transcript_03_01

March 1, 2011
Senate Meeting Transcription

Claire Crutchley, chair: I call this meeting to order.
Good afternoon. I am Claire Crutchley, Chair of the University Senate. I welcome you to the March Senate meeting. Senate membership is 88 Senators. I would like you all to click in; a quorum requires 45 senators. A quorum has been established.

A short review of the rules of the Senate. Senators and substitutes for Senators, please sign in the back and get a clicker so you can vote. If you would like to speak about an issue, go to the microphone; state your name, whether you are a Senator and the unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that senators be allowed to speak first; after all comments by Senators on an issue, guests are welcome to speak.

If there are no objections, the chair would like to reorder the information items. We will then.

The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes from the February meeting. Russ Muntifering posted the minutes and sent a link to all Senators. Are there any additions, changes, or deletions to these minutes? …. Hearing none, the minutes will stand as approved as written.

I now invite Dr. Gogue to come forward to present the President’s remarks. [2:39]

Dr. Gogue, president: Good afternoon. I have a couple of items I want to mention. Bob McGuiness is back here, I want to thank Bob. We have the ambassador from the Congo here at Auburn, been here for a couple of days and will be here through tomorrow. I think the interesting part is I think it may be our only ambassador that is an Auburn graduate. He is a graduate in the College of Liberal Arts and spent 3 days with us. We had a number of different meetings with students and groups and I appreciate those of you that have had a chance to attend.

Second thing I wanted to mention, you probably saw in the paper this morning that the Educational Trust Fund has been prorated by the governor, a 3% budget cut. The good news is that it could have been 4 or 5% so we are kind of excited about the 3, which is terrible to say. The bad news is that it’s about 7.2 million dollars for Auburn across all 4 divisions; the Experiment Station, Extension, AUM, and Auburn on the campus and the teaching component is 4.7 million, is a rough number. [3:52] Don will be working with a whole host of people to figure out ways that we will be able to address that prorated budget.

The third thing I wanted to mention to you is that we’ve worked for some time over safety issues on Magnolia, we also have concerns on College, but certainly on Magnolia you’ve seen there are 7 different temporary crosswalks out there. They have brought some lights in, but again those are temporary. Dan King at Facilities and in interaction with the city, this summer they will be able to put in a permanent solution into that area. The city will cost share in doing that. It’s another step at least in one area of the campus that we will hope it will become safer as well as look a little bit better than it does now. There were 7 or 8 different items that would go in from digital signage, some kind of walkways that give the appearance of a different texture and look, so to try to improve the safety in that area.

The next thing I want to mention is when the new ethics law was passed just before Christmas, the effective date of that is March 16 for the new ethics law to go into effect. From the date of March 16 I think we will have 90 days to do ethics training. It’s an online package and I’m told that any employee that makes over $50,000 a year would be expected to go online and spend 55 minutes of your life and go through and complete the ethics training. There is not a test at the end, I am told, I have not had it yet, but I’m told that you go all the way through and complete watching it. Then you have to put in some indicators of who you are so that there is a record that you’ve done it. And I think Human Resources will ask you to print a copy of your certificate of training and send it to them on campus, because we don’t know or have any record otherwise. Be sure to print one for yourself or somebody will come around and want you to take 55 minutes more of the ethics training, so I’d save a copy.

Next week we talk about the state of the University. The provost and I will give you a complete update really on the strategic plan and the elements that we have pursued this year, and tell you where we are. I think it’s an exciting story with terrible budgets this campus has responded in ways that I would never had thought possible, and a whole host of items that you’ve been able to do that we set out to do, so I appreciate what you do. I’d be happy to respond to any questions. (pause) Thank you.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
We have a full agenda again today and will through June. So I will give a few announcements.

All of you who use scans sheets need to know that Test Scoring will move to the new IT Building located at 300 Lem Morrison Drive (next to the Poultry Science Building) over Spring Break. Initially, service will be limited to the 7:45 to 4:45 University business hours, but we will have extended hours during Finals and are working to get a 24-hour drop box solution in place. Bliss Bailey is in attendance if you have questions after my remarks.

The QEP process is going forward. Thank you to all who have responded to the surveys. You are invited to submit concept submissions through March 8. You can submit a short description of the concept and why it is a good topic for student learning at Auburn University. The survey results are also available on the QEP website. Also the survey reports are available so if you are interested in what someone thought was important in student learning at Auburn University, they are found there as well.

Please vote for Senate officers—voting is Thursday through next Monday. Committee signup also closes next Monday. You will be sent an email reminder on the faculty mail list. Don’t forget to vote.

Tuesday March 8 is the annual faculty meeting. At the meeting Dr. Gogue will give the State of the University address, and the Glenn Howze Academic Freedom Award will be presented by AAUP. There will be discussions of the common book for next year, the AU internal grant program awards, and a discussion of going to a smoke free campus. In addition the election results will be announced. I invite all faculty to attend the meeting.

Again, a few reminders about the Senate: All Senators, whether ex-officio or not, have a vote and should attend every Senate meeting. If you cannot attend, please send a substitute (who is not a sitting Senator); the substitute has full voting rights. Each Senator or substitute Senator should have already signed in and picked up a clicker to vote.

Are there any questions or comments for the chair?

The first action item is the vote of Rules Committee members. Russ Muntifering, Secretary, will present this information.

Russ Muntifering, Secretary: thank you Claire. This is basically a representation on the names of individuals who were nominated by the Senate from the floor at the February 18 meeting. Since that time we’ve put together short biographical sketches on each individual and Senate Constitution requires that we now come back to this body for approval. Those individuals again are Fenny Dane, Department of Horticulture, College of Agriculture; James Witte, Department of Educational Foundations Leadership and Technology, College of Education; and Shea Tillman, Department of Industrial and Graphic Design.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Again the Rules Committee is the committee on committees. They staff committees and we appreciate everyone who is willing to volunteer.

We will vote on each person separately. Check to see if your clicker is turned on.

