Transcript Senate Meeting
April 8, 2014

Larry Crowley, chair:  Come to order please. Welcome to the April meeting of the Auburn University Senate. I am Larry Crowley the chair of the Senate. Patricia Duffy is the chair-elect, Gisela Buschle-Diller is the Secretary-elect, in the back furiously counting the roll is Judy Sheppard she’s the current Secretary and she will confirm that we have a quorum. While we wait for the count the only business that we have is the approval of the minutes.
A short review of the rules of the Senate, senators or substitute senators please sign the roll in the back, and we will confirm a quorum from the count.

If you’d like to speak on an issue go to the microphone and when recognized 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 the comments by senators on an issue are made, guests are welcome to speak as well.  [1:28] There are currently 88 members of the Senate. I am getting a nod so we have a quorum (requires 45 members).

The first order of business is the approval of the minutes of the minutes for the March 4, 2014 Senate meeting. The have been posted online are there corrections to those that are posted? If there are no corrections the minutes stand approved.

I’d like to call on Dr. Gogue to come and make remarks from the Office of the President. [1:48]

Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you Larry. I appreciate all of you being here today. Two items; Board of Trustees meets this Friday at 9:30 in the Hotel. There is only one issue on the calendar that deals with academics side of Auburn, there are a couple from AUM but one for this campus and it deals with an option in the Fisheries. School of Fisheries has been through all the university processes and if you have questions about it, the Provost will be happy to respond to those.

Second thing I wanted to mention was the Legislature has completed their work their various bills have been sent to the governor. The ones that have been signed at this point, the general fund budget which does not affect us has been signed by the governor, the contracting threshold passed. If you had something that you wanted to acquire and it cost $7,500, of course you had to go through the bid process to be able to acquire that; they have changed that to $15,000 on the bid process. The other thing that has been signed is something that is referred to as Curly’s Law, it has to do with marijuana and I’ll read specifically what it says: “provides defense of necessity for the unlawful possession of marijuana for research, for development purposes related to epileptic conditions.” So that has been approved by the governor.

Our bill, the Educational Trust Fund Bill, is pending. It has been through the House and Senate, signed and is waiting on the governor either to sign or to veto. The current budget that’s been approved by the Legislature is a 0.7% increase in the O&M on all 4 lines of the university; so that’s AUM, the main campus, Agriculture Experiment Station, and Extension. That’ roughly, Don was telling me it’s about 2 million dollars, is what that is in terms of an increase.

The reciprocity bill came through the Legislature, waiting again for the governor to sign, it allows for distance electronic courses to be handled in a different way. The final bill that is pending that received a lot of attention is the ethics bill. All that doesn’t affect us but if you were a member of the House and Senate the old bill allowed you to leave say the House and immediately begin consulting in the Senate. Now there is a 2 year wait for either bodies. So if you are a senator you can’t consult on the House side for 2 years. The governor has until April 13 to either sign those bills or veto them.

A couple of bills that died, some because of the way they hurried it up at the very end and adjourned, where the governor would not veto some of these bills prior to their adjournment; One was the open meetings act, again that really did not involve the university, but in certain counties they were using series of meetings to talk to each of their county commissioners in private and in a way it circumvented the concept of gathering together and talking about the various items. So that bill was defeated. The age of majority which is one we are very interested in failed again this year, so our age of majority is still 19. It did not go to 18.

One of the bills that was very controversial during the session; some states consider your house and your car the same in terms of carrying a weapon without a permit. So there was a movement in Alabama, fought by most of law enforcement that did not allow you to carry a weapon in a car without a concealed weapons permit. That bill was defeated so carrying a weapon in a car without a permit would be illeagal in Alabama.
Those were the primary things that they spent 30 days working on. I’d be happy to respond to any questions.

Larry Crowley, chair: The Provost indicated that he didn’t have any remarks and briefly I want to mention the fact that next month this room will be under construction so we will be meeting in 1203 Haley Center.

We have two information items today, one is one the Honors College, she is going to get us up to date on all the good things that are happening in Honors, and we have Beth Guertal, chair of the Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee, will come and talk about the parental leave policies at Auburn and a survey of those around our region. [6:55]

Melissa Baumann, Honors College Director and Asst. Provost for Undergraduate Studies: I want to thank you very much for having me and giving me this opportunity to share some of the things that are going on about the Honors College.

I’ll start off with the broad goal which may seem obvious but it is probably good to say that we would like to provide the challenging academic experience for everyone of our students. To give them broad experience within the core while also engaging them in our land-grant mission, so this is where some of the research and the service will come into play.

My background, I’ve been a faculty member for 25 years, my research is in tissue engineering. I am a materials engineer so you will see me kind of stick to numbers probably a little more than most. I’ve also got a broad background in Honors College education so I’ve been involved with the Honors College at a big ten institution for 25 years and I’ve also been an associate dean for 5 years. I also have an NPS, the National Prestigious Scholar background so you will hear me making comments about our NPS program which is strong but I think we can do even better because I’ve had many of my students go on to win these awards. I’ve been very actively engaged and would very much like to promote both study abroad for every Honors College student as well as an undergraduate research experience.

Entrance requirements, so I’ll give you some of our, and none of these have changed and then I’ll go on to the new curriculum, so as an entering freshman ACT/SAT scores as you can see; 29
ACT and a 1290 SAT. the average score for entering college honors students is a 32.6. Just so you know that is extraordinary. That’s 97–98%, so that’s the average entering Honors College freshman. So some of the things I am putting out there is we really are demanding but if they are in that percentile they should be delivering. So if you teach an honors course, I would tell you that’s who you are teaching and you should expect much of them.

The students have to have a 3.4 GPA to continue in the Honors College, but new this year, if you don’t make it your first semester in the Honors College that’s okay. Anytime after your first semester, as long as you have to have an Auburn grade point of 3.4 we welcome you in. There is a short application, you come in, you tell us a little bit about yourself, we look at and make sure you have the grades, but as long as you can complete the program, we don’t care when you join us. Now mathematically it would be difficult if not impossible to do your last year, but it could be possible. This is going to be something new and I think it will also help us a bit on our diversity.

A few facts and figures about the Honors College (HC). In the fall we had 2,141 students, we’ve had some graduate, so now we are at 1,958 HC students. I hate to say target but I am comfortable with a 10% number in terms of undergraduate enrollment. So Drew, I see him here, can correct me as to the absolute number, but between 19,000 and 20,000 undergraduates are here at Auburn. We are roughly about 10 percent. Over the last few years now, I am new here and only been here 9 months, but I understand that we have a little bubble that occurred. We don’t have that any more we’ve had a steady enrollment in terms of HC students entering. So I expect that roughly 2,000 number to be pretty constant and if we had a target it would be to keep it around those numbers. [10:45] We don’t want to grow too large because I don’t think we could offer as many courses to meet a much larger enrollment. But certainly if the students are great, we are going to welcome as many good students as we have and that would be a great problem to have, So that’s as far as numbers.

to give you an idea about HC students and where they are,  the numbers in parenthesis you are going to see are for the average Auburn University student and then I’ll tell you a little bit about Honors. So we know that our students have more than one degree, so 41% of them have a minor or a dual degree or a second major, that’s in comparison to 29% of Auburn University students. [11:27] 93.9% of Honors students are retained one year. The Auburn University is always very good too, so 87.8%, but even more Honors students are retained. And you can say, yea, they should, but again we are asking more from them and asking more isn’t turning them away. So that is an important point to know. Our 4-year graduation rate is 57.6% and we know that Auburn’s is 39.8%. We looked at 5-year, it’s 81% compared to 62..6% (Auburn) and I didn’t even put our 6-year on there, I want to say it’s 92 or 93%, it’s very good, but again we should expect that.

Sixty percent go on to enroll in graduate or professional school. So this is law school, med school, dental school, vet school, and graduate schools. When we look at the graduate schools the best in the country and the world, there is a wide range, but our students are getting in pretty much where they want to get in. So we have students at Cambridge right now in the UK, we’ve got them at Oxford, they are in Ireland, they are at MIT, they are everywhere so we know that 60% of Honors College graduates are looking to go on to grad or professional schools. The other 40% go on and get a job, a few percent go on to things like “City Year” or “Teach for America.”

There is a 60/40 in-state/out-of-state, it’s actually 62/38, no wait it’s 42/58, so we actually lean a little more out-of-state which is a good thing for Auburn in terms of our bottom line and budget. We seem to be able to keep our out-of-state students too. So they are doing well and are choosing to stay.

