Interim Chancellor Paul Sarvela is not wasting any time making changes to campus policies.

In less than one month, five policies have been changed, including continual appointments, as opposed to one-year contracts; the hiring of retired faculty and staff; allowing head researchers of a grant to be in charge of the money they’ve been awarded; more overhead recovery money distributed throughout campus and hiring decisions being made without the chancellor having to sign off on them.

Sarvela said these changes have been made because he is trying to create a “strong dean model and strong vice chancellor model,” and decentralize critical decision making on campus.

“My management philosophy comes down to you hire good people and let them do their work,” Sarvela said.

One-year contracts were implemented by the previous administration last year, and Sarvela said it is hard to have people commit to a job at the university with that policy.

“It’s real difficult to hire a chair of a department from let’s say, Central Michigan or something like that, when we say, ‘Well, you’re going to be on a year-by-year appointment,’” Sarvela said. “It makes people feel there’s more job security.”

Cameron Shulak, president of the Undergraduate Student Government, said students will benefit from the change in hiring retired faculty and staff.

“In aviation, our department chair just retired and is going to come right back on and start to do some part time teaching,” Shulak said. “People like that have such a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of experience that it’s crazy not to consider them for those positions.”

Sarvela said another change is allowing the principal investigator of a grant— someone who writes a proposal and leads an academic project—to be the fiscal officer once again. He said a department chair or dean can still be the fiscal officer if the principal investigator chooses to not take that position.

“If you brought in a half a million dollars, gee whiz you outta have a say in how to spend it,” Sarvela said.

Rachel Stocking, president of the Faculty Association, said this policy is very important for people who do research on campus.

“There was a lot of unhappiness that was changed by [former-Chancellor Rita Cheng], and there were people who saw it partly as an attack method on the position of the people who were applying for the grants,” Stocking said. “But also more of a diminishing of the importance of research in general. … People viewed it as a very unbeneficial policy.”

Another policy modification Sarvela has made is how much overhead money the chancellor’s office receives when a grant is written. Sarvella said he has reduced the rate from 40 percent, implemented about two years ago, back to 30 percent, as it was before the previous administration made this change, allowing more money to go to other campus operations, such as the Graduate School.

Sarvela stated in a memo sent out July 16, 9 percent of overhead recovery allocated from the chancellor’s office had been returned to the vice chancellor’s account, and 2 percent had been returned to the School of Medicine.

The chancellor’s office has made an effort to streamline paperwork as well. While there is not a memo for this policy, Sarvela said it “takes forever to hire someone here.” He said it shouldn’t take two weeks to hire a cook.

“I don’t know if we need to have a cook in the cafeteria, but the great people at housing and the vice chancellor in charge know if we need to have a cook in the cafeteria,” Sarvela said. “Doggone it if we need to have a cook in the cafeteria, go and hire them.”

Shulak said Sarvela sat down with about seven constituent heads of the university as soon as he was appointed acting chancellor to discuss changes on the campus.

“He set in our hands right there the immediate changes he wanted to make, which I was really impressed to see,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that faculty and staff and students as well had continually expressed concerns about and he addressed some of those right away.”

Shulak said at the first meeting of the semester on Aug. 26, USG will discuss policies unfavorable to students, such as the 20-hour work cap implemented by former administration.

“From what I’ve heard that is something no students want,” he said. “I’m not sure what contact the previous administration had with the provost on that but I definitely want to take it up as a subject of conversation and see again what the reasoning was.”

Sarvela said he and Susan Ford, recently appointed interim provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs, have discussed changes to other policies, which will be announced in the future.

“We have every belief that people will be happy about the additional changes we’re proposing,” he said.