Transcript from the Senate Meeting May 2008

Robert Locy (Senate Chair): Let me call the Senate Meeting to order. The minutes from the April meeting have been circulated and distributed on the web. Are there any additions or corrections to the April 8th minutes? Seeing and hearing none, the minutes from the April 8th meeting will stand approved as read.
Dr. Gogue is apparently at the Employee Recognition Dinner, so Dr. Heilman will be here representing Dr. Gogue’s office.

Dr. Heilman (Provost): Thank you and good afternoon. Dr. Gogue is, as Bob said, at the Employee Recognition Ceremony. I spoke with him earlier in the week and he suggested the following kinds of comments might be the kind that he would make and asked me to do that on his behalf.
The Auburn-Some of these things you know, but they’re important enough to repeat. The Auburn University Trustee Selection Committee has nominated Raymond Harbert (Sp?) of Birmingham to serve in the position that has been occupied by Mr. Earlon McWhorter from Anniston. The nomination requires confirmation by the Alabama Senate.
With respect to our Legislature to which the Senate forms a part, we are hopeful to have an Education Budget passed in the next few legislative days because the Governor’s Budget that will result in a 14% cut for us, if it is the House version it will be a 12% cut, but in either case it will be difficult. I offer two thoughts. Number one, I think folks in some other states are a lot worse off than we are and are experiencing really major budget cuts there and never having got as high as some of those places are in terms of funding, private and otherwise.
Unknown Speaker: The mic’s not on.
Dr. Heilman: Oh…on now? Okay, I will-
Mr. Raymond Harbert of Birmingham has been nominated to serve as Trustee in the seat occupied by Irwin McCorder. The Senate will confirm that nomination. We hope to have a budget out of the Legislature in the next two legislative days. The Governor’s Budget would involve a 14% reduction, and the House version, not quite as bad, is a 12% reduction. Two comments from me on that- One, I think folks in some other states may be having a harder time than we are. But second, I think overall, Auburn’s financial position is very strong and Don Large is not here. But I think really over a decade, I think he’s done an excellent job with the University’s finances.
During the April 25th Board meetings, Drew Clark gave a report on Auburn’s results from the Collegiate Learning Assessment Tests. This test allows us to estimate the gains that our student’s make in Analytic Reasoning and Written Communication from the time they enter as freshman until they graduate. Auburn’s most recent results place us in about the top 30% of participating colleges. In other words, our students picked up more than those at the average institution did or the median I suppose, and Drew can advise on methodological fine points. Very importantly, the Board, on hearing this, very favorably impressed and asked that I commend the faculty for your work to foster these important learning outcomes and I would like to second those thanks. That is a very important reflection on the culture of teaching at Auburn, which I have long felt was one of the strengths of this institution.
Dr. Gogue advises that he has invited one of the Vice Presidents for Research candidates to the campus for further conversations. And we are also in conversations with Craig Adelbach from the University of Georgia following his recent return to campus to discuss the position of Dean of the Graduate school.
We have formed a task force on Distance Learning. It is chaired by Dean Dan Bennett. It has been charged to take a broad look at Distance Learning and prepare recommendations on the role of Distance Learning as a strategic asset to Auburn University in the 21st century. I think that timing of this committee, or task force, which has been asked to complete its work with recommendations by the end of the calendar year, will fit in well with the strategic planning process and the results of this task force’s work will be available to the next Provost.
The Board met on Friday the 25th. On the 24th it had a lengthy Strategic Planning Workshop which in my view, went very well. I think the Board is invested in academic quality and I think that showed in the conversation at the workshop. And I think it will also be apparent in the Strategic Plan which we’re in the process of working up for Dr. Gogue’s review and then for all of us to take a look at the process. Those are my remarks. I’d be glad to respond to any questions if you’ve got them. Thank you very much.

Robert Locy (Chair): Thank you John. The search committee for the Ombudsperson has been selected and is presently initiating the Ombudsperson search. Committee members are Ronald Clark from the School of Business as Chair, Jack DeRuiter from the School of Pharmacy, Isabelle Thompson from the College of Liberal Arts, William Sauser representing the Provost’s Office, Todd Story representing the A&P Assembly, Wendy Peckman representing Staff Council, and William Hammond from Human Relations. Let me remind the Senate that our resolution allows this position to be filled by a tenured full professor or retired full professor or similar appropriate person for a position of two years as a trial. It’s for a 0.75 FTE person, a three quarter time person and will serve faculty and staff needs. If you need more information, you can find the position description advertised on the Senate Webpage, on the Acts of Senate as the resolution that we passed for this. There’s a lot of information there, if you have further questions. I’d like to ask all the Senators to assist this committee in identifying candidates for the trial run of this position as we move forward with hiring. So please make your folks in your area aware of it that this position is open. We would very much like to have an outstanding slate of candidates from which to choose.
Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of representing our University at the Second SEC Faculty Senate Chairs meeting at the University of South Carolina. Among the many issues that we discussed was participation in joint SEC Institutional Academic programs that are being created by the SEC Council and Provost that’s referred to as SECAP. These include join Study Abroad programs which our University is already participating in, and a series of new programs that they are considering initiating. I will not take time to summarize for you all of the other issues that were discussed at the conference except to say that we, as Auburn University Senate, have been working hard to address many of the issues that other institutions in the SEC are just now approaching such as hiring new Presidents or Provosts, getting seats for faculty on Government Boards, PTR, hiring of Ombudspersons, etc. And frankly, when you look at the things that we’ve accomplished in these areas, and the fact that other institutions in the SEC are struggling with them, I’d like to give us all a big round of applause really, because we’ve, and I don’t want us to break our hands patting our backs, but we’ve accomplished a great deal compared to where we might have been discussing these same issues two or three years ago. So, I don’t know if I can recommend putting yourselves on SACS probation as a mechanism for emerging stronger in the final analysis, but I felt like we really seem to have emerged much stronger from the problems we’ve had in the past, so I think we all deserve substantial credit for that.
The Staff Council recently brought forward for consideration a proposal to develop a child care facility on campus. This issue has been discussed several times across recent years and there seems to be opportunities for things developing for us to look at it at this time as a possibility once again. (Not understandable) has conducted a survey. She’s preparing to make that information available and so we’ll be working with her and probably the Faculty Welfare Committee to look into the issue of developing these programs of a Day Care Facility in the future. Are there any questions? Thank you.
Before we begin the agenda, let me remind everyone of the Rules of the Senate.
When you rise to speak, please proceed to one of the microphones and clearly announce your name, your departmental affiliation, whether you’re a Senator or whether you are not a Senator. Note that, on issues, Senators are allowed to speak first. When the Senators have exhausted their opportunities to speak, others may speak. Everyone speaks until others have had the opportunity to speak and you may not speak a second time.
With that, then, I believe the first item on our agenda, action item, is the Calendar Committee Report by Stan Reeves.

