Transcript Senate Meeting
May 15, 2018
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Welcome to the May 15, 2018 meeting of the University Senate. This is our ninth meeting of the 2017–18 academic year.
If you are a senator or a substitute for a senator please be sure you sign in onto the sheet at the top of the room. Be sure you have your clicker, because we have three action items today. Second, we need to establish a quorum. We have 86 Senators in the Senate and we need 44 for a quorum. Please press A on your clicker to show you are present.
Let the record show that we have 45 present to start the meeting, so a quorum is established. I now call the meeting to order.
I would like to remind you of some basic procedures for the Senate meeting for senators and guests. Let me explain the Senate rules about speaking. If you’d like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go to the microphone on either side aisle. When it is your turn, state your name and whether or not you are a senator and the unit you represent.
The rules of the Senate require that senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first and then after they are done guests are welcome to speak.
The agenda today was set by the Senate Steering Committee and posted on the Web site in advance, it’s now up on the screen. The first order of business is to approve the minutes for the meeting of April 17, 2018. Those minutes have been posted on the Web site. Are there any additions, changes, or corrections to the minutes? Hearing none, do I have a motion to approve the minutes? Do I have a second? All in favor of approving the minutes say aye please.
Group: Aye.
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Opposed? (No response)
The minutes are approved. Thank you. [3:22]
The first item of business is some remarks from our Provost, Bill Hardgrave. Bill please come to the microphone.
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: Good afternoon everyone, I hope your summer is off to a good start. I just have a couple of quick items, but I thought it would be appropriate to take a moment to reflect upon the students that are leaving us, left us last week and those that will be joining us in the fall. So to share some numbers with you; in our spring graduation, over 7 graduations. As my job as Provost I had the pleasure of attending 7 graduations on the 4 consecutive days. It was fantastic. We had 2919 Bachelor’s degrees awarded, 643 Master’s degrees, 77 PhDs, 268 professional degrees awarded, for a total of 3,907 degrees awarded over the 4 days and 7 graduations.
For those that will be joining us in the fall, what it looks like at this point and still, these are squishy numbers, but they are getting closer every day, it looks like we will have 4,962 freshmen join us in the fall and 1,123 transfer students. Now compare that to last year, which was new freshmen were 4,836, so about 130 or so give or take additional freshmen and 1320 transfers. So at this point tracking a little bit behind the transfers although those kind of trickle in over the summer. To put our freshmen class into perspective, if we do have 4962, again the numbers are a little squishy, our largest incoming freshmen class to date was 4,902 in fall of 2015. So this would be the largest incoming freshmen class in Auburn history if that does happen.
The second thing I want to mention is that we have several key searches underway. [5:43] The Harbert College of Business Dean search is toward the end. We had the 3 finalists in over the past few weeks and hope to move forward with a decision in the very near future. The Library Dean search is underway. Doing a national search there, we are still months from the conclusion, but it is underway. The Honor’s College Director position internal search is underway and hope to bring that to a conclusion in the very near future. The Museum Director search is underway, again that will be several months from conclusion. And we are also reorganizing the Provost’s Office given some of the changes that have been made in the last few months. With Associate Provost Relihan’s departure as of the last of this month, at this point there are no plans to replace her position. Over the next few months we are going to take the work that she and her office have been doing and try to farm that out to some existing personnel and let things settle down over the next month or so and see what the new organization looks like. At this point there are no plans to replace that position immediately.
The last thing I’ll mention is that at this point it looks like for merit and one-time salary supplements for this year, the October time period for the merit and the December time period for the one-time salary supplements, it looks like it will be a 3% pool for both of those. Again, that’s pending approval of the Board of Trustees at the September meeting, but that’s what we are aiming toward and budgeting for. At this point keep in mind that is not a 3% across the board raise for everyone, it is a 3% pool that will be awarded based upon performance. That’s all I’ve got at this point. [8:00]
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: Hi Bill, Mike Stern, senator, economics. With regard to the raises, I know we talked about this a little bit during your audition to be Provost or your session about how raises were done last time. It sounds a little bit similar to what you described this time I asked you about units being able to use their reserves, their funds and so forth, to add to this 3% pool. So, I was wondering if that’s going to occur this time?