First vote on Fenny Dane’s candidacy for the Rules committee. All in favor, press A, opposed B. A=50, B=3

Thank you Fenny Dane is elected. I should have told you before that we need 3 members for the Rules committee so voting on one does not mean that you cannot vote on the others.

Next we’ll vote is on James Witte’s candidacy. All in favor, press A, opposed B. A=44, B=3

James Witte is elected, thank you.

Last we’ll vote is on Shea Tillman’s candidacy. All in favor, press A, opposed B. A=43, B=1

Shea Tillman has been elected also.

Congratulations, we have three new members of the Rules committee. The term of these members will begin in August.

The second action item is a revision to Chapter 3 of the Faculty Handbook, it’s on Academic Freedom. James Goldstein will present this revision for the AAUP and as a Senator. [3:18]

James Goldstein, senator English: I want to thank the Senate leadership for allowing me to bring this to the floor of the Senate. I want to explain first of all that the 3 paragraphs, a, b, and c , that you are looking at now from the Faculty Handbook are verbatim quotations from the AAUPs 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom. What we’re proposing is to revise the third paragraph in the light of the new legal situation that’s developed following the Supreme Court case of Garcetti in 2006 and some of the appellate court decisions in the wake of that. So the suggested rewording of this if following a recommendation from the national AAUP organization and it’s been discussed by the local chapter and with the administration. It’s a little bit of a hybrid text to fit our situation because the AAUP and their report on this gave a couple of boiler-plate versions, they also gave the version that the University of Minnesota adopted, so we have our own kind of hybrid of that. The footnote explains that we’re changing the 1940 language following a recommendation of the National AAUP.

I’m not going to read the whole background statement or the actual language for the proposed revision. I just want to cut to the chase and explain that in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision there have been at least 3 federal district judges that have ruled in ways that should be frightening to anybody who is a member of an academic institution and in a public university. I sent a little bit more detailed by e-mail. I apologize if the format was wrong, whether you got it on the Web interface or directly through Groupwise it might have messed up the formatting, but I gave a little bit more information about the case from the University of California, Irvine that I remember hearing about when it was in the news. This was Hong v. Grant in 2007 and I discussed this in my e-mail a few days ago. The federal district judge ruled that the University of California “is entitled to unfettered discretion when it restricts statements an employee makes on the job and according to his professional responsibilities.”

So a few of the facts of the case, Professor Wong Hong was a tenured professor of civil engineering at Irvine and he was a critic of some administrative practices and decisions involving hiring and promotion within his engineering school, and he also criticized what in his opinion were an over-reliance on adjunct faculty…and he didn’t get a routine merit raise and he suspected it was his outspoken criticism of the administration that led to that, so he sued and the Federal District Judge said that he had a right to unfettered restriction of his statements on the job.

So we are not changing the definition of academic freedom with regards to research or teaching, this is for our role as faculty in shared governance. That we ought to have an ability to speak our minds about administrative policies and how the institution is governed, because otherwise I know that I’m a member of certain committees that I would not feel as comfortable participating in discussions on committees if there was a threat that expressing one’s views frankly or for that matter in the Senate, could be something that could be restricted and held up for punitive measures. So I hope everybody will vote in favor of revising the part of the language that deals with on the job speech that pertains to university governance which is what this is mainly about. If there are any questions I’d be happy to answer before we move back for a vote.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Do I hear a second? Okay we have a second
At this time I open the floor for comments. [19:00]

Tin-Yau Tam, senator, Mathematics and Statistics: I polled the department and I got 19 persons replying to my e-mail for support, very phenomenal. I would ask people to support the motion.

David King, senator, geology and geography: I wanted to say that I think this is very important amendment to the Faculty Handbook. These are very important issues at a very critical time at the way these decisions are evolving in the courts and I think we need this change. We need these protections, so I hope that everyone in the room who shares a concern about shared governance and the statement of principles will support this and that we get a unanimous decision in favor of this change.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there any other comments? We will now vote on the motion.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B, A=61, B=2. The motion passes with 97%.

The next information item is an update on Intercollegiate Athletics, presented by Mary Boudreaux, chair of the intercollegiate athletics committee.

Mary Boudreaux, chair of the intercollegiate athletics committee: I’m here to report on the committee of Intercollegiate Athletics. I’m a veterinarian, I primarily do research, I’m in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Most of my research is on platelets. I was appointed as a faculty athletics representative in August by the president and I asked the folks in athletics “please don’t feel you have to do anything exciting for me to be on board, I like thing under the radar,” and did they listen to me, no. But anyway I’ve had a lot of fun it’s been fun working with folks in athletics. I’m now bipolar, I have the platelet side and the FAR side, today we are talking about the FAR side. [23:16]

Some of the things I’m going to talk about are the composition, the charge, and subcommittees, we’ll talk a little bit about student athlete eligibility, we’ll talk about the GSR and the APR and of course at the end we’ll talk about some accolades.

Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics (CIA), this description comes right out of the handbook, so basically the CIA shall
(1)recommend to the President the policies for the operation of the Intercollegiate Athletics program at Auburn University, (2) monitor for the President all aspects of the Intercollegiate Athletics Program at Auburn University for compliance with University policies, and with NCAA and SEC legislation. (3) assist the President and the Director of Athletics on any aspect of the Intercollegiate Athletics Program for which advice or assistance is requested. We are to meet at least 4 times a year.

I became the FAR and the chair in August and we met twice at the end of last year and we have another meeting scheduled for March 24, the first meeting of 2011.

The committee is composed of these individuals at this time. I must say that the Rules committee has always done a very nice job of making sure that the faculty who rotate on and off this committee in a staggered fashion, 3 year terms do an excellent job of selecting the appropriate people to serve. It is a very good committee and they work very hard. I was elected as chair of this committee at our first meeting after I became FAR and Barbara Struempler was elected as vice-chair at the meeting. We have continuing members who are virtually always there including Don Large, Ainsley Cary, Wayne Alderman, Kevin Robinson. We also have representatives from A&P and from the Staff Council and we also have the SGA president there. President Gogue, Provost Mazey, Jay Jacobs, Rich McGlynn, they are virtually at all of the meetings. These meetings are planned well in advance and we pretty much get everyone there at most of the meetings.

