October 19, 2010
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 October Senate meeting. Senate membership is 88 Senators. If you could turn on your clicker and press A; 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 either 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.

The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes from the September 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.

Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you Claire, I just want to remind everyone there is the govenatorial debate tonight at the Student Center at 7:00 p.m., I think it’s first come first serve.

Second point I wanted to mention is Gains Smith had announced his retirement. So we are in the process of beginning a search for a new director for the Cooperative Extension System. You may recall that that is a position that reports both to Auburn as well as Alabama A&M. I’ll be going up to Huntsville tomorrow to sit with president Hugini. [2:55] As we begin to put a search process together that really engages both campuses in that process as well as the selection.

Third thing I wanted to mention to you is I think back in the spring there was a presentation about a variety of medical tests, blood pressure, cholesterol, I don’t remember the other but one other one and if you will go and be checked and do what ever the system calls for that you save $25 a month (on yor insurance) starting in January. The deadline to have your tests done is November 30. If that’s of interest to you there is an announcement on the Web page that you can print off and a physician will do it or you can do it through Pharmacy.

The forth thing is don’t forget that we have open enrollment for benefits during the month of November.

The fifth thing has to do with the forms that are necessary for the one time supplemental pay have been sent to the colleges and to the other areas on campus. Remember 0–6%, the plan is to make those payouts in December, a one-time lump sum payment. The guidelines say 0–6% with the average being 4%.

Final thing that I wanted to mention is that we may have another vacancy in our office. Dr. Large has told me that he believes his golf game is good enough that he may be going on the tour, so I wanted to be sure that we knew that and those of you that are golfers, you might want to talk to Don about that. Be happy to respond to questions. (pause) Thank you.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
I now invite Dr. Mazey to come forward to give remarks from the Provost’s office.

Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey, provost: Well first of all my golf game is not good enough so I will continue to do what I enjoy and that of course is working with all of you. I just want to give you an update on our Strategic Planning process here at Auburn. As you all may know the Strategic Plan was put in place in 2007 right after President Gogue arrived on campus. When I arrived in 2009 there were 35 objectives that really fit into the 6 overriding goals of the Strategic Plan. We did a report that year and discussed what our achievements had been on those 35 goals. We revised some of those last year and had 35, some of them being new goals some of them being revised goals from the year before and we did another report this past spring. And we completed about 15 of those in the first two years and I think there was 60 some in the original plan of these objectives under the six major goals and you can see the 6 major strategic planning priorities up there.

Now here we are going into year 3 and we have 25 objectives under those 6 strategic priorities or goals. Some of these again are revisions of work that we have previously been doing and all of you have been doing and first and foremost when I say we, it is a collective we, our office has just been facilitating this process, it’s been the faculty, the staff, and the students that really should take all the credit for the achievement of what we’ve done thus far in the Strategic Plan. We are currently working on implementing the new honors curriculum. Jim Hanson is going to be reporting to the Board of Trustees in November about the revisions of the new Honors curriculum and as you all know we have over 1,000 freshmen in that Honors program this year.

We are also working and must give kudos to the Core Curriculum Committee that  have worked long hours over the last year and continue to work on revising our General Education Plan and I think they have just about completed the review of a number of those courses and our goal is to implement that revised plan in the fall. You are going to hear of course the number of achievements that have taken place under the writing initiative. Margaret Marshall is going to give you an update on that shortly, but the good news here is that the Writing Center is now being available to all undergraduate students here I think even to many of our graduate students, so it’s not just undergraduate students but graduate students here at Auburn.

So I won’t go through all of these specifically but I think we need to continue to work on those while enhancing our undergraduate program particularly our graduation rates, retention, and better advising. However good we think we are we can always be better at the undergraduate level. We need to continue to work on the research enterprise. As you can see we have a goal there this year to increase our external funding. As part of that we’ve asked the Deans on a quarterly basis to look at the number of quality proposals that have been submitted to funding agencies. Last year we were down on that number of proposals that we submitted, so I hope that we can put collaborations there this year to increase the number of quality proposals that can go forward. Increase the number of graduate students, in fact I just looked, last year about this time the Senate passed the accelerated Bachelors/Masters degree. I think we now have 6 programs that are participating in that so that obviously increases and will help us in terms of the number of graduate students.

