Transcript Senate Meeting
February 5, 2019

Michael Baginski, Chair: Welcome to the February 5, 2019 meeting of the University Senate. This is our sixth meeting of the 2018-19 academic year.

If you are a senator or a substitute for a senator, please be sure you sign in at the back on the roll and take a clicker. Again, if you are a senator, sign in, or a substitute and take a clicker. Second, we need to establish a quorum. We have 87 Senators in the Senate and we need 45 for a quorum. Please press A on your clicker to show you are present.
Let the record show that we have 54 present, to start the meeting, so a quorum is established. I now call the meeting to order.

I would like to remind you of some basic procedures for the Senate meeting for senators and guests. Let me explain the Senate rules about speaking. The rules of the Senate require that senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first and then after they are done guests are welcome to speak. If you’d like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go to the microphone on either side aisle. When it is your turn, state your name and whether or not you are a senator and the unit you represent.

The Senate is not a time for personal conversation with a speaker. Please limit yourself to one or two questions unless you are making a motion or an amendment to a motion before the Senate. For additional discussion we should meet after the meeting and speak to the speaker.

The agenda today was set by the Senate Steering Committee and posted on the Web site in advance, it’s now up on the screen.
The first order of business is to approve the minutes for the meeting of January 15, 2019 Senate meeting. Those minutes have been posted on the Senate Web site. Are there any additions, changes, or corrections to the minutes?  Hearing none the minutes are approved by unanimous consent, that is a little different from before.

Now, I have a few brief remarks regarding collegiality and decorum in the University Senate. Please do not insult or ridicule anyone, God forbid, or say anything that questions a person’s personal integrity or motives. You may always ask questions about policy, but I ask that everyone refrain from personal attacks and making statements that beg the question of a person or their character. if you disagree with a policy or procedure of the Senate, there are procedures for making a change, if you are uncertain or feel that a policy is unfair, then follow Robert’s Rules of Order to state why it’s unfair in your objection. Or you can discuss it with me after the meeting or later this week.

Now I would now like to introduce the officers of the Senate and our administrative assistant.

Dan Svyantek is the immediate past chair, Nedret Billor is the chair-elect, Dr. Beverly Marshal is the secretary this year, and Adrienne Wilson is the secretary-elect: Herbert Jack Rotfeld is our Parliamentarian. Finally, our administrative assistant is Laura Kloberg and she does the lion’s share of everything here. Are there any questions? Okay.

Now President Leath has some comments and I believe that Ron Burgess will also be speaking too.

[4:50]

Dr. Leath, Auburn University President: Thanks for welcoming me. Michael asked me to make some comments and I am glad to. So, last time I was here I spent a while addressing the Senate on the State of the University and one of the things I spoke about was a desire to get an R1 Carnegie rating designation for our research efforts. That was kind of a long-term institutional goal and I like to be in the situation where I under promise and over deliver. In this case it wasn’t just me, but you all know we are super excited that the Carnegie designation came through.

A little history on that; when I came we were on a schedule for a 5-year review and many of us, me at another institution were pushing for 3-year cycles. The month I got here we were in full form and were going to go to a 3-year cycle, but as a result our next evaluation will be in 18 months. And that was kind of scary to people like me, Jennifer Kerpelman and others, but as a testament to the faculty, a lot of our staff, we worked hard that 18 months to get things right. Nobody was more pleased or maybe a little surprised that we got it so quickly. I had no doubt this faculty would drive us to R1, but to get it that quickly was really tremendous, and I always felt that our faculty was a little bit undervalued nationally in terms of our research efforts and a lot of that goes away with this. So, congratulations to everyone who had a role in that and everyone who benefits. It makes our degrees worth more for graduates and gives us more opportunities, I couldn’t be happier about that. [6:40]