Our most popular colleges, people ask this, these are the top 4; Engineering, COSAM, CLA (College of Liberal Arts), and Business. The first 3, I want to say engineering and COSAM are pretty equivalent, CLA just a little bit less and then business comes in 4th, but I think business is growing and we’re seeing over the next year. CLA was a little larger and is shrinking a little bit, so that’s where our enrollments are.

The numbers of Honors College…Larry asked me why should a student be in the Honors College…my thing is that it is good for the student and it is good for parent, so taking these hard courses, I’ll talk about the new curriculum in a minute, they are going to take 30 credits of Honors level courses. Why would you do that? Well you do it because these students actually do better. So strangely enough it has no impact on their grade point. So the average Honors College student grade point is 3.73. When you compare the students who chose Honors to the same entering students who didn’t choose Honors, they are doing better. So doing more and making it harder, they are actually performing better. So this is the bottom line. If we broke down, and again Drew’s office has been very helpful, we are just starting to collect some of this data, we looked at students taking 10–15 Honors courses. There was no statistical differences between their grade points in comparison to those who only took 1–5 of them or 6–9. So this idea of having them do more it’s not hurting them.

The new Honors College curriculum. When I came in we had a two tiered program and that’s going to continue as the students move through, but there was very much this idea that you took 18 credits and you were done. And we didn’t have as many students staying on to complete it for 4 years and they weren’t doing that undergraduate research experience like they could have and I think should but part of it we thought was, had to do with the flexibility in what they were able to do before. So what we have is we want them to excel in academics, we do want to keep a focus on undergraduate research, if I had my druthers I would have everyone of them do undergraduate research and they would all study abroad/ study away. So I guess I have my development goals cut out for me, but we will keep the focus there. Then we also are always going to be looking at, I came from a land-grant school, Auburn’s a land-grant school, I think it’s really important for students to not just look at what do they get out of it but what are they going go give back to the state and the nation. So this is going to remain a focus in the Honors College.

It’s a 4-year curriculum, there is only one curriculum now. You come in and it’s 4 years, it’s 30 credits. It’s roughly 25% of the classes so we look at students coming in and say 1 in 4 classes you are going to take at the Honors level. The flexibility, they have to take at least one a year but we are trying to make it more flexible so we can get the completion rate up. Last year, this past year 2013–2014 we had 138 Honors sections taught, so thank you. ‘Cause we don’t teach them, you all teach them, so thank you., thank you., thank you. This is amazing.

Something new with the curriculum is that graduate courses are going to count toward this 30 credits. Now that was a little scary, there has been a lot of conversation going on at a lot of different levels about this, but basically they can enroll in the lower graduate courses without your permission or having an override, but the upper level courses they can’t. Now are you going to be flooded with Honors College students taking these classes? We don’t think so. But are the best students going to be taking it and using it to possibly stay here at Auburn for a graduate degree, yes we hope so. The graduate school has been very supportive of this and we are already seeing some students enroll and take advantage of that. So we are excited about the graduate courses. Up to 12 credits, I think it’s 9–12 credits depending upon the degree that you choose to go into, if you stay at Auburn can then be counted toward your Master’s degree.

Other types of courses: we have Honors seminar courses which we’ve had we use the Honors study abroad courses; there is something new we are calling Honors research seminar courses. We are looking at having 4 or 5 in the coming year. We’ve piloted one now. The students are studying marine biology but it’s a research course so it’s taught by Nannette Chadwick. She is teaching them her research, but she is also teaching them the biology. Over spring break she went to the Keys, took them all camping and they collected specimens that they have learned how to analyze and they are doing the data analysis now. So students, we can’t pay for every one of them to have a research experience and we might run out of faculty, but if they do this in a course they are getting both the course content and an exposure to research. So this is a new way that we are trying to give more Honors college students research exposure. I think in the coming year we are looking at 3 to 5 of these courses. I would love to have 3 to 5 every year. Not the same courses, so that a student coming in could go oh, I could try this. It doesn’t have to be in their area of expertise but they can still have a class where they don’t know the answer. I think that’s really important for every student but especially for the Honors College student. They have to understand there are unsolvable problems, they have to get the idea that you are going to work towards something. So that’s a new course.

