Policies for Instructional Support Staff

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Policies for Instructional Support Staff

General Conduct

Accounting for your Time

Planned Absences

Lateness and Unplanned Absences

Access to Privileged Data

Reading Users' Files

Disciplining Students

Work-Related Injuries

Computer Usage

General Conduct

Instructional support staff are expected to adhere to the rules of conduct that are required of all University employees. These are detailed in UC Berkeley Policies and Governance.

Most important:

Staff should use University resources only for tasks related to their work at the University. This specifically rules out any personal business uses. It implies that there should be no personal uses at all, but the use of minimal resources for personal email, local phone calls and WEB pages is generally overlooked.

Staff are often given physical access to restricted areas and should not allow unauthorized persons to share that access.

Communications with our clients and colleagues should always be courteous and professional.

Accounting for your Time

Staff are expected to post their work hours, with approval from their supervisor, and to be on the job during those hours. When you are away from your desk for extended periods, please post a sign in an appropriate place to notify others of your location, when you expect to return and/or how you can be reached.

Students should work no more than 49.5% time (about 19 hrs/wk) during the academic year. Students should arrange a work schedule with their supervisor. Students may be asked to schedule some office hours and also to work unscheduled hours on evenings or weekends as their time permits. The unscheduled work is typically troubleshooting technical problems that occur in the labs during these extended hours.

All staff are required to keep track of their work hours. Career staff submit a time sheet via CalTime at the end of each month. Student staff submit a time sheet via CalTime every 2 weeks. Supervisors approve the time sheets before they are submitted to the personnel office.

All staff should maintain records of the work they did and be prepared to present summaries of their efforts to their supervisor and at periodic group meetings.

Reference: http://policy.ucop.edu/doc/4010406/PPSM 2.210.

Planned Absences

Staff should contact the ISG or ESG supervisor for approval of planned absences for vacation, professional development, exams, etc. The supervisors must insure that there will be adequate staff coverage and that planned absences are distributed fairly amongst the staff.

Lateness and Unplanned Absences

If you are to be more than 15 minutes late or will be absent due to sickness or for other personal reasons, please notify your colleagues before you are due to be on the job. You should contact a real person, rather than only leaving a message, to be certain that your message is received.

These are good methods to inform the group of your absence:

send email to inst@eecs

call Kevin (643-6141)

call one of the staff listed in the ISG/ESG Organization Chart

call an EECS front office (253 Cory = 642-3214, 387 Soda = 642-1042)

keep trying until you get a confirmation to your email or phone calls

Access to Privileged Data

Staff are often given computer access to the files of faculty, students and other staff. This access must be used with great restraint: we should never read, copy or alter those files unless the user has requested it or there is an emergency that justifies it. Discuss this with your supervisor if you are uncertain about this: errors in this area can expose you or the University to legal retributions.

We cannot read email in a faculty account without approval from the faculty member or from the Academic Senate and Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs.

We cannot read email in a student account without approval from the student or from University counsel.

We cannot divulge any information about any of our users to anyone outside of our group unless the user has requested it.

See the UC Berkeley Model Privileged Access Agreement for a summary of the rules.

Reading Users' Files

Before looking at a user's files, we should consider these guidelines:

Student must have been notified that we might look into their files (we do, on the account forms that we give them and in http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/policies.html).

It is best to have the user's permission to look at the contents of any of their directories or files.

Student should be notified and given time to respond before disabling the account, except where the delay would cause more damage than good.

Staff should be self-restrained in looking at the files; first look at sizes and names of dirs and files. There should be a good reason for needing to look at all.

Read the contents of any files only if there is good reason to suspect that they are pirated software or active security risks (such as a password cracking program). Don't read email.

That rules out reading for evidence for harrassment complaints, etc.

In a case where the account is the source of continued and frequent undesired email or other transmissions, it could be disabled for a warning period to get the user's attention, but only after an effort has been made to contact the account holder, and only if the account holder will be able to find us right away to get the access restored.

When in doubt, a "higher authority" (sometimes UCB legal cousel) should be consulted first.

Disciplining Students

Students cannot be denied the use of their computer accounts unless the rules and procedures have been presented to them in advance (as with an account form and initial login message). So if a student is suspected of an infraction, usually we should just contact the student and resolve the problem without disabling any computer accounts.

If the situation warrants more immediate disciplinary or preventative action, we can disable the account, as long as we provide the student with information about it (via a login message, etc) and make ourselves available to restore access soon. If more severe restrictions are to be placed on the student, then the chairman of the department and the The Center for Student Conduct should be consulted and presented with the evidence against the student.

UCB Campus Policies:

Computer Use Policy

Guidelines for Administering Appropriate Use of Berkeley Campus Computing and Network Services

Staff should never have to do battle (verbal or physical) to enforce the rules, so it is sufficient to get the login of any offender and report the situation to your supervisor. A user's ignorance of the rules is no excuse for arguing with you.

The rules on their account forms specify that

"I agree to abide by the following rules of conduct. I acknowledge that my failure to do so may result in the denial of my access to the Instructional systems and may also warrant further disciplinary action by the University.
...
7) I will not bring food or drinks into the labs."

The account form is duplicated under

named accounts

class accounts

Work-Related Injuries

Students on the University payroll, including Work Study, are covered by the University's Workers' Compensation progeam for injuries sustained on the job, and by the University's general liabilty self-insurance program for any other injury or damage resulting from their employment (and for which the University is legally liable).

Students have the same access to Workers' Compensation and Vocational Rehabilitaion programs as regular University employees.

Student employees with work-related injuries should contact the Occupational Health Clinic at University Health Services (Tang Center, 2222 Bancroft Way, 642-2000) or Urgent Care (643-7197).

Computer Usage

You must abide by the campus and department computer usage rules, which can be accessed from http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/policies.html.

Notable rules include:

You should not share your account with others or give anyone access to the computers or labs for purposes unrelated to our work.

You should not use the accounts or computers for copyright infringement or any other illicit behavior.

You should not create user accounts without approval from the ISG manager. (We have specific procedures to maintain our recordkeeping and our usage agreement with department.)

You should not alter the network access of a computer or change the network port that it is plugged into without informing ISG and the IDSG network staff. (This is usually done via the EECS network update WEB site.)

Computers on the campus networks should be secured, firewalled and patched to current levels. If the computer you are working on cannot maintain that standard, then it should be unplugged from the network.

Thursday, May 02, 2019 kevinm@eecs.berkeley.edu