Transcript from 9-9-08 Senate Meeting
Bob Locy: I’d like to ask the Senate come to order. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes of the last meeting, which was our July meeting as they were distributed? Hearing and seeing none then, those minutes will stand approved as distributed. First item on today’s agenda is some remarks from our President, Dr. Gogue.
Dr Gogue: Thank you Bob I am delighted to be with you I appreciate all of you all being here today. I have a couple of personnel issues I’d like to announce, we have At the conclusion of a national search first we have a VP for research John Mason. John I’d like you to come up you might like to make a comment or two and also Jeff McNeil (Jeff are you here?), I don’t see Jeff. Jeff is the new Vice President for advancement, but John if you would come up and give us some comments. I’m going to ask Stew to come up and give and update on the provost search. So if you will follow fight after John.
John Mason: Thank you Dr. Gogue. Hello everybody, I am six days into it from a long drive from central Pennsylvania. My first day on the job I found out that I had some infection in my throat, so last week was a tough week but I am ready to rock ‘n’roll this week. Let me share three bullet items I guess there’s really four. I served in Faculty senate at Penn State quite an extended period of time in various roles and responsibilities, so I can say with confidence that I understand what you are volunteering your time for and the importance of how to provide some joint leadership in a university structure. I’ve come from that environment, I understand that environment and I can appreciate your service in this capacity. So the other three items go like this. One of the things you be seeing surfacing in a few weeks or months is my intent to reach out through faculty senate and throughout the campus to create a taskforce to look at the strategic elements that have been identified in the plan. Help with some agenda setting and do some internal assessment on that and if we need some external help we can get that also. So my plan is to have some taskforce that’s fully representative of faculty body, and my administrative office would provide the staff support and data collection analysis. So hopefully somewhere along the line you’ll be hearing about the establishment of a taskforce, primarily focusing on the research future here at Auburn University. I want to reach out and gain more knowledge than just my administrative knowledge. I need faculty input, department head input, department head input, and dean input. The other thing I’ll be doing is working regularly with what I call research deans, you may call them associate deans that have research responsibilities. I met with the deans for lunch yesterday, they seem to be fully in concurrence with that approach, so my main mechanism for communicating with faculty, departments, and colleges and sending practical information up and down the pike will be through a close working relationship with the research deans and various colleges.
Then we have institute directors and center directors and I need to figure that all out, and what that all means because terminology from where I’ve come to where I’m at, we’ve only had a few institutes and they were umbrella institutes that were across the whole university and every college participated finding that not all institutes are created that way. I will then form what would be referred to as a university research council and that council would be an advisory body to me dealing with policy issues and too we will also have representation from the research deans, probably center directors and one or two administrative staff that deals with policy issues, difficulties faculty may have, so it’s an action oriented research council. And then finally what I’ll be doing is scheduling a series of visits to every college and every major unit in school. After work out there with the deans meet with their executive committees of the colleges and then get my boots on the ground and walk through facilities, see facilities, talk to faculty, and I’ll actually either have a graduate student with me or my own camera and I wouldn’t take any security pictures, but I want to have a good facebook and some information so we can start promoting that which I’ve already seen being done in the research and scholarly environment of the university. So thank you very much that’s just a heads up of what Dr. Gogue and I have been talking about and it’s going to take some time, but we are ready to go down that path.
Thank you very much, and call me if you need me.
5:12
Stew: I think it was the meeting before the last meeting that I gave you some summary of where we were with that time with the provost search, but for the sake of review let me back-up and touch that and move forward to today and beyond. We retained a search firm for this process, it’s Funk & Associates of Dallas. And through several iterations with the search committee, we came up with a position description and then further qualifications, which has all been posted on the Web. Actually the process got started–I want to say in the middle of June, we really finally got going on this with the advertisements and contacts being made with potential candidates. We had originally established, August 1st is the time we would begin reviewing portfolios. As it turns out as you might suspect the summertime is a time that some people need more time to prepare their portfolios due to travel commitments and other obligations, so we moved that to Sept. 1. We had a pool, if you want to listen to me just a little bit, there was a pool of about one hundred names (a little bit more than that). That pool came from several sources, applications, nominations, and then candidates that Funk & Associates had identified from previous searches. From that 100 plus the pool narrowed down to around 60. Some did not follow-up on their nominations, some did not complete their applications or there was no response to initial contacts from the Funk people. So the search committee has just begun to look at this group of nominations and applications. And we are now on, we can begin to project some kind of a calendar, some sort of schedule for this if you want to keep this in mind. We are looking at having the campus interviews in early Nov. This has all been pushed back a little bit because of the delays in getting complete files. So we’re thinking sometime after the Election Day and prior to the thanksgiving break is when we will have candidates on campus. So that’s where we are at this time, and I will be happy to answer any questions for you. We are just now beginning to look at the pool of candidate that we have, so that’s where we are. Any questions I’ll be happy to address at this time. Yes.
Q: How many will actually be interviewed?
Stew: By saying that you mean brought to campus? Perhaps 3-5
Okay, Thank you President Gogue.
8:20
Dr. Gogue: I want to comment on a couple of questions that I received that may have brought interest. Number one had to do with what will happen relative to proration. When we have proration what does that mean? What would be the impact on the academic side of the institution? I’m going to ask Don to come up and speak to that, but let me just say that part of the (I don’t want to say deal) but part of the understanding with the students when we went to a twelve percent tuition increase was, during the academic year there’d be no effect on academic programs. And so we do not if there is proration it should not have any affect on colleges, on departments, at all. There will not be a midyear request for you to send back a certain amount of money, am I’m correct in saying that now. Is there anything else you want to add on proration? We do anticipate the state will probably have proration this year but it will not have an impact on the academic side of the institution.
Don Large: One thing Lee just reminded me. Any good news about proration is, unlike the way state allocations are funded this year it would be across the board the same. K–12 through Higher Ed would be the same percentage.
Dr. Gogue: K-12 would be affected by this proration at the same rate even though there were differential funding during the year, and the community colleges and the four-year schools. I got cha. Let’s see the other question Don I’ll ask you to come up, had to do with security. There was a question or comment made that ah, that Don made back in the spring, that ah, status quo relative to where we are in security is not acceptable. And so if you would I would like you to come up and spend a few minutes on specifically what we’ve been doing in the last few months relative to campus security.
