The Urbana campus will have an additional four weeks to fully implement a new employment background check policy for new hires that goes into effect Oct. 5, university officials have announced.
A Sept. 18 massmail from Barbara J. Wilson, the interim chancellor, said U. of I. President Timothy L. Killeen notified her Sept. 15 of the decision to push the Urbana campus implementation date back to Nov. 1. The Chicago and Springfield campuses will implement the policy by Oct. 5.
Killeen said the decision was made after consulting with U. of I. Board of Trustees Chairman Edward L. McMillan and trustees Karen Hasara, the chair of the Academic and Student Affairs Committee, and Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the chair of the Governance, Personnel and Ethics Committee.
Killeen also announced the creation of an ad hoc committee chaired by Christophe Pierre, the vice president for academic affairs, which will include input from employees from all three campuses for making recommendations for revisions to the policy.
Wilson said the Office of the Provost and the Senate Executive Committee, in the meantime, would “work together to ensure our background check implementation procedures are fair and nondiscriminatory to applicants while protecting the safety of our students and employees.”
The agreement to provide more time for the Urbana campus to fully implement the background check policy followed a 100-18 vote in the Urbana-Champaign Senate on Sept. 21 that urged trustees to reconsider the implementation of the policy until “problems and inconsistencies can be discussed, addressed and resolved with input from the senate.” (See the original story.)
“We want to thank the board and President Killeen for responding to the senate in a manner that supports shared governance,” Wilson said, “and we thank the Senate Executive Committee in advance for collaborating with us to complete this work in time for the Nov. 1 implementation.”
Whatever the outcome, she said campus officials would closely monitor the implementation policy to assess its impact on hiring.
The university already conducts background checks for sensitive positions, but the new policy would extend the checks to the final candidate in all job searches, with the exclusion of graduate students and internal transfers.
Authors of the senate resolution said the background check policy, approved by the board Sept. 10, lacked adequate candidate privacy protections and did not adhere to American Association of University Professors guidelines.
After Killeen’s announcement, human resources officials were informed that hires on the Urbana campus during the extended four-week period to fully implement the policy would not be finalized, with limited exceptions, until a background check is conducted.
Anyone with questions about the policy is urged to contact Elyne Cole, the associate provost for human resources, at 217-333-6677, or Deb Stone, the director of Academic Human Resources, at 217-333-7466. Questions about a specific position or search can be answered by Yulee Kim in Academic Human Resources at 217-333-6747 or Chris Carr in Staff Human Resources at 217-333-2137.
