Faculty
Association: President Fisher, Andrew Larkin,
Terry Peterson, Jack McKenna, Judy Kilborn, Bill Langen
Administration: President Saigo, Steve Ludwig, Ruth Meyer, Roland
Specht-Jarvis, Lin Holder, John Burgeson, Diane Burlison, Laurel Allen
Guests: Roya Majid, Mark Mills,
King Banaian, Piotr Pryztula, Jean Hoff
FA: Let me just say a big welcome to both returning faculty and administration,
new faculty, administration and guests.
This is the first meet and confer of the year. (Introductions) We have three items on today’s agenda. We will do the Mass Communication Curriculum
proposal first.
Curriculum-Mass
Communications
FA: I would like to give a
brief overview. The reason for this
proposal is to address in a rational way what we do in our program, which is a
3-credit program. There are several courses we teach in this department very heavily
involved with lab work. Students have
to do quite a lot of work in labs, Broadcasting being the most. We also have courses in Advertising that do
campaigns that have a lot of work outside classrooms. We have put forward this proposal to change Broadcasting to 4
credits to acknowledge the amount of work put into these classes. We would like to clarify that it is
completely based on the rationality of making sure the students are getting
enough credit for what they are doing and this does not reduce the number of
contact hours for the students.
ADM: How long are your labs?
FA: It varies because they each work one day a week in the newsroom,
but the average is 7 to 8 hours a week.
The major reason we put in for these changes is we spend just as much
time in class as everyone else but about 5 times more in lab.
FA: We conduct lecture and discussion in classroom but above all when
students go out to prepare on the materials, the work outside the class is more
than what we spend in class.
FA: This doesn’t include advertising in this proposal.
ADM: If you were confronted
with a choice to work with the current system or to commit to a 4-credit system
for your department, but had to guarantee that every faculty taught the 12
credits what would you say? Are you
able to change your curriculum for those requirements?
FA: We have made an attempt at that and yes it is possible.
FA: The big pile of changes that we tried to put through last year
kept all the professors in broadcasting at 12 credits. The only difference was 4 3-credit classes. Yes, we can do that.
FA: We are a nationally accredited program and the conversion would
meet all the guidelines and requirements for that.
FA: The professors are in the labs while the students are working.
FA: Any questions or follow up
on the rationale on this?
ADM: I think the issue has been addressed. I have a lot of hands-on experience with this. There are many ways to handle this. We have expectations that students will
participate and get credit for it. The
way that you’re describing is one way to do it. Part of the difficulty is how you define “lab”. The contract defines “lab” in a particular
way. Unfortunately, the contract speaks
in a more traditional science aspect.
FA: What is the definition of “lab”?
ADM: The contract says from a
workload standpoint you need to be given one hour of workload per two contact
hours.
FA: So what is the problem?
ADM: In the way you are talking
none of your courses have been defined as having a lab component. If you’re saying you have a 3 credit class
and 3 credits of lecture time and then 3 credits of lab its an issue if it’s
not reflected in your workload. I would
want to be sure we all understand the difference.
FA: Two contact hours per lab hour and our labs meet that. Do we need to re-describe our courses to
you?
ADM: That might be helpful.
FA: I think an issue is to make it more clear about our labs. I think it would be very easy to do that and
make it more detailed.
FA: The students work in groups in lab and we just need to explain it
better for the administration to review it.
FA: Do you have some advice for them to address the clarity on this
issue?
ADM: I don’t have a lot of
advice today. I did give some advice in
the memo. I wasn’t real sure of the
issues you were going to bring today.
There’s no simple answer to this, but I’m open to whatever we decide is
the best way to handle this.
FA: Maybe we could have some
subsequent meetings between the Administration and Mass Communications.
FA: The main concern is to redefine the lab and why we have them in
this way. Could I propose to rewrite
that and send it to you?
FA: Some curriculum cannot be
changed due to the national accreditation guidelines.
ADM: The guidelines for national accreditation will be changed and are
becoming a little more open to what you put in as long as certain criteria are
met. What I foresee is that if we don’t
look at the whole picture we will lose sight of the larger issue. Solving your problem could create problems
in other areas. If we can look at the
total curriculum and see how it fits best and still meets the national
guidelines that would be better.
FA: Do you think we would be better served taking an entire deparment
approach to this?
ADM: I think that will help you a lot. Please consider the following fact: when much of the curriculum
was thought out this was not created new at that time. The computer use and Internet was not
figured into that.
FA: So we are going to go through revisiting the workload and
curriculum and put forward another proposal?
ADM: I think it’s a good idea to have us deal directly with the Mass
Communications Department.
FA: I think we can work
together on this one and work with the department and administration to meet
mutual objectives. Perhaps we would
like to be in contact.
FA: The second curriculum
issue is Social Studies but we are waiting for the chair. Should we go to
another issue?
FA: The next issue is the
Diversity Conference. We had a list
from him regarding this conference and the Executive Committee passed a motion
to support the idea of a Diversity Conference.
We’ve invited him into Senate tomorrow.
We do have some questions regarding the opportunity for faculty to
participate in this activity, so perhaps we can have some discussion on the
selection. Does the Administration
have some ideas on this?
ADM: I believe this list came from a brainstorming session. I think what they attempted to do was to
cover a broad range of faculty. I think
that was the intent of this list. I
think the more important piece here is that all areas are included.