10:23
Don Large: Thank you Dr. Gogue. Melvin Owens would normally make this presentation, He’s out of town, so I’ve actually taken his latest Powerpoint and we’ll share with you the kinds of things that he felt important for you know. The first thing I would need to do is…this is going to be about a five minute response, so, we have to go back to a year or so and tell you where we were, and hopefully convince you that we’ve certainly not remained status quo. If you go back to Feb 07, Dean Boosinger had led a broad base committee. We were already beginning to look at our security on campus and what we should do and the kinds of things we should be guided by. As we were beginning to implement those recommendations of Dean Boosinger and committee, the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech occurred. That caused us and every institution in the country to step back and assess their current security and what kinds of things should guide future decision making.
In, the first thing we did in that June of 07 is appointed Melvin Owens as our executive director of security. And said we need to have all the key areas in place to insure that we have as good a security as possible. Melvin and a broad based group then set about looking for experts that could come in and give us a detail review of our security on campus, and I think we shared that with this body approximately a year ago. That was done at the same time a security action team was formed of a broad base group that help us organize and structure and communicate as we went through that assessment. Also a security location was selected. It is currently right behind the Credit Union. We have targeted the Credit Union to become our permanent security area, when the current occupants move. Included in our future contracts with the Auburn police will be a requirement that a certain number of their police force will actually ah, are present at that location will have the cars will have the presence that we want as well. Moving in that direction.
In the area of personnel, we were fortunate, we had Chance Corbet and Susan McCallister who many of you probably know, already on board with risk management and safety we moved down under Melvin for what we felt like was more effective coordination and the kind of areas we were trying to focus on. We’ve also hired or assigned Robert Mann as our emergency planner. He’s responsible for readiness exercises and training drills, and Randy Cherasky has rejoined Auburn University and we are pleased to have him in the area of public safety responsible for coordination of law enforcement, security and campus shuttle activities.
In the area of campus communication capabilities, as all of you know and most of you have I think appreciated that we selected a permanent vendor for AU Alert. We are up and running on the alert system. We can provide pretty quick information to cell phones, land-lines, e-mails and text messages. Those things didn’t exist a year ago. University wide publications have been enhanced. We’re linked better to our daily e-mail and extra mail. Publications have gone out to faculty, staff, students that desktop, z-booklets, and other information to hopefully that will assist you in times you might need information.
Residence Hall security. We’ve improved all security for residence halls, all ground level entryways are now alarmed we have card readers installed. The alarms activate when the doors are left open any length of time. We have security officers employed that will respond when activated. We have surveillance cameras either at or will be installed at all ground floor entrances. In the area of campus security shuttles, um, this summer, we operated security vans from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. We also operated one from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. This is sorority rush, we had seven vans going and we keep adding these security vans in the evening as the demand increases. The student simply has to call the dispatcher. The vans will come pick them up - we take the students from anyplace on campus to anyplace on campus. We’ve been asked, “Can we start going off campus?,” we just realistically can’t do that. There’s no end to where that takes us in cost and challenges.
Closed circuit television system. We, this took a little bit longer than we thought it might. It was a little more complex than we anticipated, but we have completed the RFP process for all the cameras-the several hundred-that will go up around campus and will be monitored, and that has already begun, but the complexity in what took maybe a couple of months longer is that it had to integrate with the systems that we had in place and has to work well and integrate with all of our IT and Bliss Bailey was great in working with us to insure that we accomplished that concern. So I’m sure there were other complexities that I’m leaving out but we had a good RFP process, selected a vendor that we are convinced can do a very good job, their references are all who have they’ve served are outstanding. So they are installing cameras now, and now through December we will be installing a great number of those. We will begin to monitor those.
In the world of expanded training opportunities we also, with the personnel I’ve noted earlier, increased training exercises. First responder training has been increased, increased emergency management training, bomb threats active shooter hazardous materials, hostage, or barricaded suspects. We have gone through various training with other people, tabletop and live exercises with evaluation protocols—So a lot more personnel and training and efforts to have us ready. Security officers, the Library has stationed security officers to offer a security presence in the building we have provided escorts to students from the library to the parking deck, and others security officers around campus that are available when needed or called upon. We continue to increase the number of forums. Currently Melvin and group are working with SGA are hosting quarterly safety forums across campus. Looking periodically at the equipment and other kinds of inspections that need to occur to be sure we’re timely and effective. The whole collaboration between law enforcement and emergency medical services and community safety providers, I believe, is improved with the group that I mentioned earlier. And we continue to move forward. Credit Union being the next key area that I hope will enhance the security efforts and presence. So, a work in process I think we are moving at an appropriate and reasonable pace, I think Melvin and group have done a very good job and hopefully in my comments a year or so ago that the status quo was not acceptable, hopefully we presented enough suggest that that’s not where we are. I’ll be happy to respond to questions.
20:22
Connor Bailey not a senator: Has there been any discussion of reestablishing a campus police department? Or in other words, changing the relationship we have with the city?
Don Large: We discuss all our options periodically, but I would say that has not been a realistic option at this point. We believe what we’ve got works well. We believe we can enhance it. We believe the presence I mentioned at the Credit Union would take us one step further. And we will continue to monitor and evaluate and make sure we are doing what is best for the University.
Dr.Gogue: I want to conclude my comment by asking for your help on something. I guess it was Monday a week ago, tornado warnings went off. We convened in basement of Samford. We had Johnny Green, dean of students, we had, Bob was with us, Bob Locy, we had, Leigh (Lee) was there. You were there weren’t you, Don? Who else did we have with us? We had a large group and our great brain power- we licked it all the day that it showed a terrible of it just going to be in and out of tornado warnings all day long. Based on the information that we had at that time we made a decision to cancel classes and send people home. You need to know that we talked about in some respects, students and faculty are safer where they are than to get out in cars and try to go home. Some of our buildings are far safer than where some of our students live. We don’t really have that system down good guys. And we need some follow-up because we tried to think through it. Could you cancel things for three hours then pick back up? And we were basically advised no, that’s going to be awkward to do. We made the statement of essential employees, and people don’t know who essential employees are, so we didn’t do that very well. So we need some help on doing that. The discussion was, do you close classes, but keep the university open. Well I’m guilty of saying well, you know, we care about our faculty and staff so if it’s dangerous for the students and you’re going to send them home then do you really want to keep your faculty and staff there? I would just say that we did the best we knew how, but we probably need better protocols and better thinking going into it when were faced with those situations. I’d ask Bob to think about who within the senate can sit down with Chance Corbet and our group and try to guide us through to make sure that to get the best thinking that we can. It obviously creates issues for you and I’ve heard from several people. The issues of clearly when you cancel classes and faculty at Auburn hate that, and how do we work in an academic calendar, makeup days if we have to do that? So those are the difficulties that we really need some help on and we’re open to the suggestions on how to do it. And so I would ask Bob, if you can, think about it a little bit and see those that are really knowledgeable interest to give advise and input. I’d be happy to respond to other questions that you may have.