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: Thank you for the question. The answer is ,no, it will not occur this time. Quite frankly the decision making started too late to start looking at that for this year. I have talked to the Budget Advisory Committee and the compensation (salary) and welfare committee as well. We are going to start that conversation about merit and one-time salary increases in June for next year. So we are going to start it well a year in advance so we have plenty of time to look at those type of things. Whether it’s market adjustments or letting different units use the pools of money they have. We are going to start that well in advance so it’s not a one-month conversation it’ll be a 12-month conversation.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: We did do that prior to last year, right? On several occasions? Prior to last year while you were Dean of the Business School we did go through raise cycles where we did use additional funds.
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: That’s correct, but that was…the budget model was new.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: I understand, but adding additional funds whether is was under incremental costs to that declared pool has been done before.
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: It has been done before, but that was prior to the new budget model. The new budget model does present some challenges around how we look at those things. That’s why we need to look at it several months in advance, not just the month before.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator:: So when I look at it ex-post, if I poll budgetary units, I won’t see anything beyond 3% on average appearing in the raises?
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: You shouldn’t unless there were market adjustments that were in there.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: In terms of the raise process?
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: Each unit is allocated 3% of their salaries as of March 31, and that’s the pool that they can allocate to give raises.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: And that’s all there will be in relation to raises?
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: Yes, it is. In addition to promotion and those things. [10:48] Anything else? Thank you.
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: I now have brief remarks for the Senate.
First, I would like to introduce the officers of the Senate and our administrative assistant. James Goldstein is the immediate past chair, Michael Baginski is the chair-elect, Donald Mulvaney is the secretary, and Beverly Marshall is the secretary-elect: James Witte is our Parliamentarian. Our administrative assistant is Laura Kloberg.
Second, we would like to thank the efforts of all Senators with terms of office expiring in June. Approximately one-third of you are ending your term then. For those of you with terms that are expiring, we ask that you please remind your departments to elect your replacements (or if you are a glutton for punishment and eligible, re-up for another term).
Third, the Senate has been contacted by the Senate Chair of another SEC school to collaborate in a learning opportunity. This will involve visits from the other institution to understand similarities and differences in shared governance procedures at our respective institutions. This has the capacity or potential to be a unique learning opportunity for both Senates.
Are there any questions?
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: Hi Dan, Mike Stern, senator, economics. I know I talked to you before this meeting, there’s a Senate document, and executive committee document that I wanted to ask you about because it’s something I haven’t seen before, so I was wondering about practice and policy. I wanted to ask you a few questions. Over head [12:50]
So this is on Auburn University’s Senate letterhead, it is from the Senate Executive committee to the prior Provost [dated 6-27-2016]. You see listed there the members down below of the Senate Executive Committee at the time and the subject of it is “Reviewing an Ethics Point Allegation” and the body of it after reviewing it, if you pull up a little bit, they recommend dismissal proceedings. So, I haven’t seen something like this before and I’ve been around a long time. So, I have a couple of questions based on your knowledge.
First, when did you officially become a member of the Executive Committee? [13:46]
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: It would have been…this year is 2018 so 2017.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: You would have been chair-elect, right?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Well, actually…
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: It would have been July 1 of 2017?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: No, 2016
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: July 1st?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: yes.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: So, 4 days after this was issued, you became a member of the executive committee?
Are you aware of any specific authorization or direction in the Handbook or Senate Constitution whereby the Executive Committee shall review ethical charges or personnel matters regarding individual faculty members?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Nothing specifically.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: Are you aware of any portion of the faculty dismissal process in the Handbook that mentions the Executive Committee?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: In the dismissal? No.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: During your 2 years, which started 4 days after this, on the Executive Committee, was the Committee ever asked to review any ethical charges or ethical findings against a faculty member, and issue recommendations regarding dismissal proceedings?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: No, we have not been. [14:48]
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: If you ever agreed to be on a committee that reviewed ethical charges, would you speak to the relevant faculty member or members, prior to issuing any form of recommendation?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: I would.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: To the best of you knowledge, did the prior Executive Committee speak to the relevant faculty member or members prior to creating this document?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: To the best of my knowledge, no.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: Thank you. [15:14]
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Any other questions? Diane.
Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center, not a senator: I have an easy question. Are we allowed to know the other SEC school that contacted you to try to get information?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: It’s the one that…
Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center, not a senator: Do they also have orange as one of their colors?
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: I’m not sure they can come yet, it’s not orange, it’s blue and white.
Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center, not a senator: Okay, thank you. [15:46]
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: We actually have an arrangement with them for the Vet School I believe. Any other questions?
We have two action items on the agenda today. The first item is a request to change the membership of the Faculty Research Committee in the Faculty Handbook. This motion was presented and discussed by Ralph Kingston, Chair of the Faculty Handbook Committee at our April 17th meeting. Ralph could not make it today and Don Mulvaney will present it.
Donald Mulvaney, Secretary: This was a resolution that came out of the Faculty Handbook Committee regarding the Faculty Research Committee. There are some minor changes. One in particular that we discussed last time was the addition of a member to that committee from Libraries and the correction of the number of total (faculty) representatives that would be on that committee. [16:52]
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: This motion comes from a standing committee of the Senate and there is no need for a second. However, this action is a constitutional amendment. As such, 58 Senators (representing 2/3s of the Senate) must vote for the amendment before it is approved. Okay, we do need to check because this vote requires 58 votes. So I you would hit A again. Only 48 senators.
We will table it until the next time.
The second action item from Rules Committee requires voting by the Senate to approve nominees for Senate committees.
This action item will be presented by Don Mulvaney, as Chair of the Senate Rules Committee.
Donald Mulvaney, Senate Secretary and chair of Senate Rules Committee: This is a result of some very hard work by the members of the Rules Committee and looking through those that volunteer in trying to find individuals that are willing and able to serve, in some cases from very specific department units or colleges. This has been posted online. Since it comes from a standing committee (of the Senate) it requires no second. So we are prepared to vote.
Press A for approval, press B if you object. A=42, B=0. The motion passes, thank you.
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: We also have two information items. The first describes testing services that are available for faculty for common events or situations such as makeups. Lindsay Doukopoulos, Assistant Director of the Biggio Center and Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center were going to present together, but Lindsay is under the weather, so Diane is going to present.
Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center, Testing Services: Thank you, good afternoon. I am pinch hitting for Lindsay, she was going debut at Senate, but is not able to be with us.
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It came to our attention in the Biggio Center that some faculty aren’t aware of the Testing Services Center. How many of you are aware that it exists? That’s good. So I hope I won’t bore you. How many of you have actually used it before? So a smaller number. Hopefully some of what I say will inspire you to take advantage of services.
You can see here that Testing Services is located in Biggin Hall which is kind of a quasi-brutalist building. It’s a little ironic that the testing center is in a brutalist building, one of the only ones on campus but here you go, northeastern corner of campus across from Toomer’s Corner. That’s where it’s located. Inside: that’s where you would send your students to take tests if you did not want to devote class time to giving them tests. So, inside there are 2 different kinds of testing we do here. One kind is vendor-based tests. I’m going to focus on the other kind, which is academic testing for today. In vendor-based testing your students can take the GRE, the MCAT, the Praxis, all this is available online. And community members and maybe other staff who want to develop professionally would take tests there.
Academic testing is for Auburn students and we also provide testing for online students. We provide that testing in a room that has a 72 computer mediated testing stations. A little bit of context about the Testing Services Center. We do a lot of testing, you’ll see last year almost 18,000 testing situations happened. What I’d like to draw your attention to is that time at the top. When you send you students to Biggio Testing Center, you get to free up that hour of class time to do other things in the class. So maybe you want to give them more time practicing or give more time for student presentations, so that’s important. One of our big accomplishments last year, prior to Ernestine Morrison’s retirement, she achieved national college testing association certification (NCTA), which is a big deal. We were in a race with our cross-state rival, who will not be named, and we lost that battle after a valiant fight, we lost by about 10 days. So they received their NCTA certification about 10 days before we did.