I also like to combine study abroad with research. I just got back from a fabulous trip where I had to go to Switzerland and the Netherlands. It was very tough. We visited a lot of labs and there is a program where our students can enroll in  a semester away they can enroll in these universities and they do research, and I want to say laboratories because again I am a laboratory engineer, but it can be in anything; political science, economics, literature. They open up these and you do research one-on-one with the faculty in their group. You take a few courses but we can arrange to have those research experiences count towards their degree here. [19:52] So the cost is almost comparable to an out-of-state student, it’s going to be a bit more for the in-state student, but I’m looking to see how we can top that up maybe with scholarships to help. So again, another way of providing both the study abroad and the research experience.

Then the senior year experience, rather than just saying it has to be senior research and a thesis, cause that was stinding lot of engineers, we had a lot of engineers not finishing [20:23], maybe I am more sensitive to that, but it is an issue when we have a lot of engineers enrolling and not finishing, that’s a problem. So we went to say listen, you can go ahead and do the research and then write a thesis, or you could do 3 graduate courses in your major, that’s your senior year experience. Or what ever your capstone course is (every discipline has them), just do that at the Honors level. So that’s going to be contracted, so do it at the Honors level and we’ll say that’s your senior year’s experience.

Also within the Honors College we have the National Prestigious Scholars Office and the Associate Director of the Honors College, Dr. Paul Harris who works with me and we also have our other Associate Director here, Cathy Maddox. Paul works on getting more NPS winners and it’s been great coming in because between the two of us I think we can have more winners. Not that more is more, but it is, but we have so many students here that we can get more of these awards because of the quality of our students. I am used to a system that brings in more students early on and then helps them develop all the way through. So I think we are going to get a more systematic approach to these awards, I think we’ll keep the level of excellence that we have, I think we’ll grow the program.

Even in this year we have more Fulbrights that are winning and we just need to bump up our Fulbright and our NFS graduate fellowships. In the past year we had this Mitchell Scholar, over the years we had 3 Gates-Cambridge winners, 9 Fulbright winners and 8 finalists and I want to say this year we have one for sure Fulbright and another that’s likely and then one that’s going to be an alternate. I think this is a strong office I think though we can do better.

Scholarships, so it’s really important to me to get as many students scholarships as possible. Honors College students tend to come in with an expectation, let’s put it that way, and the longer I spend in the state I realized that maybe other universities are handing out cash. So we’re working pretty hard to try to give as many of our students meaningful scholarships as possible. One thing, and again this will tie into the National Prestigious Scholars Program, I’ve taken some of our development money and put it to use in that we have 12 Colleges, we named the best scholar entering undergraduate, so 18 year old, the best student from each college. We worked with the colleges and let them pick them, I am looking at Steve Duke, I sent Steve 3 to 5 names and let him pick it. That student gets to work with a faculty member for 2 years. [23:21] All of the winners that I’ve had personally run through my lab, they all did this. I can’t tell you how important it is. Are there terrible ones?, I wouldn’t say terrible, there are some that aren’t great, the majority of them are fabulous. My last one that I had before leaving is a Marshall Scholar himself and he will be at Cambridge and he also won an NIH Oxford award, These are fabulous awards that we can use to identify early on who are going to be stellar researchers. So we have that. I’d love to have 5 per college, that’s a personal development goal of mine is to build those programs up so we have the top 5.

If anybody ever asks you about the quality of these I think the slacker in the group that I sent out, there was one student with a 34 ACT, everybody else either has perfect 36s or 35s. So these are the top of the top of the top students, just to give you an idea of the quality. I’d also like and we are very fortunate that we’ve had support particularly from the Drummond Foundation for scholarships that are more need based. And I wish I had more of that because again I don’t like to see a student leaving because they can’t afford anymore to stay at Auburn. So those are some of our goals.

