wfn.org | Convention amends LCMS Bylaws To help establish faculty evaluation

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@wfn.org>]

guidelines

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
Board for Communication Services
1333 S. Kirkwood Road St. Louis, MO 63122-7295

News Release

July 17, 2001 #17

Contact: Bruce Kueck (314) 342-5715

61st Regular Convention St. Louis, Mo. July 14-20, 2001

  Convention amends LCMS Bylaws To help establish faculty-evaluation guidelines

ST. LOUIS -- Delegates to the 61st Regular Convention of The Lutheran 
Church--Missouri Synod (LCMS) decided on Monday, July 16, to amend the 
church's Bylaws to give LCMS colleges, universities and seminaries 
guidelines for establishing standards and practices for attracting, 
retaining and evaluating faculty members.

The action came on the triennial convention s second day of business.

The action creates two levels of faculty appointments and lets institutions 
call those levels whatever they want. At the "initial level," a faculty 
appointment can be terminated with no formal requirement for a show of 
cause. At the "continuing level," termination requires a formal show of cause.

By a 764-288 vote, the convention removed Bylaw references to "permanent 
tenure" and replaced them with guidelines for promotion from initial to 
continuing-appointment status.

The new Bylaws require regular performance reviews for all faculty "to help 
faculty identify their strengths as well as areas in which improvement is 
needed" and "to proved the information needed to make a decision about 
future employment status." Schools are required to set "clearly articulated 
criteria" for evaluating faculty performance and to share those criteria 
with faculty "prior to their employment and current assignment."

The Synod in convention in 1998 established a task force on tenure and gave 
it the assignment of bringing recommendations to the 2001 convention. The 
task force s report, presented at this convention, said the changes "would 
create a system that combined the protection of faculty rights emphasized 
in tenure systems with the increased accountability demanded by contract 
systems," in which faculty appointments are made for a set, often 
renewable, period of time.

"An underlying assumption in all of this must be that the process strike as 
good a balance as possible between the needs and rights of the individual 
and those of the institution. Above all, it is to be carried out in a way 
that recognizes our institutions are not just another group of colleges, 
universities and seminaries, but are Christian institutions," said the report.

The church s Board for Higher Education/Concordia University System (CUS) 
board will assess the effectiveness of the changes and report to Synod s 
2004 convention.

The convention s floor committee on higher education presented the task 
force report. The committee also gave the convention an update on the 
church s "For the Sake of the Church" campaign to attract more LCMS members 
to the church s 10 college and university campuses and to increase 
scholarship possibilities by increasing the CUS Endowment.

The Rev. Edward G. Bertram, director of the national campaign, reported 
that the CUS Endowment held $62.5 million a year ago. Since then, another 
$68.7 million was added. The campaign s goal is to have $400 million in the 
fund by 2010.

Another goal of the campaign is to double the number of LCMS students on 
CUS campuses by 2010, said Bertram. LCMS students now account for 4,673 of 
the approximately 15,000 students enrolled at LCMS colleges and universities.

The campaign s cabinet has been working to improve the Missouri Synod s 
records about members younger than college age, for the purpose of 
recruiting and developing church leaders. As part of the "For the Sake of 
the Church" report, cabinet members presented LCMS President Robert T. Kuhn 
with data on 152,000 young people.

PHOTOGRAPHS: Photos of convention coverage are available at 
www.lcms.org/convention/

*****************************************************
LCMSNews is published by the News and Information Division, Board for 
Communication Services, of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.  Free 
subscriptions to this service are available by sending an electronic mail 
message to mailserv@crf.cuis.edu, containing only the words SUBSCRIBE 
LCMSNEWS in the body of the message.  To unsubscribe, send only 
the  message UNSUBSCRIBE LCMSNEWS to the same mailserv address.  For more 
information, contact Joe Isenhower Jr. via e-mail at 
joe.isenhower@lcms.org, or by phone at (314) 996-1231.
*****************************************************