Dear Colleagues,

You are receiving this email because you are one of the 67 academic year adjunct lecturers (AYALs) whose employment ended on June 30 and who have a contract for academic year 2020-21. While we have only heard directly from some of you, we want to share this information with all of you. We will also share a notice of and link to this email to the full SCU Faculty listserv.

There have been several problems with the recent conversion of AYAL contracts from twelve-month to ten-month terms. We write to apologize on behalf of the Provost’s Office for these problems, to share the list of issues brought to our attention, to indicate the actions we are taking to correct the errors, and to invite your recommendations for improvements we need to make beyond those we list below. The issues brought to our attention include the following: 

• Workday
• You received an automated notice in Workday that you had been “terminated,” when in fact you have a contract for AY 2020-21. This is the standard language in Workday that triggers when an employee is no longer in contract with the University or no longer employed by the University, but it was confusing and alarming, and led some to fear that health care benefits might be at risk.
• At least one person experienced a software glitch in Workday that created a frustrating cycle of login obstacles at the initial password reset prompt. 

• Health care benefits
• Those of you who enrolled in Blue Shield received notification that your medical benefits had ended. This was a data-mapping error on Blue Shield’s part that our Human Resources team quickly rectified. Nonetheless, we understand the anxiety it caused, particularly in the midst of a pandemic.
• Those of you with medical FSAs who had outstanding balances as of June 30, 2020 could only access those funds during the summer by enrolling with COBRA; while we had advised about this in our Fall 2019 FAQ, we should have reminded you in March. For those who did not enroll with COBRA, unused funds are not lost; they are still available to you for expenses incurred from September through December 2020 if you re-enroll in your FSA as part of your fall onboarding in Workday. We advise anyone with a medical FSA to contact Benefits staff in Human Resources (SCU-Benefits@scu.edu) to discuss your particular situation.
• The COBRA invitations led some to believe they had lost all their medical benefits, when in fact they had not. We should have anticipated this and alerted you in advance how to read the COBRA notice.
• The end of employment meant, among other issues, that you could no longer access past medical FSA contribution records in Workday, complicating your efforts to recover those funds.

• Retirement funds: 
• Fidelity sent required “participants distribution notices” offering information for you “to review before you decide how to receive benefits from the Plan.” Some read this to mean that they had to take distributions; no such action is necessary, and university contributions to your original defined contribution retirement account will resume in September. Again, had we anticipated this notice, we might have alerted you in advance how it applies to your situation. We were able to anticipate the similar TIAA notice in late July, and alerted those of you with TIAA retirement accounts.
• Some faculty members first hired in 2018-19 or 2019-20 have wondered whether termination interrupts their two-year vesting requirement. It does not. Our Fall 2019 FAQ states, “[If] you complete academic year adjunct faculty appointments for two consecutive years, you then become eligible for the 401(a) contribution.” 

• Several of you intending to enroll in unemployment benefits were unclear on who your supervisor was and sought guidance. While the University cannot provide guidance on how to complete unemployment benefits applications, we can provide you with the name of your manager or supervisor, who is usually your dean (the attached pdf shows you how to find this information in Workday).

• Because access to some campus areas is restricted to current employees, your Access cards do not work during July and August in these areas. Of course, in Summer 2020 access to campus was restricted for everyone due to the pandemic. We will continue to explore whether we can keep Access cards active during summer months. 

• On July 30, you temporarily lost access to the single sign-on MySCU Portal, and thus to your email and Camino accounts. Your access to email and Camino has been restored. If you have any problems logging on, contact Information Technology at 408-554-5700. This was the result of a coding error between Workday and the MySCU software. Our team rectified this problem for each of you within an hour of discovering it, and we are working with HR and IT to fix the coding issue. In the meantime, please remember that since you are not employed in July and August, there is no expectation that you are doing any work on Camino during these months; we just want you to know that your access to Camino has been restored, should you desire it.

In addition to assisting individual faculty with direct and personal support, we have been partnering with Human Resources to adjust and improve the business processes that contributed to these lapses. We should have done a better job to anticipate the notices you would receive and communicate those in advance. We are working to provide such guidance for next June, should the ten-month term still be in effect.

We will be activating your academic year appointments for 2020-21 in the next few weeks, which will trigger an email invitation from Workday to “onboard.” We have prepared a guide to walk you through the onboarding steps. Some of the fields you will be asked to review should populate automatically from your past employment records, but others might require you to supply information. We ask your forbearance as you fill out these fields; Provost's Office and Human Resources staff have worked hard to minimize the steps. Your renewal in Workday will automatically activate your Access card effective September 1, and that will be the date that the “[Terminated]” notice will disappear from your Workday record. 

Questions have also emerged related to the exempt status of AYALs and their salaries. As background, Santa Clara transitioned most AYALs from twelve-month to ten-month contracts in September 2019 to maintain their exempt status under California labor code, which allows us to continue to pay those AYALs as salaried employees instead of hourly employees. Below are the minimum monthly salary requirements to maintain exempt status under California law. These minimums are not prorated—meaning a faculty member teaching one course, five courses, or nine courses during the academic year would have to be paid the minimum monthly salary to be an exempt employee. 

 

As you can see in the table below, our ten-month AYAL salaries exceed the requirements set forth by the California labor code but vary by the number of courses taught. Nevertheless, the Provost’s Office remains committed to improving compensation for academic year adjunct lecturers.  

2020-21 Ten-month Salary Ranges by College or School

Finally, we should note that Santa Clara University continues to work toward a solution where all faculty can be classified as exempt. In mid-July, we received word that Governor Newsom’s administration had given its endorsement to legislation that would allow SCU to treat Academic Year Adjunct Lecturers as 12-month exempt employees—an effort on which both the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities and the Service Employees International Union agree. The bill currently awaits the final legislative hearing and vote, followed by the Governor’s signature. 

There are many people in the Provost’s Office and in Human Resources who are working tirelessly to remedy these issues. If you run into further obstacles, or if you have ideas for improvements, we welcome you to share those directly with us. We will also be working with the three bodies representing lecturers—the Faculty Senate Committee on Lecturers and Adjuncts, the Faculty Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Lecturers and Adjuncts, and the Provost’s Adjunct Faculty and Lecturers Council—to field your concerns, develop better processes, and review all communications to lecturers. 

We deeply value your work, your presence, and your significant contributions to the Santa Clara University community. We are committed to demonstrating that more fully in our efforts to support you.

 

Kitty Murphy                                                                                                                              Associate Provost for Faculty Personnel and Policy                                                                                                                                                           

Ed Ryan                                                                                                                                  Vice Provost for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness