Faculty Meeting Oct 14, 2008—transcription
Bob Locy: Thank you all for coming today for our fall general faculty meeting. It did not get on the properly circulated agenda but we need to approve the minutes of the March 11th General Faculty Meeting that were posted on the Senate Web page. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes as they were posted? (pause) Hearing or seeing none those minutes will stand approved as they were distributed.
We’re perhaps deviating a bit from the normal order of doing things, the president typically talks first, however you’ll notice that on the agenda, on the information agenda for today’s the president’s giving the first presentation in the information agenda so we’re going divert his comments down to that information item and let him do his remarks and do the information item at the same time, so I’ll make the chair’s remarks.
The first thing I’d like to inform the faculty of, that we have established a Senate and general faculty leadership office, it’s in the basement of room 5 of the Quad Center. There is soon to be hopefully an administrative assistant who will be manning the office during normal working hours. And we’ll get to you by e-mail contact information for phone numbers etc. for the office if at any point in time this comes up that you need to contact us. In addition to that we’re working on trying to establish a conference room in the Senate office complex, so if senate committees need a place to meet, it’s a pretty central location and might be a good place to hold Senate or university committee meetings if appropriate in the new office complex. So we ask you all to come by and see us. We’re still just barely up and running so don’t get too anxious if we’re not quite ready to receive guests yet, but we hope to be very soon.
The second item I want to discuss with you is, you may recall that beginning this fall and over the summer we searched for and established this fall an office of the ombudsperson. Our ombudsperson has given me a brief report of his basically first month of activities since he started working on ombuds work beginning about the first of September. The ombuds person reports during the month of September since the second he’s seen between 20 to 30 individuals concerning ombuds activity. Roughly half of these visits to the ombudsperson were by faculty members the other half by non-faculty employees. The concerns raised by these visitors to the ombuds person touched on all nine of the areas where ombuds people normally report their activities and these include compensation and benefits issues, supervisory relationships, peer colleague relationships, career progress and development concerns, legal regulatory financial complaints, health and safety and physical environment issues, third party and administrative services issues, organized and strategic mission related concerns and organizational ethics values and standards. Ombuds persons normally in those nine categories in their activities and his report in his first month of activity is that he’s seeing individuals having those kinds, all nine of those kinds of issues. The majority of them involve supervisory relationships, about 50 percent. Compared to other recently initiated ombudsperson’s offices, the ombudsperson reports that his 20 to 30 visits in a month are substantially higher than the level of activity seen in other ombudsperson’s offices that have been recently started around the country, however her believes this is due to the nature of how we established the position here and how open we were with setting the position up and not necessarily that the level of concerns at Auburn are higher than at the other institutions where ombuds activity has just begun. That will suffice for his report of his first month of activity. I wanted to give it to you to let you know that it looks like we have an ombuds office that’s off to a successful beginning and we’re looking forward to that continuing to be a vital asset to Auburn University as we progress further.
Another concern that has come to the faculty senate’s attention concerns the graduation committee. There has been a question of whether they have recently changed policy in behavior concerning the faculty involvement in the graduation process. The graduation committee asserts that there has been no change in policy, the policy is as it has always been, however we have evolved away from shall we say using the policy that we have had in place, for quite a long time. And the issue of concern is faculty attendance at graduation. Specifically the policy we have been using for well over a decade is that faculty from each department, at least one faculty from each department is asked to attend graduation. And that should be a faculty member who is not involved in the hooding of a graduate student that brings them there for some other reason. We apparently evolved to a system where if you were there hooding for a student, a graduate student, you could substitute for the faculty representative. The concern that this raises is that it kind of is embarrassing when the president announces at graduation how important the faculty are to the life of the university and asks the faculty to rise, and the cluster of faculty not hooding students is four or five people sitting there kind of sends the wrong message. Now, I realize this is all appearances, and we could decide to eliminate faculty at graduation altogether, but I’d like to submit to you that I don’t think that’s the image we would like to have as a faculty. This requires that one person from a department, if you have 20 people in your department, every 20 graduations you have to show up for graduation in addition to the ones that you are hooding graduate students for. I just don’t think that that’s an unreasonable concern to ask. So we have jokingly discussed that we might submit the idea that department chairs must attend to represent their departments unless they can find somebody to substitute for them. So I guess if the faculty don’t fall into line we’ll have to consider making that a non-joking request., but I would like to send that message to the department chairs that we believe the graduation committee needs and deserves your help at making sure that we get folks representing department and making it look like the faculty really care about graduation. I think we do, I think it’s time we have to show it at this point in time.
The next item on my agenda is that Mr. Ronnie Herring has contacted me concerning health and wellness initiatives and he’s brought a representative from Willis Company, Mr. Scott Peckman was it?, yes, Who is here today with us and I’m going to invite him to come up and give you a brief overview of what’s going on with the health and wellness initiatives. He can do so much more effectively than I can, so I’ll allow him to do that.
Mr. Scott Peckman: All right, thank you. With respect to you time I’ll keep this brief, but I just wanted to make you aware that as of yesterday Auburn University kicked off its official wellness program. It’s called Healthy Tigers and to find out any information or to find out more than what I actually share with you today you can go to the payroll and benefits web site on the internet and click on the wellness URL, it’ll walk you through there. There’s a neat little video, if you haven’t seen it, with Aubie and Dr. Cam who is the primary physician at the AU Medical Clinic. As of yesterday they kicked it off and the goal for Auburn is to help create an atmosphere of health and well being and improve the quality of life of its employees as well as help control the health care costs. We all know that since you are self insured you’re helping foot this bill, so it’s important to improve quality of life, but also maintain average or declining health care costs. In order to participate in this program you need to sign up on that web page, and what it asks you to do is take a health risk assessment (should take 15 to 20 minutes) and then participate in a biometric screening. Now these biometric screenings are taking place around campus at 5 different places, you’ve got the AU Medical Clinic, the Vet School, AUM, the Facilities Division, as well as the new Student Center. And as of yesterday I checked online and there were 602 participants or people that had signed up actually, so that’s roughly 13 or 14 percent of the population. I think that’s probably pretty good for the first go around and seems to some good positive feedback from it. What happens after you do that is the lab work and the HRA results (health risk assessment) go into a health risk identifier and it identifies what levels of risk that you ay be at and you get a letter with some suggestions and some Web sites to go to as well as, potentially if you are high risk, to come back to the medical clinic for a full evaluation and then a funnel, if you will, to various health related resources on the campus. So we’re real excited about the participation level. It is all voluntary, and there is a cash drawing at the end of this for everybody that participated, but remember you’ve got to do the HRA online and the biometric screening to be considered a part of this. The cash drawing is one, five-hundred dollar amount; two, four-hundred; three, three-hundred; four two-hundred, and five, one-hundred. So as I said you can go to the Web page at Payroll and Benefits find out more information about that, and I look forward to working with you all coming down the road. Thank you, any questions? He was right, he said there wouldn’t be any.
