Senate Meeting Transcription
March 3, 2009

Bob Locy, chair: I’d like to call the March 3rd Meeting of the Auburn University Senate to order, please. First item on our agenda is the approval of the minutes of the February meeting. These minutes of the February meeting were attached and circulated on the Senate’s Web page. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes as circulated? (pause) Hearing and seeing none the minutes will stand approved as they have been read and circulated. The next item of agenda is the President’s remarks to the Senate. Dr. Gogue.

Dr Gogue, president: I’m delighted to be with you today. I want to cover a couple of items. After almost a year-long-search, I think it’s the first time many of you have met our new Provost, Mary Ellen Mazey. Mary Ellen please stand up and say hallo to everybody, we are delighted to have you here. [1:00]

The second item I wanted to mention is about a year and a half ago we tried to open up the federal process whereby ideas that come form the campus actually become part of the federal agenda for the University and then put forth the effort to try to market and sell those items. Last year we were able to go in and do a very good job of selling, but I think most of you are aware that congress operated under a continuing resolution. They are under a CR still in the current year but in the last week or so the House has taken action on the 2009 Federal Budget. So we don’t know what will happen in the Senate, people are optimistic. Auburn gains quite a bit in the version that is in the House. Now again you don’t know what will come out of the Senate, but there’s a couple million dollars, most all the money is in research. A couple that I remember, I think the Vet School and Food Safety, a couple million dollars, Fisheries, a couple million dollars, and so forth, but certainly movement in that area.

I will show this is the book for the 2010 Federal Marketing cycle, their budget year would begin on Oct 1, of this year (2009) for 2010. I want to make sure everyone has a chance to at least see this, I think it’s on the Web page, so it’s available, but look at it and you’ll get an idea of projects. And if yours is not one of the ones that was actually submitted then it gives you a chance to spend some time and let’s be sure we get it in for the 2011. We usually complete the process prior to Christmas of this year. Several people will spend time with staff to try to sort through the list to make sure these are things that the various members have interest in. And then last week as an example we were there with Trustees and a group to sit with each of our members from Alabama, both senators, seven House members, and to go over the priorities of the institution. Help us with it, I think that in the long term the better job we do actually the more resources that we’ll get through that process.

I wanted to mention there is a request out for faculty across the campus on what I think is referred to as a Faculty Scholarship Report. Many universities on annual basis go through and look at the research, the scholarly endeavors, the creative activities of a campus, and they are actually bound and included in such a way that our own people can look and see what has happened in the past year. So I know the Provost’s Office is working in that area, it’s an important report and it often the summary parts of it allow you some rather dramatic ways to explain the productivity of your faculty. So I hope you will look at that when that request comes.

About a year ago we had a death on our campus or close to our campus, Lauren Burke. I just would report to you that the Public Safety, Don Large, and a host of people have worked very hard in the past year. I do not want to imply that everything is perfect, but I do believe from seeing what they have done that the emphasis on campus safety has been greatly improved. Don, I would say thank you to you and Melvin and the team that has worked on that, it’s really been a campus wide effort.

Next item that I wanted to mention is that you may have read in the newspaper today about the Alabama PAC Program, the one in which individuals are able to prepay their tuition. This is not being prepaid to the State, it’s a private organization. They prepay their tuition with the idea of when their child goes to college that the money would have earned enough interest that it will cover all the tuition costs or whatever it is at the time the kid goes to school. We met last week with the state treasurer. When I say we, it was the University of Alabama chancellor, Mack Patera, myself with Kay Ivey, the state treasurer, and several members of their board. The PAC Program in Alabama has not done well in the recent stock market change, seventy percent of their money was in equities and they’ve lost about 45 percent of their money. They are in a very difficult situation. In spite of what you may have read in the newspaper the only commitment that we made and the only thing we were asked to do was to identify a financial person at the University of Alabama and a financial person at Auburn to begin to sit and try to help them look at what they can do over the long term. So, this is not an Auburn program. I think most of you are aware that most states have quite doing those kind of things, they did not work well. They have had tremendous issues in other states. Alabama’s had one and still has one but obviously their management principles were based on every year they would earn something like 9.8 percent interest, and you know guys even at a university that’s pretty optimistic, so there are some real difficulties there. So we will continue to work and to listen. What they would like for us to do is to take our money and subsidize those students. That I don’t think is something that we feel comfortable at all about. So I’ll at least give you a heads up on that.

The next thing I’d mention is that within the next few weeks we have the 5-year mid-term, I’ll call it ‘report’ to SACS our accrediting body, is that? What should I call it? Five year report, we have a reaffirmation visit every ten years this is the midpoint of that. So you have to file a report and I only bring it up to say that when it comes to accrediting groups, regional accrediting bodies, 5-years out is not too early to begin to think about the details and the changes because those standards are changed. Since you have all last done your accreditation and reaffirmation visit one of the areas of attention nationally and I assume at SACS is your faculty rosters, their expertise, and a clear link to what they actually teach. So you could have a degree in X and be very good in that but there then has to be justification of why you’re teaching in area Y. You have to justify that. You will hear more about that in the coming years.

Final thing I wanted to mention is many of you are aware that Harvard runs a survey instrument that looks at young faculty and their happiness, their productivity, their feeling of inclusiveness in a college campus, and for years Auburn has scored quite well. Drew shared with me today that they actually came down and did some in person interviews because they wanted to find out, was this really accurate. And he tells me that there were obviously, it was viewed as a very good place to live and a good environment to work in but one of the things, and this is unique from any school that I’ve ever worked at, that you have a definition of collegiality that is actually a part of policies within the institution. So I would just compliment you on that, it’s an extremely important evaluation to say that we are trying to do the best we can with our young faculty.

At the open Faculty Meeting next Tuesday, Don and I and the Provost will talk with you about budget related issues, where we are and what we’re trying to do. Be happy to respond to other questions. (pause) Thank you.

Bob Locy, chair: The next item on the agenda is the chair’s report and the first thing that I’d like to do is to welcome Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey for her first Senate Meeting. Dr. Mazey if you’d like to…

Dr. Mazey, Provost: Thank you and I am so pleased to be Provost at Auburn University and I look forward to working with all of you. I thank you, Bob for working with us and I look forward to working with Kathryn and I particularly want to say a special thank you to Sharon Gabor for all that she’s done to help me transition into this position. When I interviewed last fall the search committee told me that Auburn University wanted to change, and I said well, I have been a change agent at my previous institutions and I would really look forward to working with each of you to do that. And so as we think about that we all should think about our vision and I think that we want to be a major innovative land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant institution of the twenty-first century and know how we can then best compete with our peers. Certainly the reputation of the academic programs here is absolutely outstanding, and so it’s how do we only improve in terms of those national rankings; how do we continue to build our graduate programs, because that’s a very important component of the strategic plan and certainly tied to that is our research funding.

