University Times

Some 1,300 School of Medicine faculty members are being asked whether they want to form a faculty association.

In a March 13 letter to all full-time medical faculty, a committee of senior professors wrote that the association's aims would be to:

* "Preserve the professional and scholarly values held by the faculty."

* "Protect and strengthen the privileges and responsibilities traditionally reserved to the faculty."

* "Provide for effective participation" by faculty in governance of the School of Medicine, the UPMC Health System and the proposed University of Pittsburgh Physicians (UPP) unified practice plan.

* "Maintain and improve the economic status and welfare of the faculty." The letter asks recipients to check off whether they support or oppose forming a faculty association, and return the letter to Ralph Siewers, chairperson and professor of surgery, as soon as possible. Siewers chairs the self-appointed Steering Committee for the Faculty Association that distributed the letters by campus mail.

Respondents are asked to identify themselves and indicate their faculty ranks and years of service, among other information, but the letter adds: "Anonymous replies are acceptable." Pathology professor Bruce Rabin, another of the nine professors on the steering committee, said the group is accepting unsigned replies to accommodate faculty who fear retaliation by the school's administration.

Most Pitt schools, including professional schools, maintain some sort of faculty association. The proposal to form such an organization in the School of Medicine came up during a pair of faculty meetings, held Feb. 26 and March 9, to discuss perceived threats to the school's academic mission, to the faculty's rightful role in school governance — and to faculty incomes — at a time of major change for the Health Sciences.

Officials from Pitt, UPMC Health System and the UPP practice plan are negotiating a new financial relationship, through which the health system would absorb UPP. See stories in the March 5 University Times. UPP is being formed through a merger of the 17 previously independent Pitt faculty practice plans of the School of Medicine plus the dental school's practice plan.

Rabin said: "At this point, we're simply trying to see how many faculty would support the formation of an association. If there's strong interest — say, if at least 500 faculty members support the idea — then we'll proceed from there." It's uncertain whether such an association would be a new organization or a revival of the Faculty Association of the School of Medicine (FASM), Rabin said.

During the 1970s and 1980s, when some Pitt professors sought unsuccessfully to unionize faculty here, the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board recognized FASM as a separate collective bargaining unit for School of Medicine faculty. But FASM has not met since 1991, when the last faculty unionization election was held at Pitt. "Apparently, it [FASM] may still be recognized by the state labor relations board as our official bargaining unit," Rabin said. "On the other hand, because it hasn't fulfilled its meeting requirements under the FASM bylaws, it may just be a defunct organization. We're meeting with attorneys to clarify those questions." For now, medical professors aren't seeking representation in collective bargaining, according to Rabin. But that could change, he said, if medical professors came to see unionization as the best way to defend their faculty rights, their salaries and fringe benefits, and the teaching and research missions of their school.

At a Feb. 19 school-sanctioned meeting and in subsequent, informal gatherings, medical faculty have discussed a number of volatile issues including: the ongoing UPP-Pitt-UPMC negotiations; alleged threats to shared governance and to the school's academic mission; interim Dean George Michalopoulos's sudden dismissal last month of Sheldon Adler as senior associate dean (Michalopoulos recently named Charles F. Reynolds III, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, and chairperson of the school's curriculum committee, to succeed the popular Adler); and a plan to reduce the salaries of 1,000 non-tenure stream medical faculty by 10 percent over each of the next three years. Faculty have been told they can make up the cuts, and earn additional income, by seeing more patients at practice plan clinics.

Following the Feb. 26 and March 9 faculty meetings, nine professors volunteered to form the Steering Committee for the Faculty Association. In addition to Siewers and Rabin, members include Nicholas Bircher, associate professor of anesthesiology; Robert Connamacher, professor of pharmacology; Toby Graham, professor of medicine; David A. Greenberg, professor of neurology/neurobiology; David P. Greenberg, associate professor of pediatrics; Thomas Medsger, professor of medicine; and Basil Zitelli, professor of pediatrics.

In a March 16 e-mail to medical faculty, interim Dean Michalopoulos expressed "concerns and misgivings" about the proposed faculty association.

He argued against creating what he called "a parallel channel of communication" among medical faculty and administrators, saying the association would have "an overall disruptive and negative effect on the many and simultaneous transitions ongoing in the school."

Michalopoulos cited current efforts to recruit a senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences/medical dean (see story on page 5); integration of the 18 practice plans into UPP; and the fact that: "Our hospitals (and I emphasize the word 'our') are going through the difficulties of adjustment to the financial challenges of managed care. Many hospitals throughout the country have suffered irreparable damage in this process. Our hospitals have been and will continue to be the forum for all of our clinical activities and the bloodline of our academic sustenance."

Michalopoulos continued: "Any of the above changes is associated with a measure of risk. Each one alone provides an atmosphere of anxiety. Each may endanger, to some degree, the academic enterprise of any institution. For a variety of reasons, we have to deal with all three changes at the same time! "I urge you not to add one more complication to the already overburdened, fragile academic ecology of our school. Establishment of a separate channel of government is bound to complicate all of the above issues and perhaps terminally derail some of them. The school is committed to maintain an open forum of communication where all voices will be heard, and healthy dialogue will continue to thrive."

The medical school's executive committee recently decided that the school will hold monthly faculty meetings through July, with "a free and open" agenda, Michalopoulos pointed out. The school already had been holding several meetings of the entire faculty annually, with "free discussion of all news and issues of concern to the faculty," he wrote.

— Bruce Steele