Transcript Senate Meeting
November 6, 2012
Bill Sauser, chair: Ladies and gentlemen I’d like to order the November 6, 2012 meeting of the Auburn University Senate, I’m Bill Sauser, the chair of the Senate. I do want to remind everyone if you don’t know already, do get a clicker so that you can vote on the matter that requires a vote. So please do get a clicker and sign in and if you are substituting for a senator you also should sign in at that senator’s place. So welcome to the meeting.
A short review of the rules of the Senate; First is senators and all substitutes for senators, please sign the roll, get your clicker. Second, if you’d like to speak about an issue then go to the microphone located on either aisle, and when I recognized you state your name and indicate whether or not you’re a senator and if so, what unit you represent. Finally the rules of the Senate do require that senators and substitute senators have the opportunity to speak first, then after all comments by Senators on any issue, our guests are welcome to speak when recognized.
As of today we have 87 active members of the senate, so a quorum requires 44. So turn on your clicker and press A, (senator or substituting for a senator) and let’s see if we have a quorum. Okay, we do have a quorum, That’s great, my eyeballs did not fail me today. Thank you everyone.
Our order of business is to approve the minutes from the October 2, 2012 meeting. Those minutes have been posted on the Senate’s Web site, you’ve all had a chance to read them or read the transcript if you desire. Unless I hear any objections I am going to rule that those minutes be approved. Are there any objections? If not then we rule that those minutes be approved. Thank you Robin for taking care of those.
Our first order of business on the agenda then is some remarks from Dr. Gogue, our president. [2:29]
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you Bill. Good to be with you today. I just have a couple of things to share with you. Next week the Board of Trustees will meet on campus. There are several items that pertain to the academic side of the institution that I wanted to share with you.
One has to do with the Faculty Handbook, Faculty Policies, and I need to tell you that a lot of people have worked awfully hard to get them to this stage. I read through them the other day. They are very readable, they are very good and, so Bill you and the committees and all those who have been involved, I would give you a strong round of applause for the good work in that area. There will also be the AUM Policies that are very consistent with Auburn’s that will be presented at the same time. The plan is that they will be presented by, legal council, Mr. Lee Armstrong.
The second item is that in the department of Biosystems Engineering they have a proposal for an accelerated bachelor’s/master’s degree. I can’t remember, this is our 12th different area that has an accelerated bachelor’s/master’s degree, so I expect that to receive approval.
We have 3 posthumous degrees that have come through that have departments come through all the various stages, I think the individuals involved have more than 90 hours of credit and received recommendations from their academic units.
The academic presentation will be by Margaret Marshall to the Board of Trustees and it will be on our QEP proposal that deals with electronic portfolios for students.
So those are the items that will come up at the Board of Trustees Meeting. I always try to mention budgets and Don has shared with me that it’s probably too early we really don’t know much about the current fiscal year that we are going into with the state. You do see a little bit of optimism. We are seeing the monthly. First monthly returns in terms of the educational trust fund, there is some positive growth in that. We’re not pessimistic, we’re not extremely optimistic, we are just going to watch it and see what happens.
I want to also mention that again this year, Auburn had a Rhodes Scholar finalist, and I particularly want to thank the faculty for your work and your effort in allowing us to have so many students, it seems on an annual basis, that compete for really prestigious post-graduate scholarships. I know the Rhodes finalist is something we should all be proud of.
The Provost and I have done 20 academic departments, I missed one, so I’ve done 19 and he’s done 20, and I have to simply tell you that we talk a lot in those meetings and we learn a great deal. We’ve learned a lot, particularly about the level and the extent of electronic education that’s going on within the institution that I have to tell you we were not aware of. So we appreciate those discussions and look forward if we haven’t visited your department later this month or early in January we are scheduled to complete them all. I’d be happy to respond to questions that you may have. (pause) Thank you.
Bill Sauser, chair: Thank you very much Dr. Gogue. I do want to comment that I had the opportunity to review the various resolutions that are going forward before the Board of Trustees. I found all of the resolutions to be, in my opinion, in the best interest of the university and its faculty. So I do want to thank the president for allowing the faculty representatives to have a chance to look over and comment on Board agenda before matters go to the Board. That’s very helpful and we very much appreciate it. And certainly we are delighted to know that the Handbook Chapter on personnel policies is going before the Board. We anticipate no difficulty in having it pass since we worked it very hard.
I do have a couple of things I’d like to report. Here’s my brief report for today. First thing I’d like to tell you is that I always like to begin by acknowledging my fellow officers. They work very, very hard on your behalf. Many of you know that Ann Beth Presley, our immediate past chair has not been well lately. I spoke to her just earlier during the week, she’s still not feeling well but she’s trying to keep up with her academic duties. She’s not teaching this semester, but she’s very much interested in what’s going on on this campus, so we wish her well as she seeks to recover.
Larry Crowley is here, Robin Jaffe is here, and Judy Sheppard is here, where is Judy? I thought she was here, well she’s not here. These people work very hard for you and I do like to acknowledge their work. Our parliamentarian, Constance Hendricks, is not here today, but Laura Kloberg is here. Laura thanks for all your good administrative work.
A couple of notes on the agenda and this is the primary thing I wanted to comment on. The reason we bring forward for action, it seems just about every meeting, one or two names for committee members is that our constitution requires that all members of Senate committees be endorsed by the Senate as a whole, so as faculty members come and go and assignments change and so forth it seems like every month we need to find one or two replacements. So that’s why Robin keeps bringing those forward. I do want to invite you if you are interested in serving on a Senate Committee, let Robin know that because if a vacancy comes along well he just may have an opportunity to add your name to the list. So I want you to know about that.