Now I want to take a moment of Presidential privilege to introduce someone new. Many of you know I had a Chief of Staff for a while when he was here, he went back to his home state and I am thrilled to introduce Steve Pelham today. Steve would you like to stand up, so they can see your face? Steve is the new Chief of Staff for the University and we are fortunate to have him back, this is his alma mater. It’s a great testament to Auburn that he came back. He had great economic development experience. He’s serving as our Vice President for Economic Development in his relations, he’s wearing two hats as Chief of Staff. In addition to all that experience with economic development, which we really need, Steve was also Governor Ivey’s Chief of Staff, so it took a bit to lure him from the governor here. We had the advance that Steve is not only an Auburn Alum, he grew up in Auburn, so we had that leverage to get him to come home. We’re really glad he’s on the team, it’s going to make us more efficient and drive our agenda faster than ever, which is what we want. So, hopefully we will duplicate this R1 type thing and deliver some results faster than anyone expects.

Now, to get a slice of my job, which Michael gets because he meets me regularly, on one side we’re talking about big initiatives like becoming an R1, driving research, driving the success of our research, so I spend time occupied with that. At the same time, laying in top, I am occupied with things like parking. I mentioned that at the State of the University Address and it was a huge concern, and I’ve heard it from everyone. From the condition of our parking to the inadequacy of the parking, but I want you to know that I took that seriously and it wasn’t just, okay, we’ll work on parking. So, if you look were doing some immediate fixes to parking and we’re going to do some long-term solutions. If you look immediately, if you look at the parking deck near the Hotel, that thing is going up, we have a scheduled completion date of basically Labor Day, and we’ve got it now at Memorial Day. So, we are really moving quickly. At the same time, we’re not on any one thing, big solutions, little solutions, we just got 19 more spaces across the street from Lowder Hall. Some of you might think that’s only 19 spaces, if you’re one of those 19 or 20 people looking for parking space that morning, then you’re happy. But the big part of this is we need a long-term comprehensive solution, so we’re going to modernize some parking lots, clean them up, repave them, we’re building a new deck, we’re finding spaces where we can, but that’s really not a long-term solution. I’ve tasked Ron Burgess, Chief Operating Officer, to really look at how do we fix this long-term, but we will go with these immediate solutions that will help, but I think everybody here wants to get rid of the hunting permits and actually have a space when you come to work. So, I’ve asked Ron to give you some specifics of where he’s at, what he’s trying to do, what it means to you, which might mean 6 or 7 dollars more a month too. He’s going to go through all of that and I’ll be glad to take questions on anything and Ron can take questions on parking. Ron do you want to take the parking part and we can both take questions on anything?

Ron Burgess, Chief Operating Officer: I’m trying to keep you all on schedule. Today I am going to do what I would call a CliffsNotes version, and for any English professors that are in here that were professors while I was at Auburn, that’s how I got through British Lit., so I am going to use that today a little bit. [10:29] I just want to give you a basic understanding of what it is we are trying to do from a parking standpoint and also talk a little bit on the enforcement side.

I’ve got some slides, I am not going to talk you through them. I am going to try to go through them fairly quickly because I am trying to respect your time. What I am committing to Is that between now and May, I will announce far enough in advance where I will run 2 town halls because as Steve pointed out, I’ve got faculty that want to shoot me every day (and I mean that), I’ve got parents that want to shoot me every day, I got students that want to shoot me every day, then I’ve also got people that attend events. So, while you’re an important piece of that clientele, get in line with the other 3, it’s just, welcome to my world, as I say. Bottom line is, we don’t have enough but we’re trying to address the issue. So, we want to take a look at how we construct new parking places. We want to institute a new plan on how we are going to do that. We want to look at the transit system that we have going on, and we’re going to do that in conjunction with the City of Auburn as we look at that. And I am going to talk to you at the end about what I’m looking at right now as far as parking fees. And that will get everybody’s attention as I talk my way through that because nothing is free.