24:16
Tony Moss, senator Biological Sciences: I happened to be out of town, taking my daughter to school, and noticed that we were getting many messages. Many of them very much out of synch. We got the impression that the system was severely overloaded.
Dr. Gogue: I don’t disagree with you. We’ve talked about that very thing, that when you have these fronts go through, from which you are going from warning to…what is it from watch to warning that maybe watch again to warning, and we try to do that, it’s almost in my judgment a single thing that says hey for the next 24 hours we’re going to have these coming and going and we’re not going to send any more messages, just go to your web page. That may be the better protocol than to try to send them each time. To some degree, after the thing was over , some were ah…
Some other comment by Tony Moss.
Dr. Gogue: They tell me it it’s very unusual to go from no watch straight into a warning, and that happened over that weekend so I got the notice that we got a tornado warning after it said, at least on the news, your out from the warning—so I don’t disagree and that’s another example of where we need a little help on that. Thank you.
25:42
Bob Locy: Thank you Dr. Gogue. I have a number of informational items as well that I need to pass on to you. The senate has really not had an office for sometime now. And we’re in the act of literally almost as we speak establishing a senate office. The senate offices are going to be in the basement of the Quad Center in what was formerly the Equal Opportunity Office in room 005 of the Quad Center. Expect to be notified of a phone number and appropriate ways to communicate with the senate at our office once we get it established later this week.
Simultaneously along with that the senate has had a position to hire a secretary to assist the elected-secretary of the Senate with her chores. We’re currently proceeding to fill that position and that’s going to be a jointly occupied position between the ombudsman and the (the ombudsperson, excuse me), and the Senate office.
Um, I have two matters from the provost’s office that I want to relay on to the Senate at this time. You may recall that in our July meeting the provost presented a triggered post tenure review procedure and we are at this point in time anticipating that that triggered post tenure review procedure will be what we move forward with for the coming year. As such since the requirements of that are two negative annual reviews in the preceding five years from this annual review, no triggering would take place until after the annual reviews are conducted for the 08-09 academic year in the spring. At least as I understand it from the provost’s office, that’s our plan for proceeding at the moment.
We also back in February, the Senate passed a Professional improvement leave policy that requested that funds be put aside every year to pay for professional improvement leaves. We were candidly concerned that with the budget constraints of the university, it would be convenient to eliminate that for the moment because of budgetary concerns, however, we have a commitment that we are going to proceed with whatever we can make available to do professional improvement leave. And it’s a significant amount of money probably not what we need to have, but at least we are making some progress to get a professional improvement leave programs back up and running and start it this year and so the administration has committed to move that forward. So I bring you that as two good pieces of news.
Another piece of information, which I want to report, concerns a Retroactive withdrawal policy that the senate passed also in the last meeting in July. When that policy was passed there was discussion on the day that it passed that there were some issues concerning the idea of backdating forms. What I want to show you is that the form in question indicates a place for the date at which the form is being filled out, today’s date. Indicates a date at which the form is expected to be effective, typically predating the date at which the form is being filled out obviously. The issue of calling that backdating seems rather highly inappropriate because there’s no change of date indicated on the form, it’s very clear that the form is asking for the date at which it’s being filled out and the date at which it’s to be effective. As such, the decision was made to go back and slightly modify the wording in the senate policy, and I believe I have misplaced my wording changes, but it will become clear in a minute. What we are going do is we’re going to eliminate the words backdating entirely from the document [entirely] and (pause to read) we’re going to use the words effective date wherever possible.
You will receive an e-mail with these proposed wording changes in it, and if you have any comments, then if this rises to the level of and administrative action being taken without appropriate senate approval in your comments, we will bring it back for your ratification. However, our feeling was, the changes that were being made, only clarified the document in terms of making it accomplish what the original intent of the document was by eliminating what was perplexing and confusing wording. It’s perhaps, difficult to understand how such wording got in the document in the first place, but nevertheless what we would like to do is to make those changes as administrative changes. And I would note that the last line of the document says the policy will be reviewed in a year. It seems inappropriate to bring a bunch of changes back that are really for clarity purposes only we will re-review the document in a year. If it hasn’t worked you’ll have the opportunity to change it at that time.
If you object to this and if you believe the senate needs to look at this, after you’ve had a chance to look at the changes, let us know and we’ll take appropriate action based on the feedback and comments that we get. 32:49
There’s another action that was taken toward the end of the summer concerning the Center for Longleaf Pine Ecosystems. This reflects a deeper consideration that we will be obviously be bringing to you at some point in the future as well. Right now we have a policy for the establishment of centers and institutes that dates back to the early 90s, specifically to 1990, I believe. The president’s office has been sending to the senate centers and institutes that come forward and asking if we have any input. What we were trying to accomplish with the Center for Longleaf Pine Ecosystems was to send out the proposal that the president was reviewing to the faculty senate and ask you to give us some feedback on what needed to be done. We seemed to have confused a bunch of people by doing what has not been done for previous centers and institutes, and we believe it’s going to be important to look at a policy for how we are going to handle this in the future. I hope that you will continue to give us feedback on the Longleaf Pine Center if there is any additional input that you would like to see move forward before this is approved.
Finally, I’d like to ask all of our new senators that are here for their first senate meeting to please rise. In principle about a third of the senate turns over every year. Thank you, I just wanted you all to see that we have some new visitors and so in concluding my remarks I’d like to make sure that both the new and old senators are aware of the fact that we have an attendance policy that says that “If you have three consecutive absences from the senate without sending a substitute in your name then officially the senate leadership is to proceed to replace you and additionally in order to monitor that there is a signup sheet in the back of the room, so if you did not sign in please do so and if you do send in a substitute please ask your substitute to sign in so that we know there was someone representing your position in attendance at the senate meeting. The rules of the senate for the new senators are that you stand to address the senate and proceed to either one of the microphones that you see on the sides; you give your name; your unit; and whether you are or are not a senator, as Dr. Bailey did earlier. Speak only once until the others in the senate have had a chance to respond, and everyone whether your are a senator or not is welcome to speak, however, we would ask that you allow senators to speak first and if you’re a non-senator hold your remarks until after all the senators have had their opportunity to speak. Beyond that I want to welcome the new members to the senate and ask if there are any questions. 36:05
James Goldstein, Senator from English: Did you have a sense of about how many professional improvement leaves the administration was able and willing to move forward with?
