Presidents Report

May 9, 2003

System Faculty Council News

1. Program discontinuance and faculty severance packages are being examined for cutting back from the current policy of providing one year notice and one month of severance pay for every year of tenured service up to a maximum of 24 months.

2. Associate VP McNally reported that faculty should expect 15% increases in their health insurance premiums for each of the next five years.

3. CU is seeking enterprise status that would take tuition out from under TABOR caps. This would also give us more funding flexibility in that it would give us bonding authority and funds obtained from bonds can be mixed with other finds to finance capital construction projects whereas funds obtained via COPS can not be mixed with other funds.

4. President Hoffman is negotiating with the CCHE on the size of next year’s tuition increase.

5. Faculty council is examining the possibility of tuition benefits of some kind.

6. Faculty council has passed a new sexual harassment policy and a new uniform grading policy.

7. LETTS is examining better ways of doing the FCQs and Mark Malone has been asked to begin talks with the regents about amending the current policy requiring each campus to use a standard form. There was widespread discontent with the current FCQ practices except at the Health Sciences Center, which uses different electronic forms and uses them only for formative purposes.