[12:02]
This is just real fast at a 50-thousand-foot level basically shows you where were on parking spaces in 2012 across the history. So, right now, in 2019 if you read the chart we basically have increased ourselves by 26%, but again for those of you that have a hunting license and you believe in Maslow’s hierarchy of need and the fact that it is all about you, it doesn’t matter because you can’t find a parking place. So, our plan if we execute, and right now that’s what we’re on track to do, shows that by 2023 there we’ll increase a total of basically 40%. Do I think that will get us where we want to be? Probably not. At the end of the day because I don’t think the Provost thinks a wit about how he increases the faculty in terms of the number of parking places, and I don’t necessarily look at it on the administrative side as we look at that. But we are going to do our best to keep up and at least try and get ourselves ahead.

Just to give you an idea pictorially where we’re taking a look at where we’re going to try to increase it. This just kind of lays out, this is where we are taking a look. Let me give you an example of why I am going to talk to you at the end. So, those 19 parking places that he just talked to you about, at the end of the day those parking places are going us, Auburn University, so that’s everybody in this room, and If you really cared, cost me an average of $1,033. Okay, what about that parking deck we are building over next to the Hotel that people are going to be able to take advantage of? Each of those parking places cost us $26,500 to build, for a parking place. So, when I give you the number that I am going to charge you for parking, those of you that are business majors, you figure out the amortization schedule that goes along with that, how long it’s going to take us to re-coop part of that. But this gives you an idea of where we are looking on campus right now. We are working in conjunction with the housing side in terms of what we’re going to do, but we have a plan and we’ll see how this unfolds, but I will be looking forward to your feedback when we conduct those town halls. I will get the information out. I am going to give everybody access to this information because I want you to be fore armed to come in and have a frank discussion. Because if you’ve got a better idea, we want to hear about it.

This just captures for us at the end of the day the total parking inventory of how we want to look at it across those different constituencies as they look. Because, remember, faculty is one of those constituencies. I would to be able to stand here and tell you with I a straight face and I think I am probably only one of 3 or 4 people in the room that have ever really passed a polygraph, so I can do that, but I can look you in the eye and I can tell you that I am not going to promise you that in front of the door to your building I am going to give you your personal parking space. That is not the way this is going to work. But I am going to work hard to get proximity in terms of where it is you work to give you a place, so you are not having to qualify for a 25 mile rut march getting to your place of work.

This just lays out the timeline. The key thing here as you look at our synchronization matrix, as I call it, when we build things, the real thing to pay attention to down at the bottom. The net additional parking places. You’ll see a little ebb and flow there in 2020, but from there it takes off to where we hit our goal in 2024, if we execute this plan of adding that number of parking places. But folks, if I execute this parking plan, and I said if, but the guidance is I am going to move down this path, but I have overseers that will provide permissions, and guidance in some cases, that’s going to be the tune in excess of 50 million dollars. So, for those that don’t know the parking deck that we are putting in right now next to the Hotel, 13.5 million, that’s the reason the cost per parking space is $26,500. It’s not just a matter of finding a place, a level field, that I can throw gravel out on in all cases because we have other things we have to take-into-account here at Auburn University.

This just gives again, for full transparency all those different areas we are looking at and the cost associated. So again, don’t want there to be any secrets. Now that one if we execute and go to the total and add in the total number of (net parking increase) 2551, that would be in perfect world, the cost for that one right now is 71.5 (million). I’m going to go up how much? 2% on tuition? Okay. Yep, going to take me a little while to re-coop all of that in terms of doing it. But again, all I am trying to be right now, for sake of further discussion, is transparent.
So, looking at it; we want to increase parking. Something I am going to put into effect at the beginning of the summer is we are changing the policy, effective immediately, of where students cannot come on campus until 5 p.m. I am changing that to 6 p.m. to give faculty an opportunity, although every one of you would look at me and say you’re burning the midnight oil and in your office until midnight so it doesn’t help you, but if I move it from 5 to 6, that will give campus an opportunity to egress before we allow the students to ingress in terms of that. So, that will be happening at the beginning of summer. I am making the command decision, I can be overruled, I don’t want to change in the middle of the play. I think that’s unfair, we wouldn’t get the word out, there would be people that wouldn’t hear, and it would turn into a bad situation. So, we are going to do it at the beginning of the summer.