The CIA is made up of several sub-committees. Most of these you are familiar with from past presentations. Priority and seating, that’s been a real exciting sub-committee especially recently. Art has been working very hard, we’ve been meeting quite a bit to try to re-evaluate priority seating, trying to change things – not to make everybody happy we understand that we are not going to make everybody happy– what we’re trying to do is make things more fair, so what it means is we are going to make different people unhappy than who are unhappy right now.

One that you may not recognize it is a brand new one it’s the Athletics Department Seminar Series – Barbara Struempler, Chair. One of the functions of the CIA and the Faculty Athletics Representative (FAR) is to try to bring information to the faculty about what the Athletics Department does. There are lots of things going on in Athletics, that’s why I’m here today it’s one of the ways to transmit information, but this is really not that effective or efficient because when you talk about how many faculty and staff are out there that aren’t hearing this presentation, there’s lots of other things that go in besides what I am presenting today. So what I thought would be a nice idea would be to start a seminar series, develop a series of seminars that present different topics related to Athletics. So many things going on in Compliance, eligibility and things like that, and just have a series of seminars, hopefully have some coaches come to answer questions. Have them throughout the year, so people can come, not only faculty and staff, but perhaps people from the Auburn community, especially with the stuff related to compliance. Not only that by video record them, so if people cannot come to that particular seminar, they can go somewhere (online) to hit a link to look at the presentation; see what the questions were and see how they were answered especially if there is a specific topic about athletics that they would like to learn about. So that’s the goal. Barb Struempler has agreed to chair that sub-committee, so be on the lookout for that. It’s brand new and there will probably be some rough going at the beginning, but we are going to get it going in an effort to enhance communication.

This last one here, Professional Sports Counseling Panel, it has not been working very well lately and we need to sit down and re-evaluate it. Rich McGlynn is helping me figure out how to restructure that.

A few things I want to make sure that you understand about student athletes. Student athletes are under a whole totally different set of circumstances, criteria than regular students. One of the things that they have to meet, their criteria starts at high school. So Division I academic-eligibility model provides a set of standards that begin when a high school student is considering becoming a Division I student-athlete and end when the student-athlete earns a degree from a Division I institution. So they can’t even come here until they meet certain requirements in high school. These are some of the things. These standards include: The successful completion of 16 core courses. A sliding-scale combination of grades in high school core courses and standardized-test scores. Example, if a student-athlete earns a 3.0 grade-point average in core courses, that individual must score at least 620 on the SAT or 52 on the ACT and it’s a sliding scale. The higher the GPA the lower these other scores have to be. So that’s how that works. Did I say that backwards, I meant that they go in the opposite directions, but anyway I forgot to mention that all the information that I am presenting here is from the NCAA Web site and you can find this information any time you want, so you don’t need me to stand here and talk to you about this if you want to understand something a little bit better.

Another thing that is not listed here is that these student athletes must come from a high school that is recognized by the NCAA, and trust me there are pages of high schools that the students that come from those will not be able to play and will not be eligible at the Division I level.

Another thing you have to realize is that once they are here they have to follow the 40-60-80 Rule. Student Athletes, when they come here they have to make progress toward degree. What does that mean? That means that by the end of their second year the have to be 40% complete, 60% by the end of their third year, and 80% by the end of their forth year. That means that when the get here very quickly they have to decide what they want to when they grow up. And they can’t change their mind, because if they change their mind they are going to run into problems especially if they change their mind drastically they will run into a situation where they just don’t have the courses they need to meet these progress toward degree requirements. [30:08]

So it is very, very stringent. That means when a student athlete comes in here they have to; make up their mind of what they have to take; they have to be very carful in how they schedule their classes, they have to make sure they get their pre-requisites out of the way first and quickly, they can’t fail anything especially if there are a series of courses where they have to take one and then the other and then the other, if they fail that first one and they get behind, they will become ineligible. So it is very important for them to lay everything out, their counselors have to work with them they can’t make any mistakes. If they make a mistake they will become ineligible. Every semester people are sitting down looking at every single student athlete, checking to see are they 40, or 60, or 80. If they aren’t they become ineligible. So they are under very strict rules.

They are allowed 5 years to graduate while they are receiving athletically related financial aid. And this says that all student athletes must earn a minimum of six hours each term to be eligible the next semester. Hello, yeah, I guess so, they are doing a heck of a lot more than that. They have to be in order to meet this requirement, the 40-60-80 rule.

A little bit about graduation success rate. This again comes right from the NCAA Web site. The NCAA developed the Division I Graduation Success Rate in response to college and university presidents who wanted graduation data that more accurately reflect the mobility among all college students today.

The rate measures graduation rates at Division I institutions and includes student-athletes transferring into the institutions. Unlike the Fed rate which does not do that. It differs from the rate mandated by the federal government, which does not count incoming transfer student-athletes and counts student-athletes who transfer out as not having graduated, regardless of whether they actually did. So you could have a student athlete who went here for 3 years participated in a sport, decided that they wanted to go to medical school, left, went to medical school and won the Nobel prize in medicine. As far as the Fed rate was concerned they don’t count. They didn’t graduate they are a failure. That’s not exactly right, okay.

The Graduation Success Rate takes that into account, it also allows institutions to exclude from the computation student-athletes who leave their institutions before graduation, so long as they would have been academically eligible to compete had they remained. To give you an example, I like looking at tables because it gives you a picture about what we are talking about, what are we counting and what are we not counting. The Fed rate does not include freshmen that come in January, they only include in their cohort students that start in the summer or the fall, so they are not going to pick up any students that come in January. This is for the cohort that came in 2003-2003 entering class. The Fed counted none of those students the GSR picked up over 2,000. Two-year college transfers not counted in the Fed rate, a bunch in the GSR; 4-year college not counted in Fed several in the GSR. This one doesn’t count for us this is for non-scholarship these are schools not offering aid so we can just count that number. So there are a lot of exclusions, even the Fed rate allows people who die to not be counted so those are kind of similar. Students that left eligible are of course not counted in the Fed rate, but the GSR does count those. So this gives you an idea of the numbers we are talking about and how they differ in a tabular fashion. So both the Fed and GSR rate evaluate at 6-year graduation rate, so a percentage of student graduation by the end of their sixth year of before the seventh fall.

