Transcript Senate Meeting
June 17, 2014
Larry Crowley, chair: Come to order please. Welcome to the June meeting of the Auburn University Senate. I am Larry Crowley the chair of the Senate. This will be the last Senate meeting for the academic year, we will not have a meeting in July, but beginning in August we will continue with a new chair, Patricia Duffy. And I brought the gavel to hand off. A short review of the rules of the Senate, senators or substitute senators please sign the roll in the back, and get a clicker so you can vote.
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. A quorum requires 45 senators. Press A to indicate that you are present, B, I guess to indicate that you are not here. 49 present, A quorum has been established.
The first order of business is the approval of the minutes of May 20, 2014. They have been posted online. Are there corrections to the minutes? If there are no corrections the minutes stand approved.
And now I’d like to call Dr Gogue forward to make remarks from the Office of the President.
Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you Larry. [2:07]
Our board of trustees meets a week from this Friday, that’s June 27. There’s about 5 or 6 items on the agenda that I want to share with you today. There are 2 property and facility items. One has to do with the School of Forestry has requested a lease of land out in the black belt. A conservation group that will have hunting for disabled individuals, that has been in effect for a number of years, but this is a 10 year extension to that particular lease. Second item is, it comes out of the College of Liberal Arts, it’s to hire an architect at Pebble Hill, the Scott Yarbrough Home to do some renovation on that house and some expansion. Funding for that is through external development sources.
On the academic side there is a bachelor of science in accounting at the Distance level. As I understand this, correct me Provost, you have to have earned a baccalaureate degree in Business and if you have that then you are eligible to work on a second baccalaureate degree in accounting at a Distance. So that’s on the agenda for approval.
There is roughly the 20th accelerated bachelor/masters degree and that is in Physics, What’s the exact number, Provost? 16 of those will allow a student to come in, in an accelerated program and hopefully in a 5 year period of time earn both a baccalaureate degree as well as a masters degree.
There is a Master of Science in Natural Resource Management in the School of Forestry. That particular degree was offered as a professional degree to start with, no thesis involved, they are coming back and asking for there to be a thesis with it. So the first degree approved a thesis option, this would be a thesis being required.
Then we also had a renaming and rehabilitation science, rehabilitation services, what’s the correct name?, Rehabilitation Council. So a specialize accrediting group came in and you have to use either hospital or clinic is also a part of the title of that particular degree to meet the accreditation requirement. So that is on the table for approval.
Also the budget guidelines are on the agenda. What the university does is it carries guidelines in June, gets approval on the guidelines, works throughout the summer and then presents the budget beginning in October, we will present that to the Board in September. There is roughly 20 million dollars of additional funds that will be allocated. Those come from, 12 million from tuition, 5.8 million come from reallocations internally, 1.9 million is what we got from the State in new money, so that’s not quite 20 million dollars.
The allocation of the funds based on the current guidelines should be about 14 million dollars would go into promotions and salary funding increases. 2.3 million to the Provost would be used for specific academic needs, 1.5 million would be to go back and increase the amount of money in our deferred maintenance pool. When we went through the recession or prior to the recession we had about 20 million dollars a year that was spent on deferred maintenance. During the slowdown in funding we got it down to about 5 million, this will bring us up to about 8.5 or 10 somewhere in that range. We’ve added back almost half of what we reduced. The remainder is for insurance, bonds, maintenance, facility operations, the new small animal hospital and the energy costs that go with that. That gets us to about our total number.
I’d be happy to respond to questions but since it is the last meeting of the year I do want to say thank you to all the members of the Senate, and particularly your officers. We have a chance to meet on a recurring basis and I can tell you from all of us on the administrative side, not a meeting goes by that we don’t learn something. We really appreciate those opportunities to interact, it’s informal, we spend about an hour to an hour and a half and we learn a lot. So I want to say thank you to Larry and your team and really all of you for the work that you do. Be happy to respond to questions. [6:36]
Larry Crowley, chair: Next on the agenda are remarks from the Provost’s Office, Dr. Tim Boosinger will come to speak.
