Transcript General Faculty Meeting
March 25, 2014

Larry Crowley, chair:  Come to order please. Thank you for being here at the spring  General Faculty Meeting. The first item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes from the last Faculty meeting, which was in the fall/ They have been posted online. Are there any corrections to the minutes? Seeing none I will declare the minutes accepted as written. The next item on the agenda is remarks from Dr. Gogue and I will invite him to come and provide his remarks.
[0:36]

Dr. Gogue, President:  Thank you Larry. I appreciate all of you being here today. When you are at a state university the health of the state economy is very, very important to us. I don’t have to tell you over the last 5 or 6 years the health hasn’t been too good. It has been slowly improving. We, in the height of the recession, we lost about 102 million dollars of ongoing money. We did not have proration last year, which was great news. This year we will not have proration and we will actually see a slight increase. In the one percent level, but still a slight increase from the state.

I think I’ve mentioned several times before that the legislature that was elected chose to put more money in a rainy-day fund. Their concept or their idea is that the next time there is proration the impacts will be far less on K-12 and on higher education. Just to give you an idea, the rainy-day funds prior to this recession were about 500 million dollars. Their current rain-day funds will be about 1.6 billion dollars, so considerably more which makes it difficult in the short term, but in the long term it’s probably a smart move to do in terms of trying to maintain some semblance of budget order. In spite of those things an awful lot of good things that I always want to share with faculty, there is a group that about 2 weeks ago came out, it’s called Best Colleges Organization and they lined up the 50 states and they selected the best university in each of those states and they selected the best Liberal Arts College in each of those states. It is available on the newsstand, some of you may have seen it. For the state of Alabama, Auburn was selected as the top university in the state. The top Liberal Arts College in the state, anybody know what it is? What would you guess? Apparently Samford called itself a university so they don’t count it, that’s all I can figure; Springhill College down in Mobile was the one. [2:58] In Georgia, it was Emory, Tennessee was Vanderbilt, so it was a pretty interesting list. We also received a note from another organization in the last couple of weeks. It may surprise some people, it sort of surprised me a little bit, Auburn was ranked in terms of quality, access, and affordability for out-of-state students. So we were in the top several percentage points in the country in those areas. So we were excited about that.

We also received a note and I think you may have seen it in the Chronicle that Auburn came in seventh in terms of the most beautiful campuses in America. They theoretically evaluated 4,500, I don’t know how you do that, but it is a pretty campus. Never the less we were excited to see that.

The most recent ipeds (integrated postsecondary education data system) data has come out. And that is data that compares your university with your peers. Our peer group is 22 major universities, primarily in the southeast. They go from University of Texas, Austin in the West, University of Maryland in the northeast. So all the public schools within that area, there are about 22 major schools. So they compare your data with those being peers. I wanted to share with you just briefly, they look at race and ethnicity. In race and ethnicity they look at what we have versus our peers in terms of Asian-American students. We are about one third lower than our peers with Asian-American students.

In terms of Latino students, we are about 25 percent lower than our peers. International students we are about one third lower than our peers. African-American students we are actually equal with peers. So we’ve seen some changes in those numbers over the last few years and I certainly want to say thank you to the faculty.

Our FTE number, which is really our true enrollment, many of you hear us talk about 25,000 students, that’s a head count number. Our true enrolment number based on the U.S. Department of Education is 21,090 students. So there is about 4,000 more if you look at it on an FTE basis for us to get to that 25,000 number.

How does our cost compare to our peers? We are about $740 dollars a year more than our peers, so we are a little bit outside the normal range that we’d like to be, but then I went down and looked at freshmen scholarships. Free money. Free, not loans, but actual free money. What percent of our freshmen do you think receive money? 71%, our peers are at 72%, so we are in the ballpark in terms of freshmen that receive financial scholarship aid. The thing that was interesting to me is the Auburn amount of aid the average is $10, 797 and for our peers it’s about $7,402. So we do charge a little more but our aid packages are considerably stronger, over $3,000 stronger.

