March 8, 2011
General Faculty Meeting Transcription

Claire Crutchley, chair: I call the meeting to order. Welcome to the Spring General Faculty Meeting. I am Claire Crutchley, chair of the University Senate.


The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes of the October 12, 2010 General Faculty Meeting. The minutes are posted on the Senate Web site. Does anybody have any corrections or changes to the minutes? Hearing none, the minutes stand approved as written.

Procedure for the meeting. If you have any questions or comments for any of the speakers during the meeting, please go to one of the microphones on either side of the room. Please state your name and your unit. This is needed for the transcription of the meeting.

Second thing on the agenda, Dr. Gogue will present his “State of the University” address.

Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you, delighted to be with you today. I need to tell you that I continue to preside over the greatest budget cuts in the history of Auburn University. I do that by way of opening to say thank you guys, it’s been unbelievable to me to think of 3 years of 3%, 12%, I don’t know it’s up of over 30% of proration that we’ve had to endure. And the business of the university, the real business the teaching the research and the outreach continues to move forward and I appreciate that.

We in the last week or so received another 3% proration. I shared with the University Senate last week that’s about 7.2 million dollars in terms of lost revenue in the latest round. And we’re still early in the year, you may recall last year I think it was in September that they added a prorated amount at the end of the year, so we are following it closely.

The second thing I wanted to mention is on a weekly basis we talk about campus safety at the cabinet meeting and theirs is nearly always a report of something that deals with what we’re trying to do to improve campus safety in some way. A couple of weeks ago this issue over on Magnolia where you see a lot of temporary looking signs, the city and the university have decided to jointly go in and you will see a permanent change hopefully with the same concepts of safety that will be put in this summer in that area. We still have not resolved the issues on College Street. Those are still on the board and we are still dealing those but we will see how well we do on Magnolia.

I want to mention to all faculty I think it includes virtually every faculty member on the university, we have to, based on the special session called in December that dealt with ethics, go through ethics training. This is a requirement. Several of us have gone through it, it’s an online operation it takes 55 minutes to go through it. I will tell you that I watched Don Large multi-task during part of his ethics training, but I think he still got the certificate at the end when you print it out. Bliss Bailey is trying to work on a way where when you get through and you print it you keep that one for yourself but it will automatically will tell the university as well as the state that you have completed that component of the state requirement. I believe we are supposed to have it done by April 30. So sometime in the next 45 days or so you are going to receive an e-mail with the Web address and an explanation of what you need to do to complete our ethics training.

In terms of student quality, it has been spectacular. We had a goal in our Strategic Plan to try to get an average ACT at the university of 27 by the year 2013. We got there too quick, we got there in 2010 this fall so there is a lot of progress there, a lot of progress in terms of national merit scholars. I think we are either fifth or sixth among all public universities in terms of national merit scholars. So a lot of excitement about it, but I should be candid with you it also costs us a lot of money. So we are going to look carefully at that as we go forward to make sure that we still have scholarships but we may not have as many scholarships as we’ve had in the past to make sure we manage our budget better than we did in the last year or so.

I want to spend just a few minutes and talk to you about some of the Strategic Planning activities that are underway. [5:05] Most of them I think you are familiar with. The complete list…let me digress a second. A couple of years ago you may recall that we came up with about 65 fairly tangible things that you could measure if you achieved them or didn’t achieve them. We have done about 30 of those 65, some are multi year, some will stay on our chart for years, but they are important things for us as a college community to think about and work toward.

I want to mention about a couple of those, about 80% are in the academic area and only about 20% are non-academic in the Plan. The entire list with complete discussion with details is found on the Provost’s Web site, so if you don’t see on you are interested in please look there. I picked about a dozen just to mention in passing.

The General Education Core Curriculum that you revised and implemented this fall, my goal in that was not so much that I had an idea of what ought to be in a core curriculum, but it something that as an academic community you should debate every couple of years. You should talk about it, you should make tough decisions, it should change over time, but the key is not that we the administration know what should be in the core curriculum but that is one of the things that at most universities there  is probably more debate over the core curriculum than anything else in the university. It’s important. While we have implemented a new one I’d say try it for a year or two but we need to debate it again, you need to have more discussion in that area.

The Honors Curriculum. I think those on the taskforces and the new programs and honors have been absolutely spectacular. I have to tell you part of the concern that we had. We were taking about 250–300 freshmen in the honors program and then it would come 4 years later or 5 years and there is graduation. We ask for those that have graduated from the Honors College to stand up and sometimes…we always held our breath we didn’t think anybody would stand up, but it was usually one or two at a very large graduation, so very small numbers of people. The concern we had was that you’ve got really bright kids, now you are now over 1,000 kids in the honors program with freshmen, and if we continue that path you leave in a way with a student being somewhat disappointed they were not able to continue, parents being disappointed that they sent their child to be in honors and it didn’t work out for what ever reasons. So a group studied that for about a year and they found some reasons that many of the areas where you have capstone programs and there was only the research requirement, it made it very difficult for certain students and certain majors to really devote the time to stay in it. They did the early parts of honors but they didn’t stay in it until the end.

The recommendation that came to us, I think they call it the Apogee Program, but it allows some choices. It allows you to do the basic Honors course, but also to be able to say I am going to do an enhanced study abroad, or I will do service learning in a special way. So it allows a little flexibility and hopefully over time we will see more students in different majors choose to stay in the honors program.

The Writing Center, still relatively new but in a little over a year I think it’s been expanded to 7 locations. The part to me that was exciting is that Dr. Marshall and others, they’ve expanded it now to 41 different academic departments in which they actually work in what I would call upper division writing. Writing across the curriculum in those areas. That’s important to us so I give all involved tremendous credit for that.

Graduation Rates. Every year I’ve mentioned to you of all the metrics that people look at relative to Auburn University, our weakest metric is our graduation rates. It was 62% 6 years ago, it’s 67–68% now so it’s made some improvement. But folks a school like Auburn, we ought to be 80%, maybe a 78%. A lot of our peers are in the 80–85% range. We are trying to look at a variety of things. I know that they have a degree audit that’s online that hopefully would help kids make better decisions. We restructured tuition to try to make summer school a little be more of a viable option, particularly for out-of-state students. We’ve increased the mentoring to some extent, advising and mentoring. We’ve done some distance ed programs to try to help students. There is not a single silver bullet that’s going to solve this, but as an institution we’ve got to move those graduation rate numbers up.

Distance Education. When I came I remember you had 2,100 enrollments in distance education. The enrollment numbers have grown a lot. My approach was typically and most universities you look at masters level programs to focus on anything that’s electronic distance education for schools like us. I have to give the committee and the group that worked a lot of credit. They tried to go in and look at some very high demand courses that really we had capacity problems and try to develop some at the lower division. Time will tell if those are going to work well or not, but I think it’s a good fallback position to have. As I said before Auburn’s strength is faculty in the classroom, doing our jobs, but in certain areas if it can work and be supported we want to try to do it. So, thank you to those in distance education work.