Dr. Tim Boosinger, Provost: As you know almost 2 years ago we began a Strategic Planning process at Auburn University. We developed a 5-year strategic plan. It just so happens that this month is the end of the first year of that strategic planning process. So there is a committee working on implementation and will report more on that in the future, but our strategic plan contains 5 strategic priorities. [7:21]
Student Success, teaching excellence in faculty, excellence in research, outreach, and strategic priority number 5 had to do with making sure that we were optimizing the resources we have available, aligning our resources with priorities we have set and the other priority areas of our strategic plan. So as you know we’ve invested quite a bit of time, a lot of people have worked real hard in the last year trying to find a way to better allocate resources to our priorities, make sure that we have good systems in place. That’s one of the things we’ve invested a lot in, in the past year; a better understanding of our current processes we’ve identified weaknesses in that process and we’ve had pretty extensive discussion about how to improve our budgeting process.
The tentative plan, the proposal that’s on the table for discussion in the coming months is based on 2 things the way I look at it; to have a more incentive-based approach to budgeting at Auburn University and also have a plan that’s more adaptable. Because our historically based budget model that just changes incrementally with history doesn’t necessarily adapt well to the changes in our environment in higher education. As we approach the end of June we are approaching the end of our engagement with our consultants. We had a wrap-up meeting yesterday with the deans so this is in discussion with the Senate Officers, this is a good point in time to have a faculty committee take a look at the work that’s been done to date, give us their evaluation of what they think about our work from the last year, make recommendations and then as I understand it in the resolution then that group when they finish with their work will come back to this body in the spring of 2015 and make recommendations on how we might move forward together to make Auburn University a better university.
Again, I’d like to thank all of you that were involved in this process. There have been a few hundred if you count all of those that attended the open forum sessions that we had at all the colleges and schools. Thank you. It has been a very interesting year. [10:03]
Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you Provost. I really appreciate the time that we’ve been able to meet and Drew Clark, his English skills came into drafting a lot of the proposal. I appreciate that help as well.
The first order of business is the introduction of the resolution. Patricia Duffy, the incoming chair will make that presentation.
Patricia Duffy, chair-elect: I am going to go ahead and read through the resolution and I hope, we had a number of iterations and I’d like to thank Drew Clark too for his expert help with the wording. I hope what I read is going to be exactly the same as what’s behind me. I think I have the current one. This is a:
Resolution to Form an Ad Hoc Senate Committee on Strategic Budgeting
WHEREAS, Auburn University has set a strategic priority to focus resources on institutional mission and priorities; and
WHEREAS, to this end, the University retained the Huron Consulting Group to assist in the development of a new budget model for Auburn University; and
WHEREAS, the proposed budget model has been presented both in university-wide open forums and in meetings with the deans and faculties of each school and college as well as with representatives of the University’s central support units and auxiliaries; and
WHEREAS, considering the scope and impact of adopting a new budget model and the importance of shared governance, the Steering Committee of the University Senate and senior administrative officers of the University are desirous of formal faculty input on the proposed strategic budgeting model before making a final commitment to its implementation;
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the University Senate shall authorize the Senate Rules Committee to appoint an ad hoc committee on Strategic Budgeting; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that this committee shall include a representative with faculty rank from each academic school and college as well as a representative with faculty rank from the University Libraries; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Rules Committee, in consultation with the senior administrative officers of the University, shall also invite representatives from the central administration or other units to serve as full voting members on this committee as needed for the task; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the charge of this committee will be to present a report to the University Senate by the end of March, 2015, with an analysis of the proposed budget model as well as of viable alternative budget models, if any, that will focus resources on institutional mission and priorities, along with its recommendations for the strategic budgeting initiative at Auburn University; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the University Senate recommends that no actions be taken to implement the proposed budget model or an alternative strategic budgeting model until this committee has submitted its report and the University Senate has had an opportunity to consider it. [13:11]
Larry Crowley, chair: The resolution comes from the Steering Committee so it does not need a second. Is there discussion?
