AU Senate Meeting Transcription
Feb. 10, 2009

Bob Locy, chair: I’d like to call the February Meeting of the Auburn University Senate to order, please. First item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes of the January meeting. These minutes were circulated on the Web. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes as circulated? (pause) Hearing and seeing none those minutes will stand approved as distributed. The next item of agenda for today is a report from the President’s Office, from Dr. Gogue. We’ll turn it over to you.

Dr Gogue, president: Thank you Bob, I’m delighted to be with you. I wanted to mention a couple of things to you and then I’m going to show you a couple of view graphs. Last time I was asked about the Provost search, and I think you probably have seen, Mary Ellen Mazey was named the Provost and is actually here this week, I don’t know that she’s here this afternoon but she starts officially next Monday. I want to thank those who served on that committee it took forever as you know, started last April and we were able to complete the deal with the final approval by the Board of Trustees the last day or two of January.

The second thing I wanted to mention is that about ten days ago we had an opportunity to visit with the Seaman’s Corporation, the German instrument company, and the leadership was given by our College of Engineering on campus. Seaman’s has signed an agreement with Auburn in which they will collocate with us out in the Research Park. It will bring to us capabilities in MRI and imaging. I do not know what I am going to now tell you, but as I understand it the three-tessler unit is the one that is allowed for human use at this time. The next largest size is a seven-tessler unit and as I understand it is in the approval stages for use on humans. The seven, there are only a couple of them in the United States, one at Harvard, one at Johns Hopkins, and one at the University of Pennsylvania. This will be the first one in the southeast and from my understanding there were interest expressed by a variety of different department on campus for use of those particular instruments. So that is moving forward nicely and hopefully we do actually have the resources and the funds available from I guess two years ago to look at the facilities to be able to accommodate that in the Research Park.

A couple of weeks ago I presented some charts to try to show a little bit to put Auburn in context with our peers in several different areas. There is not a theme to these charts that I’m going to show you, but I thought that you might be interested as you look at those to see how we compared against peers and some of the metrics that are used for evaluating universities are for decision making.

[see if you can see that] I want to start with public education vs. private education colleges, what are the costs. I think you can see these data are from 2007. The actual costs and these come back to you from the US Department of Education, for our class university our peer group that we are compared against by the Feds, tuition was about  $6,400 for a public university; the same class of private institution was about $33,000. The parenthesis under it is what they actually paid. So you have to think of college tuition as a sticker price on an automobile and then that is the actual payment price that was at those institutions. The lower number at the bottom was Auburn and based on apples to apples comparison we’re about $5,300 in terms of tuition. The part that I think is particularly interesting and Don Large verified the numbers, we actually discount our tuition about 44 percent, so the actual price if we took all the sources of funds that go into support students and just flat reduce tuition on the campus, your actual rate would be about $2,300 to $2,400. Today’s numbers would be about $2,600. The range just in case you are interested, the low was at 32 the high was at about 12, Auburn’s certainly not quite in the middle in that pack. I don’t recall the school, I think it was Oklahoma State, that was actually the lowest that was in the peer comparison group.

This is a chart that I always like to show, I’ll start over here and work forward, to show trustees and business folks. Three main costs within an institution, your instructional costs, your support costs, academic support cost, and in the far column I’ll show you in a second are the student costs, student services costs. And if you look at it from a business perspective it makes Auburn look very efficient, when our peer public are spending $10,000 and we’re spending $7,600 in terms of costs for instruction. From a university perspective the higher those numbers are, typically the higher rated a university is. So I’ll talk to you a little bit later on why our instructional costs appear to be lower, but certainly we spend less in terms of academic support and in terms of student services support than our peers.

You often see in the media that public tuition has just gone out of sight and that private schools have been much better stewards in holding the percentage increases together. And what I’ve tried to show in this chart is that public institutions did increase more than the privates, this is a ten year average. (I can’t see the number) I think it’s 6.61 percent was actually the increase of our peer public institutions, privates only went up a little over 5 percent, Auburn went up 7 almost 8 percent. So our numbers went up more. The bracketed number below is the amount of money that generated. And so while we did go up more you can see we’re almost $1,000 less than our peers and considerably less than the privates with a lower percent.

Current data on student anxiety or concern about cost; everybody says that if you ask the parents it would be a very different set of numbers, but never the less the surveys ask the students. And it’s kind of interesting 40 percent really had no concern about cost, 51 percent some concern, but figured them to be able to make it may have to have a part time job, and a major concern for about 9 percent of students.

One of the charts that all universities follow carefully are projections of high school graduation rates. These are national data, so we know how many kids are starting in K–12 or pre-kindergarten, they then calculate what are the dropout rates nationwide and they factor those in. There are a couple of points on here that I think are instructive, number one when you look at the total over the next twelve, thirteen years, whatever the numbers are, you’ll see that there is no growth in the United States in high school graduates. So we are in a flat period, Alabama is in the same flat period. We are seeing growth in Georgia, and seeing growth in Florida, but Alabama is flat and the Nation is flat. The other thing that is interesting is you will notice in the demographic categories, rather dramatic percentage increase in Hispanic kids. The national number is by 2020 more than 50 percent of your K–12 will be Hispanic in the United States. So we are seeing rather dramatic shifts in the ethnicity, but certainly no increase in the graduation rate numbers.

People often ask about financial aid, student financial aid. The only two point I want to make on this chart is one you will see that our state grants to support students is about 4 percent and the average is over 40 percent. That’s the impact of lottery in certain states. If you go into certain states those numbers will be virtually 100 percent of their kids receiving money from their state to go to college. In Alabama it’s only 4 percent and many states that don’t have lotteries you will see a much higher number than 4 percent. And then the second one that I call our attention to is institutional grants. We…, if you looked at the numbers prior to President Richardson, our numbers on institutional grants would have been down around 10 or 15 percent, but there has been growth and a lot invested in that particular category to try to get us more competitive with our scholarships support for students.

Final chart has to do with the level of degrees that we offer compared to our peers. I think if you look at professional degrees, pharmacy, vet medicine, we’re about same as our peer groups. When you look at doctoral degrees we’re about two-thirds of the average, and when you look at Master’s we’re about two-thirds of the average, and I haven’t calculated the percentages, but on the baccalaureate side we actually produce more than our peer institutions in terms of baccalaureate degrees.

I enjoy sharing those. You often get a lot of discussion particularly from lay groups, but constantly we’re trying to look and put Auburn in the context of our peers and try to look at various things that I think that as you look at these some of the elements that you see in the strategic plan of the university come out as to why they might have been listed and included in that.

