July 14, 2009
Senate Meeting Transcription

Kathryn Flynn, chair: I’d like to call the meeting to order. If you are a senator or you are here serving as a substitute I’d remind you to please sign in on the roster at the back of the room. The first order of business is approval of the minutes of the June 9 Senate meeting. Dennis DeVries distributed the link to these draft minutes and they are also posted on the Senate Web site. So at this time I’d like to ask if there are any additions or corrections to the minutes. Hearing none the minutes will stand approved as posted.

Dr. Gogue is out of town today, so Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey is going to provide an update on several items of interest.

Dr. Mazey, Provost: Thank you Dr. Flynn. And Dr. Gogue does send his regrets for not being here today. I’m just going to give you some updates about what we’ve been working on in the Provost’s office. First of all in terms of searches that are underway, we’ve had four candidates on campus for the Dean of Nursing and I see Bonnie MacEwan in the back of the room I thank her for co-chairing that committee and I met with the committee last week and I plan on meeting with the nursing faculty and staff, so hopefully over the next few weeks we will have a decision, but I wanted to make sure that there has been plenty of input into that search. We also have a search out there for the associate provost and we’ve had nine candidates for that position. I appreciate Russ Muntifering for chairing that search and the committee will be meeting tomorrow to narrow down that pool of candidates. I believe that Leigh Evans is in the room he represents the deans on that search committee, Rick Cook is on the search committee, and Kerry Ransel from our office is on the search committee. Once they narrow down the number of candidates we will have interviews and we will have open forums for the candidates that have been chosen by the search committee. So that should take place in the next couple of weeks. Another search that we have ongoing is the Writing Program Administrator and I think you heard the presentation by that Taskforce and Sharon Roberts. We do have two candidates that will be coming to campus the week of July 27 to interview for that position. And just as an update on the Writing Initiative we now…the Writing Center has been named for Jack Miller who is of course our deceased Board of Trustee member. The Writing Center will be moving to the Library Learning Commons with another group called Study Partners and the writing program administrator will actually be located in the Library. Those renovations will be done in the next few months.

Another move that’s taking place that was recommended in a Taskforce report was that on the Honors College and the Honors College will be moving to Cater (Hall). They will be doing that before Fall Semester and we should be so pleased that we have such a large number of students coming into the Honors College this fall, I think we’ll have over 700 students in total in the Honors College. Another Taskforce report, just to give you an update on that, was the International Skills Taskforce, you heard the presentation in here, and we’re working with faculty governance to appoint an implementation group for that. That particular taskforce report, Robert Weigel who is chair of Foreign Languages will chair that implementation committee.

Yet another taskforce, we had quite a number of taskforces this last year, Distance Education; we’re currently working to come up with a model of distance education that will be acceptable to everyone in the institution. I have a group working on that. Based upon the taskforce report and hope to bring that to the Dean’s Council and to others by September.

You also know that there was a taskforce on General Education, there’s a resolution here today that pertains to that. We certainly will be following the Alabama articulation agreement, which says that we have 6 hours of composition, 12 hours of humanities and fine arts, 11 hours of natural sciences and math, and 12 hours of history, social, and behavioral sciences. So I think that committee that will be working on looking at new proposals for General Education will have quite a bit of work in the coming year.

As far as the Graduation Rate Taskforce, yet another one, think we can encompass that into the Enrollment Management Council. And so the Enrollment Management Council will be working on the recommendations that came out of that taskforce report.

Another issue that we’ve been working on with faculty governance has been revising the handbook. There are various issues there. Our goal will be to work on revisions together and take those revisions to the Board of Trustees at their meeting next March. So we plan to do that each year that we have changes in the Faculty Handbook.

An issue that I know is always of concern to folks are the budget and what does the budget picture look like. Certainly President Gogue always talks about that. If you look at the budget since I’ve arrived, it’s pretty factual in terms of our state appropriations, we’re at 39 million dollars shortfall, and of that we’ve been trying to take two fiscal years to see what we can do to cover that shortfall. The increase in the tuition that we received, the tuition increase that we hope to receive yet when the board meets in September, would cover about 10 million of that 39 million. And then the other 30 million in our goal will be to try to see what we can do to cover it over fiscal year 2010 and fiscal year 2011. In fiscal year 2010, we worked with the deans and others to actually reduce the academic side of the budget by 5.7 million dollars in permanent cuts and that hopefully were mostly vacancies that we had, I don’t think we cut and individual per se that was already here, but that was about 125 positions, and 8 million of one time cuts. Now the problem is going into fiscal year 2011 is the one time will be working toward permanent there. In meeting with the Provost of the SEC it became obvious that particularly at the University of Georgia and the University of Florida that they are using the stimulus dollars to backfill some of these cuts. And so I’ve talked with President Gogue and talked with Dr. Large about this and what I think we will be trying to do here in the next months and year is see how we use some stimulus dollars to do the same. [7:48] Now that would of course mean that we have no choice when we do faculty appointments, but to do term appointments, because we only know that we have the stimulus dollars for two years. So we can’t make guarantees in terms of tenure-track positions, but it certainly would be one way for us to help on the instruction side and certainly the instruction side and the research side and any important outreach activities or what we want to preserve as we do have to cope with this 39 million dollar shortfall. I would like to say it’s not there, but it’s there and as I have continued to follow the budget since I arrived in Alabama, I just hope it doesn’t go any deeper than that. So that’s where it stands right now, but I would like to think that we will be committing funds to those term appointments.

Another issue that we have and we are looking at, I think I’ve mentioned before, is how do we improve the annual evaluation and the promotion and tenure process. We’re going to have a retreat, a half day retreat with the Deans, the department chairs, the university promotion & tenure committee, and we created a notebook to make sure that everyone is on literally, coming up with and reviewing the same documents and talking about how we go to the department levels to set up guidelines and standards for annual evaluation and promotion and tenure. It would then be approved through the system and work on that this next year. So it’s always about starting at the departments and building consensus and hopefully working upward there.

Another major issue here at Auburn would be facilities. And we’ve been working on that too. The deans have submitted up to ten projects that would be their priorities and they have ranked those. The facilities group has now done an assessment of those projects and then we have a group in our office including Kathryn Flynn that will be reviewing those, I think it is about 100 and some projects now in total and prioritizing them. [10:01] Our goal then is to certainly make all that public once we finish that prioritization process and I think it will be something that’s very beneficial to the institution.

And finally, we continue to do what we can to implement the University’s Strategic Plan. It was a plan that was built on consensus when President Gogue arrived. Certainly some of the areas that we’ll be looking at: a dean’s retreat in the fall, would be how do we increase graduate enrollments, meet our instructional mission of course, and enhance our research mission. So if you have any input to that, last year we did a report that at the June Board of Trustees meeting looking at those 35 goals and we’ve completed many of them, I think we completed 12 of those and we’ll probably have many of them we will continue to work on, and we’ll have about some new ones and maybe have about 30 goals for this coming year. [11:05] So any questions from you? That’s a little bit of a long update, but it shows you we’ve been busy. Any questions? Okay, thank you.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Dr. Mazey. I’m going to make a few comments during this portion of the meeting. I’m going to try to be brief because we have a very ambitious agenda, but there are a few things that I would like to mention.

The first is that this is the final meeting of the Senate for this 2008–2009 academic year, and so about a third of the Senate membership will be rotating off the Senate and will be replaced by newly elected Senators coming in at the September meeting. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who’s terms are ending for your willingness to serve on the Senate. You willingness to do so is important, we’ve been pretty busy and I think this next year we are going to be even busier, but it’s really pivotal that people are willing to do this so that we show our commitment to shared governance. And I just want you to know how much I appreciate all of you taking the time to do this.