So, here’s a little scenario about how you might use Testing Services if you are interested. Usually it begins by talking with one of us in the Biggio Center, faculty development side. You redesign a course or an assignment and you find that maybe you want to have your students have more time hands on learning. When you do that you need to free up class time so they actually get what they need from you in terms of feedback. Then you would revise your test, your regular paper-based test by working with Biggio Tech using CANVAS. You can put your test right on CANVAS, it’s in a locked-down browser to prevent cheating and that test your students would then sign up to take the test. They are empowered to do that themselves on the Testing Center Web site and they would go to Testing Services to take the test.
It gets better. There’s even more advantages to doing this. In CANVAS there’s a quiz statistics feature, you can see there in the bottom left side that will give you some sense of the reliability of your test items. You can then use that feedback to improve your test and also probably change it a little which will help with potential cheating in the future. And then, which we hope will end up in the enhanced student learning and more satisfaction for you as an instructor knowing that your students are actually picking up what you are putting down.
Now we are going to try a video. This is a one-minute tour of Testing Services. Let’s see what happens. Play video (available at the Biggio Center). The students would enter on the second floor and would be greeted by Aubie, we try to make testing less painful. This is where they would go to check in on the second floor, we get to share the space with art faculty. We have a waiting room specifically for students waiting to take tests, where they can chill and maybe even prepare, then they cross the hall and go into the testing room. Here is where they take the tests, very secure. There is Biggio Testing Center Proctors to make sure there’s no nefarious actions going on during the testing. This is where you go to sign up, you as a faculty for the exam. And that’s the end of the tour.
So, I will end with a little bit of a faculty testimonial. If you go to our Web site you’ll see that we do have faculty that have used the service with some success. We are extending our open hours on 3 days a week from 8–4 to 87 to accommodate students who need a later time for testing. If you have any questions I hope you’ll come to the Web site or e-mail Mary Clark, who is the manager of Testing Services. I can answer questions if you have any. [25:20]
Mike Baginski, chair-elect: This isn’t really a question, but it’s something I think some faculty need to be sure of…you don’t collect exams and send them back to the faculty? That’s very important.
Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center, Testing Services: Thank you for that clarifying question Mike. Yes, we do not administer paper-based exams because we are a fully computer mediated center. We had some challenges in the past where when we try to send them back they get lost somehow and that’s a serious issue that we don’t want to prolong any more. Any other questions?
Someone off microphone.
Diane Boyd: No, they can schedule…what you might do is say that there is a window for taking the test, such as a 3 day window. When you set it up on the Web site, you say the window is these days; and the students figure out what’s good in their schedule and they go and sign up for that exam.
Someone off microphone.
Diane Boyd: It’s okay. I raised my hand earlier when I had a question, It’s a little weird.
Same someone now on Microphone: The other question I have, is there a way to keep the students from cheating? By having one student go take the test and remember everything then tell everybody else?
Diane Boyd, Director of the Biggio Center, Testing Services: If we have students with photographic memory, and I know we do, then there is no way to prevent against that particular form of cheating. We did invest in about $10,000 in a new security camera system and our proctors are trained to help find cheating as it is happening in the space. Here’s a little lagniappe for you; when our proctors notice students cheating they immediately remove them from the test situation and they e-mail the professor. At this point that’s what we are empowered to do to report that cheating incident. It has been the case that professors chose not to press charges against the student and the student then showed up the very next day to take the very same exam again. You’ll see we put forth a lot of effort to ensure test security, but there are limits to what we can do. Thank you. [27:40]
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Two other minor points that came up in a discussion in Steering is currently they can’t do number calculations. They don’t have touch screen or anything like that so you can do the number calculations. However they can do open-ended questions, like I use, so they can do text box and open-ended questions on tests. It’s not just multiple choice.
Our final information item is an update from the Athletic Department. Beverly Marshall, Auburn’s FAR and Allen Greene, Auburn’s new athletic director are going to be up here. It’s Allen’s first time to come to the Senate.