In terms of study abroad we have programs to Germany, Costa Rica, and then Grease/Turkey, I just discussed that Euro Scholars program and that’s a program without limits, which I discovered and I’m thrilled with. So we can send them 20 students and they will be there in January. [24:57] They’ll take it, all you need is a 3.5 GPA and to fill out this application. So I think that’s a very viable program for students. The University of Oxford just contacted us and I will go visit in June, which will be a lovely time of year to be there. I’ll be there for a week and what they are opening up is for Honors College students. Euro Scholars is not Honors, that could be anybody, but for Honors College students as long as they are in good standing with Honors College they are going to allow them to enroll and take a semester of courses at Oxford University and have them transfer that here. So that won’t be the traditional study abroad, but it will be a semester away studying and then coming back. Then we have Averswith in Wales contact us for our CLA students for a specific program for them to study there and again transfer it back.

Future study abroad, looking at maybe partnering with people to develop something in Rome. And then Asia, a number of our students mentioned this, but we don’t have anything in the Honors College, so if anybody has any ideas come talk to me about those.

How do faculty engage with the Honors College now? Currently the number one is teaching an Honors section and I can’t thank you enough. So 138 times last time you guys came to bat for us and thank you. Honors contracts, that’s got to be thousands of Honors contracts, thousands, okay? Thank you. For those of you who don’t know an Honors contract, if you don’t have an Honors section of a course, generally those are the upper level courses and an Honors College student approaches you and says no this isn’t an honors course but can you give me extra work to gain Honors credit in it? That’s a contract between you and the student. Hopefully after today I keep trying to get the word out, you can make them do more than a book report. I cringe if I see book reports, these should not be book reports, these can be significant things. I said I do biomedical engineering. I used to have…I worked on implants a lot so I would have failed implants and I would give those to the students and say, go do the microscopy, look at the failure analysis, do the chemical analysis and come back with a report and tell me why that total hip failed. It would take them a semester but it was a real thing and it engaged the little gray cells in them. Please push on that. Give them good projects.

You teach study abroad, you are our seminar speakers, I’m trying to think, we had at least 1,000 students show up for our “no poverty” series. I was blown away when I would walk into a room and see 300 students showing up. So we had faculty from Auburn and from around the state come in and those are wonderful experiences so I don’t what our series is going to be. We were focusing on poverty this semester, I don’t know what it will be in the fall, but if you have any ideas, please let us know. We’d love to have you come in and meet with our students then.

We have undergraduate research mentors and then 6 wonderful people who have volunteered to serve on our faculty advisory council. And that’s just been great for me especially being new here saying what about this and having people go, oh, no, that’s not the Auburn way, but I need to know that, that’s a good thing. Or they go, that could be the Auburn way if we talked about it this way. So that’s been wonderful to have that.

Value added. I hear this and as a faculty member it’s funny I didn’t always focus my attention, even though I had very successful students, the ones who’s parents hugged me at graduation were the kids that barely passed. Those were the ones that , oh my gosh, they still keep up with me, with thank you, thank you. So I struggle sometimes with why do we have an Honors College but I’ll tell you it’s really easy. These are the best and the brightest students, they will win these big awards, they will go on. They are part of our reputation. So when they do well and the Honors College helps them to do well, our reputation increases. It will also hopefully build our graduate school enrollment. So this is part of the focus.

I think the Honors College is an incubator for student success and if it works here, there’s no reason it can’t work out there. I know everybody and the Provost wants to have a better 6-year graduation rate. The research will tell us if we can give every student an undergraduate research experience and a study abroad experience, and I know that costs a lot of money, but we know these types of experiences build retention and they increase graduation rates. So we are experimenting a little bit with these Honors College research courses, but that doesn’t have to be limited to Honors College students. We can break down aspects of our research that we can teach to other people and build that tie to the discipline and tie to the university. I think one reason you have an Honors College isn’t just the prestige, it’s to say look we can try things here at a smaller level and we can see what might work at the larger university level.
And then like success on the football field, they build our academic reputation in the Boardroom. So we want people walking out of here that are stellar and AT&T or Coca-Cola saying, I’ve got to have Auburn grads. I need these grads and if it takes us putting a little bit of extra money into the best and brightest so they build that reputation, I think that’s money well spent.

How can you contribute? Clearly if you want to teach an Honors class we would love to have you do that, that’s always great. Be a research mentor, it is so important. So when these students come to you and say would you consider working with me on research? Give them a hard problem. If you walk away with nothing else today than the understanding that these should be amazing students and they have the capability please keep that in mind and challenge them. I’d love to have people on my advisory council. And then NPS, we are always looking for people to serve on practice interview panels. And think about sponsoring a student for undergraduate research.