The other thing I want to do is give you a heads up on Dr. Mazey mentioned a lot of things that we’ve been working on, I’ll probably duplicate some of that, but there are a couple of other issues that the Senate leadership has been asked to look at and we’ll be bringing you information as early as the September meeting, some of it will take more than one meeting to get through. But things that we will be bringing you include such things as revisiting of the academic calendar, the length of semester. We’ve been requested by a number of units on campus to look at the 75-day calendar and get a feeling for how the faculty feels about shortening the calendar by 3 days. We will be bringing you some information to allow you to go back to your faculty and get their input on this. We’ll probably be looking at that at the September meeting. We’ll also be looking at various recommendations that come from the committees chosen to serve for implementation of the Taskforce reports. They will be bringing things to the Senate probably for the next year, maybe longer. In addition to that we have the various revisions to the Faculty Handbook that will be occurring, many of the taskforce recommendations if adopted will make minor and sometimes major changes in a variety of things in the Handbook. So we will be asking you for input on that and approval. In addition we will be looking at a review of the retroactive withdrawal policy that was approved by the Senate last year. We were asked to come back in a year and look at that, so we will be doing that in the fall. [14:35] Also we’ll be bringing you a report from the Administrator Evaluation committee, the Teaching evaluation committee, and the ombudsman will be brining his year-end report forward. So those are just a few of the things that we’ll be looking at in the next probably 3–4 months. Some of those may take longer, but as you can see I think we’re going to have a fairly ambitious agenda for the next year.

I’d like to again encourage all of you whether you’re a senator who’s about to leave office or one that’s going to continue, and then I’ll remind the new senators when they come in next meeting to bring things to the executive committee or the Steering Committee that you see as issues that the Senate should address. We’ll do our best to do that, we do have some time constraints that are laid out in the Handbook, we’ll work within those so that we’re within the guidelines of the procedures, but we will address issues that you bring to us. [15:43]

At this time I’d like to call on Dennis DeVries, the secretary of the Senate. He’s going to present our first action item.

Dennis DeVries, secretary: Today I’m bringing to the Senate nominations for 19 Senate committees. One additional committee that will not be presented today is the subject of the next action item we will be considering. I just want to give a little bit of just a minute or so of background. I think everybody knows the Rules Committee is the committee on committees, it has an extremely important function relative to shared governance at Auburn. I wanted to highlight those folks that serve on the Rules Committee so that the first 5 are the members of the Rules committee the bottom are the officers, but for those folks who spent a lot of time in addition to the Senate committees that I’m going to bring forward in a minute we also have provided President Gogue with nominations for 28 University Committees. Only 4 of those University Committees beyond that still remain to be worked on. The Rules Committee works hard, gives a lot of thought and deliberation to all these nominations. I’ve added up we’ve met 13 times since April, about 20 hours worth of meetings that we spent deliberating nominations. Volunteering was extremely strong this year and one of the things we wanted to pass on to everybody was to thank your faculty for their willingness to serve, for their willingness to volunteer and potentially be nominated. So with all that as background, I’ve provided a link to the slate of nominees for the 19 Senate Committees, I’ve also provided some copies at the back table if you don’t have a copy hopefully somebody near you has a copy you can look at. So on behalf of the Rules Committee I’ll move the approval of that slate of nominees for the 19 Senate Committees that was distributed with the agenda for today’s Senate meeting.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Is there any discussion of the slate of volunteers? Since this is recommendation from the Rules Committee it does not require a second, so all those in favor of the nominations please say aye.

Group: Aye

Kathryn Flynn, chair: All those opposed, Nay. (pause) Nominations carry.

Our second action item is a resolution to change the name, membership, and charge of the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee. This is coming to you as a recommendation from the Rules Committee after consultation with Linda Glaze who chairs that committee. I sent out a letter last week that tried to explain the logic of what we’re suggesting here, what we’re requesting that you approve. And this is in response to both the learning outcomes that were approved by the Senate roughly a year ago and also to pave the way for preparation for the SACS review that will occur in 2013. So what I’d like to do is put a clean copy of the proposed revision and then read you the resolution and then see if there is any discussion.

Resolution to change the name, membership, and charge of the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee.

    Whereas the General Education Taskforce Report made the recommendation to expand the role of the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee to encompass and more broadly address general education outcomes, and

     Whereas all Colleges and Schools contribute to undergraduate student learning outcomes that the Senate has approved for general education, and

    Whereas the composition of the existing Core Curriculum Oversight Committee does not include a representative from each of the Colleges and Schools, and

    Whereas the name Core Curriculum Oversight Committee is not reflective of the expanded role of the committee,

    Therefore be it resolved that article 4, section 11 of the University Senate Constitution be revised to change the name, composition and charge of the Curriculum Oversight Committee.

And the recommended changes would be those here (pointing to the overhead projection). So at this time I would like to open the floor for discussion of this resolution, or questions.

Mike Stern, senator from Economics: With regards to the membership of this committee I see it is changed in the copy that was sent around to everybody, that’s a clean copy, they crossed out what it was before with 7 areas that were represented in the core to have representation. Under that original formulation under item 7 the social sciences, my department would have representation. And it appears that they have expanded it to try to bring more people, including those that don’t traditionally participate in the core in there so we can call it a general education committee, we have no objection to that, however in the language by which they reformulated it membership was done by college and the department of economics resides in no college we reside in the Provost’s Office. We have previously raised no objection over the past year (we’ve been in the Provost’s Office since last October) to our exclusion from faculty Senate committees that have membership by college, as we are members of no college, therefore we have neither been eligible to serve nor have we participated in voting for those people that were nominated to serve within a given college. However we are still faculty members within this university and this is the University Senate, but we certainly didn’t want to cause any problems or reformulation of all kinds of committees. But with regards to this particular committee, which is rather special, our department last academic year taught over 10,000 student credit  hours in the core on roughly 10 faculty member input labor, that’s 1,000 student credit  hours in the core per faculty member which would have to be one of the highest in the university. It’s about 50 percent of the business in our department, so we would request because we’ve essentially been cut out by the way this has been worded, from at least initial representation in this committee, I propose an amendment to this resolution that the chair has to provide representation for our department on this committee. If that’s the proposed amendment the only modification to request representation for the department of Economics, no deletion of representation anywhere [23:05] else I’d put in italics the only modifications to the words of that faculty membership.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Do we have any discussion or a second for this motion? We have a second, could you state your name? Emily Myers, senator from Sociology seconded the motion. Do we have nay discussion?

Larry Crowley, senator, Civil Engineering: [23:57] It’s kind of unusual to have a department reporting directly to the Provost, and I’m a little concerned about writing in perhaps something that would may be changing in the near future, writing into the proposed amendment. So I would stand in opposition to that.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Does anybody else have any comments?

Anthony Moss, senator, biological sciences: Although I have nothing against the department of economics having representation, this specifically singles out one department to specifically have representation and then other departments for instance there are being quite a few in COSAM, that would not necessarily specifically have representation. It seems kind of unfair. [25:04] Not sure how we would resolve this, but this doesn’t seem to be a fair solution either. I appreciate the situation and understand that, but this doesn’t seem to be an even answer, for instance my department could loose any representation, so thank you.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: are your comments related to the resolution? Does anyone else have any comments related to this particular resolution? If not…

Mike Stern, senator for Economics: may I respond to something? It is not correct that no other department is singled out for representation, as I believe that reason is that mathematics is to receive direct representation. So the Rules Committee already saw fit to single out a particular subject area/department for specific representation. So it seems to me the original amendment already singles out representation for a very specific subject, not just distribution by college and in fact it states the distribution of representation by college is asymmetric as both Liberal Arts and COSAM have multiple representatives, so this proposed amendment does not set the president that a particular subject matter is singled out for specific representation as the existing resolution already does so.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Okay, we have a call for the question. All those in favor of the amendment to the resolution say aye.

Group: aye

Kathryn Flynn, chair: All opposed?

Group: aye (more voices)

Kathryn Flynn, chair: I would have to say it was not approved.