Second we have a brief matter on the agenda that has to do with a change in membership on the University Writing Committee. This is what most of us would call a ‘housekeeping’ matter, simply changing a couple of titles and so forth, but since that committee is also in the Senate Constitution, to change the membership requires an amendment to the Constitution. We’re starting to sound like the State of Alabama. None the less that’s why it’s coming before you to be reviewed.
The other aspect on the agenda is a pending action item and bringing it forward for your review today to be voted on in January. We are not going to meet in December, I know you are delighted to hear that, but in January this will come before you as an item for action. It has to do with mid-term grades for core curriculum courses. We’ll hear more about that in a few moments. I do want you to know that we are trying to see to it that every item that comes to the floor of the Senate has also been carefully reviewed by at least one Senate Committee. We want to very much to make certain that any thing that comes forward, a representative group has had a chance to review. Ordinarily this would go to the Retention Committee, since it’s focus is on retention, but we did not at the time it came to us as an executive committee we did not have a chair of the Retention Committee; we do now, thank you Dr. Rotfeld, and so we sent it to the largest committee we could find. We found a committee that had representation from every college and school and that is the Core Curriculum and General Education Committee, so that’s where the matter was sent and it’s coming forward to you today. [10:32]
This is interesting, the future of the Auburn University campus. There’s a lot going on. Many of you have been involved in forums and meetings and committee discussions throughout the campus the officers are trying to keep us closely informed on what’s going on. But these are some of the matters that are all happening right now that could affect the future of our campus. The opening of the Health and Wellness Center, that’s going to have a major impact and that’s about to occur. Plans for the Central Classroom Facility, the Campus Master Plan is being updated, Health Sciences sector is being reviewed as we have the Via College coming. We also have a Master Landscaping plan underway. There are plans for Toomer’s Corner, some of you may have attended one or more of those meetings, I think we had two. There is Campus land planning being discussed by the Executive Facilities Committee, so all of this stuff is happening right now and we thought you would really enjoy a presentation on what’s going on so you will be in the know if members of your department come and ask you about what’s this new building, or what’s this all about?
Finally vote. Get yourself one of these things (indicating the I voted sticker on his lapel). If you haven’t already voted and many of you have, I see lots of the little “I voted” tags, if you haven’t already voted we’re planning to adjourn this meeting in time for you to get over there before the polls close. So please do go and vote, and if we are pressing up against it and you need to just go vote then do so anyway, because we want everybody’s ballot to be counted. So that’s my report for the afternoon.
Next item on the agenda is an action item it comes to us from Robin Jaffe, who is our senate secretary and also is chairing the Rules Committee. [12:42]
Robin Jaffe, secretary: We have two nominees for committees, one for Faculty Grievance and one for the Faculty Welfare. And this comes from Rules, these are replacements for people who have left vacancies.
Bill Sauser, chair: Thank you. So you see the names before you I would entertain a motion that these individuals be approved by the Senate and in fact that was a motion since it came from the Rules Committee and requires no second. All in favor of approving press A on your clicker and if you disapprove press B. A=56, B=1. Okay, those names are approved and they are now official members of the committees, Thank you Robin for bringing that forward.
We have two action items that are pending they are going to be presented as information today, I’ll give you two months to think them over and then come back in January ready to vote. So the first comes to us from Core Curriculum and General Education committee and our presenter is the chair of the committee, Dr. Constance Relihan.
Constance Relihan, chair of Core Curriculum and General Education committee: Thank you all for letting me come and talk to you about this proposal today. I want to say that this is a complicated issue, I know that and the intention is to start a discussion which I hope we will conclude in some way in January, but I know that it’s a complicated matter and this is a subject that we need to talk about and need to think about. The discussion relating to mid-term grades really started back in 2008 when we had the improved graduation rate taskforce. One of the recommendations that came from that taskforce was that mid-term grades were useful as part of an early alert system to help students especially first year and first semester students know how they are doing, stay on track and move on to succeed. Because that first semester grade point average is really one of the best indicators we can have of student’s academic success. So I want to point out that I’m calling this “early alert” grade proposal rather than mid-term grade proposal because one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that mid-term grades mean different things to different faculty. Some faculty see that a mid-term grade must be given at the date of mid-term and must be over 50% of the course work, others would argue that any grade that’s given before the final grade is a mid-term grade. So since the focus here is on “early alert” calling it early alert grades. [16:41] [17:07]
All right, this is our existing grade policy. This is what we tell ourselves as faculty about our grades, grades are our prevue and we have to submit them at the end of the semester. Right now we do not have any statement as a university that says we encourage faculty to give grades to students before a term ends. We leave that entirely up to our own pedagogical sense. That may be great for us, I’m not sure it’s so great for our students. One reason why there may be problems with this is that we say now that students may not drop a course after mid-term, after the 37th class day. Often students don’t have a grade by then.
I would encourage you to talk with the advisors or associate deans in your colleges with your students about this because this can make it very difficult for a student to know whether to drop, whether to stay in a course, just what they should do. Problems that our current policy causes; one, students need feedback on their academic performance, especially during that first year. First year students need help adjusting. I don’t know how many of you remember your first semester in college, I’m sure all of us or most of us were stellar, stellar students, but actually I know from talking with some of you that your were not and that first semester went very badly for you. Having mid-term grades provides students with a way of knowing objectively how they are doing. Students often are coming from environments in which they were nurtured and coddled and now they are on their own and they need some help. The best help we can give them is graded feedback.
We also know that we are scary people, as faculty. It can be very hard for some students, especially freshmen, to make it through the door to come see us, or to find out about tutoring and go see a tutor. At Camp War Eagle they’re told all about going to see their advisor, going to get tutoring, going to see the professor, and they are all thinking, I was an “A” student in high school I’m not going to need any of this, when can I go have fun. So it’s just not registering when they are told it. We need to get that information to them sooner.
More concrete problems: being placed on academic warning, about 10% of our freshmen end up on warning at the end of their first semester. That’s about a third of all students who have some kind of academic action placed upon them, they have gotten below a 2.0 GPA. You start off badly, you dig yourself a hole, it can be hard to get out of it. It can undermine your confidence and your ability to perform well.
Right now we’ve got a 4 year graduation rate of 42%, we have a 6 year graduation rate of 68%, we have about 25% of our students who leave Auburn after 4 years without a degree, or sometime in that 4 years mostly they are leaving in the first couple of years. I think we can do better than that. They are leaving for a number of reasons, there is no silver bullet that will solve all of our retention and graduation rate problems, but providing students with more feedback on how they are doing in our classes is a good start. And as I say the improved graduation rate taskforce suggested back in 2008 that mid-term grades were a good way to go.
Here’s some information on what some of our peers do and you can see there is no single answer to mid-term grades. Alabama and Arkansas require that mid-term grades be given in a 100 and 200 level freshman/sophomore courses. Clemson encourages faculty teaching freshmen to register their grades in Banner, but all students are supposed to receive graded material by a mid-term grade that is both a letter and a number at Clemson by 5 days prior to the drop day. Georgia, Mississippi State, encouragement is provided. LSU, mid-term grades for all students in Banner. Texas A&M is interesting, they require mid-term grades in certain categories, students below 30 hours, students with below a 2.0 GPA, students athletes, students in their intensive language course. So there is no single answer, but doing something seems like a good idea and as we see there’s a range of options of doing nothing (which is where we are now), encouraging,, mandating grades be given for certain classes or certain subsets of students or for all. About 60% of all post-secondary institutions do require mid-term grades of some form. [22:55]
To let you know how we’ve gotten to this point, as I said there was that improved graduation rates committee that met in 2008 (I know there are some people here that were in that group), that really got some people on campus thinking about various things that made a number of recommendations about advising, about policies, about recruitment, about using data. One of the things that happened after that group submitted its report was that there was a small group headed by Nancy McDaniel before her retirement from Educational Support Services, myself and some other individuals that implemented a pilot mid-term grade project, they were behind a mid-term grade project which involved faculty from biology, math, and history whom we asked to provide grades in banner for students who were getting Ds and Fs. We did that for a few semesters. Students who received these grades had follow-up e-mails telling them where tutoring was and in some cases instructors followed-up with them as well. The general result from that was that students GPAs (we followed them) were slightly higher, the number of Ds and Fs in those classes in that project tended to go down. Faculty reported more engagement that the students had more engagement with the class after the mid-term grades were given. At least in some cases there was more use of office hours, but there is a positive result from that. It’s good pedagogy to help students know how they are doing.
So after working with that pilot project for a while we came up with several options for mid-term grade policies. They went over the summer to the academic affairs group which is the academic associate deans. And we looked at 4 options for kinds of policies and the policy that was recommended was a version of what I am going to show you in a minute. Took that, as Bill said to Senate Executive Committee and they said to take it to the Gen Ed Committee since it involved core courses. Gen Ed looked at it and worked with it and sent it here. {25:31] So it’s kind of gone through various groups of people.
This is the proposed policy: In order to facilitate the adjustment of students to the rigors of Auburn University course work, faculty teaching core courses must record in Banner an early alert grade for all students enrolled in those classes one week prior to midterm. This process will permit students to seek tutoring or take other action before the midterm drop deadline.
Three points of this that I think are worth discussing; the first is core courses. We focused on core courses rather than freshmen as a whole because freshmen tend to congregate in core courses. It seemed simpler than saying all freshmen need to be given mid-term grades which would mean that no matter what course you were teaching you would need to be aware of who the first year students were and be sure to give them grades. So that’s why we focused on core courses. In Banner, rather than giving the grade back to the student and have it be solely a faculty/student interaction; the reason for that was that you put a grade into Banner then someone on the back end can pull out reports and do follow-up. If you are the only individual who knows what grade the student has gotten, then all of the responsibility for telling the student about tutoring, office hours, follow-up, rests on you. If on the other hand we can have and advisor, a coach, someone in academic support pulling reports of students who are in trouble, they can be sending the information about where tutoring is. And more importantly from my point of view, anybody can have a problem with one core course, for me it would have been calculus. But, if someone is having trouble in calculus and English composition and sociology 1000, odds are they need more than a tutor. Odds are there’s something going on there, some kind of adjustment problem, some kind of issue that an academic coach, an advisor can follow-up with and make sure the student gets the help they need. So that’s why in Banner.
We’re looking at…Nick Backschider has started work on working on the functionality that would move grades from Canvas into Banner. Canvas has the capacity to calculate grades to date and then that could be pushed into Banner. Nobody wants to create a whole lot of extra work for people. We are working on that potential functionality.
The final part of this I think merits discussion is the one week prior. Right now we’ve got students who are getting their mid-term grades at 10:00 p.m. on mid-term day, and you faculty know who you are. I mean it just happens, but that doesn’t give students time to really evaluate what their options are. To find the tutors to talk with you as a professor about what they can do, to consider whether tutoring is going to help them out, or whether dropping the course is going to help them out more. So that’s why we want it prior to mid-term. Some of our peers do it two weeks before, we’re going with one week here. But as I say those are the three most contentious parts of the proposal. I would say, right now we don’t require anything and don’t even have a university policy that encourages it. I think it’s time for us to think about this. This is the end of all I have to say on this but I’m happy to answer questions if it is appropriate now. I’m happy to come talk to you between now and January. It’s an important thing for us to talk about and think about as faculty and how we can do best for our students.
Bill Sauser, chair: Before Dr. Relihan departs I do want to say notice as she pointed out to us an early alert grade proposal. We seen the proposal we’ve heard the rational and again I would like to invite any questions if there are any, you can go to the mics, if not, if during the time that you are discussing this with your faculty members, if any concerns arise, please contact Dr. Relihan, because we will be bringing a proposal to you in 2 months.
