transcript01-13-09

AU Senate Meeting Transcription
January 13, 2009

Bob Locy, chair: I’d like to call the January 13 meeting of the University Senate to order. The first items, is the approval of the minutes of the November 11 meeting of the Senate, which was our last meeting. These were distributed on the Web with the agenda. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes as distributed? Hearing none, or seeing none the minutes will stand approved as they were distributed.

The first item on the agenda is the remarks from the President’s Office and President Gogue is with us today to present those.

Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you Bob. Hope all of you had a great holiday season and that you’re…it’s good to see all of you back. I wanted to mention just a couple of things to you. Sharon Gabor provided me with the work of a committee on graduation rate improvement, and it’s an absolutely wonderful report and I understand it will be distributed broadly for further input. But it’s got some good ideas in it, I think most of you know our concern is that about a decade ago when we were on the quarter system our graduation rate was about five percentage points higher, is that roughly correct from what I saw in the data?, and it’s been steadily coming down in terms of graduation rate. So they offer some good ideas and some good suggestions.

Second thing I want to mention is that you may have seen the proration call by the State. The current numbers that we’re operating with (and Don Correct me) is about 68 million dollars in losses. That would be in all four lines of the University, so Auburn, Auburn Montgomery, Cooperative Extension Service, and the Experiment Station. The data that we’re seeing for next year’s, beginning October 1 next year state shows tax revenues down between 800 million and a billion dollars. So that is sort of the climate that we are working in. I know that you’ve been seeing in the newspaper and you’ve been seeing in various media what other universities are doing across the country, I’ve certainly followed many of those institutions that I worked at before, I saw a little small university, Utah State, 600 I think it was that they laid off in terms of employees. I would just share with you that at some point Auburn will have to participate in this recession. Our hope and our goal is that we participate at the lowest level possible. And Don would never say it publically, but the institution has been very well managed and so there is a degree of flexibility that some institutions don’t have. At the same time we know that if it continues that we will have to participate in some way and we’re trying to look at everything we can, obviously the academic part of the institution would be the least affected and the last affected, so we’ll continue to keep you posted on that, we expect to know a little bit more when the revenue projections officially come out in February. Probably won’t know anything completely until they end the session in May.

On your agenda today is the Consulting Policy and I just wanted to make a few comments about it. I may be an outlier in terms of what most people have on consulting. I believe that consulting done by faculty is immensely important. I believe that when you engage in work with state agencies and federal agencies, industries and business and not-for –profits, that that is extremely important work. And so one of the elements in the strategic plan calls for us to be able to address consulting in a positive way, to encourage it where it’s appropriate, and to actually recognize and reward those who go above and beyond and actually contribute to consulting in the various groups that I explained. So I hope you all will look at that carefully.

Sometime just prior to Christmas the new cell phone contract was negotiated for the University. The provider is Verizon, same that we have now. And there’ll be something that will formally come out, but we wanted to give people the heads up, there are some people that have been deferring on buying certain items not knowing if Verizon was going to be the one selected. So it is the one selected is that correct, Don or Lee? And I don’t know how many years it’s for, do you recall? Five years, thank you Bob.

Let’s see, the next thing I wanted to share with you was last month the College of Engineering was able to bring their second member of the National Academy of Engineering to Auburn. Dr. Lou started in December and we had a goal to get one member of the National Academy of the engineering or sciences, so I give a lot of credit to those on the Engineering side that have been able to go out, find individuals and actually encourage them to come to Auburn, that’s our first two that we have ever had.

Final thing that I wanted to mention was that we have an extended an offer to one of the three candidates for the Provost position. The individual has accepted the position, it now has been sent to the board, which is required to look at the compensation and to approve the position finally. Assuming that works out, the new provost would start out on February 15. I’d be happy to respond to questions you may have.

Connor Bailey, not a senator: Dr. Gogue, you very carefully did not mention a name for the Provost.

Dr. Gogue: Until it’s completely finished I’d rather not.

Connor Bailey: It was one of the three that we interviewed.

Dr. Gogue: It was one of the three that you submitted and as you recall you submitted a name from Dr. Apple at Delaware, Dr. Mazey at West Virginia, and Rafert I think was the name, Rafert, Rafert at Clemson, so it is one of those three. (laughter among the group.) Thank you.

Bob Locy: I only hope it’s one of the two you could remember the name of. (more laughter). Next item of business on our agenda is the Senate Chair’s remarks.

I’d like to, with deep regret, inform the faculty Senate of the passing of Dr. Scotte Hodel in the department of electrical engineering, he passed away this past Friday. There’s a memorial service, as I understand it, planned for Wednesday afternoon at I believe it’s 4:00 p.m. at Lakeview Baptist Church. Scotte was both a person sincerely committed to the work of the Senate, I first met Scotte serving on the Academic Standards committee almost 14 or 15 years ago, when, what we all know today as the GAP policy, came through the Academic Standards committee, and he was at his death serving on the Faculty Senate Rules committee. So Scotte gave tremendous service to this University, and he was a young man in his passing is greatly mourned and I’d like to ask all of the Senators to just take a moment of silence in whatever way you feel appropriate, recognize Scotte. (quiet time)

The next remark that I’d like to make concerns the fact that there’s an organization called the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, they have recently adopted a new charter. This is a coalition of the faculty senates, so it does involve you folks, of some 56, I believe it is, academic institutions that play division 1A College Athletics around the country, including practically all of the big names and many but not all of the members for example the Southeastern Conference. The purpose of this organization is for getting faculty senate involvement in oversight of the process of interaction between academics and athletics on campuses and particularly for student athletes. Every year for the past several years Senate leadership has, a member of Senate leadership has attended the COAI meeting and they have as I say very recently, like this month adopted a charter and they have an upcoming meeting. Among their activities for the coming year which you will likely hear about is going to be asking senators and senate leadership at institutions that are member institutions to, let’s call it-engage in surveillance activity over exactly how their institution is complying with the NCAA rules in compliance and to use senates to monitor said compliance. The feeling is that there are institutions that are, I don’t know if they are falsifying records would be quite the way they would like to have it said, but at the very least there’s a certain uncomfortability with some institutions. To my knowledge, we’re not on their list, but the NCAA has more or less at least in the person Miles Brand, the director of the NCAA the chairman of the NCAA has certainly issued support for the coalition being involved in these kinds of activities. They have a draft survey that they’ve tried this year and so if you get some word of a committee that you are on being asked to look into certain activities in response to this you’ll at least know what that is all about.

