transcript_11_16

Transcript Senate Meeting
November 16, 2010

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 November Senate meeting. Senate membership for this meeting is 86 Senators. Please click in to see if we have a quorum requires 44 senators. We will defer establishing a quorum until after the chair’s remarks.

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 from the Senator, guests are welcome to speak.

The first thing I would like to do today is to observe a moment of silence for Dr. Marie Wooten, our colleague and fellow senator. Thank you.

We are deferring the approval of the minutes from the October meeting.

So I will invite Dr. Gogue to come forward first to present the President’s remarks.

Dr. Gogue,president: Thank you very much, I’m delighted to be with you to share with you relative to Marie, I had a chance to talk with the Board of Trustees last week, I shared with them that we have a lot of people on campus, Marie had a sense of humor, that’s the part I will miss the most. She was a very special person.

I want to update you on a couple of things. Virginia Davis, college of Engineering was named as one of 19 in the U.S. for a White House related grant for an early career individual. Awfully proud of that, that’s a very special award. Want to thank all of you, we have two Rhodes Scholarship finalists and that’s not just a person or two that impact their life but a whole team of people that impact their lives. Two finalists is very good, we wish those two young students great luck in the coming weeks.

Forth thing I wanted to mention is that tomorrow we will announce a new Veteran’s and Resource Center. We are getting lots of veterans who are coming back to campus and this is a way to try to facilitate and help with paperwork and make that transition from the military back to academia as smooth as possible. One of the things that I’ve mentioned several times that I knew nothing about, there is a federal program, the stop loss program, it was approved for military folks that in essence served their time, signed up for 3 years or whatever, they served their time and ready to go back home, but the military forced them to stay 15 months beyond their enlistment periods. And the congress has agreed to pay 500 or 700 dollars per month in which they served beyond the time they agreed to. There is a deadline in early December so if any of you in classes and know returning veterans, less than half the money has been claimed and you have to have the form in by early December to be successful to receive that. It’s 3 or 4 hundred million dollars available to veterans.

Also wanted to mention that about a week ago we had a review by Moody’s and also by Standard and Poor. You usually do that when you begin new facilities and bonding. We did this as we looked at refinancing certain bonds the institution has. I guess to me the good news was they go through rather elaborate reviews of all of the financials and Auburn is one of the few universities in which their bond ratings were not affected by the last several years. So Don, you and your people, all of you, have done a great job in that area.

We received in the last few weeks, lots of very positive comments about the graduate certificate programs that a whole variety of programs have elected to look at, so I want to compliment you. It was only a couple of years ago that you approved allowing those programs and they’ve received a lot of attention, hopefully they will be successful. [5:13]

Those of you from Vet Medicine I want to say a hearty congratulations, you won a 24 million dollar award last week, so we are very excited about that. That is a tremendous opportunity for Vet Medicine. We expect a major announcement this week from Seaman’s Corporation. It will involve what will read to be a very large amount of money, it’s the transfer of software to the institution.

The final thing I want to mention is today around lunch it was announced that GE Aviation has chosen Auburn as it’s location. They had announced back in September that they were coming to Alabama and were looking at various sites. The 3 final sites that they spent time on were Tuscaloosa, Auburn, and either Alex City or Dadeville I’m not sure which, and we received word late Friday afternoon that they had chosen Auburn as their location. This is about 300 to 500 jobs that will come. It’s GE Aviation, they will actually make coatings that go on engines that make engines stealth. All the jobs will be classified security clearance types of jobs that they hire. That’s about as much as I can say, but we’re excited about it and I’d say particular thanks to the College of Engineering, particularly those in material science. They’ve had a huge impact on the decision that this company made. I’d be happy to respond to questions.

Wes Lindsay, Pharmacy Practice, senator: Can you just elaborate a little bit more on the Veteran’s Resource Center as far as who is sort of administering it and if we have students who may be looking for those services how we would direct them?

Dr. Gogue, president: I may ask the Provost to comment when she gets up, but it’s primarily to deal with services that veterans have in trying to make that transition, so it’s not only academic services but awareness of health services, counseling services that are available, it also deals with the timing of receiving what I’d call veteran’s benefits to be able to deal with the academic world sometimes they have to be enrolled for a period of time before they receive the money so how do we deal with those cash transactions. But the Provost might comment further on that.

Thank you all for being here today.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
I invite Dr. Mazey forward to update us on dean searches, and also to speak about the Veteran’s Center. [7:50]

Dr. Mazey, provost: Please excuse my voice, it’s not as bad as it sounds. We’ll have an open house tomorrow in 2238 Haley Center, that’s where the Veteran’s and Transfer Student Resource Center will be located. And the effort there is to coordinate the existing services on campus and Dr. Johnny Green will be the services coordinator. Pleas feel free to go over there anytime, but the open house is tomorrow.

You know we have one dean search currently underway and that is the dean search for the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction. I believe that they had a total of around 50 some candidates and that search committee is working then to decide on the number of candidates that they will interview for airport interviews. They probably will not do that until after the first of the year, so I don’t anticipate candidates on campus for that search until late January or early February.

Obviously we are all very sadden by the passing of Dean Wooten, she was a great colleague and a great friend to many of us, but we do need to make sure that COSAM moves on into the future now. We will be starting a search immediately, a national search, for that deanship. We will be using the search firm we used last year because her passing was so soon that search firm will be doing it at no cost, only their administrative services that they will be providing. The search committee has not been established yet, we will work on that in the next week but will probably have an announcement of that within the next week or two and use the advertisement that we actually used last year. In the interim Chuck Savarda, who is the chair of Geology and Geography, is going to serve as interim dean until we have a new dean named in the college. Any questions? Thank you for not asking questions.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you Dr. Mazey. Now I would like to go back to establishing a quorum. Could all the senators please click in. Currently we have 86 senators so we need 44 to establish a quorum. A quorum has been established.

I am going back to our first item on the agenda which is the approval of the minutes of the October 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.
A few remarks from the chair. The Senate committees are moving forward on several issues. The Faculty Research committee is examining compliance committee issues. Hopefully you have heard about this from your College representative. Both the Ad Hoc P&T change committee and the Faculty Handbook committee are working on proposed changes to P&T and other handbook revisions. They of course will come back to the Senate before being decided. The Teaching Effectiveness committee is working on new teaching evaluation forms. Many other committees are working and you will see proposals in later meetings.

In addition, the nominating committee for Senate Officers is working to find nominees for Senate Chair Elect and Secretary Elect. If you are interested in running for office or want to nominate someone please contact members of the committee. Laura Plexico is the chair of the nominating committee; other members are Sue Barry, Alice Buchanan, Dennis Devries, and Bruce Gladden. If you are asked to run, please consider this. Feel free to talk to any of the officers (or former officers) about the experience of being an officer. It can be a very rewarding experience.

