Meet and Confer Notes – Final approved 2-15-07
February 1, 2007
Administration: Michael Spitzer, Nancy Jessee, Larry Chambers, Steven Ludwig, Mark Nook, Rex Veeder, Kristi Tornquist, Mitchell Rubenstein, Patty Dyslin – note taker
Faculty: Annette Schoenberger, Judy Kilborn, Fred Hill, Balsy Kasi, John Palmer, Andrew Larkin, Jayantha Herath, Jason Lindsey, Bob Inkster
Absent: President Roy Saigo
Minutes from January 18, 2007 – approved
Unfinished Business
1. Request Summary date for all peer reviewed faculty: Initial Hire Date, Rank, Date of any prior promotions and/or denials and outcome of peer review (FA – 11/2/2006)
FA: How’s that going?
AD: I thought I gave that to you. Did I give that to you?
FA: No. You said it wasn’t correct and you were checking it.
AD: I thought I had given that to you last time. I’ll send you a copy of that and if there are any additions to it, I will give them to you as they become known.
FA: Okay.
2. Board of Trustees Award for Teaching Excellence (Admin – 12/7/2006)
FA: There’s some real interesting stuff going on there. We didn’t have any volunteers to serve on the state-wide committee. I think at the state level, there are no volunteers from faculty to serve on the state committee. Three of the campuses have decided not to participate at all. Of the other campuses that may or may not participate, one is reconsidering participation and the others have no faculty who have volunteered to either submit their materials or to have a committee to even look at the stuff. I’ve been asked by our Senate to give them a full report of what’s going on at the state level so I will tell them this. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen with that. We had a discussion about this at the state Meet and Confer last Friday. It was an interesting discussion.
AD: One of the things that I found appealing about this award, not necessarily the Board of Trustees award and the way they had it structured, but the idea of having an award on campus for faculty for teaching excellence struck me as something that we ought to be doing. To recognize good teaching is something that universities ought to do. We need to celebrate our best teachers and have some way of providing recognition to those faculty is something that I think the institution should do whether or not there is a state-wide award for teaching. I would hope that at least on our campus if we don’t want to submit anything for a Board of Trustees award, there’s only one that they’re talking about state-wide, we should have recognition for excellence in teaching on our campus and celebrate those faculty who are doing an excellent job in the classroom.
FA: One of the issues at the state level is that there is this one hundred page document that the faculty have to prepare and they have to prepare it before they even know if they’re going to be sent to the state level and then at that point, we get to send five,
AD: Four. [Informational note – not part of official minutes – correct number for SCSU is seven]
FA: Well, four. So your chance of actually getting this $500 or $5,000 dollars, or whatever it is, is pretty small for the amount of work that’s required. That was the biggest thing. People just don’t think it’s worth it. Even though they think it might be a worthy thing to do, they’re just not convinced that it’s worth the effort.
AD: Should we design a process where we can do something on our campus apart from that award?
FA: That’s not very time intensive and wouldn’t add to anyone’s workload?
AD: That wouldn’t require a one hundred page document?
FA: Yes.
FA: I don’t know. I have to go back to Senate with this. We’ll take that question back to Senate and see what they want to do. I think we have some awards, don’t we?
AD: I think some of the individual colleges have awards. Maybe what we should do is promote the idea that there should be an award from each college, but I would like that to be something that’s celebrated more broadly campus-wide. I know at least in one college there’s an announcement made at a college meeting and that’s it. I’d like to design a plaque of some kind and put people’s names on it who have been recognized for that and have it displayed in a prominent place where people can see it. One of my observations about the university is that we don’t give ourselves enough credit. I’ve been in systems where people think everything is wonderful and they’re not so great; and here we do some great things and nobody notices it or recognizes it. We need to start promoting the fact that we do some really superb things at this institution and that we have some really superb teachers. We should begin to celebrate that more than we do.
FA: What are we going to do about the faculty who are excellent teachers who are not recognized? How about having an outstanding administrator award? I think somebody brought that up in the Senate.
FA: That you apply for and you have to get people to actually recommend you.
AD: Where I worked before, in Colorado, we had faculty of the year, part-time faculty of the year, administrator of the year, classified employee of the year. We had plaques, color photos and nameplates for each year. These would stay up for one year in a prominent place in the lobby. If we do something like this, we might want to think more broadly and make it more inclusive. Each of those groups would nominate and select a person from the group to get the award for a year.
AD: MnSCU does have some administrator awards that go through the same process where somebody has to be nominated.
FA: Anyway, we’ll get back to you. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the Senate.
AD: Okay.
3. Request for report on Initiative Budget Spending (FA – 12/7/2006)
FA: Last time at Meet and Confer Provost Spitzer, you gave us this document. We appreciate getting this but it wasn’t what we expected. We expected Steve Ludwig to bring us in a list with specific numbers for things that had been spent out in various categories and that’s actually what we would like – to know what’s been spent.
AD: In categories?
FA: For example, if I look at computer replacement, 3 years and older, you’ve got it marked “done.” How much did that cost. There was a projection of how much that would cost. We’d like to know where we are with that.
FA: And where it was spent. Steve was here at that meet and confer so it’s not like he didn’t hear us ask for it and didn’t know what information we wanted provided…
AD: I thought this is what you wanted; a list of what these things were and whether we spent the money on those things. The answer to that was “yes.”