Joint Appointments. This is probably a prejudice and a bias of mine. Universities of our size faculty you would normally see about 300 faculty that hold joint appointments. Tremendous excitement between disciplines and it’s through those joint appointments that you often bring that expertise together. Auburn had 6 a few years ago, you now have 83. We still have a long way to go. Those are important ways in which, think of somebody in History that has a focus in technology. Those of you in engineering ought to figure out a way to invite that person to be a part of that particular department and vise versa. So we’re excited about that.

Tenure and Promotion. I know it’s an interesting topic, lot of discussion going on. I’d like to share with you what I think is important. Obviously, you are going to make the decision and you are going to recommend, but I thought it was hard when you have a young assistant professor that comes to Auburn and they are really unclear in many departments, not all but in some departments, about what is necessary for me to do to be successful. I don’t know what the criteria are in each department, that’s up to you to decide, but when we came down to appeals in tenure and promotion we were seeing people that were denied and when you looked at their scholarship they had more publications, they had more external grant money, we looked at teaching evaluations they were stronger than the departmental averages–makes it hard for you to begin to see what caused that. So transparency and fairness to that assistant professor that comes in that really needs some guidance in terms of what counts and what is measurable in their tenure and promotion.

Research Funding. We’ve seen about 9% growth each of the last 3 years. It’s been good growth and fairly tight money. We have opened the MRI facility out at the Research Park. Strong collaboration with East Alabama Hospital for the 3 tesla unit. I’m told that this spring we’re supposed to receive the 7 tesla unit which will be I’m told the most powerful MRI in the United States. So a lot of work in that area particularly in software development in College of Engineering for it to one day be involved in actual human use. We have responded with a very small one and a half position office in Huntsville to try to take advantage of the research and the growth in that area. I think many of you know that Huntsville receives about 32 billion dollars a year in Federal money. Only about 8 billion stays in Huntsville it the contract center for a lot of other projects. But our goal is to maybe get a half a billion to stay further in the state and so we are trying and many of you have met Rodney Robertson, he’s been trying to make the rounds to visit with different departments to see if there is interest to be engaged in Huntsville.

The other thing in research that I’d mention is that when we had the Gulf oil spill, this campus responded in a marvelous way, and it was across the board. You were rewarded to some extent, I think we got more NSF emergency awards than any school in the state. You also have been able to get some of the BP money and that is an ongoing process, but I still would complement you on the way you came together, you worked in a whole host of areas, everything from clinical areas to birds to marine marshes to the chemistry of the whole process. So I appreciate what you did in that area.

In Graduate Student Growth we have a goal to try to reach 5,000 graduate students, that means about 20,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduate students is sort of a goal if we are going to stay with a 25,000 cap. The numbers that you have this year in graduate school are 3,874, that’s about a 5% increase. The thing I didn’t know and Drew had to explain it to me, none of your pharm Ds, in pharmacy, none of you veterinary medicine count as graduate students, so I was thinking with those 800, roughly, we are getting close the the 5,000. But we still have a lot of work to do with graduate students.

Outreach [16:38] I wanted to mention that group and the institution won the Carnegie Foundation Engaged University Award which is very prestigious. One of the things they’ve done that does not receive a lot of visibility but is particularly important, I guess about 3 years ago we were asked through the Federal side to adopt some schools, spend some time with schools in your local community. Part of their logic was there are 4,300 colleges and universities in the United States and if everyone of those colleges would just adopt one school, close by, and spend some time and work with them that we might see improvement. So Lochapoka and Notasulga are the two schools that outreach has been working with. Now when I say outreach I don’t mean the division of Outreach, I’m talking about everybody from Fine Arts to Mathematics across this campus, spending time in those schools. Then when they come to campus, Overton’s involved with mentoring and counseling programs to try to keep those kids in school. That was important, another thing that was important to me; Outreach is something that needs to be financially sustainable. You can’t just take money and spend it every year and then next year take more money. [18:02] It’s got to somehow pay for its own way. They have had some success through the Olli program, I think the Osher group gave a million dollars to help the lifelong learning side. They won a 4 or 5 million dollar award for broadband to work with almost every county in the State. That have a bout 250 programs a year through outreach, I thin 16–17 thousand sign up and take those. The thing that was interesting was that their, I don’t want to call it profit that’s not the correct word, but revenue in excess of costs to run the program is about 20%, so they made some really good progress there. I appreciate what you’ve done.

The final thing is SACS. From our original list of items on the strategic plan, the only one we added without appropriate input, so we didn’t go back and hold meetings and discussions is that we have a SACS evaluation coming up. It’s a reaffirmation visit in 2013 and we know there is homework we have to do be in compliance with the standards of that regional accrediting body. Drew announced yesterday, we have him make announcements every Monday where we are relative to SACS. I think today is the deadline for the QEP Plan. He’s indicated that we’ve got a lot of good ideas, remember that’s a new thing that we did not have to do historically. One facet of the university that you have not done work on, that you are not already doing that you come in and develop a plan that would really improve the quality in one facet of the university.

Let me just close by saying that the University Senate, we try to make every meeting they have, I know some of you that are here today are not part of the Senate, but in the last year every resolution that came through the Senate, came to the Provost and to me we’ve approved. So many of the shared governance part and the quality of the discussions that go on as a part of the meetings is important for me to hear. So I appreciate all of you and would be happy to respond to questions.

Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy and I teach religious studies: Now that we won the National Championship in football do you see any up side of this in terms of the academic side of the house? Will we have more incoming freshmen? Will we have more transfer students wanting to come here? What are your thoughts on this?

Dr. Gogue, president: There are probably up sides and down sides. The down side in a way is that when you have a cap of 25,000 students and you have an outpouring of really high quality students that want to come, it makes it increasingly difficult. A year ago I think Wayne Alderman would tell you that we’d send out 2,800 letters to families that either had come to Auburn or had a grandparent or somebody that came to Auburn, some type of legacy deal, I don’t know how many will have to go out this year.

On another note, I share this with you but it’s not quite accurate but it sounds good. I’ll share it with you and then tell you why it’s not accurate. Normal annual giving to the university is somewhere around 75–85 million dollars, that’s without a campaign, but through gifts that come into the university. Now if you use development accounting, not Don’s accounting, this year we got a gift through engineering/architecture from the Semans’ Corporation and that was close to 195 million dollars, so if I add those two together it looks like we did about 270 million dollars this year which is not quite accurate. There has been, Rich, tremendous interest, tremendous excitement, the number of applications I think I’ve heard is up 18% which is probably somewhat related to that blip, ie every 50 years that we seem to have in athletics. But those are the things that come to mind. Provost and Don and some of the others of you have seen other things that have also been a part of it.

Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Also the terms of several trustees are up this year, do you have any time table for filling these vacancies? Has the governor spoken to you about this?

