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June 10, 2004

Expedited Faculty Grievance Procedure to be Adopted

Pitt faculty with grievances against their administrators or colleagues soon will have a new, expedited procedure for seeking redress.
The new process – the result of several years of off-and-on talks between the Provost’s office and an ad hoc University Senate committee – will be available to full- and part-time faculty and faculty librarians as a speeded-up alternative to Pitt’s regular grievance procedure.
Both the expedited and regular procedures are intended for grievances not specifically covered by University policies on sexual harassment, racial discrimination, negative evaluations of a faculty member’s professional work and dissatisfaction with individual salary decisions.
“For example,” Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Andrew R. Blair explained, “if faculty members feel that they’re being treated unfairly in terms of teaching assignments, or that their professional work is suffering as the result of what they believe to be a hostile work environment, these [expedited and regular] grievance procedures would apply. The procedures are meant to cover a wide range of actions and decisions that faculty members believe have adversely affected their professional development, but which are not covered by other existing policies.”
Senate Council unanimously endorsed the expedited grievance procedure June 7, but Council actions are advisory only. However, Provost James V. Maher, who serves on the Council along with Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg and other Pitt administrators, confirmed after the meeting that the administration will indeed offer the expedited procedure as an alternative to the regular one.
Former Senate president Nathan Hershey, who chaired the ad hoc committee on the expedited review process, said an accelerated process was needed because, under the regular procedure, some cases have dragged on to the point that complainants had left Pitt before their grievances were resolved.
One reason for this, Hershey and Provost Maher agreed, is that it’s sometimes difficult to coordinate the schedules of faculty members who serve on three-member grievance panels. Also, some cases are especially complex and time-consuming to investigate.
The expedited procedure will offer faculty the option of having their grievances investigated by a single hearing officer selected by the provost in consultation with the Senate president (and, if the faculty member is from the Health Sciences, the senior vice chancellor for Health Sciences).
If dissatisfied with the provost’s choice of a hearing officer, the faculty member seeking redress has five days to opt instead for the regular grievance procedure.
Under both systems, investigators report their recommendations for resolving the grievance to the provost, whose subsequent ruling completes the process.
Under the regular procedure, a panel of three faculty members (chosen from among the elected members of Faculty Assembly) considers a grievance.
Provost Maher said: “The problem with the regular process is that if the faculty who serve on the grievance panels are not able to drop everything and work on nothing else, the process can take a while.”
Maher called the regular grievance process “a good one” and “the appropriate process for almost all of the faculty.” He said one reason it took so long for Senate leaders and the Provost’s office to agree on an expedited procedure “is that I wanted to make sure that any expedited process will not in any way undermine the existing one.”
Only one or two faculty members a year use the grievance procedure, Maher said.
– Bruce Steele


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