The meeting today involves looking at several issues that are really a part of the graduation rate task force report that Dr. Gogue mentioned. Other aspects of that will be probably a key component of the meeting a month from now when that comes up, so we’re really starting to look at those task force reports in terms of what’s forthcoming and there are some recommendations for some policy changes, one of which we’re addressing already today. It was already well on the agenda, others will be forthcoming and so we’ll be dealing with that task force report quite soon. I have no further announcements for this meeting, are there any questions? Seeing none the next item on the agenda concerns an amendment to the Summer Calendar and the chair of the calendar committee, Robin Jaffe, will present said amendment to us.

Robin Jaffe: I first came aware of the situation on January 7, and I’d like to propose a change to the Summer calendar 2009 so that the Independence Day holiday is taken on Friday, July 3 instead of July 6 to follow university policy. And that’s basically the main change to the calendar and that’s all I have.

Bob Locy: Are there any questions? Any discussion?

Roy Hartfield, aerospace engineering not a senator: If I read my e-mail correctly the issue was having to move class days around and because of the current calendar would this address that?

Robin Jaffe: What we also suggested was that we eliminate that one where we treated a Thursday as a Monday so that more equalization would take place normally at this point going back to the normal days of the calendar as is addressed normally—So a Thursday is a Thursday, a Wednesday is a Wednesday, Tuesday is a Tuesday, and Monday is a Monday. Friday would still be Friday too. (laughter)

Bob Locy: if there’s no further discussion of this issue, it comes to the senate from committee does not need a second. All in favor of changing, making this change in the calendar signify by saying aye.

Group: aye

Bob Locy: Opposed same sigh. (pause) Motion carries.
I was remiss, let me remind senators that when you wish to speak to the senate please go to the microphone please announce you name and your affiliation and whether you are or are not a senator. Since we won’t have to worry about Roy forgetting the next time, he’s the next item on the agenda and he’s going to talk to us about the Consulting Policy and what we’re proposing to do with the Consulting Policy.
15:50

Roy Hartfield: Thank you Bob. As Dr. Gogue mentioned a little bit ago one of the items he has shown a good bit of interest in is the possibility of increasing the visibility of consulting and so with the interest of the Senate leadership about a year ago we on the Faculty Welfare Committee commenced a process to rewrite the Consulting Policy. There are several motivations for this, one of the motivations for this is that the Consulting Policy if you’ve really taken the time to read it is pretty archaic and in some cases pretty arduous if you really follow the Consulting Policy. So, what practically has happened is that Faculty members have just ignored the policy and just tried to do their consulting without really paying that much attention and nobody would notice and much less recognize, so what we’ve done is to try to rewrite the Policy in such a way that consulting would be now an activity that would be not only considered to be more reputable I’d guess you’d say but also to facilitate that to some degree. We’ve been, I think, pretty careful not to just throw open the door and say okay all faculty now are consults full time and if you have time go teach you class, that’s not what our intent was at all here and I don’t think that’s what we’ve come up with for a proposed policy. But the current policy has both essentially consulting and conflict of interest built in and the reading of the handbook seems to make you think that Auburn thinks that consultant, conflict of interest is only likely to occur during consulting activities and so Dr. Mason suggested that we, our Vice President for Research suggested that we split the policy into a consulting policy and a conflict of interest policy. And the conflict of interest really is not exactly what we on the Faculty Welfare Committee consider to be within our purview entirely because it’s more of a policy activity than just faculty welfare and so we may get involved in this further at some point. What we proposed to do is to replace the current consulting policy with a new consulting policy which we would not envision to change, and if you will a place holder for a conflict of [19:00] interest policy that will be further iterated on, rewritten, or developed from scratch if anyone has the inclination to do that by committee directed by the Senate leadership. So, it’s our vision that the Senate leadership will now if this is adopted ask another committee or ask us or ask us to participate, set up a process by which a new Conflict of Interest Policy will be developed, possibly based on the one that we have. Just to make it as clear a possible, we’re not proposing that the Conflict of Interest Policy that we stripped out of the current Consulting Policy be the final document that Auburn lives by in the longer term. But on the other hand if we just took the Consulting Policy out and replaced it with a document that just discusses consulting then there would be no Conflict of Interest Policy, which we think is not in the best interest of the University either, so we left in the Conflict of Interest Policy with a few changes that reflect some things that we thought were pretty archaic that we have left out, but if anyone objects to those changes then certainly there will be plenty of opportunity to have input into the next process that would rewrite that policy.

