2004-05 Annual Report
June 20, 2005
To: Chancellor Ralph Cicerone
Re: Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Staff 2004-05 Annual Report
The Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Staff (CACSS) is pleased to submit its 2004-05 annual report.
It has been a productive year during which CACSS held a well-attended neighborhood meeting for staff with 5-15 years of
service, met with both Executive Vice Chancellor Michael Gottfredson and School of Medicine
Dean Thomas Cesario and continued its subcommittee work on various projects.
These subcommittees include Faculty Staff Relations, which
met with both MSOs and department chairs during the year and whose
annual report is attached.
Aiming to effect better communication between faculty and staff, the subcommittee
identified common themes, including the need for deans and chairs to set forth
clear expectations regarding appropriate behavior, consistency in
requirements and better training for MSOs, and offered proposed next steps for
leadership development programs and guidelines for chairs, which may help to address some of
the issues that concern staff (see below).
The report and analyses
of the Data Subcommittee also appear
in the appendix and contain statistics on hires and separations,
historical
staffing and demographic breakdowns.
It is important to
mention that the ratio of staff FTE to
filled faculty FTE, which had hovered around 3.80 to 3.90 for the past
several
years, dropped to 3.52 in October 2004, indicating that – for the first
time –
overall staffing on the general campus is failing to keep pace with
student and
faculty growth. This supports the
widespread contention of staff that, while workloads have been
increasing,
staffing has not. In addition to
refining its data, the subcommittee plans to collect comparison data on
staff
from peer institutions next year.
Although there are clear
indications of general satisfaction
with UCI as an employer, the results of the Staff Survey (conducted in
fall
2004), combined with issues raised at the neighborhood meeting and
comments
submitted to the chancellor’s web site, indicate that the same concerns
are
surfacing repeatedly and continue to preoccupy staff. To summarize:
- Lack of pay increases over the past three years;
- Lack of opportunity and
training for career advancement;
- Difficulty pursuing on-
and off-campus educational opportunities, due to lack of evening
courses, lack of practical degrees at UCI and issues with obtaining
release time for classes;
- Lack of available and
affordable childcare;
- Workload problems: while
it has been argued that the growth of staff has kept pace with faculty
overall, the data mentioned above suggest that this is not the case,
and there is widespread perception that in many areas staffing has not
kept up with increased workload;
- Inadequate training of
supervisors and a general lack of a coherent approach to training at
the campus level.
Attention to these
matters will make UCI a better and more
effective environment for everyone.
CACSS is grateful for the
opportunity to serve on this
important committee; its existence testifies to the fundamental role
that the
staff plays at UCI, and we very much appreciate the attention the
administration has given to our concerns.
Sincerely,
Linda Bauer
CACSS Acting Faculty Co-chair
Acting Dean, School of Humanities
James Hay
CACSS Staff Co-chair
Director, Facilities Management
Previous CACSS Annual Reports
2002-03
2003-04
