Dear Academic Affairs faculty and staff,
I am pleased to announce that the Faculty Handbook is now online at provost.tcu.edu/faculty-resources/handbook. This information previously was included in the PDF of the 2022-23 Faculty and Staff Handbook in the Faculty Section. Now, that section’s information is available online with hyperlinks to policies in Policy Tech. This online faculty handbook comprises the 2023-24 version of the handbook. The only updates within it are committee membership and updates to the Faculty Assembly and Faculty Senate Constitution and By-Laws as provided by Faculty Senate in March 2023.
This move makes this important information easy to access and update, and puts Academic Affairs in line with TCU’s repository of policies on Policy Tech.
This was quite an undertaking. It started in conversations and meetings a year ago and then took the entire summer to accomplish.
For the first step, Elaine Cole, director of communications for my office, copied and pasted the Faculty Section only from the PDF of the 2022-23 Faculty and Staff Handbook – 42 pages – and then reformatted the information for the webpages with links to each section from the Table of Contents.
She extracted the policy information for each of the 10 policies included in the section and put them into the correct format for Policy Tech, where they are now stored, and included links to each policy from the online content.
Then, a special group formed by the Faculty Senate Executive Committee carefully and painstakingly proofread the information by comparing the PDF of the 2022-23 Faculty and Staff Handbook – only the Faculty Section – to the information now online and in Policy Tech. The group consisted of Omar Harvey, Stephanie Jevas, James Rodriguez, Jill Havens, and Hayat Hokayem. Many thanks to them for approaching this summer project with serious-minded commitment.
Our next step is to address a backlog of updates to the handbook dating back to 2020. We hope to have those updates vetted again, confirmed, and made to the online Faculty Handbook by January 2024.
The final step will be to work with Faculty Senate and the Provost’s Council to put in place a detailed, consistent process for making updates to the information in the Faculty Handbook moving forward. I’ll communicate more about that as we move toward that goal.
One thing we discovered in this process is that some information has been carried forward for decades and most likely needs to be updated with links to current information. We will start to address that this semester as we address the backlog of updates.
Even with all of the many eyes proofreading this project, errors may still happen. If you see something that is in error or old information that needs to be updated, please contact Elaine at e.cole@tcu.edu.
I thank everyone involved in this worthwhile project. It is another step toward providing easy access to resources to help you succeed at TCU.
Best regards,
Teresa Abi-Nader Dahlberg
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs