FLRG Report #9: Faculty Council meets with Boston Consulting Group to discuss May 2017 FLRG report and additional context

The Faculty Council met Friday, Feb. 9, with members of the Boston Consulting Group, to discuss recommendations generated from the Faculty Load Review Group (FLRG) during the 2016-2017 academic year.

Recall from previous Advance Blog posts that faculty predominated both on FLRG and on the three FLRG sub-groups (ALPHA, BRAVO, and CHARLIE), and FLRG ordered its work on the basis of both longstanding faculty concerns about inequities in the calculation of full-time faculty load, and solicited and incorporated robust faculty input on those issues.

Summarized briefly, FLRG made three broad recommendations to increase equity and consistency in faculty load. First, lab and lecture instruction should be compensated equally in full-time load calculation. Second, discipline committee recommendations on class sizes should be adopted District-wide. Third, compensation for coordinator/chair duties should be made more equitable across the District. The Faculty Council agreed with these priorities based on repeated, consistent input from members. Upon receiving the FLRG recommendations, Chancellor May said he agreed that the recommendations would enhance equity and consistency. However, the recommendations would also increase costs to the District. Therefore, the chancellor sought and secured approval from the Board of Trustees in Fall 2017 for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to study the FLRG recommendations (as well as other recommendations pertinent to faculty hiring processes and diversity concerns) and issue its own independent recommendations to the District. The Council asked, and Dr. May agreed, that the Council should meet with BCG representatives during their study

Four representatives from BCG, all of whom are based at their Dallas office, on Feb. 9, 2018, met with the seven members of the Faculty Council. Rather than giving a report of their unfinished work, the BCG team directly solicited the Council’s feedback with open-ended questions and seemed genuinely interested in what the Council had to say. They asked about what was working well in the DCCCD, as well as what needed improvement.

A robust, wide-ranging discussion ensued, in which the Council provided both ample broad philosophical justification and poignant specific examples to support the adoption of the FLRG recommendations. The Council also explained in detail why the current Board policy regarding extra service teaching works well in giving the colleges and programs flexibility to meet student and community educational needs.

The Council also explained that the DCCFA endorses the hiring of additional full-time faculty throughout the District, particularly to meet currently unmet community educational needs given recent and projected growth in enrollment and program diversity and complexity, including and especially the dual credit collegiate academies.

Finally, the Council articulated that the DCCFA wants to diversify faculty ranks, but that structural issues like salary compression for those hired between 1981 and 2012, and lack of a coordinated recruitment effort, have prevented the District from significantly increasing the percentage of faculty from historically underrepresented groups. (Specifically, the Council shared with BCG that both the Chancellor’s Faculty Fellows Task Force, and the Faculty Hiring Process Task Force, in 2017 recommended that District Talent Central hire a full-time recruiter to help recruit candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds to apply for DCCCD faculty vacancies.)

The BCG team members took copious notes throughout the conversation, and asked thoughtful follow-up questions both to clarify their understanding of the issues and to gather additional supporting information. As a result, the Council remains hopeful that the conversations with BCG were productive and will culminate in BCG recommending the District adopt all of the FLRG recommendations as soon as possible.