Senators will vote Sept. 21 on a resolution asking the U. of I. Board of Trustees to postpone the implementation of an expanded background check policy it approved at its Sept. 10 meeting in Urbana.
The policy, which extends background checks to all new hires, including faculty members, is set to go into effect Oct. 10.
“We’ve been working very hard to balance the liability issues against the need to maintain competitiveness and fairness in the searches,” said Edward Feser, the interim vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost.
Abbas Benmamoun, vice provost for faculty affairs and academic policies, said the final policy included input from all areas of campus and is consistent with policies at peer institutions.
“We continue to seek input from people because we really want to get this right,” he said.
The senate resolution points out several concerns, among them, the fact the policy does not line up with some of the provisions in guidelines developed by the American Association of University Professors.
Those provisions include ensuring that a candidate authorizes the background check and is given a final report; that a candidate be given the opportunity to contest the check’s findings; that final reports kept on file be corrected if inconsistencies are found; and that all personally identifiable information in a faculty member’s file be destroyed.
Benmamoun said the policy, which triggers the background check after a final applicant is selected, requires applicant authorization and gives them the opportunity to respond. He said privacy issues and applicant protection were paramount in the policy’s development.
Units will be able to submit background check requests on the university’s Hire Touch system, and the results of the check go only to human resources officials.
If there is a positive “hit” from the check, the candidate is contacted immediately and given a chance to respond. That response is heard by a Conviction Review Committee, which makes a recommendation but doesn’t share specific background check information with unit officials. Likewise, no conviction information would be stored in Hire Touch.
“Only a small number of people will get to see the results of the background check,” Benmamoun said.
The review committee’s membership would include Academic Human Resources, the University Police Department, university legal counsel, as needed, and two full-time faculty members.
Katherine Oderdeck, an SEC member and a professor of history, said she thinks the process is weighted against the applicant.
“Who’s the advocate for the candidate in the process?” she asked.
Deborah Stone, the director of Academic Human Resources, said the process is individualized and gives the applicant ample opportunity to respond to negative information that might turn up during a background investigation.
She said the review committee would consider that information in the context of how long ago a crime was committed and whether it has any direct correlation to the duties of the job in question.
“The candidate has a lot of license to provide whatever information they’d like … to consider the totality of who they are as a candidate,” Stone said. “The committee will not be sharing specific information, but the candidate can choose to share whatever they wish. There is no automatic bar to employment.”
Despite those safeguards, David O’Brien, an SEC member and a professor of art and design, said he was worried that keeping a candidate’s search information confidential would still be problematic.
Katherin Galvin, associate provost for administrative affairs, pointed out that the information gathered from the background searches are public records and legally obtainable.
She said the applicant has the right to withdraw during any stage of the process.
Bill Maher, an SEC member and the university archivist, said he would like to see a pool of faculty members developed to serve on the committee. He said doing so would allow professors of specific disciplines to offer advice on whether an applicant’s past conviction was relevant to specific work.
Abbas Aminmansour, an SEC member and a professor architecture, said the new policy should be monitored to see if it has any effect on faculty recruiting.
For now, the policy excludes background checks for graduate students and for employees transferring to other in-campus positions.
But at the Sept. 10 board of trustees meeting, Trustee Patrick J. Fitzgerald asked human resources officials to consider the impact of extending background searches to those subgroups as well.
Calvin Lear, a graduate student member of the SEC, said at the Sept. 14 SEC meeting that not including those subgroups in the background searches created a selection bias that gives them an advantage over outside candidates.
