Error delays faculty evaluation of Sypherd

By Charles Ratliff
Arizona Daily Wildcat
March 19, 1996


Arizona Daily Wildcat

UA Provost Paul Sypherd

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The first faculty evaluation of UA Provost Paul Sypherd's job performance will end up in the waste paper recycling bin before it is even filled out.

Committee of Eleven Chair Kenneth J. Smith said the wrong response form was mailed out to faculty over spring break.

"We were shown a sample response form and it would have been fine, but the ones that got sent out to faculty are unusable," Smith said. "I have a lot of phone calls on my voice mail explaining a problem I already knew, and that is the forms are wrong."

Faculty completing the form will rate Sypherd's performance in 64 areas on a scale of one to five. The form that was sent out, however, does not reveal whether five is "very good" or "very bad" so faculty has no way of rating the provost in each of those areas.

The 64 items on the questionnaire will remain the same and new response forms with the problem corrected will be sent out later this week, Smith said.

The Faculty Senate decided last year to begin evaluating administrators above the level of dean on a three-year basis. Faculty members are evaluated annually and deans and department heads are evaluated every five years.

Smith said a different group of administrators will be evaluated every year after this year's evaluation of Sypherd and University of Arizona President Manuel Pacheco. Next year, he said, other administrators, perhaps at the vice provost and vice president level, will be evaluated.

"There never has been any means of evaluating administrators," Smith said. So the Committee of Eleven undertook the responsibility of developing the questionnaire which would partially serve that purpose, he said.

The committee is the oldest faculty governance committee at the UA and comprises 11 faculty and two student representatives.

Smith said the committee will take the questionnaire's results to Sypherd and Pacheco for discussion, and the results will then be released to the rest of the faculty.

Questionnaires for evaluating Pacheco's performance will be sent out in two to three weeks.

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