What I thought I would do then is hit a couple of the highlights, if you look the document is about three pages long for the new proposed (Conflict of Interest) Consulting Policy and about four or five pages long for the replacement temporary Conflict of Interest Policy, so I’m not proposing to go through the documents line by line but would be happy to do my best to remember what we did. If anyone has a particular question about any of those, but this just mentions the idea about the Conflict of Interest Policy.[21:08] Here are some of the highlights we changed, there’s not a drastic change, but we went and looked at a bunch of consulting policies for a bunch of other land-grant schools, and if you look at where our policy is compared to other land-grant schools we were pretty far over on the restrictive side as far as consulting is concerned. If you wanted to consult more than one day a week you had to get advanced approval you have to get a UPO-10 approval process for any kind of consulting and you also had some limits on how much you could make. In some cases, consulting, which I think probably is not really enforceable, and so if you wanted to consult more than one day consecutively in a week you’d have to get prior approval. So what we did was still left the amount of time you could budget for consulting at about one day per week, which depending on how you count it is about 20 percent of your time, but if you were to teach a short course it would take two or three days. You wouldn’t have to get prior approval from the Provost for example. And so that was one of the changes that we made. Moved to an average of one day a week instead of strictly speaking one day per week. We made that change in the reporting requirements so that instead of going through the UPO-10 process which we found informally that very few people seemed to be doing. We changed that so you report your consulting activities as part of you annual reporting activity to your department head, and this is very common at other land-grant universities. This seems to be a much more practical way of going about helping people by not putting road blocks in the way of them doing consulting through what we consider say a legal track as far as the university rules are concerned. [23:31] There’s another minor change, just put on here, the Consulting Policy was 30 years old or so and there’s comments in there about any use of university consulting…any use of any computing resources had to be given prior approval, but we said if you want to use your office computer you can do that without getting permission from the provost. So we left in the approvals that would be required for major equipment, which we think is appropriate. So this is just some of the highlights, I put the document on here there are three pages of this proposed Consulting Policy. I would just make a couple of other quick comments I didn’t put in the PowerPoint Conflict of Interest Policy, but I think it was put on the Web site and maybe handed out to the senators. I would just make a couple of other quick comments we’ve been working on this for quite a while. We made a revision last spring gave it to the Senate leadership, they looked at it, then we had a variety of administrators look at it. Once Dr. Mason got here we asked him to look at it, then we went through another set of revisions in the Fall and I think the Senate leadership and I think some of the administration has also had opportunities to look at the version that you have. So we tried to be very careful not to just sort of fly into a sort of a casual review of the policy, but certainly still there’s plenty of opportunity for people to maybe disagree or suggest different things. That’s really all I’d like to do as far as comments, but maybe somebody has a particular question and I’ll do whatever I can to answer it and some of the stuff I worked on months ago so I may not have an immediate recollection of what we were thinking.

Bob Locy: So this is coming from the Faculty Welfare Committee and does not need a second, it’s now before the Senate for discussion.[25:58]

Patricia Duffy, I’m not a senator: I just have a question, which may be beyond the scope of this document to address. I am not up to date on the current 2009 Policies but at least in the recent past Faculty members who had Cooperative Extension appointments had different rules for consulting than faculty members who did not, and I’m wondering if these different rules of Cooperative Extension employees will continue under the new policy or whether they will be treated as other faculty members under the new policy. Thanks.

Roy Hartfield: yeah, and that’s a very good question, that’s something I did not know the answer to when we started this and I appreciate the Extension role was as much as, I appreciated the role but didn’t appreciate the limits on what they can do as much as I do now. They are in fact actually excluded in many cases from doing consulting. That’s a concern on their part so we had some fairly extensive discussions with representatives from extension to address that [27:10] in our original document had in the policy some language that indicated that you could be assigned consulting and rewarded for it in the tenure and promotion process. To reflect so of Dr. Gogue’s comments there, but we took that out because of the people from extension because they cannot be assigned consulting and I’m not sure that they would be infringed by that language, but we were very sensitive to that and recognized that they are certainly going to have to be rewarded in other ways and in many cases through the consulting activities. Hopefully that helps to…

Patricia Duffy: (too quiet to hear)

Roy Hartfield: I’m not sure they’re separate rules entirely, but there are some additional restrictions.

Jim Witte, senator EFLT: How do you differentiate between outreach and consulting?

Roy Hartfield: Well, in some ways I think outreach might be quite similar of course, but in general I think outreach is considered to be an activity that you might do as an extension of your assignment, part of your academic year assignment that your faculty chair would give you for example going to talk to 4H groups for example with the extension folks, going to schools to present something, something education oriented, whereas something on the lines of a short course might not necessarily to be considered outreach. Or something on the lines of a problem that somebody would bring to you a company or a government agency would bring you a problem, you know I need an optimum configuration for a missile for example, that’s not exactly outreach. I think it’s pretty fuzzy though. You know there’re certainly some lines.

Sanjeev Baskiyar, senator, computer science: I wanted to ask that for the assigned duties so faculty members at the beginning of the terms, we have a certain percentages assigned to outreach activities. Do you foresee that a certain percentages would be allotted to consulting or would it be part of outreach in terms of the percentage assignments? Thank you.

Roy Hartfield: That’s sort of what we were discussing a few minutes ago. Originally when we were first started rewriting the policy last Spring we had the notion that we might would want to include consulting more or less as a line item if the department head and the faculty member agreed that that’s something they wanted to show as part of their assignment but then we did take that language out in deference to the Extension people. But I think you could get credit as part of outreach, [30:33] in the tenure promotion process for consulting activities. I know that is done now currently and formally, but I think there shouldn’t be an impediment to that, with this policy.

Jim Saunders, senator from Geology and Geography: I applaud this in its effort to update the Consulting Policy and I would like to point out that it has been lip service anyway given toward tenure and promotion, but I don’t think in practice that consulting activities have been looked on by the people serving on tenure promotion as something that actually is something good. I would like to see more even in the Consulting Policy some more lip service actually given to that, because as it is I know many assistant professors now on tenure professors shy away from this where it is actually an indicator from the free market of quality of instruction and research is going on in Auburn and it shouldn’t be something that an assistant professor who does not have tenure should shy away from. So I would like to see consistent with President Gogue’s understanding of what consulting is all about, and it is an indicator of the free market looking at quality of people at Auburn to see those words get into the Faculty Handbook and actually be used in tenure promotion and particularly down at the department head level and Dean level where none of this credit has been given in the past. [32:05]

Roy Hartfield: Thank you very much, I appreciate that, I totally agree with that idea. I would say I’m currently serving on the tenure promotion committee and I think there is some effort being given at this point to making sure that people who really are recognized as experts do get that credit in their outreach and I think going forward that should be certainly in practice something that is given credit. I’ll just make one or two additional comments along those lines. In the past several years there’s been a lot of…I don’t know if acrimony is the right word but a lot of trepidation toward assigning what is 100 percent of time for your activity and then Department Heads and Deans perhaps not encouraging consulting as much as perhaps they could because this idea that it take away from you time, and that’s something that we’ve run into a lot on the tenure promotion committee is what’s your assignment and how is what you show on your packet reflect your assignment. I think some more work really needs to be done in that area.