Next thing I wanted to mention is the prestigious post-graduate scholarships that faculty are so critical in. It’s almost weekly, it seems like, that we get notice from the Honors College of one of our students that has won a Goldwater or nominated for the Rhodes, or Truman or Gates-Cambridge; there’s about ten of those that are particularly prestigious. I was at a recent meeting with presidents in the Southeast Conference and one of them came up and said you had more students that won prestigious scholarships than any of the schools in the southeast. They had done some analysis, I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it’s certainly an indication of an awful lot more activity by this campus in that area. So I am awfully proud of our students. And they wouldn’t be there without you guys.
Also, I will reiterate, Mary Boudreaux comes once a year, gets us all excited about what our student athletes are doing. But it’s impressive when you look at the numbers, 55% student athletes have a 3.0 or higher. She mentioned one number which, I not sure that you would expect it, which sports team has the greatest number of 3.0s and higher? I would guess swimming. Women’s Golf is 89%, but the football team has 37 players that, so they actually have the most, but it’s percentage wise they are not.

I wanted to certainly compliment the campus on research and scholarship. I know we have a special week coming up next month, but when the earmarks were discontinued by the Federal side; [8:13] there has been a lot of work and a reception later this week. We were able to, not go in and add money, but you have to go and work and put language in appropriation bills that give you a greater opportunity to be competitive. Auburn has been doing that and I think we had 6 of those that were successful in the current year on the Federal side.

New facilities that are underway, construction that you will see several of them are eating type facilities. I think you are aware that one item that will go before the Board in two weeks is a redo in Foy in which the courtyards and exterior will be improved as well as a new eating establishment in there. It will be called “Chicken Salad Chick,” which there seems to be some interest by students and folks in the communities. So that will go in.

On the east side of Lowder in that indentation in the building they will be a student/faculty lounge added there with sandwiches, coffee, drinks and services. That is scheduled to be done by late fall. The Wellness Kitchen will open sometime this fall. Hopefully prior to the start of classes, it is getting near completion. The Small Animal Hospital in the Vet School, I understand opened a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a 70 million dollar program. I haven’t seen it but I understand it opened very recently. And then the other new construction that you see the evidence of on campus or right off campus it is actually in the Research Park, is the medical school, that is not an Auburn unit, but a private group that is coming in and building a medical school. Scheduled to open 2015 in the fall with about 140–150 medical students.

I want to share with you just very briefly, probably the biggest discussion among higher ed groups nation wide is the definition of success at a university. It has changed dramatically. Some of you can remember that the way you looked at colleges was really the number of people that you flunked out and the more rigorous it was in that freshman year, the better the school was. The model that’s been in place most of my time in higher education has really been focused on graduation rates. How do you improve and stimulate and increase graduation rates

The new model, the new discussion in the last couple of years is really how do you take very poor academic performing students that are also financially poor and graduate those students? So a real shift of emphasis, certainly at the U. S. Department of Education and the administration. This is being driven by two reports, one was during the height of the recession there was an article or a report that came out from the labor department and what the U.S. Labor Department talked about was unemployment relative to educational attainment. It was 2010. The unemployment rate nationally was about 9–9.5 percent. So they looked at who was really unemployed out of that. High School dropouts were either 25% or 27%, High School graduates about 15% unemployment, community college graduates about 8%, baccalaureate graduates, BS BA students 7% unemployment, masters, 1.5%, doctoral graduates .37 of 1%. So that was one piece of information that certainly the administration saw and thought about relative to unemployment downturns in the economy. The other was a study done by the Lumnia Foundation, what it showed was that if your income level is at the poverty line, I don’t know exactly that would be in Alabama, but if it is at the poverty line however it’s defined, that your children from those families have an 8% chance of graduating from college. If your family makes over $100,000, your chance is 85% that you will graduate from college. So that has lead to lots of discussion. You hear about the new educational plans of the Obama Administration, so a lot of discussion about that.

The new student as they describe it will go to multiple schools, 6-year graduation rates will go out the window, we will be talking about 10-year graduation rates. Five and six schools that students will sample as they go through higher ed. How easy will it be for them to transfer credit, so a host of questions. Since nobody has the right answer here, but I want you to think about it, if you have ideas or thoughts it would be particularly helpful to us.