I’m a major collaborator and I believe in cooperation so how do we collaborate across departments, but across colleges and with other institutions. How do we insure that our strategic plans within the departments and the colleges are aligned with the University’s strategic plan, because we all should be working toward the same goals. I think it’s important too to talk about the diversity of our faculty, the staff, and the student body. And certainly in part of the strategic plan insure that our students have the international skill set and what is going to be our roll in distance education? I don’t have the answers to all of those, but I am certainly willing to work with President Gogue and the other Vice Presidents and all of the faculty and the staff here to find the answers. Certainly in terms of my immediate priorities it will be selecting an interim Associate Provost and then of course we have a search underway for a new Dean of Nursing. So, I will have my plate full but I do look forward to working with all of you. Thank you.

Bob Locy: We’re looking forward to filling some more of your plate very soon. The next part of the Chair’s remarks involves the Sustainability Initiative Director, Lindy Biggs asked for a moment to update you on some things going on with the Sustainability Initiative. And you may recall a few Senate meeting ago we started policy where we were going to put some announcements in the chair’s remarks, so this is in keeping with that spirit.  Lindy? [13:30]

Lindy Biggs, Sustainability Initiative Director: Thanks Bob for giving up some of you time. About a year ago the Senate was debating whether to endorse the President’s Climate Commitment, which you voted to do, and then the SGA also endorsed it, and good to his word, Dr. Gogue then signed the President’s Climate Commitment this past Fall. Shortly after that the Sustainability Initiative that had been a temporary year-to-year funded initiative was made into a University office, so we are making great progress here. A couple of things I wanted to mention to you also just as updates, some of you might know these updates already, but some of you might not.

Last spring the University Curriculum Committee approved a minor in sustainability studies, that is now…has begun as of last fall. And I don’t know exactly how many students are enrolled in it yet, but several dozen, they haven’t all filled out their program of study, but I just know anecdotally from all of the students who call me about it that there are quite a few enrolled. If you are teaching a class that you think might be relevant to the sustainability minor, I’d appreciate knowing about it. If you are interested in including sustainability issues in your classes, but you are not doing that yet, at the end of each Spring Semester we teach a workshop on sustainability in the curriculum. This will be the forth year. It has been very successful there’s a number of alums from that program sitting here right now.  We’ve got some testimonials from people who’ve done it on our Web site if you’re interested. We’ll be sending out announcement for that very soon, so you might tell your faculty about it.

Following the signing of the President’s Climate Commitment we are beginning to work on our climate action plan, which is going to be a long process to try to think about ways that Auburn University can move toward carbon neutrality, sometime in the distant future. There’s no requirement that we do that in ten years or twenty years, it’s up to us to say when we think we can manage it, but I’m going to be inviting people to be part of that process. Initially we’re going to create two working groups on Energy and Purchasing. If you have interests in that please let me know, I will be sending out a call on AU Daily and AU Profs about that too. We are looking for people from the faculty, from the staff, from the administrative staff, and students to be part of this. And it will be open to…these will be wide-open committees, we hope to run it similar to the process that we did for the strategic plan because unless the entire campus has a voice in this it won’t work. [16:46]

And finally we’re looking at setting up a new advisory board, I’ve had an advisory committee of faculty for the years that we were an initiative, but now that we are a University Office we have to go next step. So I’d like to invite the Senate, we’ll do this more formally, but we would like a couple appointed from the Senate to be on that advisory board, so if you are interested in that let Bob know. Thank you. Any questions?

Bob Locy, chair: Thank you Lindy. The first thing I’d like to remind you of during my remarks is the fact that seven days hence on the 10th of March at 3 p.m. in this very room we will have the University Spring General Faculty Meeting. I’d like all the senators to go back to their units and remind all of the faculty that this is their meeting on the 10th and that all faculty are welcome to attend and participate and the main items are going to be the announcement of the election results and Dr. Gogue’s State of the University Address.

I’ve gotten quite a few e-mails and verbal comments and questions concerning the stat of the University’s budget, I think it’s impossible to know that at the present time, but I’ve asked Dr. Gogue to do what he can and to put our house in order relative to the faculty in terms of where we stand on the budget during that General Faculty Meeting next week. So hopefully there will be some message coming back to us that let’s us be as comfortable as one can in this economic climate concerning the budget. I think the rumors that are out there circulating are probably far worse than what the outcome is going to be based on the things that I hear from the meetings that I attend in Samford Hall. So I think it’s important to get that message across to you and I hope that’ what we accomplish next week. I think we all imagine are far worse than what we can because our University has managed its money wisely in the immediate past and we’re positioned to protect ourselves pretty well through this so hopefully that will make it worth coming to the General Faculty Meeting next week.

Second comment I’d like to make is the Executive Committee is aware of the fact that we have missed a deadline in our Constitution, we were to have submitted nominees for the Rules Committee; we have not yet done so. We unfortunately did not wake up and realize the error of our ways in time to get it done for this meeting, however we will have the Rules Committee nominations on the agenda for next month. [20:19] The good news is that several years ago we had the good sense to pick the Rules Committee in the Spring of the year, about now, and they don’t actually take office until August. So the fact that we’ve been remiss in making the nominations at the appropriate time there is no long term harm done we will have them in place in plenty of time for August when their term starts.

The last item I have concerns some comments that I have very recently gotten concerning the Consulting Policy that we approved last month in the Senate. There have been several questions asked about aspects of that policy and I am going to be recommending to our new Provost and to the Executive Committee that we go back in to deliberations about that. Perhaps take some recommendations to Faculty Welfare concerning a modification to that policy that may be in order, or alternatively to look at the preparation of a procedures document that would go with the actual Consulting Policy which may or may not need change. So we’ll be looking at what we need to do to address the concerns that have been raised and hopefully be back to you during Kathryn’s chair-ship to consider what specifically we need to modify on that policy. Are there any other questions, for me? Hearing none, seeing none, let’s proceed to the action agenda items. The first action agenda item is approval of the Faculty Research Committee nominees. You may recall that at the November Senate Meeting we approved the formation of a Faculty Research Committee. Sue Barry, secretary of the Senate is going to bring you the Rules Committee nominees for serving on the first Faculty Research Committee. [22:44]

Sue Barry, secretary:  Yes, as Bob said this is a new committee for us and what we did was we solicited nominations and we got I think a very good slate of nominations to represent most of the colleges and schools. We randomly chose those rotation dates and at this time I would like to move that the Senate approve this list of nominees and the rotation dates.

Bob Locy, chair: Since this is coming from Rules Committee, a committee of the Senate, it does not need a second. Any discussion of the Faculty Research Committee nominees? Hearing none, all in favor of approving this slate of nominees signify by saying aye.
Group: Aye.

Bob Locy, chair: Opposed same sigh. (pause) Motion carries we now have a Faculty Research Committee.

Second item on our action agenda for today is actually coming from the Retention Committee and the Academic Standards Committee who looked at the graduation rate task force which we looked at last month which you may recall was an information item. There were certain changes for policy recommendations in that report and Linda Glaze is actually bringing forth the comments as well as the suggested changes in the in those particular policies that we looked at to present to us today. The first one is a modification of the withdrawal date policy that was part of that recommendation last month. [24:37]

Linda Glaze: I distributed the recommendation on the change of the withdrawal date. In case you… Basically the recommendation of the Graduation Rate Task Force was to change the withdrawal date during Fall and Spring Semester from mid week to ten weeks and I am suggesting effective Fall 2009. If you look at the wording, it says, prior to the eleventh week and the reason is there’s no difference between the end of the tenth week and the beginning of the eleventh week, and I thought people would remember the idea of the eleventh-hour as being last minute. [25:31] So, it was easier to write that way once, because I did start with the end of the or last day of classes of the tenth week and it was much easier to say prior to the beginning of the eleventh week. The reason that this was proposed was one, as you know, one of the other recommendations deals with mid-term grades. I did not come forward with that yet because I want to work with Nick Backshider in terms of reporting through Banner and Blackboard, and all those issues. But one it would give faculty more time to provide more graded feedback to students so that they would be able to hopefully make a more educated decision and also, that assuming that the student was attending class and making every effort they would be further along in the course so that when they did repeat it they would have had more background in that field and therefore would be more successful on the second attempt. And so with that that is the basic proposal that’s before you. [26:45]

Bob Locy, chair: Since these recommendations are coming through two committee of the Senate they do not need a second. Is there any discussion of the proposed changes in the Withdrawal Policy? [26:58]

Rik Blumenthal, senator Chemistry and Biochemistry: I polled my faculty and they were split about evenly on this issue. Some of them felt very strongly that once a student bought into a class and started taking it they ought to take their grade. Others said that they felt that the ten week period would allow the students to get probable two exams done and graded and that would be more useful for the students to know where they really stood when they decided to withdraw. Another argument against it was, currently in our organic sequence we have a problem with enough seats in class. There was a feeling among some of the professors there that students might choose to take the course basically as a ten week, see how I’m doing,  and then drop. Now to the University we still collect full tuition on that so I said nothing’s lost to the University, but it does mean a lot more repeaters in the course which means we will need to open more sections of this same course so these people can take it more than once increasing the number of it. Cause they’re not talking about student s who might fail, they are talking about what they’re concerned with are students with the idea to go to Vet school, dental school, or medical school who believe they need and A or at worst a B in every class that they ever take. So they believe that there is going to be a number of students who would take the course up through ten weeks and if they weren’t absolutely certain they would get a minimum of a B, they would go ahead and drop. And then that seat would not have been filled by the end of the term by somebody who wanted to just take the course and move on with their career. So they weren’t sure that it really would in fact expedite gradation rates on time or getting us closer to graduation rates on time.

As you presented your argument it made me wonder when it comes to getting graduation rates on time whether this would actually do that because one of the problems that the Graduation Rate Committee had and the reason we like to get the mid-term grades reported is so that we can identify the students who are not doing well early to give them some more help. Well this is another mechanism by which a student who is doing poorly early can avoid being noticed and ending up on probation and therefore receiving help by dropping classes that they think maybe they are not going to do well in. So I’m actually wondering whether the net effect of this would be to increase the lifetime of the average student and also make it more difficult to identify students in need? As we were concerned, there was concern expressed about the GAP Program hiding the students in need from the help they need, would not allowing students who are doing poorly in their first year or their first semester to withdraw at ten weeks also hide them from identification of being in need of extra help? Personally I’ll sit down now because I actually don’t know which way to vote on this, because personally, I’m split, my tendency is to believe that student should be allowed to drop out any time they want. I come from an academic background where you could drop out until the final at one of the places I was at, and but my faculty’s evenly split and I’m willing to listen to reasonable arguments from anybody who wants to double their vote by convincing me that one way or the other makes more sense. But I did want to express those concerns.

Linda Glaze: Rik, I have the same concern when it first came forward and I don’t think we are going to be able to say either in terms of the Withdrawal Policy or the potential modification in the Grad Adjustment Policy that one or the other is going to fix the problem because with the report it says all of them, the first thing I would say is that we don’t know how many students that are earning those Ds and Fs on purpose so that they can take advantage of GAP would no longer do that and would fall in the withdrawal category. And so until we have that we’re really not going to know, Is it going to make that difference. There is in terms of if the Senate approves this I started looking at policies in terms of for the Grad Adjustment Policy and one issue that I think we would need to look at if we sense that there is abuse of too many withdrawals is that some institutions have a cap on the number of times that a student can withdraw from a particular course and once we have that if we were to change and once we have that data I think that we would be able to tweak it and go in the direction that we want to go at. Because what I will present in a minute is one school they have a limit on withdrawal hours and they have a limit on what they call academic redemption hours. And so you don’t get double but you get a portion so there are a lot of different possibilities and directions but this was really coming from the committee and I think probably people are split just like your department and this was the recommendation for the reasons given.
[33:17]

Bob Locy, chair: Dr. Montgomery, I’d like to take the chair’s prerogative and add a couple of words to Dr. Blumenthal if you would permit me that luxury.

The other point I would make is that the Graduation Rate Task Force when they looked at that considered virtually every point that you are bringing up and among the things that we talked about is that we needed a better way of tracking course withdrawals, regardless of when you do them we needed a better way of tracking course withdrawals, and using that as a trigger for students that are in distress and need help. So if we do a better job of that whether we modify the course withdrawal date or not, hopefully that will assuage part of your argument a little bit. The other point concerns the issue of…in my courses I have a lot of students who come ‘til the first exam. When they see their first exam score, they never show up again during the course of the semester, they want their F at the end so they can GAP it and come back and try to get to the second exam before they have to essentially drop out. So they’re effectively withdrawing after the first exam. The thought was that if you could hold them for ten weeks you had a better chance of them getting at least something out of taking the course rather than simply coming to the first exam deciding they’re not going to do well and deciding they are going to GAP then and completely withdrawing from the course. You have no mechanism by which you can expect to entice a student to stay longer, so I think that that argues that it might go the other way. I’m not sure that’s convincing you how to vote it’s just my opinion. Now, Dr. Montgomery, thank you.

Ron Montgomery, senator Clinical Sciences: My comment’s fairly minor on wording. It says here that exception will be made if the course is no longer required for the student’s major.

Linda Glaze: That’s a different proposal.

Ron Montgomery, senator Clinical Sciences: OK I’m looking at the wrong thing.

Linda Glaze: You’re ahead of us.

Ron Montgomery: OK, I’ll save that comment for when we get there then,
Linda Glaze: We’re just changing the date of withdrawal. I’m sure we’ll get a lot more comments on that one.

Claire Crutchley, senator in Finance: My department was split also with more going against than for and positive because of the reasons that you’ve already talked about. One issue that hasn’t been brought up is our senior classes, we pretty much only teach juniors and seniors, we have a lot of team projects and so a lot of faculty thought this is going to be really hard for these teams that do an end of course project o have students dropping out at the tenth week, so that the rest of the group members…it’s going to hurt the rest of the group members who all the sudden might loose two students. So that was an issue that some faculty brought up and others felt like Rick that it may slow down graduation rates. Students would go in take the course, drop it, without really, you say they are going to put in effort to the tenth week Bob, I’m not sure, they may just use it as something to keep going to school and keep dropping and extend their college career. I’m not sure it helps graduation rates, but anyway…

Warner Burgen, Animal Science, senator: I very seldom ever poll my faculty, but I did sort of. And I would say there again okay, they think it’s a weakening, it’s an accommodation, the students are here to learn and so that’s all I’m reporting. We did not argue about the whys and the wherefores it’s just a feeling in the department that we seem to be lowering standards daily all the time. [37:13]

Tony Moss, senator of biological sciences: One concern that crossed my mind when I went over this was that this would mean then that we’re holding possibly students who are marginal in classes longer. The students take more time disproportionately than other students do. And I’m reminded of this as I’m plowing through my written section of my cell biology exam that I gave last week, and you know it’s true, you may put as much as ten times as much effort into grading that exam, but also trying to keep things moving forward in the class. So this increases workload for the faculty too. It may seem like a really minor thing, but you add it up across the campus and it becomes big. So I wonder whether we aren’t just hurting ourselves and maybe not doing very much for the students by proposing such an idea. Sorry to be tough on you Linda, but that’s what I saw, my immediate reaction when I saw that.

Linda Glaze: I’m here presenting. (laughter) This I can say in looking over policies at other institutions that other comparable institutions have moved their withdrawal date, meaning moving it back to the tenth week, even some have it as late as right before final exams. So with that as I said this was from the Graduation Rate Committee and it’s their recommendation, and I believe they spent a lot of time on it an I felt that I needed to bring it forward. Again as I said before, you don’t know until you try it. So my recommendation would be to do it for say a year and monitor and see, because it’s going to be in combination with several things. But saying it’s not going to work when other institutions have taken that route and they seem to think that that’s the way to go, then I would recommend that we at least have the opportunity to try it and monitor it. That would be my recommendation.

As I’ve said, I already started asking Drew for lots of numbers so this would be another one to look at to see if there’s an increase in the withdrawal date. I also indicated one of the things that came up in looking at more so in grade adjustment policies because it really is tied into repeats is that institutions do limit the number of times that a student may register for a class. In other words, some institutions only allowed two repeats, some have three repeats and some of those combine both a withdrawal, or repeat of the grade [course]. So until we get to that point then I really think that we don’t have good data to say yes or no.

Bob Locy: Is there any other discussion? (pause) Seeing none then, it’s time for a vote. All in favor of the change in withdrawal policy as presented signify by saying aye.

Group: Aye (loud, and many)

Bob Locy: Opposed?

Group: Aye (quiet, and few)

Bob Locy: I think the first Aye clearly have it, that is to say the ones who voted for the policy. All right thank you. The next item on the agenda is now down in the information item category and it concerns the Grade Adjustment Policy. Linda will also be presenting this on behalf of the two committees that she serves on, the Retention Committee and the Academic Standards Committee.

Linda Glaze: you also have in your materials what’s called a draft proposal and the main reason it’s a draft proposal is that I shared this with the associate deans and the colleges and schools that implement this policy and I had I was not present for the meeting, but Patricia Duffy who subbed for me said there was quite a reaction and it was really on implementation issues. And so I felt that it was important that I present this as an information item to see whether we want to go forward. I expect response from this one I didn’t expect as many responses from the previous one so I think I probably made a smart choice. [42:16] As the policy states the major change in the policy is to require students to repeat the three courses allowed prior to excluding the grades from the calculation of the GPA. Our current policy is that a student earns a D or F may exclude that from the calculation of the GPA and not worry about it until it’s convenient and that really has created some problems for both the student and for the academic areas. [42:53]

The other problem that we’ve had is the…we needed to limit it to the courses because when the original policy was approved it was related to the student and there was no limits on which courses the student could exclude so that created some other problems and that’s why it states, the change would apply to courses in which the students earned a grade of D or F, including FA during Fall 2009 or after. In other words,  [43:29] the current policy if this is the route we go would be in place through summer. And then as I’ve indicated here students would be granted until October 1, 2009 to request exclusion of grades taken prior to Fall 2009under the old provisions of the policy. You might ask why that cutoff date before I get into some other information. We are currently entering into the implementation of a major upgrade to our Banner system, called Banner 8, and if we’re going to change our academic policy it would be very beneficial if we change that prior so that we could take advantage of that to test the system rather than change it after all the testing is done. I see that personally, and I see that Don is smiling, I see that as a cost saving effort in terms of why it would be important that we test the new policy before we switch, and that’s the date that we’re talking about and I have met with Nick Backshider on that.

And then the following gives you what that policy would be. I would like to give you a little bit more information before we start commenting. Again this recommendation does come from the Graduation Rate Task Force. Met with Susan Villaume, the Chair, and Bob Charcher from engineering, because he was the individual on the team that researched policies at other institutions. I wanted to know why the Graduation Rate Committee made this recommendation, which was to strongly indicated to change it to a repeat policy. So I went out and started looking at what other institutions do. Rather than giving you lots and lots of Web sheets I tried to summarize it in an overview. (So if you can do that) Our policy is at the top which, is… (and, I hope you can see that). Basically we do not require the student to repeat the course first. The only other institution that has such a policy that doesn’t require it is Texas A&M, but Arkansas, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Mississippi State, NC State, South Carolina, Tennessee, all require that the student repeat first. [46:07] The next question is the course limits, you can see the differences some are two some are three, I don’t see that as a significant difference. You also see the forgivable grades some of them also include Bs and Cs, that’s not really what we are talking about. The big issue is the substitution of different courses and that means what do we do about a student changing a major? And that is where we’re always going to get into trouble. So that is one of the issues for discussion.

And then finally in the last column I put other features that I thought were unique. One thing that I thought was very unique was the policy at Clemson after I could understand what they were really doing and got all of their abbreviations down, and it’s relevant to the policy that was just approved, is Clemson does not limit to freshman. However, what they do is Clemson limits the number of what they call ARP hours (Academic Redemption Policy hours) and they also limit the withdrawal hours to 17. And that if a student repeats a course for academic redemption they subtract those hours not only from the ARP hours, but also the withdrawal hours. So what that’s preventing is a student who would repeat the courses and then withdraw the same number of hours or vise-versa. As I also indicted it gets very complex in terms of… all the institutions that have a policy such as this, when they have the repeat then there are variations, there’s lots of flavors. So what I would like to do, if Bob will allow me, I’d like to get the sense of the Senate. As I work through all these policies I wanted to know, if I had clickers I’ have you all have clickers and then we’d kind of get a sense of before we spend a lot of time drafting a policy and come here and then you turn it down, I’d like to have a sense of which of these are issues for you. Okay, so is that all right?

Bob Locy: It’s fine. I’d just point out that clickers are only useful if you have a bashful class and I don’t think we have a bashful class of senators. (laughter)

Linda Glaze: I guess because I’m bashful I thought clickers would be a good idea. Okay, I think the basic question is; As an institution do we want to change our current grade adjustment policy to include the repeat first feature? [49:09] Sure, that’s the first question. Would you say yes if you do?

Group: Yes

Linda Glaze: How many don’t want to do it that way? (quiet)

Okay, it seems that if you’re not, maybe I need those clickers. It seems that if we are going to change it, it does need to be repeat. I think the next question is; Do we allow any type of substitution for courses not required in the major? That seems to be the biggest issue because whatever kind of policy you draft will be dependant upon that. What is the sense of the Senate?

Bob Locy: Clarify that, do you mean for courses when they change majors and are not required in their new major?

Linda Glaze: Yes.