Are there any questions? I see none, so thank you so much, Constance Relihan, we appreciate that very much.
Our second item of pending action comes to us from Sharon Roberts. Sharon is the co-chair of the University Writing Committee and she’s bringing forth a proposal from that committee. We will not vote on it today but she want to present it for our information.
Sharon Roberts, co-chair of the University Writing Committee: we have some changes that we’d like to propose in terms of the membership of the University Writing Committee. this committee has been meeting now for a couple of years, we’ve talked about its composition and we meet on a regular basis, we’ve done a lot of work and so based on all of that we have some requests for modifying the current membership.
Currently we have one faculty member from each College or School, we have one representative from the faculty of the University Libraries, we have an undergraduate student representative appointed by SGA, and we have a graduate student representative appointed by the Graduate Student Association, that is all how we’d like that, but the additions that we would like to make to the current membership is to add the Ralph Shug Jordan Professor of Writing. This is an endowed professorship given in recognition of a faculty member’s work on writing in the curriculum and so it seemed to us most appropriate that that individual would be a member of the committee. As it happens right now, that professor is a member of the committee representing also the College of Science and Math, so we want to make this an additional position on the committee so that person would not replace the college rep. So from what ever college they are from that representative would stay, but we would add the professor of writing. We feel that very likely the individual holding that position would be interested in serving on the committee and would have relevant expertise that would be of benefit to the committee. [33:17]
We also have considered that it’s important to have a faculty co-chair who co-chairs with the individual serving as the Director of University Writing, Margaret Marshall, and so we serve as co-chairs. For the past 3 years we’ve had that set-up where the Shug Jordan professor of writing served as the co-chair. We have done that informally, it’s worked well but we think that we’d have more flexibility if simply the voting membership of the committee each year selects from its membership a faculty co-chair. And that recommendation would come to the Senate for approval.
Finally, we also have some continuing ex-officio non-voting members, that includes the Director of University Writing, the Director of First year composition, the Director of Institutional Research and Assessment, a representative or designee from the University Curriculum Committee, and the Director of the Miller Writing Center. However the position of the Director of the Miller Writing Center doesn’t actually exist. It’s been difficult to fill. But in any case actually that position does not exist and so we would simply like to have that removed from the continuing ex-officio non-voting membership. In fact what we have done and has worked out very well is that the committee does invite the person who oversees the Miller Writing Center to brief the committee at least once a year on Writing Center issues, on usage, activities, and has done a wonderful job of keeping the committee informed as far as Miller Writing Center activities. However the person who is in charge of the Miller Writing Center is the assistant director of University Writing and they report to the Director of University Writing, so in essence their presence on the committee would be double representation from University Writing and we just don’t see any need for that. So we would like to remove that position from the committee membership.
Finally the last request then is that we allow the Director or designee from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment serve on the committee. At the present time it requires that it be the Director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and we’d like to give that individual the latitude of designating someone from their office to serve in their place.
So those are our recommendations for changes, and hopefully this follows what I have been saying. I’d be happy to answer any questions about this.
Bill Sauser, chair: Questions for Dr. Roberts? I would like to thank you for that very straight forward presentation, thank you Sharon.
We move now to two interesting information items. The first is about the Health and Wellness Center. Some pretty exciting things, I got a preview of this, our presenters are Tim Gore, assistant director for membership, and Jessica Large, who is coordinator for membership at the Health and Wellness Center. [36:56]
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: Thank Bill, we sure appreciate the opportunity to come and be with you all today and what a great opportunity to join you guys here. Any time this many folks get together and the excitement that’s around this building, there’s only two words that can go together, and I want you to join by putting war and eagle together for me. Let’s try it, War Eagle!
Group: War Eagle.
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: Come on, I’m a Southern Baptist, you’re going to have to do a little bit better than that, alright? Let’s try it, War Eagle!
Group: War Eagle!
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: there we go. We appreciate you all letting us come and be with you today on such an important thing. When you came into the Broun Auditorium today you had an opportunity to pick up an apple. When we look at these apples we see two things. First thing we see is education from that apple, that is a great part of it. How many of us had the opportunity when we were kids to take that apple and place it on the teacher’s desk and say thank you for doing a good job? And a lot of times when I was growing up I had to do it because I had to do a little brown nosing to put that apple up there and say thank you for getting me through, and also appreciative of that. On the other side of that apple is wellness. How many of you have heard the old saying ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away”? that’s what we’re in it to do today. [38:10] So that apple does represent education and wellness for us here on the campus of Auburn University and we’re so appreciative of that. Also on that apple there is a little tag. On one side of the tag it has our logo. We are excited about our logo going out on anything that represents our department and this university and on the other side, there is one line of the Auburn Creed that we are taking hold of; “I believe in a sound mind, a sound body and a spirit that’s not afraid.”
Now I’m going to take a couple of exceptions to that motto here today, because I believe in those things, but today I believe in a sound mind. Is there anyone here from the sociology department? Is Dr. Mohan here? Is he on campus still? I know I saw him…he was the last class that I had here at Auburn University, and the last final that I had, and I promise you he could tell you I was not in a sound mind when I left his class. It was an important part to get out of that thing but it was a great thing. I believe in a sound mind and a sound body, I believe you can see this body and it needs some more work. So now being here with our wellness and recreation facility we’re going to have the opportunity to work on our bodies. And Be a better self and better person. Yes, mam? (cannot hear comment from floor) Well just tell Dr. Mohan I was thinking about him, I’m sure he’ll remember me. I’m sure of that in 1977. “…and a spirit that’s not afraid.” Guys if you put a stethoscope on me right now my heart is about 98, I’ve never spoken in front of this many faculty folks in my life and I appreciate again the opportunity to do that. But if we can believe in that motto “I believe in a sound mind, a sound body and a spirit that’s not afraid” I promise you we are on the way for having this campus to be the most fit campus in the nation, and that’s our goal, an opportunity that we have here on the campus of Auburn University.