Final thing that I’ll mention is the University Senate on this campus has done a tremendous job in shared governance. It is not easy, there are lots of committees, lots of activities, but I would just say thank you to the leadership of the faculty on this campus for your role in making shared governance work as well as it does on this campus. And we obviously have room to improve. Thank you, I’d be happy to respond to questions. (pause)

Larry Crowley, chair: The history of the Senate Chair having some remarks here is that this would be my transition meeting, that I would go from the Senate Chair to the Immediate Past Chair because we’d be electing new Senate Officers, but we’ve moved that date to the end of June but we still have the Senate Officers elected today. So I was thinking about what I would share if this were to be the last time that I spoke, how would I sum it up. I went back to what I wrote four years ago because I had two terms as Secretary-elect then as Secretary, then I immediately went in to the 3 years of being Chair-elect, Chair, and soon to be Immediate Past Chair; I went and looked at what I wrote. What I wrote was about the experience that would qualify me for being a senate secretary officer. What I did in advertizing myself or talking about myself in terms of my experience, I started out with saying that it would be an honor. It was an honor to be nominated, it would be an honor to serve, it is a privilege, and it has been a privilege to serve. And I also made the commitment that I would do my best. I have done my best, it’s not as good as I’d like it to be, but hopefully we are all improving in that direction. [15:51] And the next thing I said is that we share a common experience here at Auburn and that experience is the things that we are doing right. We’ve been doing a lot of things right. If you look at the education that we provide to the undergraduates they would match up to pretty much anywhere, and if you talk about outreach, and I had the opportunity to visit with the sounding boards throughout the state and they were always impressed with the amount of research and outreach that the faculty did and the comments that they made was that they wanted to do more. We have the common experience of what we’re doing right but we also had challenges and some of those challenges remain which is some of the funding issues. But one of the challenges that we no longer have is that was the challenges of the way that we structure our upper administration. We had a very top down organization and that caused a lot of difficulty in terms of shared governance. We don’t have that anymore. [17:08]

My experience over the past 4 years is that the upper administration has been extremely good to work with, they took faculty concerns into account and it’s been an honor and a privilege to work with Dr. Gogue. I’ve studied him, I’ve learned from him and I am a better faculty member and a better individual by looking at the way that he conducts his affairs and the inclusive nature that he has everybody kind of make their comments and  their suggestions in terms of  coming up with a shared conclusion.

I talked about my shared experience from seeing Auburn from a different perspective. I was on a review board that came in and looked at Auburn University. Also as I look back over those last 4 years I had the opportunity to look at the challenges of the people that work in Auburn, for example the upper administration, I see the challenges they face every day and I know they are trying to do the best that they can do with a very challenging situation. We don’t have enough money. We have incredible work loads and I can see they are working in our best interest to come to conclusions and solutions associated with that. I also had the opportunity to visit with 4 different colleges as they search for deans and interfaced with individuals from those colleges. Everybody, I found out everybody does life a little bit different across campus but it was exciting and interesting for me to be a participant in the search committees. I’ve also had the opportunity to be involved with review committees for department heads and chairs. I can see the struggles that individual colleges or individual departments are having with delivering their contribution to their colleges. Incredible work loads, high demand for freshman and sophomore level classes, so I had opportunity to see those challenges as well.

The next I had on my list, and I am going down my list of things I shared with you in terms of experiences that would qualify me for Senate Chair and for Secretary. I have down here that my experience at Auburn includes that of a parent. As I see the struggles that we make to make things better for our students, I’ve lived that life of a parent with a student that is doing that. It is both the successful things and the challenges as well. I have a son that chose a career based on the influence of a particular faculty member and I am forever grateful that he had invested in my son. I also had the opportunity for a specialized program that we had here at the university to graduate students who were challenged in terms of their grade point average. One of my daughters made use of that. Had a son that wasn’t retained, he went through the first year and he wasn’t up to speed in terms of his focus and I can feel the need for those types of programs to help our students continue. I have a daughter now that’s thriving, she’s involved on campus living in a dorm, thriving in her school work and she is part of the Student Learning Center. She is well along and bragging to me as a second semester freshman, she is making all As. She wasn’t the best high school student but she is definitely thriving at the college environment. I can see the benefit of these types of programs. Then I have children yet to come into school so I appreciate that.