Do you want to allow substitution for courses that are not required in the major if a student changes major? Yes or No?

Group: Yes.

No.

Linda Glaze: That one’s up in the air.

Okay my next question, if you look at the…Do we limit grade adjustment policy to the freshman year? Yes or No?

Group: Yes.

No.

Linda Glaze: Okay. The other feature that I noticed and again I am trying to save you all time from reading all those Web sites, do we limit to the first three courses repeated? In other words the choice is not the student’s the choice is ours. At many institutions the student sets in motion the whole policy because it’s always the first three courses repeated. Do we want to put that provision in a policy? Yes? No? Or don’t know?

Group: (Lots of mumbling and several responses)

Bob Locy: I don’t think we understand.

Linda Glaze: Okay, that one…I spent a lot of time on…

This one will probably, I think it will have relevance to the previous question. Do we limit the number of repeats for individual courses?

Group: Yes.

Linda Glaze: Okay, that one’s clear.  That is all I have. What I plan to do is take this information and go back to the appropriate groups and work on these details, but I would welcome comments now if anyone would like to comment, because I really want to know the direction to go. [52:08]

Norbert Wilson, senator from Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology: I have a question of clarification. I understand that the student has to repeat the class before they can GAP it, but it’s not clear if there is a required minimum grade in order for the GAP to go forward. That is if a student had a D and they take the class again and get another D, what happens do they end up with two Ds in the class?, Do they GAP the first one.

Linda Glaze: What happens is, that was another feature that we did not have in our original policy, clearly if you look at 12 institutions that’s been doing this or the number that have been doing it, they have all the exceptions covered, all the bases covered. Basically it’s always the second grade counts and so therefore they GAP the first one and the second grade is the one that counts. One of the other features which will be very interesting, at many of the institutions the student must request the exclusion of the grade prior to the completion of the second course. So therefore, if a student were to exclude a D and the second time through get and F, the student gets the F. I think that in many ways is to encourage students not to exclude Ds too soon, but the second grade is the one that counts.

Again in terms of what you’re talking about if how many, really the question you’re asking is, “How many times may a student repeat a course before they can no longer repeat it?” And that then goes into our whole academic actions policies, but the reason I brought this first is this really drives many of our other policies and decisions.

Norbert Wilson: Okay, thank you.

Linda Glaze: Okay, that’s it.

Bob Locy: Any other discussion? [54:16] I want to thank the Senate in indulging us in obtaining a sense of your wish and will on this for future direction. It’s appreciated.

The next item on our agenda concerns the Honors College review task force report. To present that report is the chair of the committee and dean of the Library, Bonnie McEwan.

Bonnie McEwan, dean of Library, chair of Honors College Task Force: While he’s pulling up our report let me say that I am very happy to be here. I’m glad to have a chance to talk about this report, Linda I am thrilled to see that some of the items on the Graduation Rate Report are already moving forward and I can hardly wait for the next Senate meeting after our report today.

My committee is here, but unlike the Graduation Rate group they are hiding in the back. When it comes to questions they should know I’m going to be able to find them. Why don’t we go to the next slide.

I want to start as they did with the charge, we received our appointment letter with our charge and then later met with Sharon Gabor to review the charge. We received our letters on Labor Day, we were told our deadline was Spring Break, but for a variety of reasons some of which had to do with our new Provost, welcome Mary Ellen, we actually turned in our report prior to Valentine’s Day, so we were sort of a holiday focused group.

The task force was a wonderful diverse group in spite of the fact they are hiding out on me today, they have been diligent, attentive, hard working and I think that always the best part of doing something like this task force is the opportunity to work with and get to know some new colleagues. And that has certainly been the case with this. We realized pretty fast that although we were a wonderful diverse group, we were not a group that knew a lot about Honors. We brought various perspectives and some information about Honors to the table, but we really needed to spend some time educating ourselves. So that was the first task we took on. And we spent a good bit of time looking at materials provided by the National Council of Honors Colleges. Our Colleagues in the Honors College were very generous in presenting information to us and we spoke with representatives of Honors Colleges at a dozen institutions around the country to benchmark against them. Many of them were in the Southeast, but we also targeted some of the honors programs that have good reputations around the country. We met with a host of faculty, students, administrators, development staff, and others from Auburn. We met with the President, deans, faculty, and my personal favorite, students. The students were absolutely wonderful, made you very glad to be at Auburn after you had a chance to talk with them and meet with them. Everyone we spoke with was generous with their time and thoughtful in their recommendations.

Our challenge became, quickly was identified as…many students entered the Honors Program and as you can see from this little pie, that little tiny sliver are the students that remained to graduate from the program. In our report, I’m going to talk to you about ten recommendations that are intended to address this situation and create opportunities uniquely available to honors students, and to provide and incentive to remain in the program. We recognize that all of the recommendations like the Graduation Rate Task Force Report will require additional work and review by a variety of parts of this organization and across the campus including curriculum committees. [59:10]

We…, Our charge made it clear to consider two possible models for honors and it was tempted to go with what I would call the flow at Auburn which is in many cases a decentralized model. As we heard from students we benchmarked against programs across the country. We looked at the advantages to Auburn in terms of attracting the best students. We felt strongly, increasingly strongly I would say in our information gathering that a strong centralized model makes the most sense in the case of an Honors College. So that’s what we recommended. We had so much information at the end of our information gathering we felt that we needed to sort it out according to some structure. And we chose a swat analysis, and this framework really allows us to get to 11 areas of focus and ten recommendations. We really tried to have ten areas of focus and ten recommendations because we wanted to go for symmetry, but there you have it.

The swat analysis allowed us to identify Auburn’s greatest strength, which is the large number of students who want to enter Honors, also our greatest weakness. If we go to the next slide… One of our biggest problems is many people enter the program and then they encounter what they perceive as inflexibility. The Honors Program is overwhelmed by the number of students that they have and unable to fully meet their needs.

I’d like to turn now to the recommendations and I actually turned faster than I intended. Everyone we spoke to spoke highly of the current leadership and staff of the Honors College they in particular spoke highly of the advising that was provided by the Honors College staff however all of the information that we got indicated that that advisor is completely overwhelmed by her task. As the size of the Honors College has increased by two and a half percent, two and a half times of the current size, a single advisor has tried to meet with and assist all those students. So we’re recommending strongly that one advisor be added and actually if the funding could be identified or if adjustments in the program make that possible, we would recommend more advisors. Possibly three, one based in the sciences, one focused in humanities and social sciences, and a third one. [1:02:22]

So we think that that would be a good idea and I hope that that recommendation will move forward. We feel that students need incentive to stay in the program and we hope with the flexibility that we have that it will make sense to collapse the junior and senior honors program into a single program. Right now it’s almost as if we invite students at the end of their second year, end of their sophomore year by asking if they would like to opt out of the program at that point with a junior certificate it’s almost as if we say; Well would you like to leave now? If the objective is to get students to stay, the junior certificate doesn’t make sense and we hope that there is enough in here to get them to want to stay. We suggest that the current core curriculum arrangement with regards to honors be replaced with an interdisciplinary option that the students will be able to work with their professors to design (you can go to the next slide) programs that will provide more of the kinds of experiences the students presented to us. I think for me this was the most striking moment was to get in a room full of students and hear how diverse their needs from honors were. We had students who wanted lab-based research opportunities, we had another student who was very serious about language and literature studies in a foreign language that wanted a significant travel abroad experience that would be a part of his scholarship. The student who wanted the significant lab experience immediately said, “I don’t want to have to leave my lab.” They need the flexibility, they need the advising, they need that kind of opportunity. And we feel that they need a different kind of experience to fulfill some of their core requirement. So we have recommended an interdisciplinary honors course, and if you’ll look at the report you’ll see that there’s some syllabi in there of suggestions of what such a course might look like.