Final thing that I wanted to mention to you today has to do with budgets. I know they are on your mind. The deans and Don Large and a group of folks have a workshop scheduled for Thursday of this week to begin to try to pare and look to see where we are budget wise. Think I shared with you the last time, the budget cuts coming into this year and the proration reduce the accounts at Auburn by about 68 million dollars. The state has a shortfall of about 800 million dollars in the current year. If they apportion those the same way they did in the previous year our shortfall would go to about 100 million dollars, so that’s just ballpark numbers. It is very, very difficult for us to give clear direct responses of what we’re doing, what we’re gonna do, or what we need to do, and part of it is tied up in the Federal stimulus package. I think many of you followed what’s going on in Washington [D.C.]. Virtually every state is treading water waiting to see what’s going to happen one way or the other with the stimulus package. If you look at the House Bill, and I don’t know yet what’s in the Senate Bill, but if you look at the House Bill, and if you look at those items that are really state block grants and then you try to calculate what Alabama would receive out of those. If they do it based on population, which is basically on congressional seats, I think our percentage is about a 1.55. So when you look at a number and do the multiplication on that you get some idea of numbers. There is one example in the Bill, is 39 billion dollars in the House Bill that is for public education and higher education to be allocated via existing formulas that most states have. If you take the 39, do the multiplication, I think it comes out to be about 585 million dollars. There are items that deal with academic facilities, that’s about 3.5 billion dollars, so you then again do the numbers. There are programs that deal with Extension types of operations, there’s about 16 billion dollars that deal with women, infant, and children and these various food programs. There’s 13.9 billion for Pell Grants, there’s 13 or 14 billion for students with disabilities. There’s 13 billion for disadvantaged students, so it’s kind of hard when you look at it and to know how the money might actually, …assuming it all passed and assuming there’s no politics and if it’s all allocated based on those numbers, the best number I could get was about 3.2 billion dollars would come to Alabama. The worst number I could get was about 2 billion dollars.

The other night if you listened to the Governor speak at the State of the State Address and afterwards the Lieutenant Governor got up and spoke, and he used the number of 3.5 billion, so I don’t know exactly what the number is and we don’t know whether there will be a stimulus bill, but most states are trying to watch that because you don’t want to call in and make really tough, tough decisions on all your state agencies and all your institutions if you don’t have to. So we’re hopeful that they will either pass the stimulus bill or they don’t but then we will know and suddenly our legislature will go to work and we’ll get a better feel really of where we are. So those are the things I wanted to share, appreciate having a chance to be with you, be happy to respond to questions.

Bob Locy, chair: Thank you , Dr. Gogue. Next item on the agenda is my remarks. And the first item I want to report is that the nominations committee for Senate officers for the coming year has met and probably people in this room received some phone calls from them. The committee was chaired by Connor Bailey, and consisted of Bruce Gladden, Debra Cobia, Jim Bradley, David Carter, and Isabelle Thompson and they have returned a report saying that for Chair-elect they are nominating Claire Crutchley from Finance and Larry Molt from Communication Disorders. For secretary-elect they are nominating Russ Monteferring from Animal Sciences and David Shannon from Educational Foundations and Leadership Technology. These nominees and the committee report will be posted on the Senate Web page if you want to see it in writing and didn’t get it from my verbal announcement here today. But we had an excellent slate of nominees proposed I believe and so be prepared for Senate officer elections which will be upcoming, the results will have to be in by the 10th of March, which is the Spring General Faculty Meeting when the officers change so we will be voting toward the end of this month on our new officers and I believe we have excellent individuals, we can’t make a bad choice from the selected list that has come forward.

All of those who were contacted and agreed to serve as well as the final list of nominees, I want to thank them for their willingness to support the Senate and to stand for election it’s not a trivial matter to make this decision and we deeply and sincerely appreciate getting good quality individuals willing to support the work of the University Senate in this way.

Second remark I’d like to make this afternoon concerns the fact that we have remodeled the University Senate Web page and this work has been done by Sue Barry the Senate secretary along with the help of the administrative assistant that the Senate now has at least part-time, Laura Kloberg, and I would urge you all to go take a look at the new Senate Web page it’s a very nice Web page, It’s actually been up a little over a month I believe and I didn’t mention it last month to you because we had a few bugs to get worked out, but I think it’s all up and it’s all working pretty well and we look forward to any suggestions you have to make for further improvements in the Senate Web page. You can get there from the University’s main page by clicking on administration and then University Senate, in case you’ve never been there.

I believe later this term the administrator evaluations committee has indicated to the executive committee that they are planning on doing administrator evaluations of deans and department chairs this year, and so you should be expecting communication as soon as we get all the details of that ironed out for the administrator evaluations. It is forthcoming and I wanted to give you a heads up to be prepared to that. There’s also another survey that will be coming the way of the faculty and when we elected to use our new student teaching evaluation forms a little over a year ago we agreed that the teaching effectiveness committee would revisit the issue of evaluating and assessing how the new forms were working. And I believe they are preparing a survey to do exactly that which you should expect a heads up on. So some information being collected that we hope to be able to share with our new Provost and decide whether we’re on track in the areas of administrator evaluations and teaching effectiveness.

Those are my remarks for today. Are there any questions? All right, as we proceed to the next item of agenda let me remind you all that the rules of the Senate that we generally use are that if you stand to speak to the Senate please go to the microphones so that your voice will be appropriately recorded for the secretary to keep the minutes with, please introduce yourself with your name, your affiliation, and whether you are or are not a senator when you first approach those microphones.

The first item on the agenda is the consulting policy. The consulting policy was brought to you and presented to you last month at the January Senate meeting. It was postponed for consideration until today and we are not going to re-present it, it’s a rather lengthy policy, you’ve had at least a month now to review the policy as it has been distributed along with the agenda. So at this time I’m going to open the floor for discussion of the Consulting Policy and the Conflict of Interest Policy which formerly were one policy but what we are proposing to do is to split them into two, and we have made some modifications in the Consulting part of it. The Conflict of Interest Policy will be revisited in the coming months and there may be changes forthcoming on that depending on the work of Senate Committees, which have not yet dealt with that policy. Any discussion of the Consulting and the Conflict of Interest Policies? [22:14]