Dr. Gogue, president: The governor has not spoken to me, governors don’t usually ask those questions, but we have 8 vacant positions. We have a ninth one which is the governor, so you have a new trustee, the governor, who is the president of the Board. We have 5 members of the Board that can be reappointed, so there is an option there for reappointment. You have 3 that there will clearly be vacant and would be new positions, I would assume. Jack Miller died, Dwight Carlisle will age out this month I believe and he will be gone, and Paul Spina aged out. The governor has not made a call to my knowledge, they usually make a call and it’s done by the congressional districts of 1960 in the State of Alabama. So they send the call out and get candidates in. The selection committee is made up of the governor’s representative, supposed to be an Auburn alumni, and then the two members of the Board of Trustees and two members of the Alumni Association. So if you get 3 votes and the governor gives your name to the Senate for confirmation, the Senate confirms it and you are a new trustee. But I have not had any discussions. [24:41]

Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Thank you so much Dr. Gogue.

Bob Locy, biological sciences: Dr. Gogue this may seem like a strange question, but then I guess you’ve got to consider the source. The information that you talked about in the beginning concerning the budget where we had serious cuts in our budget and I certainly an not faulting you for not applauding us for how well we’ve survived all of that, but I wonder if that is not a little bit self-defeating? What I mean by that is that those that want no new taxes and are boisterous about trying to control spending in governmental budgets across the nation, quite frankly, are rather proud of the fact that an institution like Auburn could survive for 3 years with significant cuts and still do our jobs well. And I’m sort of wondering if all of this whole business isn’t just a bunch of spin and whether we can’t find a way to spin some of our pain out so that those that are helping pay our bills understand that we’re not without pain even though we’re doing our jobs well. And it’s coming at the sacrifice of people at the institution and maybe not doing some things as well and maybe discontinuing doing some things. I think the public needs to be made aware of the fact that it isn’t cost free to just give us no more money for 3 years in a row, or less money for 3 years in a row. To some extent we’ve survived as well as we have because of the federal funding that’s come down for the stimulus. I wondering if there are things that you see that we as a faculty could do advance the pain we have relative to the budget.

Dr. Gogue, president: I don’t want you to advance the pain, but I understand your comment. I don’t know the right answer, Bob. I’ll tell you what some schools are doing, it’s to get attention, they are reducing enrollment. So if you were to look at many schools you will see…it normally took 5,000 freshmen we could only take 2,500 or 3,000, so that sends a clear message back to families, back to people that want to go to that institution and that things are different. You have to remember that if you think about an in-state kid, the kid pays about 50 cents, the state pays about 50 cents and you try to educate them on that dollar. So there is some logic if you are not getting that other 50 cents then you have to reduce enrollment. That’s the sort of thing that you are seeing some institutions do, I’m not sure they are doing it to send a message, but I think they are doing it because there is absolutely not money to be able to support the kids. But you raise a good point. If you all have great ideas on how we can better share our story and hopefully get it listened to I would love to hear it.
Thank you.

Claire Crutchley, chair:  Thank you Dr. Gogue [28:22]
Our first information item is Constance Relihan, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts. She will be presenting about the Common Book Program for the 2011–2012 academic year.

Constance Relihan, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Liberal Arts: I’m going to be brief because shorter is always better than longer. What I wanted to do was to make sure everyone is aware of where we are headed with the common book and try to get as many of you as possible to participate in the Common Book Program for next year, and in our planning for it.

So first of all I want to make sure everyone knows that the book that has been chosen for the 11–12 year is Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would cure the world. This is a non-fiction book for those of you who know it about Paul Farmer the founder of the Partners in Health organization, which has health clinics in Haiti and Peru and many parts of the world. We have a large group that came up with possibilities and we sent some to the Provost and this was our selection for this year.

We are working on a plan for future years to get student involvement, to get students to actually do the voting. Just a couple of quick reminders. We got into this notion of having a common book program because of the improved graduation rates taskforce, part of what Dr. Gogue was talking about with our need to improve graduation rates. Research shows that the more connected students can be with each other and with the faculty around academic issues, the sooner they will feel connected to the university and the more likely they will be to persist and stay.

A reminder of the goals of our program. To promote intellectual community to gain a global or broad perspective we really want this program to get students outside of their Alabama mindset, or their 18 year old mindset. There are many ways we might define that over the years ahead but we want them to get outside of themselves somehow. We want to emphasize the hard work that is at the heart of the Auburn creed. We want to promote engagement and we want to link this to a lot a different kinds of programming. We want a book that will be broadly applicable to all of our units.

Mountains Beyond Mountains, this is kind of a beginning of a plea to all of you, not just to use the books in your classes, but to think about arranging some programming. We are interested to connections to this book in any way you can think of them. As I was leaving Tichenor to come over here and talk one of my colleagues said, “I teach Web design, how is this connected to Web design?” well I said “How do non-profits raise money these days? They raise through the Web. Arrange some kind of programming in which you showcase different kinds of non-profit Web designs and talk about what works and what doesn’t.” That’s a connection.

As you can see it’s global, it’s public health, it’s tuberculosis, it’s HIV disease, multicultural communication, it centers a lot on issues in Haiti, which is where they started their original clinics. So there are obvious connections to the research many of you are doing in that part of the world, personal determination, hard work. We are interested in how you can use this book, however it relates to the work you are doing in the classrooms.

I want you to know what we’ve got planned for right now. We’re trying to do faculty development sessions that are more targeted. The first two items on that list are some work that we are going to do with the English department to get their composition instructors on board. We want really to get this book integrated into as many courses as possible. So we’ve got some English department centered workshops. I bring this up because if you are in a department if you are in a unit that thinks that it might be useful to have someone from the common book program come and speak to a group in your college to try to get you to understand how you might use this in your courses, please let me know we’d be happy to come and talk.

The March 31 deadline is more important because that’s our deadline for proposals to be submitted. We’re asking for people there’s a link to proposals on the faculty Web site. We will pare funding with you if you want to bring in a speaker or arrange a program that somehow fits into this. This past year we had Wan Cole who is an Islamic historian of political history, we had Margaret Mills who’s an educational leader from Ohio State talking about educating women in Afghanistan, we’ve had a variety of speaker come in and for the most part they’ve played to full houses, so if you want to get a lot of people at an event that showcases the kind of work you are doing in your unit partnering with Auburn Connects is a way to do it. [34:58]

I would encourage you to assign the book if you can see a way that it connects either as a required or a recommended text. I would encourage you to get your students to attend the events next year as they are coming up and I would encourage you to read the book too so you can participate in the conversation.

I know last year when I made this presentation, I talked about my vision of an Auburn in which every one is as aware of what the common book is and the issues that is raises as we are of the football season. I won’t go through all the details of that but love it or hate it we all know what’s going on with football and wouldn’t it be great if we all had an intellectual connection that was as broad.

So that’s my presentation, go to the Web site, propose some kind of panel, arrange some panel even if it doesn’t require bringing in externals we would love to have presentations that showcase the work that you are doing. We are looking at partnering with the research week that’s being planned for next spring to showcase the work that our own faculty and students are doing that’s related to the issues of the book. But if you’ve got other kinds of speakers other kinds of events, one thing I didn’t mention is on April 13 we are going to have a kick off pizza and movie event [36:35] showcasing the film, Sun City Picture House which is about people in Haiti trying to rebuild a movie theater after the earthquake and give people a taste of Haitian culture that we will explore more fully next year. That’s all I’ve got to say. If there are any questions I will try to answer them. [37:02]

Claire Crutchley, chair:  Thank you, Dr. Relihan?
Next Bruce Smith, chair of the Faculty Research Committee and Carl Pinkert, Associate Vice President for Research will give an update on the AU Internal grants program.