Stan Reeves: Okay, there are three basic proposals that we want to bring forward to you. One has to do with removing the extended mini-term 1 from the Summer 2009 calendar and thereafter, and also the Summer 2010 calendar, and then finally the Academic Year 2010 and 2011 calendar. You’ve seen these all before, so I’m going to go through them very quickly.
First of all, the mini-term 1 is a real headache in terms of trying to deal with scheduling, trying to deal with classroom usage, and other things. We did some checking, and found that there are some ways around that basically, by accommodating those that need a six week term. Just let them start at the beginning of the ten week term and finish after six weeks, so I think that seems to work for everybody that is interested in using a six week term. So, we’re proposing that we get rid of the six week term for 2009 and our proposed calendars after that don’t include that.
For Summer 2010, our proposed calendar looks like this. We begin on the 20th of May for the full semester calendar and the ten week semester goes through to August 2nd, and then commencement on August 9th. You’ll notice that the distribution of days in the Summer is not even, and I’m going to address that in just a moment as well. There are 9 Mondays and 11 Thursdays. And so that is a small problem, or potential problem there. For the Summer mini semester, you begin on May 20th and end on June 24th with two days of finals after that, one is on a Saturday because of room usage. Again, we have an issue of the days not being balanced out completely there. And then Summer mini-semester 2 is balanced out. It begins on June 28th and ends the same day as the full term, and then has exam period from the 3rd to the 5th. And then Fall Semester 2010, it looks exactly like the Fall Semester 2009 that was already approved by the Senate, and it was approved all the way up. This balances out perfectly in terms of the number of days and it begins August 16th. There’s five days for finals and a week for Thanksgiving Break. Commencement happens on the Friday after final exam period ends on that Tuesday. We have a very similar structure and again, this calendar looks exactly like the approved calendar-It looks just like 2010 except for the one day shift in there. It begins on the 10th of January; has Spring Break from March 14th to 18th, and final exams are five days, May 4th through 6th, 9th and 10th and then a two day break before Commencement on that Friday. It balances out with the days of the week as well. So those are the basic pieces of information that you need here. There is an issue here that I want to bring to your attention and that is that both 2009 and 2010 Summer Full Term we have this distribution. We really would like to see an even distribution of days, particularly Monday Wednesday, Friday and Tuesday, Thursday. I’ll skip that one. Here is what we’re proposing. We already presented to the Senate, the idea of treating a particular day of the week like another class day so it would balance out. We agreed a couple months ago to treat Thursday, June 25, 2009 as a Monday class day for mini term 1. And we presented that as kind of a trial to see if this would work well. There are bigger calendar issues in the Fall and Spring where that becomes more of an issue because Summer just follows Spring. One of the things that we realized is that it would be pretty confusing to be treating the mini-term 1 Thursday as a Monday but treating the full term, that would be going on at the same time, that same Thursday would be treated as it’s normal Thursday. So rather than back up and eliminate that treatment, what our proposal is, to go ahead and line that up with the full term, so for mini-term one, that same day June 25th, and the full term would both be treated as a Monday for class meeting purposes. What this does, is it equals out all the days for both the mini-term and the full term. So now, with this adjustment the Summer 2009 would have 10 Mondays, 10 Tuesdays, 10 Wednesdays, 10 Thursdays, and 10 Fridays. And so that would work nicely. We do have to deal with the potential confusion of reassigning a Thursday as a Monday class day, but this would be at the end of the mini-term and the middle of the semester for the full term, so there would be plenty of opportunity to get the word out. We also propose to use the same strategy the next year, 2010, which the equivalent day then would be June 24th and we would consider that Thursday to be a Monday. That would have the advantage of balancing out the days of the week as well as eliminating confusion by treating both terms with the days the same for both terms. So that’s the general background information, so my first motion is to abolish the six week extended mini-term for 2009.

Robert Locy: This motion, coming from the calendar committee does not require a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor? Opposed? Abstained? Motion passes.

Stan Reeves: Our second motion is to line up the Thursday-Monday day so that both the full term and mini-term in 2009 use the Thursday reassigned to Monday strategy. And I think that might need a separate thing because the 2009 calendar has already been approved.

Robert Locy: Again, coming from Calendar Committee, this motion does not need a second. Is there any discussion on this motion? Seeing none, let’s call the question. All in favor? Opposed? Abstained? Motion carries.

Stan Reeves: And then our next motion is to adopt the 2010 calendar as shown in the presentation.

Robert Locy: Motion comes from the Calendar Committee, does not need a second. Is there any discussion of this issue?

Rik Blumenthal: Rik Blumenthal, Chemistry and Biochemistry. Senator. I would just like to ask if the Senate Leadership will agree that we will have discussion of whether this went well next fall that we will have an opportunity to revisit this if turning a Thursday into a Monday turns into as big a disaster as this pessimist thinks it will be.

Robert Locy: It would be my view, Dr. Blumenthal, that with you sitting on the Senate we’re very likely to not be able to avoid having such a discussion.

Rik Blumenthal: This Senator is hoping that this is the end of his term and he retires at the end of this term so that might not be guaranteed.

Stan Reeves: I can also assure you that the Calendar Committee is very sensitive to this issue because we’re not sure of how it’s going to turn out either. We think it will be okay, but we want to see to. But it will give us an opportunity between those two years for us to adjust to that.

Robert Locy: Any other discussion of this issue? Hearing none then, motion is to approve the change of the Thursday to a Monday schedule for the 2010 calendar. All in favor? Opposed? Motion Carries.

Stan Reeves: And our last motion is to adopt the Fall and Spring 2010 2011 Calendar.

Robert Locy: Discussion of the 2010 2011 calendar? Oh, by the way, it comes from Calendar Committee and does not need a second. Hearing no discussion, all in favor? Opposed?
I’d like to thank you for probably one of the smoothest calendar discussions we’ve ever had in the history of the Senate. That it right?

Stan Reeves: Believe it or not, that’s the last of it.

Robert Locy: I’d just like to say, Stan and his committee have done a real good job for the past six months to a year of setting up policies that I believe will serve us well and he’s leaving as the Chair of the Calendar Committee, if I’m not mistaken, in the Fall. So it’s his successor that we will see coming back, but we will do our best to create an institutional memory to make sure it gets revisited, Rik. And so, thank him for his excellent service. The next item on our agenda is the Core Curriculum Oversight and Student Outcomes Presentation. Dr. Glaze.

Dr. Glaze: Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Okay, good. Julie Huff is here with me, because I found at the last Senate Meeting that I cannot stand at the microphone and work the power point at the same time and my voice doesn’t carry without it. I’ve come to the Senate previously and presented this document. I would like to quickly review the process that we used. As you know, the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee has been working on Student Learning Outcomes for the Core Curriculum for several years. We started with the goals, and then we worked toward gaining the outcomes. I attended in the Fall and presented, updated where we were at that time. In March, the committee decided to send the Faculty as a whole the entire document to receive input from the Faculty as a whole. And I then came back to the Senate in April. Between the April meeting and today, the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee reviewed closely the comments that we received from faculty. We had ten. And from our original document, the Committee voted to make one change. And I want to share that with you first, and that’s the reason for the power point. I hope you can read that. Basically, of all the changes that were suggested, and this was again their vote, it was under item, under “Effective communications in the issue of students will be able to write effectively”. The original wording was ‘be able to integrate their own ideas with those of others’ and a number of the faculty suggested that be expanded to read ‘be able to integrate their own ideas with those of others’, and add in ‘differentiating and crediting ideas of others, but editing and using them for their own persuasive and explanatory purposes.’ And that’s the only change between the original document that you’ve all received and based on the input is what the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee voted on as a change at that time. And so at this point, I really have no other information. And so as Chair, I’m going to move for the acceptance of this Document.

