Despite calls for a resolution to the matter last week, none of the parties involved would say definitively this week whether the controversy surrounding University President Bruce Speck is over.

After a three-hour closed session following the Board of Governor’s regular meeting last week in Billingsly Hall, the University issued a statement saying the Board had asked Speck to improve relations with faculty and that it was “fully aware of the dissatisfaction of the faculty.”

Both sides were hesitant this week to call the issue resolved, however.

“The faculty morale has not increased at all as a result of Friday’s meeting,” Faculty Senate President Roger Chelf said on Wednesday.

Chelf is managing efforts by the senate to investigate a vote of no confidence in Speck. A preliminary report compiled by a faculty senate ad hoc committee was presented to the Board and Speck last week.

When asked if he considered the issue resolved, Board President Rod Anderson said the issues for the governors may not be the same issues for the faculty, but that both parties had the best interests of students in mind.

“In that press release we addressed a lot of the faculty concerns and wanted improvements in the various areas stated, and that’s where we met,” Anderson said Tuesday. “We’re looking for improvement in various areas and I think better days are ahead.”

Asked again if the problem had been resolved in Friday’s meeting, Anderson called the closed session “very constructive.”

“I think, I hope, we’re on the road to much-improved relationships overall,” Anderson said.

The faculty senate last week had threatened to move forward with plans for a no-confidence vote if the Board did not remedy the situation on Friday. Chelf said an executive committee is now editing the preliminary report, and the ad hoc committee will have a final report finished by early next week. It will then be given to the Faculty Senate.

“From the feeling I’m getting across campus it looks like a senate vote will occur,” Chelf said.

“There will certainly be no full faculty vote until after the executive committee meets again and if there is I would anticipate it will not occur until the senate meeting on Nov. 2,” he added.

Speck said Tuesday there was no specific plan for improving relations between the administration and faculty, but that he would discuss some ideas with the president’s council.

“I don’t think we’ve formalized anything yet but I clearly want the faculty to realize that I will continue to have an open door policy as I’ve always had,” Speck said. “I welcome people to come in and talk about whatever issues they feel are important.”

The Board statement released Friday evening directed Speck to “improve relations with the faculty and to address faculty concerns in terms of leadership, management and judgment without retaliation.”

Asked how he interpreted retaliation, Speck said it was acting capriciously, and retaliation is illegal.

“You need to make sure when you’re dealing with people you are not threatening them, and I mean threatening in ways that are inappropriate,” Speck said. “If someone is not performing the way he or she should and actually does things that contradict the job performance issues then I think you’ve got to address that, and it’s done through a process. When you retaliate, what you’re doing is saying ‘you didn’t do what I said so I’m going to capriciously do something to you’, whether it’s cut your pay, whether it’s fire you, and there are all kinds of laws against that.”

Speck added that he wasn’t sure how people were using the term, and called for more clarity in any claims of retaliation.

“If they mean in some sense a person is in another position now and you retaliate against them because you put them in a different position, then all I would ask is what were all the conditions involved and why is that retaliation, if indeed it is?” he said. “So there has to be some clarity. If you’re talking about acting capriciously and wantonly, yeah that can be retaliatory, and we have procedures for retaliatory.”

Speck said he had not been shown any specific examples of retaliation on his part, and that there could be confusion about the relationship between job performance and moving forward if someone doesn’t liv­e up to expectations.

“There has been no specific example of this someone can cite so it’s clear there hasn’t been an example,” Speck said, “and the Board really confirmed that the faculty handbook, and throughout campus, we have policies against that. My view is that’s illegal. We’re not to retaliate.”

During the open portion of Friday’s Board meeting Speck said he was concerned about inaccuracies and possible factual errors contained in the preliminary report. He refused to address specifics of the report this week, saying he wasn’t sure what the process was for addressing the report.

“I can tell you there are a number of points in the report where there is certainly more information that can be added to give clarity to some things that happened,” he said. “I think there are situations that certainly preceded me, so it’s very hard to say you’re responsible for those if there were things that happened and all of a sudden I inherited some of that so I think there are a number of issues in the report that could get more clarity by giving some more factual information to it.”

Speck acknowledged he could improve his performance based on points included in the report, but again declined to point out individual examples. He added that he hoped to move forward and amend relationships with faculty.

“I certainly think that they cite situations that in hindsight there might be some improvement in those,” he said. “I think those are lessons we can learn about how to proceed. I’m not saying the report doesn’t have specifics that might be very helpful.

“If the position is ‘I’m sorry, what you did is so egregious that it can never be forgiven or we can’t move forward,’ then clearly there’s not much I can do about that,” Speck added. “That’s not what I heard Roger (Chelf) talk about in the meeting. He seemed to say they were looking for resolutions and looking to the board for resolutions too, so it seems to there’s at least, I hope, a desire for us to move forward and try to amend what we can and to say in the past those things happened. There’s nothing you can do about the past, you can’t make it up.”