Two announcements: The office of Instructional Technology has a new service for faculty. Student workers will now come to your office to help you with Blackboard, PowerPoint and other instructional technologies. Kathy McClelland is here if you have any questions about this service and she has left flyers in the back. Secondly, there is no Senate meeting in December, so the next Senate meeting with be January 11, the second day of Spring semester classes.

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?

James Godlstein, senator from English: You mentioned that the Teaching Evaluation committee was working on a new form. Does that mean we will not be keeping the one we’ve been piloting for the last couple of years?

Claire Crutchley, chair: They are working on a new form. I do not know the answer to that question. Other questions or comments? Thank you.

Today we have one action item and three information items. Our first action item is revisions to the Academic Honesty procedure. Ashley Nichols, vice president of the SGA presented an earlier version of this policy in the August meeting. Since that time there have been forums and she has worked with the Academic Honesty committee. A revised version is being presented jointly by the Ashley Nichols of the SGA and Sara Wolf representing the Academic Honesty committee. [14:50]

Sara Wolf representing the Academic Honesty committee: Good afternoon, thank you so much for having us here. On behalf of the Academic Honesty Committee and Dr. Charlotte Sutton, our chair, I would like to thank Ashley and the other members of the SGA for their hard work in presenting these revisions and then responding to the concerns the faculty had. We have had numerous meetings with them. They have been very responsive and what has impressed me personally the most is that these revisions were done at the instigation of the students, not because of anything that came about from anything that any faculty member said. Dr. Sutton does send her regrets that she could not be here today due to some teaching responsibilities but she has asked me to convey that she does fully support these measures as well as the fact that every member of the Academic Honesty Committee is supporting these measures as well. While not all committee members are without reservations they have all agreed to support these and give the revision a chance within a trial period so that we can see what if any possible other revisions might need to be made in the future. So having said that I’m going to turn it over to Ashley and let her let you know what those revisions were and how they went.

Ashley Nichols, vice president of the SGA: Good afternoon everyone. I’m Ashley Nichols and currently serving as vice president of the Student Government Association here at Auburn. And at the August meeting of this body I presented some proposed changes to the Academic Honesty Process. I’m here with you today to explain some of the changes that we’ve made since that August meeting in response to your concerns to your comments and also hopefully for your approval of this proposed process.

First I’d like to highlight some of the goals of these proposed changes so you really understand what it is we’re trying to accomplish with this new process. First we hope to streamline the reporting process for faculty making it easier for them to report a case of academic dishonesty by making that process more simple. We have to shorten the time period between reporting and resolution of the case. Often times it takes over a month or two to resolve a case and all that time that student and faculty member are kind of in limbo as to what that resolution is going to be we hope to shorten that time period.

Also one of the main goals is to reduce unofficial unrecorded sanctions. A lot of times cases of academic dishonesty are handled “in house” so to speak, they are handled in the classroom without being reported to the Office of the Provost. We hope to increase the number of cases that are reported to the Office of the Provost. This will hopefully increase our reporting rate and provide a more accurate reflection of violations across campus, and in doing so we will be able to make sure that repeat offenders are sanctioned appropriately. If a case of academic dishonesty is handled in the classroom and is not reported to the Provost and then the student does it again later and the same thing happens when they should be receiving more severe sanctioning, more severe punishments, it’s not happening. Sometimes they are getting off committing academic dishonesty multiple times without the university knowing that’s what’s happening.

As I mentioned earlier the proposal discussed at the August meeting of the faculty Sentate has been revised in response to the comments that the faculty issued at the August meeting and also at the Provost forum that was conducted on this topic. With these changes incorporated I’d like to hightlight that any faculty member who wishes to report an incidence of academic dishonesty can now choose to either follow the facilitated meeting process or the traditional hearing process. Obviously situations of academic dishonesty are distinct, they’re very different and a faculty member and a student are going to be able to know whether that case is going to be more productively resolved in a facilitated meeting or that it needs to go directly to a hearing and now the faculty member and the student are going to both have that right to opt out of this facilitated meeting. We want it to be a productive meeting that will resolve the case. If the faculty member has knowledge beforehand if their relationship with that student is not going to end up with a productive meeting, they need to be able to go directly to the hearing stage. This will basically change nothing other than the electronic reporting with regard to the process.

Now I’d like to overview the proposed process incorporating the facilitated meeting option as well. The SGA Code of Laws concerning academic dishonesty will remain unchanged with the exception of several procedural changes. Incidence of academic dishonesty will now be reported electronically on the Provost Web site, but the hearing stage of the process is going to remain exactly the same as it always has, nothing will change with regards to the hearing. The procedural changes do describe an insertion of an additional, an optional step now, between the reporting and hearing stages of the process. This optional step is a meeting of the student and the faculty member with a member of the Academic Honesty committee who will serve as a facilitator. Ideally the case will be resolved at this step without having to proceed to a hearing of the Academic Honesty committee.

As I mentioned the student and the faculty member will ideally agree upon a sanction at this facilitated meeting with a member of the Academic Honesty committee present, but there are a number of scenarios that will lead to a case proceeding to an academic honesty hearing. One of these obviously would be if the student and/or the faculty member choose to forgo the meeing with the facilitator, they choose that the hearing will be the best way to handle this. Also if they do engage in a facilitated meeting and the student and/or the faculty member are either not in agreement that academic dishonesty occurred or further they are not in agreement on an appropriate sanction if they are not in agreement of what that sanction should be they will need to go to the hearing. [21:03]

Also if the student does not agree to an appointment with a facilitator within the identified time frame the case will be referred to the committee for a decision and if the student has previously been found guilty of academic dishonesty and this has been recorded to the Office of the Provost then the student forgoes their right to meet in a facilitated meeting, they will go directly to the hearing stage.

Now I will highlight the changes that have been made specifically and call your attention to these. One of the most important is that this proposed process will be evaluated 3 years after implementation. Obviously we need to engage in an evaluation process after we’ve implemented this in order to make sure that these goals that I mentioned earlier are actually being achieved. Or if there are certain things we need to change about the process in order to achieve those goals or if we need to go back to the traditional way of handling academic dishonesty at Auburn. During that time you can, any faculty member, any member of the Auburn University community can send any concerns or comments or suggestions about the process to the Office of the Provost, those will be kept on file and will be used in the evaluation process 3 years after it’s implemented.

