SUBJECT:  UCSD Career Equity Review

The UCSD Task Force on Gender Equity recommended in March 2002 that procedures be developed to permit faculty to request a special review to determine whether they are correctly calibrated in rank and step. The UC Office of the President has also mandated that each campus provide a mechanism for "career equity" reviews (CERs). The resulting guidelines for conducting career equity reviews at UCSD are described below. CERs are intended to supplement regular academic reviews, and they neither replace nor affect existing procedures for regular reviews.

1. Objective

On rare occasions, a Senate faculty member may be at a rank and step seriously inconsistent with his or her attainments. For example, an appointment may have been made at a rank or step substantially below that suggested by merit; or accomplishments that would warrant accelerated advancement may not have been identified. The CER is designed to examine those cases in which normal personnel actions, from the initial hiring onward, may have resulted in an inappropriate rank and/or step, and, when warranted, to allow placement of faculty at the appropriate rank and step consistent with prevailing UCSD standards.

A CER is not a substitute for a normal merit, promotion, or acceleration review. It functions as a supplemental process to correct a substantial inequity, typically a product of multiple past actions, not as a means of appeal for, or expression of disagreement with, a single personnel decision.

Because the purpose of a CER is to assess rank and step, recommendation of a bonus off-scale salary award in lieu of recalibration is inappropriate.

2. Eligibility for and initiation of review

A Senate faculty member (i.e., an academic employee in the Professor, In Residence, Clinical X, or Lecturer SOE series, excluding those at the LPSOE, Assistant, or Above Scale levels) may initiate a CER at the time of his/her regular, on-cycle review by submitting a written request to the department chair or to the head of the unit in which he/she has his/her primary appointment, or to the cognizant dean. If the request is submitted to a department chair, a copy should also be submitted to the dean. The decision to initiate a CER rests with the candidate.

3. Content and criteria

A request for a CER must contain a request for a specific rank and step and justification for recalibration. Possible justification may include, but is not limited to, the following assessments: 1) the cumulative record warrants an acceleration, even though no one review period did; 2) the rank/step was inappropriately low at the time of initial hiring; 3) particular work and contributions have been overlooked or undervalued by the department and/or other reviewing bodies.

The candidate must identify the specific area(s) of the record that he/she believes were not previously evaluated properly, or the area(s) of the record that indicate that he/she was not hired at a rank and step commensurate with his/her accomplishments. The candidate may submit selected publications from earlier review periods that he/she considers relevant to the CER request.

The department chair or other unit head will develop an academic review file that will address the candidate's entire academic record. The file will include the request for a CER. If the CER request involves advancement to or through a "barrier" step (promotion to full Professor or advancement to Professor, Step VI, or to Professor, Above Scale), the department must seek external letters addressing the barrier step advancement for inclusion in the file.

The CER review will proceed in parallel with the normal review, but will address the candidate's overall record using the University's established criteria for the rank and step requested, with one exception: Where a significantly higher rank or step is indicated, the case will not require the additional demonstration of a basis for accelerated advancement.

4. File reviewers

The cognizant dean and CAP will consider all CERs. For General Campus cases, the Dean of OGSR and the cognizant provost will also review the file if the rank and step requested involves a career review (i.e., promotion to full Professor or advancement to Professor, Step VI, or to Professor, Above Scale). There are two ways in which consideration of a CER may proceed.

a. If the candidate submits the request for a CER to the department chair, following departmental review the chair will write the departmental letter of recommendation regarding the CER request. The file will then be routed among reviewers as required for the rank and step proposed. It will subsequently be forwarded to the Senior Vice Chancellor, who will refer the file to CAP for its recommendation. CAP will report its recommendation to the Senior Vice Chancellor for final action.

b. If the candidate submits the request for a CER to the dean, the dean may recommend someone other than the department chair to interact with departmental reviewers and write the letter of recommendation. The Senior Vice Chancellor must approve the dean's selection. Further review of the file will then proceed as described above.

5. Frequency

A CER may be requested once at the Associate Professor level, once at the full Professor level prior to advancement to Professor, Step VI, and once after advancement to Professor, Step VI, up to Above Scale. All CER actions become part of the academic dossier. A CER decision by the Senior Vice Chancellor is not subject to appeal. Questions concerning career equity reviews should be directed to Heidi Hutchinson, director of Academic Personnel (x23509, hhutchinson@ucsd.edu) or to the Academic Personnel analyst responsible for the candidate's department or unit http://academicaffairs.ucsd.edu/offices/apo/StaffAssign.htm.

A Question & Answer reference on the Career Equity Review process may be found at http://academicaffairs.ucsd.edu/offices/apo/CERQ&A.htm

                                                Marsha A. Chandler
                                                Senior Vice Chancellor-
                                                Academic Affairs