Faculty Senate met Monday afternoon in the Shiloh Room of the University Center.

One of the major issues discussed was how to respond to the Employee Code of Conduct, an HR policy that was created by the Office of Institutional Compliance for all branches of the university, but had no input from Faculty Senate.

The senate only became aware of the situation when the senate president, Steve Thomas, received an email in October that stated the code of conduct had been revised and effective on July 1, 2012. The email from the OIC also asked that Faculty Senate get the word out about the code of conduct.

While the senate discussed the issue, Thomas said that OIC meant no harm by not consulting Faculty Senate and was simply unaware that they needed to do so.

The Faculty Affairs Committee has since been working on an outline of issues that they have with the code, which is available on the Faculty Senate’s website at senate.utk.edu under the “Reports, Minutes & Publications” section.

One of the big concerns was how some policies of the code of conduct appear to infringe on the guarantees of academic freedom in the Faculty Handbook.

The senate voted for Faculty Affairs to draft a resolution with those concerns. If that resolution is passed, it would be sent up to administration to ideally start a conversation about changes being made or at least have the Senate’s concerns heard. The resolution would have no power to actually change the code of conduct, but would simply announce the senate’s concerns.

Phillip Daves, a member of the Faculty Affairs committee, said that the conversation would not be a confrontational one, but a discussion where concerns are raised and discussed.

“We’ll have a conversation with them. This is not an adversarial process,” Daves said. ” … It’s not going to start off as confrontational.”

He also elaborated on the main concern of the Faculty Senate.

“Mostly there are things there that appear in the code of conduct that are inconsistent with standard academic freedom guarantees,” Daves explained. “So we’ve got a Faculty Handbook that guarantees academic freedom and on one hand we’ve got a code of conduct that appears — and I’m no attorney, right? I can’t say what takes precedent — but it appears to be at variance with academic freedom.”

Benefit Equality Response

The Faculty Senate also discussed its formal response to Chancellor Jimmy Cheek and Chancellor Larry Arrington’s letter regarding benefits for domestic partners.

Published on Jan. 10, the letter from the chancellors was clarifying the university’s position on providing married partner benefits to the domestic partners of university faculty.

The gist of the letter was that as a state organization, the university is bound to the constitution of the State of Tennessee, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman and nullifies any policy that tries to imply that another form of union is on par with that definition (i.e. same-sex marriage, domestic partnership).

At the Feb. 4 Faculty Senate meeting, the senate discussed the letter with Cheek, who stood by the wording and policy of the letter. He offered the opportunity to further discuss the matter privately with any member of the senate if they desired.

The senate has since been working on its own response to the chancellors’ letter, and a draft of it was discussed at Monday’s meeting.

The general consensus of the Faculty Senate was in support of the response; however, there were some changes that members would like to see. While overall supportive of the response, some representatives wanted the letter to have a stronger tone to imply that Faculty Senate would be continuing to look for other routes to obtain benefits for domestic partners.

The senate then requested that the letter be sent back to Benefits & Professional Development Committee, which drafted and presented the response, for revision. The committee plans to also continue looking for alternative avenues to obtain equal benefits.

Steven Milewski, the chair for that committee, was the one to present the response to the senate. He was grateful for the input of the senate and said the next step is to put those concerns into the response.

“We’re going to discuss those (concerns) with the committee,” Milewski said. “Try and frame them more in line with what the Faculty Senate indicated that they wanted. Then we’re going to work further on some ideas we have and hopefully get a meeting set up with Chancellor Cheek. …”

Once the revisions have been made, the response will go for approval with the Faculty Senate Executive Council, and then ideally make its way to the next Faculty Senate meeting for further discussion and a possible vote of approval.

Kenton Yeager, also a member of the Benefits & Professional Development Committee, explained that the lengthy process may be burdensome, but necessary.

“It’s a slow process and there’s no way to rush it,” Yeager said.

The next Faculty Senate meeting will be at 3:30 p.m. on April 8 in the Shiloh Room of the UC.