Oct 12, 2010
General Faculty Meeting Transcription
Claire Crutchley, chair: I call the meeting to order. Welcome to the Fall 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 March 9 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.
If you have any questions or comments, 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.
Next on the agenda are the President’s remarks. I invite Dr. Gogue forward. [0:50]
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you delighted to be with you today. I wanted to mention just a couple of things to you and then a couple of questions I want to respond to that I got in the last week or so. I offer these first comments by way of thank you to what you all do. We had a goal to try to strategically increase the academic quality of our students and I think I’ve shared with the Faculty Senate before but not the full faculty; your ACT scores this term for the beginning freshmen were 26.9, and I am guilty of rounding that off to 27, and your GPAs, Drew’s back there, I think there are 3.79 or 8, 78 and I round that off to 3.8. So that’s the quality of the students this fall it obviously the highest that we’ve ever had and a lot of people have been doing that. Recruitment offices do a lot but also when I go out on those there are always faculty that are there that meet with High School kids throughout the state and the region, so thank you.
The second was, remember Auburn began to acquire the writing portion of the ACT exam a couple of years ago and I thought that would have to have all kinds of policies that dealt with students for some reason did not take the writing exam. The numbers are that actually seven tenths of one percent last year got some sort of waiver and did not complete the writing exam on the ACT. The Honors College in the last couple of years has grown from slightly less than 500 students to slightly more than a thousand students, a tremendous increase in the number. They have not changed the requirements to be in the Honors Program, it’s still the average for the class is a little over a 4 point, don’t remember the exact GPA and the ACT is a little over 31 plus.
Want to thank you for the work on the General Education Core Curriculum, Provost, don’t see the Provost, but an awful lot of work has been done and it is better linked with what we are going to be faced with when SACS comes to our campus in 2013.
We’re excited, all the colleges now have study abroad opportunities for students, some colleges have had those for a number of years, but all colleges have study abroad opportunities for students and it has also been the development of innovative non credit programs to encourage additional study abroad or work abroad or service abroad.
76% of all the freshmen at the start of this fall are participating in learning communities. And that’s a remarkable number I don’t remember how much that’s grown in the last few years, but again that’s being lead by an awful lot of you in this room and across this campus. We still need to focus on our graduation rate numbers, those are still not to the level I think that we would expect out of a quality institution. One of the things that we did do in the spring was restructuring of tuition was approved by the Board in essence to give credits above 15 hours in which there is no cost. We have tried to sell that and make students be aware of that. For an in-state Alabama resident it means if you graduate in 4 years rather than 6 years and you assume the individual gets a job, it’s worth about $100,000 to an Alabama family, it’s worth about $140,000 to a student out-of-state. We are still going to focus on trying to get the 4 years numbers better and if we do hopefully we’ll get the 6 year number better.
Graduate students this fall grew by 4.8%, we are still short of our goal of about 5,000. When Dean Flowers sometimes put the data together if they include professional students, vet medicine and pharmacy, you get up close to the 5,000, but our goal was 5,000 real traditional MS and doctoral types of students. We’ve got a goal, which we’ve achieved, we had about 9 joint appointments a few years ago we’re now to about 65 joint appointments, and I think the goal has been revised to about 100 joint appointments. John Mason’s here and they worked very hard in the last few weeks, don’t remember the exact date, late September, we did open an office that focused on research in the Huntsville area–one of the strategic goals that we have tried to focus on. The numbers that I’ve shared with you before is about 31 billion dollars of Federal money comes into Huntsville each year, somewhere around 8 billion is actually retained in the Huntsville area a lot of it is contracted out. Our goal would be to try to keep one extra billion in the State of Alabama and have a little bit better luck with some of our research programs. Dr Rodney Roberson is the person that heads that particular initiative and I know he’s been on campus and hope he’s had a chance to visit many of the colleges.
The other thing that I wanted to share with you is that a lot of our faculty (members) are engaged in consulting. Some with corporations and receive fees, but many are engaged in consulting in state agencies and groups which they spent a lot of hours and a lot of time. It was important to me for that to be out in the open and for us to be aware of it and for us to recognize it at our faculty awards ceremony a couple of weeks ago. I think that was the first time we recognized an individual as outstanding in consulting activities. [6:59]
Two questions that I wanted to comment on. There have been several folks that have asked about the size of the freshmen class. The class is probably 200 students more than what the university anticipated. I think it’s probably fair to say the way all universities deal with size of class is that they look historically and they calculate a draw number. What it means that if you offer a 100 admissions, how many have you historically gotten to come to your institution? In this past year we used the same draw number, but we got more students than we anticipated. We normally get some students that will go through, get accepted, pay the initial fees, but do not come to Camp War Eagle. [7:50] I don’t recall the numbers this summer, we had very few kids that did not come for the orientation program. The intention obviously, will be change that draw number based on our experiences this year. The flexibility we have is that if the number’s higher than, basically Dr. Alderman’s group has to look at reducing the number of transfer students so historically you admitted about 1,500 transfer students, if your freshman class is larger you will tend to bring in fewer of the transfer students.