I also see the committee work, my experience at Auburn has included service. Not only includes service on a variety of additional committees also is the challenge of getting other people involved in service work. I am thankful for the commitments of so many people to volunteer their time in areas that they not only have passion about but there are also areas where they are skilled in performing those types of services to the university and I appreciate that. [21:56]

I next mention here that we had challenges and I described them 4 years ago as being challenges of the recent past, I also mention, I didn’t mention anything in particular but I mentioned that we were all familiar with the challenges that we went through. I also made a commitment at the time that I would be vigilant about those things. I would be mindful of those things. To a large extent those things have receded in the past and we don’t have those challenges with the current administration. We have things that pop up that look like old Auburn, but they are not the routine but the anomalies.

Then I made a remark about my years of experience on the Steering Committee and how wonderful it was to work in an environment of cooperative and collaborative spirit that we had with Dr. Mazey. And this again was 4 years ago. It was different than my experience in the 6 years that I had in the Senate because I went through those 6 years where there was turmoil. Some of the Senate leaders that have been added to the mix since I’ve come here, they were amazed how much difference there is in dealing with upper administration. And I am thankful for the stewardship that you’ve exhibited Dr. Gogue and I can see a wonderful difference and I expect great things for Auburn University. And thank you all for the privilege of serving these 4 years. I appreciate that. We have challenges ahead, but I think that we are on the right course and confident that things will be improving as we go along.

Are there any questions that you have? Hearing none I am going to call on Herb to make a presentation of an award.

Herb Rotfeld, president, Auburn University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP): When I first came to Auburn 20 plus years ago we were under censor from the National AAUP for violations of certain principles of academic freedom. No sense going into the case or saying the individual details, but as we were removed from the censor list by the efforts of the then president, one of our members Bill Trimble said, it is important for us to talk about what AAUP stands for, the nature of shared governance and academic freedom, how important that is and to recognize the person at the time, got us off that list.

Skipping ahead a little bit. When we had our searches going on for a new provost one of the candidates we didn’t hire made a comment to me that was kind of interesting and the context, she said that when you have a higher administration, a president and a provost that are supporting academic freedom the idea of tenure is not really that necessary, well I stop not agreeing with that, but she said whether you have tenure or not, if the president and provost want to cause problems academic freedom is a fight regardless. I say that because of a particular notice and a particular change and particular differences that have been going on with this campus for 7 years. And that’s really important to say in terms of the total context environment for academic freedom on this campus. One little item that we had of recent times is we wrote down the promotion and tenure guidelines for all departments and different areas. And one of the members of the AAUP Chapter said, this should be open, this should be online, this should be available for others. And a few people were coming up with little scenarios where they could sort of force it. Well we get a few of them we put them online on our Web page, we bring it to a particular area and in a meeting with the president and provost I said, why don’t we put these online? And they said, yea, that’s a great idea. They are immediately online and available for all to see. And I have to say for my personal case, I was in a conference not that long ago speaking with senior esteemed research faculty in my field at Notre Dame, University of Arkansas, University of Georgia and they were criticizing various aspects that were common in all of their College of Business P&T guidelines. I said, we don’t have that. How did you do that? (they asked) I said academic freedom, and the president and provost said no, and that’s why we have that difference.

I say all that as a preamble and not saying anything about the person who is getting the award, but this is important to state in terms of saying why this is so important. Anyone that’s been here more than 7 years and talk of turmoil, variation, different problems, different items going on, as I said in my speech for the new faculty orientation; my own revelation to join AAUP came from an action of a university president said, I agree with academic freedom, but… (and the but was an extremely scary experience). And in the time that President Jay Gogue has been here and brings in Provost supporting these views, supporting different details, it has been a different atmosphere. It’s been an important atmosphere. When people say what is AAUP doing, well it’s like, nothing you can see. It’s really cool, it’s really nice being president of the chapter in these times when having our Committee A because people come in they say well I’ve got this problem, I have this difficulty going on and just about every single time, I say just about because we have 2 cases just starting and I think they are heading down the same path, every time send them to somebody in Samford Hall, it gets cleared up. Quietly. With people not going away cursing for the individual details involved. The single change, the important change, the difference that we have for these different times is having Jay Gogue as our president. And therefore this year, deciding who we wish to honor with our Academic Freedom Award, an award that went to an editor of the school paper for standing up to the Board of Trustees, for a state legislator for helping us with changes, for other faculty, for some people just having a big mouth (me), it is very important to say that the person that we are giving the Academic Freedom Award to, the Glenn Howze Academic Freedom Award, who is our leader, our icon, our star is the President of Auburn University, President Jay Gogue. It is my honor this time to give him our Award. [29:47]

Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you guys. I really appreciate it. The only recognitions that are really important are those that come from your peers. I appreciate all of you, thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: The next presentation is with Michael Kensler. He is going to be talking about sustainability here at Auburn University.