Robert Locy: Since this originates from the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee, it does not require a second. Is there any discussion? Seeing apparently none, then all in favor of the adoption of this report, respond by saying aye. Opposed? Motion carries.
The next item on the agenda is the amendment to the University Senate Constitution article 2 section 3. Specifically the section in red, shown below with its proposed change, is to add the chair of the A&P to the list of members who are members of the Senate. Apparently this has been an oversight for sometime, we’ve been having the Chair of the A&P as a seated member of our Senate, but it’s not been official according to our constitution. So we’re asking to amend the constitution to include updated to what the existing practice has been. Is there any discussion of this point? No discussion? All in favor of this amendment to the constitution signify by saying Aye. Opposed signify. It did require a 2/3’s vote of the Senate, I hear no opposition so I believe we have a 2/3’s vote and we can move on to the second amendment to the constitution.
The second amendment deals with article 2, section 3E and then a parallel change to article 4 section 4 that would be necessitated by the change in section 3E. And this is to include the past-immediate past chair as a sitting member on the Steering Committee. Presently they sit on the Rules Committee but not on the Steering Committee. We believe that when we move to the situation where the Immediate Past Chair is a sitting member on the Board of Trustees, it would be prudent to have the Immediate Past Chair represented in Steering as well as on the Rules Committee, and so these changes would move to accomplish exactly that. Is there any discussion of this amendment? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying Aye. Opposed Nay. Motion carries again by affirmation of the vote. That concludes the action item of the agenda for the day. We have two information items which we wish to present. Dr. Donna Sully the Assistant Provost for Women’s Advancement is going to give us a report on a dual career hiring policy for Auburn University.

Donna Sully: Thank you, and good afternoon. Can you hear me in the back? Yes, thank you. Kind of an interesting title for this presentation today. I will try to be briefer than the number of slides would indicate. You don’t know how many I have, but I have more information that I’m actually going to share with you. I got a little confused when Bob said it was an information item, I suppose. But what we’re talking about is the need for policies and procedures to address the two body challenge in academia. And this terminology has developed over the last few years as we’ve seen changes in the face of academia, with more women moving into academia, more dual career couples moving into academia, and changes in expectations that people have about how their workplace addresses issues relating to work-life quality. And what I am suggesting then, is that we form an Ad-Hoc committee at Auburn to document the need for policies and procedures here at Auburn University to evaluate and assess best practices that other peer institutions have developed and then come up with a proposal about ways to move forward. So I’ll give you a little bit of background and I’ll try to run through this fairly quickly, but if you have questions or comments, please feel free to ask me.
We know now that 80% of faculty members have spouses or partners who are working professionals. The number of these partners or spouses who are also academics has been steadily increasing and this has been documented by a number of studies. And the majority of dual career couples view both careers as being of equal importance and so the decisions that they make about taking a position, really are based on whether there are two positions, whether there are opportunities for both members of the couple. The two body problem, that terminology, actually emerged specifically for problems that were faced by women faculty in the stem disciplines, the sciences the technology, engineering, and mathematics, because women in these disciplines are even more likely to be married to a fellow academic partner. So in order for colleges, for Universities and particularly for colleges, to successfully recruit top faculty it’s very important to be aware of these issues. I thought it would be interesting for you to look at some percentages at Auburn University, and these are percentages for the Colleges at Auburn University that have fewer than 20% female faculty members. And as you can see the majority of these are those Colleges that are in those stem disciplines. Now I do think it’s important to note, because I’ve talked with a number of Deans and Department Heads, and the challenge of recruiting top Faculty is not something that’s being ignored, I think there is attention being paid to this issue, but it’s not always an easy task to accomplish. We need to be aware of what efforts have been going on, what are the challenges that are faces, and what are some ways that we might make Auburn University more appealing as we try to attract those top faculty. ¾ of the Colleges at Auburn University have less than 50% faculty members. So the need for a dual career hiring program at Auburn. I’ve mentioned a couple of changes, demographical types of changes that we’ve seen. Another type of change that we’re seeing is that younger male faculty, we’ve talked about the need to be attentive to the need of women faculty, young male faculty are increasingly more likely to be married to an academic as well. So, we’re seeing the importance of paying attention to these needs in order to successfully recruit both male and female faculty members. But in some ways we see more particular problems in recruiting female faculty members. So our goals: recruit top faculty, encourage productivity, and keep people here. I wanted to give you a little bit of background and some information about what some of our peer institutions are doing. And so I pulled out some information from Virginia Tech. And I’ve talked with Pat Higher (Sp?) who is the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs there. And she shared some information about their program. Their program was instituted in the Fall of 2005. They did basically what I’m suggesting we do. They reviewed the best practices at other institutions to see what the challenges were and what the recommendations were for addressing these needs. And then they established policies and guidelines for Dual Career Hiring as well as provided programmatic support for assistance with on and off campus job searches for individuals accompanying a partner who has been hired at Virginia Tech. They do have funding available through the Provost’s office that is designated for Dual Career Hiring. And these funds, as well as the policies and guidelines that they have in place have enabled Virginia Tech to be successful in making top notch hires. And Pat Higher shared with me their report from 2007, and I’m not going to give you all of that report. But of the 45 instructional hires that they made, 19 partners found positions at Virginia Tech, 6 found positions in the community but not at Virginia Tech, 15 couples came without the accompanying partner having a job offer from Virginia Tech, and 4 declined the offer that was made. Now, I do think it’s important to note that as we look at the policies that other Universities have come up with, there are several dimensions to keep in mind. And these I’m just going to enumerate for you. We won’t go into these, because that will really be the work of the committee to address these issues. But the issues in dual career accommodation include fairness, legality, quality, tension between departmental needs, and then spousal and partner hiring requests, and faculty economy in the hiring process. And everything that I read about Universities that have address the concerns and have tried to develop approaches for Dual Career Hiring have indicated that it’s not a nice, neat, straight forward issue. So there is a need for variability and some flexibility in how these issues are addressed. Some of the approaches that are typically used, there may be a relocation office, and Virginia Tech has done that, and I’ll talk in a minute about some efforts that already exist at Auburn along those lines. The accompanying partner may be hired in an administrative position; there may be a formal policy to hire the spouse or partner. Now, it’s also important to note the terminology that is used and I think many times when we think about dual career hiring in academia we perhaps thinking about hiring two people in tenured track positions. And in a percentage of the cases that is true. There will be two people who are both looking for tenure track academic positions. But in other cases the accompanying partner will be looking for an administrative position, perhaps a research position, or another position either in the University or in the community, so not all of these situations are tenure track hiring but a significant portion are. Creating a shared pension for the initial hiring partner is another option. Using existing relationships with nearby institutions, advertising positions jointly, of course already here at Auburn we have an existing relationship with Auburn University at Montgomery. But there are other places within the academic world that we could begin to develop relationships with and then in very rare situations, creating a tenure track position. So what I’m recommending, and have talked with the Executive Committee and the Steering Committee of the Senate about, is creating an Ad-Hoc Committee on Dual Partner Hiring Policies and Procedures at Auburn University and the committee would include representatives from all potential stake holders- Deans, Department Heads, Faculty, Administrative and Professional Staff, Human Resources, AU Montgomery, and I may have left somebody out, so there are probably other stake holders that may want to be involved or have information that would be helpful as we think about developing policies and procedures at Auburn. This committee would review best practices from other institutions and would develop procedures to be followed in dual hiring and providing information and recommendations about the funding needs that would be associated with implementing a dual hiring policy at Auburn University. So I would be happy to respond to any questions or comments that you may have.