Further the Academic Honesty Committee will review the recommended sanctions agreed upon in the facilitated meeting and forward their recommendation on to the Office of the Provost. This is really an effort to ensure that sanctioning remains consistent across campus. I know that was a major concern of faculty and it is of our concern as well. It will be the role of the facilitator to stress during the meeting to both parties that the committee and the Provost will need to sign off on this decision before it actually takes effect. The facilitator, the member of the committee, will also be informing both parties of what types of sanctions are going to be approved in this particular case. For example if a student has plagiarized their entire paper or a significant part of it, the Academic Honesty Committee now would generally give that student an “F” in the course, generally. And the facilitator will inform both parties, this is what’s happened and it’s what is generally approved you might want to consider this, they are going to stress that so hopefully the case can be resolved there without it being overturned by either the committee or the Office of the Provost. Also the provost will receive and consider the report of the committee and determine the action to be taken and when that differs from the opinion of the committee, the committee chair will be notified before the charged student is notified that the decision has been overturned.

As I mentioned earlier, both the student and the faculty member will have the right to bypass this facilitated meeting and go directly to the hearing stage of the process if they feel that is most appropriate. Academic Honesty committee members are not going to be required to serve as facilitators. We understand that the role of an instructor sitting on an Academic Honesty hearing panel that that role is very distinct from serving as a facilitator, facilitating an agreement. Those roles are distinct and we understand that some faculty members may feel that they are not equipped or that they’re just not comfortable with that role it’s just not what they are looking to do while serving on this committee. While we received enough support from the Academic Honesty committee to know that there are members of the committee that will want to engage in the role of a facilitator, some may not now some may not in the future and we want to give them the right to opt out of that.

It’s currently preferred that the same grouping of academic honesty committee members hear linked cases. For example if a professor is reporting multiple cases that occurred in the same classroom or they have the same evidence, the cases are considered to be linked cases. If that’s the case the same grouping of academic honesty committee members generally hear each of those cases now. The same facilitator would be assigned to each of these, but I’d also have to say that this might be a situation where the faculty member would consider requesting the case be sent directly to the hearing without engaging the facilitated meeting process. This is a good example of when that might occur. [25:07]

These next few slides you saw at the August meeting if you were present will show you what it’s going to look like on the Provost’s Web site when an instructor goes online to report an incidence of academic dishonesty. First the policy will be up there and then at the bottom of the screen you would click a link that takes you to the Reporting Form, there are some required fields there which will extract some information about the faculty member’s contact information and the student’s contact information and also what happened, what the situation is. And they can upload directly any pertinent evidence, be that a syllabus or information that they gave the student about academic dishonesty previously to avoid the situation or the plagiarized paper if that’s the situation. All of that can be uploaded directly without the faculty member having to draft multiple drafts of a letter.

Also you noticed on the agenda on the University Senate Web site in addition to the document that explains the changes we are proposing for the process there was also an article that highlighted some of the outcomes after the University of Georgia implemented this same model, this facilitated model in the year 2000 and it really showed that it did achieve some of the goals that we are aiming to achieve here. One of those that the University of Georgia saw after two years was that faculty members began reporting cases of academic dishonesty at twice the rate that they had under the old policy process. Here at Auburn we generally see about 90 cases a year, and UGA during those two years actually heard about 300 cases. Obviously that is a significant increase in reporting and that’s what we’d like to see because we do know that cases often go unreported.

Cases that used to take up to 3 months to resolve took an average of 7 days to resolve. And also during facilitated discussions, I found this to be very significant, 65% of students admitted their guilt during that meeting, 28% of the charges were dropped, and actually 6% of the cases that were attempted to be handled during the facilitated meeting even progressed to the hearing stage of the process. Sanctions agreed to in facilitated meetings at the University of Georgia were at least as severe as those imposed under the old policy so they really didn’t see a problem with the severity of sanctions decreasing. Also faculty evaluations for the process were overwhelmingly positive. I thought that that information about how things turned out at the University of Georgia might be useful to you. That brings me to the end of my presentation so I would love to answer any of your questions and hear any of your comments.

Sarah Wolf, member of Academic Honesty Committee: I move for the adoption of the proposed change.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Since this was adopted from a committee it does not require a second. We will open the floor for discussion.

Annette Kluck, senator for Special Ed Rehabilitation Counseling/School Psychology: I’m from a mostly graduate level department and one of the things we had questions about was it does sound that ultimately that it would either involve the facilitator recommending perhaps some resolution or going to the committee. We in our department have several programs that have national accrediting bodies that deal with unique ethical situations we are dealing with, such as psychologists, counselors, that sort of thing and our national accrediting bodies sometimes are given sanctions that we need to follow rather than following something that would be appropriate for undergrads. For example we have to have certain remediation steps set in place according to our accrediting body. So I am just curious how this policy fits with that model?

Sarah Wolf, member of Academic Honesty Committee: Let me just clarify one thing that you said and then I have to ask a clarifying question for you. One of the things that I think I heard you say was that the facilitator would recommend a sanction, and that is not the role of a facilitator. The facilitator’s role is to make sure that everybody is hearing the same thing, everybody is on the same page and to provide any factual information about policies and procedures that either party may not be aware of.

The idea of that facilitation is that the student and the faculty member would jointly come to an agreement given certain kinds of information that have happened in the past.

Regarding what I need for clarification is, can you give me, when you say your accrediting body requires certain kinds of remediation are you saying that graduate student Joe Brown comes in and turns in a master’s thesis that is 75 to 100 percent plagiarized, that your accrediting body would require remediation rather than a sanction by the University? Or are you talking about remediation in terms of content learning?

Annette Kluck, senator for Special Ed Rehabilitation Counseling/School Psychology: No It’s more that what ever we say we are going to do in our program policies absolutely have to be followed. So if the committee were to come up with some other outcome than what is set in our policies it would be problematic because we wouldn’t be adhering to… so we outline what happens when you do various unethical, which would include certainly cheating, behaviors that we have to follow the set procedure within our own department or within our own program even as to how those are handled.

Sarah Wolf, member of Academic Honesty Committee: Okay, I would imagine that, tell me if this tracks with what you are understanding that ethical issues beyond academic dishonesty are not the purview of this committee, so those kinds of things would not even come here. But academic dishonesty being reported would be the purview of the committee and the facilitator and it does not seem unreasonable to me, speaking on my own and as a member of the committee but not for the committee, that if the recommended sanction was in line with what your professional organization said, and it was not completely and totally outside the realm of possibilities on the campus and the faculty member and the student agree to that, I don’t see that that would be necessarily a problem. There have been cases in the past where faculty members have made outrageously extreme recommendations, both too lenient and too strict for any given kind of a thing, and the committee has brought everybody in toward the middle. If your accrediting agencies said that there needed to be something along those lines that was way outside the norm on the campus that probably would end up leaving the facilitated meeting and headed to the hearing section.

