May 5, 2009
University Senate Meeting –Transcription

Kathryn Flynn, chair: I’d like to call to order the University’s regular Senate Meeting. The first order of business is approval of the minutes of the April 7 Senate Meeting, I think all the senators were sent a link to these minutes. I’d like to call for approval of minutes. We have a second. All in favor of approving the minutes say aye.

Group: Aye.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Those opposed? (pause) Okay the minutes of the April 7 meeting are approved without dissent. We had a special called meeting last Tuesday. Dennis DeVries posted those minutes and sent you a link for minutes for April 28. I’d like to call for approval for the minutes of the April 28 meeting. Second? We have a second. All in favor say aye.

Group: Aye.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Those opposed? (no opposition)

Okay, the next order of business I’d like to invite Dr. Gogue to come forward to make his comments.

Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you. I just have a few comments I wanted to share with you today. Number one, the Faculty/Staff Campaign concluded in the last week or so, and the numbers were the highest ever for Auburn Faculty and Staff in terms of giving. I think it was 63 percent was the rough number. And I would just say that in tough economic times it makes you sit back and think a little bit that faculty and staff still tried to provide participation to help those within our community.

Second thing I was to mention and Kathryn just mentioned it. I want to thank you for your support last week on the Tuition Resolution that came about. I strongly appreciate that and from what I understand the students also passed one, but we greatly appreciate that.

I want to also mention that the discussions that have been going on with the emergency management groups that have tried to address the H1N1 virus concern within the area, lot of faculty involvement, most appreciative of that effort. We’ve gotten a lot of comment back from families and from others that have compared your response and the availability of information with other institutions. And it certainly has been a positive sort of response.

I want to mention very briefly an opportunity that we just learned about in the last 24 hours. I’ll share with you a little of this information, if it perks your interest please come see me, please let’s sit down and talk a little bit. The U.S. State Department is interested and will limit to about three universities, involvement in Iraq, the northern part of Iraq and the area occupied by the Kurds at this point.  One institution that we know of will be involved, Texas A&M. They are looking for two others that may have interest if that’s the sort of thing that would appeal to you, let us know. Obviously we’re not going to commit the institution unless there’s interest by faculty and various areas. Their interest will be in the business areas; construction, architecture fields, and in the foods related areas. So I want to mention that.

At graduation this morning at the Pharmacy School this afternoon I think it’s in the College of Veterinary Medicine obviously this Saturday about 32 hundred students will graduate. I want to thank the faculty for your work and your efforts certainly in the past year and for four or five or six years for many of those students that will walk across the stage on Saturday. [4:04]

Final thing I want to mention is the educational component of the budget was signed by the governor, yesterday I believe it was, and the amount of cut is about 3.3 percent. That is much more favorable than we thought going into the legislative session. [4:26] I think our planning, Don, was as high as ten percent cut so it ended being about a third of what our worse case scenario was. The other piece of good news as part of the budget is that in the stabilization money, the stimulus bills that were provided to each state, Auburn received over and above 25 million dollars of additional money. So those in our judgment are pretty good news on a very difficult budget situation. I’d be happy to respond to questions that you might have.  Thank you.
[5:08]

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue. I have a few comments and then we’ll move on to the body of the agenda. We should know sometime later today whether the PAC legislation dealing with the tuition will make it out of committee and into the legislature. From what I understand (I’m not a legislative person, but) apparently today’s the last day where bills can leave the committee and go to the senate without, I think it’s a unanimous vote, so if it doesn’t make it out today it probably won’t this session.

I’d like to mention you got an e-mail from Dennis DeVries asking for additional volunteers for Senate and University Committees. I think maybe just University right now. He’s gotten pretty good response for that. I’d like to thank you and your constituents for responding. The Rules Committee is busy working to develop nominations for University Committees to go to Dr. Gogue and also filling vacancies on Senate Committees. A lot of these committees do a great deal of work on campus and it’s rally much easier to staff the committees when we have the type of volunteering we’ve had this year, which is in my experience a real improvement over what’s happened in past years. So I’d really like to thank all of you and your constituents for being willing to volunteer. I’d like to mention that the Rules committee does try hard to match people to committees that they volunteer for. We sometimes have to seek additional volunteers if we don’t have enough volunteers of if the people who volunteer don’t fit the specific requirements of committees. We try to make the committees diverse for both ethnically in terms of the discipline area, gender, those types of things. And so those are considerations when we do fill those committees.

Today we’re going to hear two brief reports from two more of the strategic task forces and in addition we’ll have the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee Report. For the task force reports I’d encourage all of you to take the time to visit the Provost’s Web site if you’d like more detail or information. What’s coming to you today are information reports only. The appropriate committees will be receiving recommendations from these reports and over the next few months the Senate will again be provided again with further information, the potential for voting on specific recommendations to see whether they are adopted or not.

The final report from the Service Learning Task Force will most likely be made in June. We have to work out the schedule to make sure that’s true, but I think that’s probably likely. I’d also like to remind you that we have two meetings this summer, we will have a June and a July Senate meeting. I know some of you are nine-month if you are not able to attend if you could send a substitute that would be great. We’ll try not to do anything too substantive in the summer so that people miss it but sometimes things pop up and you deal with them when you deal with them. [8:36] But we will try to make sure anything that affects the majority of faculty is dealt with in a meeting in which most people are able to attend. With that I’d like to invite Dennis DeVries forward for election of new Rules Committee members.

Dennis DeVries, secretary: Good afternoon. At last month’s regular Senate meeting we had nominations of three individuals for Rules Committee: James Goldstein from English, Larry Teeter from Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Gwyneth Thomas from Polymer and Fiber Engineering. And at this point I guess we need to open the floor if there are any additional nominations. (pause)

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Okay, if there are no nominations I would like to entertain a motion that nominations be closed and the three nominees be elected by acclamation. A second. Great. All in favor?

Group: Aye

Kathryn Flynn, chair: (Laughter) Sorry, too many finals this week. (Laughter) All opposed? (quiet) Great thank you, and congratulations to the three new Rules Committee members. Your terms will begin in August so you actually miss the work were doing right now.