Bob Locy: That’s almost what I said. The last item as part of my remarks then is to talk to you a minute about the nature of today’s meeting. My view is that during Dr. Gogue’s first year as president, we put in place a strategic plan. The strategic plan logically drives a vision for what we will become. I think it’s clear if you’ve looked at the strategic plan, and by the way it’s on the Web site, it’s clear if you’ve looked at the strategic plan you will see we are being asked to undergo change as a university, I guess that’s a popular topic given presidential campaigns of recent times, but I think this is kind of logical because I think we as a faculty have been, we’ve been in a situation where we haven’t always been in a harmonious relationship with the administration. I think it’s not always been easy to see the benefit of change; we tended to resist it. I think we’re in a new era with a different administration and it calls for a different paradigm of behavior, and I’d like to suggest to us, that we need to embrace the idea that we are engaging in change. I think the University will become a better place in the future if we do embrace that change, and what I’d like to ask you to do today is to sit here with an open mind and hear about all the things that are going on, all of the kinds of changes that are being talked about, and then leave here with the enthusiastic will to participate in helping bring about the things you see happening that are beneficial changes. There’re lots of changes so there’s got to be some of them that you can endorse and get excited about. So I’m asking you to embrace change in submitting to you that this is the year of the challenge of change for Auburn University. With that brief introduction, we’re ready to begin today’s agenda with the information items and the challenges and opportunities will be talked about by Dr. Gogue. Are there any questions for me? Thank you.
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Dr Gogue: Thank you, Bob. I’m delighted to be with you. Let me start with a little over a year that I’ve been here, and I want to thank you for your kind words and support throughout the year. It makes a lot of difference and Susie and I really appreciate it. I wan to mention by way of announcements a couple of things that I have jotted down. I think, number one you may have read in the newspaper, you may have heard on campus, but a lot of credit goes to this institution. You have the strongest freshman class based on high school GPAs, based on ACT, SAT scores, that Auburn has ever had. Over the last three or four years you’ve made remarkable progress year after year. This year it went up by a little over a point on the ACT average to 25.9. And that is really a dramatic increase for an institution to make in a relatively short period of time. It’s one of the things I am very proud of, it’s one of the things that Wayne Alderman and a group of people worked really hard to do and to bring a higher quality of student here every year to campus is an important step for us.
Second thing I wanted to mention by way of announcement is on the ballot in November in Alabama there is a constitutional amendment change, it’s amendment one, it deals with a rainy day fund, that from my understanding of it, and I should tell you that the university presidents within the state will support that. You obviously need to read and decide if it’ s an appropriate thing in your mind. The data that we have shows that if you go back to 1935 in Alabama and you look at ten year cycles all the way up to the present, that basically Alabama has between seven and eight years of very good economic times. And then you have a decade where you have three years of bad times, seven years of good, some decades it’s about eight years of good two years of bad. About seven or eight years ago there was a real effort to create a rainy-day fund and that would be used to try to help ameliorate some of the bouncing around you see in state budgets. And that rainy-day fund has collected, I think it’s some four-hundred-twenty-some-million dollars. Amendment one would allow the release of that money, but it also sets a pattern as you go into the good years that more funds are actually placed in rainy-day accounts. So in essence it tries to even out the good year and the bad. The head of K–12 is supportive of that, your institutional presidents will be supportive of it, but I would encourage you to look and read and see if it makes sense, there are those who oppose that. So I just ask for your good judgment and we’ll see what happens on Election Day.
Third thing I wanted to mention is that one of the key things that we wanted to try to get done by the end of this year was to a member of the national academy, either sciences or engineering, to campus. Back in August we were able to convince Oliver Kingsley to join us, he’s a member of the national academy of engineering and is spending affair amount of time trying to help us recruit other members of the academy. It becomes particularly important because, and I’m not being disrespectful when I refer to that group, it’s clearly a very talented group. The way individuals are selected is really by internal selection by those individuals and it becomes particularly important for you to have some for you to be able to give due credit to the faculty that we have on this campus. There is not any doubt in my mind that there are members that are deserving of national academy status on our campus today that probably because of the way the nomination and the entire process works that we’re not doing a very good job of making sure that they receive that recognition. So we’re excited about that.
I think you’re aware that we had two national searches that were concluded in the past year, one was for the Advancement position that brought Jeff McNeil to our campus, and I don’t know if Jeff is here today, I don’t see Jeff, and also the Vice President for Research, John Mason that you hear from a little bit later, but those were full national searches, we’re excited about those. There is a national search underway for a Provost, Stew is the chair of that committee. I will share with you what I know and if I misstate, Stew correct me. In the next week or ten days there will be airport interviews from the pool of candidates that will be interviewed, I don’t know the number, I want to say eight to twelve is what they will review. Short term interviews. From that they will narrow the list down to about three to five candidates and those individuals will come to campus in November. I am expecting to receive recommendations from that committee prior to Thanksgiving. Is that basically correct Stew? Thank you.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about really some issues, some challenges, and some opportunities. I think the first challenge that’s probably on everybody’s mind has to do with budget related issues. I don’t think from a federal level or a state level we actually know where the future will be. I think anyone who says that they do, we ought to be very cautious about those comments, I’m not sure that we really know. I would say that the good news for us at Auburn is that we have a budget year starting October 1st, it goes through September 30, 2009, and the budgets that have been allocated to the campuses, we do not anticipate nor expect any reductions. If there were to be proration in the state it will not go back and affect academic departments. So I think that is probably good news. Of the fifty states forty-seven took budget cuts this year, and while that’s not a good situation it does mean that we certainly in the majority of the states. The only states I’ve seen that did not take budget cuts were Wyoming, New Mexico, and Texas, but all the other received budget reductions of some percentage. We are not likely to freeze positions or freeze travel. I call your attention to this because you’ll read articles of schools within the state of Alabama and nationally where they are choosing to do that as a way to try to stay within budget guidelines. Our reason for not doing that is that there is tremendous variability within this campus. We have departments in which the average faculty member brings in more than four-hundred-thousand-dollars a year in grant and contract money. We have colleges that nearly average three-hundred-thousand-dollars a year in external grant and contract money. And to put in place travel freezes and personnel freezes really creates a lot of issues on campus, so we don’t anticipate doing that. We do not know what the next legislative session will be but I would always give great compliments to Don Large and the physical conservative nature of this institution, and so I feel that we will fare well regardless of the way this future trend works out. 22:50
One of the points that I do want to mention is that when you look at the metrics, and we’ve looked at the metrics in comparing all of the Southeast Conference schools, and we’ve also looked at the data from the 31 Land Grant Schools without medical schools. There’s one area, and many of the elements of the strategic plan impinge upon this, but the one element that we really have to keep constant in our mind is that our graduation rates are actually lower today than they were a decade ago. When I refer to graduation rates I’m talking about the six-year Federally registered graduation rates for students. We’re somewhere around 62 to 63 percent of our students graduate in six years and if we want to get up and be in the area where I think you’d be comfortable with and as we see the higher quality student come in we’re probably looking to 72–74 percent graduation rates, they are the kind of numbers we need to look at. I’m not asking anyone to go back and make sure every kid passes or any of those kind of things, so don’t leave here thinking that, but there’s something that we as a campus community need to think about. As we increase the quality of the student, what the expectation is, the people who evaluate us, is that the graduation rates will increase. So, we need to look at that and be conscience of it.