Tony Moss: Hi, Tony Moss, Biological Sciences. You gave statistics on the effect of having implemented a program at Virginia Tech, but what were the statistics from previous years prior to implementing these procedures?

Donna Sully: At Virginia Tech? I don’t have them. They’re in more ways, I guess, informal. But what I can tell you is that research that has been done, Universities that have reported on the outcomes of having a policy; they indicate that they have an outcome of greater faculty productivity and also greater loyalty. So they’re retention increases from these dual hiring policies. And another aspect of that, is that there are also positive aspects simply from having a policy in place even though it may not be implemented to a person’s liking or some accompanying partners will necessarily benefit from having the policy. Having a policy doesn’t mean it’s going to work out perfectly for everyone. But the documentation shows positive outcomes from having a policy. Does that answer your question?

Tony Moss: Yeah, I guess so. It would just be nice to see the degree to which the change occurs.

Donna Sully: I think that would be a dimension to include as we continue to delve deeper into what other institutions have done. I think a lot of this information is more anecdotal and maybe a little more difficult to get, but definitely something to look into.

Tony Moss: Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for good faith approach. It settles a lot of fears.

Donna Sully: You’re right. And in the reading that I’ve done, that was a comment that was often made by institutions that have policies, that they were pleasantly surprised that again a strong message is sent when an institution indicates that they are intuitive to, understand, and recognize these things that affect faculty and other hires at a university.

Drew Clark: Drew Clark, Director of Institutional Research and Assessment. Mr. Chairman I would remind the Senate that we already have in hand a fairly persuasive set of evidence that our current junior faculty would find a spousal partner hiring program of great interest. In the 2005 Harvard based coached survey of junior faculty nationwide you may recall that Auburn scored exceptionally well on it’s satisfaction among junior faculty compared to institutions like us around the country. But there’s an interesting portion of that survey that asks the faculty to look at 16 fairly common University practices or policies and to rate how important such a policy would be to their success and rate how effective that policy is at their home institution. Where there is a high rate of importance of a policy and a low effectiveness rating we get what’s called an effectiveness gap, high importance, low effectiveness. And in the 2005 survey, though we did very well nationally, on the policy of Spousal Partner hiring, a third of our respondents that was their number one or number two effectiveness gap here at Auburn and for female faculty that was over half. Only one other practice came anywhere near it as far as effectiveness gap, and that was professional assistance in obtaining external grant funds. So we already have some tangible evidence that it is a perceived need by our current junior faculty who otherwise rate the institution very well.

Donna Sully: Thank you Drew. That really is a very important piece of evidence and information that we do have. Also, I forgot to mention, that I’ve been talking with Lynn Hammond and Angela Irwinson in Human Resources and several years ago HR was very concerned about and attentive to the importance of assistance accompanying partners and Angela has worked in those areas in Ad-Hoc ways in specific instances as they are brought to her attention to assist people in finding out about possible local employment opportunities.

Tom Smith: Tom Smith from Human Development and Family Studies. I have a question not actually aimed at you Donna, it may be to the Chair. It’s procedural. You presented this as an information item. And you, Donna, early on in your presentation seemed to be a bit surprised that this was informational only. My question, and I guess this is to the Chair, is there some eventual action that will come from this in regards of the Senate. Or is this you’re just telling us and the actual action comes through some other University mechanism other than ourselves?
Robert Locy: This issue came to Steering, and we were impressed with the body work that Dr. Sully did to this point. We thought before we proceeded that we wanted the opportunity to share with the Senate what was going on on our Campus relative to developing policy so that as we proceed we have the opportunity to have and give input about what’s going on. That’s why it’s an information item. One would anticipate that at some point in time in the future probably towards the fall this would no longer be an information item. There would be a concrete proposal brought before the Senate on regards to the policy. That’s what will be the outcome of today. We’ll get an Ad-Hoc committee and start our work. But we wanted to have the presentation as an information item to let the Senate know that this activity was taking place.

Tom Smith: Thank you. If input and feedback is what’s desired, it certainly sounds interesting, and what Drew said even adds to that. I would say thank you for that information and I hope we will see it again.

Donna Sully: My comment was really in relation to maybe I had too much information to present, too many slides. That was the background for the comment that I made.

Peggy Shippen: Peggy Shippen, I’m a Senator from Rehabilitation and Special Ed. And it’s sort of tangential to this but will there be an opportunity in this same discussion for partner benefits in terms of, well you mentioned HR, but for a non-married person to have benefits for their partner who chooses or does not work at the University.

Donna Sully: I think that is something that we certainly should consider and I believe we’ll be working with Faculty Welfare Committee too, having a representative from that group working with this group. So I think bringing in all relevant aspects is something we should look at. And see what directions we should take, I don’t know where that will go. But my guess is that we will, again, look to see what best practices are, how other institutions are addressing these topics which are very important topics.

Robert Locy: Any further discussion? Alright, we will be forming an Ad-Hoc committee and be back with a report sometime toward the fall. The second item on our information agenda for today is a presentation from Dr. John Veres on the Auburn AUM seamless admissions policy. I guess I should say that Dr. Veres is the Chancellor of AUM, if I didn’t say that.