Bob Locy: What I can tell you is, we’ll keep an eye on that. What we’ve been given is an amount of money, in the amount of approximately $70,000 that’s probably available for the program for the coming year. And it’s going to depend on the individual plans that come forward. Note that the professional improvement leave policy asks for the provost to collect in the fall semester. Those people interested in a professional improvement leave, and none would be granted until the spring and it’s highly likely then that in fact that none of those professional improvement leaves might even be taken this budget year. So our feeling is that, looking out, we may be able to get things cued up that so it can be a significant number but it a little difficult to give you an exact number at this point in time.
James Goldstein: Right. Well the dollar amount was interesting to know. Thank you.
37:17
Bob Locy: Other Questions?
All right, first item of business on our action agenda is two items that are coming from the rules committee, and Sue Barry will address us those two action items.
Sue Barry: The first one we didn’t send you anything in advance so you haven’t had a chance to review this. However this is about the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee. Actually the senate approved the composition of this committee back in July when we did all of the rest of the senate committees and the letters have already gone out. After all of that was done we were advised that we were missing a voice for the natural sciences that are taught in the core. So because of that we, the rules committee got together and discussed this, and it seemed like the best solution was to ask you to approve an additional person on this committee for one year, someone who would represent the natural sciences that are being taught in the core. Therefore, what I would like to do at this time is to move that the senate approve and additional member for a one-year term to represent natural sciences in the core.
39:09
Locy: This comes to you as a rules committee motion through steering as such, it does not require a second. Is there any discussion? Hearing and seeing none then, all in favor of the motion as stated to add one person for a one-year term to the Core Curriculum Oversight Committee please signify by saying aye.
Group: Aye
Locy: Opposed same aye?
Then the motion carries.
Sue Barry: The second piece of business that we need to attend to is that we had one committee left after we voted in July. We pulled it from our list because we had found that there were some irregularities in terms of the rotations. Jim Wohl was chair of the committee at that time and he put together a proposal to us to evenly redistribute the rotations for this particular committee. I think the one that I sent you on my first e-mail probably left off Human Sciences, which is vacant. But as you will see there are 15 people on this committee and what we’ve done is redistribute the rotations so that 5 people will rotate off every year. And we have notified those people whose terms were changed, everyone is aware of this. Therefore what we would like to do now is move that the senate, the Rules Committee would like to move that the senate approve the reconfigured Faculty Grievance Committee with equally distributed rotations.
Locy: And again this is an items coming from Rules through Steering to the floor of the Senate, does not require a second. Is there any discussion of this motion? (pause) Seeing none then, all in favor?
Group: Aye.
Locy: Opposed? Motion carries.
That moves us down to our information agenda. Over the summer the senate executive committee along with search committee for the ombudsperson, conducted a search for an ombudsperson and toward the end of August we made an offer of that position to Dr. Jim Wohl. He’s our first Auburn University ombudsperson and you may remember that our policy requires or asks for a two-year trial period for this ombudsman. I would say it was pretty much felt by everyone that I’ve talked with that this was an extremely successful search. We had three outstanding candidates that gave public forum presentations as candidates for the ombudsperson, and I believe that you’ll learn here shortly that we were very fortunate to get Dr. Wohl as our ombudsperson. So I am going to let him introduce to you all to take back to your units the idea of what an ombudsperson does and to introduce to you how to contact him and how his office is being established. 42:40
Jim Wohl: Thank you Bob. Good afternoon. I know there is an ambitious agenda here so I will try to keep my remarks to the 5 minutes I promised Bob. Thanks for the time to talk about the new office. I guess the place to start is in the pronunciation of ombudsman or ombudsperson which is the Americanized version of the Swedish term which originated in the early 1800s. The original version of an ombuds office or an ombudsman was generally a statutory office with legislative powers, or excuse me, investigative powers, subpoena powers and abilities to do investigations and issue findings at the behest of the citizenry who were perhaps in conflict with the bureaucracy of the government. So that’s the origin of the term, I’m not suggesting that that’s what my role is. But that classic model of the ombudsman still persists today. It’s more of a European model in North America the term has been branched into what’s termed an organizational ombudsman and that’s taken a foothold in North America in the corporate sector and the Higher Ed. sector. In fact there is recent thesis investigating the history of ombudsmanry in US higher Ed has identified 35 percent increase in ombuds offices at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada since 2004. So the history at Auburn University of the ombuds office mirrors what’s been going on across the country in Higher Ed. My understanding is that the origins of this office originated in 2002-2003 from the Multi-Cultural Diversity Committee that was chaired by Virginia O’Leary, and on that committee Robin Jaffe first suggested the notion of an ombuds office and did the initial research for that. That recommendation from that committee to this body of the senate lead to a resolution in 2004 that was passed by the Senate and then endorsed by the A&P Assembly and the Staff Council. Subsequent to that, for various reasons, a three–year period went by but under the leadership of Rich Penaskovic, David Cicci, and Bob Locy, and the provost, Dr, Heilman, a second resolution was passed in 2007 and then approved for funding by Dr. Gogue’s office last summer. Continuing with the history then, the launch of this office was began on September 2nd, a short time ago, and then later on this fall as Bob mentioned with the Senate offices in conjunction with those offices an ombuds office will be located adjacent to the Senate offices in the Quad Center. Later on this fall we were hoping by the end of the month.
