Previous page

Table of Contents

Next page

Joint Report of the Council and the General Board on the relaxation of the restrictions on the holding of certain College offices and on the amount of College teaching that may be undertaken by Professors and Readers and academic-related officers: Notice

10 December 2001

The Council have considered the remarks made at the Discussion of this Report on 16 October 2001 (Reporter, p. 127). They have consulted the General Board and have agreed to comment as follows.

With regard to Professor Dumville's remarks, the growth in the annual number of promotions to personal Professorships and Readerships in recent years has been substantial. The decision to move from a cash-limited promotion scheme to a scheme which has no financial restriction on the number of promotions has led to a high and sustained number of promotions each year: a difficult situation for the Colleges has been considerably exacerbated as a result. The thinking underlying the proposals in the Report is predicated on the need to ensure a fair and reasonable balance of interest between the University, the Colleges, and individual officers.

In relation to weekly amounts of College teaching that may be undertaken, the General Board considered a number of options, but in the end decided on the balance of interest argument that some minimal adjustment was required. The adjustment is in relation to the maximum amount of teaching that may be undertaken; it remains a matter of negotiation between individual officers and Colleges as to what the precise amount of weekly College teaching the individual officer undertakes.

With regard to the holding of certain College offices, and in particular Tutorships, it is certainly the case that some Professors and Readers welcome the opportunity of continuing to be College Tutors after promotion.

With regard to the point that Dr G. R. Evans has made about the underlying problem of the relationship between University and College offices, the General Board accept that there are difficulties but they do not agree that a fundamental shift in the direction of the Oxford arrangements is the way to address them. There is now an established forum in which the kind of problems to which Dr Evans alludes may be discussed. This is provided by a joint working group comprising six members, three appointed by the Personnel Committee and three by the Colleges' Committee.

The issue of College Teaching Officers' career prospects has been discussed in relation to the possibility of access to the University's senior academic promotion procedures. There has been recent consultation with Faculties, Departments, and the Colleges, and the issues, although difficult, remain under consideration.

In the consultation that was undertaken in relation to the proposals in the Report, the Faculty Board of Clinical Medicine agreed that the restrictions on the holding of College offices (and the current maximum limits of the amount of College teaching that may be undertaken) should continue to apply to Professors and Readers holding honorary NHS consultant contracts, and that Regulation 2 of the regulations for certain officers who have clinical responsibilities in the National Health Service be amended accordingly in order to incorporate this restriction. The General Board therefore propose an additional recommendation to the Report as follows:

V.  That the regulations for certain officers who have clinical responsibilities in the National Health Service (Statutes and Ordinances, p. 571) be amended, with effect from 1 January 2002, as follows:

Regulation 2.

By amending the regulation so as to read:

2. No University officer who receives additional payments for clinical responsibility under the regulations for those payments, nor the Consultant Occupational Physician, shall be a Tutor, Assistant Tutor, Steward, Bursar, or Assistant Bursar of a College, nor shall he or she give instruction on behalf of a College or Colleges for more than six hours a week, or, if a Professor, four hours a week.

With the concurrence of the General Board, the Council are submitting a Grace (Grace 11, p. 381) to the Regent House for the approval of the recommendations of the Joint Report as amended by this Notice.

Previous page

Table of Contents

Next page

Cambridge University Reporter 12 December 2001
Copyright © 2001 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge.