After more than six months of study and fine-tuning, UC Davis will soon launch an innovative, three-pronged approach to allocating new faculty positions among the campus's six general divisions and colleges.

The new approach — a collaboration of Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw, the Office of Resource Management and Planning and the Academic Senate — is designed to reevaluate every two years how to distribute new ladder-rank instruction and research faculty positions in an equitable, predictable and accountable fashion.

Of the total faculty FTE positions expected to open from growth or retirement, Hinshaw will allocate half the slots based on a formula that takes into account each division or college's base (2003-04 academic year) share of instruction and research as well as its actual growth in instruction and research. The formula uses the base and growth of such factors as each campus unit's number of majors, student credit hours of instruction in fall, winter, spring and summer, research dollars spent and the number of graduate students.

Hinshaw will allocate another 30 percent of the available positions using a competitive proposal process, and she will allocate the remaining 20 percent from a "Provost Reserve" to handle unexpected opportunities or challenges that the campus needs or wants to meet. The Academic Senate has and will continue to play a key role in the allocation process; it helped shape the distribution formula, for example, and its Committee on Academic Planning and Budget Review will review proposals submitted to the competitive process. "This process is open and transparent and is an effort to enable our deans and faculty to plan for a two-year period with certain assurances," Hinshaw said, "yet allows sufficient flexibility to address high-priority areas identified in a changing environment."

Daniel Simmons, a professor of law and chair of the Senate, praised Hinshaw "for her cooperation in developing a process that involves informed consultation with the Senate."

In launching the new process this July, the campus estimates that 125 ladder-rank instruction and research faculty FTE positions will open during the next two fiscal years, including 75 positions from growth and 50 from retirement.

Under the new approach, the provost has allocated 62.5 faculty FTE positions according to the formula, and an additional 2.5 faculty FTE positions using her Provost Reserve. Those positions break down this way: The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences will get the largest initial allocation of 14 faculty FTEs, followed by the Division of Social Sciences (13.0 FTEs), College of Engineering (11.5 FTEs), Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (9.0 FTEs), the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (also 9.0 FTEs) and the Division of Biological Sciences (8.5 FTEs).

Hinshaw exercised her power to use her Provost Reserve with regard to the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies.

When the Office of Resource Management and Planning crunched numbers concerning the allocation formula, analysts found that in every division and college but Humanities the likely number of retirement positions that will revert back to the provost is largely equivalent to the FTE allocations that the unit will receive in return from the formula. But Humanities was a noticeable exception, where the number of FTE positions that are likely to revert to the provost is about double the number of positions that would be reallocated back according to the formula. Recognizing the inequity, Hinshaw dipped into her Provost Reserve and added 2.5 FTEs to Humanities to boost its 6.5 FTE allocation to 9 FTEs.

The long-standing campus policy of reverting retirement FTEs back to the provost was suspended under former Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey during the 1990s, when the campus was experiencing rapid growth in students and faculty. It was also under Grey's tenure that the campus devised and implemented its last comprehensive faculty FTE allocation process, a five-year plan set to expire June 30, at the end of the current 2004-05 fiscal year.

Hinshaw began meeting last October with representatives of the Academic Senate and the Office of Resource Management and Planning to begin devising a new approach in the face of a growth curve that has flattened out. Indeed, she says the new approach "reflects our changing situation with regard to growth."

As part of this new approach, UC Davis on July 1 will return to the terms of campus policy that have called for positions vacated by retirement or death to revert to the provost and executive vice chancellor, while deans will retain positions vacated by resignation and department chairs will retain positions vacated by tenure denial at the department level.

The new process will not apply to the health sciences, where all vacated positions remain with the school. In addition, general campus professional schools (education, law and management) will generally not be subject to having vacated positions revert to the provost.

Both administrators and faculty praised the collaborative atmosphere in which they hammered out the new approach. For example, the Academic Senate's Committee on Academic Planning and Budget Review helped shape the allocation formula by recommending the inclusion of the number of graduate students in calculating the research factors. Hinshaw called the committee's friendly amendment "excellent input."

"The provost really did meet us at least half way, and maybe more when the research factor was revised to include graduate students," said Randolph Siverson, professor of political science and chair of the Committee on Academic Planning and Budget Review. "Everyone agrees that research belongs in the formula, but when it was first presented to (our committee), the measure was research dollars spent," Siverson said. "Some of us looked at that and thought, 'Well, that's fine but that really only measures expensive research and doesn't measure inexpensive research.' We thought graduate students. And ORMP and the provost said, 'That's fine.'"

At the same time, though, Siverson — speaking for himself and not the committee — said he still has problems with using research dollars in the formula: "Do we really believe that the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is doing 126 times more research than the Division of Humanities? Is the whole Division of Social Sciences doing 20 times less research than the College of Agriculture?"

Hinshaw responded that there "are many different indicators of quality, and I respect people's differing views on this. In the view of many, our high level of research funding benefits in many ways the entire campus and therefore should be respected in such allocations."

For more information on the new faculty FTE allocation process, including details on the competitive proposal process, see the UC Davis budget web site at http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/budget/.