Transcript Senate Meeting
June 5, 2012

[0:30]
Ann Beth Presley, chair: I’d like to call the meeting to order. Don’t forget to pick up your clickers on the way in. Good afternoon, I’m Ann Beth Presley, chair of the University Senate. Welcome to the June Senate meeting. The reason the room is wide open is because of Camp War Eagle, not because we expected a huge crowd.

A quorum requires 45 senators if everybody would turn your clickers on and click in to make sure that we have a quorum. We’ll have our fearless leader turn hers on. There are still people coming in. We have a quorum.

A short review of the rules of the Senate, senators and substitutes for senators please sign in in the back and get a clicker so that you can vote. If you’d like to speak about an issue go to the microphone and state your name, indicate if you are a senator and state what unit you represent. The rules of the senate require that senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first, after all comments by senators on an issue are made, guests are welcome to speak.


The first item on the agenda is approval of the minutes of the May meeting. Larry Crowley has posted the minutes and sent a  link to all senators. Are there any additions, changes, or deletions to these minutes?  [3:58]

Mike Stern, Senator, economics: In regards to the minutes you posted for the last meeting I have a concern and a comment and suggested revision. I made a motion to separate and delay Chapter 3 last time as it says in the minutes, which is correct. You noted that the motion was out of order which I do not believe it was, but you can put that in the minutes if you want. You then stated that Claire Crutchley states that Chapter 3, was that approved by the Senate in May 2011; that is false. In May 2011 there were no P&T revisions to Chapter 3 approved by the Senate, in May of 2011. I looked at the transcript of the statements, she didn’t make that statement about anything being approved in May 2011, she commented on a clarification statement that Bill Sauser made about something we had done back in April, but what we approved in May 2011 was Phase I, which had no textual changes to that. You may have been referring to April 2011 P&T stuff, but whatever the case that statement about Chapter 3 approval in May 2011 is not correct. Thank you.[5:30]


Ann Beth Presley, chair: So what is the motion? Okay thank you. Are there any other objections to approval of the minutes? The minutes will stand approved as written.

This is my last Senate meeting of the 2011–2012 academic year and my last meeting as chair. I would like to thank all of the senators who have served this year for your willingness to talk with the people you represent and speak up at Senate meetings for them as well as for voting and I’d like to give a special recognition to the Senators rotating off of the Senate this year. Please stand if it’s your last Senate meeting. About a third of you should be rotating off and I want to say thank you. We’ll give you a little recognition because you are giving up at least one afternoon a month. One of the senators rotating off is the immediate past chair, Claire Crutchley, her dedication, knowledge of the university and hard work has helped make this an excellent year. She will definitely be missed. On July 1 William Sauser will take over as chair of the Senate, and Robin Jaffe will take over as secretary. They will do an excellent job serving the Senate and Faculty. Working with these officers has been very rewarding and a fun experience as we have worked well together.

I would like to thank the full Steering Committee who has been an excellent group to work with, this includes the full Senate Committee as well as James Witte, Laura Plexico, Nedrit Billor, and Andy Whorley. And I would also like to thank very much, Constance Hendricks, my parliamentarian, who has given be great advise and helped me follow Robert’s Rules of Order. Larry Crowley is not rolling off the Senate because he is coming in as Chair-elect. I’m not sure he knows how much fun he’s going to have, but I couldn’t have made it through the year without him and just want to say a special thanks.

There are no remarks from the President’s Office today. Both the Provost and the President are out of the country. So we are going to go to the next item on the agenda, which are the nominations for the Senate committees. These will be presented by Larry Crowley, the secretary. [8:43]

Larry Crowley, secretary: Good evening, good afternoon I guess. I’ll make this short. I am sure you all have had the opportunity to look at the list of nominees from the committee. The Rules committee is charged in section 1, article 4, entitled Senate Committees, within the University Senate Constitution to make nominations for memberships to all standing Senate Committees unless otherwise specified, with ratification by the Senate.  The Rules Committee has reported their nominations as in a posting to the Senate Agenda and Laura has them up on the screen now.

On behalf of the Rules Committee, I move the nominations for Senate Committee membership be approved.

Ann Beth Presley, chair: This comes from a committee so it does not require a second. Is there any discussion? We will vote. All those in favor press A. A=43, B=4. This motion passes.

This sounds easy, but the Rules committee works extremely hard to get these nominations. Some of you know how hard we work because we have sent you many e-mails and called you. Thank you both very much, Larry and Robin.

The next item on the agenda is an information item presented by Kathryn Flynn concerning the Interdisciplinary Program. [10:42]

Kathryn Flynn, director of Interdisciplinary Studies Degree Program: I handed out a brochure earlier, I’ve got some additional copies if you are interested. I’m happy to be here today to give you an update on the interdisciplinary studies degree program.

The first thing I want to do is mention the membership on the Faculty Advisory Committee. This committee is very helpful in the work of this degree program. We meet roughly twice a semester in addition I often contact them by e-mail for input on a variety of different issues. They serve staggered 3-year terms. You can see we have a representative from each unit on campus that has an undergraduate degree program except for Pharmacy and the Vet School are not there, and neither is Nursing. They typically are not going to be participants in the program so I felt this was an appropriate committee.

What I wanted to do first off was to give you a recap of the program because for some of you, you may have little or no familiarity with it. So first off just talk about what actually is incorporated into an IDSC undergrad degree. Of course the university core, 41 or 42 hours there, then we have 14–15 supporting course work in interdisciplinary studies; that includes our intro class which must be taken by every student who has intentions of applying to the program, also a communications course, a computer competency course, and an upper level composition course, usually tech or business writing although we occasionally have a student who is more interested in advanced composition. Then we have a capstone course, which I will talk about in just a minute.

Following that there are 36 hours in the major. Students have two options. They can do two areas of emphasis, 18 hours in each area, or they can do three areas of emphasis, with 12 hours in each area and they must have two colleges or schools represented in their areas of emphasis. So they cannot do both areas, or all three areas of emphasis in the College of Liberal Arts or COSAM. In addition to that the program has a fairly high number of electives, 27–29, what these electives are intended to be is to allow the students to take prerequisites that are required for courses in their area of emphasis or take additional courses that would be listed as supporting courses. They can take a minor and I often recommend to students that rather than take random stuff that they are interested in, that they try to look at their interest and have a major plus a minor. For example, a language minor or a business minor, something like that depending on what their areas of interest are. Then they also have room for true electives. [14:47]

Students cannot declare interdisciplinary studies as a major. Like I mentioned before they must take that introductory course, it’s UNIV 2190. It’s offered every fall and spring semester and once they’ve taken that class and passed it with at least a C they can submit their paperwork. Students that are admitted should have earned less than 90 hours of course work and have at least a 2.0 overall GPA. As with many other majors if their GPA is less than a 2, they have to have had a 2.2 the previous semester prior to application.

We do have some students that have more than 90 hours and they can apply and we use the Faculty Advisory Committee to review these and to see if they are in fact going to be admitted into the program or not. Applications include a plan of study which must be each area of emphasis we’ve identified Faculty Advisor. Typically the undergraduate program advisor in each department will serve as the faculty advisor and the student must meet with that advisor and have them sign off on the coursework in that area of emphasis. Then they must also identify a faculty mentor. Some of you have served as mentors or have been approached to serve as a mentor and the mentors must look at the student’s entire plan, approve it and commit to working with the student through their program. When they do that and accept a student as a mentor they are also committing to serve as the instructor of record for their capstone course, one of the last courses a student typically takes. [16:40] In addition to that they must have a goal statement and in the goal statement the student must explain how the areas of emphasis are integrated and why they will allow the student to do what their professional goal is. Whether it’s grad school or law school or getting out an getting a job, they have to show that the areas of emphasis they have selected make sense and not just random course work. I use the committee heavily to evaluate that.

The capstone course that I mentioned is a 3-hour course. We now have two options. They can take UNIV 4930, which is a graded thesis option. They work with the faculty member who is their mentor to develop a topic and a syllabus, and they submit that syllabus to the advisory committee for review and approval. Or they can do UNIV 4980, which is an internship or service learning option. Again they work with their mentor to develop a syllabus. They have to provide us with the contact information with their site supervisor and written documentation to their mentor typically that the onsite supervisor realizes that they are in an internship and that they will be asked to provide feedback to the mentor in terms of what the student’s performance has been.