Gwenneth Thomas, senator, Polymer and Fiber Engineering: One important technical item, we don’t have enough clickers and the one that some of us have are not functional.
Wes Lindsey, senator, Pharmacy Practice: The ususal practice of the Senate it’s more of a process question, as we have usually been presented something like this as a pending action item in a previous meeting and then have the opportunity to digest it with our departments and then come back to the next meeting and actually vote on it. But this time it is being presented in it’s initial form as an action item. So I was curious what the rational was to present it as an action item in it’s first iteration?
Larry Crowley, chair: The problem would be that if we don’t do it here, it will be August before we could get the vote of the Senate. Since it is a time sensitive issue we wanted to bring it as an action item as posted to the agenda. I think there have been several messages that went out to the faculty. Hopefully everyone is aware and have weighed in on any issues.
Patricia Duffy, chair-elect: Also just let me follow up. This is not a policy change, it’s a committee formation.
Beverly Marshall substituting for Harris Hollens, senator, Finance: I have the pleasure of serving as the faculty representative on the Board of Trustees Finance Committee and as a part of that roll I also served as the faculty representative on the Huron Steering Committee and participated in that process for the past year or more. I support the move to responsibility based budgeting and feel that it’s needed to move this university forward with the initiatives of our strategic goals. Again it has greater potential to move the university forward than our current expense-based historic budget model. It’s my understanding that we would not implement immediately, there would be a transition period where it would run parallel at lest for a year or more with the current budget model. So I know there are concerns, but that is why there would be an additional period of study. I think that is important to understand. I’d just like to suggest that we move forward with the proposed model because it would yield important information and the formation of the committee could be parallel to that period of time. We need to change the current budget process and I want to make sure that we are not just kicking the can down the road, so to speak. Thank you. [16:25]
Mike Stern, senator, Economics: I notice on the left hand side here, the resolution says that we need to do this because we desire formal faculty input on the proposed strategic budgeting model. Then in the formation of this we need to have an untold number of administrative or other unit representatives with full voting rights on the committee, which of course then destroys the voice of the faculty. I believe we already had a hybrid committee that was formed to study this that had faculty representatives, a friend of mine was on it as a faculty representative and it also had administrative representatives. So if we are just going to duplicate and have another committee with voting administrators and arbitrary numbers of people, we don’t have the voting people defined in the resolution then it is not something designed to give a specific voice from the faculty.
I would further note, and this happens frequently, the apportionment of representation of the faculty being by college is not an appropriate democratic measure of the will of the faculty, because colleges are not by design in fact proportioned related to faculty. So we have colleges with 4050 and we have colleges with 300 faculty. To say 300 would have a single representative and 40–50 will have one gives much greater weight to the interests on those groups of faculty. You do not get an unbiased representation of the general input of the faculty by having unspecified administrators and other unit voting representatives on the committee and then a portion of faculty votes based on the existence of a college as opposed to existence of a block of representative faculty. So I don’t really see the benefit of this ad hoc committee, as is proposed, to be constructed. Thank you. [18:21]
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: I did poll our faculty and they are in favor of this resolution. I will also offer…I see a problem here in the representation just from a technical standpoint and that is the definition of school, because we have just been defined as a school and I think this intended to be freestanding schools and colleges, so I think that needs to be corrected in that part of the resolution.
Patricia Duffy, chair-elect: We will consider that for a friendly amendment, we put in freestanding schools. Thank you for that.
Larry Crowley, chair: Any other discussion? We will call for a vote then. If you are in favor of the resolution, make sure your clicker is on, A will be a vote for being in favor of the resolution of forming the ad hoc committee, vote B would be against that. A=41, B=26. The resolution passes, 41 to 26. [20:07]
I’d like to move to the information items. Andy Gillespie has graciously agreed to come and talk about all the good things that we are doing internationally to support the mission of the university.