One of the areas that I’m excited about and there’s a lot of interest on campus is that of how do we create new revenue streams? It’s one of the elements within the strategic plan. [24:35] We have five budget sources that run a university. We get state money, that’s about a third of our money, we get tuition, that’s about a third of our money, then we get money from philanthropy, grants and contracts, and auxiliaries, that’s about another third of the money that runs the institution. A number of universities have begun to develop different revenue streams as a part of their auxiliary operations. So I share with you some the Harvard School of Business in the nineteen teens, I don’t remember the year started the publication, the Harvard Business Review, that’s reportedly a, 50 million dollars a year profit line to that one particular college of business. Johns Hopkins, for many years has focused on real estate development as a part of their auxiliary operations. It often exceeds what that institution received in terms of gifts on an annual basis. We have had these discussions, I don’t know if you’ve seen it in the newspaper, the University of Georgia had gone into the acquisition of television stations as revenue streams that mirror and match with their academic programs. There are a variety of those that we could talk about from continuing education programs to, I think I’d seen Mississippi State some years ago started a cemetery, they decided that would be a great way for a revenue stream, but there’s a lot of different ways out there. So we’re beginning to have a discussion, so long as it’s dignified, appropriate, and it makes sense for Auburn, we’ve got to look at some new revenue streams to do the kind of things that we need to do.
The final thing that I would mention is that in the first year there have been a number of resolutions that have come from the Senate. I can’t remember any that did not receive full administrative support. So I encourage all faculty– the Senate is very important, and for goodness sakes serve your time, be involved, be engaged, because this administration will certainly listen and I hope in all cases, but certainly in the vast majority of cases we will support the ideas the started the grassroots of the university that we know are important. I’d be happy to respond to questions that you might have.
Connor Bailey, from Ag Econ & Rural Sociology: Dr. Gogue, recently a department was pulled out of the College of Business I believe and is now reporting directly to the Provost’s Office, the Economics Department. Can you shed light on the reason why that was done and what future plans, if any, hold for that department?
Dr. Gogue: Connor, I think I’ll let the Provost respond when…Do you want to do it now or when you come up? Come on.
Dr. Heilman: Connor, thank you, an overview of the events that led to what you describe relate to the fact that within the department of the college of business there has been concerns and considerable disagreement and those concerns were brought to the attention of the Office of the Provost over a year ago. At that time I think we did make suggestions that there are grievance process that can be used, those we not used to a significant extent, and then I’d say probably also less than a year ago, the office of legal council became involved in that several faculty members in this department who had concerns, some of whom visited with Dr. Gogue to talk about their concerns with him retained outside council. So at that point the question came to the Provost’s Office in part I think because the issues involved were not resolved at the college level to try to develop an approach to allowing the department, providing and environment of which the department could enter into a cooling off period in order to have a better chance to determine its future direction and location in the University. [29:29] The issue of location of this department within the University has been an issue that has gone back a long ways, and in fact I was involved in some discussion of it when I was dean of Liberal Arts. The arrangement that we have reached is one that has been signed off on by the dean of the college involved, Paul Brobrowski, it does not involve removing the department from the college but does involve placing the department in a receivership with an acting department chair who’s reporting line is directly to the Provost. This is a temporary arrangement. We see it as a temporary arrangement to provide a cooling off period with the expectation that as developments warrant, which I hope will be sooner rather than later, the department as a whole can revisit the options that it may have within the College or more broadly within the University. I think it would be fair to say that in terms of the arrangement that has been put into place, faculty members who were not comfortable with being part of that arrangement have the opportunity and have been invited to say they would like to consider other options and will have the opportunity to do so.
Norbert Wilson Department Agricultural Economics & Rural Sociology: I represent a department that is directly affected by the actions that occur in the Department of Economics and there are other units on campus that are also affected. And because their classes are also part of the core curriculum, this uncertainty leaves those connected units sort of concerned. The question is, how are these other units going to be engaged in the discussions of the future of the department? Of course we can’t dictate that, but its future is affecting our future.
Dr Heilman: That is a very good and a fair question and I think that the answer that I have is to communicate those concerns to the Provost Office. Of course communications is obviously a two-way street and it is not our intention to remain in shells and wait for folks to come an talk to us, but all those concerns, since this department is reporting directly to the Provost’s Office I think can appropriately be directed to us and the more we know the earlier, the better we’ll be able to respond to it, it’s a very fair question. I might add in what was a lengthy process of developing and considering options for next steps and I’ve described for you the next step that we implemented, the department in question considered moves to two different colleges. The colleges in question decided that they were not going to do that at this time. That kind of discussion could be reopened down the road. I’m not suggesting any particular location, certainly not Agriculture. That is not what I am getting at, it is that a range of options were considered. You are pointing I think to very important consequences and steps that have been taken and we are sensitive to that and I would hope that your departmental administration and others would contact us and I do see that communication is a two way street. Thank you. 32:50
Bob Locy?: Other questions for John?
Dr. Heilman: Any other questions for me?
Bob Locy? The second part of our presentation in terms of information items for today is really an update on where we are in terms of implementation. And what we decided to do was to pick the academic areas of the University and ask the key administrators in charge of each of those academic areas to kind of summarize what’s going on in their academic area relative to the implementation of the strategic plan. I’d like to ask you to go easy on John Mason because he’s relatively new to his job, he’s been her for just a few weeks, so I think he’s very brave to even consider taking on a task like this after such a brief time. With that we’ll start these presentations with the overview from the Provost’s Office and I believe Dr. Heilman’s doing that.