Mike Stern: I wish to propose additional amendments to this resolution if you want to have general discussion or additional amendments.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Let’s have general discussion first and give them a chance to talk and you can come back up, okay?

James Shelley, substituting for Guy Rohrbaur, senator, philosophy: In the philosophy department we’re one of the departments that’s loosing specific representation if this amendment’s past. Because of the time of year that we’re having this meeting our department is really not in a position to represent itself, and this is a very important amendment for us, I think, it’s no stretch of the imagination to read that a diminished status on this committee will probably result in a diminished status in the core. That really change the shape of our department, and that may be something that needs to happen, but the philosophy department would like to have the chance to represent itself at this meeting in an appropriate way. We’d like to have a chance to have our senator here, we’d like to have a chance to have our senator poll members of the department and to express our view. And I think at least half of our department is out of the State right now. So I’d like to move now as a substitute that we table the motion until next meeting. I know there’s a SACS review coming up in 2013, but I can’t see what we would loose by waiting one month. I’m sure the philosophy department isn’t the only one in this situation. So we’d just like to have a chance to represent ourselves the way we can, when we’re on campus, when our senator’s on campus and for that reason I move to table the motion.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: We have a motion to table the resolution, do I hear a second?

Someone: Second

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Okay, that’s pretty obvious. Can one of you give the name, so for the record we’ll have the second.

Rik Blumenthal, senator, chemistry & biochemistry: Rik Blumenthal, chemistry & biochemistry.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Okay, thank you. Anyone want to discuss this? Could you please go to the microphone.

Herb Rotfeld: Is the request for a motion to table it, which requires a vote of the senate to remove it from the table or are you asking for a motion to just postpone it to the next meeting, which would be the first meeting of the fall?

Kathryn Flynn, chair: Let him clarify.

James Shelley, substituting for Guy Rohrbaugh, senator, philosophy: I’m happy to just have it postponed one meeting.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: I would like to hear from the body on this. So I’m going to call for a vote even for postponing until September, because I think there are enough reasons to ask for a vote here. So all in favor of postponing the motion until September say aye.

Group: aye (many voices)

Kathryn Flynn, chair: those opposed?

Group: aye (one or two voices)

Kathryn Flynn, chair: The motion’s been postponed. [30:10]

Okay, that completes the action portion of our agenda. At this time, I’m going to call Dr. Mazey forward. She’s going to give us an update on the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Position.

Dr. Mazey, Provost: Thank you, as you know, I think this was an attachment to the agenda and it’s about two pages that describe what the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Positions would be. First of all let me say that we had some discussion on this at the last Senate meeting and in bringing this forward to me it’s about we have a number of instructors here at Auburn University that are teaching a very large credit hour load to our students particularly at the lower division levels and those instructors currently cannot be employed by us more than 5 years, because that’s a tenure-able position. The point of bringing this forward then is to have term appointments. In order to have that we need to have this Lecturer/Senior Lecturer Position, these could be let’s say from one- to three-year term appointments. I think it’s a way to treat these individuals very respectfully because they do carry a large credit hour load as I mentioned. It’s a way to give us some flexibility into the system, and it’s certainly a way as I mentioned earlier in these difficult budget times to try to address some of our, hopefully temporary, budget issues.

The Lecturer/Senior Lecturer would primarily be responsible for instruction and advising of undergraduate students. As the AAUP talks about these they say they should not exceed 25 percent of the tenure-track faculty of the institution, and that was put into this proposal. Going along with the AAUP guidelines they certainly would be, the departments would request them and no department would have to take them. The departments would request them and there’d be a full search for these positions. [32:45] So I think at this point in time if you look across the country, in fact we were talking about this at the Dean’s Forum yesterday, if you look across the country these are positions that are important at many other institutions. I had a reviewer here from Clemson that asked me why we did not have these, and if you are concerned that as Provost that I would in any way abuse what we are putting forward, I suggest you talk to my…when I was dean at two different institutions I used these positions and really brought forward a great deal of respect for the faculty that do this instruction. So I was very supported by the tenure-track faculty and these non-tenure-track individuals at both institutions. I think it’s import for Auburn and its future, so I hope you will support this. Certainly it’s just a point of information, we will hopefully have a chance to vote on it possibly at the next meeting in September. I will answer any questions that you may have about them.

James Goldstein, senator for English: I wanted to first ask for a clarification on that document that was distributed. I noticed that the word faculty was never used to describe them, is the intention that these would be non-tenure-track faculty positions?

Dr. Mazey, provost: Yes. I apologize for that, actually I revised the document that you had previously here. In fact I’m working with a committee, Faculty Governance and we will probably revise this.

James Goldstein, senator for English: Could I ask a follow up question, please? I was wondering if you have any numbers available on how big a need there is for this? I can’t imagine that our institution would actually be approaching 25 percent of the faculty and so would perhaps a lower percentage as an early stage of implementing this be something we might more cautiously put in rather than to say that it can be up to 25, because things have a way, unintended consequences of materializing later.

Dr. Mazey, provost: In terms of the funds that I’m talking about for these terms appointments I mentioned earlier, I think the maximum would be say in terms of new positions maybe 60. Now you do have a number of instructors here already and how we would go about evaluating those, converting them, I need to work with the Deans on that. But in terms of any new, the maximum would be 60, and I don’t even think it would be that.

James Goldstein: Okay. Thank you.

Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Hello. I had a number of questions from faculty and I wondered if you could entertain them all. One comes from coordinators that we within our department, and this may be a little unusual across the university from what I understand, but would those positions necessarily be reclassified or would they be held in the current form that they exist? Those people hold a non-tenure-track but they have a fairly long commitment to the university and they have to be renewed at least every 7 years, I think (not sure about that).

Dr. Mazey, provost: I’d have to look into that, Dr. Locy mentioned this at one of our meetings.

Tony Moss: They have much expanded responsibilities outside of lecturing, although they do lecturing as well, they typically coordinate activities in laboratories on, and also coordinate the assignment of teaching assistants to all those sessions, there’s a huge number of students, it’s really bigger than a lectureship position.

Dr. Mazey, provost: I think I would want to work with the obviously the department and others, and he explained that, that’s currently a staff position in the institution. And I was a little surprised because those individuals are teaching. So it may be because you haven’t had these types of positions in the past, but we just have to look into it. I don’t have the answer to that.

Tony Moss: Okay.

Dr. Mazey, provost: But I would work with the department and the Dean and others to come up with a viable solution there.

Tony Moss: Okay, thank you. Some other questions that came up; Do the people that would come in under this kind of category, would they enter into the State Retirement System?

Dr. Mazey, provost: Yes. I can’t see why they wouldn’t. Marcie’s here, yes.

Tony Moss: I’m a conduit. People call me other things too.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Then again, I’m not an expert on the Alabama system but certainly where I’ve been before, some of these individuals were .8 and not full time so we wanted to get them to 1.0 in order to get them to be a part of the retirement system.

Tony Moss: If continually employed for 7 years, are they automatically tenured?

Dr. Mazey, provost: No, these are renewable…

Tony Moss: Strictly on a contract basis for no more than three years.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Exactly.

Tony Moss: Okay, I think that covers it, thank you.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Okay, thank you. Yes, Dr. Blumenthal.

Rik Blumenthal, senator Chemistry and Biochemistry: Last time we discussed this I mentioned that I have a concern that we create second-class faculty. They would be performing many of the functions of the tenured faculty, but be subject to remove-dismissal without tenure protection and as well when you had mentioned earlier that one of the things this would do would be cost savings. You mentioned that you would pay on average less than the tenured faculty. [39:15] Again, I just wanted to raise the concept that if you…if we hire in people to do jobs that are done by the faculty, you know the actual instructional jobs of the faculty; we hire them without tenure protection and we hire them at lower salaries, I believe we are creating a second-class citizenry.