The faculty advisory committee reviews each syllabus that is received and fairly routinely will ask the mentor and the student to come back with additional information. Maybe we feel like the syllabus needs beefing up a little bit and will tell them very specifically what they need.

A quick update on the status of the program, some of you may remember that it was approved by ACHE in June of 2009, the first student was admitted in spring semester of 2010. We currently have had 88 students admitted as of today, I actually have several applications on my desk that I haven’t had time to review yet, so probably another 5 or 6 applications in hand. We’ve had 46 students graduate as of this spring semester and we typically now are seeing somewhere between 30 and 40 students enrolled in the 2190 course each fall and spring semester, beginning in fall of 2010. We’ll either have one large class depending on how many students, we’ll open a second section and try to get–it’s usually not equal distribution because one’s in the morning and one’s in the afternoon, but if we get a lot of students that didn’t make it into the first section we will try to make a second section.

The students on their own came to us and said they would like to create or form a student organization, so we now have an interdisciplinary studies student organization. They started working on it last fall and they were active at a fairly low level in the spring and they’ve got plans and have already started working on the activities that they will do next fall.

We’ve got a brochure which many of you have seen. I have additional copies. We’ve got to update this brochure, we want to get more pictures of some more current students. We don’t want to go all online because it’s nice to have to hand out when we go places, but we also will have it online and we are working on improving the Web site.

Now I’ve been directing the program for not quite 2 years and one of the things that I can say as with any new program there are things that we’d like to change or improve upon. One of the issues that…we have two main issues, one is mentor fatigue or shortage. We are beginning to see students who are having difficulty finding mentors, you know, you’ve got students coming from another degree plan asking you to serve as a mentor and that’s time away from what you do in your particular unit. And we have some people who are very willing and we have other people who would like to but they simply don’t have time. So a student cannot be admitted into the program until they have a mentor. So we have had some students who have actually had a semester or even a little longer to apply because they are looking for the right mentor. It can’t just be a faculty member it has to be someone with some expertise in their particular areas of interest. And the other is heavy paperwork form the perspective of the office and for the student and the faculty advisors and mentors. We have lots of forms, we have lots of check offs, so there is a lot of paperwork and if something’s not right, right now it’s all paperwork pretty much and so there is a lot of back and forth, so we are working on getting Xtender set up to facilitate the work flow. We are exploring options. One of my jobs this summer is looking at other interdisciplinary studies programs to see how they handle capstones, whether they have mentors, and if there are alternative ways that we can capture expertise and help for the student without having to have that individual mentor for each student that that has to then work on the syllabus.

The other things that we are working on are proposals that will be submitted to the grad schools. A couple of them have been ready, but we want to submit with the recommendation on the mentor aspect, do it all at one time. One thing the committee has approved is a request that we be allowed to increase the number of hours in the major from 36 to 45. What this would allow is a stronger major, it would allow students to do 3 minors for emphasizes if they did the 3 option. If they did the 2 option there are a couple of different models we’re looking at; one would be that they would have uneven course work, they’d have 21 hours in one and 24 in the other, or they could do a 6-hour capstone. [23:24] And that would allow or encourage actual research for a capstone as opposed to maybe a research paper. They might be able to collect data and do some things that they can’t do with a 3-hour course. It would also potentially make it more attractive for students to do an internship that would be international, where they could get 6-hours of credit instead of 3. So those are a couple of the things we are looking at in terms of changes to the program.

With that I will open it up to questions. If you don’t have questions now and you think of them later, you have comments or suggestions, there is all of my contact information and I appreciate any input that I can get.

Mike Stern, Senator, economics: I’m not too familiar with this program but I’ve heard a few people express some concerns and I’m not sure about the accuracy of it so I just wanted to see how you respond to something I’ve heard. The Interdisciplinary Studies major is serving as a way for low quality students to avoid the more difficult classes within a major, sample from several and just take the easy classes within a major and maybe it’s attracting a portion of students that are looking for an easy way out rather than those that are truly good students that are truly interested and getting a broader education than a very specific program.


