FAUW holds general meetings twice a year, in December and April. They are open to all regular faculty who have opted in as voting members of the association. Here are some of the highlights from the December 8, 2020, meeting, at which we massively broke previous attendance records with 134 members in attendance!
- We budgeted for “business as usual” this year and (obviously) things are playing out a little differently. Key changes are that we’re underspending on events (no surprise there) and have added some donations and advocacy related expenses.
- The Climate Justice Working Group has proposed that FAUW declare a climate emergency at our next general meeting in April. The Board of Directors and the working group will be looking into what exactly this would look like in the meantime. Doing so would involve applying a lens of climate justice to all of FAUW’s own operations and supporting our members in relevant teaching, research, and service efforts. The CJWG is holding a meeting about this on January 28 that all FAUW members are welcome to attend.
- We strongly support the proposed updates to the Pregnancy and Parental Leaves policy. We need your help to keep the pressure on the administration to pass the policy. Email your feedback (both things you like and things we can still improve further) to fauw@uwaterloo.ca and uw.policy@uwaterloo.ca by December 18—and ask your colleagues, chair, and dean to do so as well!
- We’re picking up the research professors file again after it was paused in March. We expect a formal vote of current research professors to happen in the new year.
- The latest salary anomaly review is underway (after the 2015 review, the University committed to repeating it every five years). The FAUW reps on the committee are Mario Ioannidis, Diana Skrzydlo, and Cecilia Cotton.
- We recently hired Kathy Hogarth (an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Renison University College) as a Special Advisor on Racism and Anti-Racism to help us live up to commitments we made this summer about working to become a more just organization.
- Members are wondering if it will be easier post-pandemic to designate courses as ‘online’ and to create hybrid online/in-person courses than it was pre-pandemic. We will keep an eye on this and hope that members will be able to continue using the online resources you have been creating.
- We’re finally seeing some progress on policy drafting:
- Policy 14 (Pregnancy & Parental Leaves) is out for public consultation now.
- Policy 57 (Accommodations) is close to a finished draft.
- Policy 33 (Ethical Behaviour) is currently being redrafted based on consultations.
- Policy 76 (Faculty Appointments) is still underway. We’re hoping to reorient the process of updating this one to focus only on teaching stream faculty at this stage.
- The new Compassionate Care policy is getting started. We have agreement from the administration to create this policy and are waiting for the Secretariat to prepare the Terms of Reference.
Our next General Meeting is tentatively scheduled for 10:00–11:30 on April 16, 2021.
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