Dr. Mazey, provost: My response to that is that you currently have at Auburn quite a number of instructors and those individuals, I’m trying to give them the opportunity to if they want to remain at Auburn and they are good in the classroom, they go through the annual review processes and it’s a way to not treat them as a second-class citizen. I have a great deal of respect for these individuals that are in the classroom carrying a major credit-hour load for us, and so I think it’s just the opposite and I have certainly as I said been a proponent of this as a Dean at my previous institutions and those individuals would I’m sure agree with me in terms of how they’ve been treated. Yes Dr. Stern.

Mike Stern: I’m just going to respond to that. Many universities have positions like these, Dr. Mazey’s correct. These positions, these people are under legally binding contracts and can be such for 5 years and they possess more job security than untenured tenure-track junior faculty do, which could be fired after 3 years. So I don’t see any second-class status for these individuals. We have differential pay based on subject, based on duties, job description, etc. If their job description’s not similar, we don’t pay secretaries similar to faculty, we don’t pay faculty similar to administrators, differential job duties carry differential pay in the market place. And if they have contracts that give them X number of years in service it seems to me to have as much status as our initial faculty hires do.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Thank you very much. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes sir.

Norbert Wilson, senator, Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology: [41:22] I have a question, well actually I have two questions, one for clarification. It states moreover the faculty…excuse me, moreover the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer position would be less than 50 percent of the faculty in any unit, but that is only of the tenured-track faculty, so that is not counting lecturers or grad students who maybe teaching courses?

Dr. Mazey, provost: Not counting graduate students, it’s counting all of the faculty in a department. For example: English I think is when we put this in there and that was added in discussing this with faculty governance is that we would not want 55 percent of the faculty in X department whether it’s English or what ever to be Lecturers/Senior Lecturers and the remainder then being tenure-track faculty. This would be, the percentage would be smaller. [42:20]

Norbert Wilson: Okay, maybe I’m not clear on what is faculty, so faculty is only the tenure-track people or is it including tenure-track and the instructors and the lecturers…

Dr. Mazey, provost: Yes, faculty includes all of those, the senior lecturers, lecturers, instructors if they had a tenure-track faculty, that’s all faculty, but the lecturers/senior lecturers will not be over 50 percent of all that. Graduate assistants are not at that category, okay?

Norbert Wilson: Okay, so you in theory could had a department with very few tenure-track faculty members, a series of instructors even though they rotate out I guess less than 5 years, and then also the lecturers. So you could have a department that’s really heavy on instructors.

Dr. Mazey, provost: You possibly could have but I think the instructors would be in this category of lecturer/senior lecturer, is what I perceive will happen, and what has happen at my previous institutions is the instructors…there’ll be less of those or they will be non-existent.
Norbert Wilson: Okay, that was the point I wasn’t clear on. And then the other question I has was the process of promotion and review, it seems that this is only on a departmental level this is not on a sort of college wide P&T committee and I was just wondering what is the reasoning behind keeping it only in the department where I guess if they have a run-in with the department head there is no way of sort of…how do you deal with that?

Dr. Mazey, provost: Well I think we’d have to work out those details if this is approved, but certainly the dean, when I was a dean, had the final approval on this.

Norbert Wilson: Okay, thank you.

Becky Curtis, from Special Ed Rehab and Coun.: Just for clarification, would it be for graduate and undergraduate?

Dr. Mazey, provost: No, just undergraduate.

Becky Curtis, from Special Ed Rehab and Coun.: Would the graduate level position ever be…

Dr. Mazey, provost: I guess from an academic viewpoint these positions are primarily teaching. And I certainly think, and with the hope that everyone would agree with me, if your teaching graduate students, research should be a component of your position. And so therefore I don’t think that the lecturer/senior lecturer should be teaching or advising graduate students. [44:48]

Becky Curtis, from Special Ed Rehab and Coun.: Also another question. Would there be prohibitions in terms of who could be hired for these positions, for example if someone was a tenure-track faculty member and did not become tenured, they would not be eligible to…

Dr. Mazey, provost: These are not positions to do that. There would be a search process and if someone did not receive promotion and tenure here and a position came open and they wanted to go through a search process, that’s a whole other… , but this is not as a way to keep someone that did not receive promotion and tenure. It is not.

Yes Herb.

Herb Rotfeld, substituting senator for Marketing: There’s one thing, I thought Norbert’s question was going to get to this in part, and that was the calculation of the numbers when you are saying percentages of number of positions because this is…you and I exchanged a couple of additional e-mails with the question of the part-timers, and when you count bodies it could relate to things as you bring in account the visiting and/or part-time faculty, leaving instructors out of it. Which from where I know a number of instructors are not really visiting teachers as much as they might be faculty hired before their doctorate is done. But the question becomes as you bring in the part-timers and the visiting people that are just teaching one or two classes, what are you using for the count for the percentage of people for these slots?

Dr. Mazey, provost: I don’t count part-time, part-time is not a full time faculty member.

Herb Rotfeld: So your counting FTEs

Dr. Mazey, provost: Yes

Herb Rotfeld: It’s stated in terms of people not

Dr. Mazey, provost: It is, but I think in our exchange you mentioned to me that you had a visiting person that has been there for a number of years.

Herb Rotfeld: There are a few of those in my college, yes.

Dr. Mazey, provost: I guess I think visiting is someone who is not here longer than let’s say 3 years. So I think this is a way to hopefully system. Yes sir?

Calvin Johnston, veterinary medicine: [47:00] I have a question about eligibility of a lecturer? If that person were to apply for a tenure-track position later would the years of service as a lecturer count toward their tenure eligibility?

Dr. Mazey, provost: No. That’s a whole different position. But if they choose to try to apply for that or are put into a tenure-track position then they can start the probationary period.

Calvin Johnston: Okay.

Dr. Mazey, provost: Okay, thank you, oh you have another question? [47:32]

Carl Backman, from Sociology: I am on the Non-tenure-track Faculty Committee, which will be presumably reviewing this, and I had a couple of issues for things that we may be talking about on the committee that have been, some were and I guess we haven’t gotten much clarity how will people be dismissed? And/or what kinds of protections, It seems to me that the way you have written this no one has any protection even for the next year because if budget contingencies come up the contract says “well you know if we don’t have the money you’re out.” And so these protections seem to be pretty thin and maybe we want to put more in. I think it’s important to add from what you’ve proposed here, to make it explicit that we expect these folks to have professional development because that’s what faculty do, and that the university will have to support faculty development for these folks just like they would for assistants and any body else. There’s some extent to which it seems to me these positions are going to compete for resources and ought to if we in fact want to use them to improve instruction, and to improve their commitment to the university. And the advantage of this is now it’s worth your while to commit yourself to Auburn University, and it’s also worth Auburn’s while to commit itself to these faculty. And so, I would like to make that more explicit in these recommendations.

Dr. Mazey, provost: I don’t know…I certainly want the committee to have a chance to put forward their ideas, but I really didn’t think that this document would be necessarily…we’d have to work out many of those details as we move forward. Okay. Thank you so much.

Kathryn Flynn, chair: The final item on our agenda today is information on the Fringe Benefit Rate. This will be a joint presentation by Marcie Smith, associate vice president for business and finance and George Flowers, the dean of the graduate school. I think Marcie’s going to start first.

Marcie Smith, associate vice president for business and finance: First let me apologize, the title slide and I think some people have already commented on this, it just refers to the Fringe Benefit Rate and initially these two topics were integrated a little bit more and the Graduate Tuition Remission Rate actually should be a separate item there they are related, but George is going to help in covering the second topic. [50:42]

What we’ve done is submitted to HHS a proposal to establish 3 fringe benefit rates at Auburn University. There are the categories, this is fairly typical. Institutions have from 4–6 so we’re right in the mix. What we will do is apply these to all budgetary divisions of the university, so even AUM will be included. We’ve talked about doing something like this for years and for reasons I’ll mention later it’s become more critical right now.