Kathryn Flynn, director of Interdisciplinary Studies Degree Program: I’ve heard that as well. Like any major we have some students that are looking for the easy way out. One of the things that I will say is that creating the major for yourself requires some effort, so oftentimes students who aren’t interested in putting much effort into that, they may come take the class and then they realize that it’s not something that they want to be bothered with. We have a range of GPAs. We have some students who have low GPAs, we have students with high GPAs. What happens with many of the students that come in with lower GPAs are students who came in in a major that they weren’t prepared for.

I hate to pick on engineering, but we often see engineering students who came in without the math background or COSAM students who came in without the biology background. So they don’t have great GPA, but typically if you can get them into something that they are prepared to take, we see an improvement in those student’s GPAs. We have some students who do get into the major that have low work ethic, I guess you could say as with any major on campus, and what we’re seeing is that those students don’t complete because you have to have a minimum of 20 hours of 3000 level or above coursework in your major and you also have the faculty advisors in each unit who have to sign off, for example in biology they are not going to be interested in students taking 1 and 2 thousand-level classes.
Typically a 1000 level class would be a supporting course not in the major. There are some majors on campus that don’t have a lot of 3000 or 4000 level classes so it really ranges depending on the particular discipline. Do we have some students that are weak? Yes we do. Do we have some students that are strong? Yes we do. And we do try to when the committee reviews the plans or when I review the plan, I look to see that they have courses that make sense.  If their goal statement says I want to do thus and so and then the coursework doesn’t at all apply to that then it gets sent back to them and they start over on the drawing board basically, or we do a course substitution. Does that answer your question?

Mike Stern, Senator, economics: Do you have…we have in our major a graduation requirement that you have to maintain in what are classified the major hours, we have a mandated GPA in those, do you have  the same things for your students?

Kathryn Flynn, director of Interdisciplinary Studies Degree Program: You have to have a 2.0 in the major. You have to have a C average.

Mike Stern, Senator, economics: To graduate in what are declared the major courses?

Kathryn Flynn, director of Interdisciplinary Studies Degree Program: You could have an overall 2.0 or higher, but if you had below a 2.0 in your major courses you would not be able to graduate until you brought that up to a 2.0. [28:22] Any other questions? If not I’d encourage you if you have ideas or you are interested in working with an interdisciplinary studies student, let me know. Sometimes I make phone calls to find out if people are interested and kind of steer students your way. We have some very interesting students who come up really interesting ideas for their capstone experiences and I’ve found many of them to be quite fulfilling to work with. So I encourage you to at least consider it. Thank you.

Ann Beth Presley, chair: Thank you Kathryn.

The next person speaking is Bill Hutto and he is going to be talking about the Auburn Airport. [29:46]

Bill Hutto, director of Auburn-Opelika Robert G. Pitts Airport: Good afternoon. Can everybody hear me in the back? It’s a pleasure to be in front of you today. My name is Bill Hutto and I am the airport director. I must admit it is a little intimidating standing in front of this group of faculty members, but I appreciate you letting me come here today. I feel I am among friends, there are a lot of people I know here that I see from the swimming pool to the soccer fields to church to here at the university, so thanks again for letting me be here today to share a little bit about what’s going on at the university’s airport.

Just a couple of topics I want to cover today. If you don’t know, a little bit about our history: the operations that we have at the airport that deal with the university are community operations, a little bit about what we are doing in our outreach and marketing and also some of our future plans. I don’t have time to get into all of these and I hasten to say at the front end that if you have any questions and you’d like to come out to see me or give me a call or e-mail, I would love to show you around the airport and give you a personal tour.

The airport was first built back in 1930 as a private corporation. We actually had some stock certificates out at the airport that were sold in order to build the airport. At that time it was leased by the Civil Aeronautics Authority for a mail route from New Orleans to Atlanta. And back then we didn’t have the nav aids that we have now so we had bon fires. There is a great book out if you are an aviation history buff called “Bonfires to Beacons.” So we were part of the mail route early on.