The second question that comes up has to do with facilities and I think Dan is going to talk in far more depth, but at the June Board of Trustees meeting based on fairly broad input from campus about a year period of time, a list of priorities, planning assumptions were presented to the Board. It included approximately 400 million dollars in new facilities and construction over the next decade at Auburn. That was approved. September Board meeting we broke out and had discussion on the academic part of that requirement. So How much money is tied up in academic facilities. The reason it is broken out is that if Athletics builds a building they are paying for it out of their own fund sources, either ticket sales or revenue. If the academic side builds a building it usually comes out of tuition money. If you had a great State budget some of it would come out of that, but it’s nearly always related to tuition dollars. So as we move forward what we wanted to do was present to the Board in November workshop. There are several things that come out of your tuition dollars and we have to make some tough choices. Scholarship monies are coming out of tuition dollars, not all of it we have some endowment money and some gift money, but the vast majority of it comes out of tuition dollars. Second component that comes out of tuition dollars is salary increases. So we have a goal to try to maintain faculty salaries near the midpoint of the SREB schools. So that’s another chunk of that money that has to come out. Another piece of it is the benefits and I don’t recall the numbers but we see increases in benefits so we know we’ve got to have that chunk of money that’s planned for. And then to some extent you get what I would call unfunded mandates, that’s when your power bill goes up or your university insurance related costs go up. So we have that component we deal with and then within the other component is facilities. So how do you balance those, how do we present a comprehensive plan that shows what tuition increases have to be and what’s our appetite relative to new facilities, also do we want to continue to increase the number of scholarships, do we want to hold that level for a few years, do we want to look at our benefits, or do we want to defer on building and construction or do we move ahead on it? So I think those are the two broad questions that I had and I’ll be happy to respond to questions that you may have. [11:11]
Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Dr. Gogue you mentioned that we now have 1,000 students in the Honors College. Have we added any more assistant directors or staff to that unit to help Jim Hanson who’s doing that.
Dr. Gogue, president: Mary Ellen would have to respond to that and I don’t see her here yet. I know a year ago they added Paul Harris to focus on the Honors College and particularly on high ability for prestigious scholarships. I was with him last week and you have 8 kids that have filled out all applications for an example for the Rhodes Scholarship. So I know he’s there and I believe there is another position that’s advertized as an assistant director of the Honors College. When Mary Ellen gets here we’ll ask her that question.
Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Thank you.
Dr. Gogue, president: Drew do you know if that’s correct? Emmett?
Emmett Winn: They hired a new advisor…
Jim Hanson, Honors College: We hired this past January two full time academic advisors so we have 3 full time academic advisors including Cathy Maddox who’s been with the Honors College for many years. We added Paul Harris 3 year ago. There is not as far as I know a search for an assistant director although the accounting of the budgeting of Honors has gotten more complicated and Dr. Mazey is giving us some accounting help that will help a lot. I appreciate Dr. Penaskovic’s comments. I think we’re keeping our head above water and we certainly going to be looking at perhaps setting a number a little bit lower than 1,000 for next year. We are doing some capacity analysis, making sure that we don’t overtax the departments that have to offer those honors classes. [13:13]
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you Jim. Thank you I appreciate what each of you do.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
The next item on the agenda is remarks from the Provost’s office. Dr. Winn, Associate Provost will be making the remarks.
Emmett Winn, Associate Provost: Good afternoon. First, Provost Mazey sends her apologies, she planned to address you today, but she’s been called off campus as part of a search for a dean’s position on campus. In her stead I am going to briefly address 3 items this afternoon.
The first is a report on the recipients of the 2010 faculty awards. As you know each fall this awards ceremony honors several of Auburn’s wonderful faculty. This year the festivities were held on September 30. It’s my pleasure to present the names of the honorees to you again today. [14:23]
For the Distinguished Graduate Faculty Lectureship, Dr. Malcolm Crocker; Alumni Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Awards went to Dr. Wheeler Foshee, Dr. Theresa McCormick, and Dr. Stuart Wentworth. New Alumni Professors: Dr. Chris Correia, Dr. John Drew Hamilton, Dr. Jay Kodadadi, Dr. Tin-Man Lau, and Dr. Kenneth Noe. Distinguished Diversity Researcher Awards went to Dr. Joshua Inwood and Dr. Donald Wehrs. Creative Research and Scholarship Awards went to Dr. Paula Backscheider and Dr. Geoffrey Hill. The award for Excellence in Faculty Outreach went to Dr. David Hinson. And as Dr. gogue mentioned the first External Consulting Award went to Dr. Levent Yilmaz. And finally the Gerald and Emily Leischuck Endowed Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching went to Dr. Donna Bohanan and Dr. Elizabeth Guertal. I think some of them may be with us today so let’s give them a big round of applause.