Drew Clark, director of the office of institutional research and assessment: I came here to teach Paradise Lost in 1982 and among the other mysteries of my life is how I came to be the last signatory of record and all the UPO-10s filed at the university, which I am. [33:51] So I speak with some knowledge of this subject and would like to point out a couple of things about one feature of the propose amendment to the policy, namely the feature of doing away with a system of prior consent or prior approval and replacing it with after the fact reporting. It may be of some interest to the Senate to know that most of the UPO-10 forms across my desk involve? and a paper trail showing prior approval from that from the paying unit is necessary for people who engage in consulting, internal consulting for extra compensation actually to be paid for their work. I would presume that such consultation would still be viewed as something that people want to be paid for and so a system for which they didn’t report any of it until after the fact would probably delay their payment until the end of the year. At Dr. Gogue’s request I did a little checking with some sources and with permission Mr. Chairman, I’d like to read a brief paragraph from e-mail to Dr. Gogue. Is that all right with you?

Our procedures call for prior approval of consulting activities by the faculty member’s department head and Dean as well as by the Provost. This system of internal controls was designed to make sure that the proposed consulting activity does not impede other university functions, it also give payroll a basis for approving and disbursing extra compensation and it makes possible to document the extent to which faculty are allocating their effort to out-of-classroom activity. Sometimes in the past our governing board has asked for periodic reports on the faculty’s consulting activity and I’m told so in the spirit of making sure senior professors were not neglecting or abandoning their instructional responsibilities. I spoke last week with Larry Williard, who is director of the education division of the department of examiners of public accounting for the State of Alabama. He says that this office takes no position on what Auburn University’ Consulting Policy should be within the law, but does expect us to maintain an adequate internal controls over consulting activity. In the case of controls for extramural consulting he suggests that we be able at a minimum to document for each consulting activity, whom it was with, the dates and times it occurred, and whether there was any compensation. He also strongly commended our current practice of being able to document prior approval at a level above that of the consultant, for example the level of a department head would be above the level of a faculty member consulting; if it was a dean consulting, Provost would be above that.

In my office (just one more paragraph) last November or so an examiner from the department of public accounts came to my office wanting to see the paper work on consulting activity for an Auburn University faculty member with a specific client. The reason he came to my office was that a complaint had been filed that the consulting activity was excessive and was double-dipping, and as you know that been in the news a lot. While they can’t discuss particulars, as Willard did divulge that this particular case was the result of a complaint. Their examination of our records, which included prior approval lead them to conclude that while the facts were indeed as alleged in the complaint, the complaint was without merit since we could document through prior approval that the consulting activity in question was approved per policy and was within the University policy. I believe if you check with either the department of examiner of public accounts or with our own internal auditing office, they will offer abundant caution about dropping the feature that calls for prior approval of at least one level above that of the consultant. Thank you. [37:49]

Roy Hartfield: Thanks for your comments, sir. One comment I guess I would make about that is I’m not saying that we should throw caution to the wind by any means, the main comment I would like for us to take away is that we are not proposing a final version of the Conflict of Interest Policy and I think, certainly there needs to be some careful thought put into the Conflict of Interest Policy to insure some of the safeguards that you mention.

Tim Boosinger, senator, College of Veterinary Medicine: Consulting is important to the College of Veterinary Medicine. At any given time during the period of time that I’ve been Dean we’ve had 5–10 percent of our faculty participating in consulting activities and we have worked within this structure which I agree is a difficult thing to make work right now the way it’s done and are supportive of many aspects including the ability to group the days together and to simplify the reporting process. Although I share some of Drew’s concerns about insuring that there is appropriate oversight in order to protect the reputation of the University.

Some of the colleges and schools have some unique situations that need to be considered, they could be considered in this document or they might be considered, it might be possible for the college to have some local policy that would be compatible with this document. As an example for those of us that have clinical programs there’re difficult area for us to deal with is defining the difference between consulting and moonlighting. When does it achieve all of the positive benefits that Dr. Gogue would like for us to see vs. just having outside employment on days in which the university is paying their salaries? So that’s a bit of a problem. Also at a College of Veterinary Medicine that operates a teaching hospital there’s a potential for conflict of interest within this region because we depend on referrals for teaching material and in some cases material for retrospective studies, so I would just offer those as concerns overall, I’m supportive of the changes that are being made I think this is a real positive step if we have the flexibility to address and maybe it may just be those colleges that clinical programs would need to have a local policy, and I don’t know whether that’s an option or not. [40:38]

Roy Hartfield: My understanding is there’s no reason why a particular group couldn’t have their own policy, but I wouldn’t want to try to make that comment as a way of setting university precedent or policy by any means, I don’t think I’d be able to do that but I think one of the areas that everybody I think just about every comment has had to do with conflict of interest, I think certainly there is going to be a significant amount of work put into the Conflict of Interest Policy just for the reasons you’ve mentioned just then and the reasons Drew mentioned. I certainly think that’s an important piece of work that needs to go forward and that’s why we didn’t want to leave out everything about conflict of interest temporarily. We are maintain a Conflict of Interest Policy it’s pretty similar to what we’ve had, but recognizing that going forward we need to improve it. [41:42]

Tim Boosinger: You mentioned outreach and right or wrong the way we have dealt with that was outside of the UPO-100. What we’ve done if it’s for continuing education activities approved by the department head and that’s done just by approving an unfunded request for travel and those kinds of things for the appropriate time, but there is oversight provided by the department head, myself, and that’s works for us. And I think that might be a solution…if everyone else was using the form and reporting it to Drew then we may have been underreporting our activity in fact it really is consulting.

Roy Hartfield: I think there has been substantial underreporting maybe some intentional and some unintentional, but certainly the process has not been friendly to the consultant. [42:40]

Tim Boosinger: one other point about oversight. While it’s, this has been a rare event in the 13 years I’ve been dean there have been some abuses that have caused us difficulty.