Dr. Heilman: Thank you very much Bob and I will provide a brief overview. I might take just a moment to offer a personal thought. And it’s following up on what Dr. Gouge said a few moments ago, which was to emphasize the importance of faculty participation. We’ve got over twelve hundred faculty here at Auburn University, by some measures probably a lot more, and I’d like to say thank you to those few of you among that faculty who elected to attend this meeting today. I got here in 1973 and recall the general Faculty Meetings that took place in Langdon Hall, the first president that I served under was Harry Phillpott. Those meeting were packed and I think participation in the general Faculty Meetings as well as in the Senate Meetings is something that is tremendously important, and I hope the numbers of attendees of these meetings will swell in the future. Thank you for considering that.
The heart of the strategic plan, or a major part of the strategic plan consists of 35 one year goals, which our goals if we accomplish them we will be strengthening the University all across the board. Dr. Gouge has given and example of one of those goals which has already been accomplished and that is the recruitment of a member of the National Academy. Many of these 35 goals are academic in nature and to provide an overview of them I thought what we would do is not go through all 35 but rather to point out that they fall into the different academic mission areas of the University. And starting with that point I like to have some discussion of them and we’ll call for discussion of them by mission area. I’ll start with…, John Mason recently arrived Vice President for Research, who has plans for an organizational structure to strengthen our research capacity here at Auburn University. John is out and about a lot representing the institution, was not able to be at the October Senate Meeting and will not be able to be at the November Senate Meeting, but has proposals which are most likely to come forward as resolutions for consideration at the November Senate Meeting and he’ll talk about his ideas with us this afternoon to provide an opportunity for the faculty to hear what they are and ask any questions they have about what’s going to be proposed in November.
The research mission of the university is closely linked in the strategic plan to graduate studies, and then we’ll have a presentation by George Flowers on graduate studies, graduate instruction, and then following that, the undergraduate component of our instructional mission will be addressed by Dr. Linda Glaze, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies. The third leg of the land grant stool is Outreach, and will be addressed in remarks by Dr. Rhett Cook from the Office of University Outreach. I think it’s important for us to recall that Outreach is an important part but it is not all of the extension mission of the University, and the strategic plan does identify specific objectives for Extension, and Dr. Gains Smith recently recognized at the highest levels of National Award with Extension and very, very well deserved, I might say, will speak with us about that. Dr. Sharon Gabor who is Senior Associate Provost will have some concluding comments on just a little bit about oversight and implementation of the strategic plan. With that I’ll call first on John Mason. Since we’ve got subject presentations in different areas I think what we might do is if there are questions each of the presenters might call for any questions, discussion points at the conclusion of their remarks. Thank you. John welcome to Auburn
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John Mason: Thank you very much. I am in transition and my friends at Penn State thank me for leaving because they have a winning season and I arrive at Auburn, and there you have it. I’m a disciplined person and somewhat deliberate so my style is I’m going to tell you what I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you and hopefully tell you what I told you and if you have any questions, we’ll take them and if not, track me down and we can talk one on one, or come and visit me at my office. So there’s three things, I like to work in groups of three, I want to talk about the methods I am advocating to engage the faculty at large at Auburn in the research, and what some of you heard me talk about, a discovery mindset. I think the word discovery is a way to engage the broadest community in the academy. Sometimes the word research is quickly equated to contract research. So I think if we think of it in those terms, so if you pardon me if I use the word research it’s from a customary and traditional point of view, but if you translate in your mind, that indeed I’m talking about an element of scholarly discovery whereby faculty bring new knowledge to the undergraduate program, the graduate program, and the community at large. If indeed those are noteworthy to be brought into an outreach mindset or into scholarly publications, derivatives such as patens and what have you, that’s fantastic, but my goal, my articulation during the interview process was to be engaging from a scholarly mindset. Those of you who have looked at my background and the types of diversity I have worked in both the public and private sector and across the university structure should demonstrate that I’m trying to implement that which I have practiced in my own professional career.
The second items deals with a little bit of building the necessary staff infrastructure for the research enterprise. I want to bring you up to date on some of the interim steps I have taken, those that are in play and those that are most likely, I hope, will be outcomes of some key individual that’ll be working with me and with you.
Then the third element, which should be easy, I started last week to visit the various colleges and units. My expectation is to physically see, listen, and receive some briefings on the types of activities that are going on, but also have some first hand opportunity to just listen. I’m sure there’s issues that deal with matters like, implications, problems, policies, procedures, takes me forever to get a proposal out the door, so the spectrum and the range of the input certainly is quite broad. So hopefully those visits will allow me over the academic year, I don’t know if I’ll get to every single location, I’m going to do my best. But as the Provost has indicated I am going to continue some of my national exposure activities, so on behalf of Auburn I am probably in the Washington, D.C. areas and Alabama on a regular basis, and hoping to fly the Auburn Flag in all those locations with my representation on some of those national initiatives. I think it’s good to be present and accounted for. So with that, I do have a time line and let me go back now and deal with a few of those. First of all I’m on a mission to more fully engage the AU community. I guess that will be OK for Auburn University, my daughter graduated from American University so when I say AU I’m pretty safe in talking about that.
First of all the item that I’m trying to advocate from the University Senate perspective, and I’ve been working with the chair, Bob Locy, on this, some of you may have heard about it, is to create what I would refer to in my past life a standing committee on research in what we referred to as a faculty senate but I understand it is more appropriately referred to as the University Senate here at Auburn. The idea is that the community at large through its representation in the Senate activities would have a forum whereby my office and my assistant VPs can be sitting, listening, and learning, providing feedback, and observing some of the concerns that the faculty and the staff from at large would like to discuss. So hopefully that will be discussed and that will be one venue by which the University Senate can be interacting directly. My policy to be open as possible, the only exception if it’s something that is personal or confidential I don’t think that would be ready for prime time, so if it isn’t confidential and it isn’t personal I consider my role to be exchanging with you in real time as much information as I possibly can. [43:53]
The second venue would be the establishment of a university wide task force that would have limited life that would render a report that deals with some of the reflections about the implementation of the strategic plan elements that deal particularly with the scholarly, discoverable, and research activities. I would be looking for representation from various colleges, the different units, some of the administrative elements, both the business side, legal side, and some of the Technology Transfer issues. I’m using as an opportunity for me to hear, and hopefully I’ll make a presentation to the various constituencies, but certainly the agenda would also be driven by that group, so why I might offer some bullet items for them to reflect upon, it would be an agenda setting type of task force. Perhaps some of the things that have not been put in the strategic plan for some reason. It would be an opportunity to raise those issues. The issue there would be hopefully within a limited amount of time to have the group dialogue, do some internal assessment–if we have to get some external groups we can do that also, but it would be a finite life, something that would be an instrument that would provide input to me as a barometer of some of the concerns that are more formally presented in a written document versus just hearsay.