Annette Kluck, senator for Special Ed Rehabilitation Counseling/School Psychology: I guess that’s my question with the hearing, when there’s some kind of remediation that’s mandated or that has already been specified for the program, there’s not necessarily a lot of wiggle room for the program to adopt a different outcome from that hearing. If that makes sense.

Sarah Wolf, member of Academic Honesty Committee: I’m hearing the word remediation and I think I’m hearing it differently than you are using it, so I…How do you feel about that (to Ashley).

Ashley Nichols, SGA vice president: I don’t see how these proposed changes will affect that in any way. If the faculty member feels that they obviously don’t think that what is going to happen in the facilitated meeting then they would opt to go directly to a hearing, but I feel like that that is something the faculty member and that department would notify the Office of the Provost that there are other things that we need to consider when resolving this case. I don’t think that these proposed changes would have any bearing on that at all seeing that you can engage in the traditional hearing process the way it’s always been handled at Auburn. And from what I understand the traditional hearing process would not create any problems for those specifications that are required by the department or anything else that would have any bearing on that type of case. I don’t think that the proposed changes are anything that this would necessarily affect. If that helps. [34:00]

Claire Crutchley, chair: Other comments or questions?

Robert Agne, senator, department of Communication and Journalism: A couple of questions, one, I may have missed in the document, but it’s a procedural question, does the facilitation meeting take place in lieu of the meeting that is currently in place that the teacher has with the student, informing the student that I’m going to report academic honesty. It’s not in lieu of, so where does it find itself in the process?

Sarah Wolf: Currently the process is discovery, meet with the student, send a letter with evidence, have a hearing.

Robert Agne, senator, department of Communication and Journalism: By way of the new reporting.

Sarah Wolf: The optional loop in that would be discovery, meet with the student, (send a letter with evidence,) facilitated meeting, and then a resolution.

Robert Agne, senator, department of Communication and Journalism: So it’s an optional addition to the process. Second question is, you mentioned that the facilitators role is to make sure everyone is hearing the same thing, understanding the same thing, these are the nuances of the procedure that you might not know, that sort of thing. It strikes me that the facilitator, and this is and observation, it strikes me that the facilitator at the end of the meeting or during the meeting when sanctions are proposed, that facilitator can say, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” Yes?

Sarah Wolf: The facilitator would be able to say, “that does not track with past practice, that does not track with past precedent…

Robert Agne, senator, department of Communication and Journalism: So it can be vetoed right then and there.

Sarah Wolf: No, not necessarily. That does not…that’s a new sanction that no one has ever heard of but the facilitator will communicate that agreed upon sanction to the committee and the committee when they review it.

Robert Agne: Not without advising that.

Sarah Wolf: Exactly. So the facilitator says, kind of like when you’re driving through a new town, “you might want to slow down here,” but that driver can still drive 55 in a 35 and then when the police pulls them over they are still going to get a ticket. So the facilitator can go I don’t think that sanction…it may not work, it’s not in line with what’s happened in the past, but if both faculty member and the student agree that’s what we want to recommend then that recommendation can go forward and the committee when they do their review can look at it and say, no. Or, yes, we’ll go along with it. But then it gets reviewed again at the associate provost’s office, and the Provost can look at it and say, no way or yes we’ll uphold that. [36:59]

Robert Agne: The next question is who runs this meeting? Who owns the meeting?

Sarah Wolf: My understanding of it is that the university ombudsman will be the primary person in charge of training the facilitators and that the facilitator’s role is not as chair of the meeting.

Robert Agne: So it’s the accuser that runs the meeting? And says thank you for coming this is why we’re here. This is what I propose: this is what I…the accuser then runs the meeting. Does he or she not? I think that’s an important thing.

Ashley Nichols, SGA vice president: It is and obviously those types of questions will be handled in the training when the university ombudsman, Dr. Wohl, trains the academic honesty committee members on how to do this but the facilitator will be there to introduce and give an overview of what we’re doing here what the procedures are. I think the facilitator would be the one to open up and lay everything out and say this is what we are hoping to achieve here, this is how we are going to do it, what do you propose, what do you have to say and then they start talking.

Robert Agne: So it’s the facilitator runs the meeting? If that’s the case then the facilitator owns the meeting.

Claire Crutchley, chair: I recognize the senator on the other side.

Stuart Pope, senator from Nursing: I call for the question.

Claire Crutchley, chair: The question has been called to stop debate. To call the question requires a two-thirds vote. Would everyone please vote, this is not voting on the resolution this is voting on whether to call the question. A is yes I call the question, B would be let the discussion continue. That does not appear to be two-thirds, A=37, B=24. So the conversation may continue.

Jim Wohl, ombudsperson: In reference to comments, it’s an operative and important question, who owns the meeting. From a facilitator’s approach or training for a meeting such as this, the starting place for this is to get away from that language of who owns the meeting, but I appreciate the question and why it’s being asked. What you describe Sarah is pretty accurate. In a facilitate meeting like these generally the facilitator lays out a process for how that discussion or conversation would go. It can take a variety of different forms as an example, both parties can make a statement in an uninterrupted fashion for example followed by some questions or clarifying questions by the facilitator, followed by questions from the other party. And then that’s followed by the other party, discussing their point of view or perspective on the situation in an uninterrupted fashion. The facilitator’s role is to manage that process if you will, if pressed, who owns the meeting, ideally it would be both parties that won that meeting not the facilitator. The facilitator is in charge of managing the process. The content and the outcome would be owned by the two parties that are participating in the conversation. [40:51]

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you. Seeing no other comments or questions let’s call for the vote.
Check to make sure your clickers are turned on. All those in favor press A, all opposed press B, Abstain C. A=52, B=6, C=3. This just calls for a majority. The vote carries.

Ashley Nichols, SGA vice president: Thank you all for you time and assistance during this process I really appreciate it.

Claire Crutchley, chair: The first information item is an update on the Honors College. It will be presented by Jim Hansen, director of the Honors College. [42:06]

JimHansen, director of the Honors College: Good afternoon everybody. First off I’d like to thank the Senate leadership for giving me the time and opportunity to give you this update on the Honors College, which as you may know has undergone a lot of change over the last 3 or 4 years. Most of the changes have been very good ones, very positive ones, as my opening slide indicates. In the past 4 years the Honors College without lowering its standards at all has quadrupled the size of its freshman class instituted a new curriculum model that further enhances honors education while enabling more students to complete the program and successfully recruit top students. Students who have been choosing Auburn over such lead schools as Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, Miami of Ohio, UC Berkley, and Yale, to site some specific examples from this year’s freshman class. All of this has happened hand-in-hand with priorities and goals laid out for Honors in the university’s strategic plan, which call for enriching learning opportunities for our strongest students and also called for us to develop a new model for Honors that keeps the strengths we’ve traditionally enjoyed in Honors education here on our campus, but add to those strengths with some of the freshest and best ideas in Honors education nationally.