We’ll move on now to the information items on the agenda. The first item is a report from the Distance Education Task Force. At this time I’d like to invite Dean Bennett, who chaired the task force and is also Dean of Architecture, Design, and Construction. [10:39]

Dean Bennett, Distance Ed chair and is also Dean of Architecture, Design, and Construction: While he’s getting the PowerPoint up just let me say that it’s a pleasure to be back with you. I’ve been at Auburn nine years and six of those years I’ve been employed at the Senate, the President gave me a year off, but I’m back here anyway. What you’ll see today is really the Readers Digest version of a very complex set of recommendations that we made to the Provost, and in ten minutes it’s just not possible to give you a lot of depth with it but I’ll do my best and if you have any questions I’ll certainly try to answer those. Linda Glaze is here as a member of the Task Force. She’s promised to help if there’re things I can’t answer.

John Heilman appointed this Task Force back in April of 2008 and we met and finally got our recommendations to Provost Mazey in February of this year. So the Task Force met for quite a while. It was made up of about 16 members each of which was represented various Distance Ed constituents across the campus so I think everybody that had anything to do with Distance Education was represented on the Task Force. In general, what John Heilman basically asked us to do was to develop recommendations to the Provost to expand Distance Education on the campus, and that was really our charge. From that we developed some secondary goals, which included expanding non-degree non-credit course offerings for personal and professional development across the campus for non-degree course offerings. To expand offering for degree seeking undergraduate students, that really came from President Gogue and it related to the fact that many students in the core curriculum can’t get the courses they need and so it delays their graduation. And his charge to us was to try to deal with that through Distance Ed and a second part of that is just because the world is changing there’s a strong belief by the President and the Task Force as well that every Auburn Student should have some exposure to Distance format of learning. Primarily, when the get out of school and graduate, that’s the kind of learning they’re going to be involved in in their jobs, so that was certainly important.

Also we want to expand the offerings for graduate and professional degree students, to make recommendations regarding financial and policy frameworks to support new offerings, and then finally to recommend improvements to enhance or increase the marketing and publicity for Distance Ed at Auburn. If you look at our peers we’re offering probably only about 25 percent of the number of distance courses that are being offered by universities like Auburn.

The first thing we did was to develop a glossary of terms. I’ve not put that on the PowerPoint, but please refer to that if you’d like to at the Provost’s Web site where the report is posted. Because when we talk about Distance everybody has a set of terms and we found out that on the Task Force very quickly that we’d be using the same term and talking about different things, so we first had to get to that point before we could move forward. And then the second thing we did was to develop and inventory of all Distance Ed courses that are now being offered at Auburn. We conducted a review of educational offerings, Distance Ed offerings, at peer institutions best practices if you will across the country and then finally we looked at what the constraints were to changing the rules here at Auburn. What kind problems we would run into if we wanted to expand different Distance Education. And from that background, that took basically all summer, from that background we then used the fall to try to develop the recommendations.

That’s rather small and I apologize for that, but let me just try to go over those with you relative to policy changes and policy recommendations. For those disciplines where tuition rates cannot cover the required cost we recommend that those costs be covered centrally, now that didn’t mean that any unit or any department could offer Distance Ed, but if it’s a need course that deemed by the Provost that Auburn needs to offer through Distance and there are not the resources to offer it, then we felt the only way to have that done was to cover those centrally.

We also said that the University really needs to review the general fund distribution of those units that participate in Distance Ed, and there I am talking about, students with disabilities, the library, all those kind of contributing units to Distance Education.

Then thirdly, if we move into Distance Ed in a big way the obviously we’ve got to provide some sort of campus facility where that production can occur. It needs to be centrally located. And this is a cost and expense that will most likely very difficult to do certainly in these kind of economic times, but if we’re to do this and make it available to everyone then there’s got to be production facilities, production staff where that can occur on campus and available to all units. Then finally we said that, well not finally. Financial support should be provided to the office of Distance Learning and Outreach Technology to insure that we can market Distance Education appropriately for the campus.

And then finally, if Distance Ed does begin to take hold and it begins to be a meaningful component of our offerings, that we have to have some sort of assessment that would kind of parallel classroom assessment so we could understand, Is distance Ed working for us, what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses, and where should changes be made particularly when compared to classroom offerings. It may be, if fact we found from many institutions that the student learning was actually better in a distance format because they could go at their own pace review things more easily and so forth.

Now relative to tuition, and I can be more specific in a Q&A with you if you’d like, but we basically said that we recommend that students will be subject to set tuition rates that are made by the offering unit if they are doing it on a per profit basis, for example, the College of Business has an Executive MBA program. The market basically determines what kind of tuition rate they can offer. [17:25] On the other hand, if they’re on campus students then they would pay the tuition based on their status, in other words, if they are an on campus student we recommend they pay the same tuition that any on campus student pays. However if they are off campus and out of state they would pay an out of resident rate. [17:46] So a range of rates based on basically on student status. It’s based on resident, non-resident, non-degree seeking, degree seeking, undergraduate, and graduate status. Relative to procedural recommendations, we recommended first that graduate first degree programs and certificate programs, that we use existing graduate courses and programs and they continue to offer those courses as they have been, and that we said that all regularly admitted graduate students would be eligible to take distance educations courses that are offered, and that off campus non-degree, excuse me off campus non-degree seeking students must meet Auburn’s admissions requirement. So we’re basically saying that anyone that’s taking a Distance Ed course on the campus that moves toward a degree must meet Auburn’s minimum degree standards whether they are graduate or undergraduate.

Now relative to funding we’re recommending that the Office of the Provost, the graduate school the college, schools and departments along with the Office of Distance Learning and Outreach Technology identify those course that are need to be taught relative to blocking courses in the core or other needed courses that need to be taught or there’s a market for Distance Education. For those courses that are done that way we’re suggesting the start up funds need to be developed to actually get those courses online. Because there are all sorts of expenses associated with not just the production cost but also the amount of time that it takes to prepare Distance courses is probably three to four times the amount it would take to deliver an on campus course, so there are obviously some costs there.