Andrew Gillespie, Assistant Provost for International Programs: Good afternoon everyone. I am happy to be here it’s been about 1.5 years since I was last before the Senate so I am happy to have this opportunity to come and report to you today. [20:53]
Just to remind everyone out in the audience the components of the Office of International Programs is we are constructed of a few main units and then each of those units has different responsibilities. Most of these are long-standing, but some of them are new since I last reported. Things like the global teaching academy are our efforts to recruit sponsors, the King Sejong Institute and what we are trying to do overseas in establishing some offices. These are new kinds of activities for my office.
By the way there is a handout at the back table. If you don’t have one you are welcome to grab one on the way out today. It gives as many of these statistics and a few others that are pertinent to International Programs. I am happy to report that our student numbers are climbing steadily over time and perhaps in terms of undergraduates where we are going to be making a large effort in the next few years to grow numbers. We are probably twice what I found when I came to Auburn, but we’ll be growing that to help diversify our undergraduate population and the experience that our domestic students have in their classrooms. So that’s a good thing for our students. And we can see that certainly the trends are continuing in terms of where the students are coming from. The far east and Asia continue to be the number one sources for our international students and simply because of population density that will continue for some time into the future. So we need to make a concerted effort to get out to other regions and recruit other students and bring those students to Auburn. Certainly many of you are assisting us in those efforts and we will be able to grow those numbers here as we look to bringing on an international partner to help with those efforts.
As we look at some of my other components, English as a second language that continues to grow. We are focusing the ESL Program today however on serving our departments and our programs. Freestanding in the past many of you have developed partnerships that bring students over and we work with you to assist your departmental efforts to provide English training to those students. In addition to those students helping the graduate students become international teaching assistants, tutoring both students and scholars those are some of the activities that are happening through the ESL Program.
As we look at Study Abroad we’ve had very good growth over the past 4 years. Today we are seeing 1,100 plus students go abroad on an annual basis. And we will continue to get more and more students going abroad as most of the units come online in terms of offering study abroad courses. A few issues continue and require our attention in terms of sustainability of the classes we’re generating. My Auburn Abroad Office is trying to work with your departments to make programs that we create today to be sustainable into the future, whether that’s a financial question or whether that’s a curricular question, we are trying to push those frontiers. There is also the desire to move more of our non-credit courses over to credit bearing courses as well as growing research abroad opportunities and service opportunities overseas. Sometimes that requires the creation of new classes within your departments if no such classes exist today.
in terms of numbers, as I said we are doing well, we have 107 programs going abroad today, but what’s important is the variety of programs that are coming online. Faculty-led of course is the big growth area for the United States, but we are seeing more and more student exchanges at Auburn, which is a good thing and then also internships and research service abroad kinds of opportunities. We suspect that faculty-led programs will soon plateau at Auburn, most departments are becoming involved so there is a little growth potential there, but certainly we’ll switch over and see growth in the research area where students are quite interested as well in internships. [26:01] So still room to grow at Auburn and we’ll be pushing as many students overseas as we can, knowing the kind of impact that that kind of experience has on the undergraduate population in particular.
If we look at where our students are going, most still go to western Europe. It’s not uncommon in our universities but we do have a diverse suite of destinations. And that suite of destinations is growing and becoming more diverse across different regions, different continents and again we’re going to work to grow that sort of selection of opportunities for our students to go to different places in the world where peoples and languages and cultures are very different than what we find here in the U.S.
Again we are doing quite well. To date we only have 7 or 8 departments that don’t offer opportunities for their own majors. Most departments now are online in terms of having some choice for students to go abroad within their discipline. So that’s great. If you bring me back in another year and a half from now we will hopefully at that time have 100% within all departments. So we expect those numbers to climb a bit.