Beverly Marshal, FAR: It was my pleasure to get the opportunity to serve on the search committee that selected Allen Greene to serve as Auburn’s fifteenth Athletic Director. Allen is a graduate of Notre Dame. He has a degree in Finance, he earned a Master’s degree in 2009 from Indiana University. He was a student athlete in baseball, he was selected by the Yankees in the 1998 MLB draft and played in their minor league system for 3 years. He has experience in all aspects of athletics. He started in Athletic Administration and Compliance at Notre Dame and then he went on to be in Development at Old Miss. And then he held several progressive culminating in being athletic director at the University of Buffalo. Under his helm the University of Buffalo earned the NCAA and Minority Opportunities Athletic Association 2018 award for Diversity and Inclusion. [29:43] Allen and his wife, Christie, have 3 children and we are excited to have them as part of the Auburn Family. Thank you, Allen.
Allen Greene, Athletics Director: Thank you and I will drop a very soft and subtle War Eagle. Very, very happy to be here. I want to thank you all for all that you do to help educate not only our students but our smaller sub-set of student athletes. I went to the school at the University of Notre Dame and I find that it’s very important that our young people get an education. I was just talking to a basketball recruit today about the importance of education, not only in the classroom, but in real life.
We talk about 3 major tenets of what it is that we do. First, we make sure that they get an education, this is an institution of higher learning and it’s imperative that these young people educate themselves. Number 2 we invest a significant amount of resources, both time and financial, and so do some of you in this room and some folks in our community to help them achieve their athletic successes so we are not shying away from wanting to have a degree, in one hand and a ring or multiple rings in the other hand. Then thirdly in some cases most importantly is, as I mentioned before, is education about life. There is lots of value, in my opinion, in being a student athlete. My experience is as a student athlete it helped me become the man that I am today. So, not only all the successes that I had while I was in college but also some of the difficulties that I had to go through and some of the times when I tripped and fell and stumbled and had to pick myself back up have helped me be the man that I am, the husband that I am, and the father that I am.
I’ve been here for about 3 months in Auburn and I will say a couple of things. Number one, I am incredibly surprised at the amount of support that the community has had for new innovative leadership and maybe a little bit different perspective. That’s been very welcoming as I look to assess what’s happening in our athletics department in trying to determine not only where we want to be, but more importantly how we are going to get there. That’s critical. One of the things I’ve found to be very attractive in this opportunity is not only the search committee was in the room when we were having these discussions, but as we saw during President Leath’s Installation the ideals of inspiring, innovating, and transforming and raising the university’s national profile. Athletics is not the most important part of what it is that Auburn University does and what we stand for, but it is an incredibly visible part. I liken it to the term of if you are driving in the neighborhood and see a nice house you are more apt to try to figure out what’s inside that house. So we think of ourselves as the curb appeal. So, when people drive past Auburn or are cruising through and trying to figure out if they want to take a peek inside to look at all the wonderful things going on they tend to look at the things that are bright and shiny and that tends to be athletics. [32:52] so, we want to all that we can to make sure that we represent the university in a first-class manner and we will continue to do so and I’ll work with the staff and work with you all. And I see there’s at least a Dean or so in here who I’ve already had the chance to visit with and it’s imperative that we continue to raise the profile of our university and all the outstanding work that you all do and some of the folks in your respective units to make sure that we can cast an outstanding positive light on Auburn University with regard to the rest of the country.
Those would be my remarks. I am happy to take any questions. (pause) Alright, thank you very much. War Eagle. (applause)
Beverly Marshall, FAR: I made a presentation in March on Federal Graduation Rate (FGR) and Graduation Success Rates (GSR) for our student athletes, overall male and female. I promised at that meeting that I would also provide some similar breakdown by ethnicity for our male population, that was the area asked for in that meeting. So, this is in response to questions at the March meeting.
Again, just as a reminder, when we look at the total of the student body the only thing we really have is a Federal Graduation Rate. It essentially looks at the freshman cohort and measures the percentage of students that complete their degree, BA or BS, from the initial school within 6 years. So, it does not count transfers as anything other than a failure. If they leave here and go to another school, it also does not include students that would transfer in, because again they have to come in that freshman year and it counts graduations of that freshman cohort within 6 years. Only student athletes receiving financial aid are going to be included in the FGR of student athletes. I wanted that explanation of the following slides.