Secondly is a reminder that the Provost’s Office is currently conducting two searches. One is a Director of Undergraduate Research and that search is chaired by Dr. Margaret Marshall and secondly is a Director of Academic Sustainability Programs and that search is chaired by Rebecca O’Neal Dagg. Both positions are 12-month, 60% administrative assignments. Review of applications begins fairly quickly on October 15, so I want to encourage all of you and your colleagues to consider applying for these positions. [16:35]
Finally I wanted to let you know that the Provost’s Office has been monitoring our instructional space challenges especially in terms of the new freshman class. We’ve been working with the colleges since last spring and we’ve been able to address many capacity issues and we think all the faculty have helped us meet the increased student demand. To help with the demand for this coming spring the Provost’s Office is working with Facilities and the Office of Information Technology to renovate Foy auditorium and Langdon Hall auditorium into large lecture spaces that can accommodate up to 250 and 310 students respectively with state of the art audio visual equipment. And that concludes my remarks and I’d be happy to take any questions. Thank you.
James Goldstein, department of English: I’d like to call to the attention of this body that the provost’s Office has revised the policy on Lecturers from the version that was passed in June by the Senate and I wanted to just point out three changes and ask for any comment or elucidation that you could give? One change was that there is no longer provision for the possibility for multi-year contracts. A second change was that there is a new addition to the section on position of tenure track that would not count time as a lecturer toward the tenure clock if a lecturer switches to tenure track, and that would be out of sync with what the current Handbook language is on prior service where certain exceptions can be made to that. And then there is a brand new section on change of position from tenure track to lecturers and I am just wondering if we might run into problems if we turn someone down for tenure, but then kept them around indefinitely as good enough to teach our students even if they couldn’t get tenure. Thank you for any clarification you could make.
Claire Crutchley, chair: James, the first comment about the multi-year versus single-year, I am going to be sending that to our non-tenure track committee to be examining whether they should put multiple years not just for the lecturers but also for the clinical and research faculty, so I will have a committee looking at that this year.
Emmett Winn, Associate Provost: Thank you James and thank you Claire. Just to follow up on Claire’s comment, currently Auburn University has a policy that prohibits multi-year contracts and so that’s why that provision had to be removed and the Provost’s Office is very grateful to the Senate chair for asking the non-tenure track instructor committee to address that further.
To your second point James, at this point the Provost’s Office sees the lecturer position as different from a tenure track position in terms of years of service and that’s why that change was made in the policy. And then finally, although we cannot stop anybody from applying for a position, the Provost’s Office agrees that it’s not intuitively clear why someone who had been denied tenure might be considered for a Lecturer position by a search committee. The Provost’s Office would certainly have to take a very serious look at any hiring request like that that came to us from a school or college. [20:15]
Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: I’ve already stated this to Claire Crutchley as you remember, but I very much would like to see the contingent faculty have some kind of voice or representation in the Senate if they are going to be working here pretty much full time then I think they should have a voice in the Senate commensurate with the number of people who are on contingent faculty appointment. And I believe that is going to be done, but I just wanted to stress the importance of it to those who do not know about it.
Claire Crutchley, chair: As I told Rich, I am also going to send that to the non-tenure track instructors committee.
Mike Stern, economics: This may be a little ticky-tacky but since we were talking about this it just caught my eye as I was looking over the Lecturer/Senior Lecturer policy that’s been distributed, in regards to the departmental governance it contains the sentence, “Lecturers/Senior Lecturers should be allowed to participate in departmental decisions.” That statement was in the policy on June 8 that the Senate was looking at and I objected to that statement at the time and it was so struck from the policy that the Senate voted on. In fact in the minutes of the Senate for June 8 you can find the quote from Kathryn Flynn as I asked for clarification, I took out “ Lecturers should be allowed to participate in departmental decisions” quote, unquote from that policy and it is now back. Anyway we had struck that and just gone with it. It was up to the departments, they may be able to, it goes with departmental college, that’s what we had done at that meeting, we had taken out the statements that they should be able to do x, y, or z we just left it to the colleges and departments, so maybe is was just an oversight of cut and paste, but I happened to notice it in there so maybe it didn’t get updated.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Michael, I’m sure it was just an oversight. [22:30] Thank you Dr. Winn.