Looking at the undergraduate study abroad numbers, of course it varies by College where there are curricular requirements or strong faculty support. We see many more of our students going abroad, but we’d like to see that within each College a good proportion of students heading overseas. Staring off with having opportunity, having programs to choose from is step one. Step two is actually getting the students abroad. So of course I continue my faculty grants programs that help faculty develop study abroad opportunities, research abroad opportunities. Those kinds of different curricular choices that allow students to get overseas.
Thinking about the linkages, I maintain a linkage database. It is self reported, faculty tell me where they are located overseas, what they are doing, and how they are connected. That has provided some interesting data in terms of the number of connections and the top countries where we are connected. We’d like to see again this diversity grow and efforts within my office with individual faculty and deans and department chairs are trying to grow the linkages. We do have to connect the faculty with counterparts overseas, both for academic reasons, but also for research and outreach efforts. If we look at the agreements that we maintain as an institution we see that we have mostly MOUs, which are general in nature. Student exchange agreements of course are growing and we have a number of other types of agreements and we’d like to see this diversity grow as well and have the numbers for example in the
research agreements grow to support the kinds of collaborative research that we’d like to have overseas.
By region, western Europe, east and southeast Asia are certainly the two areas where we have the most connections. Those connections are historical, they are fairly strong and we’d like to get other faculty plugged into those if possible and grow the kinds of activities that we’re seeing.
In terms of travel overseas we certainly are able now after about a year and a half to grow our ability to attract faculty and students as they travel. And if we look at faculty travel we see that we have some interesting patterns for where faculty are going. Canada appears as number one and that’s kind of surprising although if you think about where your professional societies are holding those annual meetings they cycle to Canada, so we are seeing a lot of faculty travel to professional societies on an annual basis.
But then where we have strong connections, we do see faculty travel and we’re trying to grow faculty travel, it is my goal to get as many faculty overseas as possible because that’s where research connections are created, that’s where academic connections are created, that’s just where the rubber hits the road and certainly a function of my office. We had about 1,800 travelers last year, so a good number of us are getting out on a repeated basis. [31:00]
Still to be developed, a few other metrics, we have a new RAT50 effort to come here in the coming year through efforts of the Faculty Research Council. We’ve got approval to move from a Sharepoint platform to a Banner platform. That will help us do a number of things and one of those is to allow us to calculate or track the purpose of faculty travel and break that out between professional society meetings, research collaborations, academic connections, those sorts of things and give us a better sense of where the faculty are going and why.
Also with grants and contracts, my next area, to develop a back? For us is to understand where are the sponsored programs for Auburn? What proportion of our sponsored programs are coming from, international sources, or our involving international kinds of activities, and what’ domestic…so we need to do some work in that area to be able to guide us on where we can grow. And with that, if you have any questions.
Larry Crowley, chair: Our next presentation will by Mark Armstrong with the Provost’s Office. He’s the guy heading up the Camp War Eagle Experience.
Mark Armstrong with the Provost’s Office: Thank you to the Senate Leadership for the invitation to be with you today, and to the Steering Committee for helping frame the presentation with their suggested topics. At times our Office is called the Camp War Eagle Office or the SOS Office or the Learning Community Office, and all of those are certainly fine. We answer to any of those I guess. We have a fantastic staff with about 8 people plus some graduates students and any given time around 100 student employees who are helping us in the various capabilities.
My goal today is to give you enough information about our office so that it’s not a waste of you time to hear what we are talking about, while at the same time not giving you too much information so that it is a waste of your time listening to me talk about it. So it’s a thin line to walk but I will do my best.
We re part of the Office of Undergraduate Studies in the Provost’s Office and we report to Dr. Constance Relihan. Some of the other units in the Office of Undergraduate Studies include the Career Center, Academic Support, CoOp, Undergraduate Research, Honors College, ROTC Programs, and many others. A rather robust group of offices and programs, which report to Dr. Relihan through the Provost’s Office. Physically we are located in the lavish accommodations of 189 Foy Hall. You are welcome to drop in on us at any point.