Cara Mika Braswell who is the assistant director at Institutional Research provided this chart to show you the GSR. They just started doing the GSR beginning in 2005 and that looked at this cohort here from 1995 to 1999, [33:53] and this is Auburn University, we had a 72% GSR that time and we’ve come up in the past 3 years, this is the most recent year 77%, but if you look at these 3 years they are pretty much the same, about 77–78% GSR.

This year we’ve had some outstanding teams; women’s golf at 100%, gymnastics at 100%, men’s tennis 100%, equestrian 100%. We’ve had some really outstanding GSRs from individual teams and I’ll show you those individual teams here in a minute. How does this compare to other SEC schools and I don’t have the one from this year this is the one from last year, remember the last 3 years have been roughly about the same. There’s Auburn University at 78%, Vanderbilt is at 85%, Florida 85%, Alabama 82%, Division I average 79%, Mississippi State here, Auburn is in the middle here. So we are pretty good. Compared to other SEC schools we’re not that far off and we are very close to the Division I average for GSR.

Well what about individual sports? What I’ve got lined up here, this is now our cohort for 2003 this is “n” of 235 student athletes. GSR, you can see the numbers here for the different sports. The FED rate is right next to it so you can see how those compare. We do have some teams that are pretty low for the GSR, but most of them look pretty good. Some things that can affect the GSR for student athletes that don’t affect the regular student population: Coaches leaving, changes occurring that they leave and decide not to graduate, there are different dynamics going on that don’t necessarily affect the student population.

If you want to know how this compares to the rest of the students who are not student athletes, you have to use the FED rate because the GSR doesn’t apply to the other students, so that’s what I have here. This is graduation rates for all students so it’s the FED rate for the same cohort, if you look at Division I men=59, women=65, combined=62, over 2 million almost 3 million students this is all Division I. And then Auburn during that period of time all the other Auburn students were 61, 67, 64 and there are 15,500 students or so in that cohort. So just to give a feel for how these compare.

If you want to know how does the GSR at Auburn compare to all the other Division I schools, for Division I now this is going back to the GSR for the same cohort, this is how it looks, 72 87, 79 combined and this is Auburn our n=335, so it’s not that different from the way the rest of the universities are going in Division I.

We move on to academic progress rate which is more of a real time kind of evaluation. While eligibility requirements make the individual student-athlete accountable, the Academic Progress Rate (APR) creates a level of institutional responsibility. The academic Progress Rate is a Division I metric developed to track the academic achievement of teams each academic term. Each student-athlete receiving related financial aid earns one retention point for staying in school and one eligibility point for being academically eligible. A team’s total points are divided by the points possible and then multiplied by one thousand to equal the team’s APR. [37:40]

This came from the NCAAs Web site: if you have A Division I Football Bowl Subdivision team awards the full complement of 85 grants-in-aid. If 80 student-athletes remain in school and academically eligible,

3 remain in school but are academically ineligible (so you only get one point for those 3 students remember there’s 2 per student, these 3 students are academically ineligible but they stayed in school so they get only one of their 2 points) and then 2 drop out academically ineligible (that’s what they call an o for 2, which is a four letter word, that means you loose both points-we don’t want that happening), so the total is 7 and the team earns 163 of 170 possible points for that term.
Divide 163 by 170 and multiply by 1,000 - team’s APR that term is 959.

The NCAA calculates the rate as a rolling, four-year figure that takes into account all the points student-athletes could earn for remaining in school and academically eligible during that period. Teams that do not earn an APR above specific benchmarks face penalties ranging from scholarship reductions to more severe sanctions.
An APR of 925 is roughly equal to a GSR of 60%. That’s roughly.

Teams that score below 925 and have a student-athlete who both failed academically and left school can lose scholarships (up to 10 percent of their scholarships each year) under the immediate (contemporaneous) penalty structure.

Teams that have academic progress rates below 900, which is getting pretty low face additional sanctions and it gets more severe as you go; year one, public warning; year two, restrictions on scholarships and practice time; year three, loss of post season competition; year four, this gets really bad, restricted membership status for institution, the schools entire athletics program is penalized it will not be considered part of Division I. [39:54]

How did we do for APR? This came out in the spring of 2009 we’re about to get some new data it’s coming out in 2010 just not out in the public yet. This is what each sport’s APR is at this point in time this is the 4 year rate. Most of the teams are doing pretty good, if you look here at women’s basketball, they actually got a public recognition because their APR was in the top 10%. We had a couple that dropped to 914, that’s below the 925 and they did loose a scholarship here because there was a student-athlete on the team that was 0 for 2. [40:35] So the penalty kicked in. There was no penalty kicking in for basketball or cross country because they did not have student-athletes that were 0 for 2 at this point in time.

I do want to talk about some of the good things that are going on as far as accolades. Rhodes scholars in 2009, Jordan Anderson, most people remember that he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship. In 2010 Erica Meissner and Krissy Voss were Rhodes Scholar finalists. Auburn is the only Southeastern Conference institution to have three student-athletes as finalists in the last five years, so I think we should be happy about that.

I’ll give you a little background on Meissner and Voss. [41:21]
Meissner an honor student who holds a perfect grade‐point average in anthropology with a minor in sustainability, Voss, a chemistry major with a minor in Spanish, has done extensive research in optometry, she’s done very well both of them have done very well athletically and academically. Both of them were SEC Academic Honor Roll members multiple times. Let me define what that means.

What is the SEC Academic Honor Roll?

A student‐athlete must have a grade point average of 3.00 or above within an academic year (two semesters or three quarters) or have a cumulative grade point average of 3.00 or above at the nominating institution. And if they’ve done summer school it’s included in that average.