Clearly there is not time here to go though any meaningful discussion about conflict theory, but I did want to highlight that the ombuds office is a form and becoming a more popular form of informal conflict resolution. And if we look at the tornado here, that maybe a good month to use as a symbol of conflict starting with private kind of issues of conflict for an individual and then escalating to becoming a public issue and then leading up to provocation, formal action, and hopefully not violence at the peak of the tornado. Along the left side we can see the different modalities or methods of dealing with conflict, starting from informal ends at the bottom, working our way up towards formal continuums. As you can see the ombudsperson is designed to be an informal conflict resolution practitioner to deal with conflicts at the earliest level, at the local level, before they escalate into more escalated conflicts that require more formalized methods or modalities to resolve that conflict. That’s in the spirit of this faction of ombudsman known as the organizational ombudsman and that professional organization of organizational ombudsman is the international ombudsman association or the IOA who has its own standards of practice and code of ethics to which this office, the Auburn Office, will adhere to, the guiding principles of which informality, again as opposed to the formal side of resolving conflict or the process side of resolving conflict. Neutrality, in other words, not serving as either and advocate for the university or for management in any context, nor serving as an advocate for the individual visitor to the office who’s in conflict. Confidentiality to the extent allowed by law and also a secondary limit on confidentiality has to do with the risk of serious harm. So without those, beyond those limits, the ombudsperson’s commitment to confidentiality is unwavering. So any visitors to the office will remain confidential except for those limits and that’s a commitment in consistence with the IOA practice and code of ethics.
And then finally independence, independence from the academic or hierarchal structure of the university. Although the office reports to executive committee of the university senate and provost office for administrative purposes, the day-to-day activities of the ombudsperson are not directed by either of those offices., but actually function independently to serve the informal and confidential role of conflict resolution at the lowest level. Another comment that I suppose falls under informality as well is that any business or contact with the ombuds office or with myself is completely voluntary, so there’s, no one is mandated to speak with the ombudsperson nor is the visit to the ombuds office properly a part of any type of formal grievance or formal procedure on campus so it’s completely voluntary. Sometimes the best way to explain what this informality looks like is to describe what an ombudsperson does and does not. What an ombudsperson does is actively listen to the questions and concerns to be a resource, offer policies and procedures, so one of the charges I have is to become an expert on Auburn University’s policies and procedures, and I’ve started on that work already, to discuss concerns, clarify issues, and options for visitors to the office. Help identify and evaluate a range of options in responding to a conflict. My office can gather information for individuals seeking that information if they are not comfortable, for a variety of reasons, of seeking that information on their own or to refer those people, any visitors to the appropriate office if they need. 49:45
Moving along to revise steps to resolve problems informally through techniques or applications of conflict management practice to help resolve conflicts for folks. Facilitate communication either indirectly or directly as an impartial third party, that would be through some kind of shuttle diplomacy action through negotiations and even by initiating formal mediations if the parties are willing to do that. To track perceived issues in trends so my office has access to certain administrators on campus to report trends and alert policy making bodies of concerns about policies that already exist or maybe areas where no policy exists that might be helped out by policy. And so what an ombudsperson does not do is to make formal decisions of findings. So in contrast to the classic ombuds model nor to determine the guilt or innocence of anyone that might be accused of wrongdoing, so that’s not a function of this office nor is it a function of mine, nor does this office establish change or citied polices. I think in the original proposal there was a very clear statement about not being able to fix parking tickets. I guess that would fall under this category. I am not an attorney nor have I gone to law school, so I don’t offer legal advice in this capacity nor do I offer any type of psychological counseling, nor will I participate as a witness or in any other capacity in a formal investigation, a formal grievance process, that may or might involve visit to my office. I do not serve as an agent of notice for Auburn University, that’s to notify of Auburn University of unlawful activity or violations of policies, but part of my role is to advance those concerns to the appropriate offices on campus. So we can work together on facilitating the communication to the appropriate office on campus. And as I said earlier I will not to serve as an advocate for either the University or for a given individual. So, I’m sure I went over the 5 minutes that I promised Bob, but this is the contact information that we have the only caveats I suppose is one is that the Quad Center probably won’t be available for a couple of weeks, we’ll see. We’ll learn a little about that tomorrow, but I am available by telephone, which is 844-7170, and I do have an e-mail address ombuds@auburn.edu. It’s just that I’d caution you and the folks you might communicate about the office that e-mail communication is not considered a private or confidential vehicle of communication. Great, thank you very much and I know you need to get on with the agenda so I will be available for any questions after the meeting.
Bob Locy: All right, the next item on the agenda is the Writing Initiative. And I believe that Dr. Sharon Roberts is going to present the report on the Writing Initiative.
Sharon Roberts: Thank you for the opportunity to come an talk with you today about the writing initiative recommendations for writing program here at Auburn University. The Writing Initiative task force was formed in January and is composed of representatives from each of the colleges. We have and undergraduate student representative and Atwardy is a junior now in Accounting. We had a representative from the faculty senate, Rich Penaskovic, and we had a representative from the libraries, Marcia Boosinger, who co-chaired the task force with me. And so as I’ve said we were charged in January by the provost to consider some items relative to undergraduate writing at Auburn University. And our first activity with all of us getting together was to do an initial review of undergraduate writing on campus at the present time. We did this in discussions with colleagues, we talked with the freshman composition faculty, and we talked extensively with Drew Clark from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. And from this review of what is currently happening with undergraduate writing at the University. What we identified is that we have a strong recently revised freshman composition curriculum that could use additional resources and we also found that we really don’t have a coherent program for writing beyond the freshman year. This not to say that no writing is going on in upper division classes in the majors, but what we find is currently it really relies on individual faculty initiative or in some of our disciplines there are accrediting bodies or professional societies that have taken a lead in recommending the development of student writing competencies. So after having assessed the current lay of the land the committee or task force then chose to review a number of writing programs at other institutions that are nationally recognized. We talked with individuals at many of these institutions some of us were able to attend an international writing across the curriculum conference. Some us also attended the faculty summer institute at LSU for their communication across the curriculum program. And then finally this culminated with a retreat attended by the task force and facilitated by two nationally recognized writing programs and administrators. And from that retreat then, the writing initiative task force has a proposal for a writing program, the development of a campus writing program, that we feel would create a culture of writing for the entire campus community and impact the educational experience of every undergraduate at Auburn, and integrate writing throughout their academic careers. So we have three recommendations that I’d like to make. The first is focused on freshman composition, and that is to reduce the class size of all freshman composition courses to nineteen students or less. Nineteen to twenty are the typical standards for freshman composition courses. This would require the hiring of additional instructors. And along with this we would also recommend the hiring of five additional composition and rhetoric faculty into the department of English. We have two comp. rhet. faculty right now, with extensive administration duties for the program, and if we were to add additional faculty with this expertise this would provide sufficient faculty expertise to support freshman writing, provide opportunities for research, and attract graduate students who were interested in the disciplines of composition and rhetoric. 57:50
Our second recommendation is the development of the writing in the disciplines program for each undergraduate major. The model that we would propose for this is an outcomes-based model such as that developed at North Carolina State over the last few years. Now the idea that an outcomes-based model is that faculty with responsibilities for teaching each of our undergraduate majors as disciplinary experts would essentially ask the question what writing competencies do graduates need to succeed in this field? So, obviously that’s the simplest version of the question, but to ask yourselves in your majors and your disciplines as experts “What writing competencies do our students need to attain to succeed?” And having asked that, then design outcomes and strategies for achieving that. So we envision this happening at the individual department level with faculty in the majors. Faculty would identify the appropriate outcomes and the appropriate strategies for reaching these. Now, the rational for this type of model is that it provides flexibility to develop disciplines to specific writing skills and to integrate these through the curriculum. It also engages faculty in the development of writing competencies for their students and ideally, our future colleagues. Outcomes based models also have built into them, assessment. It’s a cyclical process, where faculty identify the necessary competencies, develop necessary strategies for students to obtain them, and then assess whether or not it’s working. And of course, over time also identify the development of the need for new outcomes. The final rational for the outcomes-based model is that this is really a process that’s in wide use by many professional accrediting societies and in fact it’s the process that SACS recommends, require, I think, for self-study and assessment by it’s member institutions. So to facilitate the development of this writing program our recommendation would be that we form a campus writing board with policy-making responsibilities. This board would have wide representation in the faculty from across colleges, schools, the libraries, the faculty senate, and other interested entities. And it would be the campus writing board’s responsibility to develop guidelines for the program.