Gaines Smith: I’m Gaines Smith, director of Cooperative Extension in Alabama. I’ve wanted…I’ve had part of this conversation with president (chair) Locy and I thought it would be well to get it on record here for the entire Senate. It’s been mentioned several times, there are at least two areas we need to be concerned with as far as the Cooperative Extension people being involved in consulting that is being, receiving extra compensation through consulting for work for which they are paid to do through Cooperative Extension. That would be obviously a conflict of interest. However, if that is occurring out of state that’s still acceptable so there are several pieces of that that we need to be aware of as we work through. And I think as a consultant, the overall consulting policy that I see before us I think it’s broad enough, but when we get into the discussions on conflict of interest I think it would be appropriate and we’d like to be a part of those discussions as we further those. Because overall we think consulting just as it’s university wide as very positive for extension people, we just want to make sure we fall within those guidelines out there. And there’s some federal guideline that I’m not aware they’ve changed but there was recent legislation late in 2008 and we’ll need to reconfirm that this legislation did not change some of the previous guidelines. I thought it would be just well to have that on record for the Senate as a whole.

Roy Hartfield: Thanks a lot..

Bob Locy: and Gaines, I’d like to add to that that as far as I understand it at the present time the conflict of interest policy will be going to our new Faculty Research Committee that was established in last month’s Senate meeting. They will be looking at what changes are needed in a Conflict of Interest Policy and I’ll be sure to submit to them that you would like to at least have a representative participating in those discussions and/or be a part of those.

Gaines Smith: Thank you.

Rik Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: As a former chair of that Faculty Welfare committee who initially dealt with this issue of consulting and consulting policy I think we found conclusively, Sharon Gabor can confirm this, that there was significant underreporting via the UPO-10s, because I know personally were consulting and I believe that term, we looked it up and found one filed. So there’s significant problems with that and I think it’s a good idea to address the consulting policy and right now a lot of consulting is going on at this university that is completely unsupervised, I mean not approved to completely off the books. If we are intend seriously to bring that consulting inside the system, I like the changes that you’ve proposed, I’ve read through the consulting policy…I haven’t spotted anything that I had an objection to, but I’ve not had enough time , having received this Friday evening, to get this to my faculty who also consult so that they can read this and decided if they think there’s a problem. And if we’re really going to try to seriously bring people into compliance, people into the online consulting and through the system consulting, then we have to give them a reasonable opportunity to examine this and have feedback. So I don’t have any specific problems with this policy but I still wish to make a motion that we postpone a vote on this issue for one month and just bring it back possibly for vote or for short discussion and vote, but postpone the vote on this for one month so that my faculty can have an opportunity to examine this policy since it does affect their livelihood and their quality of life if we create a policy that affects the consulting they can and have been doing.

Bob Locy: All right, we have a motion to postpone this for one month, is there a second?

Someone: second.

Bob Locy: We have a motion and a second to postpone for one month. Any discussion on the motion? (pause) All in favor signify by saying aye.

Group: Aye

Bob Locy: Opposed same sigh. (pause) Apparently we have postponed for one month our vote on the Consulting Policy, but we thank you for your input today. It will be of great value across the next month in deliberating what we have before us, outside of the Senate meeting of course.

The third action item on the agenda is a degree enrollment cap policy. As I mentioned we’ve had some discussion of enrollment caps and their impact on our retention and progress of students through degree programs in the graduation rate task force committee and this policy has been around for a bit of time and so it seems timely to bring it to the Senate for discussion and consideration today. To do that is our associate provost for undergraduate affairs, Linda Glaze.
[48:54]

Linda Glaze: Good afternoon, can you hear me in the back? First of all I wanted to share with you what group proposed and came up with this policy. Two years ago when we changed the manner in which we admit students, we did not change our policy, but we had changed the manner in which we admitted students. One of the recommendations was to establish an enrollment management council and the group that, the voting members of that group are the president and provost and vice-president for academic affairs or the designee and in this case that is Sharon Gabor, a Dean appointed by the Provost, Associate Dean selected by Academic Affairs, (Academic affairs is a group of associate deans that meets on a regular basis), and academic advisor, a representative from business and finance, myself, the dean for enrollment services, the director of institutional research and assessment and also the chair of the University Senate, is the group that has been meeting. The charge of that committee was to or council as is says here will serve as the major governing body and forum for the ongoing discussion, development, review, evaluation and all enrollment related goals, strategies, and tactics. The major focus of this group will be more on annual strategic enrollment and fiscal planning rather than on tactical issues and strategies. The purpose of the council was to bring together those individuals who would be impacted by decisions related to how many incoming freshmen that we would have in terms of either from providing the classes, providing the academic advising, providing the instruction, and also what the impact is on our university budget.

