Foreward

This document is the Faculty Handbook of the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University. It contains information and contractual material for the faculty members of both institutions.

The Faculty Handbook is organized into five parts:

Part I contains documents adopted by the College Board of Trustees and/or the University Board of Trustees as well as other administrative documents which relate to the overall mission and governance of the institutions; it is revised by administrative update. Part III is also revised by administrative update and contains administrative procedures which are of importance to faculty members. Procedures which are adopted by the Joint Faculty Assembly and approved by the presidents are incorporated into Part IV. Part V describes the faculty governance structure and is revised by action of the Joint Faculty Assembly and approval by the presidents. These four parts of the Faculty Handbook are common to the faculty of the college and of the university, although they contain some sections which may only apply to one of the two institutions. Revisions to these four parts ordinarily become effective as soon as they are adopted and receive presidential approval.

The policies and procedures of Part II are incorporated by reference into the contracts of all faculty members. This part is actually two documents, one for each institution, but they are mostly parallel and so are presented in a single text. Differences between the two documents are indicated by square brackets. Usually, the text in brackets pertains to Saint John’s University and, depending on the context either replaces or supplements the immediately preceding text which pertains to the College of Saint Benedict. Otherwise, the text in brackets begins with the phrase "College of Saint Benedict only:” or "Saint John’s University only:” to indicate the institution to which it pertains. Amendments to Part II are made by separate action of the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University faculty and must be ratified by the respective Boards. These amendments do not become effective until the beginning of the next contract year.

The pagination of the current document has been designed to facilitate updating. Each page has the effective date of that page (starting with August 2003) and the section number. The page number after the section number is from the beginning of the section, so that 2.3-2 at the bottom of the page means page two of Section 2.3. Major subsections usually begin a new page. It is the intention of the Faculty Handbook Committee to keep the latest version of the Faculty Handbook on the World Wide Web.

Printed revisions will be distributed at the beginning of each contract year. Pages with a later date supersede those with an earlier date.

No document as complex as the Faculty Handbook is ever complete or perfect. The committee hopes that the attached text is as accurate as possible, but there are bound to be errors, both substantive and typographical, and the committee takes responsibility for these. Errors should be reported to the Office of the Provost, where the official version of the Faculty Handbook is kept, so that they can be corrected as quickly as possible.

July 2000
Faculty Handbook Committee