As you see in this chart for many years our numbers were stable at about 250 incoming freshman students per year. Then you see what happened when the university instituted its merit-based scholarship program in 2007. Clearly these new scholarships made us tremendously more competitive with peer institutions in attracting top students, many of them from states and regions of the country that rarely before had Auburn University on the radar screen. This fall over 1,000 of some 4,000 students who came in the freshman class came in as honors students. We did not expect that many to be truthful, but consistent with the strategic plan enough new capacity had been built into Honors that we were able to accommodate all of them pretty well.

This growth that you see has been quite dramatic has not diluted the strength of our cohort by bringing in less qualified applicants. That’s not what has happened both in terms of ACT, SAT scores, and grade point average the students coming into Honors this year and in previous years were higher achievers with an average score of this year’s freshman class of about 31.5 average ACT and a GPA over 4 point. [45:12] So what we now have with the Honors College is an even more powerful magnet for attracting the best and the brightest to Auburn. And we believe the Honors College and I hope your do as well that the presence of these students at Auburn University raises the bar in every classroom and benefits not just Honors students but the overall quality of the academic experience on our campus.

Next year as you can see at the end of the chart here the Honors College will be benefiting for the first time from a program fee approved by the Board of Trustees to be charged initially just to the fall 2011 incoming class of Honors students then each year after that adding a new class so that by year 4 all Honors students will be paying the fee with the amount of the fee going down each year by class form $250 per semester, paid by freshmen, to $200 per semester paid by seniors. And this will give us a new source of revenue that we’ll need to do justice to the highly motivated and talented students that we enroll in the college. You can also see that we’re projecting enrollment of about 850 and that is what we projected our enrollment to be last year and what we thought it was going to be until there was a very late surge in May when a number of presidential scholars and national merit finalists didn’t want to turn away decided they were coming to Auburn. One basis for this projection also is that we have increased our GPA minimum requirement from 3.5 to 3.75 which seems fully justified to us because as you might have heard that the average grade point average of the entire freshman class, honors and non-honors this past year, was something like 3.77. So given that it didn’t make much sense for us to keep 3.5 as a minimum GPA for Honors admission. [47:08]

The strategic plan wanted the Honors College to enrich learning opportunities for our academically strongest students and what I’m going to try to do quickly is show you some of the ways we are doing it. Certainly we moved to develop a more diverse and expanded curriculum we’ve also created some new and enhanced programming within the college. It’s academic, but it doesn’t involve courses so much, so I won’t say too much about the programming. And then third we’ve tried to add greater flexibility into our requirements so we can get more students to finish their requirements. But before we look at what we’ve done let me briefly show you this slide which will remind you of the general character of our old program which you see outlined here. You can see that our curriculum traditionally has been a university core based curriculum with honors versions of all the core courses or as many of them that we could staff. There has always been a distinction between junior and senior programs. You can see how the hours earned differed from one program to the other and how the senior program was really based on the writing of an honors thesis. There was one option to that, one and only one, and that was to take double the number of hours and to do them as contract courses. Perhaps some of you have taught courses that are regular courses, individual contracts with students with additional assignments to, in a sense, honorize the course.

You can see the number of hours that were required to complete both programs and one of the big concerns we had about the traditional program is represented in this slide. We could show this problem that we faced in different ways, but this shows you the class of 2005 incoming and you can see that was back when we had an enrollment of about 250 students and half of them finished the junior program and a very small number were finishing the senior program. So there was significant attrition that we wanted to address and we felt that one of the main reasons for this attrition had to do with the fact that the senior program really required the thesis. There were a lot of disciplines on campus. One example would be engineering where at the senior year the requirements to fulfill the major involve internships or senior design projects. A thesis does not really conform very well with what would be done in the major otherwise and to expect a student to fulfill the requirements in a lot of our majors and still do an honors thesis just turned out to be asking too much. And we had a lot of students just dropping out because they just didn’t see how they could do it all. So there were other factors but we thought that was the main factor, so in reformulating our curriculum and our requirements we were looking to build more flexibility into the program. [50:06]

Here you can see a very brief outline of the new Honors program as it could be called. You can see there is a slight reduction in the number of hours that is required. There is a more diverse menu of courses to be taken and we have essentially eliminated the distinction between junior and senior programs and tried to create a more seamless program that moves from freshman to senior year. It gives students several different and more manageable options for finishing all of the requirements of the program, including what we now call the apogee experience which is our capstone experience and giving several different options as to how that final stage of the program could be completed. I will tell you a little bit about that more in a second.

Just briefly some slides to show you how our curriculum has expanded we are offering 3 different honors interdisciplinary symposia including the Human Odyssey course which has flourished and done extremely well on this campus for years. We now have two interdisciplinary courses that are being taught and we are working on ways to build the enrollment for those courses. We have a series of honors lyceums, some of the topics, you can see here, that have been covered in recent lyceums, these are special topics. They are one credit hour courses that are graded SU, but they prove to be very popular with our students. We also have honors book clubs, which have been publicized around campus, president Gogue, Mary Ellen Mazey, a number of Deans, a number of other notables on campus have thought it would be a great idea to get some folks that normally cannot get in the classroom because of their busy schedules to bring them in and give them an opportunity to meet with our honors students and vice versa. Regular faculty is fine too if you are interested in doing honors book club, it’s just a one hour SU graded class and everyone that’s been involved in them both from the student and the teacher side, have really enjoyed the experience.

We also have something now we call honors forum and this is a way for us, another one credit hour class, to get students to engage all the various events that are on campus, lecture series, exhibits, film series. Students who that this one hour class have to attend a minimum of 6 events on campus, it’s a nice way that we’ve done audience development. If you see somewhat larger audiences at some of the events it’s because honors students have a little more initiative to be there. So the honors forum has been a very successfully type of new course as well. And together these are what we call honors participation, the lyceums, the book clubs, the forums, the freshman exploration–which is an orientation for honors students. We require now in our new program that they have a minimum of 4 hours of honors participation over the course of their 4 years. They don’t have to take one every year, but that’s how most of them will be doing it.

We also have added honors seminars at the 3000 level, and these are special topics seminars and I’ve given you at least some imagery that shows you some of the topics, some of the special topics that have been covered or will be covered in the spring semester. Latino immigration into the southeastern part of the United States, the Gulf oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a very interesting course on technological design from movable type to the iPad is being offered, a special course on sustainability is being offered, these are at the 3000 level and as you’ll see in the next slide, one way to fulfill the final part of our program is what we call the apogee path. Where instead of doing a thesis or some other type of project you can take two of these 3000 level seminars and fulfill the final part of your honors program in that way.