Today we are going to show you a couple of artist and architectural renderings of our facility. I know you had that on your Web site that you were able to look at before the meeting today, but a couple of you have mentioned to us that you have not seen it, so we want to go through that today. I want to bring up to the microphone, somebody I get to share a 10 foot by 10 foot cubicle with, an unbelievable employee that we get to rub elbows with every day, Jessica Large, and we’re going to let her take you through the process of showing you what this facility is going to look like. Jessica? [40:46]
Jessica Large: (much of her vocals dropped out because she faced away from the microphone) This is an aerial view of the new Recreation and Wellness Center. The grand opening is scheduled for May 2013. The track that is going to be 1/3 of a mile long. Now we are about 70% completed if your not familiar with…coliseum… The main entrance, this is what it is going to look like, as you step into the building you have that wow factor, it’s not only a gym it’s like art. It’s a great first impression. There are rock climbing walls, this is one that will be over 50 feet tall. There are other rock climbing walls…virtual golf course simulator…of any golf course in the world virtually…Leisure Pool, lap lanes and diving well.
A link to the presentation is here. (LINK)
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: This is our, actually the area is called our gymnasium, you see an area that will house basketball, volley ball, badminton, al the different court space and we have 8 of those basketball courts in there, but the thing that makes this picture unique are the murals along the walls. Those pictures are going to be uniquely Auburn. Those pictures will be taken from around the campus of Auburn University and Chewacla Park. So the murals that you will see will be trees and things you see from the Auburn area, so it will be uniquely Auburn by what you see inside. [43:34]
A tower of fitness, this is something that everybody is talking about. Some think it’s a very small parking deck, but it is actually the tower of fitness, and again it is going to be uniquely Auburn because this is one of a kind in the country as it is now. As you can see the top level will be one of our fitness areas, our body and mind area. You can see the windows flip open so you are going to get an unbelievable cross wind and a great view from up there. It’s going to be an incredible facility. Along with that there will be cycling, TRX and all the different new things that are coming up. You can see that if you are on Magnolia and all around the campus, so when that gets to be built up it’s going to be quite the facility on that end too.
This is a picture of our mind and body area, it’s for stretching, for pilates, for yoga, for all the different things that go on, but it’s going to be quite a great facility, and people are telling us already, the best they have ever seen. So we’re looking forward to that. Jessica back up.
Jessica Large: Provide There are 3 locker opportunities, one will be over 100 free day use lockers, the second option will be for faculty, staff, students, retirees, spouse partner, then the next one will be for faculty/staff only as well as retirees and their spouse partner, but no students will be allowed in this area. It’s very exclusive, you will walk in, swipe your card to get in. There will be 48 lockers for men and women.
(dropped voice again see link above) Comparison to other prices we feel like it is a very reasonable price for all that you will be getting.
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: This chart is one that we found to be very interesting. When we were getting ready to start our membership drive for our faculty, staff, and retirees and their spouse partners we wanted to find a way that we could come up with goals. What kind of goals can we set for our faculty, staff, and the numbers that can be included involved with that. We did some benchmarking around the SEC and we found out that less than 10% of a university’s faculty and staff participate in their recreation and wellness center on their campus. So we took those numbers and put those together right there and it says 9.4%, we took that and put it into that 4,100 and we came up with our first goal of 385 faculty, staff, and retirees and their spouse partners to be a part of this membership.
Right now we are at 7.4% and when we turned this in it was 305 members, but when we left today it was 318, so we are on our way to reaching our goal of 385, but the membership goal of 500 is where we really want to be and our hallelujah goal of coming across being a great place where we can have the number one campus recreation fitness program in the country. We want 1,000 and we want you to be a part of us. So that’s where those numbers are coming from.
Parking is always an issue here, but working with Don Andrae has been the most pleasurable thing on campus. He has a tremendous responsibility of getting everybody parked and he is working very hard with us to find the best possibilities for you, as faculty and staff, to come and park. This here is the PC parking beside the Coliseum and the Arena, and he has already added more A and B parking spots just for you all to come and go to work for right now, but we know this facility needs to be some more parking for you to come, especially we feel like you really would want to come at lunch. I just have a feeling you want to come either before or after lunch. Before work is not a problem. After work is not a problem. But between work hours it may be a challenge but Don is working very hard to get parking lined up, and we are very appreciative to the Parking Services for helping out. [48:16]
Jessica Large: Our social media information, we encourage you to follow us on twitter and facebook for any updates
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: And last but not least, this is our information that you can contact myself or Jessica, these are our e-mail addresses, or you can call us. If in your department you would like for Jessica and I to come and set up and talk to your staff, which we’ve done all over this campus we are so excited to do that for you so we can surely answer all the questions that you have for us. I know we are running a little late but we will be glad answer a few questions for you now, but please feel free to call us. We will set up a time to come visit with you guys or e-mail us those different questions and we’ll be glad to answer those for you.
I want to remind you before we get out of here, December 10 is the first cutoff in our presale membership. I know we are asking you to join on faith right now but we sure want you to be a part of this and reap the benefits of the $25 rates that you will have to start off with.
Bill Sauser, chair: And we do have a question, yes sir. If you would state your name and department.
Dmitry Glotov, senator, Math and Statistics: What are the plans for the current Student Activities Center?
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: Right now as far as the plans are going it’s going to be repurposed. There will be other opportunities to be used. I don’t think it will be under the Division of Campus Recreation, is that something you may want to address, Scott?