FA: Part of this is a movement towards more transparent funding so we know ahead of time what was planned and it’s good to know that we’ve gotten the majority of the things done, if not all of them. Things may have cost less or more than originally planned. It would be good to move into a situation where whenever we are reporting something that has some sort of monetary component to it, that we actually see the actual expenditure – this is what we planned, this is what it cost, this is how much over or under the amount we estimated – so it’s a move towards watching the flow of money through the organization. That’s what we’re asking for.
FA: An example of that is the second line down. It says “purchased city property – Q lot” it said it was just finished and that we had budgeted $500k. Does anybody know what we spent to buy that land?
AD: It is not just finished. We have a purchase agreement and we have an assessment of the site that we’ve sent to MnSCU for approval. The purchase price is something like $444K, I don’t have the exact number with me. We also paid for the environmental assessment of the property and there will be some precise costs when we close. There’s a few closing costs involved – some are by the owner. Until we close, we won’t have the exact cost. It looks like we will still be under the $500K. That’s where that one is. We have a purchase agreement. We spoke about this the previous time and Michael said that in general, the ones within Academic Affairs are either done or not done for the intended purpose. So we’ve talked since hearing from you, John, that you wanted more numbers with respect to this. We’ll go back to the units because the monies were allocated to basically the units, and get the numbers as to what was or wasn’t spent on these or what the status is for something like accreditation in terms of expenditures to date because we’re not quite done with that either. That’s what we plan to go back and do.
AD: The dollars in each of those areas were allocated to the units. To get the specific details, I need to go back to each of the units and get a report from them. I will do that.
FA: I was going to ask about the parking part. My concern is that if this money came out of budget for academics, if there was a $13M surplus in academic budget, how did that get transferred over to parking? I’m trying to understand whether that’s possible even. Explain that for us.
AD: These funds were in the university’s budget and we went through our budget process and talked about places for one-time investments across the campus. One of the things we agreed to do at that time was partially fund the parking ramp.
FA: I don’t think we ever agreed to do that. You guys decided to do it. I don’t think we ever agreed to do it. We have always asked the question “how can you do that?”
AD: It was in the budget plan that we presented.
FA: Right. But we never agreed….
AD: Okay. I can’t doubt what you recall, but it terms of it being an appropriate expenditure, we proceeded with it. The planning is nearly complete. That was that first $700K roughly – it was somewhat more than that as I recall. We acquired the property and we’re proceeding to go out for bid soon for the parking ramp.
FA: If I just add those two together, that’s $3.9M out of the $13M.
AD: Yes.
FA: I think you can see my concern. In year one, we don’t fully fund academic programs and then two years later, we come up with a surplus and we take that money to build a parking lot. So we’ve been using academic money to build parking lots.
AD: I understand. I wouldn’t quite parse it as quite a bright line as that because we made changes in administrative units, we did things across campus at the time that we were looking at this. You’re general concept that we had money that was a surplus and then we decided on that basis on a one-time basis, that’s true. Most of these are for different purposes than what we would have spent them on otherwise. I agree.
FA: Do you have any sense of how long it will be before we know the status of what was actually spent on the “done” categories?
AD: I would hope, contingent upon my colleagues and the other vice president’s units, that by the next Meet and Confer we should be able to have them.
FA: I think part of my concern with this has to do with the fact that in terms of the budget, we’ve always had difficulty knowing how much money we have because so much of it is allocated to units. We’ll ask a question and Diana will say “We gave that money to the deans and the deans spend that out and we really don’t have control over that.” I think we ended up with this surplus because we really didn’t have a good sense of where what money was and some things did cost less, I do understand that. My whole point is that we need to figure out a process to make it easy to have this reporting happen so that when things are done, those numbers are filled in on a regular basis so it’s not a major project to go and find out how much something cost. At this point, we can’t fill in all the spots because some of this stuff is still in progress, but the stuff we should fill in should have been filled in. I’m simply asking that we figure out some way to do that on a regular basis with expenditures so our budget is more transparent.
AD: Because I’m one of the people who’s going to give a more detailed report, and I think just to help other people, maybe we could pick one of mine so I can know exactly what you want. You talked about the $200K for replacing old computer equipment. We spent the whole $200k. Do you want to know how many computers we bought? Do you want to know which departments we bought them in? How detailed do you need it to be?
FA: We’re looking at numbers. For this we decided we would spend for example, $200K in classrooms in the College of Business. How much did we actually spend? How much did we spend for equipment in the College of Social Science? What we want is a hard number.
AD: Do want to know what we bought with it or just how much we spent?
FA: How much we spent is I think what we’re asking for, right?
FA: Right.
FA: We just don’t want to know that you spent it all.
AD: We did spend it all.
FA: Well, did you spend it all to the penny? Did you spend less? Did you spend more?
AD: I will get you exactly what we spent.
FA: If you say you spent it all, there are people in the College of Social Sciences who don’t think they got anything out of this.
AD: So you want to know where we spent it?
FA: Well, yeah. You’ll say “Yeah, we spent it” but there are people who would say we don’t know what it was spent on.
FA: Are we asking for a detailed breakdown then?
AD: That’s what I want to know. Do you want to know which rooms and how much we spent per room?
FA: That would be useful.
AD: I can do that.
FA: Another example is for the Ehland property. It says you spent $230K. Now, did you really spend that? Suppose that when the dust settles, you really spent $215K. What happened to the other $15K?
AD: It would be carried over.
FA: That’s important because that is where you end up with this kind of….