In terms of the policy that was distributed to you, what prompted that action was the fact that over the years and actually if you look through our history in terms of our academic standards, for a long time and I’m not picking on any one college but for a long time the College of Business had a 2.0 requirement to take their courses. And then if you look through the trends you will see that at one point and actually, this was the first day I heard about the passing of Scotte and I was involved with the Standards Committee so you’ll have to excuse me. But in response to the development of our grade forgiveness policy what happened basically is that what I saw was department eventually started requesting to continually raising the GPA to take courses. So we are now at a situation where we have numerous programs that have GPA requirements to take courses. They are not requirements to graduate, but they are requirements to take courses that are higher than our academic standards to graduate. And I did distribute to you all a chart, but you may not have printed it or reviewed it but I do have a copy, so if you look at this, basically what you are going to see is our academic standards for a student to graduate is a 2.0, but for students to get into majors and to take classes, this is a 2.3—and this is not a comprehensive list, since this list was prepared we use it internally at the time for freshmen advising actually in the summer. There are five additional changes, in other words there are health administration political science and public administration has gone through the process to have their, to have and increase in GPA to major in their programs as you all know sociology, it’s listed as it is closed but recently it has been approved for sociology to admit new students, I believe that’s for fall 2008 there’s a GPA requirement involved with that. We now have [53:51] the College of Agriculture, Ag Economics is also put forth requirements on what to take courses and to major in, and if you start looking at this list it’s almost as if everything is more than a 2.0. So in response to a request that came actually from the College of Liberal Arts that wanted not only to have the 2.3 that you are seeing there, and I’m not picking on Liberal Arts I’m a member of the tenured faculty in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, it’s my home college, about two years ago they put forth a request to require a 2.5 to major in degrees in Liberal Arts. And you can see in terms of what have happened the provost did not approve that request and in response to that actually it was the associate dean in liberal arts having defined a policy procedure at the University of Georgia that the enrollment council looked at and decided to adapt that and that’s the policy that I’ve shared with you. Basically I’ve been asked what’s the difference…”What does this policy do?” And what I have seen in the few years that I’ve been in the office is there’re two approaches to dealing with not enough resources to offer classes to allow students to go through in a timely fashion. In some of our programs they have what I would call caps. It was my understanding that they were approved by the provost, it was really the dean and the provost, those requests went to the provost and the provost approved those, I was not involved in any of those discussions so I don’t know what the procedures are, but programs that have what I would call an enrollment cap, we had when I first joined the office there were about four of them, one is the program in Building Science, one is you have a certain number of spaces in Nursing that they admit a class, you also have within the College of Education the 2.5 that is there in the College of Education is not for everything in the College of Education it is only for teacher certified programs in the College of Education those are their rules those are outside rules, but even within that for early childhood and elementary education, they have a limited number of students that they admit in cohorts. And in those cases rather than setting entrance levels what they do is they know the capacity for their program, they take the admissions and then they accept, so therefore if the number, in other words, they’re not going to be able to accept everyone, they have a competitive process and they start from the top and they accept down. They don’t set a standard that this is the standard that students must reach to take classes. In my work in terms of the committees that I serve on, my office is really for individual students, the last stop in terms of the appeals. And what I see students doing, trying to get the classes and to be admitted to programs; they’re not taking classes that really advance them in their pursuit of a degree, they’re taking classes to meet these GPA requirements. Basically that’s what we’ve looked at is to create a program by which we’re looking at programs determine based on other than solely a GPA, one, the space that they have to provide their degree program and what are the courses prerequisites that are needed for the student to be successful in that program. And that’s going to be different, for example I know as part of enrollment management, Ag Econ put in a C for economics 2020, that to me is a logical requirement. If you are going to major you whole life on economics, you better be successful in the first course. But to have just a 2.3 or a 2.4 that does not target certain courses that will make a student successful in the major, that to me is not as logical as trying this other approach, so basically what this procedure would do is that we would look again at every approval that had been given and rethink that, so we are not creating a situation where basically as I see it the only programs that don’t have requirements are those that require calculus, chemistry, and physics. So that’s where we are (at). Questions? Comments? Bob asked me to present it and I came to do so.

Bob Locy: As such this is not coming from a committee so it would require a second.

Jim Saunders from geology and geography, senator: We’ve had this discussion before and I philosophically don’t think that enrollment management and GPAs are related to each other or should be related to each other, but maybe the University does. The one aspect of this is what we hit on earlier is that our graduation rates are going down, I would suggest that’s because we’ve got a lot of people floundering around trying to get their GPA average up to get into these programs to graduate. And I’m the father of one of these people (laughter). So, and I am using my outside consulting income to pay for this tuition that is paying for him to flounder around. So if in that case I think we have a real legal obligation to the kids if we admit them to Auburn University and some of them get in through the back door without taking the ACT, which this body is not in favor of but it happens anyway. That if they are in good standing with the university they ought to be able to major in whatever they want to and if enrollment management is a problem then let’s look at other issues about doing it and I think it’s a good idea, can you pass economics before going into business, you know that would be okay, instead of just making arbitrary decisions, and I don’t think we have any legal basis for doing it. [1:01:15]

Linda Glaze: I’m not a lawyer so therefore I will not comment on the legal basis, I’d leave that to Leigh(sp?), but that is really the problem that is really the issue we need to deal with.

Rik Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: I like the idea of having individualized criteria for enrollment management where each department can get authorization and it can do it’s own sort of enrollment management. I do have certain problems with the document. In the document there is an “a–e” criteria that can be used for enrollment management. If I recall, I’m trying to do this off the top of my head, “a” is don’t go violating any university rules with your criterion, well that’s obvious we’re not allowed to violate university rules with any new rules, existing rules. And then “b” states that a combination of courses can be used with a GPA or that course or combination of courses. That seems very reasonable as one of the possible criteria. “C” then, but “b” does state that you cannot use overall GPA, and I guess your trying to nail that down that we’re not going to allow anyone to use that. We then go on to “b” that states a specific criterion, “c” which states a specific criterion… are they numbered?

Linda Glaze: Which section is it?

Rik Blumenthal: Section 4

Linda Glaze: OK

Rik Blumenthal: Criteria. Right. So we first start by saying our first rule for all criteria is that they cannot violate university policy, good enough. B, the second rule is we can’t use overall GPA but we can construct a GPA of a certain relevant courses—sound like a very good idea. C then is a statement of purpose, that’s a very specific requirement, D is again special skills—that’s a specific requirement, and then E states that you must have at least two of the 5 above. One of them is not real, it’s stating that we cannot violate university rules and it seems to me that the way this is structured it restricts the department from coming up with its own criteria unless it matches either combination of GPA and statement of purpose, combination of GPA and special skills, all three, or special skills and statement of purpose. I for one think that departments in this university are very diverse, I think their needs are diverse, the students they would find the best to complete their program to fill out their program will differ dramatically in what they’d be searching for; my only problem with this document is that I think the criterion by setting down these three and saying you must have two of these three does not allow department sufficient flexibility to come up with departmental criteria that meets their needs.

Linda Glaze: I have no problem with that comment, again that’s the reason we put it out, but if it’s not flexible enough. Really the purpose of section 4 was to really give departments ideas of what would be appropriate. If someone, if a department is creative enough to come up with something else that fulfills the spirit of the policy, I don’t see a problem with it.

Rik Blumenthal: I do think though we probably need to incorporate that into the wording here.
[1:05:23]

Linda Glaze: RB: talking over one another.

Bob Locy: Wouldn’t it be simple and straight-forward to just say a minimum of two of the above plus any others that they’d like?