In the outreach area we have been doing outreach efforts in the school systems. We’ve also been, I know outreach has been trying to work internationally especially in service learning. I want to compliment all of you and say we need to continue to work to complete the departmental guidelines for the promotion and tenure process. I think that’s been very worthwhile. I have now met with all but one dean, maybe two deans, and have been given feedback on the guidelines. A special recognition goes to the College of Liberal Arts and the consistency they had in their 13 departmental guidelines that came forward.

In terms of looking at efficiency, we had a dean’s retreat where we talked about collaboration, revenue enhancement, and greater efficiency. It was recommended from the deans that we set up a taskforce to really look at some of the ways that we could all think about efficiency and become more efficient as an institution.

Finally we are working on an integrated communication plan. That’s one of the new goals under goal number 6. Some of these are carryovers, some are new goals, but the important things is that we all work on them together and continue to move the institution forward. Any questions about the strategic plan or strategic planning process and what we hope to work on together this year?

Well a couple of other things that I would like to mention would be the Dean’s searches. The searches that we’ve undertaken since I’ve been here, we have 5 new deans in place we’re very shortly I hope to name the sixth, we just don’t have an official signature on that, and that’s for the Dean of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. That search is pretty much complete and we do have search underway for the dean of the School of Architecture Design and Construction. It looks as though that that school or college probably won’t be interviewing until after the first of the year. So it will be necessary, since Dean Bennett is going to retire December 31, to appoint an interim dean for maybe for a 6 months basis there.

The only other announcements I have, I want to commend everyone that has participated in the Common Book. I think that’s been an enriching experience for us all this year for the first time we’ve done that. Gregg Mortenson’s lecture is next week the 26th at 7:00 p.m. in the Arena. I hope you will join us. We are having a big read tomorrow, starting to read the book in the Library, that starts at 10:00 a.m. and I hope you will be able to participate in that. And then finally, as you can see a new goal on our goals of the strategic plan is the SACS reaccreditation visit which is so very important to us. In talking to Dr. Clark, I told him I was fortunate to be at an institution along the way where we actually had zero recommendations from North Central in terms of our reaccreditation visit and  it certainly did make the institution feel very good about itself. So I hope that we could set that goal here at Auburn. And on Thursday there is a Provost forum and Drew Clark is going to join us to talk about particularly the QEP and your participation in the QEP as we get ready for that SACS reaccreditation visit in the spring of 2013.
Any questions for me? (pause) Thank you all.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Mazey.
The chair’s remarks include an update on voting on changes in the handbook. At the August meeting, Dr. Rotfeld pointed out that he believed we were misinterpreting votes on changes in the handbook outside of the constitution. The Faculty Handbook Review committee was asked to interpret the wording of voting and how changes in the handbook would be made. The recommendation from the Handbook committee was also reviewed by the Rules committee. Senate archives were examined to determine how changes have been made in the past. According to the archives, non-constitutional changes in the faculty handbook (changes in the Handbook that were not changes in the constitution) have been made by a voice vote or simple majority except in the 2009–2010 year.  Given the wording in the handbook and the history, both committees concluded that changes in the Handbook (outside of either constitution) require only a majority vote of the Senate following Robert’s Rules of Order (which is our regular procedure). Given the committees’ advice, this year the Senate will proceed with the interpretation that changes in Senate Constitution require two-thirds of the Senators. Changes in the Faculty Constitution require two-thirds of the faculty present at the meeting, and changes in the Faculty Handbook outside of the two constitutions require a majority of the votes, given a quorum is established.

Secondly, at the Faculty meeting last week, Dr. Rickert’s report on recommended changes in the handbook were discussed. Dr. Penaskovic asked if the report could be seen by faculty. After the meeting, the Senate Executive committee met and decided to make the report available to any faculty who requests the report. The implementation section of the report has been edited to reflect the current implementation plan recommended by the Steering Committee, the rest of the report is word for word Dr. Rickert’s report and you will be able to see Dr. Ricker’s recommendation on the implementation also. Please come to the front after the meeting if you would like a copy. Alternatively, you can send me an email and I will email a copy.