Bruce Smith, chair of the Faculty Research Committee: Thank you for this opportunity we wanted to update you on the internal grants program. It’s been ongoing now for a few months I am going to start by giving you a little bit of background in history and then Carl will give you where the program is today. I’ll through the punch line out right now which is faculty who didn’t apply last year should definitely apply in the coming year because we were quite successful in awarding the faculty who did apply. That’s money. [38:03]

So a little over a year and a half ago the Senate Faculty Research Committee was asked by the office of the Vice President to identify a way in which we could have university wide grants program. Historically we’ve had a number of programs that were administered out of the Vice President’s office that were sort of disparate programs that dealt with a number of different very specialize concerns. Some of you may remember the bio-grant program, the grants-in-aid-program, and there is also a discretionary grants program, and a 4th grants program. And those were administered in different ways and they had different applications, some of them had fairly complicated applications and what we were asked to do was come up with a grants program that would be university wide that would have relevance to just about anyone here at Auburn University who might be interested in what we historically think of as research but also areas like scholarship performance, areas in which we could enhance faculty ability to perform in that scholarship arena. Whatever that scholarship might be for that type of faculty so this is a program that was trying to go beyond the hardcore science or engineering or something like that and give some funding availability to someone in the arts, someone in liberal arts, someone in a field that wasn’t necessarily always looking at applying for NIH, NSF, or USDA funding. [39:33]

The committee, to give you an idea of what we looked at and what we came up with; the recommendations of the Faculty Research Committee were that we create a single program that had multiple levels of funding. So that individuals could get in at a low level of funding relatively easily, or a smaller number of individuals might be able to acquire a significant amount of money to get a relatively larger project underway. We wanted to see the applications be simple, this shouldn’t be a time consuming all encompassing application process. As Carl will tell you I think we’ve accomplished that particularly again at the lower levels. As the amount of money increases then the complications of the application justifiably increases because you need to be able to talk about what you are going to do with that.


We really wanted to emphasize the growing interdisciplinary focus throughout the university. Dr. Gogue mentioned it in terms of the joint appointments and we’d like to find ways to encourage people to work across departmental and particularly across college boundaries. So the idea of getting people from multiple colleges together on a project was a strong component of what the committee thought would be important for a grants program. One of the major complaints about previous grant programs has been fairness of the reviews, it doesn’t emphasize the reviews ought to be impartial fair and carried out by people who had experience in a review process, whatever that process was. Again for a grant in the biological sciences that might be somebody who’s had NSF or NIH experience or someone in engineering might have NSF experience, but for a grant that’s dealing with performing arts we need to have people who have performing arts experience to understand what the significance of that proposal was. So we really want to emphasize that the reviews be fair and unbiased.

Another area of emphasis that we thought was extremely important was that there be buy in from departments and from colleges. That’s the nice way of saying that the OVPR shouldn’t have to fund it all. When your department head provides some of the funding for this grant, when your dean provides some of the funding for this grant, And they want to check up on you and make sure that that’s happening, and that’s a way that we can provide additional support for faculty and it’s also a way we can grow the program so that we are not just talking about the dollars that are available in Samford Hall, but dollars that are available across the entire university. The kitty for the faculty grows. The amount of money that can be awarded gets larger. So that’s an advantage for the faculty in addition to the fact that those administrators do have an investment in your success.

The other thing that we wanted to see was a presentation component and I don’t know if you will talk about that or not but in the current program we have an expectation that awardees will present their work in some format to the community. Previously those awards went to the faculty member and that might have been the last thing we saw was the money going away and noone ever saw a poster or a talk. The research forum may be one place where that may happen where people can present posters supported by the internal grants program. There may be some other work we need to do to get the aspects like performances or art exhibits or things of that nature, but there should be a component of this where the community as a whole gets to see the result of this funding. And have a feeling for what did get funded and what the successful outcomes were.

And that’s the final point that I wanted to make that the committee was very strong in it’s feeling that there should be some requirement for an outcome beyond the simple result of a research conclusion. The idea was that these funding programs, this funding program should not be an end in itself. It should not necessarily be the ultimate accomplishment on a faculty member’s dossier. Rather these funds are for stepping stones, these are building blocks to go out and do bigger and better things, to build a program to build some form of scholarship to get the preliminary stuff together that you need in order to be able to go outside the university and apply for extramural funding, whatever the source is. So one of the things, the final thing that the FRC really saw as a critical component of this program is the requirement that there be a vision for where this work goes beyond simply what is happening here at Auburn with this funding. What’s the next step beyond that? Where are you going to go for additional funding? Or additional performances or somehow getting that scholarship out there to the rest of the world and not just this community.

With that we worked very closely with the Office of the Vice President to implement this program, made several rounds of recommendations and I think an excellent example of faculty working in a shared governance way to create a program that we had a vision for and the good news is that program most of you are probably aware was implemented this past fall and Carl is going to tell you the specifics of that program. [45:01]

Carl Pinkert, Associate Vice President for Research: I’ve got to start by saying that this was a huge group effort in addition to Bruce’s help, Senate leadership, Claire Crutchley and Kathryn Flynn and their colleagues for how to pull a number of these things together. But in addition to the FRC the efforts of the competitive research grants review committee, at the back end of this process as far as review that are there and I know there are still a couple of reviews still outstanding right now because we’ve given initial applicants a second chance to improve the proposals that were originally written, but we’ve got great news as far as where things were headed in the numbers that are out there.

As Bruce has outlined we came up with 4 different levels and this was something that the FRC really delved into in a huge way because they were concerned not only about the interdisciplinary efforts and where we were looking strategically as a university to grow programs, but also for individual investigators and what opportunities existed for more traditional research within disciplinary boundaries and to not exclude them from a more global program. [46:15]

So we had 4 different levels. We started out talking about half a million dollars with matching support beginning after a million dollars. There was a lot of belt tightening in addition to the indirect cost recovery funds that come into the Office of the Vice President for Research to enhance progamatic activities. We used all that money, additional funds from trying to close down operational efforts that weren’t really being leveraged in moving forward within our office. John Masson made the strategic decision that okay we’re going to bump this up and move it up to a million dollars with matching funds to get it close to 2 million dollars. [46:53] Well we were able to achieve that and more with the applications that we’ve seen so far. You’ll see level 1 and level 2 are more on the smaller scale, as Bruce has outlined, level 3 and level 4 are larger scale interdisciplinary projects that involve either research projects or scholarly activity related efforts on campus across different colleges and schools, or equipment related needs that a number of faculty members could point to as critical for an interdisciplinary effort.

I said we were originally targeting a million dollars and matching funds around 2 million dollars for programs that Bruce outlined in the best year that Auburn ever had gave away about 270 thousand dollars across all 4 programs. They were based, in some cases, on competitive applications and in other cases they were an entitlement. And we wanted to go ahead and develop something that the Faculty Research Committee was great at pulling together that would reward excellence and develop and leverage the resources that we have on campus. So we went from that 270 to 280 thousand dollar figure to, in total right now with the applications that have been funded, over 2.6 million dollars worth of awards even with these tough economic times that we’ve been able to identify 4 faculty members across our campus and something that we’ve got buy in from every college and school as well. So there is an interest not only at the central level, but also at the local level within the colleges and schools and the individual departments to see these faculty members be successful. [48:29]

This is a list of what the proposals that have been funded to date so far have broken down to. You’ll see the vast majority of folks did look at level 3 applications for the dollars that are out there, but we had a large number of level 1 applications for individual projects where faculty member needed that additional piece of travel, the additional opportunity for a graduate student or a faculty member to get involved in collecting data or collecting resources so research or creative scholarship could move forward.

When we look at level 3 and level 4 applications we had large dollar amounts that were going out from our office, but at the same time with matches that were there the most money that went to an individual project 75 thousand dollars that we provided, 75 thousand dollar matches from 3 different colleges and schools so that they are looking at a project well over 200 thousand dollars that was moving forward. And this was the impetus to get that group of faculty members together to get to the next level. At the end of the day we have expectations as far as prestige for Auburn University or additional funding with related metrics that are in place where there will be rewards for success for faculty members moving that bar to the next level.

So we used our share of indirect cost recovery and consolidation of some internal programs to provide the basis for the funds that are here. We’re ultimately at looking at growing the research infrastructure here increasing the indirect cost recovery coming to Auburn University to where we can expand on these programs overall. We think that this investment will be leverage to grow a host of opportunities for our faculty members here at Auburn. And we’re excited about where this has started. While we didn’t get the number of applications we hoped for in the early going, where we are headed and the types of projects that are being facilitated in relationship to out strategic planning efforts, we’re extraordinarily with the direction that we are headed. Thank you. [50:29]

Claire Crutchley, chair:  Thank you. Any questions or comments for Dr. Smith or Dr. Pinkert? Thank you.
Our next information item will be from Eric Smith, director of health promotion and Wellness Initiatives representing the Campus Health and Wellness committee.

Eric Smith, Campus Health and Wellness committee: Good afternoon everyone my name is Eric Smith. I am the director of health promotion and wellness services. This is a brand new office that Dr. Cary brought to the institution and I am definitely happy to be part of the Auburn University community. When I first arrived it was probably literally a weekend of my job here and Dr. Cary put the issue on my desk and I’ve been working with it ever since. Dispite what you may hear about me in the newspapers or overhear or online in a blog, I am actually a really nice guy, I’m not trying to push a nanny state on anyone necessarily, this is just an important issue that a lot of college campuses and municipalities and cities are addressing across the nation.

The question on the agenda today is should Auburn University become a smoke free campus. This question has not been answered. The answer is still out there we are still working to figure it out, I am merely here today to collect feedback. I will get into the process and where we are a little bit later but this is the big question, should Auburn University become a smoke free campus?

So the process so far. This process actually began a while ago, last April 27, 2010, an Auburn University student wrote a letter to Dr. Gogue. And in that letter he encouraged Dr. Gogue to move the campus into a smoke-free direction. The most important line from this was his very last line: I ask only that when you are making a decision on this matter you would base it on what is in the best interest of all who are part of this Auburn family. He did a really nice job of capturing what we are talking about [52:46] and that is we are talking about a public health issue on our campus today.

The issue was kicked down to Dr. Cary, he went and he surveyed the governance groups, he pulled them together to get initial feedback. Where are we on this? Where do we stand? Is this even something we should be considering? The initial feedback was very positive and right about this time was when I came on board and further research was actually needed. So the issue got moved from a small working team over to the Campus Health and Wellness Committee. At the days end it will be this committee that puts together some sort of resolution that will come before everyone.

So we started our research and what we found out was that 466 colleges and universities are currently smoke free here in America. There are also some institutions, about 170 that are completely tobacco free as well, these are just smoke free institutions that we’re focusing our research on. In addition to the universities there are a lot workplaces, in the fall East Alabama Medical Center went to a smoke free environment, our campus medical clinic is affiliated with them and as such we actually have one of our first areas on campus that is completely 100% smoke-free and that’s out at the medical clinic.

When we looked a little bit closer, in the SEC, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, and Vanderbilt are all currently smoke free, no smoking anywhere on their campus. Clearly it can be done it’s not out of the question here. When you look at the other SEC schools, Auburn University ranks at the back end here. Our current Auburn university smoking policy simply states no smoking inside of buildings. There are no buffer zones, if you are not smoke free generally speaking you might have buffer zone, 100 ft., 50 ft. 20 ft. from a building or an enclosed space that you are not permitted to smoke. Auburn University doesn’t have that at the moment either.

Currently Alabama and Georgia are both considering going smoke free as we speak. The University of Georgia’s resolution is sitting on the president’s desk waiting to be signed. I’m not 100% sure where Alabama is but I think they are pretty much in line with where we are. Schools with buffer zones, just for reference, are Old Miss and LSU.

So obviously the question is why would institutions choose to create a smoke free environment, I think it’s a very important one; one worth debating, one worth collecting feedback on, for me the answer becomes public health. [55:04] When we look at some of the other schools these are kind of the headers that lead their policy. University of Arkansas, because there is no safe tobacco product the only logical action is to promote a campus that is tobacco free. They went the tobacco route they actually are back by a state law that indicates that no state owned property or building can have smoke or use tobacco products. Then we looked at Indiana. In order to promote the health and well being of employees, students, and other constituents Indiana University has mandated that all campuses be smoke free. I include this one because it’s the idea of the Indiana University campuses, so it’s not just IU-Bloomington, but IU in Cocomo, Richmond, and all the other places where they have satelite campuses they have adopted that policy as well. When we look at the University of Kentucky, they have a pretty stringent policy and pretty intense policy but they sum it up succinctly; the University of Kentucky has a vital interest in maintaining a safe and healthy environment for students, employees, and visitors. These 3 schools are all in states, Kentucky, Indiana, and Arkansas that have some of the highest percentages of adult smokers in the entire country. Actually Arkansas is 11, Kentucky is the number 1, and Indiana is 4 or 5. Alabama currently ranks 7th on that list. So I say this just to say even in environments that are densely populated by a higher smoking population it is possible to choose success down this path as well.

The University of Kentucky has taken it a step further, they have developed a center for tobacco policy research and a lot of good materials are coming out of there right now. We have relied very heavily on their research and their support to drive this process. Some interesting things to point out; from a financial perspective they are also a self-insured institution and they do expect a cost savings once this policy was put into place. The following numbers are their numbers based on off of their health plan, but I think they are significant and important to this audience as well. The most recent estimates of the cost per year for smokers is $5,200, so if employees quite(smoking) there would be an estimated cost savings. This is a direct quote from the director of their policy research gave me, we theorize there would be some sort of reduction here as well for Auburn considering we are both self-insured, but it’s not just the insurance where we can expect some type of cost savings. There is a lot of research out there now that indicates there could be significant savings for facilities and maintenance operations as well.