It’s fairly simple but the numerator really does make a big difference, and what we include as fringe benefit cost at Auburn University is we have submitted a proposal that tries to include everything except what’s specifically not allowed. Just in talking about some of the other institutions that these, 50 percent of the other institutions have fringe rates. Some of the more recent adopters and we have been in constant communication with a couple of these institutions to see how we can manage the process. I also wanted to introduce Dustan Halverson who is from Hueron Consulting Group. Ione of the things that these other institutions told us immediately was don’t go it alone. There are certain things that the Feds will approve and others that they won’t. So it’s very important to be cautious as you develop these rates. A lot of other institutions are planning on switching as well. Why we want to go this route at Auburn, Like I’ve said, we’ve talked about it for several years and some reasons are budgetary, but right now budget is driving a lot of this. Last year we spent over $100 million dollars in employee benefits. This is just a quick breakdown of some of the major categories, but this really doesn’t include everything. This is what is going into the rate. If you include graduate tuition remission, if you include dependant waivers for employee dependants that alone is 1.5 million dollars. Also over time, I deliberately went back to the time when the State started assessing PEEHIP, which is a retiree healthcare, so as not to skew the numbers, but we’ve grown 70 percent in benefit cost and our salary and wages have grown about 25 percent over that same period of time. As we stay level for a couple of years in the salaries and wages (hopefully), we know this is going to be exacerbated, we’ve already got the Teacher’s Retirement Rate for 2011 and it’s a 7 percent increase, so I think over the next two years in FY 10 and FY11 we’ll see a 7 million dollar increase in teacher’s retirement alone. So pretty dramatic issue.

What we do now. We really have various components of rates. We have FICA, on the job injury, the biggest one is teacher’s retirement rate, and these are all charged out actually to all the different funds to contracts and grants, but we budget, this year we’ll budget 28.5 percent, is what we’ve planned to budget for FY10, and it was a 26 percent range for the current year. Various components are percentages, but then on top of that we have dollar amounts. If an employee takes health insurance of course that’s going to hit the funding source if an employee has the maximum tax deferred annuity match, that’s going to also hit the account in the cost. So you can see it’s pretty difficult to budget because you have to know exactly the type of employee and their individual benefit packages. So it makes the budget real hard to pin down, lots of variances in budget and we also budget right now full-time and part-time at the same rate. What we’re trying to do is eliminate some of that variability. I’ve been associated with issues before, some major contracts and grants that were ongoing where the benefit costs were running 40 percent and we were budgeting 25 (percent), just because that’s what we budgeted. There’s really no relationship now between what we budget and what we include in contract and grant budgets and what we actually realize.

Some advantages back to why Auburn’s doing this. Efficiency might seem like a weak reason, but in the whole course of the budget discussions and we’re trying to minimize administration, we’ve taken, some of the budget cuts we’ve taken from the administrative side. This is college administration, departmental administration, and central administration. The way we do things now is pretty complex. We have 37 different benefit categories, they all hit the individual funding sources, I’m sure everybody’s printing all that stuff out, tons of paper, and so this is one of the reasons we’ve looked at it before. It simplifies a lot of things too. We do a lot of salary and wage transfers on the contract and grant side. I probably shouldn’t say that with any auditors, but this would make it tremendously more easy to do those.

I’ve already talked a little bit about the budgeting being able to more specifically and strategically budget is going to be more important as we’re facing these funding shortfalls. This is probably the thing that is guiding us the most right now, is the increased recovery. I say we budget the 28.5 percent, but that’s not what we’re experiencing over the institution as a whole. One of the reasons for that is because there’s this roughly 12 million dollars in benefit costs that are just absorbed centrally. And if we can recover some of that and spread the cost and be fair, all funding sources will pay the appropriate amount of benefits we’re hoping to recover that and that’s money that we can reallocate in the budget process.

This is not really downsized, but these are things to consider. We’re going to have to change the way we do our budgeting and I actually think that’s a very positive thing because right now, I don’t know if you hear complaints in the benefit budget, but it’s very hard for a department to know exactly what resources they have on the benefit side and what budget is left because of the way we do it. [58:13] I guess the most important thing is, rates will be higher for some individual funding sources and some individual projects. We’re working behind the scenes to address some of the budget considerations we’ll have more information on that as it evolves. It needs to move pretty quickly though and this is where we are, this is what we submitted. I know those rates may look high to you, but they are based on actual and projected costs. So in most cases the projected really only includes the costs that we know are going to increase. So it’s a fairly conservative projection. And hopefully we’ll negotiate this prior to October 1, and implement in payroll in the financial system next year in the FY10 year. And the budget plan as I said we’re working on, ideally we would have a couple more months before w do the budgets and we could incorporate this, but having to go back a little bit and rework the budget plan. So I think that’s all and I’ll turn it over to George. [59:39]

George Flowers, dean of graduate school: As Marcie indicated this discussion is really separate from the Fringe Rate. We started off having a discussion about somehow including Tuition cost in a Fringe Rate that was one of the options and it became apparent through discussions about how a fringe rate would be implemented that we gain a lot of flexibility by not having, by not including tuitions cost in a fringe rate, but by trying to account for it in another fashion. So the title here is “Tuition Remission and Graduate Fellowships” and the point of the title is to emphasize that the tuition remission is the source of the funding that we hope to obtain here, and the graduate fellowships are the outcome, the result.

We did a survey over the last year and most universities have some system for charging at least some part of tuition benefits to externally funded contracts and grants and this really runs the gamut. Most universities have some way of charging at least a component of the in-state, the resident part of the tuition. There are some institutions that charge the out-of-state non-resident part as well and procedures/policies run the gamut from direct charges of tuition or some part of tuition to incorporating them into some sort of a rate. And with regard to funding agencies, a lot of funding agencies will support RA tuition, there are continuing to be some, I believe who do not but the vast majority of funding agencies I’m familiar with support RA tuition, but we currently have no consistent mechanism for assessing those charges in external contracts and grants. And so if we want to try to do this in a consistent way and a regular fashion, then we need a consistent policy.

Just some numbers to give you some idea of the level of tuition support in FY08 we had about 23 million dollars in graduate tuition waivers and there was a total in salaries and stipends for graduate assistants of 26.3. Now this 22.8, I believe, captures all of the graduate assistants and the 26.3 also captures all the graduate assistants, but roughly the numbers distributed between RAs and TAs is about 50 percent. So it gives you a flavor of the level of expenditure that is involved here. [1:02:48]

As far as needs, we currently have one endowed graduate fellowship. We’ve had one fellowship for the last 20 years, that’s the Meriwether Fellowship. We have no other university wide endowed fellowships and we have only a very small incentive fellowship program that Joe Pittman and I started a couple of years ago using the application fee dollars that are coming into the graduate school. So if we’re to grow our graduate programs, we want to improve them both in terms of quality and quantity. We need to identify new sources of funding if it’s possible and reasonable to do so.

So University Research Council, one of the committees of the University Research Council is the graduate issues committee and it’s been charged with exploring ways of recovering at least some tuition from grants and contracts. And this committee has been examining a possible remission rate, and there’s some basic guidelines that we have laid out agreed to and first of all this will be applied to externally supported student stipends, externally supported contracts and grants, not internally funded positions, a tuition remission rate would give us that flexibility. It would be applied to a specified percentage of a students stipend that’s charged to a contract or grant, this would make sure that a consistent percentage was charged if a student is supported on multiple contracts and grants. This approach does not require Federal approval, gives us the flexibility to being able to set our own policies and how we do it. And a critical point also is that it can be configured so it’s independent of indirect cost. [1:04:44] Indirect cost would not be charged on this sort of tuition recovery, so we can avoid that additional burden.

So where would the funds be used? The funds that are recovered from these external contracts and grants, two major items that are needed are: 1. Capping up fellowships or incentive fellowships, we have very little funding on campus that will allow us to be able to enhance student stipends in a number of programs the competition with other universities is very extreme will high quality students, and so having the ability to have a pool of money for capping up fellowships should increase our competitiveness. And then also another category is thesis and dissertation completion fellowships. We have no university wide pool or really dedicated funds as far as I know anywhere to allow students who have completed a research assistance-ship who the grant has run out on his or her project to have an additional semester or even months to finish a project. So [1:06:00] these are at least two examples of potential uses for these sorts of resources.