Student‐athletes eligible for the Honor Roll include those receiving an athletics scholarship, recipients of an athletics award (i.e., letter winner), and non‐scholarship student‐athletes who have been on a varsity team for two seasons. Prior to being nominated, a student‐athlete must have successfully completed 24 semester hours of non‐remedial academic credit toward a baccalaureate degree at the nominating institution. And importantly, the student‐athlete must have been a member of a varsity team for the sport’s entire NCAA Championship segment in order to be included on the SEC Academic Honor Roll.

This just came out recently for the 2010 it is based on 2010 spring, summer and fall, these are students at Auburn who are on the SEC Academic Honor Roll. Many of you probably recognize some of these students, they are in a whole variety of different majors and we should be proud of these students. Considering what these students do and how hard they work. We just talked about all of the requirements they have to do to make they are getting their classwork done, add that to their practice schedule, travel schedule and playing schedule. And in addition to this I don’t know if many are aware that these students do a lot of community service activity, eg. Habitat for Humanity, American Heart, reading to children at elementary schools; they do a whole variety of things they are very, very active. That’s only half the list this is the rest. We’ve got quite a few students on the Academic Honor Roll. You might wonder how come there isn’t anybody on equestrian on here, I think they would be on here but remember that criteria about having to be on a varsity. From what I understand equestrian is an emerging sport so it is not classified under the same umbrella. Please correct me (folks in compliance) if I am getting that wrong.

A little bit about postgraduate scholarships that Faculty athletics representatives are responsible for, there are two of them; H. Boyd McWhorter and Brad Davis that I will talk about in a minute who does community service. These are scholarships that go to fund postgraduate work. The student-athlete has finished their playing time eligibility and they want to get a master’s, or PhD, or want to go professional school, these scholarships help fund that.

Each SEC school pick one male and one female. Recognizes student‐athletes, one male and one female, for outstanding and meritorious academic and athletic achievements during their entire college career, two from each SEC school at $7500 each with a minimum cumulative undergraduate GPA of 3.2. Demonstrated qualities of leadership that bring credit to the student‐athlete, the Institution, intercollegiate athletics and the goals and objectives of higher education.

Then what happens is that those names go forward and the SEC FARs pick one student from each category to be the Scholar Athlete of the Year. Those students will get $15,000 a piece.

The ones that have gone forward from Auburn this year are: Erica Meissner and Daniel Mazzaferro, Swimming and Diving; last year Jordan Anderson, Swimming and Diving won the Scholar Athlete of the Year Award. So what’s in Auburn’s water? Some really good people. [45:20]

Brad Davis is community service similar to the McWhorter but it’s more heavily oriented toward community service. Student-athletes, the winners get $3,000 at the school level and then they are voted on again (we will be voting on these in 2 days) and we will sit down and vote to see which ones become chosen for the Service Leader of the Year and those students will get $6,000 each. Our students going forward this year are Addison Ragsdale, Soccer and Justin Hargett, Baseball; last year Krissy Voss won the Brad Davis Community Service Leader of the Year award. So Auburn won 2 of the 4 possible ones at that level which is incredible. [46:08] We should be very proud of these students and I know we are.

When we vote for these students for the whole kit’n’kabootle, the FARs are not allowed to vote for their own students, so I can’t vote for Auburn students I can only vote for the other students. So these students are getting there not because people are giving them special treatment, they are getting there on their own merit.

To conclude, during their time at Auburn our student-athletes not only become well educated they also develop excellent time-management skills and a sense of community that is unique to Auburn University. Their success lies in the cooperation of faculty, counselors, coaches, sports administrators, and the students themselves, they all have to work together to succeed. They cannot succeed without being both academically and athletically prepared. And I want to thank the faculty/staff that continue to help inspire our students to be the best that they can be in the classroom and on the playing field, the court, the track, the pool, or on the horse. Thank you very much.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Are there any questions or comments for Dr. Boudreaux?

Werner Bergen, animal science, senator: When I was a student at Penn State in 1960, when you got the scholarship it was for 4 years. Now you hear a lot about recruiting and the coaches releasing players to the grey shirt and this (?) football. What happens, how can you totally make over your team in 2 years by releasing students? How does that figure into these figures or is that irrelevant or is it something else? Do you know what I’m talking about?

Mary Boudreaux: No.

Werner Bergen, animal science, senator: Well the word is that I hear on all of the talk shows, they say that scholarship is for one year. And if you don’t perform well or something else a new recruit will come in, or can come in, doesn’t have to. So what do you do in that case?

Mary Boudreaux: At least at Auburn, I can’t speak for the rest of the schools, what I have seen in a short time that I’ve been the Faculty Athletics Representative is that Auburn will try their very best to make sure a student-athlete keeps their scholarship right on up until they graduate. Even a student-athlete who has become injured and cannot compete, if at all possible they will try to make sure that student stays here and is able to graduate. For one thing if they don’t, they do it because they want to and because they care, but if they don’t it’s going to impact on them, big time. So if you tell a student who is injured that “hey, you’re out of here” and they leave, guess what you’ve got, you’ve got 0 for 2 (especially if they weren’t academically qualified when they left) and you don’t want that to happen.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Other questions or comments? Thank you.

The next two items are being presented as information prior to being brought for a vote.

First is a resolution on departmental administrator reviews being presented by the Steering committee. Kathryn Flynn, member of the Steering committee and immediate past chair, will present this resolution. [49:35]

Kathryn Flynn, member of the Steering committee and immediate past chair: Good afternoon. Steering Committee has been working on this resolution for a while and one of the things that we thought would be important, Dr. Mazey and the upper administration had implemented a plan for review for Deans. And we felt like it would be appropriate to bring forth a motion or a resolution that would establish a similar type of review process for department heads and chairs. What we’ve got today is the resolution as we have it worded right now in which we will be asking you to approve a policy that would institute a review process for all department heads and chairs. I think it went out to everybody, I don’t want to read the whole thing so I’d like to let you look at it for a minute and then answer questions.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Any questions or comments?