A lot of information that I have thrown at you, I am happy to answer any questions that you might have. [31:23] So, thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: Our next item is presented by Beth Guertal. She is the chair of the combined committee looking at salaries and welfare and will give us an interim report about parental leave.

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: Good afternoon everyone, I am going to provide you with a report where the Faculty Salaries and Welfare are on the parental leave policies. What we decided is one of the things that…can you hear me at the back because I’m not a fan of microphones. (Larry explains that we need to record it).

One of the things that we decided that we needed to look at and examine was where our parental leave policy is compared to what’s currently out there at other institutions. So my committee very willingly took about 4 or 5 colleges a piece and either made calls or browsed around on Web sites to see what was out there.

So where we really need to start this process, I’m going to be really up front, I am a crop soil scientist, so when I met with HR people I said, “I assume that you all will be giving my cotton production talk after you’re done because asking a cotton scientist to get up and give a talk about FMLA is a little odd, but we’ll take a run at it. The first place you need to start is with the Family Medical Leave Act. (FMLA) FMLA is a federal policy and what it does is guarantees that you will have a job, it is for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, it can be intermittent, but in all cases, you have to have a physician certify that you need FMLA.

There is a very wide range of reasons why you may be taking FMLA. For the purposes of this presentation we are going to focus parental leave. The need to take FMLA for the birth of a child, an adoption, or some other things that may come about because of that birth or adoption, or the spouse is involved in the birth or the adoption. I am not really going to go down the rabbit trail of an ill parent member or something else, but FMLA does cover all those situations. Again keep in mind 12 weeks, unpaid, Federal, required by law.

To summarize all that, HR takes care of FMLA here. This is where it got pretty fun to talk to people with FMLA and talk with the HR folks who are brilliant at this. But started with, “you need to start the paperwork right away, because it can take 6 months.” And I am like, FMLA kind of comes into play with emergency situations, well yea, right but…. So if you are thinking of engaging in an adoption process or if someone is pregnant it’s kind of almost a safety valve to start the paperwork for FMLA and kind of have it in reserve. Now I’m going to tell you, did I do that? Of course not, most people won’t, but do be aware that it can take a little time to work the paperwork through the system.

Where do we come into things in addition to FMLA? Which again is unpaid. This is where Auburn steps in with a thing called SCP, the Salary Continuation Plan. It is an Auburn University service and offering and it provides up to 6 months of paid salary support at 60% of your salary. Like FMLA, you need to have doctor certification that you need SCP and like FMLA you ought to go ahead and get the paperwork filed. If for instance let’s say you are going through an adoption and you’re thinking that there might be some medical issues that are going to come out of that or if you’re aware that something might be happening. What SCP is really there for, is the person who arrives at Auburn and they are here for maybe one year and then discover that there is a pregnancy and they really don’t have a lot of sick leave in the bank. If you have sick leave and/or annual leave in excess of the 6 months, you’re good to go. But if you are one of the people that your annual leave and your sick leave are not going to get you that much time then Auburn offers SCP. Notice there is no stated limit for how many times you may take SCP and you do need to have a year of employment.

So SCP is two parts. You use all your sick leave and then once you are done with your sick leave, so if that is all used up and you don’t have enough sick leave to get you past 6 months, you can then go on SCP. It is a total.

Now how do the 2 things work together? Regardless of what you are doing it all starts at time zero. FMLA and SCP trigger at the same time. So you don’t get to do 12 weeks of FMLA and then enact SCP. It all starts at the same time. So it is concurrent with your sick leave and your SCP. So again if you’ve got more than 12 weeks of sick leave, you don’t necessarily need the FMLA. The FMLA though is intermittent, so if you do have an illness or your child has an illness that comes and goes, you can enact the FMLA. Again a doctor needs to certify that. Alright, everybody hanging in there? You have no idea the lengthy e-mails I’ve had with HR to work on this. You can take as much sick leave as you have. If you sick leave is less than 6 months then you are going to go on SCP if you choose to.

So what happens after 6 months? Now I just want to mention this, in the issue of parental leave, pregnancy, adoption and either of those for your spouse, you may not need this, but if it’s for something else just know that this is the next step, long term disability. Again, one would like to hope that you see it coming and you could start on the long term disability paperwork in advance.