Now there has in some discussion that I’ve had with other folks, there has been an interest in, “Well how does this impact this particular types of grants?”  Really there are two types of grants that we need to, or two categories that need to be considered. One is…under example number one what I call the bottom line fixed. Which means; suppose your program director calls and says I have a fixed amount of money, I have $50,000 that I can provide for your project. So in that sort of a situation, the basic rules–these would be uniform–if you budgeted 20K for a GRA, the rate we’ve been talking about in terms of tuition remission is 20 percent, remember there’s no indirect charge on the tuition and the return, what I envision is that 75 percent would be returned to the home department or really the home program that generated it because there are some centers and other programs that are either multi-departmental or specialized and then 25 percent would be available. Really in a graduate school account they could be used for graduate program support campus wide. The charge to the grant would be 4K and we all understand that would not be new money. If the bottom line is fixed, that would not be new money. Returned to the program, the reason I chose 20K is because it made the math easy, 3K, 75 percent of the 4K would be returned to the generating program, and the specification would be that the funds need to be used for graduate fellowships, graduate support. For cases like this the departmental graduate fellowships could be used to mitigate any negative effects on small grants. If this sort of dollar figure impacted a small grant in a substantial negative way, so the net cost to the program is going to be 1K. [1:08:09] And where does that 1K end up? Well it ends up providing support for a campus-wide program. So that is the bottom line fixed example. Now, this is just swapping dollars from one pocket to another. We’re not going to get new money on these kinds of grants, but what if the bottom line is flexible?

There are quite a few programs where the bottom line isn’t set. There is typically a range of dollars that can be and are appropriate for a given program to accept a budget. In those sorts of situations, again you have exactly the same thing, but you increase your bottom line of your budget, say the range was 130–150 that’s what you program manager told you is typical for say NSF, particular NSF grant, then the bottom line to your budget would be an additional 4K. This would be new money, which would be returned to the generating program and the amount returned would be 3K. These funds again would be used for graduate fellowships and so the net gain to the program is 3K, and again the graduate school program support campus-wide would be 1K. So this gives us some funding both at the university level as well as within each individual department. So that’s what we’ve been discussing and those are at least some example scenarios. Any questions? [1:09:52]

Barbara Kemppainen, from Anatomy, physiology and pharmacology (not a senator): I don’t have any economics background or accounting or anything but in example one and two are you putting 20K in a grant proposal for a graduate research assistant or am I misunderstanding this all together?

George Flowers: Yes, that’s correct.

Barbara Kemppainen: If you could explain to me one more time if you put 20K into the grant proposal one time it’s new money and the other time it’s not new money, I’m not following that.

George Flowers: If you have the bottom line on a grant it’s fixed. If the bottom line is fixed it’s not new money. If a program manager tells you, you’ve got 50K to spend then the 4K that would be used, charged to the grant for tuition remission really would not be new money. If you’re allowed to budget 50K then that’s 50K it comes from somewhere else within the grant. But the point being is that it comes back. Where we get new money where the new dollars come from is for situations where the bottom line is flexible or they specifically, the program manager of the program specifically says, “you can charge tuition we encourage you to charge tuition.” In those sorts of situations that is new money and that is money that currently funds that we are currently not capturing. Okay? Yes mam.

Becky Curtis, from Special Ed Rehab and Counseling (not a senator): We have a number of grants that we compete for from OCERS, Federal Government, Department of Education, that are intended for student support and they’re fixed, for the 5 years there’s a certain amount, how would this impact our grants?

George Flowers: I envision that this sort of, well we would maintain the same sort of policy we currently have with regard to student fellowships. [1:12:16] For example one program that I’m familiar with is the NASA graduate student researcher program. Funding level for that program has not increased in about 20 years. Originally the way that program was set up there was about 2 to 3K that was budgeted for tuition. That’s not even one semester’s tuition now. So a number of years ago the tuition fellowship policy was extended to include externally funded fellowships that were the equivalent of a research assistantship. So if these funds are the equivalent of a dedicated research assistantship then I believe we could develop policies or part of the policy development would include continuing providing tuition support for those types of opportunities.

Becky Curtis: Specifically right now they support both undergraduate and graduate tuition and provide a fellowship for the
student to be supported, but it’s all for student support. So…

George Flowers: It’s basically a fellowship or scholarship program and those I do no believe would be incorporated into this.

Becky Curtis: Thank you.

George Flowers: I did not intend for them to be incorporated into this.

Bruce Smith, Faculty Research Committee: George, I know we talked about this a while ago that as a faculty we haven’t been encouraged to include graduate student tuition on on grants, in fact I didn’t realize it was possible, but in exploring this it’s certainly possible, it appears that is some granting agencies to put the full tuition of a graduate student into that grant. How would that ability interact with and idea like 20 percent tuition remission rate? In other words obviously if I’m getting the full tuition for that student, what’s that situation in terms of your office?

George Flowers: I’m… that’s certainly something that we want to do. If we can get the  whole amount without negatively impacting that grant then we would certainly want to do that but…

Hi, my name’s Dustin Halberson: I’m a manager with Heron Consulting and I’ve helped out with developing this project. Typically what we’ve seen at other universities is that they basically set a rate. And most universities actually don’t recover the full rates but for consistency purposes you need to have something out there so that you are basically charging Federal wards the same amount. You get into problems if you try to charge a full to one award but not to another. Basically you want to set a rate out there that you plan on giving to all your Federal projects. [1:15:19]
Other voices: (not spoken into mic) if it’s not a federal technical non-compliance they could charge whatever they…[other things are said but cannot hear because they are not at the microphone.]

Dustin Halberson: I would encourage you to get what you can from the other sources. Federal we need to be consistent about it, not overcharge them. From the other sources we can charge them at their fair share, they can pay their full costs, we should definitely be trying to get that.

?: Your saying basically on a Federal grant you would not recommend requesting the full tuition but request a tuition remission rate?

Dustin Halberson: right

?: so it’s the same across the board for Federal grants.

Larry Teeter, Forestry & Wildlife: I’ve got two questions. One I don’t understand the passing the money back and forth, why isn’t it just a 5 percent that goes to the graduate school for these campus-wide programs?

George Flowers: That’s a very good question. If you go to example (1) the net result is 5 percent precisely, you start off with a 20 percent tuition remission rate you send 15 percent back to the department, it’s 5 percent that is kept. It’s a wash either way if you go to example 2, where the benefit comes from, is from these external dollars. If we’re not charging the 20 percent rate, if we’re only charging a 5 percent rate all we are going to get is the 1K even though we could have gotten an additional 3K that would have went back to an individual department or program that generated it. That’s the point.

Larry Teeter: Okay, and the second question. If it’s an organization that’s not really ready to pay tuition is this something that’s not applied or is it applied and called something else, besides a tuition remission charge?

George Flowers: If the program’s policies do not allow tuition to be charged then I would assume that we could not do that. [1:17:39]

John Mason: (no microphone used here) I would say that is correct, the test would be it would need regulation to specify that tuition will not be paid for with that grant and put a financial tax on it. The anomaly here is the majority of the Federal agencies are currently accepting full tuition rate and stipend. It’s the consistency of the accounting that Auburn’s wrestling with, you would be surprised that many Federal agencies ?? offer full stipend. Unless it’s a cap this is the only money we have. In many of these that are fully negotiated contracts it is [yes, got a mic] typical practice to try to recover tuition and stipend. So I guess the guidance that the University Research Council is seeking from this committee is to first see what like minded universities are doing and then follow the federal regulations and apply consistency, but not burden any faculty members grants that would not pay the tuition or stipend. So we’re only looking at let’s say the opportunity side of it, but not taxing on those that would cause it a shortcoming. That’s not the intent.