AD: Yes, it can be.
FA: The other thing is, what we also don’t want is for someone to go and look around for, like in the College of Business for $200K worth of equipment that they bought and then say that it was all bought out of this when some of it may not have been.
FA: You can anticipate that we’re going to have follow-up questions. This was the beginning, to look at the one-time expenditures. The next piece would be the strategic investments that happened at the same time that were put into place structurally in the budget and that eventually, the kind of information that we’re asking about would be available in a much quicker fashion than has occurred in the past. That’s the kind of discussion that we’ve been having with the Budget Advisory group and the principles by which the budget model and process would work so that it’s pretty easy to figure out, and we’re not dependent on the seat-of-the-pants.
AD: Okay.
Loren Boone arrived at the meeting so we moved ahead to Item 4 of New Business
The following is a summary of Loren Boone’s presentation
Loren Boone thanked the group for inviting him to speak about the new look/concepts for the SCSU web site. He indicated that the plan is to launch the new web site after Spring 2007 classes end. He reported that there have been numerous meetings with departments and campus-wide to show people the 3 options for the new site and that most people have indicated a preference for option #2. He shared that the primary issues that have been brought up were that people wanted to make sure that their tools would still be easily available to them. The focus of the change is to make our web site more of a marketing tool that appeals to potential students and their parents. He assured the group that features currently being used by students, faculty, and staff will be available and easy to get to.
Faculty had questions about access to D2L, registration information and other features that are used daily. They also wanted to know if the new site has been tested anywhere on campus.
Loren Boone indicated that they are still in the design stage and would welcome input. He indicated that feedback and suggestions should be directed to him or Sarah Grachek. He also indicated that the new site would be tested by one or more departments before being implemented campus-wide. Loren also reviewed the current marketing campaign. It is being directed mostly to the northwest suburbs. There will be billboards, advertisements in movie theaters, advertising in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report as well as a mass mailing to alumni. Due to funding restrictions of $165K, Stamats and the university concluded that it made sense to go after the adults in the targeted market area. To market to both potential students and adults would have cost in excess of $300K. Unfortunately, we are still perceived as a party school and there is hope that these pieces, targeted to the parents, will assist in lessening that perception.
Loren Boone left the meeting.
FA: There are still inconsistencies in TOFL requirement information on the web site. This is problematic and needs to be addressed.
AD: What do you mean?
FA: The information is listed in 3 or 4 different places and is not really consistent. It’s still in many different places. It’s still not consistent and now winter is starting, this semester is starting, and I’m getting e-mails from people saying “This is what the students thought was going to happen based on what they read on the web site. This is what’s actually happening to them. It doesn’t seem to be consistent.” We thought that the Graduate School was going to look at this and clean up the web site and that hasn’t happened. It is an issue about the web site because I’ve been meeting with Loren regularly and he’s been promising me …. We can have as fancy a looking web site as we want, but if the information on it is not…
AD: Are you talking about, if I understand correctly, there’s a statement on the web site about a 250 score on the TOFL exam that’s required for admission but if it’s below a certain number the student has to take ESL courses or the other way around?
FA: That’s part of it. Jayantha has more information.
(Jayantha Herath began to speak. The note taker could not hear what was being said nor was the recording device able to pick up the words.)
Note taker: I cannot hear him.
AD: Can you speak a little louder? I’m having trouble hearing you.
FA: We need to caucus. (Faculty left the room to caucus)
FA: This is the problem, the student goes to the web site to find out what they need to do, they read it, they think they’ve done what they need to do, they get here and find something else out. We have lost students because of this. We would like the web site to correspond with what is actually being done. We thought that last Fall we had a promise that you would get that web site cleaned up. The Graduate Dean, I think told us they would do that and it hasn’t happened.
FA: I think part of the issue too is that you can maybe get a picture of what you’re supposed to do if you read all the pieces of the web site in the various places and if you read them in the right order. But if you don’t then you’re in trouble. We need to look at where the pieces are and make sure that they coordinate and that they’re in the places where the students are going to look for them.
AD: Okay.
FA: Now that Judy mentions it, it rings a bell for me too. I think it’s not so much that the information that’s there is wrong, it’s just arranged in such a way as to be difficult to understand – misleading.
AD: Okay. We will look to address that.
4. Continuation of the Zmora Agreement (FA – 1/18/2007)
FA: I think we gave you something and you said you’d come back to us with?
AD: There are elements in what you gave us that are significant departures from the original Zmora Agreement. I think that one of the things that we might best be able to do is to have a sub group get together to look at what you have given us, what some other ideas are, and then come back to the group with a proposal for how we might address the continuation of some of the elements of that proposal.
FA: Do we want to decide now that we want to go ahead and do that or do we want to wait?
FA: I believe that Senate reviewed and acted on the document that we gave to the administration.
FA: That’s true.
FA: It would seem to me that if there are concerns with that, that prior to forming as it were, a group that would talk about an emerging compromising position, we get some information that outlines where you see issues.
AD: I see issues particularly with the peer review committee. That’s the area where there are issues. And the issues that I see are the areas where it’s been changed from the original agreement. If you look at the two documents, you can see what those changes are.
FA: You had wanted to make a change from the original language.
AD: I have, that’s true.
FA: So it’s okay for you to want to make changes but not okay for us to want to make changes?
AD: No. I didn’t say that what I was doing was a continuation of an agreement where the agreement was changed. I said that I wanted to make changes to an agreement as opposed to a document that says this is a continuation of an agreement when it’s not.
