Towson State University
College of Liberal Arts
Date: January 22, 1990
To: Elaine Hedges, Sara Coulter, Dan Jones
From: Annette Chappell, Dean, College of Liberal Arts
Subject: assigned time/"bought time'
The university now seems inclined to return to the department/program at least some of the money a
grant brings in to buy a portion of a faculty member's load, where the grant funding is more than the
cost of part-time replacements. Concurrently, Norm has been requiring more and more justification of
all part-time sections in relation to •past practice.• Thus I sense a question of equity in instances of
split loads, and specifically in terms of Elaine's and Sara's loads in relation to the FIPSE grant and
possible continuation grants for the community college project.
As a first step toward resolving the equity issue, I propose that we formally establish a definition of the
normal load for both Elaine and Sara (based on historical principles), against which we can compare
the load in any particular semester. My proposal is that we define Elaine as 75% WMST and 25%
ENGL, since historically for many years her load (when not modified by FIPSE grants, assigned time
grants, etc.) has been 25% WMST Coordinator, 50% WMST teaching, and 25% ENGL teaching, and
that we define Sara as 100% ENGL, since she does not teach WMST, has not had WMST CoCoordinator
assigned time since the early '70's, and is partially WMST only when she has a FIPSE
grant.
The two results of accepting these definitions would be that (a) when Elaine or Sara receives funded
assigned time (faculty research, FIPSE, etc.), the part-time section(s) should be funded in the discipline
in which she dropped sections, whether or not that is the discipline in which the funded project takes
place (e.g., if Elaine drops her one ENGL class, then ENGL gets the p.t. money but if she drops one
of the WMST classes, then WMST gets the p.t. money) and (b) if any money based on replacement
(I'm not talking about operating money in the grants, only the kind of thing that happens when, for
instance, FIPSE gives us $10,000 to give assigned time for a portion of someone's load and it only
costs $5,000 to hire part-timers to replace that portion of load) is to go back to the discipline, it should
go to the discipline which had to cover with part-time (which is not necessarily the discipline which
received the grant) unless the two disciplines can agree to some other arrangement.
I think the university has already distributed the latter sort of money for this year, or at least for the fall
semester, and what I'm really talking about is coming to an understanding for the future.
Please let me know your reactions to this proposal. If you think we need to get together to talk it over,
I'll be glad to do so.
C15-DJASG$DS.69