Our office: basically 4 programs comprise our office and I’ll mention each one of those and give you a little more detail on some of those and a little extra time devoted to Camp War Eagle, because that was the one that the Steering Committee asked for a little additional information on. Camp War Eagle, as you probably know is our orientation freshman and parents. If you’ve been around campus at all in the last 5 weeks or so, you’ve seen that going on. SOS or Successfully Orienting Students is our orientation program for transfer students and their families. Our First Year Seminars are the academic courses we offer to students in the first year to help them with their transitional issues. In most cases there are one or two credit hour course that is offered to first year students. Then closely connected to the first year seminars are the Learning Communities. Some of you have taught Learning Communities before but those are cohorts of students taking multiple classes together, including the first year seminar and there are 2 types of these Learning Communities.
One type is a major based learning community centered around the students academic interest and housed in that College or School. And then there are interdisciplinary, open to students of any major that may be around a different topic. For instance, there is a Learning Community revolving around leadership, there’s another revolving around sustainability.
Start for a moment with Camp War Eagle, that’s our orientation for freshmen and transfers. Each of our programs has a mission statement. We will get to each one of those, they are on the slide show housed on the Senate Web site, so I am not going to sit here and read it to you or expect you to read it at this point in time. If you’d like to have that opportunity again the slides are on the Senate Web site. I do want to point out a couple of things I think are the key words. [36:05] For that, the academics, social and personal success of the incoming freshman students is what Camp War Eagle focuses on, the academics, social and personal success.
Within the program there is a student schedule and a parent schedule. If we could look at the student schedule real quickly; there is a series of what we call Tiger Talk, small group discussions with the undergraduate students who serve as camp counselors. There are 2 Browse sessions, opportunity to attend 3 different breakout sessions, all that on the first day. The second day includes academic advising, some registration training, and actual fall semester registration for the students. So day 1 is more of an orientation to the campus and the university. Certainly there are times in there where we want the students to begin to develop relationships with one another and with their camp counselor who we view as a resource for them moving forward in their career. There are sessions regarding the expectations that the university has of a student regarding their conduct. We talk to them about campus safety and the expectations that we all have and the responsibilities we all have in maintaining a safe and secure campus. We do spend a little time on diversity training for our students as well and then some social issues and healthy decision making choices, all that on the first day. [37:33]
Day 2, transition into much more of an academically focused day. The students start the day with their academic advisors for 2 to 2.5 hours talking about the college, understanding the policies and procedures of the different colleges and schools and their majors, and beginning to think about the expectations that they would have for their fall semester schedule. When that finishes, our students help the new freshmen make their first mock schedule and later that afternoon students return to their academic advisors with that schedule in hand and begin the registration process. So that’s a brief overview of what the students do at Camp War Eagle.
The Parent and Guest Schedule finds the parents in the ballroom a great deal, the Student Center Ballroom, getting a lot of the same information that the students are getting in a different setting. They have several panel discussions where representatives from the housing office, student financial services, and Medical Clinic, Tiger Card, Campus Dining, the Registrar’s Office all come in and address the parents and give them much of the same information. Break out sessions for the parents as well. Then on day 2 the parents do join their students for the morning academic advising session. So for that 2.5 hours we feel like it’s very important for the students and parents to hear the same message from their associate deans, their director of student services, their academic advisors, so we group them together by major and let the colleges have audience with the students and the parents.
However in the afternoon when the students have made their schedule and return to the colleges we program other things for the parents and leave the follow up advising and the registration in the hands of the students. So the parents on day 2 after they go to academic advising, still an academically focused day for them with speakers from the Library, the Provost’s Office, Academic Support in the afternoon. Some information from the Office of Family and Parent programs.
Attendance is our next slide. Attendance at Camp is a direct result of the admissions process and what you see behind me on the screen are the last 4 years of data for students who have registered for Camp War Eagle, attended Camp War Eagle in the total freshman class. The last line is incomplete at this point in time. We do have a large number of students registered to attend Camp War Eagle speaking to the quality of education that students can receive at Auburn. Attendance rates have been strong so it appears that we are of course headed for a very nice size freshman class.