FA: So the label on the document is the problem.
AD: The label on the document was misleading.
FA: We’ll take this back to Senate. It would be useful if you could give me something in writing to take back that actually said “these are the things that are problematic.”
FA: I’m confused. I’m hearing two different things. I’m hearing that the labeling is one of the problems, but I’m hearing also that the changes that we’ve made in the section on the peer review committee are not appropriate from your perspective. If we change the name are we okay?
AD: No. Changing the name would be a different issue. There are elements in the way that the language was changed that I don’t think we will find acceptable.
FA: Can you be more specific?
AD: There are a couple of things. The first one is that is says that the review committee will make a recommendation that goes to the faculty member and if the faculty member likes the outcome, can submit it to the administration. That’s not acceptable. Either we have a review committee that makes a recommendation that’s reviewed or it’s not. It can’t go both ways. There’s a change in there that excludes non-union members which is a change from the original document.
FA: But you wanted to exclude non-tenured, non …
AD: I wanted to propose that if we continue with the process, that the faculty who are selected for the peer review committee be tenured, full professors.
FA: I’m finding what Michael is saying helpful. What I’m suggesting is that if we frame the areas of agreement and disagreement as a working group then, we can go back to Senate and know what it is that the concerns are and we can get a sense of where the Senate is and where our organization is. I appreciate the specificity. I did hear Annette say it would be helpful to have something in writing that went back to the Senate that would prepare us to go to the next step would be: can we find common ground?
FA: I appreciate the feedback as well. In fact, if I would have spoken first I would have said something too about… the only reason there were changes in the peer review committee was to put it in conformity with our contract with MnSCU. The Zmora Agreement was imposed upon us by a court so they could override our contract. If we’re no longer under that court decision, then we have to go back to our contract. That’s why we put it in there that the faculty member controls the information that goes forward concerning their application.
AD: I’m not sure that’s entirely true.
FA: That was our thinking on why we did that. That’s why we changed it the way we did.
AD: Okay.
FA: We can’t, on this campus, agree to anything that would violate the contract or that would give you more power than the contract has. If you’re asking that we do something, like the inclusion of people who are not members, I don’t know that we can do that. I’m not sure how we can do that unless there’s some special expertise that these people would have and you could tell us what it is. You would have to tell us how a person who is a fair-share member has some sort of expertise that the other people wouldn’t have and would mean that we couldn’t find someone else to be on there. If you can’t, we would be in violation of our agreement.
AD: I didn’t say that you should violate the agreement. I was simply talking about things that would change from what was in the original agreement. That’s one of the elements that was changed.
FA: We’re not interested in proposing something that would…. We’ll take this back to the Senate and see if they’re interested in forming some kind of a group to look at it.
AD: Okay.
5. Resolving Grievances and the Designee (FA – 1/18/2007)
FA: I had my memory refreshed. The President had talked about a meeting that would involve the Provost and Rex and I. Maybe the Provost and Rex were like I was and didn’t realize that the President said that there would be a meeting.
FA: So, are you guys going to do that?
AD: Sure.
FA: Who’s going to convene it and when is it going to happen?
AD: We’ll schedule it.
FA: The Provost’s office will schedule it?
AD: Yes.
6. 1.B.1 Complaints and Disability Services and Pedagogy (FA – 1/18/2007)
FA: There is a meeting tomorrow of the individuals who were identified. There is a question though. At the last Meet and Confer, it was announced that Nancy Jessee was leaving the position of lead investigator and becoming special assistant to the president. Our question is: who is the lead investigator today?
AD: I think what we’re doing is if there is an investigation that needs to be done, until we fill that position, we would contract with somebody external to the campus to handle the investigation.
FA: I think we need to make some sort of public announcement about what’s happening. Let’s say I want to file, as far as I know…
FA: Who do we go to, to make a 1B1?
FA: I’m assuming that since Nancy’s in that office, I shouldn’t call that number because it’s been announced that she’s in that office. I think we need, if we’re not ready to name somebody, we need some process in place so that faculty know who they should go to if they have a complaint.
AD: At this point I am being contacted by people and I do at least discuss with them what’s going on and tell them that we’re trying to fill the position as fast as we can. I have at least discussed the process. I don’t discuss the case with them. That’s what’s going on right now.
FA: We know of two outstanding… John, is it two?
FA: It’s one for sure.
FA: One for sure, where people haven’t received a response.
FA: The president said that in the transfer of roles, there weren’t any outstanding cases.
AD: He was mistaken about that. I’m, not going to discuss any of the case load here.
FA: Okay.
AD: If anyone wants to contact me who has a concern, if I’m allowed to discuss it with them, I will.
FA: Our difficulty is that we always thought that the lead investigator /designated officer person was separate from the president because at some time, they might have to do something the president didn’t like. Now you’re the special assistant to the president and we don’t see how you can be doing both.
AD: She’s not doing any investigations.
FA: What happens to those investigations? They’re just out there and nobody’s doing them?
AD: I don’t know what investigations are currently on-going because I’m not privy to them.
FA: I actually don’t know either. I just know that there’s one person who said “I filed a complaint and haven’t heard anything back yet. I haven’t received a response.”
AD: I thought our plan was that somebody would be contracted to conduct that investigation, isn’t that correct?