The other option is what we call the apogee project and that can be an honors thesis and for a lot of disciplines an honors thesis is still the way to go, but we also have a range of other options that we are making available as part of the apogee project. The next slide will show you that. Instead of just doing the thesis or doing twice as many hours in the contract courses, now it can be a variety of things. We want to work hand-in-hand with the departments and the faculty mentors of the students. So whatever they are doing in their disciplines to fulfill their senior requirements, we want to work with that and we want to just nudge it a little, ratchet it up a little bit, do something to honorize that experience that they are going to be doing in their senior year anyway. We think this is still a legitimate honors experience and we think it’s a way that we will get a lot more students to finish. We also think if we look at the class of 2014 and how they compare to current class or what’s graduated before, that besides a lot more students finishing we’re going to have a lot more students doing undergraduate research, getting involved in community engagement, getting involved in service learning. Of course this is happening in the non-honors section of the campus as well, so honors will be very active in that. We’re going to have more study abroad emphasis and not just to European locals, but we’re going to be trying to push and create programs that will get Auburn students to many other parts of the world.

I don’t have a slide for this but I think one very interesting idea is also to get Auburn students to take the undergraduate research emphasis, take the study abroad emphasis, lets have undergraduate students and a lot of them will be honors students, I think, and have them do research in a foreign country, at a foreign institute, a foreign academy. So you can blend these two experiences in some really good ways. [56:18]

We are also doing alternative spring breaks, we have one planned for this spring which will be Costa Rica. So we plan to have one of those every year. And I think we’re obviously showing up very well, as president Gogue said, we have two finalists for the Rhodes Scholarship this year. They are interviewing this year, this very week at the end of the week, we will have one in Birmingham and one in Los Angeles. If you haven’t met Dr. Paul Harris, he is the associate director for national prestigious scholarships on campus. I’m not afraid I’ve been reminded that on my tombstone it will read “He hired Paul Harris,” because Paul has done an unbelievable job. To do well in this area which is highly competitive nationally you’ve got to be identifying students early, you’ve got to be nuturing students, you’ve got to be taking them through mock interviews, and all the different experiences that get them ready for these interviews. And I think Paul’s put together a program that is really starting to pay off in big ways.

Just a couple of other points. We’ve put forward and had approved new distinctions for Honors graduation, so if you go through all of this let’s make sure that the students get the credit for all the work that they’ve done. So we have improved the distinctions that will come to those students at graduation. And we haven’t done all of this on our own. You might remember, certainly if you’ve been in the Senate for a while, that Bonnie McEwan chaired a taskforce that presented to the Senate outstanding ideas for reformulating the Honors College and many of the things that I’ve described come directly out of the recommendations of that committee. And we also have an advisory council made up of faculty members from 5 or 6 different colleges, and we meet with them and bounce off ideas and get their reaction and so they’ve been very important to what we’ve been doing as well.

So in conclusion, we really have now arrived at a point where there is a new model for Honors at Auburn. It’s largely complete and we’re testing it and seeing how everything is working this year. Students seem to be happy with the expanded and more diverse curriculum, with the new programming, with the greater flexibility, and virtually every aspect of our program. When I say: “Be the best for the best,” we obviously want to keep attracting as many great students to Auburn as we can. So we want to continue to play that role. We also think we have a shot at being the very best Honors College of all the Land-Grant Institutions, that’s our goal, and one of the very best of any kind. So that’s where we have set our sites. There are some challenges and I want to be absolutely honest about those. Class sizes and honors sections are growing a bit beyond what we would like. When you have all of these numbers, you’ve got to put them in seats and the colleges and the departments that teach honors classes, what’s their capacity, what can they give the honors program? COSAM and Liberal Arts in particular because of their involvement in the core, the honors burden falls most heavily upon them, so that’s going to be a challenge so the university’s going to have to continue to face. We also need to have healthy staffing of our new interdisciplinary courses. You need to regularly recruit faculty who are interested in doing this sort of team-teaching out of their areas of specialty and out of their comfort zones, so that’s going to be something of a challenge for us as well. [59:57] But we are pretty optimistic we think things even though things have, couldn’t have predicted 5 years ago I didn’t know I would be facing the kind of growth in enrollment that we’ve had, but fortunately we’ve been able to adjust to it fairly well and plan for it a little bit in advance and we’re okay. We’ve got those challenges as I say and because of financial issues that are not going to go away the program fee is going to help us. We are very optimistic of what the honors education is bringing to Auburn and what it will continue to bring in the future.
I’m happy to answer any questions or hear any comments. [1:00:47]

Bill Sauser, management department, senator: Delighted with your presentation and the exciting things that are happening, I am very encouraged about the Honors Program. The one question I had, I was wondering if there was any concern that the implementation of a program fee might keep highly talented but limited means students from participating in the honors program?

Jim Hansen, director of the Honors College: Well we certainly have given that thought, nothing is perfectly good one way or the other, the revenue source is awfully important to us. Most of the students that come in are on awfully nice scholarships and to expect them to come up with $500 a year doesn’t seem to be asking too much. And I have checked with the scholarship office and if students have scholarship money that exceeds their need in other ways it can be applied and cover this amount. I wasn’t sure about that until I heard about that from the scholarship office. So it may be that some of them will get this covered through their scholarships. We’ll have to see how it works out. If it turns away too many students we will have to at least think more about it but the demand for coming in has been such that we’ve turned a lot of students away. We turn those away that don’t meet our minimum requirements that maybe miss them by a little bit. We’d like to have them in or consider them anyway but we just don’t have the capacity to do it. It’s clear, I gave a presentation to the Board of Trustees on Friday and it was pretty clear that they wanted and perhaps a little concerned that if our numbers go down from 1,000 to 850 maybe that wasn’t a good thing, they didn’t want us to be turning away students. The worst thing we could do is to bring them in and then not have a good program for them. That’s the nightmare that we’ve created a smoke and mirrors, we’ve done a lot of great things but it’s not really there to deliver. Paul and I and Cathy Maddox, our other associate director, we work hard to make sure we’ve got a solid product when they get on campus. Thank you.

Claire Crutchley, chair: The second information item is information on e-textbooks. It will be presented by Bliss Bailey, Executive Director of the Office of Information Technology.

Bliss Bailey, Executive Director of the OIT: Good afternoon. I just wanted to give you a brief introduction to a new service that we are going to be able to make available to faculty on campus called Faculty Instant Access. It’s from a company called CourseSmart. CourseSmart has been in the electronic textbook business for a while. CourseSmart is actually a consortium of different publishing companies that have come together to try and put together a large library of text and make them available to students and campuses. You can see a lot of the big names in textbook publishing are presented here are represented and some of the smaller companies have also joined the consortium. They attest to represent or be able to produce 90% of textbooks that are commonly used in North America.