We have endorsed and idea that was brought to us, is there anything better than when your in a task force and you’re thinking that you’re going to discuss something and somebody comes to you and says, “We would like to bring you an idea that we have been working on,” and it’s consistent with what you’ve been talking about in the task force. The graduate school and Honors College brought us such a proposal you’ll see it appended in the report that there become an opportunity for these very talented students to begin working on a master’s degree or perhaps even earn a master’s degree while they are working on their bachelor’s degree here at Auburn. We endorse this we recognize that it’s going to need a lot of work and thought in the colleges, by the graduate school, and the curriculum committees to move forward.

The students invited us to go and look at their space, their assigned Honors College Center space and that slide washes out a little bit, but I hope you can see that they have not been given luxury quarters, in fact they showed us that they had built their own ping-pong table. I was a little distracted while my colleagues were seeing the ping-pong table because I was looking at the Reader’s Digest condensed books and the 1954 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that made up their library.

A more pressing issue in the space they’ve been assigned is there is no space large enough for all of them to meet, and this space is not for them alone, it’s shared with everybody who’s assigned to that residence hall. So there is no centralized space for the students to come together as the Honors College and share ideas and thoughts and to grow as Honors students. We’re recommending that I think in part because we found it so helpful to think about honors and come together as a diverse group, that the conversation continue, that the current Honors advisory council be reformatted, rethought to include people from other parts of the campus then are currently included. I think it’s very telling of our experience, most of us would be glad to volunteer if somebody were interested in appointing us. A very pressing concern that we want to recommend the honors advisory council take on, is diversity. I hope you can see this chart, the top line show you the number of African-Americans enrolled in honors at Auburn, and you will see that at the present time we have no juniors and no seniors. It’s a difficult conundrum, it’s not going to be easy to solve, but we feel strongly that it’s something that the Honors College will need help addressing from across the University. We do think that one of our recommendations, and we discussed this with Overton Jenda a week or so ago, may help, we have include in the program the opportunity for students to opt in Honors at the end of their first year. This will allow students who have been brought to Auburn and mentored to succeed here, they may not have self identified as honors students as they entered Auburn, but with good advising we believe that they may find that they are succeeding here and that honors is a program that will speak to them. This option is of course targeted to all students and we think will provide a good opportunity for a number of them.

The size of the staff of the Honors College has remained the same as nearly everything about honors except the people provided to make it work has grown exponentially. I want you to see this next slide. So as the quality of students admitted to Auburn has improved, which we all would agree, the number of students that we admit who are qualified for honors and are seeking that kind of a validation of their abilities as High School students has grow by two and a half percent. So we have the same number of people trying to provide a lot of help, and so we’re recommending that we raise the GPA for admission and for continuing in the program and that at the end of the first year we give students an opportunity to sort themselves out. Students who didn’t choose honors when they entered Auburn may discover that they’ve succeeded here, they’ve done very well, and they want to opt in. There are other students who may have opted for honors when they entered Auburn and now realize the kind of flexible, creative, work together with your advisor to create your own program kind of experience is not what they were looking for. We heard from a number of people that this may apply to the pre-med students, that those students are looking for a more structured environment. So we think that this will help that problem some. [1:11:02]

We are also recommending that the Honors College work with development and if possible a full time development officer be assigned to raise scholarship funding for honors students. We heard from the students that if they had chosen honors opportunities at other institutions they would have had better scholarship aid and benchmarking indicates that’s the case. So we’re hoping that somebody can be assigned to help raise funds for these talented students.

Another program that received uniform praise is the program that was just started this year to mentor students to apply for prestigious opportunities, fellowships, scholarships, such as the Fulbright and Rhodes Scholarships. The head of the Honors College and Paul Harris, who is leading this program, received uniform praise. It’s less than a year old, so we don’t make a lot of recommendations, I think the program needs to be continued and they support that the University has given to this need to continue. [1:12:18]

And now this gets a little bit to the heart of our recommendation, we feel that the number of multiple honors sections can be replace with multi-disciplinary opportunities for students to have a flexible creative experience in honors. We’ve seen examples of these kinds of courses across the campus and that by collapsing the many, many honors course sections that we’re currently offering, that it may be possible, Don, to free up some funds to pay for some of the other ideas that we’ve brought forward in this proposal and that it will be possible to find the funding to develop these multi-disciplinary sections. That concludes what I have to tell you today. And all of us on the task force would be happy to stand for questions, I’ll ferret them out.

[11:13:31] (pause) For one second I thought we were going to get away. Yes?

James Goldstein, senator from English: I notice that you are recommending eliminating core honors classes, first of all I am wondering how would that work with the state’s requirement for general education.

Bonnie McEwan: We wondered the same thing as we looked at those kinds of programs across the country and then we discovered that UAB is actually already doing it. I think there are going to be some complexities and I’m looking a Linda and others who will need to work through those, but it turns out that UAB is already offering such opportunities to their honors students under the current articulation agreements that’s across the state. So there’s a model out there that we can look at. If you look at the syllabi there are pretty exciting courses. I don’t know if I’d like to take them or in some cases have the opportunity to offer lectures, but apparently they do and will articulate, there are others who understand this better than I do, but I’m thinking if UAB can do it we probably can figure out how to do it too.

James Goldstein: If I could follow up with that. The English Department has the largest number of core courses that it teaches and so a lot of us have been teaching for years honors versions and one colleague of mine who’s particularly successful at it observed that this is one of the things that we do well and is working well, why would we want to eliminate it? And I would certainly second that observation from my own experience, but if I were giving advise I would suggest the possibility of making different options so that some students could go in for interdisciplinary courses, but for other students who wanted it to have a supped up version of core classes that there would at least be a section instead of multiple sections, if that is a possibility.

Bonnie McEwan: It’s something that I didn’t talk about actually, came out of a discussion and I think you attended is that we wouldn’t only offer some supped up versions of our core honors courses, but we would also offer students the opportunity to identify any course on campus and then write a contract with a faculty member to turn that course into an honors program with advising. And so I think that I would say I’m not looking to eliminate but rather change and add. Is that fair?

James Goldstein: Well is still sounds like eliminating, they do work well, it’s not the same to have a contract version of an honors core class that would be to have nineteen other really bright students in the room all together discussing at that level that they can’t do in a contract version. Thank you.

Linda Glaze, not a senator, represents Auburn University on Articulation General Studies Committee: As far as the UAB model I think what they do is if a student tends to be in the sciences they take what you might call the honors sections of the sciences and then they would take interdisciplinary work in the humanities. If the student is in the humanities they would probably take the traditional honors type course and then maybe do interdisciplinary in one of the other areas, so there is a lot of flexibility, but that has been approved and standing since the articulation agreement went in., and so that is possible.