As I was preparing to speak with the president last week about this issue one of the maintenance workers in the Student Center came into my office after the article had come out in The Plainsman, and that gentleman said to me, “ I really support this initiative I think it’s awesome, I’m really behind it. Not because of smoking necessarily for me personally or second hand smoke or anything like that, but because we have to clean up after smokers who are here and deposit their butts all over the place.” They get lodged between the bricks on all the sidewalks and concourses here, and that’s costing them extra time, energy, and material people power to actually take care of that as well. There are some other cost savings that are being investigated right now from a productivity standpoint for folks that smoke in terms of smoke breaks and things of that nature as well. I don’t have any data on that one per se but I know the research is out there and being looked at. [58:23]

Getting back to this idea about public health. It goes a little bit further, because as we all know kinds of the theories of good public health. When we talk about public health theory we sometimes talk about a deterrent factor. I think this is an important one as well considering all the wonderful students that are constantly coming to Auburn University in that freshman class.

This is from the CDC, it talks about how smoking bans in places of work have really impacted the smoking that actually goes on. If you could direct you attention to that bottom line there, this can result in reducing the number of adolescents who start smoking. I think if we look at our population of students here at Auburn, a smoking ban a smoke-free campus can definitely have a significant impact on students who actually choose to start smoking once they arrive at Auburn. When we were doing polling around the Student Center these are some quotes we got from out research. “If they do not allow smoking on campus, I’d probably just quit.” That’s directly from an Auburn University Student not edited by any stretch, that was the quote he gave when approached by one of our pollers. He was a smoker as well and he said you know what I’m probably just going to have to quit. Further more another smoker said, “I started smoking outside my dorm when I got to Auburn, guess it would not have been possible if this policy existed.”

These are just to show some of the deterrent factors that are actually out there as well. On the other side of that coin we received this feedback from an employee. “As for me I will not comply with the ban on smoking on campus and I suspect I will not be alone. The reality of banning smoking outdoors on this campus would create a new angry class of outlaws.” I put this in here, one I think that’s an adequate side of the story that needs to be told, we’re definitely not just telling one side of the story throughout this process by any stretch. Clearly there are going to be people, even if you choose to go the smoke free route, who do not accept it and do not participate in that. Many of the schools that have gone smoke free would freely say we don’t have 100% accountability on this we are not reaching that point by any stretch but we are trying. We’re putting the statements out there, we’re dealing with issues as they are being brought to us and we’re trying to make a difference in this fight. [1:00:27] Some people definitely won’t comply, others will.

Getting back to public health. Just a little bit further, the surgeon general’s report came out in December and this is the latest from the surgeon general when it comes to tobacco and second-hand smoke. This is the quote that ends the executive summary of the report. “The science is now clear that appropriate remedial actions include protecting everyone in the country to having to breath second-hand smoke.” Recently New York City passed laws where they are going smoke free. If that city can do it clearly a campus probably can. There is no safe levels to exposure to second-hand smoke, these are all coming directly from the surgeon general of course and cigarette smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals and compounds, hundreds are toxic and at least 69 are know to cause cancer.

This is just the 2010 report there is a huge list of other reports out there that have all kind of shed evidence on this and pointed in this direction. These are just a sampling of but a few of them. Some are international, some are more directly American, some are coming from California as well.

We’ve been if front of students, we actually met with them a while back. It was interesting, during that meeting someone raised their hand and they actually said that on Oct. 22, 2007 the students on Auburn University’s campus already passed a clean air resolution in which they called that smoking should be prohibited in outdoor areas of the campus where non-smokers can avoid exposure. This already happened in 2007, I’m not sure where the chips fell on this on, I think there was a lot of leadership turnover during that time. I’m not sure how far they made it on that one, but it’s there and already exists. Some of their initial concerns were that residents saw issues of enforcement, game day, and cessation programs. Faculty that are meeting here today some of the initial concerns we’ve heard from folks in the faculty room is implementation, the timeline, adequate cessation programs, enforcement, legality, and discrimination issues as well. We’ve met with A&P, we met with them back in February. Their concerns were primarily logistical in nature, but they also put out a survey, it’s out right now and will be closed on Friday. One of the questions was based on Likard’s scale and it asked the following question, “How would you rate your feeling about the campus becoming smoke-free?” We are definitely anxious to see that feedback and move forward. Their concerns like I said are pretty logistical in nature, timeline, game day, and enforcement were the 3 areas there. We will meet with the staff governance group on March 10, later this week.

If you look at summarizing the logistical concerns it comes down to enforcement, game day issues, cessation programs, implementation, and timeline. All 4 are very important things we need to address. You look simply at the enforcement issue. Schools are going about this in a variety of ways. This is one example of this, from Michigan, obviously it comes down to for faculty and staff it’s an employment issue and one that needs to be handled through the appropriate discipline channels. That language is actually in our current policy. Go a little bit further you are relying on peer support, supervisor oversight and voluntary compliance. One of the challenges I think we will face regardless even if it’s a 100 ft. buffer from buildings that will be an issue that’s going to be thought about for some time. Some campuses employ fines they employ ticketing and things of that nature, I don’t think we can necessarily do that. Places that usually do that actually have campus police force and we have a public safety and security force and I don’t know if we would be over taxing them to put them in that role, I don’t know if we’d want to go down that road. Some institutions do ticket for that and you can get the ticket waived if you go to the cessation program. There are some options there to say the least regardless of what we decide to do. [1:04:20]

The game day issue that’s a very popular one around here and one that’s being addressed, you have to control what you can control and maybe that could be inside the stadium. The University of Florida is a tobacco free campus. This policy is in effect in all of their athletic facilities and they use their game day staff inside the stadium to control what goes on. On the actual game day with tail-gaiting and things of that nature of what I’ve been told from Florida they are a little bit more hands off that day and let happen what happens but control what they can control and in this case it’s inside the stadium.

Timeline implementation of where we are in this process, we are very much early in this process yet moving steadily along. Our next steps will be continuing the discussion, but the Web site the articles and things of that nature have generated a lot of discussion and being in front of all of you today I hope furthers more discussion.

Here are a few samples of what we are hearing from folks. This one highlights the importance of the mess and things of that nature. I often get feedback from smokers who are claim to be a responsible smokers who smoke away from others and responsible with the cigarette butts, I think that’s wonderful for that person unfortunately that’s not the case for everybody. I had just completed a conversation with someone and walked outside and there was a smoker standing by the doorway and it was not a rainy day but they happened to be standing right there. So maybe that means that there should be a better buffer zone in place.

This comment was from a student and a smoker, they had read the article, smoking is legal, the health risks, why try to take away something that they enjoy. The legal arguments have been refuted a number of times, while it is legal it is also a personal choice and not something that is regulated or protected necessarily. A lot of institutions have been able to get past the legal arguments moving forward.

From a non-smoking employee, this gets to the buffer zones again and smoking while standing outside the building and the smoke comes back in through the ventilation systems. And it touches on the smoke break issue too.