Now as I said the Distance Ed Task Force really represented every constituent on the campus and so there was, if you will, there was a lot of kind of turf protection, if you will, so what we…the kind of compromise we reached to get agreement was a five tier revenue sharing plan where we basically said those units that are now offering Distance Ed on the campus for profit can continue to do that. And there would be a tier all the way from where the unit does 90 percent of the work and gets 90 percent of the profit all the way down to where 90 percent of the risk, if you will, is born by the central administration and if that occurs then the central administration keeps 90 percent of the profit, and ten percent goes to the unit so there are five tiers that basically really relate to the amount of risk you are willing to take based on the amount of return that you want to try to achieve. So an entrepreneurial approach if you will. That came from Penn State, Dr. Mason is familiar with that and I think from his perspective it works there particularly if you are in an institution that does not have a lot of funds to fund it, that’s one way to get it going.

Relative to, and I know you will be interested in this, relative to faculty compensation, what we are recommending here is that the offering unit will determine the faculty rate., the negotiation with the faculty, and it would  depend on whether it’s a core development course or for profit course and just exactly how that is set up for example; we’re doing a Distance course in our department or school of building science this summer and we have negotiated with the faculty both course delivery fee they would receive plus a preparation fee, and that was based on the amount of profit or amount of income we could get and what we could afford to pay. So we’re really saying that ought to be between the individual faculty unit and their department. And then we also have [21:51] said that subject to approval by the dean or the provost the offering unit will determine whether the faculty be compensated for teaching distance courses on a per course basis, on a per student enrollment per course basis, or as part of their actual course load. So again that’s a negotiation between the faculty and the department head based on what their normal teaching load would be and whether they are teaching as an off load or an on load situation and again what ever amount that would be would be negotiated between the department and the participating faculty member with approval by the dean and provost. So that’s kind of a quick down and dirty of what  we did an I’ll be  more than happy to try to answer any questions if you have any.

David Carter, department of History, senator:  This isn’t so much a question as just a comment. I’m struck by the fact that we are participating in Distance Learning less assertively than other peer institutions, and I think, I’m pleased about that. Um, I think a number of us in this room if we look back at our own educational odysseys and I imagine how they might have transpired differently had more of it been conducted through Distance Learning. I think my own odyssey would have been impoverished, so I’d like to commend the Task Force for all the work that it’s done, but to urge that we continue to take a very measured and methodical and go slow approach. I think as I read about technologies like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, I have a fantasy that in ten or fifteen years Distance Ed in some fashion may have turned out to be something of a fad and I know that Distance Ed, I’ve locked it into a box and probably not given it the capabilities that it has but I just want to stress that to a large number of faculty members there’s still no replacement for face-to-face constant interaction that’s not conducted over wires. And the last thing I’d like to say is that also from a faculty standpoint there may be some grave concerns about what this might mean for faculty long term, both in terms of workload and compensation, but also in terms of our central place in the institution, that anytime we move to a Distance Education model to me there always is a specter of potential for outsourcing and other things, so a greater use of contingent faculty and other things so I imagine the Task Force is weighing all of those variables carefully, but again I thank the committee for the work of the Task Force but would ask that we continue on this sort of pace of looking at all of the possibilities. Thank you.

Dean Bennett: Thank you very much.

Charles Mitchell, senator from the department of agronomy & soils: Our department has been very interested in developing courses in Distance Education for a number of times we’ve seen some of our sister institutions able to attract a large number of students, particularly graduate students that we have missed out on that opportunity because we did not have a strong program in the agricultural sciences. Dr. Dennis Shannon was represented our interest on the Task Force and he obviously had some concerns.

Dean Bennett: He did in fact he abstained, he did not vote on the final recommendation.

Charles Mitchell: He said, he e-mailed to all of the members of our department and I told our department about these concerns and I got a consensus of agreement with what Dr. Shannon wrote and because I may get it wrong if I try to explain it I’ll just read you his words.
“I want you to know that I refuse to vote for those recommendations, primarily because of the revenue sharing agreement, which is the second to last slide in the PowerPoint presentation that is posted on the Web site. This revenue proposal was adopted with little discussion or time to analyze it, but the terms of proposal are unacceptable in my view. In essence it would mean that even though we are investing a considerable amount of money on developing courses, we would give up half of the revenue and our ability to adequately administer and grow the program. This proposal in my view would force departments to either fund all of the cost of developing and offering the Distance Education courses independent of the Distance Learning and Outreach Technology (DLOT) as Business and Engineering currently do or totally dependent upon DLOT and the central administration to fund distance education and in return receive very little revenue for the effort. Since most departments can not afford the support staff needed to do distance education independently, I believe this recommendation will stifle initiative, except for those courses that the Provost’s Office wants developed.
The current arrangement that we have with DLOT is in my view a much better model for developing distance education programs across campus.”

Another one of his concerns was on, I’ll continue to read.
“Another recommendation of the Task Force which is not shown in the slides was that full time on campus undergraduate students would not pay more to take distance education courses.”

I believe you mentioned this (to Dean Bennett).

Dean Bennett: I did.

Charles Mitchell: (continues reading) “I argued without success that we could not make this recommendation without also discussing revenue sharing on tuition paid by these students. Unless there is a change in revenue sharing of existing tuition dollars offering units will have no way to recover the costs associated with offering distance education courses.”

Dean Bennett: We discussed that at length, the last thing you mentioned, but we didn’t see how in all fairness, a fully register student is on campus and cannot get say a history course and needs to take that course, how you could charge them extra to take it in distance when they couldn’t get it in the classroom. That was our concern there. I didn’t understand his first comment because on the level five where you said it’s a fifty-percent, it’s just not true. What level five says is, again I encourage you to look at the full report, but the offering unit assumes all financial risk and guaranties recovery cost, for that the offering unit receives 90 percent of the revenue. It’s not 50 percent it’s 90 percent. So I’m not sure where Dennis got that. I will assure you, Dennis’s voice was heard in the committee and continues to be heard.

Bob Voitle, senator from poultry science: I’m glad you clarified that because it wasn’t clear to me that you were going to have that differences in sharing of revenue.

Dean Bennett: The more the risk the more the revenue.