We have several partners in the Camp War Eagle process. Every college and school is a partner for Camp War Eagle, the academic advising offices are certainly a big part of that, in particular the College of Science and Math and the College of Liberal Arts play a critical role in what we do because so many of the core courses are housed in those colleges and the management of the seats for students at Camp War Eagle is at times challenging for them, I am quite aware, and we are appreciative of everything that those colleges and those departments do to make the Camp War Eagle experience successful. The Division of Student Affairs is another great partner, not only are in that facility most of the time, but many of their offices are presenting to the students and parents. Auxiliary Enterprise, Housing, Dining, Parking, the TigerCard, Communications and Marketing helps tremendously with our publications. The athletic department is a partner and we partner with the office of Institutional Research and Assessment to administer the BCSSE survey, the Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement which I think Drew would tell you is a goldmine of data for his office. It takes a massive amount of cooperation from across campus to welcome 10,000 guests over about a 7-week period. We are very thankful for all the help that we get in providing Camp War Eagle for our students and their families. [41:47]
Transition a little bit into SOS. SOS as I mentioned is our orientation for transfer students and their families and the mission is there as well. If I had to pick the key words there I would say fostering academic and social development. The SOS students have proven success in higher education transferring from another institution whether it is a 2-year or 4-year institution. The SOS orientation is much more brief and is focused more on navigating Auburn University as opposed to Camp which is that base level of explain all the services and how things might work. SOS operates on 2 different schedules throughout the year depending on the time of year. There is a full day session offered 5 times a year that’s our preferred way to do things. It includes some small group sessions with the students who serve as SOS counselors, break out sessions for campus offices to present to the students, campus tour, computing resources, and then academic advising and registration. Then twice a year in January and August, just preceding the beginning of those 2 terms we do an abbreviated half day session that primarily covers the small group and academic advising. Parent and family members do attend SOS, but much less frequently than they do at Camp War Eagle. You are looking at about 1.2 parents per student, more parents attend than freshmen, at SOS that number is less as there are fewer parents and family members attend than students. The SOS schedule includes at least a 2-hour block with the academic advisor for those students.
SOS attendance is directly driven by the admissions process, students attend SOS in the spring or the summer prior to their enrollment in the summer or the fall, so if you look across the middle line there, if they attend SOS in the spring or summer that means they are coming to the campus either in the summer or the fall. Somewhere in the 1,100 to 1,300 range is about what we would normally see there. For students who attend SOS in the fall and are beginning in the spring, that number is in the 160 to 240 range and that is inclusive of freshmen who begin in January. Typically a very small population of freshmen there, but we do provide orientation for them as well. So those 2 sessions feed into spring semester, the other 5 feed into either summer or fall semester.
Our next program is our first year seminars, which I mentioned earlier. Quite a lengthy mission statement, again I will not leave it up there long enough for you to memorize it. If I had to pull out some key words; the academic career and personal success skills that we are striving to teach in these classes with a very ambitious list of student outcomes including critical thinking, time management, various academic skills, and the transitional issues that we know students are facing. The courses are 1 to 2 hours and many of them are linked to a Learning Community, which we will touch on in a moment. As you see the enrollment statistics behind me, somewhere in the 50–60% range of the freshmen class is what we are touching with the first year seminar student.
One of the things we do in the first year seminar classes is ask the instructors who missed the first day of class as a follow up. We know that if students are struggling in a 1 or 2 hour first year seminar class the chances are very, very strong that they are going to be struggling in their additional courses as well. And those instructors are asked to make contact with those students at the first sign of distress. First year seminars are also newly part of the university’s early alert program so beginning on a pilot basis last spring and moving forward to the fall they will be taking part in the early alert program and it will be working with the retention specialist, Judy Sanders, in that roll.
