The public support from the administration at UC Davis, where the majority of the 140 UC specialists work, follows a summer recommendation for membership from a systemwide task force and a 93-31 ballot vote by specialists in support of pursuing the idea.
These academics, who do research and outreach education as part of the national land-grant college mission established by Congress in 1860, have been excluded from the UC Academic Senate since 1920.
At issue are several privileges that senate membership brings, not the least of which is benefiting from the governor's pledge to increase senate faculty salaries over the next three years to reach parity among UC's peer institutions.
In addition, senate membership provides the right to have principal investigator status, allows specialists to apply for grants without asking for special permission, gives automatic eligibility for campus administrative positions such as departmental chairs and eligibility for campus Committee on Research funding, and allows full participation in graduate student education and training. However, at the Davis campus, specialists have been granted a blanket principal-investigator status.
At a December brown-bag briefing, Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef spoke about the issue of making the specialist faculty members of the Academic Senate.
"We feel we should recognize that, because across the country they are recognized [as members of the academic senate], the same should happen here," he said. However, Vanderhoef pointed out that the decision concerning senate membership must be decided by the ladder-rank faculty in the Academic Senate throughout the UC system. "We're putting this issue on the radar screen of the senate," said Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, vice provost for academic planning and personnel. "All around the country, specialists are members of their senates. We are an aberration in this regard."
According to a report submitted this summer to Tomlinson-Keasey's office by the Cooperative Extension Specialists' Task Force, specialists should be included in the senate for three reasons:
The UC Academic Council, which represents campus academic senates, is reluctant to recommend the specialists for senate membership, reported Jessica Utts, vice chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.
That's because faculty leaders worry the decision "might open a Pandora's box" for requests of similar membership from other non-senate academics, such as some faculty members in UC medical centers, Utts said. In recent years, more than 100 clinicians in the medical school and 30 diagnosticians in the California Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory were admitted to the senate.
According to the Cooperative Extension Specialists final report, "The members of the task force agreed that the functions of these two groups of faculty were not qualitatively different from the outreach education and applied research role of Cooperative Extension specialists."
The council decided against recommending membership for specialists at its November meeting after a lengthy discussion. However, at Utts' urging, the group asked the University Committee for Academic Personnel, as well as the divisions at UC Berkeley, Davis and Riverside to look at how the Cooperative Extension faculty can be integrated into their departments.
"The issue isn't closed; it's just back at the campuses," Utts said. If the Davis senate were to advocate membership for its 93 specialists, she believes the systemwide faculty leaders would be willing to reopen the issue.
UC Davis specialists, who are housed in about 20 departments in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, represent the vast majority of their group in the UC system. The Riverside and Berkeley campuses employ fewer than 20 specialists on each of their campuses.
The issue of specialist representation, however, is only one of two outstanding concerns among those in Cooperative Extension, points out Michael Reid, associate dean of environmental and resource science and policy in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. The other issue involves salary and academic recognition of the 360 Cooperative Extension advisors who are stationed throughout the state.
"The advisors and specialists are all part of the academy. For the specialists, it's important to be a close-knit team with the advisors," said Reid, one of only five specialists at UC Davis with senate membership because of his three-way appointment among Cooperative Extension, organized research and instructional research.
Advisors, too, are concerned about receiving salary raises as well as being acknowledged as an integral group of academics within the University of California. Most have at least a master's degree in their field and many are doing research that is published in peer-reviewed journals, Reid said. However, they are not being proposed for membership in the senate because of different educational backgrounds and responsibilities.
Instead, the Office of the President is conducting a national salary survey to see how UC Cooperative Extension advisors stack up against their counterparts at other land-grant colleges. Many advisors believe that their research and outreach responsibilities in the UC system are quite different than those of advisors in other states and that the surveys will be invalid, Reid reported.
Reid, like Tomlinson-Keasey, believes that the general UC faculty is unaware of but needs to understand the importance of activities of Cooperative Extension specialists and advisors to the university.
"Why should the senate care? We are a state-funded institution and we need to justify the money we spend and demonstrate our value to society," Reid said. "We have a cadre of 500 advisors and specialists whose goal is to make research relevant and to bring to the university society's research needs."