Bob Voitle: Right, there several units on campus, the College of Business, Pharmacy, Vet Medicine, Agriculture, and I’m sure there’s more out there that have gone forward and developed these courses at their own cost and looking at the fact that the revenue would help offset that as a result of that. What I understand is you plan on sharing.

Dean Bennett: We’ve recommended to the Provost, I’m not sure what will eventually happen, but we basically had five levels. The first level is, let’s use the College of Business, if they’re offering Distance Ed in their Executive MBA, they can continue just as they’ve done, there’d be no change. Let’s say that your college wants to offer a course, but you don’t have the revenue and the Provost approves that course, then the central administration would assume, we’re recommending 90 percent of the cost, you’d assume ten percent and any benefits from that course, you get ten percent of the profit. So it moves in a five-tier situation all the way to a level five where the offering unit assumes all the financial risk and all the recovery cost and for that they get 90 percent of the revenue. Now that’s for a series of courses that you want to offer yourself, if it’s a course that is deemed important to the university to offer by Distance then we’re recommending that all of those costs be board centrally.
 
Bob Voitle: This is something that we’re looking into because poultry faculties across the country are getting smaller and smaller and we’re thinking about coming up with course that can be shared with other universities around.

Dean Bennett: And the recommendations encourage those kinds of collaborations.

Bob Voitle: Thank you.

Guy Rohrbaugh, senator from philosophy: I was wondering if you could just… your summary of the report didn’t draw much distinction between sort of what I would call traditional distance learning involving video cameras and shared classrooms and new-fangled on-line learning and…Maybe what I’m asking is this all now just one in the same, it’s all distance learning and that’s what we

Dean Bennett: The Distance Learning encompasses all that from the traditional video streaming to Web based courses to e-mail interaction to a blend where you are on campus part of the time and you are doing part of the course in a distance format.


Guy Rohrbaugh: So it’s just one set of recommendations and goals for the whole shebang?

Dean Bennett: Right, so it will kind of be up to the Provost and the offering unit relative to what format it eventually took. Gosh, I was afraid Rik would get to the mic. (laughter) Can I sit down now?

I think Rik’s giving me the floor first. Thank you Rik, Tony Moss, biological sciences: I was wondering what the projected faculty teaching effort would be, considered to be for this kind of teaching versus classroom teaching across the entire university because it has to be, it seems to me, a standard set and then of course, work does have to be graded, it is delivered somewhat differently, but might require at least as much contact time.

Dean Bennett: Our research showed that it require substantially more work, at least twice as much maybe as much as three times, that’s why we said it really needs to be negotiated between the faculty and department relative to that teaching load. Some universities actually allow it to be done on an off load as an overload as a way for faculty to make extra income, but with full knowledge that it is a whole lot of work.

Tony Moss: Yeah, I would expect. So there’s no framework that’s been projected.

Dean Bennett: No, not as yet.

Tony Moss: Thank you.

Rick Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: I just wanted to agree with what I think Dr. Carter said, from English. I think that the one thing Auburn University does extremely well, and I don’t think anyone can put their finger on it, is when our students are asked, “Would you choose Auburn University again?” they overwhelmingly in some of the highest numbers of the nation say, “yes, I would come back to Auburn University.” That sort of approval and confidence in the program that they had was developed in on campus classes and I worry about undermining that with Distance Education, because whatever it is that we do so well I don’t think it will translate across the internet.

The other real concern I have is, you answered in you slide that the compensation for faculty will be negotiated with the faculty.

Dean Bennett: Correct.

Rik Blumenthal: It’s not my experience that compensation is negotiated with faculty here. There is such a concept that summer salaries and summer numbers (payments) being negotiated with faculty, but in fact in most departments this is set by the department chair or head. I’m particularly concerned, not with tenured faculty being overloaded and being dealt a big distance learning, but I know of distance earning in other departments, because we don’t do any distance learning, where assistant professors have been assigned distance learning and teaching assignments. And I don’t know if that person’s had the proper balance of teaching load or not, but assistant professors cannot object, they are not in a position to negotiate. And now we have a proposal coming down the line to have instructional faculty, who will not be tenured, how will they be dealt with, with distance learning? Will they just be assigned one ton of distance learning? I don’t know I’m getting a just little concerned about it and I understand you put in they are negotiated, and I’m sure you mean well that it will be, but that’s not my experience.

Dean Bennett: Well our problem was, with salaries ranging across campus the way they do we didn’t feel like we could take each individual unit and make a recommendation. It just felt like it was impossible to do, but I understand your comment.

Chris Correia, senator from psychology: I’m just curious, one of the comments was that at some point every Auburn student should undergo some kind of distance learning to kind of prepare them for the type of learning environments they will find themselves in. I’m wondering if there’s going to be some kind of cap on the percentage of courses that they could eventually take through distance learning? I’m thinking in our own department we have at least at the graduate level residents here requirement that they have to be on campus for a certain number of years in order to qualify for a graduate degree from our program and I think the graduate school has similar kinds of requirements, and I’m thinking of some king of analogous situations where if you are a full time student at Auburn does that kind of communicate that you have to be in these classroom environments for a certain percentage of that time versus percentage of credits that you could earn through distance learning?

Dean Bennett: Again we did not address that. The president actually gave us that goal, he basically said I’d like to see each student have at least one distance learning experience while they are at Auburn, (I think that correct isn’t it?) and I think for the reasons that I stated.

Chris Correia: Right, so I was just wondering if you had a flip side where a student could not take 100 percent of their courses through distance learning format?

Dean Bennett: I don’t for see us ever having those kinds of offerings, quite frankly, but I would doubt that would be a possibility.