We’re going to look at location-based parking zoning in terms of where you work and who we will allow into certain areas. Different people are coming up with different ideas; do we go to parking lots that have the arms where you have to have the badge to get in? I heard the horror stories, the badge doesn’t work today so the professor just drives straight through the barrier, ‘cause who cares it’s just a little piece of plywood, I can break it, to where it doesn’t matter, people will copy credentials. We will work all that, but I’m not sure how we’re going to do in terms of that.
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We’re going to close the loop-holes, Not sure that necessarily applies and some who are in the various areas might not appreciate “What do you mean a loop-hole?” We have parts of our constituency that are not contributing to the overall parking. An example, and I am not picking on them, but they work for me, are folks that work out at the old Bruno’s, the HR. They’re looking at me saying “I’m not on campus, why should I contribute to parking, why should I pay a parking fee?” Well, when time comes to repave that parking lot that’s out there, in addition to what we use and in addition to what our bus system uses that takes people to the Atlanta airport, we are going to have to pay for that. So, I am going to charge everybody. I am listing up there as we are starting to capture all the folks that currently do not contribute to the pot. Everybody’s going to be a contributor at the end of the day. It’s going to be shared pain, as we used to call it in the military, in terms of that.

Then on the Transit side of the house, we are taking a look at where we do and how we do that. Where are we going to provide that transit support to, are we going to work in conjunction with the town and how are we going to work that? So, at the end of the day we are going to try and expand our parking and currently the plan, that I am taking forward to leadership in terms of parking is I intend to take parking from $80 a year to $160 a year. Now, if I do that, right now I already know based on the data that I have personally done by going on the internet, so it must be true, in terms of going to every other university Web site and taking a look; our closest entity to us on that would be Mississippi State. Which right now Mississippi State charges $255 per year as their lowest fee.

True story, when I was doing this because I believe in socializing an issue, when I was socializing it with one of my elements with an individual who raised his hand because I said, “gee, I’m thinking about raising the rates, we probably ought to go up a little bit, should I start at $80.” And a guy said, “are you talking about $80 a month?” I said, you’re kidding? He said, “No. I came from the University of Georgia. I consider that a deal.” So, everybody is all over the map. Our friends across the state, if you got a parking space next to Samford Hall, if you were one of those individuals, you can go on the Web right now, $660 for a premo-parking place. So, what the president has given guidance to me of is improved parking, but be able to demonstrate to those people if you are going to raise their rates, what are they getting in return for that? What is the value proposition coming back from them? So that’s what we want to do on this.

Last thing I would say before I want to see if anybody wants to take any slings or arrows. We are working hard on what we’re doing in terms of trying to enforce. We have 3 enforcement vehicles that work during the day with camera systems that continually traverse the campus. I would offer to any faculty member, senate member that wants to participate in what the police would call a “ride-along.” You are certainly welcome, we will put you in the vehicle and ride-along and see what we do. As a comparison for those that wonder how we do on that, to compare apples to apples, in January of 2018 we gave out 2, 171 tickets. This year, this month in January we gave out about over 3,000. We doubled the number of tows and we increased by a factor of 1.5 the number of wheel-locks. Enforcement is up. I’m not sure, quite honestly, as I look at our student population that it’s a deterrent. And I mean that. So, I am also taking a look at do I raise the cost of the ticket? Now, if I do that it may hit some of you all because some of you all have reached out to me as you’ve gotten a ticket from Don, Don’s in the back–he said he’d come and take shots with me, he’s talked with you all also. We want to make this inclusive. At the end of the day do I believe that when I finish this parking plan and I stand in front of you again, that every one of you is going to stand up and rise up and call me blessed? That is not going to happen. Okay? But I think that if everybody is a little equally unhappy, I will have succeeded at what I am doing in terms of this. So, my guarantee to you is I am going to increase the availability of parking, I am going to try and work my ‘behindus’ off to get it to as close to where you work as I can, and that you will not have to be buying a hunting license that is never going to be a one for one in terms of that. So, with that we are also going to increase the enforcement because the other thing I am going to do is I am going to give Don Andrae some additional resources to get more people. I have personally seen the students doing work on social media following where the vehicles are. They are not stupid. We may have some faculty.

