Minutes of the Steering Committee Meeting
30 March 2009
3:30 p.m. 208 Samford Hall
(by Dennis DeVries, Secretary)

Attended:  Kathryn Flynn, Mary Ellen Mazey, Russ Muntifering, Dennis DeVries, Joe Molnar, Larry Crowley (nominated member), Bill Hames, Claire Crutchley, Bob Locy

Absent:  Ruth Crocker

--The meeting was called to order at 3:30 p.m.   

--Kathryn introduced Larry Crowley, nominated as the replacement of Claire Crutchley (now Chair-elect), contingent on Senate approval at the 7 April 2009 meeting. 

--Copies of the minutes from the 23 February 2009 Steering Committee meeting were distributed.  After review, the minutes were approved unanimously. 

--Kathryn provided some introduction as to how the Steering Committee has functioned historically, and we discussed the role of Steering for the coming year.  The Constitutional roles of Steering are to set the agenda, handle issues for the Senate between Senate meetings, and to provide input relative to academic matters.  We discussed whether to have 1 or 2 meetings per month, and decided to schedule 2 per month.  The second meeting may be cancelled if there are no issues requiring Steering Committee attention.  Kathryn will set a schedule and distribute it to the committee. 

--We discussed the agenda for the 7 April 2009 Senate meeting.  There will be 2 action items (approval of Larry Crowley’s nomination for the Steering Committee, nomination of members for the Rules Committee), and 5 possible information items.  After discussion of those 5 items, we decided to have a report from the General Education Task Force, a report on the CLA/NSSE, and an update from the Writing Initiative.  Other topics will be included in the May, June, and July meetings; we will discuss potential scheduling of those after the April Senate meeting. 

--We discussed the status of the consulting policy, and Dr. Mazey provided an update.  We discussed potential approaches for it being brought back to the Senate.  

--We discussed the proposed employee separation plan for ACES and AAES employees that was tabled at the Board of Trustees meeting, and potential implications for academic programs in 2010. 

-- Meeting was adjourned at 4:45.