Linda Glaze: I have no problem with adding something if you give me the appropriate wording this is just a first pass

Rik Blumenthal: I don’t have the wording in front of me so it’s very hard for me to… I guess what I was thinking was on “a”, basically move Bob’s two or more to the end of that…proposed selection criteria…consistent with school, college, university policy and regulations and must contain at least two of the suggested criterion below, and may contain other criterion as approved.

Bob Locy: Rik, why is that not restricting it more?

Rik Blumenthal: It says two or more of the b–c, b–e, b–d, plus any… so it requires a minimum of two of those, I’m okay with requiring two of those; I think the wording the way it is right now where it says two or more of the ones above.

Linda Glaze: I don’t see where it says ones above, in the document I have.

Rik Blumenthal: In the document as it say here, selection must be of one or more of the type of criterion.

Linda Glaze: But it doesn’t say that it has to be the ones above, I think really what the intent of the wording is that basically a general GPA requirement is not sufficient, so I really have, the department can come up with what is appropriate for its discipline, more power to them. I really don’t see that as restrictive, I really think that departments and programs need to determine what are the special talents or what are the skills or what is the knowledge that is specific for that academic discipline and that will be determined by a department and the main thing is that the department just has to give a rationale that for us it’s x, y, and z in terms of, that’s really what we’re looking for.

Rik Blumenthal: We’re in complete agreement. The only thing where we have disagreement is the words wording that might, I think be used to restrict the freedom of the departments to come up with that other idea.

Linda Glaze: No intent to do so. Except for just not having what I call

Rik Blumenthal: I guess what I’m looking at is should conform with the following guidelines and then a, b, b through d are very explicit types of criteria and then c says more than one type of criteria and when I read that I read that as meaning more than one of what was stated previously, that’s my reading, I’m afraid other people will read it that way and it will become restrictive.

James Goldstein, senator from English: I would propose that as a friendly amendment in e that we replace the word must with may in the interest of…

Linda Glaze: thank you.

James Goldstein: now I’m commenting in the interest of more flexibility so it’s conceivable a unit might decide they only need one criterion.

Linda Glaze: …not must, but may…

James Goldstein: So a selection may be based on more than one type, but I would leave in place must be supported by appropriate rationale, whatever…

Linda Glaze: It’s for “e”?

James Goldstein: Yes.

Linda Glaze: So may be supported by appropriate rationale.

James Goldstein: No, may be based on consideration of more than one… Just like that (referring to written change of document happening while speaking), that’s my suggestion.

Bob Locy: Should we also change what may be supported by appropriate rationale?

Linda Glaze: No, must be. I’m sorry I got the wrong place.

Bob Locy: Before we proceed further from this we should address the issue of this really needs to be seconded before it can be deliberated by the Senate further…

Someone: Second

Bob Locy: Thank you. Didn’t think we were going to have a problem but… any further discussion? (pause) seeing and hearing none then, the enrollment cap policy as presented, All in favor signify by saying aye, with friendly amendments, yes. All in favor signify by saying aye

Group: Aye

Bob Locy: Opposed same sigh. (pause) Motion carries.
That was the last action item for the Senate agenda. The information item on today’s Senate agenda is a presentation about living and learning communities by Nancy McDaniel. Nancy official title is she’s director of educational support services.
[1:12:18]

Nancy McDaniel: Thank you Bob for providing the opportunity to present to you on the role of student services and learning communities. Throughout the work that’s been done on several of the planning committees and the strategic plan committees, learning communities have come up in discussion. Bob had asked in the Fall if we would present and I’d like to introduce to you Ruthie Payne, the coordinator of the learning community initiatives. We were not quite ready at that point but we are now to talk to you about the role of student support services and the student success center and how they play into the development of the learning communities that will be coming online in 2009-2010. The student academic success as you see is influenced by the variables that we have on the screen for you, providing a solid orientation in first year academic experience has been found especially in the graduation rates committee that Bob alluded to, to be the most important variable in a student working toward graduation in six years. First term GPA and first year persistence, the two most important variables. Drew Clark’s office ran figures for us every way they could and those were the two variables that at the end of the day that prove to us that first year experience is in the development of learning communities bringing freshmen together in cohorts and supporting them through student services. As you see the offices of student success center are the things that can help students be successful in their first term and in their first year. Freshman year experience for example, moat of you when you hear freshman year experience you think of camp war eagle, rah-rah, there are a lot of students moving about campus in the summer, 8 camps, 4,000 students, 6,000 parents we move through, it’s like running 7 or 8 major conferences back to back sometimes with less than 12 to 16 hours in between when they leave and we get started again. But freshman year does a lot more than orientation, they work with students on an academic transition skills and all of the staff also teach in the university Auburn Experience and study strategies first year course which forms the anchor course or the foundation for the learning community courses.

Academic support services, provides academic counseling, supplemental instruction, and academic coaching that we have found in the literature to be key to the success for the first year student. Career Development, Dr. Saunders, if he’s still here I’m going to talk with him tomorrow about his son and what we can do to help him. So if you know him send him an e-mail before I get there. I know that there’s a way we can find him and let him spend his consulting dollars in a much more fruitful way.
Student Counseling Services has developed, we’re running 8 groups this semester, we’re working in a much more proactive way to provide students a vehicle for stress at the front end rather than to have that stress mount on up until their academic performance is so negatively affected that they find themselves in a hole that they absolutely cannot climb out. And then as Linda glaze just described the Cater Center for academic and career excellence was an outcome of Dr. Glaze sitting there not only on the readmission committee hearing students talk about how they got into the hole of suspension and expulsion, but also what can they take now that there is not a college or a department that will accept them back in. we have nearly 600 students that were serving in the Cater Center at this point who’s GPA does not allow them to go into the college, the department, or the school of their choice. And we are working with an interdisciplinary model of academic advisors, personal counselors, career counselors, and academic coaches to help these students get the right fit in the quickest way possible and we have some really kind of great success stories over the last week of students who we’ve worked with in the last year who came back to us and said, “My GPA is up, I’ve worked with the career counselor, I have found my major and I’m not going to be seeing you so much anymore, and good bye,” and we were happy to send them on their way.