Now, do I have some faculty, I’m not, again I am getting off center stage here if anyone want to ask a question. Do I have some faculty that the husband and wife that work at Auburn University, and do we know that the child of said faculty who is a student takes advantage of the faculty parking pass? The answer to that is yes. So, as I say, it’s a team sport. Bottom line is we are going to try to take it on. I want to solicit your input and we’ll see what we can do to improve this, but we have a plan. Every plan begins with a step. This is our first step.

Any questions before I turn it back over to someone? Oh, come on, give me your best shot.

Michael Baginski, chair: Could you come to the microphone and state your name?

Ron Burgess, Chief Operating Officer: I have takers ears, so that is probably a good idea.

Ash Bullard, senator, Fisheries: Do you have any data on the portion of students that take A zone parking and get a ticket? Because if they’re the ones that are actually taking up the faculty spaces, you ought hit them hard with a ticket and use that for the revenue rather than charging faculty more for parking spaces, in my opinion.

it seems, especially during certain times of the day, there are certain lots that are basically all students and it’s A parking. So if you ramped up the fine from them, you said 3,000 tickets? That’s a lot of revenue.

Ron Burgess, Chief Operating Officer: I do not disagree.

Ash Bullard, senator, Fisheries: But I agree with you that it is not that expensive anyway at $160.

Ron Burgess, Chief Operating Officer: The good news, for those who’ve never had the opportunity to work in our beloved Federal Government. Last data point just to know how it works, I would be standing in front of my workforce at DIA, Defense and Intelligence Agency, having this conversation, the Federal Government, Washington, because they want to encourage mass transit, by law I could only build one parking space for every 3 employees. Washington was going to force my workforce to take mass transit. Luckily, we live in the beloved state of Alabama. (laughter)

Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: What’s the chance that the transit bus numbers could go up significantly from where they are? Maybe changing over to a quiet system instead of diesel, which are very disruptive when they go near a building?

Don Andrae, Director of Transportation Services: I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but we had electric buses going around for the last few weeks. In fact, we have one today it’s going around from a company from BYD, we had one from ProTerre, one from NewFire, so they’ve been operating on our campus trying to see if they can bid on routes and make sure the battery will hold up during the day when we run our routes, and also make the turns. So, we are looking at electric buses. The new contract…the contract we already have expires in 2021. We are planning in putting in RFP that is has to be electric buses.

The other thing you may have noticed too is that the buses are not standing at the Student Center idling anymore. We have implemented a new plan that says that you stop, get off, get on, and you go. So, the buses are not idling as much at the Student Center. We also started a new plan in the morning of putting more buses out as students are coming in instead of having them staged. It has caused some confusion with students and got some complaints because they were counting on the app that says the bus is 3 minutes from here, and that was because of the old system was timed. It wasn’t actually where it (the bus) was it was based on where it was supposed to be. So the bus would be gone but (the app) tell the student that it was 3 minutes away. So, we are trying to teach them now to look at the bubble. The bubble is where the bus actually is, not what the time says.

We’re working on those things, but we are going to have some electric buses. There’s a good possibility, we do have an offer and will have to look at it seriously, we have an offer for an autonomous bus to try that out. It might be something we could try to run around inside campus. [30:16] We’ll have to see about that though.

Michael Baginski, Chair: Do you want to comment about the vans that are available for faculty use?

Don Andrae, Director of Transportation Services: in addition to the electric buses we do have an employee shuttle for faculty/staff and if you call a number they will come pick you up at your building and take you to where ever you go. Our ridership is increasing every day, yesterday we had about 40 people ride, so it keeps going up every day. It’s a really good thing, so if you have a meeting across campus we all know that if you drive over you are not going to find a place and certainly when you come back you are not going to find a place. The shuttle will take you from door to door and bring you back.

Michael Baginski, Chair: Where’s that number?

Tony Moss, Senator, Biological Sciences: Would it go to the Vet School?

