Transcription of
June 9, 2009 Senate Meeting

Kathryn Flynn, chair: I’d like to call the meeting to order. If you’d please sign in at the back I’d appreciate it. The first item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes of the May 5 Senate Meeting. Dennis DeVries distributed a link to the minutes when he sent you the announcement of the Senate Meeting. So at this time I’d like to ask if there are any additions or corrections. Seeing or hearing none the minutes will stand approved as posted.

The next item on our agenda is comments from Dr. Gogue.


Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you. Delighted to be with you today. I want to mention a couple of items to you. I don’t think I mentioned it to you at the last Senate meeting, but the very end of the legislative session there was a resolution that was passed dealing with the PACT program, prepaid Alabama (college) tuition program. The resolution asked for the Alabama Retirement System, Mr. Bronner, to actually look at that and see what possibilities what may happen with that. W met jointly with the University of Alabama and ourselves last week with Dr. Bronner and tried to look at what they are doing. They’re doing actuarial work on the actual fund they expect a report back sometime in about a month and at that point they’ve been charged to make recommendations and options to the governor. If there is an option that the governor supports, we understand that there may be a special secession to try to address that, but we don’t know at this point.

Second thing that I wanted to mention was, the stimulus money that we’ve talked about several times, the federal money that was passed through to states, the one that Alabama got about 3 billion dollars in total money, the governor has been clear that there will be no allocation of that money until October 1 of 2010. So as part of the new year the component that was stabilization funds that has to go to higher education or to K–12, we’ve got out tentative numbers from them. The number for Auburn, when I say Auburn that would include AUM, Auburn main campus, Experiment Station, and Extension, there’s about 26 million dollars of additional money starting October 1st and there will be a commitment for that same amount for the second year, so it would be two years total of about 52 million dollars. [2:35]

In about ten days we have our Board of Trustees meeting and I know that a number of you have seen the agenda and actually reviewed it, but I would share with you that the meeting will start at 10 o’clock on the Thursday, a week from this Thursday. We have normally been keeping these meetings to one day; this will be a longer meeting. It will start with sort of a budget workshop, try to look at Higher Ed finance and how it’s structured, the Board had asked for that, so there’ll be a bit of time talking about in general how Higher Education is financed than it will move in the afternoon to tuition and the actual budget principles that we’ll use to put together the actual budget that would begin October 1, 2010. The tuition rate will generate a lot of discussion would be my guess and certainly the operating principles of the budget, so that we plan will take much of that afternoon.

On the academic side there are a couple of items, there are several academic name changes. There’s one in Forestry that changes Wildlife Sciences and adds Ecology in that title if I’m correct. And let’s see, Biosystems Engineering also has a name change as I recall, (some conversing with Dr. Mazey) Masters and PhD programs in Biosystems Engineering.

On the international front I want to mention a couple of things to you. This Friday the Council General from Brazil will be on campus. I know a number of the different colleges are involved in that particular visit. Earlier this week we had the president of the University for Albania looking for relationships between Auburn and it’s actually a private school there it’s called Crystal University. And we’ve gotten a commitment for the Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. that will be on campus this fall. And we are trying to work out the dates. I’d be happy to respond to questions that you might have.

Connor Bailey, not a senator: Dr. Gogue, speaking of stimulus monies, I saw in a local newspaper that the SEC was handing out substantially larger sums of money than in previous years. It’s been going up fairly dramatically over the past decade, going to the athletic program I presume. The athletic program has been prospering in some regards anyway, certainly financially, and I’m wondering if the balance of funding opportunities through the SEC monies, through the ability of the athletic program to start their capital campaign six months before the rest of campus are creating imbalances financially within the campus and what steps the administration may be taking to address that question. [5:40]

Dr. Gogue, president: Connor, good question. What some of you may have seen is that our television revenues in the Southeast Conference last year were 82.5 million dollars. They are split 13 ways, each school gets an equal share, the Conference receives one share. In the past year we were involved in renegotiating television contracts and the amount of the contract for the coming year is 160 million dollars. So you’ve seen a doubling of the amount of the value on the television side for institutions. And so it has created as Connor suggested additional money that was unplanned for, certainly by the athletic program. The athletic program is making commitments, and we’re in negotiations now, back to the academic side. They are going to fund some, I think the number I’ve seen is three of the endowed professorships, they are creating some funds for scholarships, and they are also looking at funds that could be used for returning veterans. So those are some of the things that they are looking at in terms of contribution or support back to the institution. Thank you. [7:04]