In the first year the campus writing board would also search for a writing programs administrator. So we also recommend, of course, hiring a writing programs administrator, and that this would be to get our program off to a strong start, that we would identify a nationally recognized expert to lead this program at Auburn and that this individual would have strength in program administration, faculty development, the teaching of writing, and experience with research with undergraduate writing programs. We’d anticipate that this individual would interact with faculty from across the university to help them in the development of outcomes, strategies, and assessments and that they would initiate a faculty development program. One of the things we found is that we all met and talked about writing and writing in our disciplines and writing in our own classes, and oftentimes one of our own committee members would say “Ooo—, yeah that would be a really good idea– I don’t know how to do it.” We feel that faculty development is critical to the success of this program. And that the WPA would be very much engaged in the development of a faculty development program and would also work with other experts already on campus, such as Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and the Auburn University National Writing Projects Site. We feel that once it’s implemented a writing in the disciplines program could be in place within a couple of years, and that departments would then make periodic reports on their progress to the campus writing board. Bothe the campus writing board and the writing programs administrator would report to the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies.
Our third proposal then is that we increase the capacity of the writing center to provide support to all student-writing. And in fact at the present time, our writing center is called the English center and it has the facilities and resources to provide tutoring support for student writing in freshman composition and world literature. And what we would like to see is that we initially expand their resources so that they could provide tutoring support for all writing in all of the core curriculum courses. But we also recommend that we identify a physical site, convenient to the Auburn University campus community to house a writing center that supports all undergraduate writing. We feel that a physical presence of this center would go a very long toward creating a culture of writing for the campus community. It would provide across disciplinary venue for academic discourse, in addition to supporting writing through tutoring. It would provide training for tutors. And it would provide research opportunities for graduate students and faculty. And so finally when the writing center is ready we would merge the English Center into the writing center.
Now, in discussions with the administration, they have brought a fourth proposal or goal for the writing program for undergraduates at Auburn. And this is to use the ACT writing score for advising and placing students in enhanced writing courses in the summer before they enter the university, or in some other form of supplementary writing experiences. This would require then the hiring and training of instructors and tutors for these courses. Now in terms of a timeline, I will have to admit that as the Writing Initiative Task Force got going and got enthused and got this all developed, we of course were ready to start yesterday, but honestly we feel that all of these four proposals could be started immediately. We have as recommendations that we begin to reduce freshman composition class size as resources are made available. That could start in spring 2009. In terms of the writing and the discipline program our recommendation would be to from the campus writing board this semester and initiate the search for the writing programs administrator. We also feel that the campus writing board could begin some activities to create a culture or at least increase awareness of undergraduate writing even before we hire a writing programs administrator. Again, in terms of developing the writing center we feel that, at present, we could begin to expand the English center in terms of its space and resources, so that it could serve all core courses starting spring or fall of 2009. And that at the same time we identify space and begin whatever renovations would be necessary for the development of a comprehensive writing center. And finally, with regards to the enhanced freshman composition courses for student with lower ACT writing scores, that that could be initiated in the summer of 2010 after we have hired and trained the necessary instructors and tutors for that program.
So that’s my report. I’d be happy to answer any questions.
Mark Fischman, senator from Kinesiology: Sharon, this sounds like a wonderful program that can really advance the writing skills of students that come in as entering freshman, but what about the large number of students that transfer and don’t come to Auburn until maybe their junior year?
Sharon Roberts: We didn’t formally address that but our feeling was, that in large part, that by having a writing in the disciplines program as they get into their majors, you’re right we miss them as freshman but that we could pick them up after they get into their majors they would learn the disciplinary genres that are necessary, and again with the writing center, Ideally have the tutoring support that those student would need.
MF: just a follow up, do transfer students even have to take the ACT to get into Auburn? My understanding is that they don’t even take it, they don’t need it to get into Auburn.
SR: My understanding is that the answer to that is no. Is that right?
MF: No meaning they don’t need to take the ACT?
SR: No they don’t need to take the ACT.
MF: Well…thank you.
Norbert Wilson dept. of Ag Econ & Rural Sociology, I am a senator: Sharon, like our previous speaker, this sounds like a great program. I want to see our students improve their writing skills. I understand that the interest is in an outcomes-based approach for the writing through the major., um, and I understand that there’s an effort to try to hire someone who will serve as a coordinator, where I don’t understand it is how will we really assess whether our students improve their writing skills through this series of initiatives? I think it’s a great idea but how will we really know if across the board we’ve done a good job with through this program?
SR: yea, I think that’s in a sense that’s always a concern because we have in using the outcomes-base model allowed that assessment to occur at the individual departmental level always a concern, but there would be periodic reports to the campus writing board and so that group as a whole would be seeing what was happening at a university level. So we would be providing that review at that level. And ideally in their policies they’ve developed be able to insure that students, regardless of major, are getting equal opportunities to develop writing competencies. What we are trying to insure is that the writing competencies that the students attain are those appropriate for successes in their field.
