Know Your PAF!

Your PAF is your “Personnel Action File”. Your Personnel Action File lives in the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) on the fourth floor of the Student Services and Administration Building. If you are a regular faculty member, your WPAF (Working Personnel Action File) consists of both the dossier that you prepare and selected documents (such as student evaluations and previous RTP recommendations) that are provided by the Office of Academic Affairs and accompany your dossier through the RTP (Retention, Tenure, Promotion) review process.

Here are a few things that everyone should know about his/her PAF:

· You have the right to submit evidence to your PAF. How do you do this? Write a memo to your department chair with the evidence attached and specifically request that the evidence be placed in your PAF. Always keep your own copies of anything that you submit your PAF and follow up to make sure that what you put in gets to its destination.

· You have the right to do visit your PAF to see what’s in it. How do you do this? Contact the Office of Academic Affairs (usually Gina Traversa, gina.traversa@csueastbay.edu, x53711) to request an appointment to visit with your PAF. OAA likes to have at least 24 hours notice. You can also make copies of items in your PAF, but you can’t take it away from OAA.

· Evidence not in your PAF (or in your WPAF, which includes the dossier for regular faculty) cannot be used as a part of your professional review. This means that you need to be proactive in getting the good evidence into your PAF and also make sure that bad evidence is not cited in your professional review (whether RTP/ Careful Consideration, and Periodic Evaluation).

· Chairs need to send Official Student Evaluations to your PAF, but in some Colleges this is not happening! So, be sure that at least two of your official evaluations are getting into your PAF each academic year (if you work trough the whole AY), and if you visit your PAF and don’t see them, contact your chair.

· If anyone wants to put anything in your PAF, they need to share the information with you 5 days in advance. You also have recourse to try to keep documentation out of your PAF; see 11.4 and 11.5 from the CBA below:

11.4 The faculty unit employee shall be notified of the placement of any material in his/her Personnel Action File that the appropriate administrator initially considers to be accurate and relevant, and the faculty unit employee shall be provided with a copy of such material at least five (5) days prior to such placement.

11.5 Upon request, a faculty member shall be provided the opportunity to meet with the appropriate administrator regarding material to be placed in the file to which the faculty member objects. The request to meet, if any, shall be made within five (5) days of the receipt of the notification. If no meeting is requested, the material will be placed in the file. If a meeting is requested, it shall take place within ten (10) days of the request made by the faculty member.

For more information on your PAF, read Article 11 of the CBA:

http://www.calfac.org/resource/collective-bargaining-agreement-contract#article-11

Questions about your PAF or any other faculty rights issues? Contact me at jennifer.eagan@csueastbay.edu.

In Solidarity,

Jennifer Eagan, CSUEB CFA Faculty Rights Chair