Bonnie McEwan: Way more clear description than what I offered, thanks Linda.

Rik Blumenthal, senator chemistry and bio-chemistry: I just wanted to reiterate what James said and agree with him completely. I think what we offer in the honors section of freshman chemistry is different and much more than what is offered in the general chemistry courses. They are more than one level above. In fact I think it’s an exceptional course. My son is interested in science and it’s one of the reasons that being in the Honors College would be one of the reasons I would recommend he come here. And taking those courses, I do not see how when I’m teaching a freshman course to 220 people, 180 of which are there because my major makes me take this, I have the opportunity to spend the time with and raise the level of the course that will challenge the honors student. I just simply don’t think I could teach that freshman course across that gradient, the one who’s in agronomy and has to take two freshman chemistry courses and the one who is an honors physics student. I just don’t see how that can be taught in one room. The background the assumptions of background the amount of material they can assimilate and learn and use as background for their eventual advancement through the course is just so different. And I think we’d be doing a big disservice to our students if we took away those honors sections. Now maybe I mean that only in terms of departments like mine where we have some very large classes and you don’t have that small class opportunity. But still even if you have the smaller class and you’ve got that very wide range of students, you can’t teach to the best student in the class and not loose the bottom five. And I don’t think any faculty member here is encouraged to loose the bottom five to teach to the top one. And I think that that top one does deserved to be taught to at his level.

Bonnie McEwan: Good point.

Guy Rohrbaugh, senator from philosophy: I think I’ll manage to mostly demonstrate my ignorance. We have a number of honors sections of core classes and I’ll just say from the few times that I’ve done it, it’s this odd combination of really sort of strikingly more talented students, and maybe in philosophy we’re just not communicating very well, but I get instuctions, to not… the assignments aren’t supposed to be any different, I’m told, and I get this great class that I can see why and honors student would come back and report; “Those core classes are a huge waste of my time, man,” because boy could I do a hell of a 1020, but I’m told not to. So I don’t, I try to enrich it around the edges, but I certainly feel as if I get assigned this weird task and now I told that people don’t find it really rewarding and I guess I’m not shocked. And I don’t know exactly where this fits in with the recommendations but that certainly for the few honors sections and these are again small, we have small sections for the general population and for honors students. We could go to town but we’re told not to, and I would rather try the go to town method before just sort of abandoning it.

Bonnie McEwan: I am gratified to hear Rik’s experience because we heard from faculty this same frustration that you are expressing. They’ve got a room full of bright students and would like to be doing something different.

Tony Moss, biological sciences, senator: I also taught an honors biology class this last semester, as did Dr. Locy previously, and I concur completely with the comments that are made here. I took the risk of pushing it forward particularly when I found out that most of my students really were dedicated, science in particular, biological sciences majors in one way or another, there were a few students who, I think it wouldn’t have made much differance[1:22:42] if I had really tried to cater to them or not because they simply were not interested in the material. And so I think that’s where advising would be… an improvement in advising would be very useful in this case, but I have to really strongly come down on the side of keeping the classes small, giving us the freedom to move around a little different than we normally do in an introductory class and allowing those kids to stretch their wings. You know nearly all of them did actually very, very well, probably seeing material that they’d never seen before, in ways they’ve never seen presented. And that really was very encouraging to me, and those students again who didn’t do well in that class, they just disconnected, they let go and they did it pretty much from day one. They just were not interested in the material, so I think there might be some real need for some interdisciplinary other courses for those people so they get some experience with, in our particular case we are talking about sciences—there’s some pretty tough stuff in there, so that they are well served. So they don’t have to feel that they’re beating their heads against a wall with students who really do want to fly.

I just wanted to also convey a concern that one of the faculty members in my department had about the fast track program. He’s very concerned about how this would actually work and whether or not students would really stick with the program effectively. He was very concerned about that. He was also concerned about whether or not this would become a kind of watered down version of the kind of thesis we normally have with our students in our department and whether or not this would be taxing on both the faculty member individually and on the faculty as a group if they were trying to take care of these students who then summarily just dump the program toward the end. And I realize that you can’t lock people down to a program and so I’m not sure what you can do to try to counter this concern of faculty?

Bonnie McEwan: We will be interested to see how it works and it’s unique so there’s no much we can benchmark against.

Tony Moss: Thank you.

Bonnie McEwan: Thank you. Other comments?

Connor Bailey, not a senator but I’m on the task force: I was lurking up front where Bonnie couldn’t see me. My understanding is that we were not going to do away with all of the core courses, so I want to make sure that that’s very clear. But it’s pretty clear that the honors program to this point has been all about the core courses in the first two years. What we are trying to do is for some students who have done extremely well and have maybe compt out through IB or AP course credit, maybe they would instead of taking the honors…they were taking these honors courses because they had to pile up a certain number of honors credits in order to get the junior certificate. We are trying to do away with the honors certificate and try to open up opportunities for more advanced interdisciplinary honors work outside of the core, not doing away with the honors core courses, but opening up and shifting resources into some other fields. Thank you.

Bonnie McEwan: Thank you, well said Connor.

Bob Locy: Thank you Bonnie. The last item on our information agenda for today is Mr. Fred Bobo, who’s going to talk to us about the tuition restructuring recommendations. Don Large is going to start the presentation.

Don Large: Thank you and if this agenda could wait we would defer it for the length of this session already, but unfortunately we were trying to get this on the agenda today because we want to take this subject to the Trustees later this month. A one minute history on tuition charging is for 40 years, as best we can tell, we’ve been charging tuition the same way. It’s a way that I can’t, none of us can reasonably explain and possibly even defend. We charge at full rate at 10 hours, but federal rates are 12 hours, and financial rates are 12, so we don’t know why 10 was the number. From 10 to 15 is so called free for the student and then after 15 we begin to charge again. Then we have registration fees that don’t make a lot of sense and a host of other issues. We began to look at this 7 or 8 years ago and then semester transition got in the way and we were afraid to change because we’d seen universities experience major downfalls in tuition revenues during semester change so we backed away. Then we looked at it again 2 or 3 years ago and Banner was coming about and we were afraid of it then, so now’s about our best time. We’ve got a proposal by way of a broad-based committee that Fred Bobo has led that I think makes a lot of sense. It came out of thinking it was more of a financial area but as it ends up we’re going to stay revenue neutral, that was the goal. And really we have more academic arguments for making these changes than we do financial and an ability to be able to explain tuition to parents and students when they ask. So the Provost will probably end up taking this as an agenda item to the Board because really it’s for academic reasons that we’ll end up doing this, but Fred has led this charge and I’d like to ask him…he’s done a number of great things while he’s been here, but unfortunately its his last month of employment here. He’s retiring, this was his last big hurrah and I told him 40 years from now we’ll be calling on him to ask him why he made these recommendations. Fred if you’ll come up, we’ll be brief and if there are no questions or big problems we’re going to take it to the Board in March.

