Our Academic Freedom & Tenure Committee often receives questions from current and prospective faculty wondering if the course load they are teaching or being offered is fair compared to other members of their department. Unfortunately, standard course loads are not universally published by departments at Waterloo.
It's also becoming increasingly clear that workload is an obstacle to addressing inequities on campus, including but not only for teaching-intensive faculty.
FAUW is monitoring the University's work on developing more avenues for assessing teaching, including Student Course Perception Surveys, peer evaluation, the Taskforce on Graduate Supervision, and more.
This is a new policy, initiated through our salary negotiations process in early 2021. Lori Curtis and Aimeé Morrison are the FAUW representatives on the drafting committee, which began meeting in early 2022. The minimum benefits to be covered under this policy already came into effect May 1, 2022.
In November 2021, following a few months of questions about specific procedures and practices that are not accounted for in the FAUW Constitution, and proposals to introduce new practices, the Board voted to undertake a comprehensive review of its governance documents and practices. The project was on hold until an Executive Manager was hired. In November 2022, the Board voted to proceed with CAUT conducting the governance review.
This is a new policy, initiated in 2019. FAUW representatives on this drafting committee are Jay Dolmage and Lori Curtis (who were the Equity Committee and Academic Freedom & Tenure Committee chairs, respectively, at the time the drafting committee was struck). The committee has submitted a draft to FRC and SRC.
The Ethical Behaviour policy (33) has been under review since 2014. A draft was sent to members of the UW community for consultation in 2019. In February 2023, the Faculty Relations Committee and the Staff Relations Committee held a joint meeting to discuss the latest draft (from 2021), to consider outstanding issues, and to press for implementation of the revised policy as soon as possible.