University Senate approved of a set of recommendations dealing with pay and promotion issues on Thursday. Professor Thomas Holtz, co-chairman of the Non-Tenure-Track-Faculty Task Force, said he “would rather see it done right than see it done rushed.”

Non-tenure-track faculty members who have expressed concerns about their treatment at the university could soon see changes, after the University Senate voted Thursday to accept a set of task force recommendations.

The recommendations deal mainly with pay and promotional issues and seek to address gaps in the handling of non-tenure-track faculty and their tenured counterparts. Now that the senate has accepted the recommendations, various senate subcommittees will review each of the 21 proposed changes next school year, nearly two years after the Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Task Force was created.

“I would rather see it done right than see it done rushed,” said Thomas Holtz, the task force’s co-chairman.

Although some awareness of the issues already exists, the report could be a step toward broader understanding, Holtz said.

“I think all the NTT faculty have been sort of aware of issues of themselves and maybe other people in their own unit,” Holtz said. “They’ve been pretty aware of some of the specific issues but not seeing the bigger picture.”

The task force identified many concerns: Non-tenure-track faculty members work too much for too little pay, have limited upward mobility, work under misleading titles and receive administrative treatment that lags behind that of tenure-track members.

“I’m still paid what I was paid 11 years ago, when I started working at this university,” Sabrina Baron, a part-time lecturer and non-tenure-track faculty member, told senators at the meeting.

From behind the podium, senate Chairwoman Martha Nell Smith grimaced.

“I was horrified,” she said after the meeting. “That just appalled me.”

The task force’s recommendations could greatly impact the university if implemented because non-tenure-track employees constitute a majority of the faculty. About 3,000 non-tenure-track faculty members work in instructional, research and service capacities, compared to about 1,600 tenure-track faculty members, the task force found.

Over time, non-tenure-track faculty have taken on more of the university’s teaching load, and the breadth of their role on the campus surprised even Holtz. Non-tenure-track faculty are now teaching 40 percent of the university’s total credit hours, the same as tenure-track faculty.

“The NTT faculty are, in fact, a majority on campus, which is something that I wasn’t specifically aware of,” he said. “I suppose if I sat down and started thinking about it, I would have realized it. Seeing the actual counts really brings this to light.”

Scott Wible, professional writing program director, said non-tenure-track faculty members are critical members of his department, doing work that “demands a lot of time and energy.”

“They help us to advance the university’s collective teaching and research mission,” he told senators.

The task force’s recommendations are broad, generally avoiding hard numbers and leaving some leeway for implementation if they eventually pass the senate in individual votes.

One provision calls for the senate and Provost Mary Ann Rankin to “collaborate with the relevant bodies on campus” to place more non-tenure-track faculty in the senate, where they are drastically outnumbered by tenured senators.

Smith said any discussion of increasing their representation in the body ought to extend beyond the hard numbers.

“The various contributions that people make and how much time they spend on task and what their work is really does vary. It’s different if you’re tenure-track,” she said. “I think that any adjustment to senate representation cannot be just looking at numbers because I think that’s a very simplistic way to analyze.”

The issue of how to treat non-tenure-track faculty has extended beyond this university, several senators said.

“This is a great step in leadership for the University of Maryland. This is not just a conversation on campus,” Baron said. “This is a nationwide conversation.”