Bill Sauser, management, senator: Kathryn I just have one question about the 3–5, I notice it says every 3–5 years. Did the committee intend to leave that at the discretion of the deans or is there some reason it doesn’t say 3 or 4 or 5?

Kathryn Flynn: I think the rational for that is that we have department heads and we have department chairs and some serve for 3 years and some serve for 5, so the logic would follow that if you have someone that has a longer term you would have a longer space in between the review.

Bruce Smith, not a senator: Kathryn has there been any discussion about who would have access to the results of these surveys. I know historically participation has been awful and it’s in part because faculty never get to see the results, never have any feeling of what the outcome was, and never get any feedback for their effort in contributing to these kinds of surveys. [52:16]

Kathryn Flynn: We have talked about that and I’m not sure that I’ll answer very well at this point, but there are two ways to look at it. If you are the person being evaluated; when I’m evaluated it’s a private thing between me and my dean and so there is some sentiment that it should also be the same policy for a department head or chair. The logic here would be that if you have a department head or a chair who’s performance is substandard there will be some type of a process instituted for remediation and I would assume some follow-up and then replacement if the performance was not what the administration wanted.

Also if you notice on the last line, I can’t see from here, the Dean will inform departments of the general results not specific. So there will be some feedback, but it will not be explicit information because of the confidentiality issue.

Mike Stern, economics, senator: You know the position of department chair is of course distinct from that of Dean, as a department chair should be elected by the faculty as opposed to deans who are not typically elected per se, they are hired by a higher administrator. That being said it always seemed to me that the correct remediation or review of the dean of a chair is on a continuous basis by the faculty 54:08] and the way you deal with under performing chairs is you vote them out and you elect somebody else. So it doesn’t seem to me proper to pattern the way you review chairs the same way you review deans, because they are not determined in the first place in manner.

Kathryn Flynn: If I remember correctly we did a survey and we have sort of an unusual…all I can say is we can take that under advisement if other people want to comment on that. It’s one thing that we talked about but felt that it was appropriate that even though departments do elect, they (the positions) are ultimately approved by the Provost. We thought that it would be fair to make the policy across the board.

David King, senator, geology and geography: If a department chair’s term is 3, 4, or 5 years and the purpose of these evaluations is to deal with correcting behaviors or input that’s intended to affect the way a department is operating, then the frequency of the evaluations would seem to be more often than the 3–5 years because it would only be on average one evaluation per chair term and that would be maybe part of some packet for renewal of the chair if that were the case.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you. Also these are not intended to replace annual reviews for department heads and chairs. These are going to be pretty big reviews so therefore we did not think it would be feasible to do them each year. Heads and chairs will still have their annual review just like all faculty.

Kathryn Flynn: One thing to remember is there are roughly 60 department heads or chairs on campus and so putting it on a 3–5 year makes it a manageable number each year just in terms of the effort involved.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Other questions or comments? Thank you and this will be brought back for a vote in the April Senate meeting.

The next item is also an information item being brought a month before being voted on. It is modification of the promotion and tenure process. This will be presented by Ann Beth Presley, Chair Elect and comes from the AdHoc PT revision committee. [57:14]

Ann Beth Presley, Chair Elect: This is work that was done by the AdHoc committee on P&T and these are proposed Promotion and Tenure revisions. I want to thank Claire for being the facilitator on this committee. I was on it; Constance Hendricks, our parliamentarian; Bill Trimble was our AAUP Officer; Ed Thomas who is currently on the P&T Committee; Larry Teeter was a former member of P&T; Bonnie MacEwan, our dean of Libraries; Paul Patterson, associate dean from Agriculture; and Alice Smith, department chair from Industrial and Systems Engineering.

We did have some rationale for the proposed changes. This is part of the Strategic Plan goal to improve the promotion and tenure process. The committee objectives were fairly clear: to promote transparency, to promote equity, consistency, due process, and clarity in the P&T process. And we want to thank everybody on the committee for those 4 o’clock Friday afternoon meetings and the other meetings that we had.

Recommended changes. As all of you know you are working on or have already developed you departmental guidelines, so you will be referring to departmental guidelines for evaluation methods. Criteria will be based on assignment weights. Collegiality is a part of all areas, it is not a separate category; candidates expectations to be met for promotion or tenure even it’s early; de facto tenure applies to tenure-track faculty.

Transparency of Process: Letters submitted at department level, at this level the candidate can review and rebut letters at the departmental level. Letters from college committee and Dean, candidates can review and rebut letters at the college level from the committee and from the Dean. If candidate is denied, University committee sends letter with specific reasons why the candidate was denied promotion and/or tenure.

The Dean and department head/chair do not vote at departmental level. We clarify that departmental members vote once at the level of choice, in other words, if you are serving on the college committee you can choose to vote at the department level or at the college level. That’s your choice. Where ever you think your vote would give most worth for the candidate. Then there would be a new composition of Appeals committee, there would be three current members of P&T committee and five past members of P&T committee.

Are there any questions or comments about the recommended changes? And this is an information item at this time.

Claire Crutchley, chair: I do want to point out that we summarized these, what you got was longer, but we wanted to make it easier. At this time I open the floor for comments.

Charile Eick, teaching & curriculum, senator: When this information went by my department, overall we feel very favorable about it, but there’s one point that people really did not like and I agree, the idea of having the letters that we write–public to the candidate. We like the idea that was proposed last summer where there is a general consensus letter of information about the strengths and weaknesses about the candidate that all faculty sign off on, but we still like the right to send our own letters with information to the various committees that are not viewed by the candidate. One of the big reasons for that is not so much a transparency issue as one of cohesion, collegiality within the unit and positive working conditions. We think it would just really create great dissention within a unit if these letters are reviewed publically when a candidate goes up and then that candidate has to stay and work with individuals in that unit regardless of whether they are tenured or not when they do go up, because there will always be some letters of dissention generally speaking. We think for those reasons it would be better to have a general consensus letter which I think was earlier proposed at one point.