1932 it was commissioned to serve our area and at that time we were API but still not owned by the university, but leading into World War II the Federal Government was contracting with the universities to provide flight training to military. Auburn as I will mention in a minute was providing aviation degrees since 1930 so it was a natural extension to get into the flight training business. But the airport needed some improvements, there was some Federal monies to get it but it had to be owned by government entity. At the time the cities the county, none of them were interested, so out of default I guess you would say the university got the stock certificate. If memory serves I think for $150. So anyway they got into the CPTP (Civil Pilot Training program) and began training pilots. This is one of the early flight training classes that came out of API at the time. This is an early picture from the early 40s of what the airport looked like, a little bit different than what we see today. You don’t see much development around it. This is where the old terminal building is, the current flight school is here today. So there’s not much there.

There is a strong partnership that exists that is really unique that we have with the cities of Auburn, Opelika, and Lee County. They recognize the importance of the airport as an economic development tool in the work that they are doing in recruiting industries to our area to bring jobs and tax dollars. So they support this airport politically and financially. In recognition of that the Board of Trustees back in 1980 or so formed an airport advisory board and it’s changed a little bit over time. The current name is Auburn University Regional Airport. This is the current airport advisory board and you might notice one of them off hand, one of the members of your group, Dr. Joe Hanna sits on our advisory board along with Tom Tillman from the university, both mayors, the Lee County Probate Judge sits on it, an elected official from the two cities and the county sits on it, as well as the speaker of the House, Mike Hubbard. We meet as a group at least once a quarter or more often to discuss airport business. We get their input from the community perspective into the airport operations.

In recognition of that you see we put all 4 plaques showing our partnership on the entrance sign going into the airport. We also have these plaques on our new terminal building as well. And this tag line, “A City of Auburn, City of Opelika, Lee County and Auburn University Partnership” it’s critical to making all we do possible at the airport, including the new terminal building.
We have 423 based aircraft…423 acres, I’m sorry, I wish we had 423 based aircraft, some of our neighbors may not but I wish we did. We have 60 based aircraft, and that number goes up and down. We have some that come some that leave and as we start building more hangers that number will go up. About 65,000 operations a year, an operation is a take off or landing. So the flight school folks when they do a touch and go that’s 2 operations. This number is old, it’s about a 2002 number, but this was a study done by the State of Alabama that showed the economic impact of $19.4 million a year. That would be more today as we have more activity on the airport and we’re selling a lot more fuel today than we did 10 years ago. [34:59]

One of the things that we do, going back to our heritage of owning the airport is supporting the flight school. This is one of the aircraft that they have there today that they fly, actually that one may be retired, but they look alike–just have different numbers on them until you get to the inside and they have some fancier ones. [35:20] This is the terminal building that they are operating out of today along with a supplemental office building beside it. This building was built in 1950, before a year and a half ago the airport operations and their customers were in there, the air transportation department was in there, and the flight school was in there. We moved out and they filled it up. So we were really cramped. I’ll show you as we near the end of the presentation where the flight is planned to go.

The degree that they have out there is Professional Flight Management, and they also have a standard Aviation Management degree, and that’s what my degree is from Auburn. My undergrad is in Aviation Management. About 100 total flight students and this is not just pro-flight if you will, this is other students from the university taking classes and also they do teach anybody in the community to learn to fly. About 15 aircraft out there including a couple of twin engine airplanes. We support them as the airport side with fueling, maintenance, general upkeep of the airport, improving our navigational aids and these kind of things to make their job of flying easier and safer. A lot of people may not realize, today there are 3 different university units out at the airport and we are all separate and distinct.  There’s the airport itself, we report up through the administrative side of the university, if you know Bob Ritenbaugh, assistant vice president for auxiliary services. He’s my boss if you will, the air transportation department also reports up through Bob, they’re a separate unit, and then there is the flight school, up through the College of Business. This is one of the two aircraft that are used by the air transportation department and their operations.