Rik Blumenthal, senator, chemistry and biochemistry: I think it is a very good Consulting Policy, there were a couple of things my faculty noted that were concerns to them. The first thing that my faculty noted that was a concern to them is right now the reason that we are dealing with this is that very few people are following the actual consulting, as I found out as chair of the Faculty Welfare Committee a couple years back. And I think that we want to bring people into the fold and encourage them to actually do their consulting by filing the actual forms and having it approved at the university. And, right now there’s one point here on the second page, it’s the third from last paragraph; the first sentence, “Faculty members should not commit specialized University facilities and equipment or other resources to external consulting [sic. practices except]( projects unless) such use is specifically approved in writing in advance by the department head or other appropriate administrator.” Right now that wording as it exists here, I think is just too open and implies all equipment with the exception of what is specifically stated later to be your office, your computer and office equipment, is going to be a real road block to people believing that they can actually take their consulting to their chair for approval. I think one of the reasons people do not currently take their consulting that they are doing and do it on the books through University approval is that they fear that they will have a nice consulting agreement and to be safe, to play it safe, the department chair will say “No, you can’t do that.” Once you are told no, you go ahead and do the consulting and you are in big trouble. If you don’t ask people feel that that will be okay, “I didn’t ask, I didn’t get told no.” So I would like to expand this and make this wording a little bit more specific, where it says “specialized University facilities” my faculty certainly agrees that nobody doing consulting should take time on University equipment without approval of those responsible and those who have authority over that equipment, but along those same lines I would like to move that we, after the word facilities, strike the word and, replace that with comma and shared (you’ll have to zoom that so everyone can read it, Bob.)

Bob Locy: can you guide me as I…

Rik Blumenthal: Yeah. Third from the last paragraph.

Bob Locy: The third from the last.

Rik Blumenthal: Yes. Top line, after the word ‘facilities’, University facilities, comma, shared and strike the ‘and’ [pause while correcting] and then insert the word ‘shared’ between other and resources.

And the purpose of this amendment is to make it clear that any equipment as my office computer is completely under my control, that I determine how it’s used daily and how to appropriately use time on it should not become under the control of my department head when I ask to do consulting. And so if I want to use something that other people use that is shared equipment, I will need my department head’s approval, but if I wish to use equipment that is 100 percent under my control it’s then under my authority to decide what is appropriate time of use of that for consulting. And so that’s my first motion there’s another one, I’d rather do this as two separate ones.

Paragraph below indicates the change.
[Faculty members should not commit specialized University facilities, and shared equipment or other shared resources to external consulting projects unless such use is specifically approved in writing in advance by the department head or other appropriate administrator.”]

Bob Locy: Okay, so you are making a motion to amend the Consulting Policy as proposed in the following way? Is there a second to such motion?

Someone: Aye.

Bob Locy: Any discussion of the proposed amendment?

Sanjeev Baskiyar, computer science, senator: I think the shared word is too generic because really your personal computer too in your office is actually shared, and we should consider something that is probably ‘specialized’ equipment rather than ‘shared’ equipment. As you would know your personal computer is for us is actually shared by the college of engineering, they can log on and so can other people, other people can get access to it.

Bob Locy: Other comments? (pause) Hearing and seeing none then, All in favor of the amendment as proposed signify by saying aye.

Group: Aye

Bob Locy: Opposed, same sigh.

Group: Aye

Bob Locy: I believe we are going to have to do a hand count. I can’t determine how the vote went, so all of those in favor please raise your right hand. (counting) All those opposed please raise your right hand. (counting) All right, thank you, the amendment carries, 27 for, 11 opposed.
All right, any other discussion?

Rik Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: I rise to make a second [motion], this is just a word order amendment. Currently the way that last paragraph reads, it is not clear once you’ve said consulting of, a faculty member doing consulting work on his or her own time is not subject to restrictions in the amount [of time he or she can earn,] of compensation he or she can earn. And then we get down to the last paragraph, the last sentence which is the acceptable limit on these activities is considered to be the equivalent on average one day per week, I don’t want to change anything there, that’s all reasonable. I have a bit of a problem understanding necessarily what it means as his or her, own time. In my interpretation of that and I may be interpreting it differently than the authors of the document. I’m thinking that’s the three months of the year I receive no compensation form Auburn University, not the academic year when the Auburn University pays me. So I think that would be, the way it’s worded it’s seems like the last sentence modifies the first sentence. Saying that even though I’m not being paid a dollar by Auburn University for three months over the summer, I’m still limited to only consulting one day a week. So my amendment would be to take the final sentence, pop it up in front of that paragraph as a separate paragraph. Not to change it at all, but I think just the ordering of that makes it then say that on your own time, there’s no restrictions.
So the amendment is to take that final sentence, make it a separate paragraph before what is currently the final paragraph. [31:28]

Bob Locy: Does the Faculty Welfare Committee consider that a friendly amendment? Or do we vote on it? Yes, Bill.

Bill Sauser, Provost’s Office: I just wanted to make a point of clarification. I don’t have any problem with the amendment. Typically, also when we’re talking about the faculty members personal time that includes weekends, evenings, and if you’re on 12 month appointment, annual leave. I think we all understand that and does not actually interfere with what you are talking about. Just wanted to make that clarification.

Bob Locy: Thank you Bill.

Ron Montgomery, clinical sciences veterinary medicine: That may be clear at this point in time but I’ve frequently seen documents where years later that become subject to interpretation. Whatever that understanding is I’d like to see that as part of the wording here. That people on 12 month leave [think he meant 12 month appointment not leave] are a little different situation, that weekends and annual leave are considered personal time.

Bob Locy: Actually you bring up a point that I’d like to introduce based on some e-mail correspondence that’s taken place over the last month. When this Consulting Policy originally came up, the objective, as I understand it, of the Faculty Welfare Committee was to really do two things. Number one to encourage getting all of the consulting within the purview of the policy rather than having consulting being done under the table, and secondly to clarify this particular point of language concerning the one day per week to make sure it was understood that that was meant to be one day averaged across your semester’s worth of time commitment and not to be one day per week absolutely literally.

At the time that this came to the Executive Committee there was a lot of discussion with the Provost’s Office over the idea that probably what we needed to do was adopt the philosophy that has been adopted in reviewing a number of University policies recently, where policies should focus on policy and maybe there needed to be a separate document to go with that, that maybe was procedural on how things were being done relative to policies and to not make procedures part of policies in general. So the policy was somewhat rewritten with that particular point in mind, and relative to some of the issues such as the one you brought up, where different places on campus kind of have different needs for the basic policy we want to establish; they certainly have the option of preparing and bringing though the Provost’s Office, procedures for what they are doing. There needs to be a way to standardize that procedure and make sure it’s consistent with the intent of the policy. So we would envision that there may likely be additional new procedures on the implementation on the policy that need to be made and would be made at some point in time in the future, but we believe this mechanism gives us an opportunity to have both input to the changes in those and to have it be tailor made to specific units where there’s specific needs. I know for example the issue has been brought up that the Extension Service really has unique needs in this regard, because they have rules that suggest that faculty members are not allowed to consult for in-state businesses. The nature of their outreach activity for the University is such that that’s probably a conflict of interest with their otherwise job status and the Extension Service therefore needs the mechanism by which they can clearly delineate that particular policy. I think Dr. Boosinger has addressed the idea that perhaps in the context of the Vet School there are certain conflicts. So we wanted to create a policy that encouraged consulting yet at the same time allowed units to manage consulting in a way that was appropriate, but to do as much as we could to bring it underneath the general umbrella of our Consulting Policy. Could be we haven’t accomplished that but at least that was what the objective we were trying to accomplish, objectives we were trying to accomplish were. Any other comments? (pause) Hearing and seeing none then, are we ready to vote on the Consulting and the Conflict of Interest Policies collectively as a group? All right, all in favor of approval of the policies as drafted and amended here today, signify by saying aye.