Chris Correia: Thank you. [37:29]

My name is Joe Giambrone, I’ve been at Auburn for 32 years, and I’m in poultry science and I’m not on the senate, but I’ve been doing distance learning for about ten years and all my students are married with children, they have 40 hours a week jobs, both spouses, and they are trying to better their lives. The reason I’m teaching them is because either their company has indicated that they want them to learn more or they want to learn more for themselves. One thing that I teach my students when they graduate, the most important thing I can teach them is to be a lifelong learner. Look at these people at GM that are out of work, if they had been lifelong learners and continued to move up then maybe they would be able to be flexible to take another job and I like the Auburn experience too and I think that you cannot ever replace the bricks and mortars university with distance learning, and I don’t think anyone here is saying that, but what I’m saying is that there are individuals for one reason or another that are out of the country or (for whatever reason) who cannot come to Auburn and take the classes, but they need them in fact to better their life. And that is what distance learning to me should be number one, and then serving our students here who cannot take a class because the problem was their advisors at day one when they started here as freshmen did not advise them properly in order to get through the curriculum when they needed to. And the ones I see are the ones that they put all their science classes at the end and they have all these labs when they cannot possibly take them all at the same time, and they come to me and say, “Well Dr. Giambrone I need to take this class distance learning because I can’t take this other.” I let them in there, but really they shouldn’t have been in there because they were improperly advised. That’s my experience. Thank you.

Dean Bennett: Thank you.

I’m Bob Locy, immediate past chair of the senate: Dr. Bennett, I’ve got a couple of concerns that I kind of come at from the point of view of being a parent of children who have taken Distance Ed courses and if our goal is to really find the place that Distance Ed should have in our curriculum. I’m concerned about the pricing structure that you put together where out of state students are going to pay full out of state tuition for a Distance Ed course and whether that’s going to make us uncompetitive in the market place. Did you at all survey?

Dean Bennett: Yes, that seems to be the norm. [40:16] There are always exceptions, but that is the norm, but we just didn’t see how we could recommend charging a different rate for someone who lives in West Virginia that’s coming to Auburn taking Distance than on campus versus off campus. It just didn’t seem fair, but that’s the norm, there are exceptions.

Bob Locy: Thank you. [40:39]

Dean Bennett: Well, thank you and again I encourage you to read the full report on the Provost’s Web site if you would. I’ll certainly be happy to meet with any committees to talk about this further. And Rik, thanks for going somewhat easy on me. Oh, I’m sorry, Sue?

Sue Barry, I’m not a senator, I’m from curriculum and teaching: I’m not sure that you answered Bob exactly correctly or else I don’t understand, but I’m thinking it’s the undergrad program where you were talking about out of state tuition, am I right? Not graduate programs?

Dean Bennett: I think you were talking about both weren’t you Bob?

Sue Barry: No, but I think in the distance programs that are graduate programs they don’t pay out of state tuition.

Dean Bennett: In general.

Sue Barry: In general. I mean in this university right now.

Dean Bennett: We just said the rate would be the same, that’s what we said. In other words we said, the rate would be set based on status, it would be exactly the same.

Sue Barry: Are you talking about students who are on campus and taking a distance course or are you talking about distance students who are taking full load distance programs at the graduate level?

Dean Bennett: Both. Your program would not change.

Sue Barry: I realize that but I’m thinking people maybe don’t understand that currently there are many programs that don’t charge out of state tuition.

Dean Bennett: And I’m saying that if they are in that program they their status would be to pay the same tuition as those students currently in that program.

Sue Barry: And they will not change, right?

Dean Bennett: Right.

Sue Barry: Okay.

I’m Peggy Shippen, senator from Special Education Rehabilitation and Counseling in the College of Education: I have a question about intellectual property. If videos are archived, did your committee discuss if videos are replayed in the future what that means and what context would that be for a faculty member who wanted to use their intellectual property?

Dean Bennett: We talked about it, but there’s no national model it’s literally all over the map. I can tell you that those universities offering distance that way they are, it appears for the most part that intellectual property goes with them if they leave. There are passwords to it that are protected, but there’s no national model. And it’s something that was too complex to really address at this level. It’s a good point we didn’t have an answer for frankly.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: The next item on our agenda is a Report from the International skills Task Force. I’d like to invite Rick Penaskovic forward. He’s going to present the Task Force Report, he was a member of the Task Force and is a professor in the Department of Philosophy.

Richard Penaskovic: Hi folks, you should have a handout on this it’s on the back table if some of you have not received it yet. First I’ll say something about the task force committee then Ill put the task force report in context, and then I’ll speak to the Task Force Report as such all in ten minutes time. [43:55]

On the committee we were led by Clark Lundell from Industrial Design who did the lion’s share of the work in many ways. I mean he called us together, he deserves a great deal of thanks for all the hard work he put into this committee. Gisela Buschle-Diller from Polymer Fiber Engineering, Katherine Davis, an undergraduate student who made some valuable contributions, Beverly Marshall from finance, Richard Zellik from Math and Statistics, Daowei Zhang from Forestry and Wildlife, and myself from the department of Philosophy. We began our work in the fall of 2008. In order to comply with the action items connected with the strategic plan developed by the administration, the faculty and our outside consultant Richard Maceina, I believe that this plan was approved by the Board of Trustees somewhere around June of 2008.

There were six strategic priorities from the heart [45:01] that formed the heart of Auburn University’s Strategic Plan. The first one was to elevate academics and enrich the undergraduate experience. The second was to build the large research enterprise, the third was redesign Extension and Outreach, Fourth was to support, develop, and strengthen our people, fifth was commitment to continuous improvement, and sixth was building our financial resources needed to advance. The action item, strategic priority number one, elevate academics and enrich the undergraduate experience had two main components under it. One was enrollment management and the other one was the Honors College. Under initiative number two strengthening learning and teaching, were such items as reviewing the general education requirements, the writing center initiative, the international skills that our students need; study abroad program, etc. so our report really dealt with the last two items; international skills and the study abroad program. One of the main questions we pursued in the beginning is this: what skills do our students need to function in a global world and how do we deliver these skills. That was our main question that we pursued. You have the handout here, it speaks of the skills we thought students need the first one understanding the history of different world views; second, knowledge of current world events through critical analysis of information sources; 3) basic level of operation in a foreign language, in other words, knowing a foreign language especially having the ability to speak it fluently or to some extent; 4) awareness of how one’s discipline functions in other cultures. Auburn University recognizes these skills as basic to a university education in the twenty-first century.

What our task force did was propose a plan for the Universities, but a lot of the nitty-gritty has to be worked out on the school and college level. We didn’t really go into, as far as I remember, much about budget considerations. I would also say this that I was on sabbatical this year so I didn’t attend all the committee meetings, maybe some other of the committee members who were here could speak to this issue if you have questions about budgetary matters.

