FYI January 21, 1999

January 21, 1999

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U Relations VP
will retire
after 14 years
Ted Capener, 67, vice president for University Relations, will retire June 30, after serving the University under four presidents since 1985. During his service, Capener's responsibilities have included Media Services, Athletics, Government and Community Relations, University Communications, the Alumni Association, Pioneer Theatre Company, Kingsbury Hall, University Press, The Utah Museum of Natural History, and Red Butte Garden. He presided over continuous improvement in all these areas, including building of the Dolores DorŽ Eccles Broadcast Center, founding of FYI...a faculty/staff newsletter, creation of the Student Alumni Association, emergence of the U as a national power in athletics, creation of KULC Channel 9, restoration of Kingsbury Hall, dramatic expansion of Red Butte Garden, and the launching of Continuum...Magazine of the University of Utah. Capener also served as chairman of the board of the Public Broadcast System. A graduate of the U, he was a broadcast journalist for 27 years before coming to the University as vice president. He will continue to host the ÒCivic DialogueÓ program on KUED, and will otherwise turn his attention to a cabin near West Yellowstone and eight grandchildren.

Online game
gives feel for
state budget
At the State Board of Regents meeting held on campus, Gov. Mike Leavitt introduced an online Windows-compatible service that gives an idea of what lawmakers are up against as they play "The State Budget Game." The site lets you download a copy of LeavittÕs budget, and then change the numbers as you will. If you decide to, say, cut taxes or give state employees a higher raise, then the bottom line suddenly becomes a large negative amount, so you have to cut budgets somewhere else to make up the difference. To win, you have to balance.
The game can be found at www.governor.state.ut.us under "Governor's Office of Planning and Budget FY 2000."

Academy Award
CDs trace roots
to U of U, 'father
of digital sound'
According to news reports, Professor Emeritus Tom Stockham, Electrical Engineering, will receive an Academy Award for Technical Achievement Feb. 27 for his pioneering work as "the father of digital sound." During the 1970s Stockham developed the means for real-time digital sound recording that made compact audio disks possible. Robert Ingebretsen will share in the award for "pioneering work in the areas of wave-form editing, crossfades, and cut-and-paste techniques for digital audio editing."
Stockham previously received Emmy and Grammy Awards for the achievement. He also participated in the development of the Bose speaker systems, and his techniques are used in computer imaging as well. Stockham lives with his wife in a condominium near the mouth of Emigration Canyon.

Wetlands/riparian
center opens doors
The Center for Wetlands and Riparian Design is now in operation, with Prof. Don Hayes, Civil and Environmental Engineering, as director, and Jack Hamilton in the Utah Engineering Experiment Station as executive director. The center will use grant funding and sponsored projects to develop design and technical approaches to guide sensible development and management of wetlands and other associated lands. Hamilton says the center will form multidisciplinary and multi-university teams in its research. For information, contact him at jack.hamilton@m.cc.utah.edu.

Senate adopts
revised policy
on faculty ranks
The Academic Senate adopted a new version of Policy 9-2 in Faculty Regulations that defines how faculty ranks will be administered campuswide. The revised policy is intended to clearly define the distinctions between regular and auxiliary faculty, provide a consistent terminology, and recognize the contribution of auxiliary faculty while reaffirming the "centrality" of regular faculty to the University's mission.
The key points are:

"Regular" faculty are those committed full time to scholarly pursuits (creative), educational activities, and service to the University. Their ranks are Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, and Instructor (which does not have tenure), as well as the honorary ranks of Distinguished Professor, Presidential Professor, and University Professor.

Research ranks remain unchanged by the new policy.

The policy creates the new nontenured category of lecturer, to be used with the ranks of Professor, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor for full-time auxiliary faculty whose primary function is teaching. Ranks will be assigned and reviews carried out in the same manner as for research or clinical professorships.

"Auxiliary" is the general term used to define all nontenured ranks. These include research, clinical, lecturer, visiting, and adjunct professorships.

Adjunct appointments are for part-timers whose primary professional efforts are outside the department making the appointment, or outside the University.

The president, vice presidents, deans, and directors of libraries also have faculty rank. (A question was raised about whether academic librarians are regular faculty. This will be addressed at the next Senate meeting.)

Only regular faculty may vote in RPT matters and to elect senators, but otherwise, long-term instructional auxiliary faculty "should be accorded more substantial rights related to curricular matters and appointments within their areas of professional responsibility," the policy says. Colleges and departments are empowered by the policy to allow auxiliary faculty to vote on these matters.

Service as an instructor may be counted as part of the pre-tenure probationary period. Instructor appointments must be made for a limited term, not to exceed three years.

After three years of service, auxiliary faculty must be given at least three months notice of non-renewal of appointment.

Faculty rank appointments must adhere to the above system as current contracts expire.

Inasmuch as regular faculty should have the primary responsibility for design of curriculum and instruction, the administration will annually report to the Senate on the makeup of the faculty. For its part, he Senate will specifically consider the implications of the regular/auxiliary faculty ratio.