John Veres: Thank you Dr. Locy. Good afternoon, it’s a pleasure to be here to speak a little bit about our seamless admissions proposal on which we’ve been working diligently. I provided some background information by way of procedure and intended benefits. Let me give you a little bit of context in terms of the precipitating stimulus for pursuing this concept. Quite frankly it boils down to money. Unlike this University, my campus has not the luxury of turning away the number of students that Auburn enjoys year after year which is perhaps not unique to Auburn, but I think makes Auburn unique in this part of the world in terms of the percentage of students who are not admitted. We have worked over the years to develop a relationship with the Auburn campus to try to essentially market our University, or our Campus I should say, to those students unsuccessful to getting into Auburn University. Why would we want to do that? Well first of all, from our perspective we’d like to grow our enrollment which has been flat over the last six years. Secondly, in Auburn, many of these students who are unable to attend Auburn have ACT scores of 22 and 23, the average ACT score at my institution because we serve primarily place bound students, a good percentage of them come from three counties in the middle of the state, many of them first generation college students, is 20. So the students that Auburn is unable to accept are above average students at my institution. So over the last couple of years, we’ve begun to send letters to those students in an attempt to attract them to AUM and have met with some success, but it has quite frankly been mixed. And in terms of our follow up focus groups, we find that many of these students desire a four year college experience with athletics and the amenities for want of a better term presently on this campus that we don’t have. A more immediate precipitating stimulus was the Governor’s budget as it went over earlier this year to legislature because, again, unlike this campus we are more dependent on tuition revenue and those state dollars because not being the kind of research institution as Auburn is, we don’t have the same revenue streams outside our Special Education Trust Fund, appropriation and tuition. So we became very interested in seeking ways to pursue this particular group of non-accepted Auburn students in a different way. The genesis of the idea came in an offhand remark that Dr. Gogue had made I think at our very first meeting when I was explaining to him that we had trouble attracting students. He says ‘Well, you could build a dorm on the Auburn campus because there seems to be no dirt to students who’d like to come here.’ So what we, in a nutshell, propose to do, is to utilize, or essentially rent facilities from Auburn University Auburn after 3PM in the afternoon and into the early evening at times when they’re not used. I’m told that by 3PM 90% of the classes on campus are done during the day. And essentially admit these students on a one year experimental pilot study of them as AUM students but those students would live and take classes in Auburn, Alabama in Auburn University’s facilities with the classes taught primarily by professors from our faculty. But we have allowed for the possibility that either Auburn University faculty or in some departments who have desires of getting additional support for their graduate students to have those graduate students teach those courses. So, the concept of the program is that the students would take 30 semester hours, basically the core semester hours the freshman courses; and at the end of that 30 hours they would transfer from AUM to Auburn just as any other external would whether they’d be from Southern Union, University of Georgia, or wherever. The minimum requirement is 30 hours and currently a cumulative 2.5 GPA. I’d like to thank publicly Provost Heilman and my colleague Wayne Alderman in assisting us to develop this kind of concept and in particular Associate Provost Gaber who has mediated, that’s a poor choice of words, arranged and coordinated meetings with our Auburn Colleagues. She mediated in the sense that she identified the people who needed to be at those meetings. We met with the College of Liberal Arts Department Heads and Associate Deans and we plan to continue the work and meet with our Auburn colleagues. We really hope this will be a win-win situation. These students would get an ID card; it’s an Auburn ID card that says AUM student. They’ll pay certain fees, Tiger Transit, Student Union, Student Activity fees and Auburn Montgomery will remit those fees back to Auburn University to cover the costs of the service. So, this has a tremendous potential for us, in the sense of generating tuition revenue. For instance, only 3.4% of our student body lives outside the state of Alabama and in the United States. We have about 1.2% of our student body that is International students. To date, slightly over 50% of the 100 or so identified for full admittance in seamless admittance are out of state so this will be beneficial for us. It also, I think, in the long run can be beneficial for this campus in several ways including the one, I think, fairly important way that there are a lot of second and third generation Auburn families out there who are unhappy when their son or daughter with a 22 ACT can’t attend their Alma Mater and this gives them a mechanism that allows them to take classes in Auburn and live in Auburn and then transfer at the end of a year. So, I’m happy to answer any questions that anyone may have about what we hope to accomplish and how we hope to accomplish it with always the provision that from the Chancellor’s level there are details that I may not know or remember.

Andrew Wohrley: Hello, Andrew Wohrley, Senator from the Library. I’ve looked through the briefing papers we had with interest and the one question I have that I can’t see answered here is, this trial period will be one hundred students or so but what ultimately, what ultimate number of students will be participating in seamless admissions?

John Veres: Well, first off, I’d hope that the trial period would show that there is a reason to go into subsequent years and perhaps grow the program; because until we see how things work out I’m not sure that will be the case. But assuming that is the case, it seems to me; though I’ve had numbers suggested that around 300 students is a practical upward limit. And the reason I suggest, and it’s just my opinion, some of your colleagues and some of my colleagues may have slightly different views on this, is that over the past five years there has been about on average a 320 student drop between the freshman year and sophomore year at Auburn, even after you transfer in I believe about 1400 students a year. So it seems to me to exceed about what that drop is, you could create a bulge that might be difficult for scheduling purposes. And we want to keep this thing truly to work in a win-win situation. We don’t want seamless admissions to cause any problems for Dr. Heilman and for the Schools here so it seems to me, at least in my opinion, that that would make an upper limit at least for the reasons I’ve given but again, that’s just my opinion.

Tony Moss: Hello, Tony Moss, Senator from Biological Sciences. What are the, and I don’t know this number at all, the current requirements for transfer of a student from any college into Auburn University, and how would that compare to the numbers that you’re giving: the requirement of a 2.5 GPA.

John Veres: They are the same. We are essentially requiring these students to meet Auburn’s extant transfer requirements. And we have worded what we want to do for this incoming class, which would be 2.5, in terms of whatever the extant requirements set, it would be by academic standards on our Campus, I’m not sure of the exact nomenclature used on this campus. But we would expect them to meet whatever standard Auburn has set for any incoming transfer student.

Tony Moss: So there’s no adjustment for these students. It’s just a standard transfer.

John Veres: No, and in fact the one negative comment I’ve gotten from a Board member was the assertion that we’re maybe doing these students a disservice because it may be easier to obtain a 2.5 at a 2 year institutions than it would be at AUM. Which, as Chancellor, I would hope would be the case. I would hope that we would be more rigorous. But we would also provide support for these students and help them be more successful so that it is not an issue.