I have only one announcement beyond what Dr. Gogue and Dr. Mazey have. I was asked to announce that the AU Mammogram day is Nov 18 and is available to all Auburn employees and spouses covered by Blue Cross Blue Shield. Finally to receive a $25 a month discount on health insurance premiums, get your health and wellness screening at the Pharmacy by Nov. 30.

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 signed in and picked up a clicker to vote.

When you vote, please look at the clicker and make sure it has a light indicating it is on, as the clickers will turn off after a length of time. If the light is out, turn it on. Once you vote, your clicker should show a green light; this means your vote has been cast. If there is a red light, vote again.  If you are not sure that you voted, please vote again. Only your last vote will be recorded.
Are there any questions or comments?

Today we have two action items and two information items. Our first action item is the AU Scholarly Incentive plan and will be presented by Bruce Smith, chair of the Faculty Research Committee. This item was presented as information at the September meeting. [17:35]

Bruce Smith, chair of the Faculty Research Committee: As Claire said I presented this last month to you all as an information item. We are bringing it back to you now as an action item. Based on the discussion last month the Faculty Research Committee added a clause in Section 2 subpart 4 which is in the version that is on the Web accessible through the minutes (agenda) where we state that departments should review their incentive policy at least every three years. That was straight out of the discussion here and was approved unanimously by the Faculty Research Committee. I don’t want to go over the whole policy again unless somebody wants me to, but this policy is basically establishing the ability to recover from salary savings a pool of money that might be used for faculty in a number of different ways including paying of post docs or graduate students, paying travel costs, and also potentially paying financial incentive to that faculty member who writes that grant.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this is a recommendation from a Senate committee, it does not require a second.

At this time I open the floor for comments or questions. (pause) Since there are no comments or questions we will proceed to a vote. Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B, Abstain C. If you do not get a green light, turn it off and back on.
A- 60, B-9, C-0.  The motion carries.

The second action item is modification of the composition and charge of the Competitive Research Grant committee. It was also presented as information at the September meeting. It will be presented by Russ Muntifering, Secretary of the Senate, representing the Rules committee.  [20:24] This is a change in the constitution.

Russ Muntifering, secretary: This item was brought to the Senate at its meeting last month for information and discussion. The key features of the proposal are as follows. The current language in article 4, section 19 of the Senate Constitution calls for a Research Grant in Aid committee consisting of 13 faculty members for which each academic school, college, and library are represented. If you have at least one from each academic school, college, and library you have exactly 13 with no ability to adjust numbers according to the program need for review and filling up gaps in areas of specialization so the committee can do it’s work. So we are proposing a change of at least one faculty member to make a provision for modifying the committee number. Secondly there’s a change in the charge, the current language talks about establishing policy for the grant in aid program and the review and proposals, we have opposed recommending proposals for funding, Carl Pinkert made a motion last time that has been implemented in the new language in the red print at the bottom; this committee shall review and rank proposals submitted to the AU Intramural Grants Program, and that you are all familiar with a deadline for received proposals was this past October 1. So I move for the adoption of the proposed change.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this comes from a Senate committee it does not require a second. Are there any comments or questions on this proposal? (pause) Seeing none, this is a constitutional change so it does require two-thirds of the Senate. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B, and abstentions press C.  This requires 58 votes to pass, we have 65 so therefore the motion passes. A=65, B=2,C=1.
The first information item is an update on the Interdisciplinary Studies program. It will be presented by Kathryn Flynn, director of the Interdisciplinary Studies. [23:56]

Kathryn Flynn, director of Interdisciplinary Studies: Good afternoon. I’m going to start by giving you a little bit of background on the program. Those of you who were on the Senate for the last couple of years are familiar with this but newer Senators may not be. The program that we now have as the Interdisciplinary Program was approved by the AU Curriculum committee in Fall of 2008, shortly afterward the Senate endorsed the concept of an Interdisciplinary Degree Program. The Board of Trustees approved the program and subsequently approved in late spring early summer of 2009. Since that time a number of things have happened. One of those is that they did hire a director and I took the position as of August 1 of this year. We have in the program an introductory course UNIV 2190. That course has been offered 3 times in the fall of ’09, spring of ’10, and this semester we are offering it. The number of students in the course has increased each time we have offered it to the point where we have about 40 students in the class this semester.