Next on the agenda are the chair’s remarks. I will share some information on the work that’s being done in the Senate. I was trying to decide if I should do it from March, which was the last faculty meeting, but I am just going to emphasize a few things that have been happening.
In February the faculty voted to change the term, so I took over in July as Chair of the Senate as opposed to March as it had been in the past. In May and June, several recommended changes to the Faculty Handbook that were voted on in the Senate. This was a long process with comments being gathered starting in January. Some of the changes passed in the Senate, some did not. I appreciate everybody’s input that they gave. I will come back to that.
Also, after a two-year trial period, the office of Ombudsperson was reviewed. The Senate voted to continue the ombuds position; administration strongly supported the ombuds position also, so it was determined to conduct a search for the Ombudsperson, which the Senate voted to be a three-year term, and Jim Wohl, who had been Ombuds for the two-year trial period was again hired to begin a three-year term.
In working on changes in the Handbook, it became apparent that the Handbook has some organization problems and some inconsistencies. Policies are mixed with procedures, and the policies are often unclear or not current—with practice different than stated in the handbook. Because of this Dr. Mazey brought in a consultant, Bill Rickert, in August, who talked to groups around campus to solicit input on the Handbook. Dr. Rickert has submitted a report with many recommendations. Some of the recommendations are style and organization changes (there are a lot of them) and those have been referred to the faculty handbook review committee.
There are a few recommendations that may go to other standing committees. However, most of the policy recommendations have to do with Promotion and Tenure; both how it is described in the handbook and specific procedures. There is no specified committee to make P&T change recommendations. It is not the charge of the Promotion and Tenure committee to do that. In the past either the Steering committee or the Provost’s office have made these recommendations. The Steering committee decided that because of the many recommendations, it makes sense to form an ad-hoc committee to review Dr. Rickert’s recommendations, and develop specific recommendations to bring to Senate. I anticipate this being a long process with a lot of feedback from faculty. Listen for those as there will be forums and many other things happening. (Of course any recommendations from the faculty handbook review committee or other committees will also come back to the Senate for a vote.)
There are other issues also coming to the Senate this year. The Faculty Research committee has been working and will bring a Scholarship Incentive Plan to the Senate next week for a vote. The Faculty Research committee is also working on other items, including reviewing procedures for the compliance committees.
In August, the SGA brought a suggested policy for changes in the Academic Honesty procedure to Senate for information. There were a lot of comments from faculty, there was a forum with faculty and substantial changes are being made in the policy. The SGA is now working with the Academic Honesty committee to bring a joint proposal to the November Senate meeting. If you are interested in this keep an eye out and look for that new policy.
Many other committees are hard at work and will bring recommendations to the Senate during the 2010–2011 year.
I encourage all faculty members to read the agendas and action proposals, whether you are a senator or not because you need to communicate your views to your senators who represent you.
Finally, I also ask any of you who have areas of concern within the University to please communicate with me. If it is a recommendation on a policy change I will forward the recommendations to a committee. I have already done that with things faculty have brought to me. So please give your feedback to me.
Does anyone have any questions or comments?
Richard Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Will faculty have access to Dr. Rickert’s report? [27:21]
Claire Crutchley, chair: I don’t know the answer to that, I guess because there are pieces that we are not following I have been reluctant to send them out because we are not doing it that way and faculty may feel that if it’s in the report that’s what were doing, so probably not the full report, but yes the substance of what we are exploring will most likely be available.
Other questions or comments?
Next on the agenda is Dr. Large presenting a Budget update. I invite Dr. Large forward.
Don Large, executive vice president: [28:28] Five- maybe ten-minute overview of the budget and potential outlook, and stop me along the way if you have any questions, it’s a pretty informal presentation. I thought we’d break it into these three areas so let me take a big picture view of what we just passed. The Board just past a budget at the late September meeting and it started on October 1, this is the FY11 fiscal year. So if you look at the budget that was passed in one way that we break it down is 4 budget divisions each with their own state appropriations and other specific and sometimes unique sources of revenue. And that’s what it looks like (pointing to slide). Let me take you to main campus now that makes up about 80% of that 900 million.
So if you take the main campus and break it down you will see that you’ve got a restricted and auxiliary and an unrestricted. The restricted is simply that, it enhances what we are as an institution, it adds quality and a lot of other things, but it’s restricted it’s either gifts or grants or things we take on the basis that we will honor the restrictions on which we take the money. So it’s important but it doesn’t help with the operating budget of the day-to-day things that impact the university. Auxiliaries I will break down in just a minute for you, those are different functions, business functions around the university that support themselves. The unrestricted portion though is the key to really the priorities and decisions that are made, the tough decisions of operating budgets. Primarily those revenues are tuition and state appropriations. It’s no surprise that state appropriations have been our challenge. This is our newly developed chart that we are proud of. There have been two questions we keep getting from the press, “how much have you been cut in State appropriations?” and there are two answers we give them and often seem to confuse them. From one perspective from the ’08 year, which was our great year, our highest funding ever, $336 million in state funds; we’re now down to $242 million for 2011. So from a continuing source view of funds we are down almost $94 million dollars of continuing money.