The Campus Health and Wellness Committee will be finishing our meetings with folks this week and we are going to spend some time looking at all of the feedback we’ve been given and develop some sort of resolution, we will include in that resolution a draft of potential policy, key word here is potential. By no means am I the architect of the policy I am just helping to collect the feedback. One of the big issues that needs to be addressed is boundaries, if we do choose to go smoke free where are we going to draw those boundary lines? How far out are we going to go? If you look at some of the other policies they indicate that it’s all property owned, leased, and operated by the university. For us that would include some of the extension offices as well as a lot of the Greek homes that are located on periphery of campus yet still on university owned property and they are leased through us. How far out do we want to extend that boundary? Do we keep it to the main academic core of campus or extend it further? All these issues will need to be addressed. As I said we will be presenting the resolution and it will be the same resolution that will go before every governance group and then be here for a vote in May. Once we get all that done regardless of what the change will be, whether it’s the boundaries, the smoke-free campus, we need to announce that and we need to do so far enough out in advance that it gives us time to plan and prepare, this is an arbitrary date, effective January 1, 2012 Auburn University, fill in the blank, in terms of the smoking policy.

I would then like to cite a point of implementation. This policy is going to have ramifications that are going to go well beyond my means and scope, even the Campus Health and Wellness means and scope. We are talking about issues of facility concerns, signage, that adequate cessation programs, the cost of those programs need to be addressed, the cost of the signage needs to be addressed. If new buildings are being built where do we actually do we install cigarette receptacles and things of that nature or do we pull all of them from a study standpoint. Clearly there is still a lot to think about and clearly it is not an easy question to answer by any stretch. That’s why I am here today to gather feedback and at this time I’d love to hear some.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Any comments or questions for Mr. Smith?

Eric Smith: for anyone who is not going to share in this room or would like to let a colleague know, my e-mail is eric.smith@auburn.edu it’s very simple to get back to me and we have not shied away from anything, we are finding that the responses we are getting we are actively researching through our committee. Thank you.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you and the Campus Health and Wellness committee is a university committee comprised of students, staff, A&P, Faculty, so it has all of the representative groups.
Conner Bailey is representing AAUP presenting the AAUP Glenn Howze Academic Freedom award. [1:10:05]

Conner Bailey, representing AAUP: It’s my very great pleasure and honor to perform this task on behalf of my colleagues in the AAUP to present the Glenn R. Howze AAUP Award for Academic Freedom to Dr, Herb Rotfeld of the department of marketing in the College of Business. As everybody here knows I am sure AAUP has been very important voice on campus for many years, long before I got here and I’ve been here for a very long time. Our Faculty Handbook is crafted out of the standards that were created by the national AAUP. Our members have served in leadership capacity across campus and nationally within AAUP as well. And during the recent unpleasantness which is now past. AAUP leaders played a very important role and that is why this award was created because there were times when academic freedom was actually something that was a hard won value. It’s for this reason that we make this award and we’ve been doing so for a number of years now honoring faculty, students, Leigh Davidson, the editor of The Plainsman at a particularly crucial time, Bill Muse early on in his career as a university president, and of course faculty. So this award has recognized a number of key actors on our campus over the years. Today the honor goes to Herb Rotfeld.

Anybody who knows Herb knows that he’s not necessarily the silent type. To say that he has served this campus is absolutely true. To say that he’s served quietly would not be true, but he has served. He’s served as parliamentarian to the University Faculty Sentate, he served on the steering committee of the university senate, he served on the executive committee of the AAUP, and other committees as well campus wide and college. And he’s been very active professionally in his discipline as a journal editor and scholar. He’s know on this campus as an iconoclastic gadfly, a pain in the posterior portion what ever you want to call…he certainly been a consistent thorn in the side of those who did not adhere to or value shared governance or transparency. And he often challenged these people, often pointedly and often publically. He did this in settings where others did not on parts of campus where questions of academic freedom were not necessarily as central as they were on other parts of campus. When others kept their silence Herb spoke up and was often the only one doing so, where shared governance and transparency were not common values, where they were uncommon. He has demonstrated a limited tolerance for nepotism and unfairness and forms of favoritism. He’s not always been gentle or kind and he’s ruffled feathers and even irritated people and some of the people he’s irritated are in this room and one of them is speaking to you right now. He has an acerbic wit and he’s not only used that wit here in academia, he’s used it in his professional role challenging the perceived wisdom in the corporate world with this same kind of barbed, funny often wit. So it is for Herb Rotfeld’s long service and advocacy of academic freedom, shared governance, that led to his selection as recipient of the 2011 Glenn R. Howze AAUP Award for Academic Freedom from the Auburn University Chapter of the AAUP. And I’m sure Glenn would be proud. [1:14:38]

Herb Rotfeld: Conor is always able to make me feel speechless, as rare as that is. I notice that my dean left.

I can't ignore the observation that my receiving this recognition continues the tradition of honoring those of us who say things that get people upset.

Some years back, in a time of what seemed like unending turmoil, another newly appointed interim president came to an AAUP open forum. I raised my hand with a question and he called on me, but as I said my name his head whipped, his eyes bulged a bit and he did a double-take reaction shot suitable for a Looney Tunes cartoon. It was if the thought was in his head, "Oh my stars and garters, I called on HIM!"

I never sought to be controversial. Consider it a lesson from the school of unintended consequences. Maybe some people showed up today to see if I insult anyone.

I know that many faculty refer to AAUP as "the union," mostly in reference to discussions of tenure. However, the Auburn chapter exists for advocacy, not union protections. There is no union at Auburn. AAUP advocates for academic freedom and shared governance. Tenure is a means to those ends, not an end unto itself. I am not unlike Glenn a lifelong member of AAUP. I can imagine Glenn Howze organizing a protest on a 5 year old’s playground at some point, and when I came to Auburn everytime I published another article or distributed another essay, Glenn was at my door saying, “You ought to join now.”

Yet too many people on campus, especially in the college of business where I toil, don't understand what is meant by those terms, "academic freedom" or "shared governance."  [1:16:33] I look around the room here and except for the Senate chair and the person who was running to be chair-elect I don’t see many people out of my college and they don’t see the business of what’s involved. Let’s make a point here

Beyond what academic freedom assert about individual rights, they are a personal duty. They are desired for intellectual diversity. They help assure academic integrity. They protect those who strive for educational quality. People who don’t realize this and don’t’ see the connection.

The greatest defense of tenure as part of academic integrity comes from (of all places) a book by a well known author on business management practices, a quote from David Ewing:  "The power of employees to speak out against wasteful or illegal practices probably is the most important check we know on management. In an age in which employees are willing and able to protest faulty operations, management's prerogative to fire at will or penalize an insider comes close to being the same thing as its prerogative to direct operations wastefully or illegally."

I often write from the perspective of a scholar of business practices. From that I know that the most common business practices are often illogical, dysfunction and counter-productive. I often tell my students that when the see a business practices, even by a large successful company, they can't assume it was based on a good idea, or any idea at all for that matter. Businesses make bad decisions with irrelevant information because it can be quantified. Their managers often think that leadership involves beating people over the heads. I mention this because in any area of campus it is easy to find academic administrators that emulate the worst of business management. I can only guess that they desire to be successful in their jobs, and therefore seek to emulate the head of a large bank.