Group: Aye

Bob Locy: Opposed? (Pause) Motion carries. Consulting and the Conflict of Interest Policy has been approved.
Next item on our agenda is a report from the Calendar committee. Robin Jaffe, chair of the Calendar Committee has three separate calendar items he brings before us today.

Robin Jaffe, chair of Calendar Committee: I’d like to thank the committee’s work this year in developing these proposed calendars and I wanted to talk to you a little bit that we’d like to return to the experiment in equalizing the number of days in the semester for the Summer and also try it in the Fall/Spring academic calendars. That’s what we were trying to do here. This is an experiment so we can always change it as we have just seen. It’s easy to change a calendar. So following the rules set by the previous calendar committee, the committee would like to propose these three calendars.

First, this is the approved calendar for the 2010 Summer session and we would like to move and have June 24 be the only change here where the classes will meet on a Monday schedule. This will also affect the Summer mini-semester 1 so this will equalize the days. That’s the only proposal for this Calendar change.

Bob Locy: Any discussion of the Summer 2010 calendar amendment? Hearing and seeing none, all in favor of amending the Summer 2010 calendar as proposed signify by saying aye.

Group: aye

Bob Locy: Opposed? (pause) Motion carries, we have a new 2010 Calendar for Summer.

Robin Jaffe: For the Summer semester 2011 that will start on May 19 and end on August 8 for the full summer semester with the classes meeting on Monday’s schedule June 23rd. This will give us 50 days and the Thursday will be treated as a Monday. The Summer mini-semester will begin on the May 19 and end on June 23rd with a final period on the June 24th and 25th, that one Thursday will be treated as a Monday. The summer mini-semester 2 will start on June 27th and end on August 1st with finals on the second through the forth, giving you 25 days for each mini-semester and 50 days for the summer semester whole.

Bob Locy: Any discussion of the Summer 2011 calendar as presented?

Claire Crutchley, senator from Finance: When it was first proposed in May that you’d switch a day, and I know you prologued that you said, not you but the former chair of the calendar committee was asked, ”Are we going to review this and make sure it works well?”

Robin Jaffe: That’s correct.

Claire Crutchley: And now you’re saying we’re not going to review it before it happens we are just going to go ahead with several calendars…

Robin Jaffe: I have spoken to several of the senators the other day about this and this is…I’d like to go ahead with this and review it. This way it’s in the books and it’s going forward. If you would prefer me not to go ahead with this, we are going to try it in 2010 and then set it up and if it doesn’t work we have an opportunity to change it later on, but to come back and change it again after we change it once again I thought if we set it up this way and keep it moving in that same direction, we can always change it back.

Claire Crutchley: So you’re saying if it’s a disaster in 2010 when will you re-propose this for 2011?

Robin Jaffe: If it’s a disaster I will tell the calendar committee, I’m moving off of it at this point unless somebody wants to keep me on it, that it should be adjusted appropriately, but we want to try it and we didn’t get a chance to try it this year, because of the July 5th debacle. So I want to try it, put it in place and see if it works and if it doesn’t, you know, change it. We can change the calendar.

Bob Locy: Any other discussion? Hearing and seeing none, all in favor of the Summer 2011 Calendar as proposed by the Calendars committee signify by saying aye.

Group: Aye.

Bob Locy: Opposed? (pause) Motion carries.

Robin Jaffe: Okay, I expect some discussion here, although I have talked with several senators about this. We’d like to start the Fall 2011 Calendar on August 16, as you know that’s the earliest we can start because of the 9-month contracts of our faculty. Running the semester through Dec 16 the commencement. We are proposing to try this experiment here in equalizing the days to place, to treat Tuesday, September 6 as a Monday. This is the Monday after Labor Day, which is a Monday holiday. This will equalize the number of days. The Spring Semester does not have that issue to deal with. So we would like to try that as it has been stated. If it doesn’t work during the summer, it will probably be changed and that’s fine.

Bob Locy: Any other discussion of the 2011–12 calendar? Yes?

Howard Goldstein, senator from Music: So this it purely to equalize the number of class days?

Robin Jaffe: Correct.

Howard Goldstein: So it means that if you have a class that only meets on Tuesdays they won’t be able to meet that week.

Robin Jaffe: That is correct.

Howard Goldstein: Right, but in the context of the fine arts if you have a concert with an ensemble that only rehearses on Tuesdays, you can’t have that rehearsal that week, unless you schedule an extra one.

Robin Jaffe: But are you going to have one on that Monday which is a holiday?

Howard Goldstein: No, but your Tuesday rehearsal for that week will be unable to occur

Robin Jaffe: But your Monday is already unable to…

Howard Goldstein: This is a class that only meets one day a week, let’s say. But a concert has… you understand what I’m saying? In other words, an event that’s outside of class anyway cannot wait for, unless I guess you could structure it so that you simply wait until the next Tuesday and then add that into your schedule.

Robin Jaffe: We’re trying to equalize the days is what we are trying to do. And we thought about having it be the last Tuesday of the semester, but then you’d have two Mondays in a row and that would really screw with people’s minds. Monday is a bad day to have twice in a week. (laughter)

Bob Locy: Any other discussion? Hearing and seeing none then, all in favor of the 2011–2012 academic year calendar as presented signify by saying aye.

Group: Aye.

Bob Locy: Opposed? (Pause) We had one opposed? Yes. The motion would carry then. Thank you Robin for you presentation.

The information item on today’s Senate agenda is a report from the Graduation Rate Task Force. We have a series of Task Forces that I’m sure you all know have been working for some time, some a lot longer than others, and this is the first task force to bring forward a report. And what we’d like to do today is to have a presentation on the content of that report from the task force chair, who is Dr. Susan Villaume, will make that presentation now. We’d like to then open the floor for discussion from the Senate concerning the recommendations in the task force report in the things that are there and the entire task force committee or nearly all of us are present in the room so we can all address issues, concerns, and/or reflect for you on why we came to certain of the recommendations. I say we because I was also a member of this particular task force. It’s expected then that there will probably be a series of action items on the next Senate agenda deriving from this report, which we will bring forward among other things after consultation with our new Provost and get everybody onboard with the changes that we want to make and those will be coming back for Senate approval from Senate Committees probably as subsequent reports or from appropriate places in the University. At least that’s our intent for how we are going to address the task force reports with the Senate for the coming years. These reports come in and Susan gets to be our guinea pig to help us figure out how to do this well.