Our recommendations are these:
1.) We thought we should have a Senior International Officer at the Associate Provost level, with support staff. And this person will coordinate all international skill-building efforts. I believe all SEC Universities need to designate a Senior International Officer.

2.) We think that our foreign language offerings need to be expanded to include those in the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, French (we already have French), Spanish we already have, Russian we already have, plus Korean and Japanese, which I don’t think we have right now. I think Korean would be especially important with Honda here taking a significant role in the auto industry here in the Montgomery area.

3.) Students will participate in a core curriculum sequence with the opportunity to engage in three additional international skill-building options illustrated below. Students completing a specified number of optional activities will be awarded international skills certification. We found out that, students from other universities who did focus on foreign languages and international skills and knowledge, at graduation it meant a lot to them. While the international skills emphasis will not impact existing credit hour or time requirements for degree completion, skills certification may. Prior to each semester the Auburn University Office of International Education (OIE) will publish a list of the top ten upcoming, on campus, international skill-building resources, such as films, lectures, performances, exhibits. Some of this has already been done.

4.) Colleges and schools will then develop a system to validate student participation in international skill-building options.  Faculty accomplishment in international scholarship and student skill development will be acknowledged in the annual review and promotion or tenure processes.  On campus housing/meal plans will be available to international students/faculty and non-internationals developing international skills. 

This is required of all undergraduate Auburn University students:
Basic foreign language proficiency will be preferred for admission. Here there may be a problem because some students who take maybe two years of French or Spanish in High School would come to Auburn University and take the basic 1010 course in foreign language just to build up the grade point average, so I don’t know what can be done about that, but I just mention it. Students and faculty will be encouraged to acquire a Passport. Required core curriculum courses will emphasize international skills and awareness. Each college and school will make available existing courses, relevant to the expansion of international skills (such as art, world religions, ecology, economics, etc.,) that can serve as core curriculum alternatives. The development of a student’s ability to extract a single foreign culture’s impact from diverse core course offerings is required. 

Finally I’ll report on the three possible options

* Option #1 General student access, extracurricular:
Students can participate in university sponsored international experiences such as visiting lectures-ambassadors or consul generals who visit, performances, exhibitions, international student fairs, etc., (see OIE top ten list.)  Participation will be monitored through swipe card check in/out. Freshman, on campus Living / Learning Communities, will offer cross cultural residency experiences.  I don’t know if we thought about this but I was wondering if we could, maybe this would be too hard logistically, but admit students to these new housing centers, academic learning communities, that are being built now, if they want to specialize in a particular language. I don’t know if that would be a worthwhile idea but I could see it being a possibility.

* Option #2 Limited student access, study abroad:
Students can participate in university supported (existing tuition waiver), for credit / three week (minimum) study abroad experiences. These experiences can be reinforced during the semester by on campus class meetings before and/or after the study abroad. I recently talked with one of our undergraduates who spent some time in china and Tibet and learned Tibetan and he was very high on this and he wants to go back there now and try to help these people economically, so I think he’s going to get an MBA and then go back to Tibet. And I really got to hand it to him because Tibetan in a very difficult language, especially since the written language doesn’t always match the spoken language.

These experiences can be reinforced during the semester by on campus class meetings before and/or after the study abroad. We’ve already done that, my students have gone on missionary trips for several weeks to like Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and it’s been an enlightening experience for them. I find that our students are very conservative and they really need to go out there and see more of the world. Some of my students also have never been on an airplane.

Auburn University offers the Human Odyssey core curriculum experience and most colleges/schools have discipline specific abroad programs in place. A three-week program length may allow students to cover the program cost, with tuition waiver savings, and provide an adequate international immersion experience. Participation in foreign travel programs will require payment of a per-semester International Education fee, which will directly support the AU/OIE.

As a footnote I think that offer needs to be beefed up I think they need to have more staff and all to handle this new initiative.

* Option #3 Limited student access, foreign language elective:
Students can complete an elective 9 credit hour foreign language sequence.

I’m probably most sympathetic to option number three. I await your questions or comments. [54:49]

Gwyn Thomas, senator polymer & fiber engineering: Just a brief one it shouldn’t be too hard to answer. The languages that you are mentioning for the United Nations, Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, Russian, and Korean and Japanese, could you substitute others in addition or instead of those? In particular in our department we a quarter million dollar scholarship endowment to send students over to Germany to study and to bring German students over here, and you’ll find a lot of our students will speak German after they get back and they love it they want to go back over there.

Richard Penaskovic: We already offer German here so we probably should have put that down there, that was an omission. Thank you that’s a good comment Gwyn.
Could I just make one comment for clarification, I’m not a senator Robert Weigel from foreign language: we do offer Chinese and Japanese. We actually have an Asian Studies minor that was implemented for the upcoming fall. And as far as the languages I was wondering about German obviously being German, there is also this huge demand for Italian, actually our most successful program at the moment and that was left out too, so there was some kind of mistakes as far as languages and the United Nations

Richard Penaskovic: We’ll put those in there.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Rich. That brings us to the last information item. This is a Report from the Intercollegiate Athletics Committee. Dr. Gary Waters is the chair of that committee. Thank you very much. I think all of you should have a handout, if you don’t if you’ll raise your hands I’ll get them up there and make sure you get one. [57:05]

Gary Waters: First of all Kathryn, I appreciate the opportunity to come to present our annual report on Intercollegiate Athletics. If you’ll just kind of look at the handout I’m going to kind of walk you through the material that’s presented there.

The first item is related to the role of Intercollegiate Athletics and I think I can summarize that very briefly and that is we serve in an advisory capacity to the President and to the Athletics Director, in particular as it relates to institutional control and monitoring to make sure that we are following Auburn University policies, South Eastern Conference policies, and NCAA Conference policies.