Now if you looked at that from a different way and said, “if we had that money from 08, 09, 10, and 11 cumulatively we would have had $274 Million more than we’ve received so take you pick on which way you want to view the reduction but either way they are substantial. But from a budget standpoint the continuing money is the key because that’s the basis for which we make allocations of salaries and other continuing needs. If we don’t have those making those continuing commitments becomes a problem.
The auxiliary portion, the only reason I’m spending any time on this is there was a question from one of the faculty members earlier of “does athletics pay some appropriate administrative charge?” In our whole auxiliary budget you see the amounts, athletics makes up almost 60% of that, and each one of those units do pay 6.3% of their revenues as a part of what we would consider overhead or indirect cost allocation. [33:21] Some people ask, well I don’t understand because when we actually do receive fully funded indirect costs, which is not as often as you might think of the 40% percent, that representing a lot of costs that are paid out of the general fund and the whole theory of indirect cost is to reimburse the university back for those costs. For the auxiliaries they are paying for all those costs, they are receiving the revenue they are paying all of their direct costs they are covering depreciation, electricity, everything else so the only thing that had reasonable theory to charge them overhead was the amount that’s computed as general and administrative cost in the indirect cost study. So that’s what we do. Is that fair? We think it is. Athletics is the only one of those auxiliaries that we do give some credit for, so we assess them the 6.3% we do give them credit as we discussed with this body before for the value of their discounted tickets. We could choose not to do that, but we kind of look at it as a benefit. We could get rid of that benefit, everybody could pay full price and we could move that money back in the budget, but there’s not really been much interest in doing that and reducing that benefit so that’s what we do.
The second thing that came out of the budget and the one people seemingly are most interested in is the one-time salary supplement. That came by way of, we presented to the Board in June a proposed set of budget guidelines–as it said the bad news is we’re $94 million down in state appropriations, we are probably going to start the budget year out of balance by about $5 million and we did not present any recommendations for one time salary supplements and a continuing salary supplement was out of the question because we don’t have those funds. The Board felt strongly that we needed to do something. They said go back and look and see if you can find a way to do a one-time merit allocation. So between June and presenting to the Board in September the good news was, our projection of out-of-balance we were able to address and balance the budget starting in 2011 because of the tuition revenues came in a good bit higher than we had projected. And we were conservative on the projections, but as you know the enrollment was up. So we’ve got that situation where we are in balance and the question was can we do a one-time supplement and we went back and forth because we still don’t know for sure what 2011 brings and we don’t have a good idea on 12 either. So we waited as long as we could to make the decision, we met with budget advisory right before the Board meeting and said we’re going to make that recommendation to the Board and the thing that I would argue reasonably allows that, it may pull some from reserves, but the one-time stimulus monies that we’re receiving again in FY11 allows us to address costs that we need to address, frees up some of the general funds that allow us to make a one-time allocation. That was our recommendation to the Board. They did pass that.
Eligibility you see, it’s important again and maybe its been emphasized enough, it’s one time and we did not even want to put it in a regular paycheck, we want to just do a one-time supplement just to reinforce that it is one-time. We had a broad base committee meet and discuss and everybody wanted to do this before the first of the year if we could, right before the holidays if possible. And that’s what we are going to do. Actual allocation to the budget will be 4% of salaries, auxiliaries will pay their share, restrictive will pay theirs and everybody pays their share. You see the cost breakdown.
Then funding and outlook stimulus, main campus did receive an allocation of almost $17 million, work with the Provost Office said if we want most of this if not all possible to go to the academic needs. So 15.4 ended up going to the Provost for these kinds of expenses. We also have allocated a chemical inventory storage system in those other areas that you see, critical needs that the Provost and we all agreed on had to be addressed.