Claire Crutchley, chair: We are not trying to say that there isn’t a general consensus letter. In the Faculty Handbook it will probably say, consensus letter, individual faculty letters are welcome. We discussed this back and forth on the committee and we decided that we would make all of the letters open. A consensus letter is welcome and when we rewrote the handbook, it recommended individual faculty letters, but our committee after discussion decided to leave those open as well.

Charile Eick, teaching & curriculum, senator: Just sharing my department’s views.

James Goldstein, senator for English: I wanted to make a comment on something that was not in the abbreviated presentation today. I notice that you are recommending that there be clarification made in the Handbook that de facto tenure would only be eligible for tenure track faculty not for contingent faculty. On the one hand if we do vote as a body to support that recommendation, then at least we will be consistent with what we did last year on the new lecturer line. On the other hand as I pointed out to this body when we were having those debates, it will put us within violation of AAUP policies and exposing the university to risk of AAUP censure, but at least we would be self consistent if we rewrite the Faculty Handbook in that way. As I commented before we don’t get to unilaterally rewrite AAUP recommendations and guidelines, but as an institution we have to decide what’s the way forward. At least it will be consistent internally if we approve that recommendation. Thanks.

Vicky van Santen, senator, Pathobiology: I just want to agree with what the previous person said. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the letters be available to the candidate, I think it would really discourage people from writing any negative letters at all. It’s basically equivalent to having a public rather than a secret vote.

Guy Rohrbaugh, senator from Philosophy: I wondered if the committee also worried about I guess I don’t usually expect to see one’s external letters when you are coming up for tenure, this does not include those? This is only the internal letters?

Claire Crutchley, chair: The external letters we are keeping closed.

Jim Witte, senator, EFLT: On the subject of these reviews by the candidate on the internal letters our general consensus is there is not an objection. I think the idea that we can only have truth in darkness is kind of an antiquated sort of thing. We are not asking that the letter be blocked, we are asking that the candidate have the opportunity to respond. And I think that is perfectly in keeping not only in transparency, but in fairness.

The other thing that is kind of curious that I want to bring up is paragraph 9 and this is pretty much parallel to what we do now for the P&T review, using members of the current committee and adding on 3 more. Was any consideration given to holding an entirely separate review committee? For instance the Provost could call for previous committee members to form a review committee when necessary as opposed to using the people on the current review committee.

Claire Crutchley, chair: This is different now it’s the whole P&T committee with 3 additional members. The members of the P&T committee current or past believe that that continuity was helpful to have some members, but we did make sure to have a majority.

Jim Witte, senator, EFLT: Continuity is important, any member that has previously served on that committee could serve on a review committee taking it away from that currently existing committee. Just an input. You’ve got a committee right now, part of that committee is going to review what they already decided, and I’m submitting that if we had an independent review order committee it would serve that review at a much better level.

Claire Crutchley, chair: So no members of the current committee?

Jim Witte, senator, EFLT: Yes, and independent review.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you.

Mike Stern, economics, senator: I appreciate some of the revisions that took place from the open forum that you held. My review of the process constructed that it looks like a hybrid mess, it is very convoluted in some sense; first you want the departments to come up with guidelines and evaluation methods and then you mandate that they infect all of their measured areas with collegiality, which is worse than having it as a separate category, and I don’t see any reason to mandate the departments if they are writing guidelines why they must or must not use collegiality in all areas of evaluation. I don’t understand what the purpose of that is. I thought collegiality was ill-defined, poorly measured and that’s why we didn’t want it in there. So now we are going to put an ill-defined, poorly measured component into all categories, that’s making all categories ill-defined, poorly measured. So I don’t understand that. I’d prefer if you left it to the departments.

Also I notice continued asymmetry as I brought up last time in the functioning of the university committee. You indicate that the college committees must write a letter, which is then open to the candidate. There is no clause, they only write a letter if it’s negative, yet supposedly the university committee is only going to write a letter in the case of denial [1:09:49] as opposed to a recommendation of acceptance. It seems to me that there are problems with both denial of tenure and receipt of tenure. So it seems to me that any committee that participates needs to write a letter justifying the recommendation whether it be postitive or negative. I see no reason for the asymmetry between the college and the university committees in that regard. In fact if we are going to have an open process and the candidate has seen and responded to every stage what’s the purpose of an appeal? I don’t really get it. An appeal under the current system is your first chance to respond, that is a response to what has occurred. If you’ve already responded at each and every stage what are you appealing or what’s the new discovery, I don’t understand what the purpose of the appeal is. Second, as I mentioned the open forum, I know judicial process as the previous gentleman was mentioning where you take somebody that had already been involved in the decision and put them on an appeal. Second I believe under current construction the Provost position is the chair of the committee, so to have a committee that has already functioned on this choosing who it is that will hear the appeal is like having a lower judge determine who the higher judge is going to be. That should all be determined ex-anti long before the process gets underway. So if you are going to have an appellate committee I don’t know why you would because you already had a response at every stage, but if you were going to have an appellate committee it should be completely distinct body form any other body that has participated in it. It should not be chosen by people that have already participated in the process, after the process has occurred or anything as such. So if you want to appeal it should be independent, but you don’t need an appeal as I previously mentioned because you already responded to everything.

That being said, I spent 5 minutes before I came over here just to scribble down what the P&T process would look like to me that I thought would be good. May I share that on the screen?

Claire Crutchley, chair: Why don’t you send it to us and the committee will review it.

Mike Stern, economics, senator: I want to show it to the Senate as a sitting senator since we are going to vote on it, what a P&T process might look like.

Claire Crutchley, chair: I don’t believe that follows the rules of the Senate. The committee would appreciate your input.

Mike Stern, economics, senator: Would you like me to read it.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Yes that follows Robert’s Rules of Order.