Dan King, assistant vice president for facilities: I can probably address that fairly accurately. Currently the Student Activities Center is, there’s two main pieces of it, one piece is really is used by the students for the current intramural program. Obviously that will move to the new student wellness center. The students still want to retain use of that portion of the Student Activities Center for large gatherings. I think you can put about 500–600 seats, maybe 1,000 on the floor there with the stage, so that will be dedicated to student use under Student Affairs. And then the back half is currently utilized by the athletic’s department for Women’s Volleyball as their practice and competition venue. They may try to do some renovation and improve that but largely it’s seen as we move forward to the future to continue to be used, although the final decision has not been made on that, for Women’s Volleyball.
Bill Sauser, chair: Are there any other questions? I think all of us are aware that student membership is covered from the student fee, but those of us that want to take the opportunity to use this facility, that opportunity is yours. I want to thank Jessica and Tim for making the presentation. Thank you so much.
Tim Gore, assistant director for membership of the Health and Wellness Center: I appreciate you letting us come today.
Bill Sauser, chair: And cont them if you have any questions or you want to join.
Our final information item today comes from Dan King, the assistant vice president for facilities. He’s going to give us an update on what all is going on with respect to future plans for our campus. [52:10]
Dan King, assistant vice president for facilities: Hi, good afternoon, thank you for allowing me to come speak to you today. What I’d like to cover if I could is…well Dr. Sauser had a long list of potential topics, I’ve really tried to focus this on the Master Plan Update for you all. Before I jump into this, what I would like to share with you about the Master Plan is at its essence, at its core, what the master plan is is a long term plan for how land will be used or space will be utilized on campus to execute not only the current mission of the campus of the university but also the future mission. So the trick to the Master Plan is to try to anticipate what might have to happen in the future even though we don’t know what the future holds and to make sure that we have land or space set aside to allow for future changes, particularly future expansion. That’s what at the core of what we are trying to do.
So I’d like to give you a quick update on a topic you’ve all heard some bit of before, but to tell you about the Central Classroom Facility. There’s been a lot of questions about that in the past. I’ve been asked for well over a year now, where’s it going to go? So we are narrowing that down, and I will tell you about which locations it is being narrowed down to. I’d like to tell you about the potential site locations for the other academic buildings in the core of campus that we’d like to replace. We’ll talk about that a little bit. Again we are coming to the point where we pretty much can put together a recommendation to the university leadership and eventually the Board of Trustees on where those facilities might go. Thirdly, I’d like to give you an update on the health science campus, a new major initiative here at Auburn. And last but not least, overall land use on campus. So I’m not going to cover quite all the things Dr. Sauser mentioned earlier, quite a long list, but in the interest of time I tried to limit it to these.
We’ll start off with the Central Classroom Facility. Over the last year we looked at what sites, there’s about 20 possible sites that it could go on, pretty much every green space in the core of campus and every parking lot and a number of sites where there’s existing buildings, we took a look at those and tried to assess whether or not they’d be appropriate for the Central Classroom Facility. Those are the dots all over the campus map there. Eventually we narrowed it down to 3 primary sites. One at the location essentially where Parker and Allison are, second at the west end of the Library, the Mell Street end of the Library, and a third where Dunstan Hall, L Building, and Engineering Shops currently are, more on the north side of campus. So we tried to assess could you put the Central Classroom Facility at any one of those 3 locations, and a second set of options, could you split the Central Classroom Facility (CCF) between any 2 of those locations? Because it’s a pretty big facility, about 169,000 square feet. The anecdote we’ve been trying to use to describe it is it’s about the size of Shelby I complex, so it’s a pretty big complex.
As it turns out as we tried to figure out could you put that much building on the site to the Mell side of the Library, it really doesn’t fit there. So our 6 options dropped to 5 and we assessed those. There was not a lot of support to date for trying to put the facility up here for a number of reasons. One it’s not necessarily close to transit, our ability to create more transit option up on Magnolia although recently there has been a pedestrian path there with a bus turnout are somewhat limited. A second reason is potential expansion for the College of Engineering; that would be the prime site for that in the future. At some point we hope the College of Engineering will expand, a petty critical college to the university. Some thought it was too far to the north of campus, so there was not tremendous support for the site up here. So that pretty much dropped out and left us with putting it all at the Parker/Allison site, or maybe splitting the CCF between Parke/Allison and the Library site.
So two options: a single facility at Parker/Allison and a split facility at Parker/Allison. This shows option #1, trying to put the whole facility at Parker/Allison. As part of the planning effort to make sure, does it really fit there and will it fit whatever else we might need to there in the long run. We are also trying to take a look at eventually as part of replacing the older academic buildings in the core of campus, it’s not only to replace Provost classroom space in Haley Center or Parker, it’s also to replace Parker/Allison. As you can see from this slide there is not only two parts of the CCF, but also is there enough space to put, for lack of a better term we are calling it the COSAM replacement building (the facility that replaces parker
Some advantages to this site, it’s close to the stadium parking deck, from the student standpoint close to the core, close to the student center. COSAM replacement of course is sort of the COSAM precinct, COSAM facilities already exist there. So it fits well from that standpoint. The second option is a split facility where we put a portion, probably about 100,000 or 110,000 sq. ft. of the CCF and about 60,000 on the west end of the Library, so split the facility between the two sites, allow for some distributed classroom so it’s not all just clustered in one spot and greatly increase the density there. Again trying to take a look at what does that mean in terms of being able to site the COSAM expansion facility.