Don Andrae: Yes it would go to the Vet School. I do not have the number off the top of my head.

Michael Baginski, Chair: is it on your Web site? Could you send it, and could we put it on the Senate Web site?

Mark Bransby: 844-8600, Employee shuttle number.

Don Andrae: There’s a pretty good response time, they show up in a few minutes.

Mary Sandage, senator, Communication Disorders: Just a quick comment. We have a lot of building going on on campus and I was wondering if any thought was given to incorporating parking at the lowest levels? When I was walking by the new Engineering Building before I knew it was overgrowth space, I thought they are finally putting in parking and that would be cool, but no? Just a thought.
Dr. Steven Leath, President: Every building that goes in we think about parking, but underground parking is extremely expensive, never mind the 26,000 a space we’re spending on above ground parking, so we do struggle with underground parking. That building is primarily a student innovation center, so it doesn’t necessarily need more parking in a big way. The new Harbert Graduate Building, there’s parking associated with that, so we are trying to be sensitive. We’re building it as fast as we can but if you look at even modest proposals, $50 million. From my perspective any time I spend any money on parking, never mind $50 million, that’s money I am not investing in some academic programs, scholarship, so it’s always painful to do this. So, we are trying to be thoughtful about it and meet your demands as thriftily as possible.

Michael Baginski, Chair: Anyone else? Thank you President Leath.

Next, we are going to have Ralph Kingston present an amendment to the Faculty Handbook, but we need 58 (votes). So, if you are a senator or a substitute and have not gotten a clicker please do so. We are short by 4 people as far as I know, and I saw some people wandering in. so, if you have not gotten a clicker, go get it please. We just want to see if we have 58 people here, or more.
(This took a couple of minutes to check for a two-thirds count of senators.) We can’t vote, we need to table this item.

Next up, Beverly, this is going to be a call for nominations for the Rules Committee. [35:46]

Beverly Marshall, Senate Secretary: The Faculty Handbook calls for us to have nominations for the Rules Committee at our February meeting to be voted on by secret ballot at our next meeting in March. Again, I sent out a call to all senators, you have to be a sitting senator at the time of nomination. It is a two-year term, staggered term, so there are a total of 6 on the committee in addition to the officers so we have to have nominations to elect 3 of those nominated today. I am calling for nominations. The Rules Committee is basically the Committee of Committees so we insure the proper running of the Senate, election of senators etc. do I have any nominations?

Dan Svyantek, Immediate Past Senate Chair: I would like to nominate Mathew Hoch from Music as a member of the Rules Committee.

Adrienne Wilson, Senate Secretary-elect: I would like to nominate Mary Sandage from Communication Disorders.

Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Are we allowed self-nomination? Tony Moss, Biological Sciences, self-nominating.

Beverly Marshall, Senate Secretary: Do we have any others? Any other nominations? Once, going twice, nominations are closed. We will have vote by secret ballot at the next meeting, thank you. [38:20]
Oh, one more thing. We do have one committee replacement. I would like to go ahead and approve this for Faculty Salaries and Welfare. Loka Ashwood will replace Christy Bratcher.

Press A for yes, B for no. A=47, B=2. Thank you all.

Michael Baginski, Chair: Next is an information item. Jim O’Connor is going to come up and talk about the status of Tech Projects.

Jim O’Connor, VP, Information Technology and CIO: Thank you all, I appreciate the opportunity.

Some days I feel that my job is awfully hard and I get to feeling bad about it and then I think of the poor people who have to handle this whole parking problem and solve this thing, and I feel much better.

I was asked to come in and give you an update on some of the things going on in the IT world on this campus and they are not all OIT, a lot of these have to do with the folks around the campus. As we start to bring the first phase of the Strategic Planning Process to closure I thought it might be a good idea to give you … (problem with advance on clicker to advance the slide).