Susan Villaume: Thanks Bob. As Bob pointed out one of the goals of the strategic plan was to improve graduation rates. So in typical Auburn fashion a committee was formed or a task force as some people call them. We met with President Gogue and Dr. Gabor in September. Our charge was to identify strategies for moving Auburn to the top 25 percent of land-grant institutions relative to graduation rates. We were directed to review the literature see what best practices were and how they lined up with what Auburn University was doing. The best part was that our task was going to be finished before the holiday break began. We had a great committee that was willing to work quickly was very capable. We have four of the committee sitting down here plus Bob. Marcie Smith, Nancy McDaniel, Bob Cartcher, and Constance Relihan, we got to know each other very well, we met nine times Fall semester and we did complete a 16 page report plus timeline and budget and appendices that Drew Clark’s office provided for us the appendices. He provided a lot of data for us, that office was extremely helpful along with Educational Support Services, which had met with us and provided additional information. So that report is posted on the Provost’s Web site, we hope that you’ll take the time to read that. Bob asked today that we just provide a brief summary of that and open it up to questions and comments. We did get our report turned in on December 19 the last day of Fall semester.

[50:00]
As I mentioned before the Office of Institutional Research provided us with lots of data and what we did in report and what we’d like to do for you today is simply provide some of the highlights of the data that we looked at. First of all our current graduation rate is 64 percent, that’s based on the 2002 cohort which had to finish before Fall 2008 in order to be counted. We had access to seven years of data. The graduation rate has fluctuated between 62 and about 68 percent during that time. And when you look at us comparatively with the SREB schools and land-grant institutions we’re hovering right in the middle. But our goal is to get to the 25 percent. It looks like if everybody else stays the same that means that we’ve got to reach about 75 percent, but the President has asked us reasonably to reach for 80 percent because we’re assuming that other institutions are going to be looking at improving their graduation rate also.

When you desegregate the data what you see is that females consistently graduate at a higher rate than males, 5–8 points. The data that was most troubling for us had to do with black non-Hispanic students. The graduation rate for Auburn University black non-Hispanic students is significantly lower than the SREB average. The SREB average for black non-Hispanic students is about 62 percent, and ours is at 44 percent. What’s even more troubling is when you look at the gap between the graduation of white and black students, it’s widening, we’re at our largest gap right now it’s 22 percentage points between white non-Hispanic and black non-Hispanic students.

The good news is that when you look at withdrawal rates after the first year, the second year, the recent freshman cohorts are showing a decrease in those withdrawal rates, which we would anticipate would result in an increase in graduation rates even if we don’t do anything. But certainly to make significant improvement in our graduations, we feel like we do need to do something.

[52:22]
Drew Clark did a comprehensive study of the 1999–2001 cohorts for us and there is an appendix in the full report that provides all the details of that. But based on that report, those three cohorts, 63 percent graduated within 6 years, 34 percent left Auburn University prior to graduation, and only 4 percent were still here after 6 years and hadn’t graduated. We interpreted that that in order to significantly increase graduation rates, the greatest opportunity for growth was keeping kids at Auburn. That means that we needed to address their academic needs, their financial needs, and their social and personal needs. [53:10]

We looked at the literature and to no surprise we found that no one strategy fits all students and no one best practice fits all institutions. What we did carve out from the literature is that there are seven areas that we needed to look at carefully and we need to determine what best practices were in those areas and how they lined up with our existing practices here at Auburn University. So what we did: we divvied up assignments, people took different categories. After much vigorous stimulating discussion we made 7 recommendations and I am going to try to go through each of those quickly, just hit some of the highlights of those recommendations.

What I have on the slides is the actual recommendation, but what you may want to do now is turn to your attachment which has the summary of recommended actions, and we’ll look at those one by one.

1) The first one has to do with recruitment and we really feel, the committee felt like we’re really doing a lot of right things here. As President Gogue just pointed out there’s been significant increases in the funding for institutional grants. So we’re seeing significant increases in the preparedness of our students, that we see the average ACT increasing. Now then that logically leads to improved graduation rates, but we have had trouble with minorities. When you look at Fall 2008 there was a significant decrease in the number of minority students in our freshman class. Our understanding is that the office of enrollment services is taking steps to rectify that and hopefully we anticipate a more diverse Fall 2009 freshman class.

At this time the committee is recommending no additional funding. Mainly we need to look at what we’re doing, assess what’s working and as funding becomes available put it in what’s working well for us.

2) The next category we looked at was advising system and this is where we felt that Auburn University was most lacking when you compared it to other institutions. We have a team of dedicated and competent professional academic advisors, but we don’t have enough. Florida State significantly increased their graduation rate and they eliminated the ethnicity graduation gap by hiring academic advisors so each student would be contacted three times every semester. Now in order to do that the National Academic Advising Association recommends, and if you’ll look at your footnote, they recommend a 300:1 ratio for general advising, but a 100:1 for at risk students. Auburn’s average advising load is 541:1 and we have one college functioning at 949:1. So when we think about what’s needed, we need sufficient staffing to allow frequent contact with students, particularly those at risk. We also need an early warning system which many institutions have that flag students, it may flag students as they are coming in because of a low ACT score because of significant financial need, it may flag them once they get here because they haven’t registered for the following semester. Or if mid-term grades were reported, they have a mid-term grade below C. There are many different reasons that we would need to flag students, but we have to have the resources to respond to those needs and do what is needed.

Why do we need this? Even though we are increasing the average ACT scores according to the [Office of Institutional Research and Assessment] OIRA data the Fall 2007 cohort after their first semester, nearly 20 percent of them would have been on academic warning if it hadn’t been for the Grade Adjustment Policy (GAP).[57:25] And these are well prepared students, but still we all know when students start college there are other things distracting them from going to class and studying and it is that type of contact that we need as students make this transition into college. And at this point we do not have sufficient staffing in order to address those kinds of needs.