In addition to the COSAM replacement building another part of the master plan, which I’m not going to get into today for time’s sake, I’ll be happy to come back and tell you another day, is we’ve tried to develop fairly objective base model to try to determine space requirements for all the colleges and schools on campus and their various departments. That analysis shows that COSAM has the single greatest space deficit, nothing to do with the replacement of Parker/Allison, it assumes we will replace that, but as we sit here today without any of this happening COSAM has the single largest deficit of space of any college on campus. Most of it’s laboratory space, that seems to correlate well with what’s generally known anecdotally across campus that we have a shortage of laboratory space for the core courses in biology, chemistry, and probably physics as well, so at some point not only would there be a CCF of just classrooms, there’s a COSAM replacement building that replaces everything else that was in Parker and Allison, but there’s a shortage of COSAM laboratory space which someday for lack of a better term, we are calling the COSAM expansion building. Would all that fit on this site if you had a split site? The answer is, yes it could or most of it, This is probably not the entire facility requirement but it’s a significant portion of it. So those are really the 2 options that we have narrowed it down to.
Pros and cons for each there is no perfect site, no perfect configuration for any of this, but those are the 2 that seem to be at the moment the leading contender and some of the analysis we are trying to do to figure out what fits and what allows for expansion in the future.
Taking a step back. The initiative to replace the older academic buildings in the core of campus included Haley, you’ve all heard these before, the 5–6 building list, Haley Center, Parker/Allison, Spidle, Funchess, and Upchurch. So where would those replacement buildings go? We just talked about the Central Classroom Facility. That takes just the Provost’s classrooms out of Haley, but there are other occupants in Haley. Before Haley can go away, the CCF does not replace Haley Center, we still have the College of Education, College of Liberal Arts, and other things in Haley as well, Outreach, the Bookstore, all kinds of things like that. But at least addressing where would the college buildings tend to go.
First starting with the Funchess/Upchurch replacement, there is enough real estate if you will on Ag hill we believe that if Funchess and Upchurch were to be demolished that you could rebuild whatever that replacement is going to be on Ag hill. This is Comer Hall, one of our best architectural buildings, a little run down at the moment, but an outstanding building from an architectural standpoint. Obviously the headquarters for the College of Agriculture, that you want to keep Ag Hill as Ag for the most part. So generally we think without a lot of detail of how it would sit on here that the Funchess/Upchurch replacement would go on Ag hill. Again you might have to search somewhere while the construction is going on for the existing folks. But generally we think that is the location.
For the College of Human Sciences, they are currently in Spidle Hall and we think some combination of the former Mell Hall site and Spidle Hall still makes a lot of sense where that might go. There’s a pretty good bit of land there to do that. It keeps the synergies with the College of Human Sciences and the Hotel which their hotel management program across the street on. Yet another group that’s in Haley Center that would need to relocate would be the College of Liberal Arts. One of the sites that was looked at for CLA, we could build a new building for the CLA in where Dustin Hall, Engineering sites. L building are on the backside of Foy, and Tichenor, so that could work, but in a minute we will talk about the Health Science Campus. And there’s been a thought for a good while that the School of Pharmacy and the School of Nursing might be better if they relocated out of the core of campus into a Health Science Campus, and I’ll show you where that is being considered in a minute. And then an option would be that happened CLA, the potion of it that is in Haley is about the same square footage as what’s in the Walker Building and Miller Hall (for pharmacy and nursing). So probably with some renovation we think probably the better option from the facilities would recommend, rather than build a separate Liberal Arts building/offices, that probably a better use is to relocate Pharmacy and Nursing out of the core of campus, reduce the density on campus and then move Liberal Arts into those facilities to give them the space they need along the Thach pedestrian walkway. So this is a Liberal Arts sector along in here.
Again taking a step back to the broader campus, so where would we still have in Haley Center the College of Education, and where might Pharmacy and Nursing relocate? The College of Education, we’ve talked to them about a potential site. This is the Hill Dorm Complex, this is P.O. Davis Drive, this is Duncan Drive, that’s the School of Forestry, that’s the new parking structure, and that is the OIT building, and Poultry Science. So it is on the backside of that on P.O. Davis, college of Education is generally thought that they need to be in the core of campus so it could be located there. So we think that is the leading site for the new College of Education facility.
I’ll show you the broader construct for the Health Science Campus in the next 2 slides but in general where School of Pharmacy and Nursing go would be in this area of campus, which some of you know as the beach. This is Lem Morrison and this is South Donahue. [1:07:30]
Shifting gears to topic #3, the Health Science Campus. This has been a long-standing initiative on campus to figure out if we were to establish a Health Science Campus where should it go? That decision making was greatly accelerated when the decision was made about a month or two ago to relocate the Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine to Auburn University. The site that was selected for that, this is south Donahue, this is the hay field, right up here is the beach (as you would know it), Research Park is down in here. Once VCOM was sighted here, where would Health Science Campus go, and there was a desire for growth and expansion for research facilities that might have synergies between VCOM, Nursing, Pharmacy and maybe the clinics here, so the thought was that on the west side of South Donahue (this is currently wooded land and there is impact on that with some forestry program), but probably the best long-term solution would be to have a stack of facility uses here from Health Science Campus, research facilities, VCOM on that portion of campus. Some renderings of initial site drawing of what that could potentially look like. [1:09:22] I have some bigger ones of these, but it shows where it is, cut and paste into that same map to show where it would go overall on campus.
Here are depictions of how the Health Science Campus could potentially be laid out, with this portion more down to the south, at the bottom of the slide as you would see it would be the VCOM facility. Some research facilities potentially in here with some clinics, School of Nursing, School of Pharmacy, in this building or this building and these will change somewhat. They are not hard and firm at this point, just exploratory layouts for the site.
Moving on to topic #4, our overall land use of campus. We currently have a lot of things going on at Auburn. There are some new ones though to incorporate into the master plan. We’ve talked about a number of these already; Health Science, osteopathic medicine, there’s been a long standing desire that if Auburn could ever get the funds to create a performing arts center here, also a thought the city is very much interested in a welcome center. Student Affairs is very interested in expanding recreation fields for our students, which were originally created in the 70s when Auburn had about 17,000 students, not 25,000, so expansion has not kept up with enrollment. The identification of field laboratories, we’ll talk about that a little bit later, that will be an important thing we try to accomplish in this master plan, make that clear of how do we use our land as it relates to instruction and possibly research? I think we need to plan for future athletics complex expansion, that’s a function that tends to grow. We think we should consolidate service function, such as facilities, and game day activities– a comprehensive approach to how does game day impact campus and how is the land utilized to support that one way or another. While it’s only 8 days a year it has an awful lot of impact.