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue. I’d like to provide and update on several items during the chair remarks. The first item is dealing with the process that’s being used to conduct the search for the associate provost position. Most of you, hopefully all of you saw the job announcement for this internal search. It was distributed via the faculty mail list on May 21, it’s also been in the AU Daily I believe. And it’s posted online at the Provost Office Web site. The deadline for receipt of application materials into the Provost’s Office is June 19, 2009, and the review of the applicants by the search committee will begin shortly thereafter. Russ Muntiferring who is the secretary-elect for the Senate is chairing that committee and the other members of the committee are Lee Evans, Rick Cook, and Kerry Ransel. I’d like to encourage all of you to contact Russ or other members of the committee if you have any questions about the process. Also I’d encourage you to contact them if you’d like to nominate yourself or someone else for the committee, people are talking to Russ and if you give him a name then he will reach out or someone else on the committee will reach out and try to ascertain that persons interest. We’d like to get a very healthy pool of people on campus to apply to this particular position. Once the committee reviews the applicants and develops a short list, those finalists will meet with Dr. Mazey, they will meet with the deans and then there’s a plan to have public forums so that faculty and staff will have an opportunity to interact with each of the candidates. Dr. Mazey is going to give some additional information, not so much the kind of step-by-step procedural things, but a bit more information about the position and her comments later in today’s meeting.

The second topic that I’m going to address is an update on the resolution that the Senate passed back in February 10, 2009 where in that resolution outlined changes to the Consulting Policy, that through the resolution we recommended to the administration. This resolution was sent forward to the Provost’s Office prior to Dr. Mazey’s arrival I believe. It was reviewed by the University Council who determined that the Policy could not be approved as written. After discussion with the Senate leadership and Roy Hartfield who is chair of the Faculty Welfare Committee, Dr. Mazey developed a procedure for implementation of the existing Policy and in doing that she developed a memo that was also, a link to that memo was also forwarded to the senators when the meeting announcement went out. The procedure that she’s developed addresses many of the concerns that prompted the development of the resolution, in particular prior approval will still be required, but it will be prior approval by the department head and dean in the unit for which the person who wants to do the consulting at their home unit. That permission, the form that grants that permission will be forwarded to the Provost Office where it will be filed for record keeping. Dr. Mazey has someone in her office developing a pdf format so that this permission process can be done online to hopefully streamline the process. In addition it states that very specifically the interpretation of the policy should be that it’s on average one day a week and not a literal one day a week of consulting, as long as the person has covered their other responsibilities here at the University. The Senate leadership has met with Dr. Mazey and the Office of the Vice President for Research to discuss both Consulting and the Conflict of Interest Policies that exist in the Handbook and we’ll be developing charges to both Faculty Welfare and Faculty Research committees to address the wording that’s in the Handbook, we’ve got some progress, but we’ll have to revisit the consulting issue. [11:47]

Mention of the Faculty Research Committee leads me to the third topic, which is to introduce Dr. Bruch Smith, he’s at the Vet School, he is the chair of the newly formed Faculty Research Committee and he asked if he could come forward and give you just a brief overview of this new committee.

Bruch Smith, chair Faculty Research Committee: Well first of all Kathryn thank you for inviting me to do this. For those of you who haven’t noticed that there’s a new Senate committee out there it’s the Faculty Research Committee, I’m the chair. We had had a grand total of one meeting and so I thought I would come and at least bring this committee to your attention and ask for your help and your participation in your various units and encourage people to contact their representative on this committee. At the moment we have representation from the College of Education, Liberal Arts, Business, Agriculture, Architecture Design and Construction, Sciences and Mathmatics, Engineering, and Human Sciences. In additions the chairs of the three major regulatory committees on campus; the Animal Care and Use Committee, the Biosafety Committee, and the Institutional Review Board, the Human Subjects Committee are represented ex-officio, and Dr. Mason and Dr. Pinkert from the Office of Vice President for Research, as well as Dr. Flowers from the Graduate School. Not represented directly by design in this committee as the Senate created this committee, the idea was to have a relatively small streamlined body that could have active discussion without necessarily being bogged down by numbers so we recognize that three schools and the Library are not represented on this committee. And one of the things that we’ve done is to identify members on the committee who will help represent those unrepresented colleges and the goal here is that as membership turns over each of those schools which is not currently represented will have representation, and that representative will in turn be expected to represent additional schools who are not currently represented. So the idea is to have a little smaller body, but to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard. We do have…we will let the schools know once we have this out who their identified representative is. So if you are in one of those colleges that’s named that does not have a representative now we will be telling you who has volunteered on the committee to help bring your concerns in front of the committee. So it’s not as if those colleges are completely unrepresented. And we can work over time and see how this arrangement works, this is a discussion we’ve been having.