They approached us back in the spring and wondered if we might want to participate with them in a pilot project. I took the information to Dr. Winn and we talked to Dr. Flynn and we talked to a few other folks and decided that it might be a good thing for us. The pilot project is to make available this entire library of e-textbooks or electronic textbooks to faculty at the university for free. They have ulterior motive, their motive is the publishing industry spends about 200 million dollars a year shipping examination copies of textbooks to faculty members. They’d really like to cut their expenses and they felt that if they could develop this electronic infrastructure and make the entire library available to faculty members then faculty members might not need as many hard copies of the textbooks and they could cut their shipping costs and faculty would have access to a wider variety of textbooks.

They came to us because they needed the assistance of the Office of Information Technology because it was important to them that only faculty member got access to the entire library of textbooks. Through the facilities that we have and AU Access and the way we make different service available to different types of users on campus we were able to work with them and integrate their product, the Faculty Instant Access product, into AU Access. So here’s what you’ll see as of today, under the faculty services tab that this CourseSmart icon is available and if you would like to take a look at this you click on the CourseSmart icon then you’ll be taken to this initial sign up screen. They want you to enter a password, please don’t use your Auburn University password. Choose one of those passwords you use for Amazon or your off campus e-mail, but don’t use your Auburn University password here. And the reason that they have this password here is there are other ways that you can access this system besides AU Access. If you come through AU Access you will never have to enter a password again after the first time, but if for example you download their iPod or iPad app and access their system from you iPad this is the password you would enter. Once you are into the system then you have access to a search facility and you build what’s called a virtual bookshelf. You can search by ISBN numbers, titles, key words, or authors and then you can narrow down your search. There is some advance search capabilities to make sure you are finding all the books you are looking for or find only the books you are looking for and once you have narrowed down your choices then you can choose to add those to your electronic bookshelf. The way you do that is you click on that big green button that says request an exam copy. They won’t actually ship you a physical exam copy, but what they will do is collect a little bit more information and basically figure out if you are teaching a class in a curriculum that makes sense for that particular book and approve that and give you electronic access to that book. Now, I don’t think they do a lot of tight matching there I think if you ask for access to pretty much any book they are going to give it to you. My experience here has been that I got access to the books in a matter of minutes.

I spoke to the developers of this and it’s my opinion that this is an extra unnecessary extra step. [1:08:19] They agreed with me, other people had raised this issue as well and they actually decided to eliminate this function. We don’t know when this function change will trickle into the technology but they decided that golly if we’ve authenticated you, we know you are a faculty member and you just want to look at these books then you shouldn’t have to go through this extra step. So I hope to see that green button go away pretty soon.

Once you have access to books and added to you virtual bookshelf, then you can do more detailed searching. For example you’re looking for an intermediate accounting text, you may add a variety of intermediate accounting texts, and you can do key word searches and compare sections of the books that deal with those particular key words. The system is fairly simple. If you can buy a book on Amazon or if you can use ebay you shouldn’t have any trouble using this. If you do have question though, Kathy McClelland will be supporting this through the Instructional Multimedia Group. We think this has the potential to save you some time and get you access to more textbooks than you might normally see and also get you accustomed to what electronic textbooks will look like in the future. One of the nice things about this is these electronic textbooks are formatted the same way that the physical textbook is, so when you go to class you have a mixture of students who have an electronic textbook that’s provided by CourseSmart or the other students have the hard copy textbooks. If you tell them to go to page 322 and look at the graph on the left, they will all be able to go to page 322 and see the same material. We think this will be a good thing and give you an opportunity to have access to things you might not have had access to in the past. Questions or comments? [1:10:21]

Rebecca Pindzola, filling in for my department’s senator, Communication Disorders: You said don’t use your Auburn e-mail or password.

Bliss Bailey, Dir. OIT: They will have your Auburn e-mail but don’t use your password. We don’t like you using your university password in other venues, we just think that we’re special and we want the password that you use for Auburn University resources to be unique. I don’t think the CourseSmart people are going to sell your passwords, I just think it’s a best practice to use different passwords for different things.

Rebecca Pindzola, filling in for my department’s senator, Communication Disorders: I just wondered if was going to be blocked or something

Bliss Bailey, Dir. OIT: No.

Rebecca Pindzola, filling in for my department’s senator, Communication Disorders: Okay, thank you.

Bob Locy, biological sciences, not a senator: You covered this and I just missed it, I apologize if that’s the case. What happens when a student does an electronic book like this and let’s say 3 semester later they’ve got a question when they want to refer back to their freshman biology text?

Bliss Bailey, Dir. OIT: First of all I am not promoting electronic textbooks for use by students in this format necessarily. What I’m really promoting here is this Faculty Instant Access program. Now I think electronic textbooks are coming like a freight train, but to specifically answer that question, the way most electronic textbooks work is it’s a rental. So there is a term usually set out, you see these are for 360 days, so that fee if a student were to buy or rent access to this material that material would be available to them for 360 days. Generally the terms are 180 days or 360 days. That’s appropriate in some courses, it’s not appropriate in other courses, so I think that’s up to the faculty members to determine.

Bob Locy, biological sciences, not a senator: So is there any format we can use to communicate this to the publishers of these things because I think that’s a real problem. Personally I think electronic books are a good idea, but the issue is how do you deal with a book that you are going repeatedly want to have access to or that you might not even know you’ll need to have access to down the road.

Bliss Bailey, Dir. OIT: In the discussions I’ve had with publishers I think there is some flexibility in term of that term. They really seem to have a hard time letting go of that term limit, but exactly what that term turns out to be I think there is some flexibility there. I think that sort of feedback, which I’ll be happy to carry back to the publishers, is good. And I think what we’ll see over time is that eventually they will adopt more of a Kindle model where once you’ve bought it you’ve bought it, or at least stretch those limits out significantly.

Bob Locy, biological sciences, not a senator: Thank you. [1:13:47]

Claire Crutchley, chair: Thank you. The last information item is on the SACS Quality Enhancement plan Exploratory Committee. The chair of the committee, Sushil Bhavnani will present this information.

Shushil Bhavnani, chair of SACS QEPE Committee: Thank you for giving us this opportunity to come and tell you about the work of this Quality Enhancement plan Exploratory Committee. It’s only recently been constituted, we met for the first time in September and it is part of the SACS requirement and to give you the broader context of the entire SACS reaffirmation process I’d like to call on Drew Clark from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.