So this is a diagram, very busy, it just shows different areas on campus and different uses that have been proposed and different groups that might be interested in those various areas on campus. The major point to this is there is increasing competition for various parcels of land on this campus among different entities. So the trick to come up with a long-term land use plan is to sort through those and again based on highest and best use how can Auburn maximize what we can do with the campus land that we have to best further our overall mission. But there is a lot of competition and the competition I think has increased in recent years as the campus has grown south from the core, and some things like research is starting to grow north a little bit and we are also growing west. So the campus continues to expand west and south.
This is a diagram that shows some of the areas that are somewhat in play, whether it’s the area for the Health Science Campus, the Hay field, a potential area for a performing arts center, some field laboratories spots (will identify those in a little bit), service sector stuff, intramural fields, athletic expansion, all our possibilities of what could be done.
So to date we tried to work up a series of options that attempts to thread the needle in different ways, that would include potentially swapping intramural fields and maybe hay field area, there is different versions of where that may or may not occur, generally the thought is to have a Health Science Campus seems to be getting more and more locked in. Performing arts, generally speaking the site for that is across from the museum (not that it is a perfect site), sort of a gateway as you drive up from South College. Some service center consolidation, this is the garden area across from facilities, potential off campus recreation complex, takes the intramural fields and just move them off campus and build a complex. Some universities have done that, that has pros and cons of course. So none of these are perfect, some are probably better than others and we are going to sort through which of those may be the best of the bunch.
On thing we need to make explicit in this master plan…I think people look at a campus map and see a lot of green space and say look at all that unutilized land, which is a natural tendency, but most of it is tied to some sort of use related to instruction or research and in particular instruction related uses may have priority in the core, research you can do maybe a little further out, but these are all areas the you recognize, but maybe we need to describe them more as a field laboratory. To go over a couple of them, Building Science has a relatively new established field laboratory over here. We talked with COSAM about establishing a biological field laboratory there. This is an area behind Forestry, a forest field lab, this is old rotation and probably some agronomy, horticulture potential field lab, more agronomy, horticulture field labs over here, this is forested land the we may need to consider in the future, it’s a field lab for foresters and others. Beef teaching unit is a field lab, they need that to instruct people on beef program, Vet school of course you consider one big field lab overall. College of Agriculture’s equine program, what they do with the horses there would equate to a field lab and this is swine research and this is turf grass, poultry farm…so really all those are some kind of a field laboratory they are not just open space or forested land that we just haven’t paved yet. They really do have an academic use and if we make that clear, over time it will change the mindset of how we view that land.
So that’s the end of my presentation, I’d be happy to take any questions that you have on any of these topics or anything else you want to know about facilities. I realize I’m at the end here.
Bill Sauser, chair: do we have any burning questions? Yes sir.
Dan Phillips, senator, Communication Disorders: Speech and Hearing Clinic is within our department, do you have any plans for it?
Dan King: Generally speaking, the clinics the thought is we would be best off to move the clinics out of the core of campus into the Health Science Campus with the School of Nursing, School of Pharmacy. The thought is to relocate the clinics out there somewhere. So again there are some synergies between nursing, pharmacy, clinics, osteopathic medicine, it seems to make sense. That continues to be the general idea being pursued.
That’s why getting the clinics out of the core of campus is a very good idea, as we understand it, patients historically had difficulty being able to park close enough to a clinic, particularly where the patients may be a little more elderly or mobility challenged.
Sangeev Baskiyar, senaor, computer science and software engineering: You touched upon Dustan Hall, what are the plans for Dunstan Hall in the future?
Dan King: Demolish it as soon as we can. I hope you are not a lover of Dunstan because we’re ready to knock that thing down. It’s had a good useful life, it’s time…
Sangeev Baskiyar, senaor, computer science and software engineering: I guess what I was thinking about is there a replacement plan in that place?
Dan King: Not necessarily for Dunstan, we are pretty well to the point where we’ve moved most of all the functions out of Dunstan, so it’s not quite vacant, but it’s close. We’ve accommodated whatever was in Dunstan in existing space already.
Sangeev Baskiyar, senaor, computer science and software engineering: Thanks.
Dan King: That site up there where Dunstan is, L Building, engineering shops, in addition to engineering expansion, which could be decades off, is also the site where we think the top priority for a new parking garage for campus would be. To build it there to serve particularly faculty and staff in the north-east quadrant, the area closest to Samford Hall and Toomer’s Corner; that’s probably the only site we have to ever increase parking in that area. So again one of the problems of maybe putting the CCF up there is to take up a big chunk with a parking structure. That helps maybe some of the transportation issues, the CCF is a lot of building and if you try to do that with the entire or a portion of the CCF.
Bill Sauser, chair: We made the comment earlier that there is a lot going on campus that could influence the future of our campus and you can see the kinds of plans that are happening. Many of us in this room have been involved in some of these planning sessions and there will be more opportunities. Dan I found to be very open in terms of answering questions and considering ideas, so I do want to let everyone know these plans are not locked in but I wanted you to see what’s going on so you’d have a feel for what’s going to happen on campus, well here are some of the ideas. So thank you very much, Dan, it was a fine presentation.
I would like to ask if there is any unfinished business to come before the Senate? Hearing none, is there any new business to come before the Senate? Hearing none, I declare the meeting adjourned and encourage you to go vote. [1:21:39]