At the moment the committee charge is relatively broad and brief and that is the committee shall be responsible for bringing research related concerns to the ice President for Research, Dr. Mason, and for reporting appropriate research matters and policies back to the Senate. So I’m here to report that the committee has been constituted and has met and we anticipate meeting on a monthly basis. Pleas feel free to contact committee members or myself if you have concerns. We continue to work to develop the charge of this committee and the direction in which we will go, and we want to be responsive to the faculty concerns as well as the issues that face the Office of the Vice President of Research. Any questions? (pause) thank you very much. [15:20]

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thanks Bruce. My last item is that I’d like to encourage all of you to bring topics that of interest to you or a concern to members of the executive or steering committees. If you don’t know who we are you can go on the Web site, you can contact me, if you feel more comfortable talking to someone else I’ll shoulder you to the right person. We’d really like to know if there are issues or concerns out there so that we can bring them up in discussion and hopefully address them, come back with at least information. The Rules committee continues to work its staffing of both university and senate committees and I’d like to thank everybody who’s volunteered for service on one or more of these committees. Thank your constituents back in your home units, we’ve have better response to the call for volunteers this year than I can remember, I’ve served a number of times on Rules. There are a lot of new ideas being explored here on campus and many of these committees will have a more active role, a more important role than they maybe have had in the past and so I think it’s going to be really important that we staff them with people who are willing to put the time in. so I’d really like to thank everybody for their willingness to step forward. We don’t have any action items on the agenda for today so I’m going to move to our first information item which is an update from Dr. Mazey. [17:00]

Dr. Mazey, provost: Thank you Kathryn. I’ll give you some update and then if there are any questions, please ask me. In terms of the Associate Provost position I think that Kathryn made some highlights in terms of the position description, as you know it’s currently being filled in on an interim basis. I did that because we had a great deal of change in the Provost Office there in a few short months and as being someone new to the university I thought it would be better for me to get an idea of who’s out there who would be interested and wanted to complete the search then this summer. I’ve been asked what am I looking for in terms of that position, well needless to say in the Provost Office there’s just two of us, it’s somebody that’s willing to jump in and do quite a number of different activities, as we all do in there. I particularly though am looking for someone to take a leadership position, someone that believes and practices shared governance, someone that can help me in terms of the implementation of the strategic plan and of course there are a number of direct reports that the person deals with anywhere from Academic Honesty committee to the Jules Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts to the Office of International Education, the Program for Students with Disabilities, and English as a Second Language. In addition I’m looking for someone who’ll always be very candid and honest with me and give me good advice because I know I’m still relatively new here at the university. I think that probably another issue I’m going to report on is how do we all work together to improve our promotion and tenure process here at Auburn and this person certainly would be working with me on that. How do we [18:46] provide better training and information to our chairs and department heads and would like to start meeting with those individuals on a regular basis, probably a monthly basis as we then implement changes and refine our promotion and tenure guidelines particularly at the departmental level.

As far as style, I’m looking for someone that is very collaborative so the skills that the person should have is someone that’s facilitative, listens well, and then makes good decisions. Someone said to me, “don’t you want letters of recommendation?” Ah, I think that since it’s an internal search, currently we do not need those, we’re asking for a vita and a cover letter and I certainly have great confidence in Russ and the search committee in terms of going through those. Then at some later point if we need to make phone calls I would certainly talk to the individuals first and get their permission to do that. So my goal is to have that position filled by August 1. [19:50]

Any questions from anyone about that particular position? If you do please feel free to e-mail or call me, a couple of individual have come to talk to me about the position so, please feel free to do that.