AD: If there is a need for one that commences before we get somebody in that interim position. As far as any investigations as a result of complaints that have already been filed, I’m not going to discuss particular complaints, if that person wants to come and talk to me, I’ll be glad to talk to that person.
FA: What about the person who decides whether or not there should be an investigation? Who’s doing that? When you read the 1.B.1 it talks about you make a complaint to this person and this person decides whether or not there’s going to be an investigation. So we understand that the investigation will be contracted out, we’ve done that any number of times. What we’re trying to find out is: who’s the person you go to? Who’s the person who’s going to make that decision about whether or not an investigation should occur? That’s the part where we see a conflict. Because the person who’s the special assistant to the president is advising the president about these things and this other person – we can’t see how that can be the same individual. That’s where we’re at. We want to know: where do you go if you want to ask for an investigation? Who’s the person who decides whether or not there will be an investigation?
AD: That person is not in place at this time. It will not be me while I’m wearing this other hat.
FA: What happens to people then who have/…
AD: What happens if they contact me is I explain the process to them, I give them a complaint form, I explain that we’re pedaling as fast as we can, and that they’re welcome to contact me every single day to find out the status of the interim appointment if they like.
FA: So you’ll provide information, but you won’t do any intake at all.
AD: I give them a complaint form and send them on their way.
AD: I don’t know, Nancy, how this might work, but one solution might be – we do have administrators and others on campus who have 1.B.1 training. In the interim, until the interim person is hired, so that you are freed up of some of this, maybe there could be somebody who could fill in on the intake. We’re talking about an intake person basically.
AD: Maybe we should caucus.
FA: Can I clarify what I’ve heard?
AD: We’re going to caucus. (Administration left the room to caucus)
AD: The issue you raised is a valid and very important one and we’re glad you brought it to our attention. While we’re in the process of identifying someone to serve in an interim capacity, we’re going to check with Renee Hogobloom at MnSCU to see if she will handle those inquiries and intakes and let you know.
FA: Thank you.
7. Center for International Studies: What are the fees used for? $100 administrative fee, $22 student ID, $125 emergency fund, $75 application fee. (FA – 1/18/2007) Request for External Review and Audit of the CIS (FA – 1/18/2007)
AD: You asked for some information about that. Unfortunately, the interim director is doing a lot international traveling and is again, out of the country. We have just hired an accountant to work in that office. That accountant is going through records and putting together a history of revenue and expenditures. What we would like to do is once that is complete, to have an external accountant come in and review that document to verify that it meets the various standards for accounting procedures and if there are any changes that we need to make in procedures, we’ll look to adopt some of those and we’ll look at how we fund the office as well. It’s going to take a little while for us to get back to you.
FA: How long?
AD: I’m not sure how long. My understanding of the accounting process that has been in place for a fairly long period of time hasn’t been very good. It’s going to take some time to reconstruct some things and we’ll do that as quickly as we can. I’m not sure I can give you a deadline, but this is the first major task for the person who’s been hired as the accountant. She wants to get this understood and have it clear so we can move forward. We’ll give you as transparent a record as we can and have somebody external to the campus look it over to make sure it’s valid and correct.
AD: As soon as we have the material, such as we get it, from the accountant, we want to share that first so that before we go to somebody and ask them to review it, let’s see if we can agree on questions that we might have. Then if we need to have an external review, we’ll do that.
FA: Do you think March 15th might be a reasonable date?
AD: It’s certainly a date we can aim for. I don’t know how long it will take the accountant to go through all of that stuff. I’m not an accountant. I don’t know what’s involved in the details of doing that. We certainly can aim for March 15th.
FA: Okay.
AD: If we have it before then, we’ll send it along.
FA: So this is a new full-time person?
AD: Yes.
AD: A new person in an existing position.
FA: And her primary thing at first will be to put together some structure out of this chaos?
AD: Yes.
FA: Okay.
FA: You mentioned that the current CIS director is not in the country. Is there someone in that office now who has authority?
AD: Each of the directors for the various areas has authority over each of those areas. There’s the Study Abroad Director, the International Student Program Director, and the International Admissions Director.
FA: Last fall there was some difficulty with a course that got stuck in the wrong place by records and registration accidentally, and trying to get it moved, because there was no one in the office who thought they had the authority do anything, we can’t just have students losing their enrollment and financial aid because there’s nobody who can…
AD: I think each of the directors can address each of their specific areas of responsibility.
FA: Okay. Thank you. We’re going to revisit this on March 15th.
New Business:
1. Article 22 and Professional Development Document from IFO (FA – 2/1/2007)
FA: This document was prepared by Pat Arseneault and reviewed by Fred Hill and Bob Inkster . This is the document that we are giving our faculty and we are endorsing for them to look at when they are preparing their Article 22 documents. We want you to know what we’re telling Faculty.
AD: Okay.
FA: Does anybody else want to say anything about it?
FA: You might want to deal with the calendar one at the same time.
FA: We could do that. Have any of you actually looked at the calendar that’s on the web site? That little document that has all of those little tiny numbers and everything in it and then tried to figure out what you have to do if you were a faculty member and you wanted to know what to do? It’s pretty near impossible. We’ve had a lot of complaints.
AD: Are you talking about just for the tenure?
FA: All of it. All of the Article 22 and 25 stuff.
AD: That’s the master calendar.
AD: I have very few faculty that I have to run through this process so I haven’t checked the web site.