Rik Blumenthal: Rik Blumenthal, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Senator. Several things about this program disturb me. One of them is, we’re currently trying to increase the quality of the student body by no longer doing Early Admissions by when you apply, but in fact considering qualifications. This is a mechanism by which we will be admitting under the board people who did not make it into normal admissions. Now if this were a program to admit people, who didn’t make the normal Auburn admissions criteria to, let’s say, increase diversity on campus I might think it’s worth while. But my guess is, as you said the 2nd and 3rd generation Auburn alumni are white. And I think that’s going to make this place less diverse, not more diverse. Another thing that really bothers me about this proposal is I see it as creating a second class citizenry both of students and of faculty. The Auburn University of Montgomery faculty coming over and teaching in these facilities will be treated most likely and I think it will happen, as second class citizens. They will be given whatever crap offices to be available, if they’re given an office here. They will not be treated as equals. We have a policy of tenure where people who teach courses at Auburn University have to be hired by the faculty and then face a tenure decision by the Auburn University Faculty. In this way we’ll be teaching Auburn students to be with faculty who are not Auburn faculty and will never come up for University tenure facing the criteria of Auburn University Tenure. To me this is kind of a crazy concept. This is Auburn University at Montgomery at Auburn University. Since when does the branch campus open a branch at the main campus? The whole thing just seems quite hokey to me and to be quite honest I peel it down, get to that bottom line, the last line that you wrote in this summary. The purpose of this is some legislator or trustee’s grandchild could not get admitted to Auburn so we’re going to create a program to get this kid into Auburn damn all the standards. Damn the requirements, this kid’s getting in. We’ve got a special program to put them in.
John Veres: I’ve actually forgotten your first point, so could you stay at the microphone because let me address your second and then if you’d refresh my memory I’d be happy to attempt to address your first.
I think that is, that for some percentage, I don’t know what percentage today I could not tell you what percentage of those students are second and third generation Auburn students. I still think that’s an advantage of the Program. I come from a campus where over 30% of our student body is African American. So, with respect to diversity, some of those students that we currently get will be interested in this program and they’re not getting into Auburn with a 20 or 21 ACT score. As the board moves more selectivity, there’s a balance, and I wish Wayne were here because he could tell you what percent is on test scores and what percent are on other factors. But I don’t believe that this program will decrease the diversity on this campus. In fact, by allowing those students who want to be at Auburn the opportunity to be here will increase your diversity. With respect to the issue of tenure and who’s teaching them, if they don’t come to us, they’ll go to Southern Union, a junior college, we don’t know where they go. That’s certainly true of all the other institutions. Every 22 that goes to another institution for their freshman year and transfers to Auburn, that’s certainly true. I would like to think that perhaps some of the difference between us and some of the two year institutions is that we also tenure our faculty on our campus, and at the risk of seeming defensive, I would assert that in many disciplines we have very fine faculty members who are doing research and publishing, and teaching well and quite frankly I shouldn’t be in this job if I don’t think we can’t do a better job than the 2 years in terms of educating in the core curriculum. You know, I believe that we should do a better job and if the program works appropriately you will see a more diverse group of students coming in who are better prepared to succeed than some of the kids who are currently transferring in, or students I should say, they’re not all kids. And that’s another way we differ from your campus. We have fewer traditional students. We have many working students, even among our traditionally aged students 70% of them work 30 hours a week or more so you know we get a different kind of student. I think events will tell us how it effects Auburn’s enrollment, both in terms in respect to diversity and how many of them are going to be trustee’s children. I am unaware that we have any trustee’s children who have applied for seamless admissions, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one because I am not aware of anybody who’s applied quite frankly, at my level. But certainly that is not our interest. Our interest, in part, is for our faculty to have the opportunity to teach some of these higher ability kids who are more like traditional students because they don’t get to see as many of those students on our Campus. So I think it will benefit our faculty.

Robert Locy: Dr. Heilman, would you like to respond to that too?

Dr. Heilman: I would, and thank you very much. The comments that were just made, I think, are basically assertion. And I recall once Paul Parks, standing once at this microphone and observing something that I’ll observe now which is he didn’t hear a single word he agreed with. I think it’s important for us to understand that Dr. Gogue’s role in this was more than just making a casual comment. This is a program that I think he has had some interest in and I think also one value which is important to this University was mentioned is diversity. But there is another value that is important to this University particularly with its land grant mission and that is access. And I believe that’s part of Dr. Gogue’s thinking. With respect to the notion of second class faculty, it seems to me that a hallmark of Auburn faculty and Auburn Montgomery faculty is civility and I would certainly hope we would comport ourselves in that way. To the extent my office has had anything to do with this, we have taken every effort to ensure that the AUM faculty that are teaching AUM students on our facilities, and by the way our teaching facilities are highly under utilized so there’s reason to make additional use of them, will be treated with respect both in terms of our colleagues relate to them and the facilities they are able to use. Thank you.

Francis Robicheaux: Francis Robicheaux, physics, senator. I have to say that when this program was described to faculty in the physics department it needed to be explained several times for us I guess to believe that such a thing was possible so it was very negatively received in my department. The question that I have though is a year from now, when the hundred students have done their year what will be the thing that goes into deciding whether this was a success or not?

John Veres: Well I think there will be more than a thing. It has been a challenge particularly under the time constraints under which we’ve been working given how rapidly the economy went south, to look at all the logistical details. And our colleagues at Auburn have been very helpful in terms of identifying potential problems and offering potential solutions to those problems. There is an operational level of assessment. I mean, were we able to run the program in such a manner that it didn’t dramatically increase the workload of the staff or faculty on either campus? Were we able to deliver the courses, get them scheduled, and get them manned? We will survey the students. That is something that we do annually as a matter of course on the Montgomery campus to assess their level of satisfaction and how it ran. There is an issue over time of the percentage of these students who successfully transfer into Auburn. If that number was 30% I think it would be hard to throw confetti in the air and call this program a success. I think that over time as we know more about the program the list of things on which we will choose to assess it will grow rather than shrink. Those are some things off the top of my head as I stand here today.

Francis Robicheaux: One of the things, one of the possible metrics that was sort of noticeably absent especially in this venue was that there was no I guess input from Auburn University faculty on whether this was a success or not.

John Veres: In year one, it will be difficult to obtain data from Auburn University faculty. I think if the program is sufficiently successful to go forward to a year two and a year three, I think a reasonable metric becomes to assess the satisfaction in some way with Auburn University faculty in terms of the problems that they received. I have confidence in my faculty, so I believe that the students you’ll receive in your physics classes eventually will be better prepared than from some other institutions where other transfer students may have originated. But that is my belief at this point, and it will either bare that out or it won’t. That is certainly an important metric, but that is not a metric available in year one.

David Carter: David Carter from the department of History. I just wanted to make a few brief comments. One, I think, myself included, not all of us at Auburn have a great degree of familiarity with the procedures in place. So working closely with the undergraduate program officer in History I’m always somewhat surprised at what the transfer requirements are. So I do think it is important to stress that this doesn’t necessarily change the dynamics of that. I think Dr. Blumenthal and others have raised some very important concerns. Classroom space I don’t envision as a serious issue. Office space, I think would be a very serious concern and I would very much want our AUM colleagues to be welcomed. We work very closely with them in the Department of History. My concern also would be thinking about our colleagues at AUM. They already work a more extensive course load than we do and gas is certainly not getting any cheaper. And my concern, I think, would be if we wound up staffing this program perhaps more with Auburn graduate students or adjunct from either AUM or Auburn and I’m not sure that would necessarily be in the best interest of these students. So I have some concerns about that. And I think the thing I’d like to close with is, again I’m not always in the loop, but I think a lot of Auburn faculty felt a little bit blindsided by this process and had a sense, and again I may be just speaking for myself, that had become in effect complete and there hadn’t been an adequate chance for them to give their input on the Auburn faculty side, and truthfully having spoken with several colleagues in Montgomery, I’m not sure that all the faculty at Auburn Montgomery are completely sold on the idea. So, I’m relieved to hear it is a limited trial. I also have a few concerns that a 100 person trial makes it difficult to achieve an economy of scale but I’m sure you all have worked out the logistics so I think I may speak for a few people when I just say, we felt it materialized very quickly.

John Veres: I think that’s a fair statement, and I think if the Governor’s Budget had looked differently it could well have been that we may have been talking about the succeeding fall rather than the upcoming fall. But that was in fact a precipitating stimulus.

