One fourth of Loyola’s faculty members may be getting extra attention soon if a proposal is passed that will review their responsibilities and expectations.

The proposal, written by both extraordinary and ordinary faculty, has been created to study and review the responsibilities and expectations of extraordinary faculty, or non-tenure track faculty members.

The proposal deals with issues such as job security and expectations of contract renewal. It was initiated last year by the Center for Faculty Innovation, an advisory committee working on all matters related to faculty development and mentoring.

Melanie McKay, vice provost for Faculty Affairs, and Robert Bell, director of Writing Across the Curriculum, discussed the status of extraordinary faculty in a meeting for the center.

“This committee asked Robert Bell to create a group to study the status of extraordinary faculty at Loyola and make a proposal for changes if they felt changes were called for,” McKay said. “He put together this group, kind of an Ad-Hoc committee of this larger committee and did a survey last May to gather information for their study, with an 80 percent response rate.”

The distinction between extraordinary, or non-tenure-track faculty, and ordinary faculty, tenured and tenure-track faculty, is found throughout American higher education, McKay said.

“Ordinary faculty are hired with the eligibility for tenure and with the expectation that they will split their time between teaching, researching and doing service by doing contributions to original research,” McKay said. “Extraordinary faculty, on the other hand, are usually hired as teaching faculty only and on the basis of an annual contract, which is not necessarily renewable.”

The proposal was then presented to the University Senate, which decided to get involved by enlarging the subcommittee and bringing some ordinary faculty to work with the extraordinary faculty members on the proposal.

Barbara Ewell, University Senate chairwoman and English professor, said the role of extraordinary faculty needs to be discussed since it affects the whole university.

“The (Faculty) Handbook, which is currently under revision, has only about one paragraph on extraordinary faculty, because at the time it was created it did not envision as many extraordinary faculty as we now have,” Ewell said. “We need to look at where we really are right now in order to get more consistency in how we treat their rights and responsibilities.”

Loyola has a current ratio of approximately 75 percent ordinary to 25 percent extraordinary faculty, while many other universities have a greater ratio of non-tenure-track faculty, McKay said.

“At a lot of universities, there’s a kind of revolving door where non-tenure-track faculty are either part-time, or they’re hired for a year and then they revolve out,” McKay said. “While we have some one-year appointments and ‘visiting’ faculty positions, we have many other cases of extraordinary faculty who have continued at Loyola for years, who are deeply integrated with the university and its mission and who do some of our most important teaching.”

Judith Corro can be reached at [email protected]