How much would it cost? A lot. If you take, just if we were to assume that 20 percent of the freshman class needed more intrusive advising, even if we just focused on the freshman class we would need to add 8 academic advisors at a cost of approximately $350,000. Now then, if you go ahead and provide more intrusive advising for the sophomores, juniors, and seniors, you are getting upwards into a million dollars. What we have suggested though is first of all we need a council that focuses on student advising system in general. How it’s integrated, what are the comprehensive resources, but also one that would help develop this early warning system, but it would set priorities too. So if we have this much money, this is what we could do; if we had this much money this is what we could do, but we felt strongly that a university council was needed and it needed to be housed under the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies and all services that dealt with academic needs of students needed to follow through that chain of command through Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies. Of course being overseen by the office of the Provost.

3) The third recommendation had to do with academic policies. When we looked at some of the things that we do, the GAP was the one that got the most discussion. Educational Support Services helped us understand that many freshman GAP themselves off of an academic warning therefore they delay the intervention that they need in order to be successful in college. I think if the committee had its way it probably would just do away with the GAP, but being realistic as to what might actually happen, what the committee suggested was that a student not be allowed to invoke the GAP until the course had already been retaken. I think the academic standards committee has already looked at some of the specifics of the policies that we discussed and I think the Retention Committee is also looking at those. Just a couple of other policies that we looked at was attendance. Some institutions in order to improve graduations require attendance for 1000 and 2000 level courses. We’re not saying that’s what we need to do here, but we were saying is that we probably need to consider if there should be attendance policy and another recommendation we look at courses that have high failure rates. So it may be that may be something we would want to consider for some courses. Reporting of mid-term grades. Clemson, and I know this is going to be a controversial subject, but at Clemson which has a graduation rate of 78 percent, faculty are required to report mid-term grades five days prior to mid-term. University of Connecticut which has a graduation rate of 75 percent takes a little bit lesser roll what they do if you are faculty member teaching a 1000 or 2000 level course and a student has a grade below C you are required to report mid-term grades. These are the kinds of early warning systems that allow a cadre of academic advisors to get in touch and respond to students needs before it’s too late. [1:01:15]

4) Student Engagement and Commitment to the Institution was an area that we looked at and we very pleased. We were very well aligned with best practices here as far as our learning communities the first year seminars or the UNIV courses, the mentoring programs. Nancy McDaniel’s office would very much like to increase the number of freshman participating in learning communities. Their goal is, within 5 years, 50 percent of the freshman class would be in a learning community. That is going to take some additional funding. They estimated about $210,000 I think is what is in the budget for that.

5) The next recommendation had to do with just a timely progression. As been noted before we talked about only 4 percent of our students are still here after 6 years and haven’t graduated. Some of them may have stayed with us if they had graduated a little bit sooner, maybe their parents wouldn’t have pulled them home. We think it’s important to think about how to make sure they are moving through. One of the easiest things to do, most of these are without cost, faculty advisors or professional advisors, we can encourage students to take 15 or 16 hours; most of them aren’t. And you are not going to graduate in 4 years unless you average 30 hours a year, 15 or 16 credit hours a semester.

The tuition restructuring committee has already made a recommendation to eliminate the additional tuition that is tacked on if you register for more than 15 hours. And I think that recommendation is to the (some talk with Don Large away from the microphone) So you are going to pay the same price if you are at 12 hours or if you’ve got permission for an overload even. We got kind of creative here though. One of the things we talked about was what about eliminating or limiting football tickets to 5 seasons or 150 attempted hours, because I know all of us have heard about that student who is still here for that sixth season, or that seventh football season, so we’re not sure how great of an impact that would have and I don’t think it would cost any money, so it is certainly something we could have further discussion about. We talked about ways to incentivize Summer enrollment for those kids that didn’t rack up those 30 hours, or that needed to retake their biology class. There’re reasons that we can look at how to incentivize that which probably means smaller classes, I don’t know if tuition reduction is possible for that. To explore online delivery of the courses and someone even suggests, can we guaranty football tickets for those freshman who start Summer, and a lot of our freshman don’t get football tickets, so I think that certainly would be an incentive. We were trying to be creative in ways that didn’t cost money.

The other thing we talked about was bottleneck courses. We are not sure how much of an impact this has, but we hear the complaints from students that their graduation is being delayed because they couldn’t get a seat in that required class that they needed. We don’t have good information on that, but we think it is really important to investigate that more thoroughly and if there are courses that truly are holding up student’s graduation to think about how to allocate resources in order to remedy that problem.

6) The sixth recommendation has to do with teaching and learning. We need to ask if the ways that we teach lead to learning and if they don’t we need to investigate. Several of the institutions that we were looking at, run a report and they identify the courses and the course sections that have higher than average failure rates. And then it’s important to look into why that might be. Is it because, maybe if you required attendance it might make a difference, maybe there is inappropriate curriculum alignment, perhaps it’s large lecture classes that would be better taught in small classes or maybe we need more supplemental instruction, or it may be that the delivery mode, but if it is a high failure rate the committee felt it was important to do some investigation. Again it kept coming back to us over and over and over again; the best one D, one F, one W that first semester has a significant negative impact on the graduation rate. So we can’t move forward without exploring the teaching and learning that is going on at Auburn University.

7) And the last recommendation had to do with just pervasive use of the data. [1:06:19] If we’re serious about improving the graduation rate, we have to be serious about assessing what we’re doing, particularly the impact it has on sub groups of students. We can’t wait 6 years down the road and find out that our graduation rate hasn’t improved. We need to look at each year, each cohort and figure out what’s happening. This means that we’ve got to try for attention and graduation rates for sub-groups of students, we need to figure out a way if we are going to implement these strategies whether it’s limiting football tickets or an early warning system, What is the impact that that’s having we need to explore different ways of gathering data. We can send out surveys to students who have not registered during their time ticket. We can target students with significant financial aid and have focus groups with them, but I think we need to be creative in the ways that we are gathering information. If we truly want to learn, adapt, and improve the ways that Auburn supports its students. But most of all we need a process and structure for collecting the data, for analyzing it and most importantly for responding to that data. We do see that the enrollment management council would have a big piece of developing this system, but again everything would need to have oversight through the office of the Provost in conjunction with the Office of Undergraduate Studies.

In conclusion, it’s not going to be easy and it’s going to have to remain a focus for a very long time. If we are going to be successful it’s going to be important to integrate our current efforts. There’s got to be a campus wide commitment, it’s got to be at the President’s Office level, the Provost, at every college level, at every department level, at every program level, and in every classroom. We need to carefully select the strategies that we are going to use, but we need to vigilantly evaluate what we are doing. We need to be good stewards of the limited funds that we have at this point. And in conclusion we’ve got to make sure that everything that we do is coordinated and we move forward in an integrated and comprehensive way. So now my cohorts down here will be glad to respond to your questions and comments.
[1:08:50]

Mark Fischman, kinesiology and I’m a senator: Susan, when you talk about failure rates in a particular class do you include just the students that came in as freshman or does it cover everybody? Which would include transfer students.