Lastly, fiscal 10 we were hit with an additional proration of 2% in those last few days of the fiscal year. We did not come back to the departments for any relief on that because we reasonably planned on that additional proration. Don’t have an idea yet if that 2% is a permanent cut or a one-time, so right now we are treating it as if it were one-time. What happens in FY11 if proration does occur, we talked about that with the faculty leaders this morning, if it’s 2 or 3 % we feel like we can cover that centrally, we planned well enough for that. If it’s 8%, we will probably need some help back from the respective units at some level and we will have to figure that out. Most of the colleges had already planned on a give back for FY11 because we thought we’d be out-of-balance, but once we balanced we said keep it but be careful how you allocate it at this point. So we don’t know what 11 looks like for sure, your guess is as good as ours, and the same way with 12. With the economy begins to pick up. The good news about the education trust fund is it’s driven mainly by sales taxes and income taxes, corporate and individual, so if the economy moves those move and the good news is they go into the trust fund. It’s not a legislative decision on where those funds go, so still optimistic that things will pick up, we just don’t know when.
So that’s a quick and brief overview of the budget, and happy to answer any questions. [41:07]
Roy Hartfield, aerospace and engineering: I just have a comment and question. In engineering we do a lot of research all of my projects lately have paid the 45%. I understand the part about athletics paying only 6% they pay their own power bill, but one thing that’s made it a lot more difficult for us to do the same amount of work with the contract money that we get is the benefit rate. I noticed that the benefit rate went from somewhere in the high 20s to around 35% and for faculty members it’s kind of hard to sometimes understand where the 35% comes from. I know for my own salary that’s not the case, but I’d like for you to comment on that, clarify how it is that we end up having to pay what seems like a high tax rate.
Don Large, executive vice president: I’ll try. Probably Marcie could explain this better, she’s been involved in the implementation. Basically we believe we have been leaving a fair amount of resources on the table by not having a negotiated benefits rate and most research institutions do have such a rate and it’s not unlike the indirect cost study that you do provide the information and documentation, and have it reviewed by the Feds and negotiate those rates based on what the information is showing. So what you find is some people actually experience a rate much higher than that and some would not. But it is a composite rate and we can support it and it is an agreed upon rate, so for the university as a whole we think we’ve done something good. Now we acknowledge that the higher paid units probably would view this less fair than the lower paid units. It’s just the way we do it. Thank you.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Large.
Next on the agenda is an update on facilities. I invite Dan King to come forward. [44:13]
Dan King, facilities: Good afternoon. Thank you for letting me come and speak to you briefly today. I just have a couple of slides that are excerpts from what we presented to the Board of Trustees about 3 weeks ago at the September Board meeting. That’s on the main topic of an update on the capital project program and the priorities and campus objectives for the future. Dr. Gogue gave an excellent summary of where we are at, I don’t have that much more to amplify on that, but I will give you a little bit more detail. I’ll be happy to take questions. I have single slide on the Master Plan as well that I’m happy to present and take some questions on if time permits after that. As President Gogue mentioned, June Board meeting–we’ve gone to the Board of Trustees a couple of times trying to present to them the facility requirements for Auburn University. We have not done it in such a way that we’re trying to overwhelm then all at once, we’re kind of warming them up, we’re not trying to boll them over all at once. I think that direction has probably proved to be smarter today as I sit here than I thought it was maybe 4 or 5 months ago.
This is what we presented in June, as a set of campus objectives. We didn’t use the term priorities, we didn’t use the term plan, but we couched it as a set of objectives in that this is what we really would like to achieve over the next decade from a facilities standpoint. Many of the major projects within the university listed there, some are close to being underway and some are years away from being underway. The top two though, they are generally stratified in order of priority although we didn’t again put numbers associated with those, so a lot of specific projects more than what’s listed there that falls out of these objectives, but you can see that the first two are really related to the academic mission of the university, and those are at the top of the objective list. And that was not by accident, we are trying to subtly convey to the Board, we need to invest in many things here one of the things we need to invest in is facilities related to academic instruction, because that’s really why we are all here. This is a one slider we presented. It didn’t get a lot of discussion, but we put it out there and said we’ll come back and talk to you some more. So at the September Board meeting we tried to be a little bit more focused so we didn’t include all of the various projects to be part of all of those objectives. We tried to focus with the Board on academic facilities and what really are our priorities relative to academic facilities. I give great credit to Dr. Mazey and Dr. Winn and the provost staff working with many people on campus, faculty, deans, and having a clear vision of what our priorities really should be for academic facilities. We stated very simply to them that our key need here is we need to invest in some of the older facilities that we have where we teach a tremendous number of credit hours particularly core credit hours. That’s where all of our students pass through those facilities and those facilities are fairly dated, they don’t necessarily operate the way that you all as faculty would like them to operate so you could teach the way you’d like to teach, instruct the way you’d like to instruct. And from our standpoint they have major facility problems, so we wanted to be short and sweet and put it out there. This is what the top academic facility priority on the campus is. A simple message so they could walk away and retain that.