The third element is something that is implemented right now. That which we’re referring to is the University Research Council. The key membership of the University Research Council is the associate deans in the colleges that have responsibilities for research related activities. And again I recognize that that varies in its construct and its nature. In addition to those people being represented we will have people from the legislative part, again, legal, the accounting side, on a monthly basis we’ll be exchanging information on research opportunities, getting some feedback on some problems that might be occurring in research administration and an opportunity that every meeting, one unit will have the opportunity to do a presentation on the research activities going on in that college in that unit. I’m looking for sharing of information to increase some of our interdisciplinary activities. So that will be a formal body where we can be working on administrative matters, again, hoping from all information levels flow up, deal with the issues have the people assemble to try to at least hear them and then we deal with them in real time. So the first point is the methods, three opportunities to engage, the faculty and the staff at large at AU in the research enterprise looking toward the future. The second one I said was staffing issues and changes. Dr. Ralph Zee who was the interim or acting Vice President for Research has agreed to stay on with me for a little while. We purchased a portion of his time from the College of Engineering to help me bridge some of the activities that have already occurred until some point in time there’ll be an announcement for a search for and Associate Vice President for Research. The main attributes of that role would be to work directly with the faculty where we are trying to cross college lines, go after things like NFS Igerts, FTC, and other activities coming out of NIH, DOD, and DOE where you need collaboration and the proposals need to be assembled in an interdisciplinary fashion–it might require partnering and call sharing so that associate VP should be working with the college, with the research deans, with the faculty to go after those not only multi-disciplinary but truly interdisciplinary. It could be in research, the educational components and the outreach element. [47:56] So it’s not only let’s say in contract research, it will be multiple avenues for that type of activity.
The second thing that has happened, I’ve asked Dr. John Weete to play as acting assisting VP for Technology Transfer and Commercialization with the advent of the Research Foundation and some activities at the Research Park. I needed a bridge from the campus to the Park and to the Research Foundation and the establishment of a 501C3 to conduct some of the research related activities that are not easy to accommodate in the University contracting mechanisms, hiring people, some of the security interests, working with industry in a more hand and glove relationship, those are not often easy to do in quote campus academic environment. So we’ll be using that opportunity. And if at some point in time that grows and justifies an Assistant Vice President for Technology Transfer and Commercialization, I’ll be working with the president and others to make sure we can develop the necessary finances to support that position. Martha Taylor will continue as the Assistant Vice President for Sponsor Programs, I’m working with her to continue on the training aspects, such that we have knowledgeable people doing research administration at a more localized level. I come from an environment where research administration was highly decentralized with a very small, centralized operation. We have a rather centralized operation so I’m looking for some balance between what can be done at a local level versus central administration. But it’s always meeting compliance, that’s going to be the guiding principle, we cannot be wild and crazy about things, we’ll have to follow procedures, both state, federal, good academic policies and procedures to simple decentralize this to be closer to the department level may not be reasonable and prudent and that’s my usual test. If it sounds reasonable and it’s prudent we’ll talk about it. I’m not known for shooting from the hip, so we should be able to have some good dialogue, but I think it begins with adequate training of the personnel, then we talk about how to release some of the authority to a more localized level. [50:20]
The last aspect would be something that is perhaps my personal background in broader interdisciplinary initiatives. Doesn’t that sound administrative? My point is truly if you look at the landscape of the funding mechanisms throughout the United States, both public foundation and private. Truly if it’s not at the intersection of the disciplines, some of you may have heard the Medicci Effect, that’s exactly my philosophy is working at the crossroads of the disciplines. It is not in lieu of disciplinary activity by single PIs doing excellent in depth scholarly work, but I think Auburn has an opportunity to present itself on the national scene by looking at the crossroads of some of that disciplinary work. I’ve served on may committees in the NSF, evaluating proposals, I think I have a good feel for some of the key attributes of what some of those things can be and what the successes are and what some of the failures are. We’ll have to work on that.
The last component of that is to double back and say it’s not in on the research side, there could be educational programs with funding from foundations and some outreach initiatives that we’re working with, with some industries in the state. I’ve been visiting the Huntsville area already, a lot of our alumns up there can’t wait to have a AU sign hung up in some of the buildings that sounds great, my question is what does that mean? How do we engage in that in a very positive sense?
My last item then was the third item that just to recall I am working with the deans and some of the institute unit heads for my visits to all of the locations I’d like to gather information that we could use for good external communications, some good PR and likely bring those to other members on the campus and share with them some of the opportunities that I’ve learned in other locations and simply say “Can person A please go talk with person Z?” and maybe there’s a connection, so it’s a multifaceted goal. With that being said, to double back then I think my goal is to have a mechanism to engage the faculty and staff at large. Number two, putting together a leadership team in my office that I think will be responsive to the needs of Auburn University, and then number three to get my boots on the ground to be out there visiting with you all and then hopefully we’ll start to meet those objectives of the strategic plan that relate to research. With that I’ll take any comments, questions, concerns, issues? (pause) All right, you’ve got my number, you can find me, thank you very much, look forward to meeting you.
53:05
John thank you very much, and we’ll hear next from George Flowers , dean of the graduate school.
George Flowers: Just take one moment, we have a short PowerPoint slide that sums up most of what I’m going to say. [setting up]
As John has mentioned there are a number of points in the strategic plan that are related to the graduate school, and of course most of the points are tied directly in with Dr. Mason had to say with regard to the research enterprise and of course the graduate programs relate very closely to that. So I thought I would identify the points that are specifically related to the graduate school that are in the strategic plan and just give you some idea of what we’re doing with regard to those points. There are a number of points, the ones that are in bold are the points that are (except for the very last ones) the ones that specifically relate to the graduate school and the first one I’ve got is: grow the graduate student population to 5,000. You will notice that the other four that are listed all complement that growth, as long as we’re looking for growth is appropriate for Auburn University in terms of our mission and also expanding our program so that we’re not just getting numbers, but we’re identifying and bringing quality graduate students that help our research enterprise as well. If we’re growing our graduate student population to 5,000 we need to know where we start. I’ve got a brief chart over here on the right hand side that shows you a little bit about where we stand as far as the current growth over the last eight years we have grown in a fairly consistent way. You’ll notice that over the last three years or so we’ve been growing in a fairly linear fashion, we’re looking at a 125 or so graduate students per year over the last three years. That puts us at 3,519 students, first time we’ve been over 3500 I believe, if we’re going to go to 5,000 we’re going to need to accelerate that growth rate a bit. We need approximately 1,500 more students if we’re going to get there in the next few years we’re going to have to accelerate that growth rate a bit. So we’re looking at doing what we can to accelerate that growth rate. A big part of that is identifying areas of opportunity for growth. We’ve had a number of meetings with the different department heads, GPOs, associate deans, departmental people that are affiliated with the graduate programs with the idea of trying to identify areas for opportunity to see where there are potentials for growth, and also fits in very well with the first bullet item below the initial point which is conduct and review a situation assessment of our graduate programs. It all fits in with trying to identify appropriate areas for growth. We are also dramatically increasing our recruiting, both domestic and international students. We have a number of initiatives of which we have greatly expanded our domestic recruiting as well as targeted international recruiting; specific countries, specific universities, and we’ve already done a substantial amount of that this semester. We are also seeking to enhance our admissions processing. If we get students to apply, we’ve got to handle their admissions processing in an effective way, an efficient way, and we’ve restructured within the graduate school, both restructured in terms of staff and in terms of processing and policies as appropriate to try to make the admissions process more efficient. We are also seeking to enhance resources for graduate students, so we must be competitive if we’re going to bring in first quality graduate students. We have to be competitive in terms of the financial packages of the resources, the opportunities that we can provide them. And we’re looking at, with my associate deans, we’re looking at housing opportunities for graduate students, you know there really isn’t any at the present time on this campus. We’re looking at doing what we can in that regard expanding our research and travel grant program, scholarly activities for the students. We have a small incentive fellowship program we’re looking at expanding that as much as we can, and then health insurance and other opportunities.