Living and learning communities, something you need to know, we are having 100 percent increase. Many of you don’t know what the living or learning community is. Living and learning communities are based on a college major or interdisciplinary theme. Students take linked or clustered courses, they’re co-enrolled in at least three courses, one of these is a university or anchor course. Students, a number of 25 make up a cohort, and it may be a theme course, which may have to do with, like the earth smart course taught by Sharon Roberts and Gisela Buschle-Diller, which weaves in freshman study strategies and study skills, but also environmentalism. The theme that they have worked on along with students being co-enrolled in an English class so they have two small classes where they are enrolled in 25, two classes with their same cohort and then a larger lecture class. So they have a natural foundation and a natural environment to provide themselves with study groups and so on. The theme is woven through these groups and the ultimate goal is that we have faculty who communicate not only with the students but also among and with each other.

Approaches used are residential and non-residential options. Those of you who have watched the residences come up on the west side of campus know that they are coming up a little bit more quickly at this point, but Richard Light of Harvard had said in his making the most of college, the single most reported item that students told him, he interview thousands of college students, that students had made their college experience the most successful is that connection with a particular single faculty member, and learning communities provide that option. Approaches used include that engagement of faculty from different disciplines. We have a number of interdisciplinary learning an living communities coming online this Fall which we will be talking to you about. We wanted to show you our growth factor. Last year this current year that we are in, five years ago or four years ago in 2005, 150 students, projected this coming Fall, 765, and we have two more communities (one or two more communities) that we may bring online. So we’ll be upwards toward 20 percent of our incoming freshmen. That may not approach some of the larger institutions in the SREB who have been at for twenty to thirty years, but when you look at where we began we think that we are going to do the most with what we have, all of these communities are supported by the Student Success Center units.

We know from the literature and the national student study on programs that these are the outcomes from the survey sciences group in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Here are the highlights that our students have given us through both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our students do have higher percentage rates for good academic standing, they do persist at a higher rate than students who are not in learning communities here at Auburn, our data shows us that. They are in better academic standing at the end of their first year than students who are not in learning communities and they tell us that they have had an easier transition, they retain their study groups from the first year into the second year. And a student said, I don’t know if there is anyone left from English, but here was a student’s contact. “I think having an English class together was the most significant component. We were able to see the different levels each student was at and the work congruently to improve as a class as well as an individual.” So that small English cohort was important.

Here are the beginnings of our list, this will be 2009-2010 college and school learning communities. Where you simply see the name of a college, those are really introductory learning communities to the college. These communities will have their students introduced to the various majors to their academic policy. Students will develop a common cohort learn together and they will also be introduced to all of the services that the student success center provides. Let me give you an example.

The women in engineering learning community is a brand new living learning community of pre-engineering women students. We know that engineering is a field where women are in the minority, so engineering worked with us and said we would like to really promote women within this field at the freshman level in our pre-engineering curriculum. They will be focused on preparing women for the rigors of the engineering curriculum and they develop of a cohort so they may begin to communicate together, living in the new village complex. And they will be taking success strategies, English, and a history together their first semester. Dr. Julia Freeman will be leading that one.

You will see that COSAM has three, conservation biology, marine biology, and micro-biology. We told them, come up with a really snappy term, who’s going to sign up for those? Those three go as fast as you can believe, students love those. The conservation biology for example focuses on biodiversity and studies how humans coexist with nature. Dr. Bob Boyd does that in the second semester and their univ 1100 seminar is an experiential seminar and they work in Pine Mountain, GA at the wild animal safari park and they worked on the habitats for the animals in making them more animal friendly to see what they could do to create an environment and the students volunteered their time, their efforts, wrote their papers on it, worked in teams, learned leadership skills, carried it back to the classroom. This year we also have cross-disciplinary learning communities coming online. You see from the titles that they are innovative. I want to bring you attention to the Earth Smart, the college of engineering and COSAM, Dr, Sharon Roberts and Dr. Gisela Buschle-Diller are really our pioneers with our residential communities, this will be their forth year with Earth Smart our longest running residential community, which provides students with an opportunity to learn about environmental issues and redesign the future by calculating their own environmental footprint, and then reducing the impact on the environment. You might say, would freshmen be interested in this one? Certainly they would be. Dr. Linda Glaze was also involved in one of the first residential liberal arts communities and helped students who were unsure of their major in liberal arts, so there’s always an opportunity for students. Fighting against hunger, for example includes agriculture, human sciences, with Dr. Don Mulvaney and Dr. Susan Hubbard. They will be looking at both leadership and the war on hunger.

Just to give you an idea about the residents where they will be living, rather than putting all of the students in the village, students will be spread across campus and the residences but also have some non-residential students mixed in as well. For those students who register late, come from far away, who live in the city of Auburn, so that will have a mix and a combination in some of our communities of residents plus non-residential students. But we will also have students who are living in their residence halls near their home colleges. And have variable pricing, which is important. Here are our goals for next year and number 2 is going to be directed at our next Provost, can’t remember his or her name, but it’s important for the deans and the associate deans and the department heads who are here to help us in this effort to determine how to work with faculty and to determine how this counts in a faculty load. Our faculty members have been tremendous and they have all been volunteers. And when you have never really worked with first term freshmen, they take up a lot of time. And they do connect to you, and they kind of wrap themselves around you; you become their person. So we really want to take that to the next Provost and say help us figure this out.

If you will go to the Auburn home page, learning communities is the youtube button on the right hand side under special features they’ve got a youtube about learning communities running right now. It did a much better job than I could ever do, standing here trying to within about 12 minutes tell you everything that we’ve learned. What we’ve learned is that students in learning communities need the wrap around services of the Student Success Center. We have students of all abilities, they come form all over the country, and international, they represent the population of the university in terms of diversity and we will be coming to your door or you may be coming to ours asking us how you can get involved. So Bob thanks so much for giving us this opportunity. And Ruthie thank you.

Bob Locy: Are there any questions or discussion? I think the hour is late. I’m sure you will get some comments from people, thank you for your presentation. That concludes our formal agenda for today is there any unfinished business of the Senate? Any new business of the Senate? Hearing and seeing none then we will stand adjourned till next time.
[1:28:54]