In terms of another update then, with the promotion and tenure process, in case you don’t know we had some meetings on that particular item, we met with the chair, certainly talked with the deans about it, had two forums, one in here I know with faculty that may be going forward next year either in terms of both promotion and tenure or just promotion. What we’ve done is come up with a new calendar, I think it gives everyone more time, I see some heads shaking that they appreciate that. If you don’t have the calendar you can certainly go to the Provost Web site and review that. But what we really do want to refine is our offer letters, how can we be more specific in terms of the offer letters. I hear over and over form our new faculty, “What are the expectations?” So the offer letter should be specific we should be doing good annual reviews, that can be again part of the training for chairs and department heads the third year review is very, very important. We need to have, I think, department guidelines in terms of our expectations and that will vary from discipline to discipline. I hope that with this we can put together, and part of the process is a good mentoring process and Sandra Forsythe has worked on that in terms of with President Gogue as a presidential fellow, so we hope to implement some of those recommendations [21:42] It will be a work of shared governance.
I’m more than willing, I’ve actually worked on this at two previous institutions, I think there was an improvement in the system, it will never be perfect, there will always be some subjectivity that’s part of it but we can continue to try to refine it and work on it together. Any questions about the promotion and tenure process? One of the areas is certainly external letters, greater consistency in how we seek those, hopefully make sure they are coming from the peer institutions and then how we make sure that they are in the files. Yes Rich.

Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy not a senator: I’m very happy to hear that you want to refine our outside letters, no, no the letters that the chairs and heads draw up for folks coming in, because I was chair of the P&T Committee in the
College of Liberal Arts, and on the P&T Committee at another institution and sometimes departments had arrangements made up with individual faculty members and we were not aware of them in terms of what was expected in terms of P&T. So I’m very happy to hear that this has to be looked at.

Dr. Mazey, provost: and I think those departmental guidelines once they’re approved at department level by the chair, by the Dean by the University Promotion and Tenure Committee, by the Provost Office they should be part of and go out with the offer letter. It will take us a while as I say to get there, but I think we can improve the process. So thank you for your support.

Richard Penaskovic: You’re Welcome.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Other questions on that? (pause) Okay, two other updates. We have established a University Assessment Council and that’s certainly…. Drew Clark is going to chair that council, we all know that outcomes based data will be very important as we prepare, always is important but even more important as we prepare for the 2013 SACS visit. We will be having a retreat of that group. I think it’s in late July. And again it will be a facilitated session and I know a number of people have been invited to that. By the way, I didn’t mention but we’re having a retreat of the department chairs, the deans, the University Promotion and Tenure Committee, and others that have heard about it and want to be invited in terms of this whole new P&T process too, and we’re doing that August 11.

And finally then I’ve been asked to mention the faculty evaluation of administrators and we had this year about a thirty-four percent return rate on that and that’s higher than what it’s been in the past, we did have a shorter survey. I think we all owe Mike Baginski and others a thank your for working on that and all the effort that they put into it.

How is the data going to be used? I will be using it, currently I’ve asked the deans to send me their accomplishment for this past academic year, their proposed goals for the coming academic year, I’ve been working on an assessment of what they’ve sent me and I will be using that data as part of the assessment and meeting with each one of them individually. I have 13 of the 21 of those done this past weekend, so it might take me another week or so to get those done. I will be giving them, the Deans, when we do meet a copy of the survey results for all of their direct reports, plus the written comments. And I will give the deans the written comments that we received on them, too. Any questions about that and I think you plan to have a report from Mike at even a later date with more detail on it. [25:20] But he certainly and Maria did a great job on it. Any questions?

James Goldstein, senator from English: I am also the president of the local AAUP chapter. You sent out an e-mail on Friday that mentioned that you were interested in exploring the possibility of having long-term lectureships that would be non-tenure-track appointments, and I certainly in favor of anything we can do to improve the working conditions of our non-tenure-track faculty and my department is the largest employer of instructors. I am concerned that of the possibility that that might lead in the future to a decrease in the number of tenure-track lines that might otherwise be approved. And for the people who are tenure-track and particularly senior faculty, the number of committees that we’re being asked to serve on seems to be growing and it becomes very difficult to be able to do that kind of service which is so important to shared governance. So the balance between tenured-track faculty and non-tenured ones has large implication. I think we all know that the national trends have been going toward shrinking the percentage of tenure-track faculty. The AAUP analysis took the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education and that showed the trend now has more than half of the faculty in the country are part-time and more than two-thirds are full or part-time non-tenure-track positions. I know at a place like Auburn we are nowhere near that kind of percentage, but the gradual erosion of the balance is something that I’m concerned about. There may be other models to consider. I don’t know if you saw the article in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education that talked about St. John’s University (Dr. Mazey: yes I did.), that had created 20 full-time writing faculty that would be tenure-track but they would only teach freshman composition and they would teach a 3–3 course load and have lots of time to be working with students and so on. And I’m just wondering whether other possible models than semi-permanent non-tenure-track lectureships might be something that you could consider?