Some other miscellaneous things we’ve been involved with over the years, and this is not an exclusive list and I may have left someone out so please forgive me, but everything from fire ants research to supporting aerospace engineering and their remote controlled aircraft that they compete with on an annual basis. We typically close the runway for a period of time and let them come out and practice. For the last 2 years we’ve been supporting the SAE Racing team, they’ve been coming out and we’ve been letting them use a piece of our ramp to do some of their testing on. And also some wildlife research through the FAA on bird strikes, which is a big deal at an airport.

We employ students in customer service, flight line, aircraft maintenance, and also for the last couple of semesters and hope that will continue we have and airport management intern working in the office us.

In the community we serve as the link to the National Air Transportation System. As I mentioned before the local governments do view the airport as an economic development tool and that’s why they support us so heavily in what they do, when a line if a factory goes down, it is critical that they get a part there in short order because it literally cost thousands of dollars per minute for a line to sit stagnant. So when they have an airport where they can get people in to fix it and get the part straight into our community is very, very critical.

This is just some miscellaneous hodge-podge of different types of customers we have at the airport with the different industries that come and visit us. By no means exclusive. One of our best customers is Briggs & Stratton, they come in out of Milwaukee as an example. They will land in the morning around 8:30 or 9:00 a.m., they will be on site for 6 or 7 hours, fly back to Milwaukee, and they have the people back home with their families for dinner. It works out very, very well and one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have about these corporate jets is that they are a lot of fat cats in the back of them, but these are actually the majority of the time people who are going to be putting their feet on the ground and do work there. They are not just going around site-seeing, they are actually people they need to get on site to do what is necessary for that day. [39:14]

Miscellaneous types of operations that we have, every thing from blimps to life-saver helicopter that are based at the airport. There are good news/bad news, we’re glad they are with us but when we see them flying we know somebody’s in trouble. They do accident traffic scene type work where they go and pick up a patient and they do hospital-to-hospital type transfers as well, so we are glad to have them in the community. We also have life like type services such as University of Alabama at Birmingham, jet and others that come in and of course law enforcement we see often. We have special events; Vice President Chaney visited us a few years ago when he spoke at commencement. Military operations are really common at our airport. Often we’ll get the 101st out of Kentucky will come in on their way to Jacksonville, they have to make fuel stops, and we’ve become one of their favorites to and from and we are glad to have them. We’ve had as many as 35 or 36 of them on the ground at one time at our airport. We have to fuel them in an hour and get them out. The Red Cross does a fantastic job, the Red Cross supports military, they come out an bring refreshments; so while we are refueling their bird they are getting refueled by the Red Cross and getting some attention as well.

We have been seeing quite a bit of freight over time and the last 2.5 months or so it’s increased. We hope to see that continue, but it may come and go as production waves come and go as well. Freight has been very important for us.

Then of course we serve all football game days. [41:00] This one of the games, can’t remember if this is last year or the year before, but as you can see we fill up our ramp and on occasions we have to close our secondary runway for additional parking spaces. Some people ask how many we get, we’ve had as many as 210 for one game, but if we are playing and I don’t mean to disrespect anyone from Buffalo or Arkansas State but they don’t draw as big a crowd and we only have 20, 30, or maybe 40. So it all depends on the opponent. SEC schools we’re going to get them and big conference games we are going to get them but also it depends on the record of the opponent and sometimes…Auburn’s record. We like them to be doing well because that’s a lot of fuel sales.

Then finally, some people say what’s the biggest aircraft you could get, so we answer it in two ways. This is the biggest in terms of passengers, it is a Dornier 328 two engine jet, it holds up to 30 people. A lot of sports teams use that, men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, soccer we use them and also visiting teams coming in. We also have seen some football fans charter these and bring them in as well. In terms of size a Gulfstream 5 or Gulfstream 550, something along that range, about 95 foot wing span about 95 foot long. It makes a pretty big footprint on the ramp.

