Faculty senators yesterday endorsed a policy requiring the university to conduct background checks before hiring employees.
The policy requires that the university verify a job applicant's educational credentials, employment history and past performance before extending an offer. It also requires criminal background and identity checks of people in line to be offered a "security-sensitive" position.
Only one senator, Raffi Gruener, a physiology professor, voted against the policy, after expressing concerns that the criminal background checks would be limited to areas in which the applicant lived or worked, without including places to which they have traveled.
But most senators agreed with Fred Kiefer, a professor of English, who described the policy as a sound hiring practice.
"This proposed policy promotes responsible hiring," he said. "This is a minimum standard to which we should aspire at a university."
The policy comes as the Arizona Board of Regents begins considering a more extensive employment policy that requires universities to adopt similar practices before hiring applicants and to lay down procedures for dealing with applicants and employees who have been convicted of felonies.
Regents heard an initial reading of that broader policy when they met last week, but won't finalize it until at least June.
A legislator proposed earlier this year that the state mandate such procedures but relented after the regents promised that the universities would consider adopting them on their own.
Simple reference checking, which not all departments now conduct, could eliminate the possibility of hiring unqualified applicants, which in the long term improves the academic climate of the university, Kiefer said.
The "security-sensitive" positions that require a criminal background and identity check include senior level administrative positions as well as those that have unsupervised contact with children under 16, access to select agents as defined by the Patriot Act or other laws, those with unrestricted access to residence hall rooms or those designated by a dean or vice president.
In conducting the background checks, the university would hire a third-party contractor to examine court documents in locations where the job applicant had lived and worked, said Allison Vaillancourt, assistant vice president for human resources.
"It's a pretty laborious process," she said.
Gruener was concerned that the scope of the background checks wasn't broad enough to cover areas that the applicant only visited, but another human resources official said broadening the check wouldn't be practical because it would be impossible to check records everywhere a person visited.
By a 35-2 e-mail vote, senators have also formalized an earlier 18-0 vote in favor of moving the School of Planning into the geography and regional development department rather than closing the school, faculty secretary Robert Mitchell announced.
The earlier vote wasn't binding because the Senate lacked a quorum, which forced a second vote to be electronically conducted.
The Graduate and Professional Student Council has also endorsed the school's move over its closure, outgoing GPSC President Jani Radebaugh said.
On Wednesday, the UA's Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee will meet to make its own recommendation on the school's fate.
All recommendations will be forwarded to President Peter Likins, who will decide whether to ask regents to close the school.
Senators yesterday also approved without discussion a policy that would require students to maintain a 2.0 GPA in their minors.
According to the justification for the rule, which was provided by the Instruction and Curriculum Policy Committee, setting a minimum GPA "maintains the academic standards of the university, college and department offering the minor."