FA: One of the items in the Executive Committee is if this is Faculty
support it is important to have buy-in for the Faculty making it available for
whoever would like to participate. If
this is just a draft we could still put a call out to have an election.
FA: Another concern is that we
have quite a few representatives on the committee who have done a lot of work
on this. People need to be involved in
the decisions.
ADM: The only piece I know of
that had been discussed is the purpose of the committee.
FA: Another issue is getting
the information out there so grant money could be received.
ADM: Could you start an
election quickly so we can move forward with this?
FA: Faculty Senate will
approve this tomorrow and then I can put a call out for nominations but there
is a concern about doing something this big in such a tight time frame. I guess a lot of us would rather see it done
right than have it come off not quite right.
Is there some reason for the spring date?
ADM: It was an event to bring us together. MnSCU has a Diversity
Conference in the fall next week. This
is the second annual one. Next year
there will be another one planned in October and it could possibly be an event
we hold on our campus.
FA: Is this a University-wide
conference?
ADM: Yes.
FA: Do we need something as
far as size for the planning committee?
ADM: You should get an
indication from him tomorrow.
Composition
Exemption, Department of English
FA: Currently we have several
ways of exempting people for Eng 101.
There’s also AP credit in terms of having a formal record of this and we
are running into a problem. The department has no way of knowing a students’ AP
scores. We are requesting that waiving
the exempt part of taking Eng 191 be indicated on their transcript so that
students don’t end up wandering around trying to figure out how to make this
happen. We would like to request the AP
scores be shown on their transcripts.
ADM: Did records give you any
indication of if they could do this easily?
FA: No, they have been
resistant to doing anything about it.
ADM: In anticipation of you bringing it forward I can take it back and
find out more specifically if there’s other issues besides getting the new
system set up at the time. I will find
out if there are other issues in dealing with this.
FA: That would be nice if we
could at least see something on the horizon.
ADM: We don’t have the option of waiving a student according to their
AP score. I’m quite sure it violates
MnSCU Policy. Once we find out what we can and can’t do then I am in agreement
that we need to find a way to make that known on a student’s transcripts.
FA: It puts a lot of pressure
on the students and causes a lot of frustration.
ADM: The Social Studies curriculum has been a problem for a
while. I am very appreciative that the
Committee has finally pulled together a system that can work for all of us. The only remaining issues are three
specializations: Psychology, Anthropology, and Social Sciences. We had two reasons for not approving
these. First, there have been very few,
if any, in those specialty areas under the old curriculum and second, with the
profile of learning being developed in the Minnesota graduation standards it is
not likely that students with those specializations will meet the needs of
Minnesota school systems and they become less desirable employees. The Dean also believes we will not be able
to staff Social Science.
FA: One concern is what kind of data is being used to predict that
there is no demand at all for either of the majors.
ADM: We have looked through and found that it is absolutely minimal,
if not zero. The largest number of
students in a specialized area of Social Studies is in History.
FA: Since Economics has a bigger piece of the profile we expect to
increase enrollment. What do you see as
the resource cost of leaving them on the curriculum?
ADM: It is not a resource issue it is a curricular issue. Why would we want to put on a program that
has absolutely no students?
FA: It’s only a few lines in the book.
ADM: If we get the students where do we get the additional resources?
FA: It doesn’t actually need any additional resources. I think there is another argument that by
eliminating entire departments from having a possible teacher major, that makes
them second-class citizens observing this variety of social studies majors. It takes out the incentive of regarding
social studies as one area of interest.
I could imagine someone saying why would we dedicate a course in this
when we get no benefit?
ADM: But those departments
don’t have a major anyway.
FA: Not currently but maybe they will in future. These are various emphases and if you look
at the entire Social Studies major most of the curriculum is something that all
the majors have in common and this is more the final emphasis that students
want to put on it. Because we are not
really looking at eliminating whole programs but just eliminating three tracks
to complete those final credits for the Social Studies major. I guess given the fact that we have just
gone through an entire change in the curriculum, I would urge that these be put
in place and maybe the questions of whether they should be allowed should come
up in a couple years. The question of
whether they’ll ever be a large class is a big issue for Administration. I would like to request that these be
allowed to stay on for a couple years and see if those predictions are
true.
FA: So there was a suggestion on the faculty side that perhaps it
would be an option to temporarily let these programs go through to see if the
recent licensure change would affect the number of students. Will that be okay?
ADM: I don’t want to give a definite yes on what we will do with
this. I don’t know why we would want to
approve something that doesn’t seem to have a future in a variety of ways. I am not willing to say yes today, but
certainly we can think about it.
FA: All of these proposals came pretty much under the direction of
the Social Studies coordinator and we all signed off on it. It may be wise to go back to independent
departments to see if they really want this.
I don’t know that they went through the department curriculum process,
but they were passed.
ADM: Is there some faculty
process who can look at this? The four
principals are there and we are ready to approve it as soon as we resolve
this.
FA: My suggestion would be to bring people from the affected departments.
ADM: I would like to see some
data just as much as you would.
FA: Thank you. I think we
covered most of the different aspects of that issue.
ADM: Is 10 days enough for them
to put another proposal forward?
FA: I think if it will take
longer than 10 days for Mass Communications, we will get in touch with you.