Dr. Mazey, provost: I certainly have been talking over this issue on a continual basis with the executive committee and the steering committee of faculty governance. I think that one of my concerns here and James, when I interviewed we talked about this and someone said, “Well you know we don’t want second class citizens here at Auburn.” And then I realized that you have quite a number of instructors and I did not know that at the time. In talking with the deans and others, what concerns me is that we’ve hired these, what I’d already say are non-tenure-track faculty member in these instructor positions, but if they do a good job for us they can’t stay over 5 years. And so you know I guess for one, I have a concern on how they are being treated right now in terms of that. According to the Faculty Handbook, that I’m not an expert on, but I’m learning a great deal about it, trying to follow diligently is; those positions as instructors, the reason they cannot go on beyond five years is they’re considered the tenure-track line, and so it would be de facto tenure at that point. As I visited the Liberal Arts departments and other departments I’ve talked about this and many times what I’ve found at my previous institutions is that the people that are in these positions really do want to do the teaching. And it’s important to value them because they generate so many credit hours for the institution, which is a primary mission, which we all want to emphasize. And it really assists us those that are tenure-track positions to be able to do those other activities such as be on committees, do our research, do our outreach, do the extension work. So the dialogue is continuing. It’s difficult in Higher Education today and the AAUP says, I think there recommendation is that no more than 25 percent should be non-tenure-track positions. We aren’t even close to that at Auburn, I’ve checked it out, we’re not even close to that 25 percent. These are difficult budget times. Whether we like it or not we have just cut all of our academic budgets, the deans can talk about that to you and I’m sure you’ve heard about it in your respective colleges, and we may have more budget reductions to come. So we’ve got to figure out the best way the entire institution to be able to deal with these issues and that’s certainly one of the ways. But I want to work with you and have the discussion about that. [30:26] Anything else? Yeah, Connor?

Connor Bailey, Ag Econ & Rural Sociology, not a senator: To follow up on that same question and the 25 percent rule, that’s certainly true for the campus as a whole but there’s at least one college on campus where, last I’ve seen the numbers which was two or three years ago, more than half of the faculty were non-tenure-track. This was Pharmacy and I’ll be willing to be corrected if the numbers have changed since I’ve last seen them, but soon after this body brought… had the proposal to create clinical and research faculty to it, it was accepted and established and over a period of years in the College of Pharmacy from the day that I’m aware of, when tenure-track faculty left or retired many of those positions were replaced with clinical faculty and I’m not in a position to argue the merits of clinical versus (tenure), but it is the fact I know when I was in Senate leadership it was very difficult to get faculty from Pharmacy to serve on committees because there were so few tenure-track faculty or tenured faculty. So when we’re discussing these matters bear in mind that we may trust you but your successor we don’t know who that’s going to be (Dr Mazey: I understand that.) Different units may have different approaches to this. So I think that we need to tread very carefully and I appreciate the open discussion. We need to continue that. Thank you.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Okay, and we will continue the discussion.

Rik Blumenthal, chemistry and biochemistry, senator: The issue of the instructor positions is something or that the non-tenured permanent line is something that bothers me. It concerns me because the argument was made as you commented that “in these tough financial times,” the comment was also made “we don’t want second class citizens.” In our case, the chemistry department, our instructor lines are generally filled with people that have not been the winner of a national search as our faculty members are. These are people that are generally found to fill an unfilled tenure-track faculty line until we can run a national search. If we intend to and this argument has gone on many times in the chemistry department, we’ve reached no conclusion, if we wish to hire as Dr. Goldstein mentioned, tenured-faculty who are writing faculty or in our case tenured-instructional faculty, they’d be chemical-education faculty in our department is what we would call them. We need to prevent them from being “second class citizens” we need to pay them the same as we pay the research faculty, active faculty. [33:39] So the argument of tough financial times, as it’s made on one hand falls apart if you say we’re going to make these people permanent. Now we’re, in chemistry it’s morally acceptable to hire instructors at considerably lower pay than tenured professors, because they are only going to be there temporarily and we’re not supposed to keep them trapped in that low salary forever.