I’ve also listed the members of the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics, I serve as the chair, Mary Boudreaux of Vet Medicine serves as the associate chair. We’ve got four administrators that continue to serve year-to-year, Don Large, Johnny Green, Wayne Alderman, and Kevin Robinson. And then the next six individuals listed there are the faculty members that serve on the committee; they typically will serve for a three year term. And then you will notice that we’ve got an A&P Representative, Jimmy Stucky; we’ve got a Staff Representative, by the way we’ve got a new Staff Representative, Judy Woodrow who is in the back of the room and she’s replaced Valerie; and then we also have our SGA President, Jacob Watkins that serves on the committee. There are four non-voting ex-officio members, President Gogue, Linda Glaze represents the Office of the Provost, Jay Jacobs and Mark Richard from the Athletics Department.

And then in relation to matters that we would discuss in an advisory roll, I think the best way to summarize that is to look at the sub committees that are listed at the bottom of the page. We have one that deals specifically with Academic Standards, one that deals with Awards not only at Auburn University but at the SEC level, Compliance issues that we’re talking about in most cases compliance issues is related to the Southeastern Conference and the NCAA; Drug Education and Testing Advisory Group; Equity Welfare, and Sportsmanship. One of the ones that we probably get more feedback form anyone more than any other group on campus and that is the Priority and Seating subcommittee. The Professional Sports Counseling Panel; and finally, Sports Camps and Clinics.

Now, what I have done in the past is I’ve presented this report as I’m willing to answer any questions that or discuss anything that you’d like to discuss, but one item that I think is always of interest is how well our student athletes are doing academically. And if you’ll turn the page we’ve got the graduation rates of our student athletes and also the general student population. The information that’s presented there reflects that the six year graduation rate that you probably heard some reports about in recent years and I guess the first thing I want to discuss is the distinction between the so called Fed Rate and the Student Athlete Graduation Success Rate. The Fed Rate is a rate that’s calculated and they make no adjustments for students that transfer from our academic institution. For example if you have a student that started at Auburn University and decided to transfer to another four-year institution, and even if he or she graduated from that four-year institution, that person still is a negative in our calculation. We look at the people that started a given fall semester and we look six years later and determine what percentage of those students graduate. You’ll notice that the Federal Rate for all students for this particular reporting time period and this information is really about nine to ten months old, was 63 percent. The Fed rate for student athletes at Auburn University was also 63 percent.

Now the NCAA several years ago started their own reporting structure and they call that the Student Athlete Graduation Success Rate, and they adjust for students that transfer away from the institution. And so they go back and say well we had X number of student athletes start at a given fall and if we had fifteen of those student athletes transfer to another academic institution they are removed from the formula. The student athlete graduation success rate for this six-year reporting period is 77 percent. Obviously we don’t have that for the general student population, so I don’t have any idea how that would compare, but when you look at the Fed Rate–all students and student athletes graduated at the same rate.

Some of you have enquired form time to time about the graduation success rates for specific teams and I’ve given them for this particular reporting time period. You’ll note that we’ve got several teams that have a 100 percent graduation rate; men’s tennis, gymnastics, soccer, and women’s tennis. We also have several other teams that are in the high 80s and in the 90s. We’ve got for example; men’s golf, women’s cross country and track, women’s golf, softball, women’s swimming and diving, and volleyball. You’ll also note that we have a couple in the 70s; Women’s basketball, and men’s swimming and diving, and men’s cross country and track. We’ve got two sports that are below 50 percent; men’s basketball, and we’ll talk more about that in just a few minutes, and also baseball was 42 percent. One comment that I’ll make is that keep in mind that this is a six year graduation rate and when you start looking at the information from the last three years, our baseball players have performed at a much higher level, so they have responded and when we start looking at another measure in just a second I think you’ll see that the baseball team has responded.

Now the graduation rates, again we’re looking at a six year graduation rate, we’ve got a Fed rate that does not make any adjustments for students that transfer from our institution, and then we have a student athlete graduation success rate that does make those adjustments. Before we move on to Academic Progress Rates, are there any questions on the information presented on the half page of page two, the top half of page two? (pause) Okay. And then at the middle of page two there is some information that I think is especially important and I think it’s the most important information that we have about the academic success of our student athletes and that’s the Academic Progress Rate. It is an annual measure of academic success of student athletes. As a matter of fact you are going to be seeing some information probably in the next couple of days in the newspaper about a release of the NCAA will have on Wednesday afternoon. [1:04:25]

In looking at the academic progress rate, you have an academic progress rate for each of our participating teams, it’s based on a 1000 point grading scale and we’re looking at the academic success of scholarship athletes. We’re not including walk-ons in this calculation at all. And you’ll note that each student athlete has an opportunity to earn two points each fall semester and two points each spring semester, so a total of four points are available in an academic year. For each of the semesters there’s one point related to eligibility and then there’s one point related to retention. In looking at how to interpret this information there is a minimum score that’s expected for each intercollegiate athletics team and that minimum score that’s expected is 925. And the NCAA tells us that based upon the research that if a team has an APR of 925 that that should equate to about a 60 percent graduation rate.

And then you’ll notice that the bottom of the second page I go into some of the penalty structure. If a team has an academic progress rate less than 925 and in that same year you have an athlete that goes “0 for 2” in other words they go through a semester and at the end of that semester they cannot remain at Auburn University and they are not eligible to participate at the end of the semester. In that situation that team will loose that scholarship for the next year.

And you’ll also notice some historical penalties. A team is subject to additional historical penalties each year that a team’s academic progress rate falls below 900, and you’ll notice that these historical penalties can be pretty severe. At one end of the spectrum you’ve got a public notice or a public reprimand, at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got a situation where teams can no longer participate in Division 1 Athletics. Now obviously as we go from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum there are several steps that are involved in that penalty phase, and I’ve listed those there. You go from a public notice to you tell a team that we’re going to reduce the amount of time you’ve got to practice each week. Most teams can practice 20 hours per week. Well it their APR is below a certain level we certainly would reduce that. You also get into a situation that if the APR is below 900 and if you get far enough into the penalty phase you could forfeit post-season opportunities, regardless of how well you performed on the core. And the one that I think is going to be eye catching to most people is that if it continues, the next phase you tell that that school that none of their teams can participate in post–season opportunities. So one sport could cause substantial penalties for all the other sports.

