Council revises grievance policy

By Nathan Winters

Published Feb. 29, 2008

The MU Faculty Council passed revisions Thursday to the proposed grievance policy that the council previously approved on Jan. 24.

Faculty Affairs Chairwoman Leona Rubin said the new revisions were made after meeting with officials at University Hall, the headquarters of the UM system.

One of the major revisions was the elimination of the proposed opt-out clause, which would allow a grievant to bypass the grievance system and file a lawsuit.

“They didn’t think including an opt-out clause would make the document viable,” Rubin said.

The council revised a previous revision regarding the chancellor’s time frame on making a decision.

“The other major issue we discussed was the language that we included that if the chancellor doesn’t rule on a case within 90 days, that the hearing panel’s decision would be upheld, and they obviously would not accept that,” Rubin said.

Rubin said the new revision would require the chancellor to provide more information on why his decision is late.

“It includes a statement that requires the chancellor, if he misses the 90-day deadline, to write an explanation for the delay and to set a new deadline that must occur within 14 days, and he needs to do that every 14 days he is late,” Rubin said.

Even though this creates a situation in which the chancellor could continuously request for extensions, Rubin said he thought this increased communication would encourage the chancellor to make a decision.

“Initially we thought we were creating a never-ending scenario, but in fact what it creates is a rather embarrassing paper trail, which if it ends up going to a trial could be quite damaging,” Rubin said.

In addition to the two major changes, Rubin said some smaller changes were made, including a clause that would eliminate anonymous statements.

The revisions were not passed by a unanimous vote though. Faculty Council member Edward Adelstein was the only member of the council present who voted no.

Adelstein said the policy hadn’t be revised enough to be considered an improvement.

“People who win their grievances often get nothing as a matter of fact,” he said. “They consistently violate the spirit and the rules of the grievance process, and so we can do one thing. We can go sniveling around and say, ‘Great, we’ll change it so that you always have the option to win,’ or we can abandon the grievance process as a vote of no confidence to the administration, and you have very little to lose. It’s the principle of the thing.”

Adelstein did say though that past changes to the grievance policy have improved it.

“The work that’s been done has not been totally in vain,” Adelstein said.

Faculty Council member Michael Devaney warned that not approving the revisions would be an unwise step to take.

“If we don’t accept these changes, we revert back to a process which was very ineffective and led to 25 or 30 cases being interminably held at the presidents level that were never going to be reconciled,” Devaney said. “So I think we really have little choice in the matter. We can’t abandon the process because if we do nothing, we go to the previous system.”

The next step to change the grievance process would be proposed revisions through the legal department at MU, and then to a faculty vote.