We do quite a bit of outreach or we try to. One of the things we’ve really gotten involved with over the last several months is with the Civil Air Patrol. [42:31] I know Larry’s wife has gotten involved with them as well. The Civil Air Patrol does a wonderful job of attracting youth, ages 12–18. They have 3 missions, aerospace education, cadet programs, and emergency services and that’s where they get started as an auxiliary to the Air Force back in 1941 patrolling the shore lines for submarines and other people that are not supposed to be here. and even today they’ll have if an aircraft, forbids goes down, there is an emergency beacon on it that emits a signal, the Civil Air Patrol is trained to help locate that signal and find that aircraft. They search for missing persons, there are all kinds of different things that they get involved with. But on the cadet level, the youth level, they really are strong in leadership skills, character development, and physical fitness. They do a wonderful job. They’ve started meeting in our building. The local squadron is very active they’ve won many awards, as a matter of fact yesterday, I’ll show you a picture, Alabama Public Television was at the airport doing a feature on the local squadron, which will air sometime this fall.

There’s a picture of the room they meet in at the airport. We do radio shows. You may recognize our boss Bob Ritenbaugh, there’s Andy Bertrum, Rich Perkins, we do radio shows talking about the airport. As a matter of fact I was with Andy this morning at 6:30 just giving briefings on what’s going on and letting community know what’s happening at our airport.

We do many school tours, boy scouts, cub scouts, you name it, we love having them come out. We’ve had as many as 120 at one time from the Auburn Early Education Center. They brought 100 one week 120 the next week, so we love having them come out sharing aviation with our youth. Of course the older youth gives us an opportunity to talk about the aviation programs, the aerospace engineering programs, and other things that we have here at Auburn. I forgot to mention a minute ago, the College of Engineering has worked with the CAP every year and they bring in top scholars from around the country, for high school age, for a week-long study. Last year I think there was someone from Hawaii here.

We have in the past…we haven’t for the past couple of years for a number of reasons, done a fly-in, but we actually have an exploratory committee working now with a target of perhaps doing another fly-in or maybe an air show next May. That’s a great way to share aviation with the community. We market ourselves at seminars and conventions, where ever aviation is and we might think we have a nich in that market we will go an show our wares.

This is another outreach effort, this is Todd in his younger days, he’s still doing it today just don’t have an updated picture–and he likes that one too–but going out to local schools doing career days. Todd and I were at Opelika High School about two months ago doing a career day sharing aviation.

We do general advertizing, we do e-mail ads, what ever it may take to share the word about what’s going on at the Auburn airport.

Some of our future plans, this is our 20-year airport master plan. We do a 20-year airport plan and it’s approved by the FAA, by the State, by your policy Board, in this case the Board of Trustees, then we break that down into 3- to 5-year increments, 10-year increments, and 20-year increments. This is a vision, we don’t know what’s going to happen 20 years down the road but we plan for whatever the case may be so that we save ourselves room, we don’t box ourselves in by making the taxiway too narrow or a hanger where it shouldn’t be and that kind of thing. Then we can revisit it about every 5 years as well and do tweaks.

This is our 3–5 year capital improvement program showing our new terminal building, which is complete, and I’ll show you more about this in just a minute, but this is our south ramp. We are going to have some corporate hangers that are going to be built, and what I mean is big box type hangers that we can put a big aircraft into. We want to build some T-hangers up on the north side, this taxiway project is in progress, then also in the next 1–3 years we will be working on our taxiway alpha. Which is widening it down on the southern end from 35 to 50 feet and on the northern end we have to relocate it, you can see it gets up close to the runway here, we need it to be 400 feet centerline to centerline all the way down. At that point that’s when the old terminal building and those 2 hangers will need to be raised.

This is a work that is in progress now. It is our taxiway Charlie extension. Currently aircraft coming out of the terminal area have to cross the runway mid-field, or if they land they have to cross mid-field to get in and that’s not a very safe scenario when you have an aircraft crossing in the middle of your airport. Especially when there is inclement weather, we have an instrument landing system so you can land when the weather’s down pretty low so we want to extend this down so aircraft will not be having to do this mid-field crossing. As a matter of fact we closed a runway down starting yesterday for up to 2 weeks so that we can make these connections here and here. Hopefully we will open it back up and by the end of June it will be stripped and ready to go.

