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Photo by Reed Hutchinson UCLA Photographic Services |
New chair aims to improve Senate's reputation
by Cynthia lee
Today staff writer
Nine years ago when Adrienne Lavine joined the Undergraduate Council, an Academic Senate faculty committee that reviews UCLA’s academic programs, she found that it can be an agent for positive change.
After reviewing a struggling program in the life sciences division of the UCLA College, the council recommended that the chancellor appoint a joint Senate-administration task force to address the serious problems faced by that department.
“I later ran into a faculty member from that program who told me, ‘You know, that review really started us on a positive path.’ That was very heartening to hear,” said Lavine, a professor of mechanical engineering.
As the new chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, Lavine is hoping to lead the faculty down several such positive paths. She wants to educate the faculty about what the Senate does and improve its reputation among the faculty by making it more efficient. She wants to make more transparent the processes of and criteria for off-scale salaries for faculty. She hopes to find creative solutions to the constant shortage of child-care services. Finally, the Senate will be looking to fix impediments in academic personnel procedures that discourage faculty from undertaking interdisciplinary research and teaching.
That’s a long list of goals and issues for anyone to tackle in a year, but Lavine doesn’t back away from challenges.
She knows, for example, that som e faculty groan when they realize that their proposal for a fantastic new degree program has to go through Senate committees that will deliberate for months. “That can be disappointing and off-putting,” Lavine said. “I want to be able to communicate better to faculty about what we do and what our contribution is, realizing that there are some situations in which the time we take is not consistent with the value added. ... So either we have to be faster or add more value.”
Lavine also wants to look closer at the off-scale salary system used by senior leaders to reward individual faculty for a variety of reasons, including recruitment and retention. Raising faculty salaries above the step range, especially at a time when UCLA salaries lag behind those of comparable universities, is the prerogative of senior leaders, Lavine said, “and rightly so. ... I’m not saying that the deans shouldn’t have this tool, but the faculty need to better understand how the system works. I would like to work on that.”
Lavine is also hard at work on research projects in her field, heat transfer, as well as on a new edition of a heat transfer textbook. Working with other engineers on a National Science Foundation-sponsored project, she is trying to resolve problems of rising temperatures in nano-manufacturing processes.
But her home life, as a wife of 23 years and mother of two sons, 11 and 14, helps Lavine keep her busy schedule in perspective.
“There will be times of crises when people feel you should drop everything else. But I value and protect my time with my family,” she said. Besides, the scientist/faculty leader/parent quickly added with a grin, “I can always work at home.” |
