HoD News - 11 June 2018

Dear colleagues,

Residential meeting, autumn 2018
We are planning a departmental residential meeting at Hotel Opus in Horsens 20-21 November 2018 with faculty and admin members participating. The dates have been forwarded to the study administration, and there will be no teaching these dates. Due to the size of the department, we have to restrict the attendance, but we consider arranging a residential meeting for PhD students and their supervisors at a later time. In the department management team, we presently discuss possible themes for the meeting such as: the education portfolio of the department and course coordination, the plans for the “University City”, open access publishing and journal rankings, as well as other themes. Also, there will be themes for the admin personnel. The programme for the residential meeting will be fixed shortly after week 42.

Meetings with sections
I plan to meet with all sections after the summer holidays in August-September, where some topics of the residential meeting will be presented. The agenda for these meetings will be discussed with the section heads, and if you have particular topics that you would like to discuss with me, I suggest that you communicate this via your section head.

Meetings with junior faculty
During the autumn I also plan to have head to head meetings with junior faculty (assistant professors and post docs) to hear about their career plans and their research and teaching progress. I know that all faculty have MUS (Staff Development Dialogue) meetings with the relevant section head once a year, but I believe there is a need to offer the head of department’s feedback and views regarding career development as well. I want these meetings to be informal meetings supporting the existing MUS talks.

Salary negotiations 2018
The salary negotiations of 2018 have now been completed, and the results have been communicated to the applicants. The frame available was limited to 0.7% of the wage sum, corresponding to approximately 650,000 DKK (2012 level) to be distributed across all employment categories of the department. In offering wage improvements or bonuses, I have primarily focussed on the applicants’ achievements regarding excellent teaching, publications in top-ranked journals, and the applicants’ ability to attract major external research funding with significant overhead. For admin personal, I have focussed on the applicants’ sustained extraordinary performance according to their work specification. I have also offered salary improvements or bonuses to department members who were not in the pool of applicants, but who according to my own and/or the section head’s judgement have provided an extraordinary performance following the above criteria. I have also attempted to offer wage improvements to department members outside the application pool that I have judged to have a salary that lags behind the salary of comparable colleagues in the relevant position category.

Relocation plan has been postponed
I regret to inform you that the relocation plan has been delayed by yet another 6 weeks. This means that the expected first moves will be in mid November. I apologize for this, but it is outside our control. The postponement is caused by delay of tender documents and general labour shortage.

Niels Haldrup