FA: I actually didn’t call on you. Please let me finish first. What we’d like to do is take that and create a separate something for each group of people so that if I was a…
FA: When we were developing this earlier, we went to a lot of pains to develop a web page that would be appropriate for each category of person. The person who’s first year probationary; the person who’s fixed term; the tenured full professor; the whole thing. The information that one needed was readily accessible and readable and comprehendible. The information as it is now is all there, but that’s the problem, it’s all there. It’s very difficult to tease out.
AD: So you’re talking about separating it out by…
FA: Yes.
FA: Once we get that done so that it’s actually clear. Maybe we could look at those and try to figure out a way to perhaps change the calendar a little. I know of some deans that have not given people back their stuff. It’s a problem for faculty. Let’s let Mark talk.
AD: That surprises me be cause these individual calendars have existed in the past.
AD: In the same form?
AD: Yes. This big calendar has been around primarily for deans’ secretaries who need all of these things in one place. It’s a very useful document for them, but there were these individual calendars…
FA: They’re not there any more.
AD: Okay. I didn’t know that. We can find them and generate them.
AD: That big giant spreadsheet was created by my office manager for our use internally and other people asked for it. That’s why it went up on the site.
FA: Deans have a contractual obligation to respond to Article 22 and 25 paper work and that obligation is not being met. I have no idea why it’s not being met. We would like to help. If it’s a problem with the calendar and the dates on the calendar, we would be interested in discussing it.
AD: The calendar may be an issue, but what we have are some situations where a dean has to comment on 150 faculty members’ reports and materials. Not all of those at once, but it’s a lot of work and sometimes the faculty members get them in late too. Not always.
FA: If there’s not enough space for commentary, we ought to talk about that. Perhaps there’s some strategies for scheduling when people talk, when those review cycles happen for individual groups. I’ve heard, and this is informal gossip so I’m going to just name it what it is, that some colleges have it arranged so that everybody at a certain level goes through at a particular time which could give you a situation where there are 150. Whereas if a different model is used, maybe it breaks out differently and there’s less work at that particular time then.
AD: So I hear you saying there are two issues: one is the way the calendar is presented, which we can change; and the other is that we can look at the process and the dates and see which ones are contractual and can’t be changed, which ones can, and maybe make some modifications.
FA: Right. If we have a dean who has 60 full professors and their doing all their full professors the same year, maybe we can have that dean suggest letting people go an extra year and we can do an MOA that allows that to occur. It’s important that these be meaningful and that they’re done when they’re supposed to be done. I just don’t think that’s happening. I know of at least two where it’s not.
AD: Okay. We’ll make the changes in the way the calendar is put up and then we’ll look at those other issues.
FA: Bob, did you volunteer to help?
FA: Sure.
FA: If you’re going to change the calendar, we want to be able to view it before you post it.
AD: We’re not going to change what’s there, we’re just going to change the format.
FA: Okay.
AD: We’ve started talking about that with the new academic calendar, it might influence the dates for Article 22 and 25. Once that calendar gets finalized, then I think it would be important to go back and start looking at dates again for sure.
AD: We talked about this at Academic Affairs. If there are going to be issues about making some changes, it might just be worth leaving the calendar the same for next year because it’s the year after that that the start dates are going to be significantly different.
FA: But we should start talking about the year after that.
AD: Yes, and we will.
2. Search Committees for Positions in Student Life and Development (Admin 2/1/2007)
AD: I am requesting faculty to serve on the search committee for the GLBT position.
FA: Is it true that the director of the Counseling Center is an interim?
AD: Yes. It is an interim. We haven’t decided whether to continue it as an interim for another year or whether we’ll do a search. If we do a search, I will make a request.
FA: Okay. So we’re talking about just one faculty?
AD: Yes, for right now.
3. FA: Okay. Tenure Calendar (FA – 2/1/2007)
(Was discussed with New Business Item 1)
4. New SCSU Web Site (FA – 2/1/2007)
(Was discussed under old business when Loren Boone arrived at the meeting)
Progress Reports:
1. Taskforces on Diversity (a.k.a. Motion from Teacher Development) (FA – 9/22/2005)
AD: There is nothing new to report at this time. We’re still forming groups and focus questions. As to the other one, I don’t know if the groups decided they would like to hear more from… Frankie and Jeanne Lacourt offered to come and talk if they were wanted.
AD: That taskforce is now meeting without administrators so we have nothing to say about it.
AD: We have no information.
FA: One question we have is: do we know if all the departments are sending members to that? Is that a question that you could ask?
AD: I can ask.
FA: One of the concerns we have is that some departments think they don’t have to do this. If they don’t take it seriously as a department then it becomes difficult for the entire college to participate.
2. Upper Division Writing Requirement Status Report (FA – 3/2/2006)
AD: Progress continues.
FA: I got something from Judy Litterst and said they were going to do something. There are a whole bunch of catalog changes that have to be made. I finally got that straightened out. They’re not ready to tell us what they are yet. Apparently there is information that appears in numerous places throughout the catalog so they are combing the catalog to look for all the spots and recommend some uniform language that can be in the catalog. I’m glad they’re doing it and not me.
3. Academic Calendar (Admin – 9/7/2006)
FA: We had an exciting time at Senate discussing this. Senate endorsed option 2. They would like one of the days that’s at the beginning of January 2009 to be a faculty forum day. Believe it or not, faculty really do want to be in the classroom with the students. We had a lively discussion about it and it came down to – give us that extra day in the classroom.
FA: There are specific problems like labs and such.