Michael Kensler, Dir., Office of Sustainability: It’s hard to follow on that warm and gracious event but I’ll do my best. [30:53]

I want to talk to you about 3 things briefly today. One is to talk about sustainability imagery and messaging the second one is about sustainability story report you want to do, and the third is we were here about a year ago to talk about a comprehensive sustainability assessment we did in 2012 and preparing for the next one which we’ll do in 2015. And things we’d like your help with.

Well the first one has to do with imagery, you know sustainability is actually a very new field, twenty years old. The ideas behind it go back hundreds of years. Both Emerson and Thoreau wrote about concepts that really lay the foundation for sustainability, but it’s really only about 20 years old. And there’s no such thing as an elevator speech, so tell me about sustainability and what you do. It’s too complicated. Here’s a systems map of a meeting that was held in Atlanta a few years ago about public health and creating a sustainable future. It’s a very good synopsis of that meeting but it takes about 20 minutes to walk through that to try and get the essence of it, so I want to walk through a few more slides about our reasoning about coming up with some imagery that we think does the best job possible to in a snapshot remind people about what this concept is all about. Because as folks have recognized, sustainability is a global megatrend and it’s going to affect business, it’s going to affect higher education, every layer of society, so being able to articulate what the idea is is really important to us. For one thing that makes it so hard to describe it in a nutshell is that it’s really about the big picture.

You know it’s just a tendency of humans to look at an affect and based on our knowledge and experience and our world view make a conclusion about what the cause of it is. So we tend to think on the surface of things and in a lot of ways, which I won’t take time to go into, it gets us into trouble in terms of decisions we make because sometimes the evidence we look at can lead us to a conclusion about it’s cause that’s 180 degrees from what the actual cause is, or what the actual situation is.

For example, the polar vortex , which we’ve all come to know and love and which will revisit us again tonight and tomorrow night with 30 degree temperature. If you look at this, the dark purple spot over the eastern United States, that was the temperature variation for the month of January compared to a 20 year average. [33:35] And it was 20 degrees colder and based on all the information that showed up on the news about how cold it was and record snows, it was easy to conclude that well maybe climate change isn’t even happening. For those that see this as an opportunity to deny the science of climate change, which is fairly well settled in terms of humans causing the earth to warm, it provides a lot of fodder and could lead people to conclude, well I don’t know what to think now, but that’s looking at only one bit of the evidence. Because if you look at Alaska and Canada there, it turns out that in January while we were 20 degrees colder, Alaska and Canada were 20 degrees warmer. And a really interesting little factoid that on January 26, Homer, Alaska, which sits on the Bay of Alaska at 54 degrees was warmer than any place in the lower 48 states except south Florida and southern California. And it turns out that January was the 4th warmest January globally on record. So how important it is to look at the whole picture and not draw conclusions based on what we just see in front of us.

So there are all these models out there that exist. Triple Bottom Line, The Natural Step, The Daily Triangle, The Bretlin definition, “meeting human needs now in a way that allows future generations to meet their needs.” But you’ve already seen, this is the image we came up with. And it’s actually an idea that was developed by Alan Atkinson, who is a sustainability consultant based in Stockholm. The images were created by Courtney Windham, a graphic design faculty member right here on campus. When we showed these to Alan he liked them so well that he distributed them to his global wide network of sustainability consultants. So now Courtney’s images are on display really all over the world in sustainability trainings and processes. So you can see it’s not just about being green, it’s not just about recycling, and it’s not just about making trade offs between the environment and the economy. It’s about nature, the economy, society, and individual wellbeing. It’s not about trading off and it’s not about balancing, it’s really about optimizing all these things together. So really these are the 4 system conditions for a sustainable future, which means that no matter what a student’s academic discipline is, it is really relevant to contributing to a society that we all want to live in. So that’s the image that you will be seeing more and more and a frame that we will be using as an office to try and describe what sustainability is all about. So if you ever get confused just remember the 4 points of the compass, that’s the systems view of what sustainability truly is.