So let’s try to make a flow chart out of this, ‘cause I’m a scientist as well and this is as good as I got. You start in the top left, somebody’s pregnant, your spouse is pregnant or you are pregnant or you are contemplating an adoption. At that point if you are really organized and on the ball you will go ahead and get your FMLA paperwork and SCP paperwork. Both do require a doctor’s signature. That doesn’t have to happen. It can happen after when you realize that you are going to need to do it. The you would submit your FMLA paperwork to HR if you have such a condition. And then your sick leave and your FMLA clock starts at the same time. You run out of sick leave then you can possibly go on to the continuation program SCP. Going back to the second row, continuing on, on the left there, you have exhausted your sick leave. So you have less than 6 months of sick leave. You don’t have to touch your annual leave as a product of this. There is nobody that requires you to touch your annual leave. So you have either exhausted it or you choose not to use it. if you are still within the 6 months you switch to SCP. FMLA is still going if you’re not at 12 weeks, Isn’t this fun?, and up to 6 months is 60% salary via SCP.

A very good question was asked, what kind of numbers are we looking at? These are averages to give you a general idea. I was surprised, it was larger than I had contemplated they would be. So in 2012 we had 76 people that made use of the 60% salary continuation. 83 in 2013, and so far in 2014 we have 14. In smaller type are the employees that have gone on long-term disability at anytime, that’s just to give you an idea of course because none of these numbers are directly related to the specifics of having a baby or adopting a child. This is just a general thing, so that could include taking care of an ill parent or yourself being very ill. But to give you an idea we had 39 employees that have drawn long-term disability from 2011 to right now.

So, my committee called all these different universities and one of the things we found out; Alabama, don’t have your baby in the summer, that’s one thing we found out, nine month faculty do get some maternity leave because they are not on sick or annual leave. Everybody else is kind of nos, where there were yeses, you kind of had to pry it apart. You see Perdue, Illinois, were yes and Indiana was yes, but a lot of these other yeses, like Florida, if you start picking it apart what the yes really was, was that you are perfectly able to use your sick leave or your annual leave. So University of Florida they said yes and I called, and they said you can use all your sick leave and all your annual leave. Well, that’s not maternity leave, that’s just using your sick and your annual leave. Florida will let you function like a leave bank. So again maybe your newer to the university and you only have 4 weeks of annual and sick leave, they will let you borrow against your own leave and then pay them back. If you were to leave the university you would actually write them a check for the leave. But again it is not an additional parental leave.

Illinois, there were 3 schools from those that we examined and could find the information for that had a true parental leave in addition to your sick and/or annual leave. If the first was Illinois you get 2 weeks and the clock starts the minute you walk out of the hospital or the adoption facility. Two weeks it is paid, it is in addition to your sick leave and your annual leave. In all cases the minute you start these leaves the FMLA clock starts running. Indiana really is paid FMLA. You get 12 weeks in addition to sick and annual leave and it is paid. So it starts the minute…and if you look through there, 10 and 12 month, in Indiana, post-docs aren’t allowed, part-time is not, intermittent appointments are not, you can do twice every 5 years.

Probably the sterling example is Purdue. They cover everybody up to and including post-docs, which I thought was very generous, again the clock starts ticking with FMLA. You get up to 6 weeks, 240 hours and if you and your partner are both employed at Purdue it doesn’t double it, you get 240 and the other partner gets 120. But together you get that. It does again run concurrent with FMLA. I called Purdue to just get an idea of how many people have taken advantage of this and she said they didn’t really know. And she said that’s an interesting question, but I wasn’t able to get it. But if you look through it, it is a very generous policy. Post-docs, father of the birth child, same sex domestic partner, it covers pretty much everyone who would be involved in the birth or adoption of a child.

So where are we at this point? Our snapshot with our 60% SCP, we sit pretty well. I frankly was rather startled by the number of nos. Everybody really has made the assumption that you will use your sick and annual leave as a parental leave policy. The next step the committee wants to do is now go back and see how many universities also offer some kind of salary compensation programs. If there was anything, for instance, Illinois had the 2 weeks, typically they are offered to faculty regardless of appointment, 9, 10, or 12 month, except for Purdue, if you are a post-doc you are out of luck.