We were careful with the choice of the word, maybe an earlier version of this, 5 months ago, might have just said “replace.” But with the budget realities and we’ll talk about that a little bit more, we sort of softened this with the Board and we used a term improve because really there are several options out there, we could repair these facilities, we could keep them operational. That’s not going to improve them from your standpoint, it might make them more reliable from my standpoint. That is an option, whether it is the best option or the preferred option, it is an option. A second would be we could renovate those facilities, that would certainly help improve it from my standpoint. The building systems, in many ways it might improve your ability to teach or instruct within those, it certainly would help in a major way. And a third would be to replace. That way you would no longer be constrained by let’s say the way Haley is currently constructed and have to live within that. There would be a chance to have a facility to have a different way might provide even better service for a longer period of time. So there are several options out there. We tried to be careful at the last Board meeting not to preclude the Board deciding that maybe replacement isn’t the right answer, maybe we’ll go another way for budget reasons. We’re not trying to force the answer on them, we’ll certainly give them recommendations, we can give them numbers, we can paint the picture what each of these mean, and we are hoping to do this at this workshop I think in November here.
The next slide, we wanted to make sure that they knew, well what building were we talking about? We didn’t want it to be vague, we wanted them to know what are these older deteriorated buildings, so we flashed that up there with them and that, I’ve had 3 or 4 presentations, I cut it down for this presentation, and then we went on and said out of these buildings, projects would come out of that, and these projects would have this amount of cost associated with it. So that’s what we walked the Board through. [51:28]
We didn’t give a specific recommendation, we did not ask them to approve anything it was simply informational just so they would understand it a little bit better, not boll them over with too much detail and really try to set the stage for a future workshop where we really can have a discussion. A Board meeting is not necessarily a place to have a great discussion and so it looks like that’s going to happen in November we weren’t sure if it would be November or maybe January, but it looks like it will be November so all the sooner.
I think the good news here is that as we look ahead over the next decade I think we really do have a good set and I’ll use the term priorities. I think we know what we want, we know what we need, I think we know what we want even within what we need, and I think we have a good solid plan to do that. The question is, is it affordable? [52:22] Can we afford to execute within those priorities and set of needs? So the good news is I think we really have a good plan, probably better than we had ten years ago or maybe 20 years ago. The problem today is that the resource environment is much different, we are in the worst economy in, pick a number, 50, 60, 70 years, we are in the worst budget situation that the university’s been in, in quite a while, but I guess the only solace in all of that is, I certainly can make a strong argument as many of you could, in times of tight economic resources you need a better plan than ever. When money’s free and floating all over the place you can afford to be a little less well planned. In an environment where money is pretty tight you better have a really good plan [53:13] If you really know what your priorities are and what you want to invest in. We close the slide with the Board and that is what does the university really want to invest in? It’s kind of a zero sum game there is only so many dollars to go around. I can sit here and argue for facilities all day long, I’d be happy to do that, but is that a balanced plan if it makes other things unaffordable like faculty salaries, president mentioned scholarships, or benefits and things like that, well I could be a strong proponent for facilities. I agree that the university needs a balanced investment plan and we’re hoping we’ll make some significant progress, I hope I’m not being too optimistic, at this workshop at the Board in November relative to what really is affordable. If all of these things will be paid for by tuition, how much tuition increase can the university withstand, how much will the Board support, I think all of us would know it’s not a free check writing situation where a. keep raising it and raising it, that doesn’t do Auburn families or the State of Alabama justice either. What’s the right answer? I don’t know. I hope we’ll have a good dialogue with the Board and begin to figure some of that out.
So that’s what we’ve recently taken to the Board, that’s what we hope to discuss with the Board in November or so. Let me stop at that and see if there are any questions on the facilities and priorities.
Rich Penaskovic, department of philosophy: Several people in Haley Center asked me to speak to this issue. To the question is it affordable? I’d say we can not afford not to fix Haley Center. Something drastically has to be done about it. We’ve been talking about that for years now. We spent for example $86 million dollars on a basketball arena, we spent $120 million on those eight new dorms that won’t be paid off in 30 years time, surely we have to do something about Haley Center. We have asbestos in that building, it’s a health hazard, the seal of the building is broken, right now–today I walked from the concourse trying to get into Haley Center and one portion of it is closed down, shut down for months, I don’t know why, I don’t know if the stairs are too weak or the ceiling is hanging off and students might be hit by something as they walk into it, so it is really in desperate shape. We have windows that were put in while Wallace was governor, that he gave these contracts to people who were his friends, and they (the windows) leak and you have a whole crew coming over from facilities each time rains to the various rooms and faculty offices, which are often flooded. So there are really big problems here, it’s like the elephant in the room that nobody’s talking about.