Other opportunities as far as areas for growth include expanding our distance education offerings, we’re working with the distance education task force in that regard and also with some other groups on campus to indentify opportunities, increasing our graduate student population our international graduate student population that’s part of our recruiting effort as well as increased interaction with AUM. I’ve met with John Veras and a number of his staff with the goal of identifying opportunities for collaboration at the graduate level between Auburn main campus and AUM. So, that’s what we’re doing, that’s where we’re headed as far as graduate education, it’s what we’ve got started and where we’ll be headed in the next few months. Any questions?
Rik Blumenthal, Chemistry and Biochemistry: Last week the Senate unanimously approved this new program for certificates in the graduate school, I’m wondering how those students will be counted as additional graduate students, the ones who might enroll—we don’t even have programs for it, but the ones who essentially, eventually who will be enrolling in certificates, and I just wanted one answer in context of that. How do you see growth within the PhD Masters and then other graduate student population numbers? Do you see it uniform? Are you looking for more growth in one area than in another?
1:00:34
George Flowers: Ideally we’ll see most of our growth, and I’m putting the most emphasis on trying to grow our Doctorial and the Master’s programs are more traditional degree programs. As was mentioned, growth of the graduate programs are a key part of growing our research enterprise and our PhD students in particular and our Master’s students to some, but a lesser extent are critical components of that enterprise. So those are the two major areas these others, the certificate students or the distance programs they are something that we should be doing, it’s a major part of our mission, but in terms of the focus areas I think that the more traditional degree programs are the areas where there’s the most opportunity both for Auburn and our enhancement of our other activities.
Andrew Wohrley, Library: I didn’t think I was going to stand up here and ask a question but your comment about expanding international students leads me to talk about a situation that I had at the beginning of the semester that I didn’t know happened but apparently it happens more frequently than I thought. I had a student come to the library, international student, and wondering whom he could contact on campus for housing. It was one of those things where a couple thousand miles away you think something’s going to happen and basically he found out he was here and he really didn’t have any housing for a little under a week, but he was wondering how he could get out of this fix. Basically if you could work with campus housing sometime in the intersession, I think you could make a world of difference with some of the grad students who are looking for a place to stay. They think they have a lease and then they realize the lease is not quite consistent with their schedule, and they find themselves out of a shelter for a bit.
George Flowers: Are you talking about in between semesters?
Andrew Wohrley: I’m talking about basically I’m talking about the period of time beginning of August, when leases expire and when the school academic year begins. So when leases begin there has been at least one problem that I aware of, and I’ve been told it happens a lot more often and in particularly to international grad students. Who aren’t quite familiar with the lease process, and are a couple thousand miles away anyway and they get here and find the situation has changed. So if there can be a shelter–shelter is too grim a word– but if there can be a temporary housing somewhere in the dorms that could bridge that week long period (it would never be more than that) that would probably be appreciated by your international students. Thank you.
George Flowers: We will definitely follow up on that, I know that’ something also that the Office of International Education is very interested in. Any others? Thank you very much.
Linda Glaze: I’ve been asked to talk about what is going on in undergraduate education in terms of the strategic plan. Of the thirty-five goals for this year there are about ten that deal in some way or another with undergraduate education. And given the time I’m only going to talk about two. First of all this year we are working toward develop two general education courses completely online. During the past year my office has been working with the department of Math in their course redesign for one of our core courses which is Math 1120, Pre-calculus Algebra, we’ve been working with an national organization, called NCAT, it’s not the one that deals with asphalt it’s the National Center for Academic Transformation. The mission of this center is the use of technology to improve learning and also to reduce cost in this budget era, that’s very important. [1:05:05] Many of our peers, LSU, I know, University of Mississippi, Virginia Tech, have used this organization to revise their lower level math courses. Currently we have a pilot going on in Math 1120 whereby the students are working through their math problems in a computer lab environment with the help of graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants and tutors. By moving in that direction we are first redesigning the course and then that becomes…it’s very easy then to offer that course in a totally online format as an option.
The other initiative I want to talk to you about, are the learning communities. You may have seen a lot of information about that floating around. And first of all you would have this question as faculty, what is a learning community? Basically a learning community is a cohort of 20–25 students who are co-registered in three classes (core classes generally) so that they immediately develop a small group of students with whom there is commonality in terms of their academic interests. If they reside in the same residence hall we call them living-learning communities and as we are developing the village—which is if you’ve been out to the Credit Union you’ve seen all those new residence halls, that’s the village. That will be one area where we will be having learning communities. [1:06:40] The other two areas where we’ll be having living-learning communities is in the Quad Center or in the Quad area and also on the Hill Dorms. The important thing about learning communities is that national data has shown us that students who participate in learning communities, whether they are residential or non-residential make a positive transition from high school to college life and that affects our retention rates and obviously if we retain them the first year then hopefully they will graduate in the six years, less than six years. One thing that I would like to point out is the success of learning communities really is dependant upon the involvement of faculty. And when we started learning communities about ten years ago, at least the non-residential learning communities we started with one pilot in the College of Liberal Arts. Well we’ve moved now and in the fall we are going to have twenty-eight learning communities on campus, and that will involve some of our colleges, some of our colleges are involved in more than one.