The program allows students who have more than 30 hours or less than 90 to take the UNIV course and declare as a major, it also has an avenue for students that have greater than 90 hours to declare it as a major with the approval of a faculty advisory committee. And we have had several students who have done that and because of that we actually had our first graduate this past summer 2010 and we have 2 students who are scheduled barring any unforeseen difficulties to graduate this semester. We’ve got currently 6 students that have approved plans of study, which means they formally have declared the major. We’ve got 4 of those 6 students who are still currently enrolled and not yet graduated who have approved capstone projects. Two are completed and two are underway. We’ve also got a number of students in the pipeline, because of where we are in the semester working with students who are developing their plans of study I cannot give you an exact number, but we’re thinking that we may end up with roughly half of the class declaring the major at the end of the semester. So maybe 20 students. I’m seeing e-mails or I had one day talked with 4 students, which is unusual one afternoon who were interested in the Interdisciplinary Studies major.

A number of activities have taken place, many of these and probably most of these have occurred prior to my becoming the director. Patricia Duffy was the person who really shepherded this and worked on it until I assumed the position in August. So part of the work that’s been done over the last year or so is to make sure people are aware that the degree program exists, so there have been a number of announcements in different publications, e-mails to students, presentations to students in UNIV courses, and then counseling students who are looking for degree programs but are not really sure what they want, through the use of advisors.

We’ve also got a preliminary brochure and a Web site that’s available for students, faculty, and staff to access if they want information about the program. We are working on some updates of both of those that will take place through the rest of this semester and probably early into spring because we are working with a couple of students, we have a grad student in Technical Writing who is going to work with us on the Web site next semester as a practicum type experience. The other thing we are doing this semester is we are hosting an event that will bring together interested students, current students as well as those who may have not made up their mind, current faculty mentors as well as faculty that have indicated and interest in the program, and academic advisors across campus. We are going to have a short program. They will see this presentation, we will have handouts available, what does it take to be a mentor?, what does it take to find a mentor?, make sure they know the staff and try to get the faculty and students together and advisors in a less formal atmosphere.

We tried to brainstorm and come up with a list of people who were interested in the program and sent out invitations, however we’ve still got a few places available, so if anyone here is interested in the program, if you will contact me I will let you know location and that type of thing. It’s tomorrow afternoon from 3–5 p.m. We will have a light meal and we are hoping to have 25 or so students there. We probably have that many or more faculty and staff that will come. What we plan to do is try to do some type of activity it may not be at this level but some type of activity every semester that will help to bring students and faculty and advisors together in a way that kind of breaks the ice, because over and over in the class I hear from students that they are a little hesitant to approach faculty. So we are going to try to do everything we can to make that a little bit easier, at least that initial contact. [30:16]

It’s going to be in the Forestry and Wildlife Sciences conference hall.

The other thing that I want to mention is that integral to the program is the existence of a faculty oversight committee, I think of it as the governing board basically and we’ve had one meeting this semester. We also agreed to plan to have one meeting per semester. To make it more flexible for the faculty members and also for students as they get their plans of study ready, we’ve got it set up where we can post on a password protected Web site the materials that the faculty committee members have to review so that we can streamline trying to get meetings with basically getting 12 to 13 people together can be a little bit difficult. That we hope will make it a little bit easier for the advising committee to work on this project.

Future plans, and I am always interested in ideas if any of you are interested in interdisciplinary and have additional ideas for things we can do to get the word out or to facilitate students moving into the major, if you let me know we will work on those. I plan to make some visits to either an initial visit or revisit to universities that have strong interdisciplinary degree programs. For example Arizona State is in the top 5. That’s on my list of universities to visit and spend some time with.