It’s been more than 3 years since our office has done a campus-wide sustainability report. You’ve seen them whether it’s a campus or a corporation they put out a 50 page 4 –color, lots of charts and graphs and heavy in text report on, and annual report on sustainability. I used to get them in the mail and now I get them in pdf form and what I do is take it from my inbox and slide it to my sustainability reports folder and there it sits, I never look at it. I think, I’ll read that one of these days when I have time.

So we want to tell Auburn’s sustainability story and there are a lot of stories to tell. So we’re going to do something that I think is a little bit of an experiment and we hope it will be successful, we think it will, but rather than looking at something like this we are going to use Prezi. If you’ve used them you know that they can be lively, musical, you can insert video with text; there’s a lot you can do to make these interesting and interactive and creative. We’ve hired a very good intern, a student to work with us this summer to start us in this process. So we are going to hit the big picture, academics, engagement, operations, planning and administration, and then we can drill down to all kinds of topics. I was thinking that 7 minutes would be short, she said that 3 minutes is about it, more than 3 minutes and it’s too long. So the bad news is is that we can’t tell a long story in 3 minutes, the good news is we can tell a lot of stories in 3 minutes.

And speaking of stories, on the academic front, we work a lot with Nanette Chadwick, who you know is the Director of Academic Sustainability Programs, and she just told me today that the academic minor in sustainability has doubled in size since it started 4 years ago. [38:38] All of the sustainability classes are already full for the fall. She had more faculty members willing to teach the classes than there were slots available and a number of new classes have been added as electives to the minors. So the minor is really doing well. She also wanted to remind you that there are at least 4 sustainability tours on campus that our office has put together. So if you want to see some of the things that are happening in energy, food, waste, and water, those tours are now available and she’s just putting one together now for buildings. So students take these tours, folks coming on campus from off-campus and of course faculty and staff are also welcome to attend these tours and if you want one just let Nanette know and she will put it together for you.

By the way, when it comes to these stories if you have stories to tell please let us know what they are because in 3 minutes we can put together a really snappy punchy story to tell, the story that you want to tell about something going on in your classes, in your curriculum, campuses living and learning laboratory project that you might have going on in one of your classes.

The last thing is STARS. You remember when we were here a year ago to talk about this, this is the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System. It’s a national program, it’s a comprehensive, in depth sustainability assessment and we did our first one in 2012. While the slides are old the distribution is about the same, Auburn ended up for our very first try at this right smack in the middle of all the schools that have done these assessments. We think that’s a very good out-of-the-box evaluation of where we are. You will see that STARS is like the Olympics, bronze, silver, gold and there is actually a platinum category that no university or college has yet met. Georgia Tech came pretty close.

In the new Strategic Plan there is a statement that reiterates Auburn’s commitment to sustainability and it says we are going to do our best as an institution to go from 49 points to 60 points according to this AASHE STARS evaluation. Well if you look at the scale you can see where 60 is and that would be a significant leap and that a public goal. However, if we can squeeze 5 more points worth of credits out of our next evaluation we’ll be a STARS gold campus and that’s the highest achievement that has yet been obtained. And with more and more faculty, staff, and students coming into universities wondering what a campus’s sustainability commitment is, how many leed buildings do you have, what kind of sustainability classes can I take, it’s an important acknowledgement of our performance. So we would ask you help as Nanette reaches out about the classes that you’re conducting, what kind of sustainability component they might have or sustainability emphasis, sustainability research. We really do want to squeeze every point out of this next evaluation which we will be conducting the year after next to achieve the highest level of performance we can. We really think we can achieve because there is enough good going on, we can achieve a STARS gold status at the next go around.

That’s it, I don’t know if anybody has any questions. I would be happy to answer them.  All right, thanks.

Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you Michael. [42:05]

Our next presentation is about the Teaching Effectiveness Committee. Don Mulvaney is up tending to a child at Birmingham right now and Dean Schwartz is going to fill in for him.

Dean Schwartz of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee: Good afternoon, Dean Schwartz, department of Anatomy, Physiology, and Pharmacology at the College of Vet Medicine. Don sends his apology for not being here.

Today I am going to give you and update. These are the programs that we have going on right now; the AU Senate Departmental Award for Education Excellence and the Breeden Grant Program.

