At first listen, a criminal background check for employees may seem trivial to some, but the University of Wisconsin Faculty Senate has a different take on the matter.
At their monthly meeting Monday night — after hearing the State of the University address from Chancellor John Wiley — the senators expressed discontent with the pending UW criminal background check policy.
The latest draft of the policy, which is dated Oct. 30, 2006, calls for each division on campus to have at least one background check coordinator and for that person to conduct background checks on all prospective employees in his division. Current UW employees would also be subject to such background checks at least every four years.
Employees holding student hourly, terminal academic staff, graduate assistant, employees-in-training and Limited Term Employee positions would be exempt from background checks unless otherwise required by division policy.
Faculty senator and UW mathematics professor Jean-Pierre Rosay expressed his dislike for the policy, summing up the rest of the Senate's collective opinion.
"It stinks, it's awful," Rosay said at Monday's meeting. "It is so shady."
The worst part of the background check policy is the lack of due process, according to Lawrence Kahan, faculty senator and UW biomolecular chemistry professor.
The least the administration could do to improve the policy, Kahan said, would be to limit the background checks to charges, convictions and pleas that occur after the policy is passed.
As the policy stands now, Kahan noted, there is no distinction between a faculty member's past and present actions, and he said the policy needs "rethinking."
"This is intended to find out what happened in the past so that action can be taken," Kahan said. "I can't understand how something like this can get this far."
However, according to Stephen Lund, director of UW's Academic Personnel Office, criminal background check policies like the one at UW are a growing trend in Big Ten schools.
Wiley said the only way the criminal background check could prevent employment for new employees would be if they were convicted of a felony that was relevant to their particular position at UW.
"We would not knowingly hire a child molester to work at a childcare center," Wiley told the faculty. "We would not knowingly hire an embezzler to work in the Law School's accounting office."
A UW System Board of Regents special committee has been drafting a new disciplinary policy since last fall after it was revealed that three UW-Madison faculty members convicted of felonies while employees were still on the payroll. One of them, physiology professor Roberto Coronado, was even serving an eight-year prison sentence for sexually assaulting three girls.
And last semester, a state audit revealed 40 convicted felons were employed across the UW System, including 27 at UW-Madison.
The UW Faculty Senate and the Board of Regents have been exchanging views on the disciplinary policy, and the special committee is expected to have a final draft of the revised policy for regent approval at their next monthly meeting, which takes place at the end of this week.
