Dear Members of The University of Tennessee Board of Trustees, On behalf of the UTK Faculty Senate I thank you for all your efforts to enhance the opportunities provided to Tennesseans through our fine University. I suppose I am your lunch entertainment, so I should start with a bit of a song - this is from the 1880's called Pans of Biscuits about an old farmer with verses "I saw an honest farmer. His back was bending low. He's picking out his cotton as fast as he could go." and chorus "It's pans of biscuits, bowls of gravy, Pans of biscuits we shall have." and probably the saddest verse is "I've toiled all my lifetime and still I find I'm poor Without an education. My children's left my door." (one of the most frightening things for any parent is to have their children turn away from them as happened to this farmer). One of the most gratifying advances IÕve seen in my 27 years of service at UT has been the effects of the Hope scholarship program which has provided the means to keep our children, including many of our best high school graduates, in-state. Our faculty is committed to doing all we can to help these students but frankly we are not satisfied with this farmers limited imagination that the best he could hope for is biscuits and gravy. We have much higher aspirations, have been working very hard to enhance the resource base at UT and hope that we can work with the Board to convince our legislators that it is in the best interest of the State to at least provide a little bit of protein and some "greens" to go along with our biscuits. I'm proud to serve as President of the Faculty Senate at UTK because our faculty are doing their jobs quite well. We have significantly greater numbers of students on campus now than 4 years ago, yet we have successfully dealt with the increased demands by these increasingly better prepared students with essentially no increase in regular faculty. Regarding our contribution to resources, if you compute the average external grant and contract funding that comes to UTK, essentially all of which is generated by our faculty, the average is $135,000 per faculty member. This includes all regular faculty, including disciplines that generate little external funding. Of course faculty also are primarily responsible for teaching, which generates tuition revenue. So if you conservatively allocate this tuition income equally across all 4500 UTK employees, this adds about $41,000 to the revenue stream generated by faculty - so faculty generate on average about $176,000 per faculty member per year. A standard measure in business is revenue per employee and so our faculty rate pretty well - we even slightly beat Walmart employees which generate about $170,000 in revenue per employee. Of course UT faculty contribute to our State in many ways other than revenue generation some of which are described in President Petersen's annual report. On the negative side our record on faculty diversity is unacceptable. Regarding gender diversity, statewide the UT system has 59 faculty in Chairs of Excellence, Distinguished Scientist and Governors Chairs positions, generously supported by State funds. I am rather ashamed to point out that only 3 out of the 59 faculty holding these distinguished chairs are female (all at the Health Science Center). The Knoxville News Sentinel recently ran a list of the 100 highest paid public employees in Knox County. Of the top 100, 69 were UT employees (40 of these based at UTK). Of these 69, only 4 are female. The faculty and the administration are simply not doing the job we should be with regard to diversity Ð this is a disservice to our students, to our faculty colleagues, and to our State. What can the Board do about this situation - tell us to take action, make it clear that this is not appropriate, urge us to do better at providing funding for opportunity hires and encourage us to develop a policy for spousal accomodation which has become more and more critical as faculty couples become a larger part of the pool of excellent faculty weÕd like to attract. Do everything you can to support our President in his goal of obtaining significant funds to enhance faculty salaries, provide graduate research stipends and support the Governors scholars program. Let us know what we can best do to assist you in this process. UT indeed has a bright future and we need to be certain we work together to go beyond being satisfied with just biscuits and gravy. Louis J. Gross President UTK Faculty Senate 2006-2007