Just a couple of things real quick, I promised Dr. Marshall I’d be brief and succinct in these things. I want to talk a little about the investments we are making across the campus. A little bit of feedback on what we’ve been doing with an IT Strategic Plan that will correspond with the institutions Strategic Plan. And I can never leave the podium without talking about cyber security. [41:06]

We have a governance committee put together from folks across the campus, and I’ll show you that list in just a moment, but what we’ve done is prioritized the things we want to do on campus. So, we have priority 1s, priority 2s, and priority 3s. These are the priority 1 items that we submitted through the budget process in support of things going on, on campus. The customer resource management, customer relationship management, take your pick. We have an RFP that has already been closed. We have 3 primary vendors that are going to come in and do some presentations, this will affect virtually every department on the campus, there will be an opportunity for all of the departments to participate in this. Those source selection discussions will be going on over the next month. Is that right, Bliss? Bliss Bailey, back there, really knows what’s going on, I just stand up here. We will select hopefully one vendor and then we will start implementing those. Once we’ve got the vendor in mind and can look at the total cost of this thing, we owe the Provost an update as to what it’s going to cost over the next few years and what our priorities will be.

The eResearch Administration many of you have participated in some discussions with IBM over what the future state of and R1 electronic research administration should look like. We are about to have a 2-day work session in March to kind of bring that to closure. I would expect that probably in fiscal 2020 we will start looking to acquire a system, but we have a lot of business process and re-engineering work to do between now and then.

Research Computing. I’ll just hold on that one, I’ve got some numbers for you. Business continuity and disaster recovery, we can really improve upon that. We have some back-up facilities here on campus and just today Bliss was telling us how we have been able to replicate data into the cloud in some cases, so we are way better off with that, but we still have an awful lot of work to do there. We have some new internet circuits coming on line which will give us twice the capacity that we’ve had in the past. And all that will help keep the place running.

These are the projects that are already funded in one state or another. You may see the network guys around campus. Updating the campus network is constant, it goes on every year. We keep the wireless up to speed, so you’ve got the latest protocols, security pieces in place, but as large as this campus is, that’s a huge amount of investment we make there, in the neighborhood of over a million dollars a year just to keep that running.

Classroom upgrades. Some our classrooms are really old, the technology is very old. Some of them I am told have computers that are over 7 years old. We’re replacing those systems, taking out all of the old analog stuff that used to sit in these big cabinets and replacing it with digital. So, we have about 70 of them planned for this year, another 80 for next year, but there will still be classrooms left after that we will need to update, but this is just for the next 2 years.

Research Computing. Many of you subscribe to Hopper. We brought that in just a couple of years ago. The current investment in that is just between 2.2 and 2.5 million dollars. We are about to replace that machine. Bliss is doing the final edits on an RFP to go out. We will be sending that off to a consultant that we use to make sure that we are getting everything that we need out of it. We expect our initial investment to be about 2.5 million dollars, 2 million is funded through OIT, other departments like COSAM have identified some funding they want to put into this as well. The equipment that we are buying now is almost twice the capacity of the gear that we have. So, you’ll see us continually trying to refresh this to keep the highest degree of computing available.

Talked about Research Administration, the core systems and services. You’ll hear us talk about migrating to the cloud. One of the first things you’ll see is we are moving e-mail off of the campus and into the Office 365 cloud, a number of units have done that already. OIT was the first to go, so we could trip and fall and skin our knees and things like that, but I think we got it pretty worked out at this point.

A lot of you hear about voice over IP, the old Vonage commercial type stuff. We are bringing in upgraded lines to the campus. We will keep the copper distribution system in the buildings, so you’ll actually not see much of a change anywhere unless your department decides they want to have voice over IP phones, in which case there is some expense associated with those. By and large we are going to use as much of the equipment in the buildings as we can and just upgrade the trunks coming into the campus.

Cyber Security. I could probably talk about this for years and scare you all to death. What we really wanted to do is tell you about some of the upgrades. We’ve updated the firewalls, we still have some things to do there with Web application firewalls. Those are things we put on Web sites to try to keep people from putting those ugly ads on your Web sites and things of that nature. We are doing a lot of proactive scanning of sites. You are going to hear us over the next few months push that even harder. We need to know where all of our sensitive data is and we need to scan those things on a regular basis. You have heard in the press a number of times where some municipalities have been hit with ransom ware attacks. If you don’t have good back-ups and you are not scanning for those things it can really create a big problem. So, we are going to scan proactively and are asking all the IT folks in the departments to help get that done.

