What is this all about?

The text below is divided into two parts. It appears that many faculty are unaware of certain technicalities pertaining to processes concerning lecturers. These faculty are seeking clarifications, and those requests are collected in part 3, Questions. The right thing is to address these questions to the Chair and/or the Lecturers. In my humble opinion even better idea is for Dr. Neerchal and/or the Lecturers to email me the relevant answers, so that I will be able to put them on the web. This may save some time.

General

• Lecturers are hired/fired by a different procedure with different criteria from those for the tenure-track faculty. Lecturers are not hired by all the faculty members, but hired/fired essentially by the Chair alone. Many faculty are unaware of hiring/firing procedures for lecturers.
• Lecturers have career goals often not including research, and job duties other then those of the tenure-track faculty.
• Lecturers enjoy a job security level other than that of the tenure-track faculty. It would not be fair to ask them to take sides in the Chair election.
• Because of the hiring procedures, job security and duties lecturers are more likely to vote for the incumbent Chair. This in turn provides incentives for the Chair to seek opportunities to hire lecturers more diligently than opportunities to hire tenure track faculty. At the last faculty meeting the Chair revealed that the Provost agreed to give the Department additional lecturer lines should the department make use of the Castle. The incentives provide the Chair with a motivation to dictate particular instructional pattern to the faculty. I wonder if the Chair could have negotiated and obtained a couple of tenure-track lines instead.
• Because of their common interests, duties and goals, it is likely that they form a voting block and interest group, which may disproportionately influences the Chair and the direction of the department. Do we want to change the main goal of the department from being research-oriented to teaching-oriented?
• If we include lecturers in the electorate, then why staff should be excluded? Staff are people working side by side with faculty although their career goals different from those of tenure track/tenure faculty.

  What about graduate students? In Europe graduate students are often university employees on a contract.

  How far should this go? Should we also include undergrads? After all they are involved in faculty performance evaluation (teaching), why not to involve them in selection (and evaluation) of the Chair?

• The contract of a research faculty (postdoc) is renewable for up to 6 years, exactly the length of two chair appointments. Should research faculty also be allowed to vote?

Questions

• How long is a lecturer's contract?
• Who renews those and what the procedure for their renewal?
• What about the so called "automatic renewal" of senior lecturers? How does that work?
• Can the Chair influence renewal?