SUSAN VILLAUME:  I think what the committee felt very strongly about was first of all we need to identify those courses and then we need to investigate. One of what we might find out is students coming in from Junior colleges are having a more difficult time, we need to know that and that information becomes part of the solution then.

Mark Fischman: While you mention Junior College, my understanding is that these graduation rates are based just on kids who start as freshman.

SUSAN VILLAUME:  That’s correct.

Mark Fischman: Do we know anything at all about graduation rates for transfer students?

SUSAN VILLAUME:  This committee did not look on any data, but I think you bring up a good point Mark, is that improving the graduation rate, some of it you have to understand how the game is played and who counts and who doesn’t. I think in a broader spirit of things Auburn University needs to be concerned about all its students, whether they are transfer students or enter as freshman. I don’t know if that’s the point of where you were going to make Mark, but you know I think that we can move forward as far as improving graduation rates for the US News and World Report but we also can move forward in a way that realizes that we need to invest in all of our students.

Bob Locy: I’d like to respond to that as one of the members of the committee because we spent a lot of time on one our initial meeting if not our first meeting discussing the idea that, I don’t think there was anybody in the room that was really interested in figuring magic ways to play games with the numbers to make our graduation rates look better for that incoming freshman class. What we were interested in doing was identifying those factors which would help our graduation rates go up that were substantial things that the university needed to do better or more of in order to improve the graduation rate. [1:11:18] Our feeling in doing that was that if we did if for the freshman class and made the numbers better by matters of substance it would obviously have the same effect on the transfer student. What may be the lacking part of that is that there isn’t at this point in time contemplated a separate effort to look at the specialized needs of the transfer students which since I teach quite a few of them I am fully aware of the fact that there are those transfer needs, but at least in terms of this report we did not throw something out because it was going to help transfer students too or something of that nature.

Tom Sanders, library not a senator: I had one comment which was that I couldn’t help noticing that 1997 that year, the entering freshman that had the best graduation rate was also the smallest entering freshman class we had during that 6-7 year period and I wondered if you had looked at capacity problems? Was the University simply not able to provide satisfactory service to the increased numbers of students in the other years?

SUSAN VILLAUME:  I think that’s a good point we didn’t have any specific data on that we may have indirectly discussed that with the bottleneck courses and I don’t know if the larger classes if we’ve had more complaints and that would just be more anecdotal information than anything, but I think looking at the optimal size of our student enrollment probably does make a lot of sense.

Tom Sanders: The other question I had really had to do with the fact that we have in previous faculty Senate said presentations about (loosing my train of thought here)…about the fact that individual departments and colleges have been raising the bar, GPA wise, for being able to major; and have you looked at what that has affected the ability of people to graduate within a set time or to frustrate them into leaving. I know some because I used to be on the admissions appeals committee that there are a number of students who end up coming in the Summer and taking volleyball, tennis, golf and whatever, something else[1:13:42] to try to raise their GPA. It seems like a terrible waste of their time and money, but on the other hand if that’s the only way they can do it.

SUSAN VILLAUME:  Well I think the issue was discussed to, it didn’t find its way into the report and perhaps it should have, but Linda Glaze probably has some comments she could make on this but one of the concerns that we have talked about in academic affairs with associate deans and on this committee is that you can graduate from Auburn with a 2.0, but there are becoming fewer and fewer programs that you can enter into with a 2.0 and that’s certainly could impact on our graduation rates. When we have students with the 2.0, 2.1 with very limited options as to how they can move forward. Linda, do you want to add anything to that? OK. Yes?
[1:14:38}

Chris Correia, senator from the department of psychology: I’m just curious in the research you and your committee have done to what extent have you found development of medical or psychological illness or conditions contributing to attrition rates in college students and in universities, peer universities where their rates were significantly higher, to what extent that could be explained potentially by differential levels of services that they are providing again for counseling, medical illnesses and those kind of conditions?

SUSAN VILLAUME:  I think that’s an excellent question and one that our committee didn’t have access to any of that data. I think that one of the recommendations is that we look at different groups of students, first generation students, students with significant financial need, students entering with particularly low ACT scores, but perhaps the students that you just described may be a target population that we need to pay particular attention to. But no we did not have any data on that.

Bob Locy: Any further discussion?

SUSAN VILLAUME:  For the rest of the committee? You all prepared me well.

I’m Mike Baginski, I’m in electrical engineering and a senator: Do you have any data about how many kids literally flunk out vs. drop out for financial reasons? Or Transfer?

Susan Villaume: Yeah, Constance can you?, I don’t have the details in front of me. We don’t have all that data but we have some of it.

Constance Relihan: I’m Constance Relihan from the committee. We have some data that impinges on that.  Nancy McDaniel’s office had a survey of students who left the University at one point and this goes back to the prior question. The reasons why they chose to leave and the most significant reasons seem to be distance from family and friends and things that we might really consider homesickness in one way or another. And that’s not something that we can look at. In terms of the academic failure rates, the number of students who are on academic warning is at least 20 percent for our first year students. Did we get more specific about that?

SUSAN VILLAUME:  It was the unGAPed of that freshman cohort group, it was that 19 percent.

Constance Relihan: …right, so it’s about 20 percent…

SUSAN VILLAUME:  I was looking at data that Drew gave us. If you just looked at I think it was the freshman 2007 cohort, even with GAP, by their second semester there were only 3 percent that were actually suspended at that time. In looking at the literature though, the literature tends to indicate that there’s not one good reason, and typically a student that’s having academic problems is also having social problems and may be homesick on top of that. So it’s really hard to divvy out as cleanly as we would like to, but I think on the other hand what the committee and Drew’s going to set us straight on this here. What the committee discussed is that we had lots of questions just like you all do and we don’t have the data to answer those questions and that’s why we need to develop the system so in the future we can answer the questions in ways that will lead us to continuous improvement of addressing all the needs of our students. Drew?

I’m Drew Clark, director of institutional research and assessment and not a senator: I’m just going to respond to the most recent question and to point out that the 6 year graduation rate is a fairly bad statistic, it’s okay, but you need to understand what it does and does not measure. It is that proportion of first time full-time freshman who received a bachelor’s degree from your institution within 6 years of their first matriculation. That’s interesting to us from an institutional point of view and I commend the work of your committee. It is important to keep in mind that that’s not measured from a students point of view, so for example a student who begins at Auburn University spends two years here then transfers to University of Alabama and graduates is not counted in our 6 year graduation rate or in Alabama’s 6 year graduation rate. It’s just important to keep that in mind.