Norbert Wilson: Thank you 1:10:41
Guy Warbaugh from Philosophy: I was curious if you could talk a little about the first item. Of course I am all for reduced class sizes, but I was wondering if this was also tied to empirical research in education about the outcomes that they get from comp classes?
Sharon Roberts: It’s based on standards from the writing programs administrator, sorry the council of writing programs administration and the higher education division.
GW: I guess my question then is are those standards themselves in turn, based on empirical research or is it just their recommendations? I guess that’s what I’m asking.
SR: yea um, yes I believe they are and that is the professional society for writing programs administration and they develop guidelines for freshman composition courses and content so my understanding is that it is based on empirical data. (pause) Thank you.
John Weete: Close. Thank you, Bob. I want to thank you for the opportunity to ah be here and talk about the Research (we need to get that on the first slide). OK, um. Again, I appreciate the opportunity to tell you about the Research Park because I think faculty can and will play a very important part in the development of the Park as well as the Park being a great benefit to the university and the faculty here on campus. I want to touch base briefly on three things. One, I want to tell you a little bit about the partnership that made the Park possible. I want to tell you a little bit about our vision of what we are trying to accomplish with the Park. And then finally give you a status report of where we are with the building that is currently under construction and where we are going from there. The near term future, I guess.
The Research Park really came together of course most of you have probably lived through this over the past 4 or 5 years, maybe 4 years. Whenever the original idea was conceived and then began to get underway. At first…Of course Auburn University taking the leadership, providing, approving that this Park could be established on part of their campus, and contributing the 156 acres that has now been earmarked for the Research Park. And then secondly, the City of Auburn and the City Council and the Industrial Development Board—I can’t say enough about the leadership that’s been provided throughout this entire process, and with Mayor Bill Ham, who went to the City Council and convinced them that it would be good for the City and good for the University to invest 5 million dollars to provide the physical infrastructure for the Park. And of course that’s in place now and fully functional. In addition the IDB provided a line of credit for the Auburn Research and Technology Foundation for operational costs to let us get going because the money that was provided by the state, which was 10 million dollars to construct the building, this building was only for bricks and mortar and we couldn’t use any of that money for operational expenses, so the IDB of the City stepped up to the plate and provided this funding for us. And I’ll mention in just a moment that the City and particularly the IDB provided some additional assistance and really leadership in helping us get this park started. Finally, the Auburn Research and Technology Foundation, this is a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation that’s University affiliated that was formed to make all of this happen. I’ll mention in just a moment, but our scope is much broader than the Research Park, but that’s really what the basis of the ARTF was founded on and helped get this going. Now these are essentially the stakeholders that allowed the Research Park to get going and these stakeholders essentially have three expectations for the ARTF to carry out. One of them is to help to diversify the economy in the State, in the City, and in the region. As you know, we are heavily manufacturing slanted and that’s been a big boost to the economy of the State, but we need to balance that a little bit more with more knowledge-based, technology-based companies coming in. The Research Park is going to help provided this. I’ve heard second or third hand that the governor believes that this Research Park is going to be the driver of knowledge-base economy in this State within the next 10 years. And again, I want to make the point, these things do not happen overnight. When the idea started 4 or 5 years ago, it takes a lot of planning and a lot of leadership to get these things going and we’ve made an enormous progress in the past year.
The other thing is to add some economic vitality to the City of Auburn and the region in the form of creating jobs and generating tax revenues. Some of these job opportunities will be available for faculty spouses and students and recent graduates. And in fact, it’s access to the students that’s really one of the primary attractions to the tenants we have in the Park now and that will be for the future tenants. It seems to be a trend throughout University affiliated research parks.
And then finally, the third expectation is for the ARTF to advance the mission of the University, in a very broad sense. Of course, initially it was based on developing and operating the Research Park, but the mission is much greater. I want to personally and publically welcome Dr. John Mason, he and I have had several meetings. He and I will be working very closely together to fulfill the roll of the Research Park in advancing the research mission of the University, and that includes Research funding, developing faculty-industry partnerships, facilitating the technology transfer, and forming new businesses, new ventures, to help generate new high technology and knowledge-base jobs. Those are essentially the three expectations that the stakeholders have that the ARTF mission is my responsibility operating between the private sector at the interface between the private sector working through Dr. Mason’s office, but also through the deans, the associate deans for research, and working directly with faculty. And that process actually has already started as companies come in, they express an interest, they have something unique and it’s my role to bring these people together and help facilitate the development of the partnerships and some of these will in turn then will result in tenants in our Research Park.
What are we trying to achieve here, essentially three things. One we want to develop a mixed use of research and business campus out at the Park and we want to have an appropriate balance of high technology companies, university research facilities, federal agencies, and support businesses. For example, we may want to have a hotel out there, we may need an accounting firm, we may need a paton law firm, for example, along with a support for the high technology companies that are and will be locating in the Park.
We need to create a more of an entrepreneurial environment, not only in the Park, but on the campus. Really give some value added synergy between the Park tenants and the university faculty and the students. We want to balance the need for development, which we are moving forward with fairly aggressively, with the desire to protect the natural environment. In doing so, we are capturing the image and the character of the university campus. If you’ve seen our building you can see that it could be moved anywhere on campus and fit right in. it’s just a beautiful facility. Many of you know this. This represents the sosocki master plan that was developed several years ago for the Research Park we are developing it in two phases, this is phase one that runs from (showing a slide) South College – curves around, this is Devalle Dr. goes out to S. Donahue and of course then eventually the Park will encompass this entire property, here, that goes out to S. College to Shug Jordan and around in this area here This is a blow up of phase of one. This here is our entrance, again if you’ve driven out S. College we have it landscaped now it really looks more beautiful. The city put in the bridge and ARTF put in the landscaping, with trees lining Devalle Dr. This is the site of our building that is under construction. Now the only difference is that it is turned perpendicular rather than parallel to Devalle. We combine two sites for this particular site. We have about eight more sites in (that a little different than this diagram) but we have about eight additional building sites that eventually will be moved over to the ARTF for development as the opportunities for development come along.