Looking forward for the first year seminars, this fall they will transition completely to an e-book. We piloted that in the spring with 3 or 4 sections and things went very well but it will be completely e-book this fall for the first time. We are very excited about that initiative. I will also be incorporating more career exploration in support of some of the strategic plan initiatives and moving students to graduation in 4 years a little quicker. Getting the set with their major and focused on their career earlier. So the first year seminars will focus more heavily on that component this year than they have in the past. In the future we will also be partnering with Student Affairs in administering both Alcohol,Edu, an alcohol awareness prevention program, and Haven, which is a sexual assault prevention effort. Both are mandated by the Clery Act and we will be working with student affairs to implement those.
The Learning Communities are the last thing I wanted to touch on. Our Learning Community mission statement is there, the highlight points for Learning Communities are somewhat similar to the definition freshmen seminar courses taught by dedicated instructors, co registered core classes with outside support. And if the student chooses a residential community, they have the option to live with other learning communities in any of the communities on campus; the Hill, the Village, or the Quad.
If you are not familiar with Learning Communities a definition could be 25 students who share a common interest in either academic college or interdisciplinary topics. So the Learning Community application opens in the spring and students who have an interest in engineering, or pre-health, or what ever the academic topic might be, sign up to be part of that learning community, the Learning Community students take 2 to 4 classes together typically you could say 3 is for most of them that would consist of the first year seminar course and then 2 core courses. So the students might walk into this room and be part of 200 plus students in a history course, but he next day they go to their first year seminar course and 25 of the students who are in this room are their first year seminar. So they begin to make connections earlier in the large classrooms and we believe strongly it makes the large learning environment feel much smaller.
Learning Communities has proven to be a very popular choice amongst our entering class. We are happy to be on the rise and growing with that part of the program over the last 5 years or so, 22% the last couple of years our students have participated in Learning Communities of some manner. We are running currently fairly consistent again with those numbers. We’ve had some Learning Communities that we had to close already, which is a good problem and not such a great problem to have. We love to be able to accommodate more. What we know about Learning Community students is that they do become more engaged with their faculty members, with the institution, they become more active learners in a quicker way.
The final point that the Steering Committee asked was how can faculty help in these different efforts? So I will leave you with 3 points today. The first suggestion, first recommendation is to develop a learning community. Each of you have an area of expertise and that may be something you may want to consider. That you may want to take your discipline and say I would love to take students who have an interest in my discipline and develop a seminar class around that, put 25 students in there and then have them taking a couple of other classes together. The synergy that a Learning Community builds in a very short amount of time is amazing to watch. And I believe you would be pleased with the outcome of that so developing a learning community, those applications and that process begins early in the fall semester.
A second would be to teach a first year seminar class. Maybe you can that part of your Learning Community or maybe you don’t want to be part of a learning community but you’d like to have the opportunity to interact with 25 energetic, sometimes problematic freshmen. That would certainly be a great opportunity to do that. Applications to teach go out late fall early spring. Quite certain all of you are more than eminently qualified to teach the first year seminar classes.
Then the final recommendation would be to attend the advising sessions at Camp War Eagle or SOS. Interact with those students at their entry point and the parents. Help the students make the connection to what they are going to be experiencing as they proceed through their degree program and it could possible reduce some of the anxiety that they have about interacting and meeting faculty, particularly faculty who will be part of their academic careers. Thank you again for your time. Hope it was informative.
Larry Crowley, chair: Any questions?
Is there any unfinished business?
Is there any new business? I do have an item of new business. Bill Sauser and Judy Sheppard are rolling off. Thank you so much for being part of my daily life, and they’ve done a great job. Bill I guess you are incoming president of the AAUP, so you are moving from one position to another and I know you are wonderful in that roll. We have 2 people rolling on and that is Laura Plexico and Larry Teeter and we are happy to have them and they are taking office July 1, 2014. I wanted to pass the gavel to Patricia and let her close out this meeting.
Patricia Duffy, Chair-elect: The meeting is adjourned. See you in August. [53:00]