Constance Hendricks: Constance Hendricks, Senator from Nursing. My views are probably very different from my colleagues here, in that in this past year I have had the opportunity to teach on the AUM campus. And I find that the students there are of the same caliber and quality and are as challenging to me as a faculty member as the students here. Yes, demographically they are different so that’s not an issue. I have found that the faculty at AUM has been very cordial and hospitable, and I know that my colleagues here will be that same way here. I hear your concern about the quality of the course work but I also heard in this proposal that these courses will be taught by AUM faculty. If you can just broaden your thinking for just a little bit to say that we would have some control, we meaning Auburn faculty collectively AUM and Auburn University, whoever wants to participate in this initiative would have the opportunity to have some input into the caliber and quality of the courses and the product that this 30 credit hour initiative will produce where we don’t have that when these students come from other institutions. We have to accept them based on GPA and meeting our published requirements. But we don’t know about the quality of the instruction that they have received at those institutions. I am returning to Auburn, but I was at Auburn for 9 years, had the opportunity to leave Auburn and for 11 years be at other institutions where have dealt with transfer students and I would venture to say folks, that having the opportunity to teach students those first 30 hours with a quality faculty and from an Auburn Institution is a benefit. I beg you to keep an open mind as we implement this initiative. Thank you.

John Veres: I would like to say that the courses would be taught primarily by AUM faculty. We have met with our colleagues and there are some departments on the Auburn campus who evidenced an interest in teaching some of the courses. For instance, one of the courses that we may well offer this spring is an Architecture Appreciation course. We don’t have Architecture on our campus. And also, the Political Science 2020 is slated to be taught currently by somebody from Auburn. And I should note that in the cases of the labs, in order to minimize the disruption in the labs that the people managing the labs and operating the labs are currently graduate students and staff at Auburn who will compensate for our labs which will meet from 5 PM to 9 PM on Fridays. We are also working with the faculty to ensure that our faculty will be using the same experiments so that the labs can be set up on Monday as they are currently and taken down for the succeeding Monday, the next weeks labs and text books and everything, doing everything we can not to inconvenience our Auburn colleagues by doing the same thing they are.

Tom Smith: Tom Smith, Human Development and Family Studies Senator. Rik I think the kind of comments you are making kind of represent many people at Auburn’s questions and many of those are very legitimate ones. If I’m understanding this though, as a bit of a different perspective, some of this I think is a lot about the transfer rules and students coming in after the fact. We have students coming from all over many in the junior college system. There ACT’s, SAT’s make no difference. They are not even looked at in admittance because transfer students are different. I mean, we could probably get those numbers but the number of transfer students we have every year they’re different from all over. I would actually be in the camp of, I’m much more comfortable about students coming from AUM as transfers who have shown that they can do academic work, I personally would have much more faith in the AUM’s faculty with an effort going on as we’re hearing to try to match things where they would be as seamless as possible to Auburn. Whereas, people coming from just take your pick are not necessarily preparing people to come to Auburn at all or maybe other institutions that they’re closer to, etc. So I think we would actually be having much less of a pig in a poke so to speak in those transfer students thinking they’ll all transfer. And the other thing this would be AUM. As the point was made, we don’t have input into how other institutions teach their students or what they do about it. This is more, I don’t hear money changing hands, but like AUM would be in essence renting our space to have some AUM on our campus. That’s not Auburn main campus. They wouldn’t be our students. They would be paying some for some of the amenities and support services that our students here on main campus have and in essence buying some of those or you talked about remitting some of those dollars into our number or our budgets for other services. I actually think it sounds kind of interesting. Certainly just a trial, but it does sound like it has come up quick. And certainly that does seem to cause some concern and I hear you say a lot of that is financial. And if it increases out of state students, and again, if half of those were out of state students triple tuition to AUM one year later if they come to Auburn it’s still out of state students paying triple tuition to Auburn. As opposed to more junior college students that come from in state, not that that’s the whole point, but I think we might actually on Main campus if it is increasing our out of state tuitions, etc, that helps our bottom line as well. In these financial times every bit of that, it sounds like a bigger portion of your issues Chancellor, but it’s not going to hurt us to have more out of state tuition students which we probably don’t get a lot of in our transfer populations, but I know there are people waiting to speak. Thank you.

Ron Montgomery: Ron Montgomery, Senator, Veterinary Medicine. My view on this is we’re already doing this folks with two minor changes. We have students transferring over here all the time, from Southern Union especially, and other two year colleges. The only two differences is that they are not AUM they are Southern Union or somebody else, and that they spent more of the state taxpayers money to build a separate facility instead of renting it from us. That’s the only differences. One other thing I would like to add is that in Veterinary Medicine there are two colleges in the Caribbean for students that are primarily for American students that party too much in undergrad. They go to these colleges in the Caribbean, when they come up to the United States to do their fourth clinical year; they are more mature better students. Thank you.

Dan Gropper: Dan Gropper, Senator from Economics. I just wanted to say, I’ve worked with, not a lot, but a handful of AUM faculty. And I can tell you that if they were taking a Forecasting Economy from Keavan Deravi (sp?) they would get a great experience. And the other people I know, Joy Clark, David Lang, are good folks and good teachers. And I would have a lot more faith in them from some generic transfer place about which I know nothing. Secondly, I would also say to echo my colleague from the vet school here in a sense that we are doing a fair amount of this anyway with transfers. And although I have some concerns about this, I think as a test case where we’re measuring the outcomes, looking at these things, it’s worth giving it a try. I would also be careful about sort of careful about measuring the outcomes are of what we’re looking for. How is it that we define success, is it these students actually then transferring to the main campus, or if they don’t do that do they continue on and get a four year degree through AUM? I mean, what other alternatives are there if they don’t hit that requisite 2.5 GPA. Having heard some other comments, I just wanted to rise and support my colleagues at AUM.

Larry Crowley: Larry Crowley, Senator from Civil Engineering. The state of Alabama has a lot of campuses that it supports, and college campuses and branch campuses. To me, if we look at it directly, the reason for a branch campus is to have a different location, and what you’re saying as I understand it is that economically the branch is not surviving with the students that it can attract. So you’re going to collapse some of the branch onto the main campus, why would, as a taxpayer and citizen of Alabama, why wouldn’t I direct my focus to shrink AUM and increase the capacity of Auburn University?