Fred Bobo: Thank you Don. Thank you for allowing me to come and present today. As Don said, there are numerous problems with our current tuition structure. One of the main ones that I experienced when I was in the Bursar’s office was just trying to defend our structure. Talking to parents and talking to students, it was really indefensible, there was really no basis for why we did what we did as Don mentioned the 10 hours, I researched it back I think as far as the late 60s we were charging for 10 hours then and in the 80s we started charging 10 to 15 hours and then an additional amount above 15 hours which I’m not sure what the 10 represented because 12 as far as I could determine has always been the full time rate or full time equivalent for federal financial aid and for insurance purposes. One of the things we did too, many of the curriculums require more than 15 hours, we have the free rate as Don mentioned, 10–15, then we charge extra for the 16th hour. And again a lot of problems, a lot of questions, a lot of complaints from parents and students about that, so we felt like we basically couldn’t defend it.

And then we have a proliferation of additional fees, we have a registration fee, which is $510 for in-state it’s $1,530 for out-of-state, again you’re at three times the tuition rate that the University has in place. Of that $510 and of that $1,530 only about 46 or 49 dollars of it is actual fees the rest of it is basically just tuition. And anytime tuition is increased, the increase is passed by the Board, then that’s applied to the $510 and $1,530. Then we also have the transit fee, new union building fee, [1:31:43] Rec. services student union fee that’s one fee and then its distributed half and half, then each school except for the professional schools has an $8 per hour course fee. So you can imagine the parent that’s seeing their first bill and saying, “What in the world is this? What is all of this?” and it is hard to defend.

So Dr. Gogue appointed a committee back in August and asked me to chair it. We started meeting then and this is the committee made up by faculty representation, student representation, Associate Dean, Associate Provost, Associate VP for Finance and Business, and all the effective areas such as the Bursar, also had the Dean of Students on it. And we met several times over the course of the next few months and came up with what our recommendation will be today. But we met with Dr. Gogue and Dr. Large for direction and our primary guidance was to try to use the tuition structure to enhance our six-year graduation rate. If I remember the numbers correctly I think we’re at 62 percent, the average SREB is 75 percent; so as you can see there is a need for improvement in that area. And also along with that was to increase our summer enrollment to hopefully structure our tuition where it would motivate students to want to come to summer and obviously help with the tuition rate if they come to summer enrollment, or if they come and attend summer. I think what we have done after you see it will yield itself to increasing both of those.

Then our additional goals were again as I said we wanted one that we could defend where if a clerical worker in the Bursar’s office receives a call from a parent they could say this is why we’re charging what we’re charging, rather than “I don’t know that’s just the way it is, just please pay it.” (laughter) that’s obviously not a very good reflection on the University. Also we wanted to be comparable with our peers and when I say our peers what I looked at was the SREB schools. I could not find one school that had anything close to our structure. Some of the schools have 12–17 hours, as a free ride if you will, and then above 17 maybe a premium, but most of the schools they consider that 12 hours is full time and once you reach 12 hours your full time and should pay the same amount regardless of how many hours you pay [take]. I understand there are arguments pro and con, but that’s what’s used by the majority of the SREB schools. And also simplicity, hopefully what we are presenting is very simple we have one registration fee, which is a true registration fee, no tuition included. The registration fee is the same for instate and out-of-state and then one rate per hour up to 12 hours and then from then on it’s the same price, except the tuition for out-of-state students will again be three times what the instate is.

Then revenue neutrality; we played with the numbers on spreadsheets and there’s nothing magic about what we are presenting it’s just that this is what numbers worked to make it revenue neutral. We didn’t want to use this as a tool to increase tuition. So the bottom line for the University is based on Fall, Spring, and Summer enrollment, those numbers, the revenue should be neutral. Obviously they could be some changes if enrollment changes. Again I did the survey of the SREB institutions. And this is what we came up with for the undergraduates. The undergraduate per credit hour tuition would be $253 for instate and $759 out-of-state, again no additional charge beyond 12 hours, and the registration fee would only be a specific fee as passed by the Board. Based on the fees we have out there now they add up to $332 and that would be charged per semester. One thing to point out if there is a tuition increase it would not apply to the fee portion. That fee would only be increased if there’s a Board action to increase specific fees and it would not be subject to the tuition increase.

This is just and example at 6, 12, 18 hours. As you can see the 6 hours and up through 11 hours the proposed tuition would be less than our current structure. That is one of the things I think should encourage students to come summer, I don’t have any data to support this, but you would think that if they could come and take 6 or 9 hours then they could see that they could save some money and it would not cost as much. Now it does go up for 12 hours and one of the selling points we’re going to have with the Bursar and I guess who ever talks to parents and students in the 12 to 16 hours that’s where about 80 percent of our students reside. There will be an increase, but the maximum increase for those students will be 4.4 percent, but again overall it’s revenue neutral. But that group of students will pay 4 percent more.

This is for the non-residents. One example that we’re always hit hard with from parents and students in the summer was, “I want my son or daughter to take 3 hours and under our current structure, they would pay almost $4,000 it they are out-of-state. Under our structure now I think that number is down to $2,600, which is still significant, but it’s 33–34 percent decrease from our current structure. Again there will be about 80 percent of the out-of-state students from 12­–16 hours that will pay more but the out-of-state will pay somewhere around 3.6–3.7 percent more, not even up to the 4 percent.

Okay, here is one of the significant differences and this is… we worked with the graduate school and the Provost’s Office on this. One of the points they wanted to make in this tuition structure was that we value our graduate education more, I guess from a financial standpoint, than the undergraduate, and it should be priced accordingly. So they wanted us to come up with a structure that would charge a premium for the graduate students. And this is the number we came up with. The registration fee would still be the same, but the per credit hour fee would be $340 as opposed to $253, and then for out-of-state it would be $1,020 as opposed to $759. For graduate student tuition 9 hours is considered full time, so we capped it at 9 hours instead of 12. Again this is consistent with SREB structures. I think the difference in graduate and undergraduate is around 33–34 percent, it’s all over the board as far as SREB schools, it’s anywhere from 1 or 2 percent difference to I think in some of the Florida schools it’s over 120 percent difference between undergraduates and graduates. I think we are in the ballpark with SREB schools in this regard.

This is just an example of the graduate resident again at 3 hours it’s less, as it gets higher than that the amount goes up for the graduate students. One thing to point out I think with the resident and non-resident graduate students; most of the students are on some type of a teaching assistance-ship, research assistance-ship, and so forth, and we only generate about 4 million dollars a year from graduate students who actually pay tuition out-of-pocket. So most of the graduate students have their tuition paid due to an assistance-ship. And these are the numbers for the non-resident, 3 hours is less and it starts going up, again it’s capped at 9 hours and undergraduate at 12. That’s it. I hope I made it short and sweet enough, I be glad to field any questions if anyone has a question. (pause) Thank you, Bob.

Bob Locy: Thank you Don and Fred. That concludes our formal agenda. Is there any unfinished business of the Senate today? Is there any new business of the Senate today? Then the March 3rd Senate Meeting stands adjourned until next month and this is my last meeting as chair. Kathryn will be here. (clapping) I assume you’re clapping for Kathryn’s starting next week not for my last meeting. (laughter)