Drew Clark, Office of Institutional Research and Assessment: Thank you Sushil and good afternoon. I’d like to say just a word of thanks to Sushil to agreeing to chair this committee. My job is to try to help give you a quick orientation to what’s meant by the term quality enhancement plan. About 3 years from today in change the delegates of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) will gather in a giant hotel room and a few members of that group will have really sweaty palms, because there will be a reading of each of the institutions that are coming up for accreditation and a reading of the status of that. So about 3 years from now our accreditation status will be announced.
About 2 years from now we will ship off to SACS all of the evidence that we have to show that we’re in compliance with their standards. And that means that we have to get started now to pull it together.

The last time we were reaffirmed by SACS was in 2004 and we’re up again in 2013. Between those two dates the standards changed. We were literally the last institution to be reaffirmed under the old standards, and we have some learning to do. The good news is the standards have been shortened, there are fewer in number, we have about 100 responses to make. The bad news if you can call it that is that there are new tricks that we have to learn. I’ll call attention to just one that’s unique to the Southern Association and will be a first time for us. Core requirement 2.12 calls for the institution to have a quality enhancement plan that includes broad-based institutional process identifying key issues emerging from institutional assessment and focuses on learning outcomes or the environment supporting learning and accomplishing the mission of the institutions. Is that clear?

Quality enhancement plan is designed to be a special project that the institution undertakes arising out of information that’s unique to its situation. The project is supposed to make a substantial and measurable impact on some aspect of student learning over a 4- or 5-year period. Unlike everything else in the accreditation review, the quality enhancement plan is not something that we have finished at the time of the review. It is instead a project that we are about to launch. That project will have to be supported by careful planning. And I can tell you in advance the 5 criteria that they will use to judge our quality and enhancement plan; they will ask first is it on a specific topic? And ideally did that topic emerge from things that the institution knows about itself not from copying somebody else’s quality enhancement plan? Number 2, does it have clear goals? And are those goals measurable in terms of student learning? Number 3, has adequate planning taken place to provide that resources necessary to carry out such a plan. These would be personnel, finance, physical facilities, potentially academic planning. Number 4, is there an evaluation plan in place to determine the extent to which the project worked? And number 5, can the institution provide evidence that there was broad-based community involvement in the development and implementation of the quality enhancement plan whatever that may be?

The hope when this was adopted was that 1,000 flowers would blossom and that each institution would choose a quality enhancement plan unique to its circumstances, its students, and its mission. What we are actually observing is a little bit more uniform than that, but there are quite a number of different kinds of approaches out there.

To get from here to there we’re going to engage in a 2-year process. We’ve already engaged what I euphemistically put up as pre-planning, and you can just gloss that as getting Sushil to chair the committee. And now we’re in a year-long process in which an exploratory committee composed of about 30 individuals, including heavy faculty representation, educational support services, student representatives, thank you Ashley, an alumnus, a wide range of persons are gathered around a single task and that’s to identify a short list of potential quality enhancement plan topics for development in the second phase of the process. They’ve been charge with running a broad-based and participatory process, so get ready to hear about focus groups, surveys, they’ve already taken a look at our assessment information. And again they will be putting out a call for proposals. If it’s run here as it’s done at many other institutions you may well be asked to submit white papers on special projects that you would like to see become the quality enhancement plan.

After a brief pause one of the plans on the short list will be selected by a central leadership team. And then we will need a year to develop the plan itself. It is not a pie in the sky proposal it needs to be carefully elaborated and as I mentioned has to be associated with financial, human resource planning, and other things.

Shushil Bhavnani, chair of SACS QEPE Committee: Let me go ahead an elaborate on what Drew already mentioned is that we have a broad-based committee that we have undergraduate students represented on the committee, we’ve got graduate students, we’ve got professional and administrative staff on the committee, we’ve got an alumnus on the committee, we’ve got members from every school and college including the Library and the Graduate School on the committee, lots of other key components of the university are involved, we have representatives from the reading initiative, the Honors College, the Office of International Education. So you can see we’ve tried to be as broad as possible. Several of the folks on this list are in this room right now and are senators also, so 30 people on the committee and it’s functioning extremely well. We’re still in the early stages but let me go ahead and repeat for the record here what Drew told you are deliverable is going to be a set of 3 or 4 topics that we’ll deliver to the Provost’s Office in April.

The key measures of whether those are adequate topics is that they have to be supported by research and Auburn assessment results. So part of our calling right now is to go ahead and study all of the existing assessment results. The plan topics must be important for students and for the university and must clearly address student learning. Learning is defined fairly broadly, changes in knowledge or skills, behavior, or values. So that’s what will guide us as we proceed and it must be seen as important and valuable and have the broad support of all the stakeholders of the university. [1:22:12]

What we started doing is embodied in these 3 bullet points. The first thing we did for about a month and a half was to start looking a institutional assessment data. We started with the strategic plan, went to the national survey of student engagement, and after that collegiate learning assessment. We looked at some other instruments that are not on this list, we are trying our best to look at all existing assessment information out there. We also tried to look at the best practices from our peer institutions not only trying to get an understanding of what they’ve used as their quality enhancement plan but also the methods that were used to develop the plan and that is guiding what we are embarking on right now. Which is we are trying to set a plan that will allow us to get input from the broadest possible constituency. So we are going to institute focus groups, surveys, there will be a Web site, and if we follow procedures that some of our peer institutions have followed it will be some kind of request for proposals preceded by something along the lines of white papers, but we don’t know that process yet. There are sub-committees that are looking at those processes, we also have on our committee somebody from the office of communications and marketing that will help us make sure that we flood you with as much information as possible. If there will be a complaint about this, it will be that we are giving you too much information, that’s our goal on the committee. So that process is about to begin now.

We finished getting our bearings, we’ve understood best practices, we’ve looked at our assessment data, we’re trying to drill deeper into the assessment data to come up with viable topics. At this point I think we will open it up for any questions.

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

Guy Rohrbaugh, philosophy, senator: Okay so I’m dying to know, What are the other institutions doing?, is this like every undergraduate at Clemson is taught like 6 basic knots, or everyone’s got to have lunch in New Orleans once, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. How do the other people solve it?

Shushil Bhavnani, chair of SACS QEPE Committee: I can answer that but I was reacting to his last comment. So Duke University decided that what they’d do is focus on globalization, so they wanted their students to be better global citizens. Several institutions have come up with a writing initiative, not surprisingly. There are others that, their initiative has to do with improving the ethics of their campus. Or others that have done better a job of increasing faculty/student interaction. Some campuses of our size, other land-grant schools have tried to incorporate undergraduate research into their curriculum. So there is a variety of very good ideas out there, and again we don’t want to copy any body else we want this to be something that is best for Auburn, but we are being guided by all this prior information.

Claire Crutchley, chair: Other questions or comments?

That was 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.