FA: There’s also the thing about night classes. They want that to be explicitly stated in the calendar.
AD: Mitch has some new information to distribute and for us to look at.
AD: What we have are some drafts for 2008-2009 and 2009-2010. Essentially they follow Option 2. I’ll briefly go over them. (Mitchell Rubenstein then explained the Fall 2008 calendar to the group.)
FA: When are the evening finals.?
AD: Don’t we generally have finals for evening classes on the last class of the semester?
FA: No. Not always. Sometimes it’s the last…
FA: Normally, it’s the night during finals week.
AD: And it does fluctuate. In the past, it’s depended on when we get the 75 Carnegie minutes in whether it falls during finals week or not.
AD: When we looked at this calendar with regard to Thursday night classes, if you want to leave that as a final exam night, that’s the last night of final exams. You don’t need to do it for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday classes.
FA: But they’re already one more day. You can’t really use that.
AD: If that’s what you would suggest that we do, we can do that.
FA: Do what?
AD: Have that final during final exam week to increase the number of times that class meets.
FA: You can’t do it all of a sudden in the middle of the week – not have a Wednesday night final and not Monday or Tuesday night finals. It would confuse students like crazy.
FA: When I teach a night class, we always have the final during finals week.
AD: So we can look at that as being the case here too then?
FA: Yes. Like I said, faculty want to be in the classroom with the students. They want as much time as they can get.
AD: We haven’t said anything in the calendar as to when those finals would be for evening classes. That’s a notice that goes out to faculty at some point – either at the beginning or middle of the semester about when finals are.
FA: Final exams are posted right on the registration site way ahead of time so it’s not like we can’t know what they are. Students know those from day one – or they should – because they are posted there for evening classes as well.
FA: That’s not the issue. The issue is what’s posted.
FA: I understand that.
FA: I think what we’re saying is: if you have reached the Carnegie minutes – what is that?
AD: It’s 45 50-minute classes.
FA: Okay. So the issue becomes, you don’t want to take another day off the Thursday classes.
AD: Right.
FA: Because then you only get 13 classes and as it is, we only get 14 classes out of a 15 week semester.
AD: So we say that final exams for evening classes will be final exam week.
FA: Yes.
AD: We’ll be short one Thursday session compared to Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday. (Mitchell Rubenstein then explained the Spring 2008 semester calendar) Semester start dates are set by the Office of the Chancellor.
FA: The start dates.
AD: Yes.
AD: Did they set them for January too?
AD: Yes.
FA: Do you know what the State legislature is getting ready to do?
AD: Someone has introduced that as legislation but it hasn’t been passed yet so we don’t know if that will happen.
FA: It has a lot of support and do you know why?
FA: For the same reasons we argued for a non-uniform start date.
AD: Right. We all argued for that.
AD: The second sheet has a calendar for 2009-2010. This is based on the assumption that the Office of the Chancellor will use these start dates. Most everything is the same as the 2008-2009 calendar except that Veterans’ Day shifts one day. It’s on Wednesday instead of Tuesday and affects the number of class meetings.
FA: So Veterans’ Day is on the day – like Christmas.
AD: Yes.
AD: Are we ready to say we’re adopting the 2008-2009 calendar? We can’t really adopt the 2009-2010 calendar until we hear from the Office of the Chancellor, can we?
AD: The 2009-2010 is meant to give us a leg up in the process in the event that the Chancellor’s Office uses these dates.
FA: So this is it.
AD: This is it unless the Chancellor’s Office picks a different start date.
AD: Your observations and comments on how we label some of these, what we do with the workshop days, for example, any comments and input would be welcome.
FA: There was the request that one of those days at the beginning of Spring 2008 be called a Faculty Forum day.
AD: We could label them differently.
FA: Yes.
AD: Okay. Thank you.
FA: We’ll give this to Senate and then if anybody has any comments on it then they should send them to Mitch?
AD: Yes.
FA: Okay. We’ve had instances when the people in the library, when they sit down and figure out what the duty days are, they discover we’re missing one. Have you guys checked this.
AD: I thought that we did. JC is on the committee. I asked him the other day since he is the one that always catches it.
AD: The difference between these calendars and earlier ones is that in August, the workshop days are usually Monday through Thursday and then there’s always a question of what about Friday? On this calendar, the workshop days are Tuesday through Friday so there’s no question.
FA: Okay.
FA: Except in 2008.
AD: It should be Tuesday through Friday.
FA: What is the 22nd of August in 2008? It’s not colored.
AD: It’s in bold.
FA: It’s not a class day and it’s not a forum day.
AD: But it’s a duty day.
FA: Part of what faculty worry about sometimes in the days at the beginning of the year is that they become overscheduled. There’s too much for them to do so they don’t have time to be in their offices. Students actually come around – especially transfer students – during those days. So if you have too much going on somewhere else, it’s hard to be in your office. We need to remember that too.
AD: As we schedule events, someone can remind us of this.
FA: Do we want to take that off? Are we done with it?
AD: I would love to take something off this agenda. (laughter)
FA: We took a lot of stuff off last time.
4. IPESL Funds (Admin – 9/7/2006)/One-Time Professional Development Funds (FA – 9/22/2005)
FA: My understanding is that the report on those are due in February.
AD: The date was extended a little bit but I don’t remember to when.
FA: I think it was originally in January, like the Martin Luther King holiday and they moved it off of that to some day like Valentine’s Day.
