The subgroup for academic personnel, which included both faculty and staff, engaged in a robust set of discussions of the issues identified in the survey data. This data, coupled with their own experiences, outreach and informal interviews with colleagues who have engaged with academic personnel actions in recent years, informed their recommendations for the faculty merit and promotion case process
Simultaneous to the work of the taskforce, the Office of the Vice Provost for the Faculty and the Academic Personnel Office were engaging in their own process improvement efforts — many of which aligned with what the task force lifted up. Especially illuminating was the deep dive that the Office for Faculty Equity and Welfare did through analysis of timelines within AP recruitments to highlight where bottlenecks were and how to address those needs. The ongoing efforts in academic personnel streamlining led by those in the Office of the VPF, APO and OFEW can be found here: https://vpf.berkeley.edu/policies-programs/streamlining
Challenges
Recurring themes in feedback included long timelines for regular merit cases and confusion about what should be submitted for favorable review. Decisions delayed beyond the effective date of actions resulting in months to a year of retroactive pay adjustments are not uncommon. Many faculty feel the need to “overachieve” in preparing their merit cases. This leads to duplication of documentation and redundancy of effort on the part of both faculty and staff.
The faculty review process is extremely personnel-as-a-resource intensive, including the faculty member, department staff, department leadership, college staff, college leadership and campus reviewers. This comes at a significant cost that must be weighed against the benefit, particularly for non-threshold merit reviews. Specifically, the following challenges related to the faculty merit and promotion case process were identified:
- Regular merit reviews take too long and communication of outcomes are delayed without explanation;
- The various memos and documents that make up faculty cases are frequently redundant (e.g., information included on the CV and in other documentation is entered into APBears and vice versa); and
- Guidance and messaging are frequently inconsistent and expectations and terminology seemingly shift regularly, sometimes in the middle of a review cycle.
Recommended paths forward
The task force commends the Office of the VPF and APO staff who are engaging in streamlining work in support of bureaucracy reduction and better processes. We look forward to the outcomes of their ongoing efforts and encourage regular engagement with key academic department stakeholders (e.g., department chairs, faculty, AP analysts, etc.) to ensure optimal results. In terms of areas to focus on for ongoing improvement, we recommend efforts that:
- Reduce the volume and eliminate duplication of materials submitted by the faculty, the department and the college;
- Reduce the time that cases spend in APO after the Budget Committee processes them: publish service level agreements and/or adopt transparency regarding timelines;
- Provide clear expectations for faculty self-assessments, with respect to both content and length;
- Streamline AP Bears to eliminate duplication; require only CV upload, publication list and confirmation of teaching and graduate mentorship records;
- Eliminate long letters for non-threshold cases by creating a two-page checksheet (modeled on the Assistant Professor first merit checklist) and by establishing the expectation that the Budget Committee will request additional information from departments when required in their evaluation of the case; and
- Adopt the use of DocuSign for APO forms and signatures.