So there’s sort of a dichotomy of the arguments if you are actually going to elevate those positions to an equality with the tenured positions, then you will have to elevate them to a financial equality and then the argument is why not hired tenured people if you are paying them the same as the tenured people, why not go ahead an do that? So I think there’s a difficulty and that’s where a lot of us look at it and you’ll get the comments from myself and other people about “second class citizens,” because you have to decide if you are going to make them permanent, not going to push them to go get a job that pays more somewhere else later, then are we really treating them fairly to keep them here at the lower wage which was initially established for a temporary position.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Yeah, and how I’ve handled that in the past is that they have been maybe paid around 70 percent say on the average in a department of a beginning tenure-track position, and they certainly should go through the searches. I think we should have a search for all positions. So I understand what you’re saying and we’ll certainly take that into consideration. I just want you to know though, my first week here a program reviewer from actually your college came in and said “You know, I don’t understand why you don’t have these positions because you may loose one of your major researchers here because this is an important position to have to keep the spouse here.” So there is always issues out there as to how best to handle them and we just need to continue the discussion and dialogue. Yes? [35:56]

Bernie Olin, senator from Pharmacy (Practice): To update Dr. Bailey’s comments we probably have I’m guessing roughly 50 percent of our faculty are non-tenured clinical track, and that’s not just Auburn that’s pretty much national trend.

Dr Mazey, provost: Is it?

Bernie Olin: it’s probably not applicable to a lot of other schools on campus, but a large number of our faculty are spread around the state full time faculty for practicing in different areas such as Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile, that type of thing.

Dr Mazey, provost: thank you for that information. Yes, Bob?

Bob Locy, immediate past chair: I’d like to reference back to what Dr. Blumenthal said, for a minute. I think the underlying issue that wasn’t address in any of the comments that I’ve heard here that I hope we’ll take a look at as we move forward on this whole issue is how exactly we value predominantly if not exclusively teaching faculty, whether they are tenure-track or whether they’re non-tenure-track. I think the issue is that faculty often get moved into the position of teaching a number of courses per semester that allows them no time to have a program of scholarly activity and I think we need to look at if you are in a tenure-track line the fact that a program of scholarly activity seems to be what your promotion and tenure should be based on (Dr. Mazey: That’s right.) So the faculty who are pursuing that avenue whether they are teaching faculty, research faculty, or outreach faculty wind up or some combination of the above, wind up having their progress based on their scholarly output as opposed to this other status of faculty that might be folks who, as a career aspiration made the choice that they want to be primarily classroom teachers. I believe both kinds of faculty are valuable, I believe both kinds of faculty need to be rewarded, we don’t need to create second class citizens but we need to better delineate what the role and difference between them is in a meaningful way so that we can reward everybody for what they do to enrich the university.

Dr. Mazey, provost: I agree, thank you very much. And in terms of thinking of these as permanent per se, what we were talking about is that they would be term appointments. It could be anywhere, maximum 3-year appointment, so it’s not really permanent and they certainly want to go on and get a tenure-track position I think we would want to support them in doing that. [38:40] But right now I’ve had one faculty member and I’m saying but one saying “I’m so worried because after 5 years I may not be able to find a position and there’s no way I can stay here at Auburn, and I really enjoyed teaching here.” That concerns me too.

Kathryn, I’ll turn it all back to you. Thank you for the discussion.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Dr. Mazey. The final item on our agenda for today is a report from the Service Learning Tack Force. This is the final task force report and is being delivered today by Ralph Foster, he was the chair of the task force, he is the director and continuing education officer in the office of Outreach Information and Program Certification.

Ralph Foster: Thank you Kathryn and good afternoon. I would like to qualify my position as a co-chair and I would like to recognize our other co-chairs: Dr. Roy Rickers Cook who’s in the front, Dr. Paulette Dilworth also are co-chairs for this task force, former senior associate provost, Sharon Gabor organized the task force and chaired it at the start of fall semester last year and her departure earlier this year she asked Dr.’s Cook, Dilworth, and I to oversee the completion of those activities and to carry the initiative forward. [40:20]

Our task force members, the membership you see here represented faculty and administrative prospectus of Service Learning from the context of instruction, student life and engagement, the task force drew upon the experience of many individuals, you see here, who are already involved to various aspects of student service engagement here on campus. Outreach for instance has been developing for two years now a student service initiative to parallel its commitment to faculty engagement. Access to community initiatives was active in organizing community partnerships and civic projects for students and faculty. The Biggio Center is active in providing programs and grants encouraging service course development. Our College of Liberal Arts as are a number of other college-based programs on campus very active in civic engagement. The College of Liberal Arts is in its second year of a civic engagement initiative. Extension has been developing potential projects for service learning through its county offices.

