Senators overwhelmingly approved a resolution Sept. 21 calling for the postponement of a universitywide background check policy set to go into effect Oct. 5.
In a vote of 100-18, senators asked the U. of I. Board of Trustees to “urgently and immediately” postpone implementation of the new policy until “problems and inconsistencies can be discussed, addressed and resolved with input from the senate.”
The board’s next scheduled meeting is Nov. 12.
Authors of the resolution said the background policy lacked adequate candidate privacy protections and did not adhere to American Association of University Professors guidelines.
The policy was approved by the board Sept. 10 and requires background checks for the final candidate of any search, excluding graduate students and on-campus transfers.
Human resources officials said that under the policy, units would submit background check requests on the university’s Hire Touch system, and the results of the check would go only to human resources officials.
If there was a positive “hit” from the check, the candidate would be contacted immediately and given a chance to respond. The response would be presented to a Conviction Review Committee, which could make a recommendation, but wouldn’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,” said Abbas Benmamoun, the vice provost for faculty affairs and academic policies, at the Sept. 14 Senate Executive Committee meeting.
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.
Teresa Barnes, a resolution sponsor and a professor of history, said the policy contained “confusing inconsistencies” and lacked clarity, especially when it came to the process of candidates wishing to appeal or correct negative background check findings.
She said the process was subjective in that it asks a committee to determine if a conviction relates directly to a candidate’s job. She said the judgment is akin to a “retrying, resentencing.” She said there also are issues related to the guidelines as they related to current searches.
Barnes said the resolution’s authors also questioned the use of the search company, General Information Systems, which already conducts background screenings for the university, because the company is the subject of lawsuits over their handling of sensitive information.
Benmamoun said his office had worked hard to make the process fair and to balance the privacy of the candidate against the safety of the campus, which is what the background search is designed to protect. He said the policy matches similar policies at peer institutions.
He said the provost’s office had sought and received input on the policy from all areas of campus over the last few months.
Benmamoun said the information gathered in the searches already is public information, that there are adequate protections of that information during the hiring process, and that candidates must authorize the search and can withdraw at anytime during the process.
Harry Hilton, a senator and emeritus professor of aerospace engineering who is affiliated with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, convinced senators to support a resolution sending the background policy back to the Senate Executive Committee for further study and recommendations.
He said the document was flawed because its development had lacked faculty consultation and suggested the work be assigned to the appropriate subcommittees for a recommendation by semester’s end.
In addition, at the Sept.10 board of trustees meeting, Trustee Patrick J. Fitzgerald asked human resources officials to study the efficacy of including graduate students and internal job transfers in the current background check policy.