Larry Teeter: Okay, thank you.

Rik Blumenthal, senator, Chemistry & Biochemistry: With respect to what Dr. Mason just mentioned I think it’s all a good idea. I’m just concerned and I wanted to get a clarification since the consultant seem to know a little be more about the laws and legality here. Certain Federal agencies, I’ve gotten most of my money from army research office, and I speak to my program monitor and he says, “you’ve got a 120K, you figure out how you’re going to spend it.” And so if some of that money goes in I’ll be in this fixed bottom line, loose a K by this for each graduate student part of this. [1:19:33] What I was wondering as we’re going over this was, would it be possible to have certain agencies that bottom line on one list if we deal with them this way and certain agencies that don’t bottom line on another list or are the Federal agencies, do all Federal agencies need to be treated the same? If you know something about the legality there, could we have list of these ones are this way and these are this way?

Dustin Halberson: I think in theory that’s kind of how you treat it, but maybe it’s kind of designed within the system a little bit differently and you could choose which ones. As was mentioned before most Federal agencies will let you include it and it really will be new money here. One of the points I want to make, currently Auburn is subsidizing the Federal government with some of these costs and these are costs that most universities are getting back from the Federal government in some portion. Most are not recovering full costs. But there are a couple of agencies that do not want to pay it or I think as had been mentioned and demonstrated in the two examples here, there is one where you do not have new money or where is your fixed bottom line and I think that’s the proposal out there right now is to how to treat that and return some of that money back. Consistency is an issue, the main theory behind that is you do not want to overcharge the Federal government. You can work within your system to design something to minimize the impact on some of the awards here. [1:21:09]

Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: So you’ve answered part of the question that we had. We were very concerned about small limited size grants, because we felt this would kill a lot of the research programs that we see across campus including some in our department, but if I understand correctly and I’m not sure exactly what the current status is the Federal level on a lot of these grants but it was a few years ago and NIH and NSF both and I don’t know about the other funding agencies I presume it would come into play with them as well, started to take a close look at the bottom line. If you have a large research program and you bring in a large grant then you start siphoning off additional money for tuition and for fringe benefits, I understand the need, it is there, but I’m concerned that that will make our faculty less competitive. Now perhaps I don’t understand the situation well and I see a gentleman in the corner there shaking his head, but his was actually a statement that was made, not necessarily with regard to these particular points but with regard to the total bottom line of a grant. So when funding agencies see these two grants from two different institutions, one asking more than the other and they are supposed to be able to do the same job then it will decrease the competitiveness of the more expensive grant, that’s what I understand. [1:22:38] Is that not true? I don’t see and I understand that there are different cost recovery rates at different institutions as well, but those are calculated based upon various things, building, electrical costs, and other things as well go into all of that. Maybe you can answer this.

Dustin Halberson: I’ve worked with a number of different institutions around the country and I do hear the concerns about competitiveness when it comes to FNA rates not as much when it comes to fringe rates, tuition remission. What I can say is that other institutions are recovering these costs they’re including them whether it’s a rate or direct charge, so I don’t think you’re asking for anything that higher than the next guy. Our experience and our feeling is that, in general this should not be a make or break thing as to whether you get an award or not. You are probably are going to get it or you’re not. When the Feds review a proposal they’re not looking so much at what are the fringe costs, do they include tuition remission or not, maybe a little bit in that area, your going to cut them a break and say “Hey we’re not going to charge you 50 grand that somebody else is,” that’s a plus, but I think the bottom line here is you want to try and recover as much of you cost as possible so that you’re not really subsidizing the research you’re doing for them. I believe it will make Auburn stronger, it will bring more money into the institution, and in the long run it will be more competitive.

Tony Moss: That answered some of our questions. I still want to be on record that we’re still pretty concerned in our department, we are rapidly growing, we’re improving our funding situation, and even with the improved funding from the Federal government this year, we’re just concerned about keeping things moving forward. We don’t want to cycle money back into the program and then at the same time loose graduate support. That was our real concern. When we saw this we were quite alarmed quite frankly. I do know circumstances with a very expensive private institution, a very famous one, where the costs were in a situation like you are describing as high as about 60 plus thousand dollars ($60,000+) a year for a single student. I know of a particular situation where that happened. Now that’s kind of unusual I realize we’re not in that kind of situation, we’re not in that league, kind of like to be there maybe someday, but these can become extremely large encumbrances to grants. [1:25:22]

Dustin Halberson: I can tell you as going through this process and working with Auburn and the fine people here that the goal is really to try and make this the best place possible to make this place as efficient as possible, to bring in as much money as possible and you know as we went through this analysis and tried to determine the best way to come up with fringe rates we looked at multiple scenarios of rates.  And we laid a number of different scenarios out there, did some high level analysis and impacts and actually the scenario we ended up going with was actually the lowest impact and the lowest plus dollar wise compared to all the other scenarios, because it made the most sense for Auburn. It caused the least amount of impact to the researchers here, so the goal is to really try and do the best thing and progress research in Auburn as a whole. That’s where our focus is.

Tony Moss: We have shared goals there, that’s for sure.

Bruch Smith: I had another question, which was; what about the potential about putting this tuition recovery cost into F&A instead of into direct costs? [1:26:32] Even when I’m submitting a grant that doesn’t have necessarily a fixed bottom line, but if I’m going to NIH for instance there is essentially a fixed bottom line and if I put this cost into F&A I can go and get that outside of the bottom line as opposed to taking it out of my bottom line. In other words…and Auburn has a ridiculously low F&A rate compared to a lot of other places. When I’m reviewing grants at the NIH I commonly see F&A rates of 95 percent, some other institutions and certainly we’re down around 45 (percent) so we’ve got room to grow there, why not grow there instead of out of my bottom line?

Dustin Halberson: Unfortunately A21 doesn’t allow for tuition remission to be a direct charge on. Even as part of their review guide for the auditors they specifically talk about tuition remission and where it should and shouldn’t be and what to do when they find it in those places.

Marcie Smith: (no mic) Another piece of that too is PEEHIP and goes into the F&A rate…(cannot hear).

Bob Locy, immediate past chair of the senate: I don’t understand the argument, a couple of people have asked questions and we’re getting at it, but it’s still not at all clear that this idea of new money. I’m sorry, but every grant that I’ve ever gotten in the last 17 years that I’ve been at Auburn, I’m told by a program manager, “here’s how much we’ve got to give you,” that’s after I’ve submitted the budget. And the amount that I’m awarded is never the amount that I asked for it’s always less than that. So we’re always operating on a ceiling cap that you have to fit whatever you have in. If you’ve asked for a graduate stipend with or without tuition recovery money in it, when they tell you that you get less, you can’t lower the amount you’re asking for it for tuition, you’re stuck with that so you’ve got to carve other things out of the rest of your grant proposal that is money that you need to do the research, and you never have enough. So there isn’t any new money here, it’s new from your point of view, George, in that your recovering money that you previously had no opportunity to recover, but it’s not new money by an large, I’d say 98 percent of it is not new money coming to the university, it’s money we’re going to get it’s only a question of how much of it you guys are going to keep and how much of it we get to have for doing our research and our grants with. And I kind of object, our department desperately needs a source of graduate funding for graduate research assistantships that could be sort of dispersed as needed to make the teaching assistantship money work better in the department quite frankly. But we have no source of that and we desperately need it. So I appreciate the idea that you are trying to get it by this kind of a mechanism, but it’s really taxing as Tony mentioned the competitiveness of our grant to get the money to do that because your taking 3K out of my bottom line for executing my research on my grant and now you’re giving it back to the department head to spend as he sees fit to help the graduate program work. We need that money and I agree, and I’m not sure I oppose the whole idea, but I think you are trying to play smoke and mirrors here by calling this new money. And that’s not really a question. (laughter)