In terms of committee members, this is the roster of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee. Don is the chairman, there are 4 continuing members, there are 14 faculty members from various departments and colleges and there is an undergraduate as well as a graduate student representative. So you can imagine Don’s trying to arrange committee meetings with 20 different individuals. It is quite an undertaking.

First off the University Senate Departmental Award for Excellence in Education. This was approved by the Senate, I believe in April of 2013 to be awarded in the year of 2014. This I believe and these are Don’s slides, but I believe this was taken right from the call for the pre proposal. The goal of the award was to recognize departmental culture that meaningfully values and advances teaching and learning excellence. The award itself we feel provides a structure for both recognizing teaching excellence and for future teaching and learning improvement efforts. Now the is really a two tiered award. It’s an award for what you’ve done in the past and it’s also what are you going to do in the future to enhance learning and teaching both departmentally as well as campus wide. So it’s a two tier application.

The award will be given to one academic department at Auburn University annually. Each award will be $10,000 for 3 years. So each award is $30,000, so it is a substantial award. Each succeeding year after this first one an additional award will be awarded, so by year 3 there will be 3 awards simultaneously with a $10,000 budget.

So in terms of the announcement that was sent out early or late December and early January requesting pre-proposals of 3 pages or less and the committee received 11 excellent pre-proposals which we reviewed independently and then chose 4 departments and it happened to be from 4 different colleges to develop full proposals. The departments were Consumer and Design Sciences, Curriculum and Teaching, Health Outcomes Research and Policy, and Mechanical Engineering. So these 4 departments were asked to develop a full proposal.

A full proposal is quite an endeavor, it is 20 pages maximum (I believe he meant minimum) and it’s not only quite an endeavor to produce, it may be quite and endeavor to review also. So we are going to have 4 proposals of at least 20 pages.

In terms of the time line for that award. A full proposal is due April 11. Each department who is putting in a full proposal will give a presentation to the Teaching Effectiveness Committee; a short presentation, hopefully 10 to 15 minutes on April 2. Obviously the next date is wrong (on the slide). Shortly after that presentation the committee will recommend to the President the recipient of the 2014 Award and then the award will be placed in the departmental budget. We are hoping that the recognition of the award can occur at the Faculty Awards Program. And it is also anticipated that the winning department will give  a plenary presentation at the Conversations and Celebration of Teaching program.

So that’s our first task we’ve been undertaking. The second task or second update is the Daniel F. breeden Endowed Grant Program. This is an intramural grant program that again taken right from the Web site; “Supports teaching and learning projects that directly benefit the instructor, students, and AU’s overall teaching program. The is $30,000 available annually for this grant proposal and over the last several years we’ve received about 26 grants a year. I believe we funded anywhere from 10 to 13 each year. Not all them full funding, some of them partial funding.

The Breeden Program is managed by the Biggio Center for Enhanced Teaching and Learning. There are 2 types of grants here; there is a travel award which has a maximum budget of $2,000 a year and there is a program award which has a maximum budget of $4,000 a year. The deadline for this year’s proposals to be funded and completed next academic year was March 17, 2014. Anybody interested in the Breeden Grants, that’s the Web site for the grants. http://wp.auburn.edu/biggio/programs/breeden/ The review process for this year’s applications will start shortly and anybody who is interested in the rubric for how the grants are actually scored, the rubric is available at that Web site.

If you have any questions, there is Don Mulvaney e-mail, (mulvadr@auburn.edu) or you can contact me. Questions? [50:26]

Larry Crowley, chair: The next item on the agenda, you have all been waiting for, the announcement of the winners for the Senate elections. Patricia Duffy, the incoming chair.

Patricia Duffy, chair-elect: We’re going to announce another chair-elect and we have the secretary-elect to announce. First of all I’d like to thank everyone who volunteered to put their name forward to be considered as candidates this year. I know Don is not available, Laura Plexico, my eyesight is not great.

Typically we start off by announcing the chair-elect, but I am going to do it backwards this year. I am going to start off by announcing who is the incoming secretary-elect. The candidates Don Mulvaney and Laura Plexico; and the incoming secretary-elect is Laura Plexico. For chair-elect the candidates were Robin Jaffe and Larry Teeter, I see you both now that my eyes are focused in the back of the room. The incoming chair-elect is Larry Teeter.

Larry Crowley, chair: Any new business? Seeing none, any unfinished business? Seeing none, we’ll be adjourned. [51:58]