Phishing. You will see over the next year that we’re going acquire some tools or build some tools that allow us to do phishing education. What we’ll do is we’ll send out education first, we will publish articles, we will tell you what to look for, tell you how to identify phishing and all the rest of that. Then we’ll do some testing. We will send out a fake message, the department heads will get back a summary report that says, ‘such and such percentage of people got caught phishing.’ Now, we ran this exercise through the IT people on campus. That was very interesting. We had a response rate of 15% of those IT people theoretically got caught in the phishing scam. However, if you walk the hallways you hear people going, “I know it was phishing, I wanted to see what was going to happen.” We don’t encourage that.

The people making these decisions in terms of what we are investing in and the timelines and all that is in this executive level IT Governor’s group. We’ve had it together for about a year now. We’ve tried to represent every constituency on campus, so everybody has a voice in what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, what the priorities are. So again, we’ve got a set of priorities, priority 1 list I talked about. There are 2 more or 3 more on the priority 2 list, those are things we get to as we possibly can, and then we have a priority 3 list which is growing every day.

This committee is facilitated by Kelli Shomaker, our CFO, myself, and basically that’s what we do, we try to facilitate it and get the conversation going to find out what everybody needs and then try to rack and stack and cost these out and things of that nature.

For our Strategic Plan. We’re a little bit behind where the campus is at, at this point, so what we’ve done is tried to create some town halls and had 3 of those so far where people could come and just tell us what they thought. We did short presentations, gathered some input. We had an opportunity to talk with all of the Deans about what’s going on in their colleges and what kind of tech support they might need in those colleges. We’ve offered interviews to the President’s Cabinet, probably about three quarters of the Cabinet has taken advantage of that. We’ve had one-on-ones with them and their staffs to gather information as well. We’ve also engaged Gartner Research. The current thinking is that and IT Strategic Plan will be 8-10 pages long. It will be very much like the campus strategic plan, very high level, not going to be very specific like (we’re going to go to Oracle and buy x, y, z.) it’s nothing like that. We’re going to talk about the strategies at a high level and then the units can use that as a guideline for where they go.

That’s really it, unless somebody has questions for us. One stat I want to leave you with because we always want to press the cyber security issue; Last year, 2018, we had 1.4 billion messages come into this institution, e-mail messages. Of which, 86% had some type of malicious content. Viruses, phishing, malicious Web sites, attempts to go get you to buy gift cards, all those sort of thing. Please don’t buy gift cards. What we’re really asking you to do, be vigilant in your e-mail. That is the biggest threat we have right now across the institution is somebody getting your credentials and using your access to systems on this campus to do some real damage.

Any questions? If you have hard questions, Bliss is here. Thank you.

Michael Baginski, Chair: Next will be the announcement for the slate of candidates. Jared is going to do that for us.

Jared Russell, Chair of Nominations Committees: Good afternoon everyone. I’ve been tasked with providing you the names of the chair-elect and secretary-elect nominees for the Senate. For chair-elect, Donald Mulvaney, Department of Animal Sciences, College of Agriculture; Jim Witte, Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Technology, College of Education. For secretary-elect, Ken Macklin, Poultry Sciences, College of Agriculture; Greg Schmidt, Libraries, Special Collections and Archives.

Here are your nominations. You will get an e-mail that’s not full of malicious malware. Thank you.
[voting for Senate officer-elect positions will take place 5 days prior to the Spring General Faculty meeting in March. Nominees will have a statement and a bio available on the Senate Web site for faculty to review prior to voting] [51:58]

Michael Baginski, Chair: This concludes our formal agenda.

Is there any unfinished business?  Hearing none.

Is there any new business?  …. Hearing none, I now adjourn the meeting. [52:16]