We have made this really quite good progress over the past year. We have gone from ah, sort of an architects rendering of the building to reality, this was taken about a month ago, so now we have about eighty percent of the landscape in on the building site. The building consists of about 43,000 square feet, nothing is built out, except when we get a tenant we will build it out to suit their needs and this is intended here that charter tenants will be able to come in and work with our architects and design their space where there is a thousand square feet or ten thousand square feet to suit their particular needs and we have a build out allowance available for that. One of the important things here is that this will be a LEED certified building, Leadership Energy and Environmental Design. We’ve taken great pains in doing this. There is only one other building on campus that is LEED certified and that is the Building Science building and it has a gold certification we will probably have a silver certification we could have gold but will probably end up with silver, and that means we have taken a lot into consideration from an energy standpoint in the types of materials that has been used. You can see a four-foot overhang, here that provides some shading, and that’s a LEED issue that you don’t see on most of the buildings on campus. You see an awful lot of glass here. There has to be a certain amount of sunlight in the building, and on, and on, and on. So it’s a very conservative about the materials as it relates to energy even for example, we would have a darker roof and get another LEED point, but we couldn’t the next level of roofing in terms of reflectance and lightness within five-hundred miles of Auburn. So we would not have been able to get a LEED point for that so we went with a little bit darker, it looks sort of light here. So those are the types of considerations, the atmosphere in the building, water usage, the restrooms are geared toward reduced water usage. So it’s responsive to the environmental and energy issues.
Completion date is set for September 2008. 1:25:13
Let me just walk you through and then I’ll tell you about our tenants and where we are at that point. This is the downstairs lobby, the elevator door here, just directly across here from the elevator we have a 40 in flat screen display that has the building directory, it will also have some required LEED certification information about the building that can be accessed here. We’ll have a news program here, CNN of Fox News, something like that going, we’ll have weather on here as well as the stock market, in real time on this flat screen in the lobby. The upper two photos show the second floor that has been built out, this will be where Lockheed Martin will be located. They will be coming in on the fifteenth of the month and starting to put in cubicles--they want a lot of openness –they only have really two offices, one for each manger on either side of the building. The other floor, the other side of the floor is actually more open than that, they have about three conference rooms. This is just an example of their break room, refrigerator and dishwasher and all of those things in there where they take their breaks and so on. This is the third floor, it’s not finished out yet, and it is now ready to build to suit, so to speak, for the tenants and I’ll mentions those in just a moment.
Now, everyone knows about north Montgomery that been in the newspapers and so on for over a year. And let me say, go back to the City of Auburn, and Philip Dunlap, economic development director, and how effective he and his group have been in helping to recruit north Montgomery Northrop Grumman actually came to the city. They started working with Northrop Grumman, and then there was a big meeting with the university and so on, and very good participation from the city and the university. And they actually ah, they being the city actually recruited them they provided a hundred thousand dollars a year for the first two years to buy down that much of the first two years rent. They also provided them with free incubator space in their incubator of, of Shug Jordan Pkwy, out there, for the past…well, over a year now. In order to get them here and to keep them here and to be sure we could nail them down. And let me say that when I was in West Virginia I was already talking to Northrop Grumman about coming there and we were trying to recruit them there too. And they eventually located there. But Northrop Grumman has told me that when they started going out to find these sites that would, they were looking for seven sites across the country and they were looking for low cost for high excess for future employees, those were the two drivers. They said that they located in some of those places because they politically had to. The politicians got in there and said no more money if you don’t locate in whatever location. They came to Auburn, they told me this directly, they came to Auburn because they wanted to in addition the economic development folks being very good in providing in providing incentives, but primarily it was because they wanted to come to Auburn we see future of growth for them. (Oops, sorry—help me out again here-hit the wrong button, yea, there we are)
In addition to Northrop Grumman who will occupy the second floor ah, we’ve got the administrative offices of the ARTF, The Auburn University of Technology Transfer will move into the building. Our space is being finished out as we speak. We’re expected to move in the first week of October, so, ah, we’re looking forward to moving out there within a month. I have two additional ah, companies that have signed leases over the last month or so. One is an electronics controls company that has a manufacturing facility in Roanoak. They want to branch out and have a branch here and form an electronic control development, they have interactions already with faculty and engineering. Johnston Sterling many of you know Johnston Sterling is a um, investment financial advisory group, and ah, they want to, they will have and office there and they will be doing advising and so on. And of the support types groups they will also be doing research on global economic trends, so they can help provide the best kind of advise to their clients. We have about 13,000square feet left, that’s on the third floor, it’s the best space, it’s a beautiful view up there if you can tell from the outside of the building and the windows. And I have three real good potential clients, ah tenants-ah, lined up right now. They want the first two that are almost sure things, already talking to the architect about designing their space. They want about 7,500 square feet. I have another one that is based in Detroit that ah, works with our national asphalt technology center. They were competing with a site in Florida there and I’m not sure. I hope more hurricanes keep hitting Florida so that will encourage them to come up here to Auburn. And then finally we have about eight more buildings site in phase one and ah, we’re looking to develop this at the rate of about one building per year, at least one building per year that we want to move out. We have about twenty total sites on a hundred fifty-six acres. According to the master plan, and so I’m looking forward to the next twenty years of adding another building—I need to speed that up because I need to retire for the third time before twenty years is up.
Next slide is the last one I believe and ah, I think, this has been a great project, it’s going to have an enormous on the long-term and Auburn University and the city of Auburn and even the state. It takes time for these things to develop, but we’ll start seeing the real return on this over the next three to five years. But I encourage you to drive by out there. It really looks good. Moving in starting the middle of the month and ah, we will be fully operational by the time I get out there in the first week of October. And that concludes my report and I am glad to answer any questions.
Bob Locy: thank you John. The last presentation item will be given by Kathy McClellan, and it concerns the, ah, AU ah, yea but what’s the word I’m missing. Authenticated AU iTunes.
Kathy McClellan: Hi, I’m Kathy McClellan. I’m the manager of the Instructional Multi-media Group, which is the instructional technology division of the Office of Information Technology. And on behalf of bliss Bailey, our executive director, and at Sharon Gabor’s request I am here to today to announce to you, finally and officially, the implementation of authenticated iTunes at Auburn University. As you might know, we’ve been running public iTunes for about a year, but starting Monday, September the fifteenth faculty will have the ability to post podcast, vodcast documents in a secure and authenticated site within iTunes for only the students enrolled in your particular courses. I’ll keep this real brief unless you have questions. Watch for an e-mail Monday for a notify@auburn.edu with all the details and all the links you need. Thank you.
Bob Locy: My sense is that her brevity was appreciated. In that regard, is there any unfinished business? Any new business? Seeing none we stand adjourned until next month.