, the group endorsed forming a Special Committee on the Academic Personnel Processes to study faculty pay and promotion at UC Davis. The standing-room-only gathering on Nov. 22 was called by petition to consider the formation of the special committee by the Davis Division of the Academic Senate's Executive Council. In a majority vote to endorse the committee, the assembly amended the committee charge and restricted group membership. The council is expected to accept the assembly's recommendations and have members appointed by the end of the quarter, reported Academic Senate Chair Jeffery Gibeling, a chemical engineering and materials science professor. Concern over faculty promotion practices, as well as news that UC Davis faculty salaries are generally at or near the bottom of the UC system prompted Gibeling to ask the Executive Council to appoint the special committee. Its task is to identify the factors affecting relative salaries and study UC Davis merit and promotional practices. The assembly voted at the meeting a week ago last Monday to restrict the special committee members to those within the Academic Senate and to exclude any faculty member who has been a member of the Committee on Academic Personnel in the past 10 years and those from the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Personnel. In addition, the assembly asked the special committee to examine whether the Committee on Academic Personnel's internal policies are in agreement with the bylaws of the systemwide and Davis Division Academic Senate and the Academic Personnel Manual. Specifically, the special committee has been asked by the Executive Council to report by May 1 its findings and recommendations about the following topics: * The salary and step/rank data for the Davis campus in comparison to other UC campuses; and * The current academic personnel policies, procedures and standards at UC Davis with the goal of recommending improvements (if any are necessary). Law professor John Oakley, a member of the senate's Executive Council, emphasized to the Representative Assembly that the charge for the special committee was written broadly so that the entire process -- not just the actions of the senate's Committee on Academic Personnel -- was to be reviewed. Because of the need to keep faculty cases confidential, the special committee will deal only with aggregate information, such as the number of actions, denials and reversals rather than specific cases, Gibeling said. "It's important to recognize that the committee will be able to ask for data other than what has been published in the Committee on Academic Personnel's annual reports," Gibeling told Dateline. "This might include statistics on the rates of advancement of department chairs." Other information may be helpful, he added, including, the various policy statements that the Committee on Academic Personnel has made in its annual report and on its Web page. The special committee has been asked whether the Davis campus is too conservative in its standards and, if so, to determine where in the process that conservative attitude is most evident. In addition, the committee will be looking at the consistency among standards for advancement at all steps of the review process. It has been asked to judge whether personnel decisions properly reflect the degree of flexibility recommended in the 1991 Report of the University Task Force on Faculty Rewards, also known as The Pister Report for its chair, then interim Chancellor Karl Pister of UC Santa Cruz. That report suggested that from time to time, tenured faculty should be permitted to emphasize particular areas of professional endeavor other than research -- teaching, public service and university service -- and be rewarded for meritorious achievements in those endeavors. Other issues to be investigated include whether the personnel decisions are being made at the appropriate levels and whether the sizes and compositions for the Committee on Academic Personnel or the school and college personnel committees are appropriate for the breadth and intellectual diversity of the campus. In addition, the report will consider whether the benefits of the personnel practices are worth the cost of time to faculty and staff members preparing the documentation. The committee has also been asked whether there is "reason to believe that compromises of confidentiality have undermined collegial respect of the academic personnel process." Along with its report, the special committee is to present any changes to senate bylaws or the Academic Personnel Manual in draft form by May 1. A final report will be given at the first meeting of the Representative Assembly for the 2000-01 academic year. Also at the Representative Assembly meeting Nov. 22, a renewed motion to reject last year's annual report by the Committee on Academic Personnel as a symbolic gesture of dissatisfaction failed by a vote of 4-58. The complete charge and list of members will be posted to the Academic Senate Web site when they are finalized.