You can see this is our new terminal building, Glenn exit 57 is here, the older terminal building is over on this side of the airport and that’s the south ramp that I am about to show you. This is 13 hanger lots that can be built here, we’ve got underground utilities to it. The power’s not there yet, but the conduit for it is and the water and sewer is available on all of these lots. And this is what it will look like when we build all of the hangers out. This space here is set aside for the flight school. It is set aside for them to be able to put their structure and this is the parking lot for the flight school. So they’ve got a place to go and we hope they’ll get there at the new facility that represents Auburn University well sometime in the near future.

Over on the terminal side you see there is a vacant space, but we hope to fill those up with these 3 hangers as well. We are in the process of developing design standards, like with main campus you have a character and image, we have that out at the airport as well. We want it to be a first class development where people in and are happy to be at Auburn. When they build a building they know that somebody’s not going to build something that looks bad next to them or will be falling down in 5 years.

Our project that we are at 90% plans for, we will be bidding it out by the middle of June, is to widen and strengthen this taxiway here and widen and strengthen the runway. We have aircraft coming out of the terminal building crossing the runway getting on this piece of pavement that’s only stressed for 43,000 pounds where the rest of it is stressed for 45,000 pounds. So we are going to be widening and strengthening that this summer.

So that’s a quick run down, I hope I didn’t go too fast or go too long, but I will be glad to answer more questions for you later. We do continue as a university unit to support academic issues or things that we can help with out at the airport that are conducive to airport operations. Also we want to continue to grow and serve and meet the continuing needs of the university and the community. I can answer any questions or turn it back over to you.

Mike Stern, Senator, economics: I was wondering why the flight educational programs or the flight programs at Auburn are in the College of Business instead of Engineering or Aerospace Engineering?

Bill Hutto, airport director: Well I’m not the one to answer that, but maybe someone else from the College of Business may want to do that. When I graduated it was in the College of Engineering, that’s what my degree is in. It was moved in the late 90s. Maybe someone else can answer, Joe do you want to try that? [51:30]

Joe Hanna, associate dean, college of business: (no microphone) Basically said that it was better suited to be based in the college of business.

Bill Hutto, airport director: I can tell you that there are a lot of airlines and other people in the industry that will like having people with an aviation management degree that come from the college of business because it is business oriented type degree. Even the pilots, they like for the pilots to understand a relationship between them flying the airplane and the bottom line.

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: Mostly asking this question I guess so we don’t get to adjourn before 4:00 p.m. I’m not sure it’s a terribly important question.


Bill Hutto, airport director: Do I have to give a ten minute answer?

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: Yea.  So compare the Auburn-Opelika airport with the airports of the other SEC institutions, are we bigger, smaller, more vigorous, less vigorous? You might want to put particular emphasis on one say a little north and west of here.

Bill Hutto, airport director: Well I think we are the best of all of them, in a lot of ways. We have great approaches to our airport, there’s not anyone out there with a terminal building that can compare to ours. I think we are a first class airport and well done and represent Auburn well. Now there are some airports out there that have longer runways that we would love to have. It’s kind of hard to compare apples and apples to sometimes as well, like Tuscaloosa, that’s a city owned airport so they don’t have the university direct influence into the development of their airport as some of the other ones. But I think that we have a lot to be proud of in our airport but we also have a lot of work to do to continue to improve it. We’re not done yet. We do a pretty good job at what we have with room for improvement. [53:40] Thank you.

Ann Beth Presley, chair:  Is there any unfinished business? Bill, do you want to come down? I have one piece of new business because this is my last meeting. That is I get to give Bill the gavel. So he gets to take over. So if there’s no other business…

Bill Sauser, chair-elect:  But there is. Don’t worry we’re still going to make 4:00.

Before we adjourn the meeting, Robin Jaffe and I will be moving into our new roles as secretary and chair following this meeting. I want to recognize with a little personal recognition 3 individuals who provided tremendous leadership to the faculty and the University Senate this year. And that’s Larry Crowley if you would come forward, and Claire Crutchley, and here is Ann Beth right here. Thank you Claire for your leadership, it says 2010–2011 chair, our 2011–2012 chair, Ann Beth, and Larry gets the prize here this is a secretary award. Larry is going to follow me in a year. Thank you for your leadership, we really appreciate it.

And if there is no other business the meeting in adjourned.  [55:55]