November 2021 Meeting

Updates from Chancellor White
Chancellor White would like to share an update on two UAF hiring recruitment's. The search for a permanent Vice Chancellor for Research is currently taking place, the search committee is reviewing two or three finalists. They will come to campus over the next few weeks, public forums will be taking place in the evenings. The Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs recruitment  is open.  Ali Knabe is currently serving as the interim. This recruitment will start as an internal search for candidates and can be made larger as needed. 
 
The November Board of Regents meeting will take place on the 11th and 12th. The budget proposal will be reviewed and then forwarded to the governor. The tuition differential proposal will also be presented to the board. Essentially the proposal is for a flat budget, last year the governor said he would accept the legislature's add-back funding from some of the cuts. There was still less money for FY22, but not as large of a cut as the original compact stated. The governor said we would move that additional cut to FY23. President Pat Pitney made a compelling argument that the unreimbursed reduction we had from COVID was equal to the amount added back by the legislature, therefore the university had met the compact. The budget includes fixed cost increases, and compensation increases. It's our hope compensation will be added to the budget. There are a few projects that the governor has been interested in that we expect to see in the proposal, those projects funds would be one time funding. 
 
Our tuition differential proposal will allow us to create different tuition rates for research university courses and CTC courses. One tuition rate for the system causes CTC students to pay research university rates for CTC classes, which puts the cost at almost double what their peer institutions pay for tuition. The attempt to solve that problem was to have a separate lower division tuition rate than the upper division tuition. We’ve learned that it is not a best practice for a university to have separate lower and upper division rates. It creates a gap between the two rates that has grown over the years. Creating a big budget shock to students when they go from their sophomore to junior year. The tuition differential will allow the CTC tuition and the research tuition to be separate. We would freeze the CTC rates, while increasing the research rates. Due to the significant gap the tuition increase would take place over the next two years. The lower division increase impact is relatively small and affects about 11% of students this year. 
The Chancellor continues to receive requests for specific vaccinations for intramural basketball and intramural hockey, an option for the pub to require vaccination or a negative test for specific kinds of events. Chancellor White continues to submit these to the President for her approval. 
 
Staff Council President Ronnie Houchin's Report
Staff Council President Ronnie Houchin gave an update on the next steps to addressing staff morale. Chancellor White asked that Ronnie coordinates time with each vice chancellor to discuss the results specific to the areas that they oversee. Ronnie plans on scheduling these meetings in the coming weeks. If you have ideas or things the staff council can do to improve morale please share those with us. 
 
The Faculty Senate passed a motion to create a committee to look at responses to the expedited administrative management review that took place last spring. Ronnie has joined that committee and is starting to take a look at the public communications to see what recommendations have been acted upon. 
 
Staff Council Vice President Juella Sparks Report 
 
Vice Provost & Accreditation Liaison Alex Fitts
Alex Fitts would like to share the Proposed New Accreditation Indicators. Please review and provide your feedback by December 18th, 2021. We are on a seven year cycle of accreditation, our accreditation was reaffirmed last fall. We are in the process of rethinking what we want to focus on this next cycle. We are required to have a set of indicators, these are the metrics that we determine as a university in addition to a few required by the NWCCU. Our previous accreditation cycle had 31 indicators and five core themes. NWCCU has done away with the term “core themes requirement” but we will have some general areas of focus based on their updated standards. UAF formed an accreditation team about 2 years prior to our site visit, the subgroup of that team then focused on the metrics. That subgroup reviewed the new NWCCU standards and one of the important piece of feedback was that thirty one indicators were too many. To develop our indicators the subgroup integrated the strategic plan and looked at the statewide goals and measures to achieve alignment where possible. By identifying key elements of institutional planning that can be defined as goals and measured over time. The next step is to collect feedback by December 18th, make any edits and present to the Chancellor's Cabinet. UAF should finalize the set of indicators and begin tracking data by Spring 2022. 
 
Chief Human Resources Officer David Bishko 
CHRO David Bishko joins us to give a brief update on the COVID-19 Vaccination Requirement. If you would like to view the Q & A session please refer to minute 00:57 in the staff council recording.  UAF willbe going by the federal contractor mandate, that applies mostly to Fairbanks employees and anybody that’s associated with a federal contract. The Federal Government has said in order to receive the contract money, you must be vaccinated. The vaccination deadline of December 8th has now been extended to January 4th. While we are not abiding by the OSHA guidelines because we do not know if that applies to us. The Federal Government did want to align all the deadlines. UAA and UAS do not meet the threshold of federal grants that is why they are not included in this mandate. HR will send out details next week on how to submit your vaccination records with HR. If you are concerned about storing your vaccination records there are other ways to verify, via zoom or showing an authorized employee your vaccination card. HR will be reviewing the medical exemptions with Dr. Hennessy. The religious exemption request attestations will be reviewed but HR will not be making decisions about one religion versus another. The expectation is to meet accommodations for sincerely held religious beliefs.  If an employee is denied an exemption they will receive communication stating why. HR will be flexible working with those employees. Contractors under federal contracts will be required to be vaccinated, other contractors on campus will not be required. Statewide employees are included in the Troth Yeddha Fairbanks campus requirement. The vaccine will be a condition of employment but it has not been discussed if any side effects will be covered. If an employee is non-compliant with the vaccine requirement and has not obtained a waiver they are no longer meeting the working conditions and will likely resign. UAF has a call into public health to schedule a pop-up clinic on campus for vaccinations.