There was a push in Washington D.C. during the last higher education reauthorization to institute a nationwide student level unit record system that would allow us to trace students across institutions. That was defeated it did not become part of Federal law, but I would point to us if you are interested in that proportion of Auburn students who transfer out after a couple of years, I would refer you to the so called ‘college portrait’ for Auburn University, it’s part of our participation in the NASULGC sponsored voluntary system of accountability. You can navigate to it by going to the University’s home page, clicking on the link for prospective students, and the clicking on the link for ‘college portrait,’ and one element of this standardized display for prospective college students and their parents is a table showing for a given freshman cohort, that proportion that had graduated within 6 years, who we know had transferred out within 6 years who are still enrolled. And that allows you to get from a students point of view a somewhat better picture of how students are progressing. As much as we would love them to graduate from Auburn University, from a student’s point of view, it’s probably (don’t throw things) just as good to have graduated from another institution. Thanks.

Rik Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: I was wondering since some of our colleges do things very differently than other colleges as you pointed out from the number of advisees to advisors varying so much. Have you got any breakdown of what, since our colleges have been individually experimenting with different advising levels and different efforts, have you done any breakdown by college to see what’s been tried here and what’s worked here, as well as, I’m interested in what work at other universities, but they probably don’t tell you too much about what doesn’t work there? We might have already done those experiments here between the different colleges.

SUSAN VILLAUME:  One of things the committee did determine was that there was a lot of inconsistency across colleges, which is what you pointed out. And there is many institutions have more comprehensive or centralized level resources. That does not mean that we would want to discourage in any way colleges to taking on some experimental or some innovation as far as advising goes. I know the graduation rates have been reported by college in different ways and we think, the discussion of the committee was, yes that might merit some attention, but overall these are Auburn’s students and they are going to move from my college to your college to somebody else’s college. The most important thing though that we talked about is whether it’s your college doing some type of pilot advising, or limiting football tickets, or whatever, that we’re able to assess the impact of that on our students and that’s what we haven’t yet created that systematic effort to do. I doubt that that really answered your question, Rik, but it kind of worked around it.

Rik Blumenthal: I have one other question which was, Based on…as far as faculty’s unwillingness to, myself included, report mid-term grades. That has nothing to do with me not giving exams before mid-term and getting that to the students. I have at mid-term their grades in a spreadsheet, I have their grades online on the system we have, the blackboard system, but to enter them like we do the final grades, one by one pulling down on a menu takes me literally hours with 200 students in the class to make sure I do that correctly. If that system could be streamlined so that I could send either my spreadsheet in or the numbers could be pulled off of blackboard, which I figured out how to get my data into, you could have my mid-term grades each term for this purpose without any extra effort on my part which would make it much more likely that I would do it.

SUSAN VILLAUME:  I think that’s a good point, certainly the early warning system that we discussed about in committee would have multiple indicators or flags in it, but whatever those flags or indicators, it’s not going to work unless there is a streamlined process for whoever needs to enter the data, that it be entered easily. I know the President has since our report I have been in meetings where he has discussed some other strategies that weren’t included in the report. One of them has to do with the students being able to go in through banner through the GAP program and easily see what it takes to change majors.

The other thing that has been mentioned is that some universities have like a January term, or a May term, where students who didn’t pass biology can come and take that course and then be caught up and move forward. Some universities have innovative scheduling where just like in summer where you have first summer session, what do you call it first mini-term, second mini-term and comprehensive. They’ve done that also with their fall and spring schedules, so I think there are some creative things about scheduling that give students a quick second chance perhaps that we didn’t think about before December 19, but I think certainly there are other ideas and strategies that need to be considered.

Tony Moss, biological sciences, senator: I thought that since you are bringing up biology I’d get up here. [1:26:12] I had two students recently who really caught me by surprise, these were Asian students who were actually students who had come from elsewhere who did not appear to have problems with language understanding in my classes and one really caught me by surprise and she ended up either failing or getting very close to failing, and that was a student who was quite far along in her studies and I think she ended up being kind of lost and going elsewhere, but I also had a student in a class much more recently in a very unexpected situation where this student, again was from a foreign country, and really didn’t understand much of what was going on in the class and she was a very bright student, if fact she was at least smart enough to come to me and explain the situation, but I couldn’t really find an answer for her, and I wonder how many of those students we are loosing? It would be a shame if we were loosing a lot of them. I have no idea. This completely caught me by surprise and I would never have known that this student was having problems.

SUSAN VILLAUME:  And I think again, just if we can identify a possible factor that might put students a risk, it may not be putting them at risk, but we can at least check up on it. We know students have been very successful, the low ACT scores, but we may just need to monitor that if students are coming to us with English as a second language, perhaps we just need to check up on them a little bit more closely to make sure things are okay and as we continue these kinds of discussions I think there will be other types of indicators that we would want to look at as we think about how to provide all of our students with the support they need to be successful.

Bob Locy: Rik, I’d like to ask a question back to you. Which would be at least in the initial implementation of a mid-semester grading scenario. I’m not quite sure we have the resources for every faculty member to be submitting a spreadsheet with his or her grades in it anyway. Would it be possible to…don’t you think it would be pretty workable from the faculty point of view to at least report Ds and Fs so that those could be identified for the early warning system to get them some intervention by mid-semester as opposed to maybe submitting every grade in? And it wouldn’t take me long to go through my 100 student class and identify the number of students that were going to get Ds and Fs out of there and report those as students that are target for a little early intervention.

Rik Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: I think that it would be easier and that certainly would not be a great chore for me, that would not take me the hours that it takes me to sit there and manually enter everybody’s grade. But it just seems to me if my grades are already there on blackboard they ought to be able to be extracted from blackboard without anybody’s effort, I mean it seems like it would take only a mediocre programmer to take the data from blackboard and determine who’s got a D and F and make a list of it and then sort it by advisor. If the data in blackboard can be accessed, but if it’s then FERPA says no one can get at the blackboard data, but the student themselves and myself, then it makes it impossible, but I don’t know I don’t know where the rules are what the university’s allowed to do.

Bob Locy: Generating reams and reams of data that somebody has to pour through to come up with what we need to have, to really help the students who need the help and… I’m just suggesting to you that I think there is the necessity of thinking in a flexible way here to do what’s best for our students in terms of identifying the ones who we really need to help.

Rik Blumenthal: I agree with you completely.

Bob Locy: Is there any other discussion of the graduation task force report? All right, let’s move on to unfinished business. Any unfinished business of the Senate?  (pause) Any new business for the Senate? Are you rising to leave Dr. Evans or rising to present new business? (laughter) We seem to have only one item left on the agenda then. Stand adjourned.
[1:31:08]