Dan King, facilities: I can’t disagree with any of that, everything that you said is correct. I could probably tell you some additional things that are wrong, but that may make you feel worse about it frankly. The mechanical system is the original one from the early 1960s. The air handler units that are on the roof are, we may have replaced a few, the original equipment. One of these days they’re going to die and how you fix that, it gets done tomorrow kind of a thing. We could replace portions of the roof, the roof has an elastomeric membrane and that’s become brittle because of age and one day it’s going to shatter because it’s brittle, it’s not rubber and pliable any more. Haley has a lot of problems, there’s no question, we have to repair it, renovate it, or replace it. Something’s got to happen. The bad news is that none of the options are cheep. Some are less expensive than others but none are cheep.
Rich Penaskovic, department of philosophy: I suggested at the president’s cabinet meeting some years ago that we nuke the building and start over, because it’s in such drastic need of repair, it’s crying out to be healed and we can’t just put a bandage on a cancer and expect it to go away. I think we really need to get rid of it and maybe build 3 new buildings, one for the College of Liberal Arts, one for the College of Education, and one for classrooms for students. That would be my suggestion. I don’t really care what it costs it has to be done. (laughter)
Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Rich.
Roy Hartfield, aerospace engineering: I noticed on you list that the L-building didn’t show up and I know the L-building was supposed to be history ever since I came 20 years ago, but I am curious about the plans. We have our wind tunnels in the L-building and as you well know the L-building is going to fall down if it’s not torn down. We don’t seem to have, I think there is a calendar for it to be torn down in 2011, but there is no corresponding calendar for what to do with the wind tunnels. Maybe I’m speaking out of turn, the Dean is supportive of us doing things developmentally to deal with that but we want to be sure that we don’t tear down what we have before we have an option.
Dan King, facilities: I can speak to that if you would like. It doesn’t show up on here because this was a one-page summary of 50–60 line items spreadsheet. We tried to collapse it, aggregate some things into bigger categories so it wouldn’t be so hard to digest. So that’s why it doesn’t show up here, but specifically here’s what’s going on with the engineering shops or principally the L-building, Tom Tillman’s here and could clarify on this. We built Shelby I, we’re in the process of building Shelby II, that will be finished in roughly a year. At this time next year engineering will be moving functions out of the L-building, and maybe engineering shops too as I recall, into Shelby II which will help free up a major portion of the space in both those two buildings. The hard nut to crack at the moment, and we want to tear down there’s no question, we’d like to tear down the L-building and engineering shops because that’s a really good site and that site could be used for a potential academic building or a parking garage. And that corner of campus, the northeast corner needs a parking garage, we don’t have money for a parking garage, but that would be a great site for it. The long pole in the tent…The general approach to parking garages is we’re not going to use university money and build parking garages, we’re going to try to get Federal funds to do it, and our senators have been pretty successful and we got two parking garages that way. We hope to get some more in the future in some transportation bill. So that why the interest in that site it has a couple of really good uses better than the two building that are there. So we want to tear it down but the long pole in the tent is what do we do with the two wind tunnels? And we don’t really have a good answer on that yet. We can’t tear it down until we relocate you. The answer to where to relocate you has not been intuitively obvious or jumped out in front of us. I understand you have a big tunnel and a little tunnel.
Roy Hartfield, aerospace engineering: The bigger tunnel, it’s not a big tunnel, is built by faculty members and students along with a little commercial hardware over 50 years ago, Ken Mattingly reportedly worked on that facility and it’s just not really moveable. So it really is a big expense to replace that tunnel
Dan King, facilities: Tom has tried to work with Dean Bennifield, what exactly is moving from L-building and engineering shops into Shelby. I think we have that pretty well documented, kind of a mini-master plan for engineering if you will to make sure that move happens correctly. We’re just looking for a space that you can put a wind tunnel in, which is not necessarily any space on campus. You guys have some special needs there and pretty noisy piece of equipment and has intake and exhaust requirements far above the norm, so it just doesn’t fit anywhere and we’re searching nooks and crannies to figure out a good place to put it. You’ll be one of the first to know when we figure that one out. We’re open to ideas.
Mark Fischman, kinesiology: I didn’t notice on the slides you showed, so I just want to make sure that the Board did approve a new building for my department?
Dan King, facilities: They did at the last Board meeting. Although the student wellness and sustainability center is on here, kind of sister project with kinesiology, I think kinesiology is not on here because we tried to scrunch the list down and put some bigger stuff on there. That looked like it was moving pretty good.
Mark Fischman, kinesiology: I just wanted to make sure.
Dan King, facilities: Schematic design was approved by the Board at the September meeting.
Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there question? Thank you.
Is there any unfinished business? Any new business? Seeing none, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you for attending. [1:04:46]