Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Senate Reapportionment

Gary Copeland, Chair

Valerie Watts

Karen Rupp-Serrano

February, 2004

The Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Senate Reapportionment proposes a reapportionment of Faculty Senate seats as indicated in Table 1. The Faculty Senate, of course, has 50 members. The Faculty Handbook allocates one member, each, to the Graduate College and to Liberal Studies. The remaining 48 seats need to be allocated in a manner that is fair and that reflects the size of the faculty within each unit. In developing this recommendation the Committee made a number of decisions that need to be clear.

The first decisions we made deal with how to count faculty. Specifically, we had to decide how to count term appointments and how to count part-time faculty. In the first case, we include term appointments at the Assistant Professor level and above in our faculty count. For part-time faculty, we count them (at the Assistant level and above, term or tenured/tenure-track) according to their FTE. Using the FTE is consistent with the way we count split appointments. The “Total” column in Table 1 provides the total number of faculty in each unit when applying our decision rules.

The four non-degree units (Library, ROTC, Sarkeys, and Honors) are treated as a separate division. Sarkeys and Honors are combined and allocated one seat.

Rounding led to complications when trying to use a direct approach because it produced 51 seats rather than 50. Instead the Committee used the “Webster Method” of allocating seats. It basically gives each unit its whole number of seats and then allocates the remaining seats to the largest remaining fraction until all seats are allocated. While there are other methods, this approach seems to produce the least bias. To see a discussion on this point, go to: http://www.brookings.org/comm/policybriefs/pb88.htm.

Following these decision rules leads the Committee to recommend the allocations in the “Final Rec” column of Table 1 for the three years beginning with academic year 2004-2005.