The policy changes will go to the Board of Trustees for review, and the final version will be posted in the Policy and Procedure Manual, available at www.admin.utah.edu/ppmanual, and at library reference desks.

Management tip
Still not using
a purchase card?
Give it a look
Campus offices that do not use the University Purchasing Card for making purchases should consider doing so, says program coordinator Peggy Lee. "The card is accepted the same as a MasterCard, with all the convenience that entails," Lee says. "You can use it at stores in lieu of purchase orders, and with mail-order firms, Web vendors, and the like." Some 600 cards are in use, in more than 150 U departments.
At the same time, administrators have more control over card purchases than they do limited POs or purchasing checks, because the card offers more transaction detail than current management reports. Each card is issued in the name of an individual.* Certain categories of merchants are excluded from accepting the card, such as airlines. Supervisors may place a dollar limit on transactions and use a secure Web site to monitor all transactions on the card. Reallocation of expenses to different chartfields can also be done easily on the secure Web site. Vendors are paid within days. For details about what the card can do, see www.acs.utah.edu/purchasing. To obtain a card, contact Peggy Lee in Purchasing at ext. 1-6623.
*Placing your name on a U of u card does not involve your personal credit record at all.

A Web site of note
For those who don't receive the printed version of the Health Sciences Report, it can now be found online at www.med.utah.edu/pubaffairs. The quarterly magazine covers achievements and perspectives of the Health Sciences Center.

Speakers Bureau links
campus experts
to community groups
The Office of University Communications Speakers Bureau is up and running, with some 100 faculty members, administrators, graduate students and staff available to talk to civic groups, clubs, organizations and schools on a variety of topics. Public appearances give community groups a way to call upon the expertise of the institution, and the resulting face-to-face interaction provides the best kind of public relations for the University. The speakers do not charge for their services, but are allowed to receive honorariums from organizations when it is standard practice.
"We've had tremendous response, both from our speakers and the community," says Speakers Bureau coordinator Allyne Betancourt. For information about joining or making use of the Speakers Bureau, contact Betancourt at ext. 1-6773, allyne@unicomm.utah.edu. Information on speakers and topics, and an online request form can be found at www.utah.edu/speakers.

Libraries strike back on high journal costs

U of U librarians and their counterparts at research universities around the country are making some progress against the runaway cost increases of scholarly journals, a national problem. The situation cannot be resolved overnight so U of U libraries will need major support from the 1999 Utah Legislature or face serious deterioration in the selection of journal titles available, says Sarah Michalak, director of Marriott Library.
The problem
As scholarly journals increasingly fall into the hands of profit-oriented publishing conglomerates, subscription prices are rising three times as fast as inflation, especially in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. Despite the fact that (for comparison) the U of U already subscribes to fewer journals than Brigham Young, New Mexico, or Colorado State universities, and half the number as Arizona State, the U libraries need $650,000 in catch-up base funding increases to see it through 2000 without serials cancellations.
No boycott
The U of U libraries are members of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition. SPARC is working to enhance price competition in the scholarly journal area. Two successes to date are reasonably priced new journals issued by the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. SPARC encourages professional and non-profit publishers to refrain from turning their journals over to commercial firms, asks faculty to emphasize quality instead of quantity in evaluating publication records of peers, fosters acceptance of electronic publication as an alternative to traditional journals, and supports creation of new highly authoritative peer-reviewed journals that are reasonably priced.
SPARC is not seeking a boycott of high-priced journals, as some legislators and others have suggested. "Not only would we lose access to the boycotted journals, academic libraries would open ourselves to lawsuits from publishers alleging restraint of trade," Michalak says.
Local Measures
Here at the U and within Utah, libraries are taking cost-saving measures. (1) Schools within the state subscribe jointly to electronic journals when available. "Contrary to what people think, electronic journals are not cheaper than their printed counterparts," says Michalak. "But they do lend themselves to sharing, and that enhances what we all have." (2) In general, there is more sharing among libraries through the Utah Academic Library Consortium. One method is the Web-based Utah Article Delivery Service. (See Dec. 16 FYI.) Marriott Library is more often a donor than receiver of shared materials, but there are savings from cooperation. (3) The U of U and Utah State University have placed a spending cap on journals acquired from Reed Elsevier, the largest supplier of the most expensive titles. "This has resulted in some cancellations, including the important but expensive Journal of Chromatography, where the Eccles Health Science Library stood its ground, even though it means sharing one copy with us," Michalak says.
What faculty can do
For their part, faculty can play a role in controlling costs. "Within your discipline, review the journals being used, and look for excellent publications that are reasonably priced," Michalak advises. She adds that being open to use of electronic journalsÑbased on quality and authoritativeness, rather than the mediumÑand encouraging publishing by professional associations as opposed to for-profit publishers can make a difference. "Influence those in your specialty to learn about this issue," she says.
"Even with state support, all these measures need time to take effect....The alternative is to dismantle our collection."