We also have several that will be topical in terms of a couple faculty, you all know Sharon Roberts, from the writing initiative, and Gisela Buschle-Diller, they’ve been giving learning community on the topic of Earth Smart Sustainability over the last several years. We’re going to the College of Human Science and the College of Agriculture are going to partner in developing a learning community next year dealing with the War on Hunger so there are many themes that are very important. So those are basically two of the initiatives that we’re dealing with at undergraduate education and I’m wanted to point those out to you because they do involve, their success depends on faculty. So if there is anyone who is interested in finding out more please contact me and I will put you in contact with the appropriate people. Thank you.
David Carter, from the department of History: Two things and I guess related. Tony Cary, before he left Auburn, and I worked last year with living and learning communities and had a really remarkable year in some ways and a trying year in other ways. I’m a huge fan of the program and got to talk with Katherine Jarvis a lot, went to a workshop with an individual from Florida State who’s done a lot of work with these down there and the one thing that I think everyone’s aware of on your side is that I think a lot of faculty would be very keen to be more involved with these if there’s more than that selfless incentive. I think a lot of the faculty that are doing this perennially are amazing, but I know from my standpoint a word, the attrition factor, would be mighty high given how it is currently structured, and there may be different departments and colleges that are doing release time and more lucrative arrangements, but I think the program has a lot better chance of success if we can do everything within our power to try to make it something that faculty can both feel good about doing but also not feel potentially exploited.
Linda Glaze: I agree with you totally. In terms of looking at promoting potential incentives for faculty members one of the things when we first started, tried our first really residence living-learning community I volunteered to be the instructor for the living learning community for Liberal Arts and the first thing I realized was that our offices need to provide, not only those incentives but also other types of support and we have gone on and hired a full-time person to provide that help for faculty. It’s a long way but that is very important, I agree with you.
Someone: I’m not quite sure how you run the program here. One of my former employers which had the house system, they hired graduate students to be part of the living learning community, and I didn’t know whether you had considered incorporating these enormous numbers of graduate students that we will soon have into this freshman and sophomore retention program. I’m kind of iffy about the enormous numbers of graduate students, because I’ve been here a little over twenty-five years and that was the first strategic plan I was aware was to increase graduate students to 5,000. It seems to me that if you are talking about a living learning community you do need membership that is already a little further up the line but maybe not at the faculty level.
Linda Glaze: Um Hum, I will share that with the individuals who are in charge of that program. Any other questions or comments? Thank you. [1:11:56]
Bob Locy: Thank you very much, Linda Glaze.
Dr. Rhett Cook: Dr. Locy, members of the Senate, thank you for allowing me a few moments to update you on University Outreach as it relates to the strategic plan and where we’re going. I think as has it’s been expressed several times here today that the faculty are the key ingredient in terms of having being able to successfully implement the strategic plan. With that said I would like to let you all know that within university outreach we have a search underway for a director of faculty engagement and program development. This person will be responsible for connecting your expertise to the opportunities and needs, whether that be government, industry, business, or non-governmental agencies. We think that there are a lot of opportunities across the state and more specifically along the I-85 corridor, and we would like to be able to connect your expertise with these opportunities. In addition to that, this person will also continue to be an advocate and work with faculty members who are pursuing P&T under the Outreach rubic.
The next thing I would like to touch on would be, one of the goals specifically says that we want to move forward with strengthening our continuing education programs. Over the last couple of months I’ve been spending some time with Dr. Ralph Elliot, who was the former vice provost of continuing studies and professor of economics at Clemson University. Taking a look at continuing studies here at Auburn University there are now offerings in nine certificate based programs. I have hired Ralph as a consultant. He will be working with me, and my directors at University Outreach over the next ten months to take a look at how we’re advancing non-credit programs here at Auburn University. Ralph, I should also note is a leader in continuing studies and has been for some 20 plus years both nationally and internationally so we’re very excited to have him on campus here to work with us on this.
The third thing that I would like to make mention of, and this has been mentioned as well, is the focus on distance education. As you all have heard that there is a distance education task force that has been convened by the Provost’s Office, my director of distance learning, Monica Datour, is playing an active role in that task force. She’s working with other task force members to look at ways of expanding our distance education offerings here university wide. I think some of the recommendations that are going to come from this task force should be well received by you all, and it will position us to continue to grow many of our for credit programs via distance education. [1:14:31] Also we have a focus within the strategic plan on student service, service learning I should say. For many years and many of you probably know that university outreach has supported a number of student engagement and service type of activities and we will continue to do that. But over about the last year and a half or so I’ve actually charged one of my directors, Ralph Foster who’s a director of outreach and program certification for developing a sort of strategy for university outreach in terms of how we would approach student engagement here on campus. I’m happy to note that a task force for student engagement has been formed and outreach is also at the table of that task force. We think that we’ve been actively involved in many of our student engagement initiatives here on campus and we think we have a lot to offer in terms of how we are going to continue to try to engage all of our students in some sort of service activities. [1:15:27]
The last thing I would like to note here is one of the goals I mentioned, the university should serve as a service, or better yet to expand our services to our governmental agencies our state agencies. We are working closely with the Auburn Montgomery Campus, I admit with Katherine Jackson who oversees outreach down at Auburn Montgomery and we’re in a process of developing a survey instrument where we would survey all of our state agencies and get a sense of what are their needs? What are the opportunities and how we can continue to expand our technical assistance and training opportunities with the state agencies. We anticipate this survey being completed by the end of the year and hopefully it being distributed by early next year. We will use these results to continue to drive the focus of University Outreach by way of our Center for Governmental Services and other training opportunities that are out there by way of state agencies. Long and short I think that in terms of outreach as it relates to the strategic plan, we’ve made some good steps in moving forward to address some of the specific goals there, as you all know many of them are anticipated for rollout in fall of 2009 and I think we are well on our way of being able to accomplish those goals. I’d be more than happy to take any questions that you all have. (pause) Thank you.
[1: 16:47]
Bob Locy: Rick, Thank you very much. Gains Smith will talk a bit about the extension system of the strategic plan.