Left to their own devices, university administrators could easily drift to toward a one size fits all easy-by-the-numbers set of work rules that might make a university look better to the detriment of things that
Still, the atmosphere for academic freedom and shared governance at Auburn seems positive and improving, under the leadership of our president and provost, and I thank you. Some faculty recently told me of their concerns that the provost might leave Auburn in the near future, and that would end the incentives for their deans and department heads to make some much anticipated changes.
[1:19:42]

As we engage in shared governance in the College of Business, I think of an old psychology experiment, devise of animal torture called the shuttle box, the shuttle box illustrates how avoiding a punishment can train an animal. It’s a two-sided box with an electrified bottom and when the light goes on the floor gets electrified and the animal has to learn how to jump to the other side. Dogs learn it in one or two tries, cats, they sit down. If you show them a video of cat doing it they learn real fast but don’t ask me I don’t know where they got the first cat. [1:20:20]

The thing is in the College of Business they’ve learned to sit down like cats in a shuttle box. It’s been so long that we are starting to do some positive things with shared governance. Today, I hear business faculty asking why they are asked to be involved with all of these committees.

Last month in the national news, Idaho State University Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the president, and as a response, the Board of Education voted to abolish the Faculty Senate. Just over a decade ago, that could have been us.

I never cared for our faculty's lengthy all consuming effort of confrontation with the Board of Trustees. It is not that I thought the Board was acting properly. It wasn't. But my attention was lower down the totem pole. I saw that battle as a distraction as it provided cover for worse excesses by department heads or deans that were left without any serious oversight. During those years, provosts gave the deans absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted, while many associate deans seemed immune to change, or even removal, decades after their non-competitive hiring. Some department heads seemed to have lifetime tenure in their jobs while they drifted into the practices and sanity of your basic despot.

I call my home unit, the College of Business, the land of top down, because that was how we were run. The unwritten motto could have been the one that the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko penned for the leaders of my home town, Ubi est mea or "Where's mine?"

There are some obvious differences between Idaho State today and AU until a few years ago, but the point is that the overall atmosphere at AU today seems positive. It is too early to draw conclusions in many parts of campus, with too many deans that are too new for us to know if they will make some needed changes. As always, there are negative exceptions. And by the way, Dean Hardgrave, please note: I like my department head.

As I said, the overall atmosphere seems positive and improving. Of course, there are pockets of problems or concerns on campus, and some still-existing strange administrative practices by department heads and deans. The faculty are concerned about academic standards, educational quality and intellectual diversity. We might not deliver the nice neat metrics of quality that fit the managers' spreadsheets. But we care about education.

That's what I'll argue and defend.

I want to thank Conner Bailey who I have always held in the highest regards and respect. I would also thank past Senate leaders Richard Penaskovic and Bob Locy, in different ways, for different things. And, of course, I will always thank and remember Glenn Howze, whose work for faculty was always inspiring, and I will always treasure having known him.

For this honor today, I thank you.  [1:24:12]

Claire Crutchley, chair: Congratulations Herb.

One announcement before I begin my remarks. After comments at the Senate meeting last week, OIT has announced test scoring will remain in Parker Hall through May and OIT is planning a drop box location for exams in central campus.   

This is my last faculty meeting as Chair of the Senate. However, my term as Chair of the Senate goes through July 1 so I have a few months of Senate meetings left.

As I look back on the two years I have served as Chair and Chair Elect, the thing that stands out most is how dedicated faculty, administrators and staff are to making Auburn University the best it can be.

While this includes a wonderful group of Senate officers, Secretary, Russ Muntifering, Chair Elect, Ann Beth Presley, Secretary Elect, Larry Crowley, immediate past chair, Kathryn Flynn, it goes much further and it also includes Bob Locy and Dennis DeVries who are past officers.  The Steering committee worked hard brain-storming about what changes should be explored and helping committee chairs draft good resolutions to bring to the Senate. Working with the provost, Dr. Mazey and the Associate Provost Dr. Winn has been a great experience; they are truly faculty advocates and very helpful in getting progress made. Dr. Gogue always listens to Senate leadership and also faculty in general. 

If you are a senator, you have seen committee chairs bring resolutions to Senate, but the committee members are also working hard on advancing research, teaching and outreach at Auburn University. There are many committees where faculty work very diligently but are not always appreciated by faculty. Both the Core Curriculum and Gen Ed committee and the Writing Committee have reviewed proposals from around the university to improve Auburn’s undergraduate education.  The curriculum committee, led by Patricia Duffy, works to ensure academic standards are upheld, and the Graduate Council works on graduate education.

The faculty research committee worked on the AU scholarly incentive plan to reward funded research, worked on the intramural grants program and is now working to improve the process of the compliance committees. The Calendar committee has proposed calendars and revised calendars after the Senate voted for shorter calendars, and again when the calendar wasn’t working right for students to add and drop classes easily. The competitive research grant committee went from reviewing few or no grants to reviewing a large number of internal grants. Ashley Nichols and the Student Government Association spent over a year working with faculty and the Academic Honesty committee on an Academic Dishonesty policy designed to make it easier for faculty to report dishonesty. The Teaching Effectiveness committee is working on revising the student evaluations to make them more relevant and save money for the university. The Library committee is considering the serious cuts in the library periodicals and staff. The Non-tenure track faculty committee is working on revising policy to enhance the careers of non-tenure track faculty. Senators poll faculty in their departments and give feedback at the Senate when important policy decisions are being proposed. The Rules committee works for several months staffing these committees. AAUP works to uphold academic freedom and shared governance. The SACS QEP committee is working to develop a program to enhance undergraduate education. There are also ad hoc committees on issues such as Promotion and Tenure and many search committees for deans and other administrators.

These are just a few of the many university wide committees that faculty, administrators, staff, A/P and students are working on. In addition, there are many college and departmental committees working on recruitment, promotion and tenure standards, assessment, curriculum and writing as well as research.

So why are so many faculty and others working diligently on these committees? I do not believe they are expecting raises based on this committee work. The saying is the reward for doing good work on committees is being asked to serve on other committees and do more work.

I see so many faculty and others working together, not for any personal gain, but to help make Auburn University a great institution. There is work on enhancing both undergraduate and graduate education, work to enhance the ability to do research, work on Outreach, and work to improve the lives of faculty, staff and students. I am honored to be a part of this shared governance at Auburn University. I hope you are too. 
Ann Beth Presley, Chair Elect, will now announce the Election Results.

Ann Beth Presley, Chair Elect: For chair-elect, Bill Sauser, and for secretary-elect, Robin Jaffe

Claire Crutchley, chair: Congratulations to Bill Sauser and Robin Jaffe. I would like to thank  Constance Hendricks and Mike Baginski for running. Again it takes a lot of work.
Is there any unfinished business? New Business? Hearing none, I adjourn the Spring faculty meeting. [1:29:37]