There were usually requirements for one year of employment prior to any of this enacting. And post-docs and grad students usually weren’t involved.

So I’d like to thank the committee who did do a lot of work. One of the things we all found is it was hard to find the information. You do a lot of prowling on the internet, many times I’d call places and leave a phone message and not get a call back. It would take a lot of pulling apart to get the answers we needed, but thanks to all these folks who helped. And the HR folks were really good, they really cared; one thing they really wanted me to talk about especially those of you in a supervisory capacity, which is make sure your folks know about these. A lot of people are not aware that SCP is there. A lot of people are not aware that HR will help you make that transition with the FMLA paperwork and to help you if you do have to deal with long-term disability things on the end. So they are all here as resources for all of us.

Are there any questions or comments? Yea, this is where you steal the decal from the athletic department and over-cede it, we were bored one day. Any comments or input or questions?

Hillary Wyss, senator, English: I was really surprised by the number of nos as well as you, so I did a super quick Google 10 minutes before I came here and I noticed that a lot of these policies are in transition right now. This is obviously pressing for a lot of people, but my quick scan on the first 2 pages of my Google search; Northwestern has a policy of paid leave, Univ. of South Florida has a policy of paid leave, University of Maryland has a new policy of paid leave, … [46:31]

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: I’m going to interrupt you real quick, because that is well worth knowing and it’s also worth letting us know, because sometimes for some of these where I put no, “oh yea, we have paid leave,” and you call and you ask and are told, “yea your annual leave…” so sometimes what they say is not what they mean. And I don’t know if that’s what you found.

Hillary Wyss, senator, English: Yea, well again I am just going by what they are saying and it’s what they are putting out there.

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: We got about 3 more after we started this. So that’s the next thing. We are going to keep working on it.

Hillary Wyss, senator, English: But the other thing that I would just add to that is when you are looking at faculty, putting aside faculty interests, which obviously are kind of relevant in this conversation, even putting those aside when you put students first, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a leave policy that takes you away for half of a semester and not the whole semester. I guess that would be something that I would really encourage Auburn, and universities more broadly to think about. Think in terms of a semester.

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: That’s a very good point. I think a lot gets based on FMLA because what the HR folks told me was, once FMLA was enacted, everything got slotted with FMLA and it is 12 weeks

Hillary Wyss, senator, English: Right, which doesn’t work with a semester system.

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: That’s a very solid point. Anybody else? [47:52]

Mike Stern, senator, economics: Just a quick question. So I’ve been through this a number of times as a father, but I’m not sure the issue if always the formal leave stuff it’s often is the university flexible enough to shift duties. Often there are some parts of your job that aren’t a problem. Some people can do some of their research at home, that’s not a problem, an occasional committee meeting. Sometimes it’s just the very fixed schedule classes have, so they really aren’t looking for a stoppage of all of their duties, but flexibilities on shifting teaching loads and stuff. If you talk to the HR people at the university, they don’t really know about that, they just know whether someone is officially on leave in total and being paid. You know the way faculty positions are and they way work loads are distributed. So sometimes it’s just having a policy about shifting work load or something like that between semesters and things like that. It is not about being paid and being officially not there in any capacity, it’s just shifting duties more during this time, less during this time the particular semester they give birth. Next fall I could teach an extra course or something like that to make up.

It’s really about more flexibility say than to complete and total leave in an HR definition.

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: I think you’re right and that was some thing that people mentioned was that Auburn has sort of had some unofficial college by college differences and our point is to just say we would really like to get everything on a more even playing field so that all of the supervisors can start at the same place. But I think your point is very true, particularly with faculty, that teach a very specialized area and there may not be anybody else that can pick up the course.

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: I was wondering, sort of taking off on what you were just asked a minute ago; I was wondering whether universities broadly have policies with respect to what happens to the tenure and promotion clock? When you are on one of these programs and not a full time employee at that point in time?

Beth Guertal, chair, Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee: I know from serving on our P&T we have official language for extension of the tenure clock. And I suspect in this day and age most universities do. Perhaps somebody else has a personal, has gone through it at another university…I know at Auburn, you can get an extension.  Okay, we’ll keep at it, thanks.

Larry Crowley, chair: Do we have any unfinished business? Do we have any new business? We’ll be adjourned. Have a good afternoon. [59:09]