We are going to work on updating the brochure and the Web site. We’d like to make it have a page that will highlight some of the activities of some of our students and allow them to showcase some of the things they are doing, particularly in their capstone programs because we are having some really interesting proposals for capstone internships for service learning projects and thesis projects.

Again hosting events that bring students and faculty and the academic advisors together each semester. And last but not least is development on an online version of the intro course. The plan is to have that online and ready for this summer. So we met with Jim Groccia to get some input from him, we are working with Monica Deture’s office to get help there in terms of the development for the course. Of course that will have to go through the curriculum committee for approval.

That’s a very short update on the interdisciplinary committee. I’d like to say that it’s been a real pleasure to work with the people who advise the students, who work with the students and the contact with the students. We have some really interesting students who are looking at interdisciplinary, so I am enjoying the opportunity to work on this project. Thank you. If anybody has any questions I will be glad to address them.

Claire Crutchley, Chair:  Thank you Dr. Flynn.
The second information item is an update from the University Writing Committee. It will be presented by Margaret Marshall, Director of University Writing. [34:11]

Margaret Marshall, Director of University Writing: Hi, I brought you additional bookmarks. Feel free to take more for your class. We’ve added stickers that show our latest locations and times and I also brought you additional copies of the brochure that you should have gotten at the beginning of the semester.

I’m going to start by talking about the curricular initiative that you approved last April. This is what you asked for: significant writing instruction beyond the core courses designed by each program to meet their needs, so relevant to each individual department or discipline, following the principles developed by the committee on writing, and the periodic review by the committee to insure consistency. So we’ve been working on that.

Here are the principles again; these were shared last May. They are pretty simple this first time most departments and most programs have not had any trouble identifying more than one kind of writing that fits with their major, or more than one opportunity to practice. Most had no trouble identifying more than one audience, feedback and opportunities to revise where most departments seem to be concentrating their efforts because they realize that they are not necessarily giving students feedback and the opportunity to revise and then trying to develop some kind of assessment so that you know whether your efforts are working.

At this point we have approved 3 plans, those are on our Web site, Liberal Arts plans came in the first part of October, they are up for committee discussion this week if we are efficient we should be able to get comments back to those departments and programs early next week. And there are the dates for all of the others so by the end of the year, in fact by the first part of February we will have reviewed plans from every program or department and we’ve left ourselves a cushion for the possibility of revise and resubmits or to get bogged down in the inevitable, we didn’t get it all done. So I think we will be on target to implement with the incoming class of next year.

Meanwhile there are all of these other things that my office is doing to try to enhance the culture of writing and many of these are things that you asked about when we presented the resolution. So here’s the way we’ve been describing it. Our role is to support students, to support faculty, to celebrate and promote writing that already exists, to do research and assessment that’s related to writing, and of course to do outreach, you can’t be at Auburn for two minutes without knowing that you need to be reaching out to the community.

Quick update, support to the Writing Center. Obviously the Miller Writing Center is our primary vehicle for doing that as provost Mazey mentioned. We made the decision with lots of requests from faculty and students to open to everyone beginning this fall, so we serve graduate students as well as undergraduates. We now have a number of satellite centers, some of those are funded by departments and programs or colleges and are located in those buildings where their students can most easily access the service, but all of them work with the same kinds of principles, the same kinds of…we don’t do you homework for you, we help you to be a better writer.

There was a myth going around as I understand from Camp War Eagle counselors that you could just drop off your paper at the writing center and we would correct it for and you could come back and pick it up–and we don’t do that. There was a parallel myth that if students didn’t like the grade that they got from their instructor on their written paper that they could bring it to us and we would help you re-grade it–and we don’t do that either. So all of our satellite centers follow the same rules and procedures, all collect the same kind of data. I can tell you from our data collection in the spring that we know that students who made use of the writing center, even from the same core courses, got higher grades in those courses than students who did not make use of the writing center. And in fact students who use the writing center tend to already have higher grades than students who don’t use the writing center.