Dustin Halberson: From my perspective and I’m not as intimate with your grants and the proposals that you have to put together, but if you have a grant proposal and they say it’s $150,000 and you tells us how you are going to spend it, that’s a capped grant to me, but if you’re putting together a project and it’s real costs and you’re including all the appropriate items and that’s what you’re throwing out there for them then I think instead of $150,000 it’s $155,000 is what you are submitting. I do understand why you feel like that, but the goal and the idea is not to take from somebody else’s pocket and give it to another person. We would not have been brought in here to do that if that was the goal. [1:31:18]

Bruce Smith: I want to ask Marcie a question. Didn’t want you to get away. I understand the need to recover the fringe benefit cost just as we have to recover graduate tuition, etc., but let’s take a for example. I have an NIH grant, it’s now going into it’s forth year, 26 percent fringe rate on that, if we bump that fringe rate up 33 or 34 percent, 75 percent of my costs on that grant right now are personnel costs, so that big jump (I know it’s not a big jump), but that big jump in fringe is going to kill my grant. It’s going to take away all the money that’s left, that other 25 percent, to do my research. The same problem that Bob’s talking about. So is there a potential, I know we’ve got to pay those bills, but for a grant that’s already in position for which we asked for 26 percent fringe, how’s that going to be handled in its last two years for example where that makes a big impact on how we can do the work. Because NIH will not pay me more that’s pretty clear.

Dustin Halberson: Maybe I can help out on this one and that is clear and that is a concern. And we’re working through some of the details on how to implement this. But I can also as in your example you have a proposal that went in at 26 percent, you are in your forth year, my guess is that you projected out salary increases for all those years and we’re going to be pretty flat here for a couple of years. I think when you look at salaries and you look at fringe together, there’s not going to be that big of a gap and when you factor in really what has happened with some of the increase with the fringe cost here which you weren’t seeing back then, there’s not really going to be that big of a difference between the proposed percentage and what the actual costs are. But I do recognize that there are going to be some winners and there are going to be some losers. And I know that there needs to be a way to deal with some of those where you have those big gaps so we are working through some of the details and trying to come up with a reasonable way to maybe handle some of that.

Marcie Smith: (talking without a mic)

Bruce Smith: I think it would be useful for instance, costs got to be paid but, a grant that’s been out there for a while; we took a 3o percent hit from NIH too so the fact that we got salary dollars that didn’t go up because nobody is getting a raise this year is not really going to help us a tremendous amount, that’s 3 or 4 percent not 10 percent, so there is a bit of a difference there. The second question, Marcie, I had was this idea of differential rates for part-time employees and how in the grant rating process we identify those people? [1:34:29] Because, for example I might write a grant that states that I’m going to have 50 percent of a laboratory technician or a graduate student or something like that on this project. Now, I’m trying to put 50 percent together with another 50 percent somewhere else, if that works out it’s great if not, I’ve got 50 percent of a person and I go out and hire a part-time person. So I can’t tell you today, submitting this application whether or not that body is part-time or full-time. [1:35:04]

A lot of the following dialogue is lost because the microphone was not used. It is necessary to speak into the microphone if we are to have the meeting transcribed.
Marcie Smith: (no mic) I understand, I think you still know…


Bruce Smith: I put a full time rate on it

Marcie Smith: (no mic) [Something about health insurance or not.] Some of those issues I think will be more precise…there will be situations where… part-time individuals versus full-time…but right now…

Bruce Smith: You just said something that got my curiosity up and that is I think that you’re saying and you said in your presentation that the actual costs of the fringe will be charged back. So it would behoove me to convince my employees not to take insurance, for example.

Marcie Smith: No, that’s how it is now…

Dustin Halberson: and that’s a bad idea. (laughter)

Bruce Smith: No you’ve got to find employees who are married to employees and have them take it from a different department, that’s all.

Dustin Halberson: see, then you get into hiring issues and in fact this is another positive is that it takes out some of those games that people play.

Bruce Smith: So in your situation there will be a flat charge period that goes into a fund somewhere that pays all this.

Marcie Smith: (no mic) If the same individual and the same salary is budgeted that would be the charge that…

That’s not common right now if you budget the 28 percent you may be anywhere between 45 and 10…I think it will improve the situation it…it will be better [1:37:07]

Kathryn Flynn, chair: You have a question?

Bill Daniels, from Fisheries: No question but a comment. It was a great idea when the university finally went to full fellowships for all assistants instead of just teaching assistants. That’s a great opportunity for us to have savings within a grant application as well as being able to use that as matching, which is very important when it comes to competitiveness. Even when matching is not required, if we have that in there to the reviewer is a bonus. It makes us more competitive. Also if I don’t have to put the full tuition in then I could possibly get two graduate students instead of one. And in that way I’m growing graduate students as opposed to downsizing. So I think it’s important to realize that. I also get the feeling that basically the research programs are going to now be supporting the teaching programs because the number of research grants, unless I’m mistaken, is far greater than the number of teaching grants. And especially when it comes to graduate students.

George Flowers: It’s not teaching grants, if it’s an externally funded grant for teaching, which I’m not sure how that works I personally not familiar with those, but if it was a grant that looks like a research grant then it presumably would be subject to this same sort of remission rate. Now as far as the research grants subsidizing teaching assistants, which is where I thought that’s where you were headed, you have to realize that we’re only talking about a very modest portion of an individual graduate student’s tuition that is being recaptured. If we used this 20 percent rate which would appear to be a reasonable number overall, then with a 20 percent rate you’re capturing with a $20,000 GA stipend which is on the high end, you’re recapturing 4K of funds that are for tuition.

The university is in terms of just the in-state part of tuition, excluding the out-of-stat tuition waiver, just the in-state part the tuition is about 3K per semester. So for a student that’s supported for 12 months there is 9K of tuition that’s being supplied for that individual student, and we’re looking at recovering maybe 4K. If it’s a 15K stipend you are only recovering 3K. So it’s certainly not subsidizing using the research dollars to subsidize the teaching assistants and then in addition there’s still if it’s important from the perspective of competitiveness for you to be able to say, “well the university is providing substantial cost share,” there’s still the out-of-state portion for the vast majority, no, not the vast majority, a good chunk of research assistants. I know in Fisheries there’s a sizeable contingent of international students. So those students the out-of-state part of the tuition as well as a big chunk of the in-state part of the tuition would still be supported by the university and could be incorporated into any sort of budgetary cost sharing. So that would not disappear. It would just be a little less. [1:41:04]

Someone: (no mic) full tuition rate into a grant…

George Flowers: If you put the full tuition rate into a grant, full tuition rate for an international student, you’re talking about $27,000 a year, and that’s certainly not what we are proposing, we are proposing this 20 percent rate on a stipend. [1:41:26]

Someone: (no mic) I heard you say put it in… that’s hurting people who are…

George Flowers: If the agency will fund it without quibbling, I think as a generic way of saying what I heard him say. If they will fund it without quibbling, then yes, otherwise a 20 percent rate. And I think that’s what John was getting at as well. [1:41:54]

Tony Moss: (no mic) I think that at some future discussion… the issue of having dialogue about differentiating grants from contracts. Certain contracts with mission-oriented agencies are really just reimbursements. Whatever you can put in as bona fide costs to the university, they are reimbursed. Where some grants definitely have caps and limits and things of that sort. You’ve got to very careful not to easily interchange all types of externally sponsored work. There are really different categories and that has to be discussed more fully. When there are situations where it does not jeopardize you getting the award and they will pay that would be to Auburn’s benefit, on the other hand, and you’re only talking about 20 percent of the tuition being charged on a consistent basis

So there would be no difference for a student who was in-state or out-of-state, I just want to get that clear.

Dustin Halberson: It would be a 20 percent rate.

Tony Moss: Okay.

Kathryn Flynn, Chair: Thank you George and Marcie. At this time I’d like to ask if any body has any unfinished business? Any new business? If not the meeting is adjourned.