So, this is our Federal Graduation for our males by ethnicity, again, because we have to have a freshman cohort they have to be here 6 years, that’s why the last data would be the freshmen that entered in the class starting 2011–2012. For our Federal Graduation Rate that first column there for all males was in the March presentation. Then what I did was I split the next 2 columns, splitting our student body population and white males and African American males. Then for student athletes, spitting them into white males and African American males. A picture is worth a thousand words, so rather than looking at all of that data, I put together a graph. You can see that our male population is pretty steady, out white male population, and we do have an increasing trend in both our African American student body and with some movement in our African American student athlete population. I am going to provide a little more stability to that graph in just a minute.
I wanted to compare that to what the NCAA reports. This is from the NCAA Web site, so they have a wealth of information if you want to look at this further. Similar to their results our African American male student athletes perform better than our African American student body. That is consistent with what we find here at Auburn. [37:11] Again the blue line there is our African American student athletes, the gray line our African American student body. That is kind of telling, so what I did was I tried to create the same graph for our student body and our student athletes and compare that against NCAA. So, for our student body white male our Auburn white male population exceeds the NCAA student body averages. Our student athlete white male actually performs worse than the NCAA student athlete white male population. Our student body African American population performs better than the NCAA and our student athlete African American pool performs better than the NCAA pool.
What I did to kind of get a better idea of what was going on with the trend, is we also report a 4-year, so it’s a 4-year rolling average. That gets some of the spikes that you saw, in the chart that I showed you, out. You can see that we have made progress in our FGR of males and we have made progress in the graduation rate of our African American males. We have also made progress in the FGR of our African American male student athletes. We still have work to do as do we nationally, but again, just wanted to report that in response to the questions that came up at the March meeting. Any questions?
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: I want to thank you for this data Beverly. [39:19] I also asked about the pie charts that showed the majors of athletes and pointed out that it matters what kind of programs students are graduating in, so I didn’t see any of that data here and they may not have provided it to you. So I produced some of my own from my records that’s relevant to the data that you produced here. I was aware of this data up through ‘08–’09, SO these last few years, ‘09, ’10, ’11 are actually updates, so I wanted to thank you.
If you could open my slides that will augment this, we can get some further information here.
First, I want to make clear since Beverly is representing the Intercollegiate Athletic Committee, I am representing no one but myself. So any of those that wish to continue retaliation against me, make sure that you direct it at me.
I am going to review this slide here which I was aware of through ‘08–’09, you will see the African American male student athlete cohort at that time down at 41% trailing all of the demographics and then you see it rocket up in the 2 most recent years to exceed all of the demographics. [40:41]
Now this is a 6-year run looking at graduation rates, so what I want to do is look at data about 3-years in past that cohort. So, that last record setting cohort there at 75% starting in fall 2010, I want to look at things in fall 2013. So, can we go to the next slide?
This is just a repeat of our graph, again you can see in ’08–’09, the most recent data that I had you can see not good and then you can see an amazing rocket up there in extra years. Next slide. So, in fall of 2013 Auburn’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR) provided some documents to me that identified 84 African American male athletes, I believe they were scholarship athletes, to identify them by funding in the fall of 2013. In going that I could not find any of the 84 with the major associated with the College of Engineering. None. [41:43] There we 65 identified of those 84 that had a non-pre or non-undeclared major. So this should be from an earlier cohort as they are entering the graduate-able programs, that is what I am looking at with these 65. 54% of them were in one program, Public Administration, and then we had 4 in Physical Activity and Health and 4 in Fitness Conditioning, performance add up as two-thirds of them. The rest of the distribution is very sparse, I am looking at the top 3. So those are African American male scholarship athletes at that point from that last cohort and you will see extraordinary clustering by academic program.