In going through and looking at the academic progress rate, Like I said, the NCAA is getting ready to release their 2009 report. The 2009 Report will be release on May 6 at 3:30 p.m. if you want to review that report all you need to do is go to NCAA.org and there is a search engine at the upper right hand corner, you could type in academic progress rates and you can see the report that will be released for Auburn University on Wednesday afternoon.

If you turn the page I’ve got a little bet more specific information about the information that will be released, obviously have some limitations on how much detail I can provide, but if you look at our women’s teams, all Auburn University athletics teams have an academic progress rate in excess of 925. As a mater of fact if you look at our 21 sports, men’s and women’s, 18 out of 21 have an APR of 925 or above. For the men with the exception of three sports all the teams have an academic progress rate in excess of 925. Those three teams have been subject to penalties and those penalties are listed there, for men’s track they lost three-hundredths (.03) of one scholarship. This is an equivalency sport where they break the sport; you could have one scholarship divided between three student athletes for example. Some sports you sign and you receive a full scholarship. Track is one of the ones that’s an equivalency sport. [1:09:07] Men’s basketball also will loose one scholarship, Men’s swimming and diving will basically loose one scholarship. Now I say will, that’s a little bit of a misstatement. Auburn University was able to forecast what these APRs were going to be, we went ahead and absorbed those penalties this year. And I think the, speaking in terms of finance, and Claire I know you’ll appreciate this, if there’s a penalty we’re going to maximize the present value of the penalty. We’re going to make them take it as soon as possible. As soon as we are able to predict it, then they have to absorb the penalty. And so all three of these sports actually absorb these penalties during the 2008–2009 academic year.

As I said earlier, I think the academic progress rates are going to have more impact on the reviewing the academic progress of our student athletes than any other legislation that’s ever passed in prior years. And if you look at what I’ve ended my report with is just a list of items that I think your going to see, and some of these you can already see, and some of these are present at Auburn University. If you look at employment contracts for coaches I would say the first item that is included in the annual review is: What is your academic progress rate?

As far as the bonus system that you sometimes read in the paper about for athletic coaches where if you go to the NCAA tournament or if you go to a bowl game, you get a certain penalty. If the academic progress rate goal is not met, that bonus will not be possible, and not only happening at Auburn, but at a lot of schools. I think you are going to also see impact on team schedules. Teams that have low APRs   think will be told that they’ve got to reduce the amount of class time that they are missing each season. The other thing that’s happening is already happening at Auburn is that when these teams travel we have tutors that actually travel with the team and they have tutoring sessions during that time that they are out of town.

And then the last item, and I think this is the one that you’ll see more and more of in the future. Teams with low APRs before they basically went out and decided whom they wanted to recruit, and they tried to recruit these student athletes and assign them to a scholarship. Teams that are struggling APR wise, I think, will have to have an approval process as far as the student athletes they’ve been given approval to recruit. And I think we’ve already seen that at several schools in the SEC where schools have, some teams have low APRs they’ve been told that this student athlete’s too much of a risk student, you cannot recruit that student athlete until the APR goes up. So you are already seeing it and I think that you will see more and more of that in the future. Okay, are there any questions or comments about the APR report?

Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Gary, you did a nice job on this. Two brief questions. On page two under teams you don’t mention the equestrian team.

Gary Waters: the equestrian team is not an NCAA sport right now but our equestrian team tends to be at the very top level as far as academics, athletics, and also community service, but right now it’s not an NCAA sport.

Richard Penaskovic: Okay, my second question. Under the football team there has a 57 percent score, does this correlate with the 925 graduation success rate for the teams since I thought it had to be 60 percent?

Gary Waters: Well this is… keep in mind the information that’s in upper half is based on students that entered in 2001. The information at the bottom, the academic progress rate is based upon what happened in the 2007–2008 academic year. And so I would say that you are really looking at two different groups of student athletes. Now one thing that I will tell you about our football players, there are some if you look at the graduation history of our football team, since 2005 Auburn has started the season and that’s a total of three seasons with a total of 39 football players that have degree in hand. We’re second in the country in that list. Boston College leads the country with a number of student athletes with degree in hand before the first game of their senior season. Auburn University is second on that list.

Richard Penaskovic: That sounds pretty incredible, how do we do that?

Gary Waters: Well one thing, our student athletes go to school 12 months a year.

Richard Penaskovic: Okay. Thank you.

Gary Waters: It truly is a 12-month commitment athletically, it’s also a 12 month commitment academically. We had one particular football player that got up in late December and announced that he was coming back for his senior year. He made that announcement the day after he graduated. There weren’t very many student athletes in the country that graduated one day and announced that they were coming back for a fourth year of eligibility with degree in hand. But answering your question Richard, the student athletes are on this campus 12 months a year. They are going fall, spring, summer session 1, summer session 2.

Bob Locy: Thanks Gary for an excellent report, but I wonder if maybe next year, some future year you could bring to the senate an understanding of the faculty point system for athletic tickets because (laughter) in my year as faculty senate chair I would say I probably had more inquiries and concerns about that than any other single issue, and what I was told when I made some inquiries about it was; “You really don’t want to know how we do it.” And so I’d like to see maybe your committee address this issue so that we could shed a little light on that topic.

Gary Waters: I’d be glad to schedule that, Kathryn, anytime that you’d like. Olin Adams is the current chair of that subcommittee, he probably gets about ten phone calls for every other phone call that every other subcommittee chair receives.

Bob Locy: Thank you.

Werner Bergen, Animal Science, senator: [1:15:44] Just an interesting point, coach Lebo is having one dickens of a time to recruit players and here they’re loosing one or maybe they’re not, you figure it out, but we’re building a $94 million basketball arena, how do these things figure together?

Gary Water: I think that’s beyond my scope of our committee. The thing that I think would also be possible for this body is for Terry Windle to come and give presentation for the budget of the athletics department. He presents that to several groups across campus. I don’t think Terry would mind presenting that information at all. Any others? Thank you all very much.

Kathryn Flynn: Well we are now at the end of our preplanned agenda. I’d like to ask if anybody has any unfinished business? (pause)  any new business? (pause) We didn’t have as short of a meeting today as we had last Tuesday but I think all in all it was a good meeting and I now call it adjourned. Thank you very much. [1:16:58]