John Veres: Well, the precipitating stimulus is the budget, but we are not going broke on the Montgomery campus. But we have been in a long period of relatively stable no growth. We have actually increased credit hour production in the last few terms on the Montgomery campus, but by small percentages. This will allow us to add to reach two markets that we currently aren’t reaching well. One is this market that absolutely has to live in Auburn and be around Auburn. Because there’s, let’s just be honest, there’s something in the water at Auburn. Dr. Gogue cites numbers from Alumni surveys where people ask the students would you go back to the same institution over again and major in the same thing. And the state institutions kind of average in the low to mid 70’s and the ivy leagues edge up into the mid 80’s. 96% of the people, who graduate from this institution, said that if they have to do it over again they’d come back here and major in the same thing. I don’t know what it is you guys have in the water up here, but clearly, there’s a real effect there. So it allows us to serve a market that you can’t currently serve at hours where you aren’t currently utilizing your facilities. So as opposed to thinking of it as the main campus and the branch campus, think of it as the Auburn campus system. It allows us to more effectively make use of the Auburn system to make use of resources that are here. The buildings are in the ground, the infrastructure is here, but they’re under utilized. Because students up here vote with their feet, and they vote to be away from here by 3PM in the afternoon so there’s that aspect of it. And one of the things that this will do because of the inference revenue, is that it will provide me the opportunity to build some of the amenities on our campus, in the next thing that we have slated, we don’t have permission from the Board we’re still working on our master plan, but most of the ground swell support on my campus from the staff and the students but particularly the students is to build a wellness center or a fitness center. So, the revenue that we obtain, if this program is successful, will allow me to make the Montgomery campus more attractive to students who want more of a residential four year experience. It also allows us to market to a group of students I haven’t talked about much and that’s the ones that won’t get into seamless admission because they’re not among the 100, but they are the other 100 who really wanted to be in Auburn and who because we’ve engaged them and interacted with them and given them the opportunity to participate and interact with our staff may be more likely to come to the Montgomery campus but not getting into seamless admissions. So this is going to allow us to tap markets particularly that out of state campus that we are currently very weak at the current time. So I view it as an opportunity for the two campuses to work cooperatively and as we move forward in our strategic plan more and more I think we need to begin to ask the question that we haven’t done historically. We’ve both existed in our silos, and how can we begin to develop in a way that the two campuses compliment one another. And I think, Don Large put it to me this way. He says ‘Well maybe we should outsource night school to you guys because you know how to do it.’ Because we run classes from 8AM to after 10PM on our Campus. And those night classes, particularly in the School of Business and the School of Education the most notable ones, the majority of their majors in Business of all levels and Education at the graduate levels, are night students. But this will allow me to make improvements on my campus that in the long run will make it attractive because I believe I need to grow my enrollment from 5000 to something like 8000 in order to achieve the things that we want to achieve. And there are a whole long list of things that we can talk about, ways that I think my campus is different and things that we can do that are a bit more difficult for you to do given political realities as to where the Auburn Board wants to go with respect to selectivity. The average ACT score keeps going up on this campus with that incoming freshman class and there are a lot of students that won’t be able to come to Auburn. And this will provide them with the option to come to the Montgomery campus or they’ll be here. And some of them may not transfer here, but again after having to work with them for a year, I think it’s more likely for them to come to Montgomery and stay in the system than to go to some place like Georgia or places like that.

Rik Blumenthal: Rik Blumenthal, Senator Chemistry and Biochemistry. For my colleagues who do not want to actually admit or say that they think there’s a distinction between the quality of education at Auburn University and Auburn University at Montgomery, I say that reflects on your department and don’t criticize me for saying there is a distinction. We are Auburn University. We are not Auburn University at Montgomery. My main point for rising again was to say that as I sat here and listened to more discussion I came to a conclusion and really what you want to do is sell your product on our brand name. This is the same thing as when Firestone Tires couldn’t be sold. This would be like Michelin saying ‘Oh, we’ll just put the name Michelin over them and sell your Firestone Tires.’ You’re saying ‘Hey kids, you can go to Auburn University. That’s something special.’ That’s what we own. That something special is Auburn University. You’re trying to sell Auburn University at Montgomery under that product name. And I understand your motivation to do it. I can understand why Firestone would have wanted Michelin on their tires. But in fact, no other company was going to allow Firestone to put their name on the Firestone product. And I don’t see why Auburn University should say ‘We’re going to put the Auburn University name on an AUM product.’ As much as there is a relationship, it is not an equal relationship at least in my book. Maybe in your departments it is. Thank you.

Robert Locy: Rik, what’s the difference whether they attend class at Auburn University for the first year, or they physically go to AUM for the first year and arrive as rising sophomores? It’s still the same difference.

Rik Blumenthal: It’s basically us trying to run a two year school, or a one year school on campus or someone else doing it on our campus. It makes no sense. Absolutely.

Jackie Depothy: Jackie Depothy, College of Business. I run the Business Development Center and am much intoned to what the state budget is doing to this campus and Auburn University at Montgomery as well as all the educational facilities around the state. I just have a couple of things to say in response to some of the things that I’ve heard here. First of all, I attended AUM. I was one of those students who worked from 8AM and then when to class from 6 to 10, and I did that for four years until I was able to economically go to the University of Alabama. And I will say that every course I had AUM was just as strenuous as any course that I attended at any college including Auburn University where I received my Ph.D. The other thing is, in looking at the Firestone Bridgestone and Auburn and AUM being two different things, I think we are only fooling ourselves if we think that the majority of our students come here because we are a great educational facility. Now, I am not putting down Auburn University as a great educational facility, but it is football that brings the majority of our students here. So lets not fool ourselves into thinking that we are some how superior faculty to faculty at another University especially a fine one as AUM. Thank you.

Bill Sauser: I’m Bill Sauser, Professor of Management. I would like to speak. I waited till last because I’m not a Senator. I did want to say that I have had the privilege of teaching on both campuses, I’ve gone through tenure on both campuses, and I’ve gone through the promotion and tenure process at both campuses. And I would just like to say that the faculty and students there are dynamite as are the faculty and students on this campus. The only difference that I observed is the focus more of the students at AUM they focused more on evening classes, I enjoyed teaching night classes. When I came back to this campus, I asked if I could teach some, I’m still waiting to teach. Maybe there will be an opportunity to do so in the future. I do want to point out to my colleagues that we just talked about dual career opportunities and I am looking at this as a potential opportunity. I think there are other real benefits for both campuses if we step back and take a look. I can understand anxieties and concerns but I think this is too good an opportunity to miss and I hope we’ll give the one year experiment a chance to work and let’s see how it turns out. I think it’s a great thing for both campuses myself.

Dr. Heilman: Tom Heilman, Provost and a member of the administration. As such, I’d like to offer my sincerest apologies to the Chancellor for the disrespect shown to your institution today.

Robert Locy: Thank you.

Gary Martin: Gary Martin, Steering Committee. I was just thinking; with respect to the quality of instruction that freshman receive. I was just sort of reflecting on who teaches a lot of the courses that our freshmen attend in large cattle settings like this.

Robert Locy: Actually, the rooms are a lot bigger.

Gary Martin: Yeah, okay. So I think you may see where I’m headed. On the other hand you may have a tenured faculty member from AUM a fine institution. And I’m kind of wondering, where is the balance. You have manageable class sizes, qualified experienced faculty versus the experience that many of our students receive as freshman which is another point of discussion entirely. But I’m not sure that the balance is entirely in Auburn’s favor when you put that together. The second point is with respect to Brand. Isn’t this the Auburn University system? Isn’t this the same brand? I think so.

Robert Locy: Any other discussion? Well, on behalf of the senate Dr. Veres, I’d like to thank you for coming and perhaps subjecting yourself to what may have not always been a pleasant experience. I would also like to thank my Senate Colleagues for an engaging discussion, the most engaging one we’ve had for a while. I thought we’d fallen asleep so it’s nice to know that we haven’t. Is there any unfinished business? Seeing none, is there any new business to cover? Hearing none, we stand adjourned until next month.