We are starting in the spring facilitated thesis or dissertation writing groups. These will be small groups of graduate students working on a thesis we hope in similar disciplines and similar stages in the process led by a trained facilitator who has already finished a dissertation or thesis. This is a pilot project and we’re doing this in cooperation with the graduate school and the graduate student council.

We’ve started what we call “Write and Bite” workshops, these are at lunch, you bring your sack lunch and we provide the dessert, and they are targeted for students. The first one is slated for November 4, “Avoiding Plagiarism” and we have one the pipeline on writing a blog, and another one in the pipeline that has been requested by both students and faculty on “how do I write and e-mail to my professor?”

Let me just call special attention to our Starbucks location that just opened this week. We’re very proud of that one.

Support to the faculty we’re doing this writing symposium, all of the seats have been filled since the first week of the semester, however we do take a wait list. We are also willing to repeat these seminar topics or others that you need if you want us to come to an individual department meeting or program meeting.

We’re working with the Biggio Center to do sessions for international students and scholars. Some of those have already happened and some of them are in the pipeline. We have a whole collection of faculty resources on our Web site.

We are celebrating and promoting writing. You may have seen that we did, entering freshmen could write an essay in response to the Common Book. Those winners have been announced. There is a similar contest in the spring open for all undergraduates. Cool prizes. In the spring they get to shadow the provost or President Gogue or the athletic director, I believe, for a day and also have the gift cards from the Bookstore.

Tomorrow is National Day of Writing. Launching on our Web site will be a video that the Graduate Student Council and Undergraduate Student Advisory Board put together. So watch for that on our Web site tomorrow, it’s a set of interviews with faculty and students and also on the concourse tomorrow we will be eliciting responses to the wonderful prompt: Writing Is… and you can say what ever you want. So find us on the concourse tomorrow between 10:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. [41:30]

We’ve been working with residential life to create a documenting writing at Auburn and documenting student life, one of the residential colleges has taken us up on that and is working with the archivist in the Library to actually record student experiences in the dorm this year, so we’re working with Hall M on that, and we have these profiles on student writers and faculty writers. So if you haven’t seen our profiles or you know somebody who would be a good profile, maybe you, please let us know and we’ll try to make that happen.

We joined the NSSE consortium on Colleges Studying writing and we did that in part to get a more detailed picture of what are student experiences here. Part of our longitudinal study is to repeat those same questions with faculty members so we will be able to actually compare faculty perspectives and student perspectives. I won’t bore you with all of that now but maybe in the spring I’ll come back and give you more of that data about what students and faculty say about practices of writing here.

I already spoke about the writing center usage study that we did and the longitudinal study that you’ve been getting e-mails from me saying, “please take our survey.” The next part of that longitudinal study is to collect documents like syllabi and actual assignments and even copies of comments on student papers, and then eventually we’ll zero in on a few faculty to follow in a close case study.

An outreach, we worked with the Truman Pierce Institute this summer and the office of outreach on two summer camps that we put writing into. There are plans to do this with another camp next summer. We are working with the Center of Arts and Humanities on a speaker series directed at undergraduates, Writing in the World and also worked with them on the writer’s conference. We’re working with the Encyclopedia of Alabama and the Art Museum to promote those as sites of real world practical writing. So if you have ideas of what you would like to do with those, or if you need ideas we can help you with that. And I talked about the Writing in the World Series, we’ll probably be inviting two alumni in the spring semester. And just today we worked out a plan with also the Center of Arts and Humanities, the College of Liberal Arts and the office of research to do a publication of faculty research, “Speaking to the Public on the Gulf Oil Spill Issue.”

So that’s me, and that’s the Office of University Writing and that’s what the writing committee has been doing. If there’s anything I can answer questions about I am happy to do so. [44:20] you are a quiet bunch today.

Claire Crutchley, Chair: Thank you Dr. Marshall?
That is the last item on the agenda.
Does anybody have any unfinished business? New business?
If there is no other business, then the meeting is now adjourned. Be sure to return the clickers on your way out. Thank you. [44:52]