Mike Stern, economics, senator: Item 1. Each department writes and maintains the P&T guidelines, the guidelines are also reviewed by the Provost’s Office. So that’s consistent with what you have. 2. Collegiality cannot be a separate category, only the assigned workload categories can be evaluated if a department chooses to utilize collegiality it must be appropriately integrated into the standard workload categories. So we have deferred to the departments as I mentioned. [1:12:53] 3. At every stage a review of department college and university the candidate is provided an opportunity to add a letter responding to any internal correspondence. Any committee or administrator participating in the review must write a letter justifying the recommendation. 4. The final decision is made by the president, no appeal is needed as a candidate has already seen and responded to all internal correspondence.
That’s the P&T Policy more or less, thank you.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you.
[1:13:17]

Rusty Wright, senator from Fisheries: I just have a couple of quick questions. The question about the tenure clock, I wasn’t sure but it seemed to me that the proposed changes would just open up the early side of that, that someone who is coming up could come up early, what we considered early in the past, but I wasn’t sure about the other end if there was any proposed change. In other words 7 years is it still.

Claire Crutchley, chair: There was no proposed change in the tenure clock. What the current Handbook says is something like, without judgment but then it says you must exceed requirements, so those seem not consistent to us so we said you can go up early and just meet requirements. There is no reason why because you are going up early that you would have to exceed the requirements for tenure. We thought the language in the Handbook was inconsistent.

Rusty Wright, senator from Fisheries: In polling my colleagues there was concern about the open letters and some concern that it might water down the concerns that faculty might have toward–especially in terms of negative letters–especially in this financial climate where replacing faculty is difficult. There could be pressure brought to bear on some of those letter writers not to write a negative letter, to not loose a position. So that’s something to keep in mind.

Also I did have a question that was posed to me: What’s the logic of having open internal letters and not open external letters?

Claire Crutchley, chair: I will say one thing we discussed, the external letters and why they should not be open, is we thought it would be harder to get outsiders to submit letters and that was the concern coming from the Deans.

Mike stern, economics, senator: A quick comment on these internal letters being open. What is the distinction between an internal and an external letter? An internal letter if it’s written by an employee of this university (that) is an employee of the state of Alabama. As such they are subsidized by the taxpayer in terms of any duties, anything they write on the job, it’s part of an Auburn process so any on the job writing is subject to any citizen of the state with only a certain set of exceptions, none of which would exempt an internal candidate from seeing such correspondence. Third parties could be so liable but not the person that it is written about. So just being in compliance with state law per se in the spirit of the law would require all correspondence to be reviewable by the candidate in question. External letters are not necessarily written by employees of the state, they could come from some other state, they are not a public writing of the state therefore they are distinct in that view, but the idea that we are going to process the internal correspondence truly is closed, just legally speaking is absurd anyway. Because it really is not in compliance with existing law.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you.

Bruce Smith, not a senator: A couple of quick observations. I applaud the committee’s decision to make letters public. This is recognizing something that’s been legal precedent for well over 20 years, that your dossier, complete dossier, is yours to see when ever you want to. Auburn University has failed to recognize that for well over 20 years, so I applaud you for doing that. However I have to add that if it’s due process you are after I see absolutely no reason to discriminate between internal/external letters. If you are afraid that the process is going to impinge on external letters I do not understand why you would not be afraid that it would impinge on internal letters. That said, I think both of those should be available to the candidate for rebuttal, that’s part of due process.

I am concerned about this issue of time frame and the tenure clock. I didn’t pull up the exact wording that was on the Senate’s agenda Web site, but it seemed to imply something like there should be no defined time frame for tenure and it didn’t have a back door. In other words it did not say for the submission of a tenure document, it implied it could be early or late. Make sure that the wording doesn’t leave open the 7 year clock and that you can keep going and not get tenured.

Claire Crutchley, chair: That was not at all intended, we were trying to say these are changes being made. We will be very careful when we bring in next month.

Bruce Smith, not a senator: On the early side, given the way in which we are at my departmental level we are approaching the departmental requirements for promotion and tenure. I think everyone has sort of degenerated into a bean counting mentality of what would be required. If we do that and we say the door’s open at the front end and we give a rate, which is usually 3 major publications a year for example, …new asst. professor hired in, publishes 3 papers in the first year and says “I’ve made the rate, I want up.” What’s to stop that? The whole point about tenure, I think, is that we have a time component included in that and there should be some kind of consideration of a minimum service time before you advance ranks.

Claire Crutchley, chair: I think you would do that at the departmental level when you write your guidelines.

Bruce Smith, not a senator: Based on the current way in which we do business I don’t think departments are doing that because the expectation is that there is a minimum clock. So we may need to suggest to departments if this goes through that they revisit their terms on that basis.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you.

Steve Brown, senator from political science: If I have access to the letters from my department, do they end with me? Can I then quote those letters reviewed in the newspaper? If someone wants to do something else with me can I say this is what my colleague said about me. What happens with those open letters after I seen them and have a chance to rebut them. Is there any provision to keep those within this department within the college of the university so they don’t go outside to press or wherever else?

Claire Crutchley, chair: I do not believe we have written that in the policy. I would assume you would see the letters but not have copies of the letters.

Steve Brown, senator from political science: Is there anything to forbid me no that I have access all the information that my colleagues said about me and I want to rebut it, I might rebut it privately or I may choose to rebut it publically. Is there any protection for my colleagues and the things that they said with this policy?

Claire Crutchley, chair: We will take under consideration, thank you. Other questions or comments?
I believe that was the last item on the agenda.
Does anybody have any unfinished business? New business?

Emily Meyers, senator, sociology/anthropology/social work: I forgot to mention, Bliss, one of our faculty members was highly disturbed by the process of taking grading forms over to the new OIT building. Said it was complex and hard to do and for a process that is supposed to make things easier it has not done so.

David King, geology and geography, senator: When a central campus function, like test grading, or the mailroom, or anything else gets moved out of the campus core, it’s a pedestrian campus now and it’s harder, takes longer to do these things. Efficiency is lost there’s no discussion of these things before they happen, they just happen. So there needs to be some faculty committee input some way so that so that we have some say about how these things are done. This is an example, move test scoring out on Lem Morrison Drive, how do you get there during the day? Too far to walk.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you.
Is there is any other new business? The meeting is now adjourned. Be sure to return the clickers on your way out. And don’t forget the Faculty meeting next week. Thank you. [1:23:09]