Our task force charge: Service Learning appears in strategic priority one, elevating academics. It states: Auburn system will elevate undergraduate education and enrich the undergraduate experience in an initiative to of strengthening learning and teaching and it states that there be participation in learning community environments or participation in service learning such as through Cooperative Extension System or in the local community. In responding to that strategic objective the task force approached service as an instructional strategy which should complement learning communities as well as other academic activities on campus, [42:30] while providing an enriching experience in and of itself. The linkage to Extension or to community partners and vision, student involvement in a broad range of potential service activities and a variety of locals.

Noting our list of charges. In addition to responding to the objective in the strategic plan, we wanted to define service learning options, review literature and look at best practices nationwide, assess Auburn’s current institutionalization of student engagement and its capacity to expand it, identify policies procedures and program development recommendations, and to outline an implementation plan to carry these forward. The task force employed various sub-committees to address each of these charges and the task force as a whole reviewed these responses and compiled the recommendations. [43:19]

In defining the object of the task force we first looked at the terminology, service learning is a very specifically defined term in the literature and it is defined so as a course based experience with reflection. It is by design very structured in its application. In keeping with our interpretation of the strategic charge we looked at student service and a larger context of civic engagement in addition to traditionally defined service learning courses, we identified a number of potential service options including outreach projects, service oriented internships and experiential education, and community service-based activity. You see these illustrated here on this page.

This presents a broader spectrum of service opportunities, engaging both faculty and students in collaborative community partnerships and potentially contributing positively to outreach scholarship as well as to the academic experience of the students. In our review of the literature and best practices we covered some thirty-five sources on various topics of service learning, experiential education, civic engagement, and community based research. We also profiled a number of student service options at eight major universities which our members had direct experience. Some of these included, those familiar to us such as LSU, Alabama, Georgia, others such as UCLA, West Virginia, and Tulane, and Duke. Additionally the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment provided us with overviews of Auburn’s participation in the NSSE surveys the National Survey of Student Engagement. And they also provided us with a comprehensive report prepared by the Hannover Council outlining the management of student service at southern flagship universities and other major institutions outside the region such as Michigan State and Virginia Tech. this report covered elements of documenting engagement, criteria for course designation, program development models, service registries, and technology support.

In reviewing Auburn’s capacity we used several means, one of these was the Carnegie Foundation criteria for its elective institutional classification for community engagement. These criteria assess both curricular engagement as well as outreach partnership. The FERCO Rubric examines five dimensions of institutionalization, each focusing on elements of administrative, faculty, student, community support for engagement activities. The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment provided us with a listing of some 100 programs at Auburn involving external experiences, accounting for more than 3,000 in enrollments. Surveys were conducted among the academic administration at Auburn and the faculty to identify additional internships and service courses. Our Extension partners concluded their survey of potential county-based community projects, which could accommodate student engagement. Focus groups were also conducted to assist student attitudes and concerns related to service engagement.

This illustration will be difficult to read from the screen but it is within the task force report, which is online on the provost Web site. [47:03] So I have it here more or less just to show generally the FERCO Rubric examines multiple dimensions and provides measure in three stages of development for each element, critical mass and planning, substantive program building and sustainability. While this is hard to see you can sort of gauge by the stage one, two, three columns that Auburn’s institutionalization at the time of our study clearly puts us in the middle of vigorous building reflecting substantial effort in the schools and colleges by the central units. I would encourage you to visit the task force report to get the detail on this model here.[47:52]

Areas for development identified in these various assessments form the basis of the committee’s recommendations. These recommendations address: promoting student engagement and service as a component of teaching strategy as well as it should be recognized in university academic policy and supported by organizational resources. If you notice we have these divided in a policy-section pedagogy and processes. Some of these include establishing a possible service designation in our official course numbering system to make service course options more readily apparent. Initiate processes to designate courses currently existing in the curriculum to such a classification, also qualify for the Carnegie engaged classification and other national organizations, such as campus combat, work with the Biggio Center and others to initiate faculty development programs, and other supportive resources for faculty to develop new programs and service initiatives, and to provide processes supporting that Web based networking system for faculty, students, and community providers; coordinate with extension to integrate their county service projects into the single system; expand a base of community partnerships and service providers and coordinate ongoing assessments of these programs with institutional research.