AD: That’s for the IPESL?
FA: I’m just wondering, have all faculty who are doing this been informed? Do they know how to get at their money?
AD: I believe they have access to the money. The money’s been allocated, but I’m not sure that they know about this reporting date. They should, but we’ll remind folks.
FA: Is there anything else we wanted to ask about that? Are we done with this or do we want to leave it on?
AD: I think we’re done with it.
AD: I do want to say, if any of you missed it last night, that the lecture by Dr. Maathai was just spectacular and the crowd was by far, the largest I’ve ever seen for anything that’s a non-entertainment program at the university. The lecture was magnificent and a lot of people felt inspired. She was a dynamic speaker and it was a wonderful event. I’m glad we did it.
FA: I was in the Little Theatre and the group was really enthused. People were talking and having fun and were very much engaged in what was going on.
FA: I just want to put in the record that Rex said today that the lecture is on tape so if people didn’t get a chance to see it, they can get it, I assume, at the library.
AD: Frankie said it’s on tape and as soon as it’s done it will be made available.
FA: I also want to congratulate the people who put this on. My course in developing countries, most of them made it. We had an excellent discussion today. They had a very similar reaction to what you had about the quality and the presentation. It was money well spent.
AD: We discovered that there were people who couldn’t even get into the Atwood Little Theatre because there were no seats.
FA: They did have a live feed to all the televisions in Atwood.
AD: So there were people watching it in other places besides the theater.
FA: Atwood was full of people watching it.
FA: I told my class to go there too and they came back and challenged me to be doing printing on both sides of the paper. Maybe we can make the commitment to do that.
AD: The students asked us several years ago to provide duplex printing in the labs and we have implemented that now.
FA: You have to have a printer that will do it.
5. Budget Advisory Group (Admin – 9/7/2006)
FA: We have a meeting on Monday to refine the guiding principles. There was a healthy discussion of those principles at the meeting that I missed, but I read the minutes so it sounded like an exciting discussion. I think we’re going to be very close to having a document that will be one that guides the process. The subcommittees continue to do work. There is concern that’s been expressed in several forums of relevance – we’re not overwhelmed with participants and subcommittee activity, nor are we overwhelmed with participants at the full budget advisory group. Perhaps there are people who still believe that they can ignore both the strategic planning process and the budget process. Rumor has it that at least one dean has told their faculty they can. We still have some salesmanship to do to convince people that the work of the budget advisory group – which is linked to the strategic plan - is real. It’s not going to go away.
AD: There’s also reported out this week that I hope we can take to the budget advisory group next week some material from the assumptions committee that will be particularly valuable as we move forward with the ’08 budget which will, by force, be out there before we get to a new model. Also, the tuition group had a good discussion a week ago Tuesday. They’ve got a little more work to do, but I think they’ll be reporting something out soon also.
FA: I don’t think so. I was at that meeting and there’s a real…
AD: There are some things I’m concerned about…
FA: I think there’s some real issues around tuition and whether or not we should use differential tuition and how that would work and how it would be decided and what’s the difference between differential tuition and market tuition…
AD: And distribution of the funds once you collect them.
FA: I think that group has a lot of work to do. I think the reason they’re meeting again is that they didn’t spend enough time the first time.
AD: Market tuition is differential tuition it’s just another version of it which is an indication that we already have differential tuition.
FA: Exactly.
FA: Everyone loves differential tuition if they get the money. If they believe that by having differential tuition the money comes back to the program that generated the tuition, they love it. The minute you start to talk about shared revenue, the consensus about having differential tuition starts to change.
FA: It depends on how much sharing you do and where the sharing is.
FA: Right.
FA: Which is why I think that group has a way to go. If anybody has anything they want to contribute they have to go back to the group.
AD: That group is particularly one where the participation that has been described is important. Not being at that table – you might get a little surprise at the end.
FA: We’re running out of time. I want to skip # 6 and just do #7 and then just be done. Is that okay?
AD: We can do 6 quite quickly I think.
5. Announce, Discuss and Bulletin Boards (FA – 9//7/2006)
AD: Since we last met I updated the draft and I’ve given Michael a copy and asked him to meet with me on the changes that I’ve put in there.
FA: Has it been to TLTR?
AD: I took all of those recommended changes and incorporated them into the document.
FA: Okay.
6. Doctoral Programs (FA – 10/19/2006)
FA: I think the last time we talked about the doctoral programs you said that you’d had someone come and look at the higher ed one and they had made some recommendations. Since then we’ve heard a rumor that the EdAd program has also been sent to the State. Is that the case?
AD: That is not correct.
FA: So it has not gone off campus?
AD: No.
FA: From a budget planning standpoint, do you expect that we’re going to be implementing the doctoral program for leadership in higher ed in the Fall of 2007?
AD: If things go as we hope they will, then yes. We need to contact our liaison at the Higher Learning Commission to verify what we would like to do in terms of stating that we can start recruiting with the proviso that people understand that approval is still pending.
FA: Thank you.
AD: I haven’t heard anything on committee members for the searches in Academic Affairs.
FA: You’re not going to. Once the request is made, it takes about a month.
AD: Okay. We’re waiting.
FA: The 31st was the deadline for volunteering. It will go to Senate and as soon as it goes through Senate… I will tell you that it’s a lot of search committees and we didn’t get a lot of volunteers.
AD: Okay.
FA: We are adjourned.
Meeting adjourned at 5:01 p.m.