Gains Smith: Thank you for the opportunity to update you on our involvement in the strategic plan. In keeping with John Mason’s theme earlier of groups of three, we are directly involved in three of those that initially and we’ve added another one already that I’ll talk to you very briefly about. The first one is one that also Linda Glaze had mentioned earlier where she talked about the learning communities, there is another component of that same goal out there dealing with service learning. The idea there is the students that are not involved in one of the learning communities here would be involved in some of the service learning activities in this area or out across the state, and there in lies our involvement. We are participants in the design team of the steering committee that’s already put together that group has come together several times and it’s and active committee that we are moving forward on gathering information from the various universities across the country that have already been involved in that. Gathering information from the units on the campus here that are already involved in that process. [1:18:06] We also made a visit to our sister university in Cooperative Extension Alabama Indian University. Where a unique feature there is that the service learning program for their entire university is centered and operated out of Cooperative Extension up there, so we’ve had an opportunity to learn that. Our specific involvement beyond the planning and design of it is that we will offer through our programs and staff out across the state a suite of service learning activities for the students out there that will be in County Extension Offices across the state that may be involved in some of our workshops our seminars, whatever those programs are. Some of the media activities that we do and we are putting emphasis now on some of our virtual learning activities through the web based techniques. They will have opportunity to be involved in that. 4H activities, is volunteers at the local level all the way up to the state level at the 4H Center which is emphasizing environmental education at that location now. We have a number regional research and extension centers across the state that will be with ag, forestry, natural resources, marine sciences, all those areas that we think will be attractive to the students coming in. There’s an opportunity in our foods and nutrition program. These are just as they are, human nutrition, educational programs that work in underserved communities out there where the need is great, all the way over to the food service establishments in the state. We’re in the process of training all those guys that handle your Big Macs all the way to up the line to other type food service venues out across the state. They have to meet a certain level of training in the near future and we’re working with that. Also someone earlier mentioned the War on Hunger, through our 4H Program we will be involved there. The community values to leadership development program through the economic development and community development initiative that we share with University Outreach, they identified leadership development at the local level is one of the highest needs for that local rule and economic development in those communities. And there will be some others, we’ll be doing that here in the state through our County Extension Offices we’ve already made contact with counterparts in the other states across the particularly the southern region where many of our out of state students come from. We in Cooperative Extension will also be involved in the design and to some degree the oversight for the IT function of recording and monitoring and tracking the data that’s going to have to be done on the systems out there.
The second goal that we’re involved with is the one on distance education. I think George mentioned it earlier. The first part of that is to have an online Master’s Degree Program completely online. That is happening, there is and adult, a Master’s Degree in adult education with the emphasis in the Extension education ongoing right now, in fact that class is probably meeting right now, as a matter of fact. It started this fall semester and has 19 students in it. We expect to enroll another 10 or so come the spring term and it’s being delivered, it’s originated here on campus from 112 over in Duncan Hall in our building to six different locations out across the state and we have the capacity to expand that as the need and opportunity occurs. The county extension office as far as the other distance education opportunities serve as potential delivery sights for a number of these other programs that are to be offered as they get further down the road. As a mater of fact our extension IT folks are already talking to the folks over in COSAM, to one of the faculty members over there about using those sites as a delivery location out there in the state.
[1:22:19]
The third area is English as a second language through our county extension offices out across the state. The idea there is that Auburn University, Alabama A&M University, Cooperative Extension, needs to reach out to these communities in this new segment of our population, I said new I should say growing segment of our population and bring them in to our activities here in some way. The ideas is that we will offer them as an opportunity in our County Extension Offices, get the there, see what we’re doing, so they will understand and connect to the University setting in doing that. We in Extension have made that a part of our larger effort on a multicultural initiative to look at all the other areas that we need to and making sure we deliver our programs to the entire citizenry of the state. We do have steering committee in place specifically on the English is second language in our County Extension Offices. We’re in the process of putting in pilot sites in at least nine of our county extension office out across the state. We’ll use those to identify the best practices that are out there drawing what’s going on in other states and other organizations as well as what we learn from that and then build a program based on those experiences. We already have on hand the equipment to do that. The location the nice locations will be selected by the end of the month. We are also in the process when we get into this looking to type the licenses that are required from what ever program we choose to offer English as a Second Language through that.
Those were the three we were initially asked to be involved with, we’ve already expended those efforts and involved the one year goals and example is a collaboration between Auburn and Auburn Montgomery.
We’re in conversation and we’ll follow up very soon with John Varas and Katherine Jackson over on that campus to deliver a state wide training through our county extension offices for the local judicial officials out there, this is state wide initiative that came through the supreme court justice and wanted to use the county extension offices which were happy to do in doing so. That’s our involvement we hope to continue to grow that, get our offices more closely affiliated and associated with the faculty here on this campus as well as that at A&M. And if any of you as faculty members or in your departments see that opportunity please feel free to give us a call. We’ll be very receptive to those conversations. Any Questions? Thank you.
Bob Locy: Gains thank you very much. Sharon Gabor will speak to us about the oversight recommendation process.
Sharon Gabor: I’m going to wrap up with just three main points. The first one is that as you may know a number of task forces have been developed in order to gather information and make recommendations that are associated with various element of the strategic plan. So if you go to the provost office web site, down, you can see where is says strategic plan ad hoc task forces (we will pull this up) So if you are interested in finding out about the task forces that have been developed, the information is on the Web site you can go to the Provost’s Office Web page, You see there’s a strategy review council, the general ed. task force, honors task force, improved graduation rates committee, international skills task force, distance education task force, service learning committee, and the writing initiative task force. So I encourage you to take a look and as we circle back, you have that information and anytime you have suggestions in any of those areas, certainly go to the Web page , you can talk to the chair, you can talk to the Provost’s Office and get that information to the chairs of those task force
The second point I was going to make is that in chapter 5 of the strategic plan it calls for the strategy review council. So as you read through it you’ll see there is a strategy review council that is chaired by the Provost and as you go through those committees there’s a trustee representative, a dean representative, a faculty representative, a Senate representative, a student representative, alumni association etc. This committee did meet at the end of September in order to be able to provide a report to the President who will make and update at the next Board of Trustees meeting. Essentially because this plan was developed in June, as you know we have a limited amount of progress in this time period, but the committee did make a few recommendations in general dealing with metrics associated with the plan. Either that the requests that there be specific metrics or that we define time periods, this sort of thing. So that report is going forward to the President and he’ll use that as a reference associated with his presentation to the Board on progress toward the strategic plan.
The final thing I’ll point out is that we’ve sought faculty input associated with the task forces, that there’s faculty representation on the strategy review council. We want your input, so anytime that you do have input associated with any of the strategic plan elements, certainly feel free to notify someone on one of the task forces–which the information is available–the Provost’s Office, the President, the Senate Leadership, that we are continuing to revise the strategic plan, it is a living document, each year it will be updated. And we do want that feedback in order to effectively revise and update it. I think at this point the last item on the agenda was questions and answers for anybody, so I’ll let Bob then take over.
Bob Locy: Are there any questions that have not already been addressed? Seeing none, let’s progress to any unfinished business of the faculty. Seeing none of that, any new business? Seeing none of that, adjournment is the next item on the agenda. Thank you all for your time and attention and I’ll look forward to seeing you in the spring, in March.