The key charge was also the development of and implementation plan to advance these recommendations and an organization collaboration to sustain the initiative. Outreach and Access and Community Initiatives was asked to develop the plan and was included. This was included in the task force report to the Provost Office. Outreach has since provided staffing and identified support towards the initiative.

Progress items that I would like to point out to date is that we have finished the faculty surveys in the course census and we are reviewing responses to those so that we can deliver a report on that. We have applied for spring Learn & Serve program development grants and are looking for other development options. We are working with Biggio Center to organize fall development sessions as well as possible showcases, symposiums, and perhaps a competitive grant program. Our system for an interactive network, which was one that the Hannover Report identified as being used by a number of institutions nationwide, Service Learning Pro, has been installed and a Web site established and that is at auburnserves.com. We currently have posted 27 community service agencies with the addition of the County Extension Office records that will bring us to over 100 options immediately available for faculty and student review.

We’ve distributed information on this to Camp War Eagle and across campus. I’ve left some posters at the table in the back which highlight the theme of “Auburn Serves” and ties it back to our Auburn Creed which states in part “I believe in the human touch” which certainly represents the service motive of this university and its historical mission of engagement. Our collaborations will continue to engage a number of individuals on campus organizational partners in the academic community as well as in the surrounding community. The goal is to provide faculty and students a supportive base on which to develop their engagement objectives. The effort draws upon the existing base programs and community partnerships for student engagement all around campus. And our approach is to optimize service learning an engagement already taking place. And this is already leading to new ideas for programs and for further collaborations. Of course any such developments that require committee approvals will be funneled to the appropriate bodies for their review.

In concluding I would like to point us back to the full report and implementation plan, which is posted at the Provost’s Web site. Would like to mention one additional thing, is that we have secured, thanks to the support of the President’s Office, campus Compaq institutional membership which is now active for Auburn University. I thank you for your time today. I know time is short. Be glad to entertain questions or would encourage any of you to feel free to contact us, we’ll be glad to talk with you.

David Carter, senator from the department of history: Thank you so much for your report. I think I’d just like to weigh in briefly with an endorsement of how important this could be to our students. Tony Cary before he left for Appallachian State was, he and I taught a Living and Learning community for a year and we asked our students to reflect on diversity and left it a very wide-open assignment. One student wrote that he came to Auburn to be with people as he said very bluntly “who dressed like him and looked like him.” Another student came from a very different part of the spectrum and argued that she had come to Auburn hoping to fine people who were very much unlike her. And she expressed some degree of disappointment at what she saw as our homogeneity in terms of our student population. Not defined racially necessarily or along any of the traditional measures of diversity but just a sort of sameness. I recently had lunch with Mark Wilson who works at the Carolyn Draughn Center for the Arts and Humanities. He spent a year working with a Living and learning community with an explicit focus on service learning and what he told me about those student’s experiences was really remarkable. These were a number of students who in his opinion had not spent a lot of time engaged with broader communities and some of them had come from what I think we might define as insular and privileged backgrounds, and he got them out into Headstart Centers and to another range of encounters with the Alabama citizens and he’s not a really rosey-eyed guy I don’t think, but what he told me really made me feel like these sorts of encounters can be critical for transforming our undergraduates perspectives. I think this in conjunction with DR. Gogue’s emphasis and others in the strategic plan on greater international programs, trying to get our students more involved in study abroad, I think anything we can do to round our students sense again of global diversity is all to the good. My main concern looking at the rubric was the funding and seeing that as far as building a critical mass toward this, that appears to be one area that I think were lacking in. And so I would encourage everyone involved in the administration and elsewhere to please try to do everything we can to incentivize this and to back it up with real commitment of resources. So thank you very much for your report.

Ralph Foster: Thank you for your comments. Thank you Kathryn.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Ralph. That completes the items we have on our agenda. Is there any unfinished business? Any new business? If not the meeting is adjourned.