Next slide. When I look at non-athlete African American males, again in OIR data from the same documents, the top 3 non-pre or non-undeclared majors unfold 2013 for African American males at this institution who are not identified as athletes was Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Biomedical Sciences. Those are radically different than the previous 3 that I showed you. So, the distribution when we compare the athletes with the non-athletes with the Graduation Rate without referencing what they are graduating in, many students struggle to get engineering done. In fact it can be remarkable to get it done in 5 years. So when I looked at Auburn’s OIR identified 571 African Americans males at Auburn that were not athletes, and when I go up to the Web for fall 2013, 234 African Americans males were associated with the College of Engineering. So outside of the athlete group that they had identified 41%, much higher than the white percentage of males were in the College of Engineering. Therefore I view it completely pointless to compare the graduation rates between the 2 cohorts, because they look nothing like it in terms of the programs that they are in.
Next slide, please.[43:38]
So, here is the time series data provided by OIR of the Public Administration major for African American male athletes. The last cohort of date you saw, at the point they started here in fall 2010 there were 3. By the time we reached the peak for their declaration date, there are 35. I provided the white male corresponding data that were identified as scholarship athletes, in fall of 2013 there were 84 African American identified scholarship male athletes, there were 82 white male. So almost even and you can see the massive differential. This was my point to Beverly, who I know is new and just started in it, you really have to break down by gender, you really have to break down by ethnicity often to understand what is going on with college athletics. As many scholars have noted and it is certainly not a difference here. I believe this is the relevant data for the data that she was able to show with graduation rates going to the mid-point of the declaration.
Next slide, please.[44:40]
The data that she showed that I questioned last time and no refinement was brought, was this data, which is student athlete enrollment in colleges and schools. First, you’ll see it’s not provided at the program level, it’s not separated by gender, it’s not separated by ethnicities. So it’s useless and does not study that which we need to study. You will notice some interesting trends in it that the percentages and the ? is dropping [45:04] precipitously. I’d like to know what program that is and I’d like to know what gender and ethnicity that was to go along with the prior data. You also see the University College explode from 3% up to 8% over this 2 year period. It was relatively young early on. I’d like to know which program in the University College and again I’d love gender ethnicity data to look for asymmetries in the trend.
Previously in data that I’ve looked at in regard to the Business School, pre-business appears to be a holding tank of cluster programs. So I don’t know now at the lower levels when they’re freshman and sophomore, because I don’t often see them much in the upper division programs that I’d look in the older data if that ‘s changed. But Business is now the main cluster that’s declared, but my guess is that’s dominated by pre-business, so those are not graduate-able majors but there are underclassmen going from that to some other program at some point to graduate from.
So, there is potentially some very interesting trends more recently in data that I don’t have in terms of how this distribution is going on. I would expect by looking at just raw racial statistics, it is clear to me that the huge spike up there in Public Administration must have collapsed because I can see that in the raw racial data so to speak from OIR’s Web site, but it doesn’t identify athlete versus non-athlete, but when it drops down to only 11 or so then I know the maximum number could be 11, a precipitous decline, but I am unclear what is going on with the University College.
I’ve a little concern about the University College because it houses something called Interdisciplinary Studies. And you see the explosive growth in it. There have been a lot of questions about that program and the previous associate athletics director was replaced by the director of Interdisciplinary Studies, in that role. I would very much like to see…I believe he retired in May-June of 2017, after this explosive growth in the University College. So it would be interesting to see that. I’d love to see the data where we could see the distribution by program level across ethnicity and gender for sure.
If anyone is interested in any further detail of this, particularly the conduct of academic or athletic officials in regard to these affairs, there is one more file I want you to show.
So, I published a nice article, it was on the front page of the national edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, you can see its titled “Unrivaled Power, Inside Auburn’s secret effort to advance an athletic friendly curriculum.” And there’s a lot of detail in that from documents that will talk about the conduct of the academic and athletic officials at this institution in regard to some of these issues. If anyone happened not to see it and is interested in anything other than the raw data that I presented. Thank you. [48:07]
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: Mike, I was just going to tell you for the topic it was your 2 minute warning.
Mike Stern, economics, sustitute senator: I’m done [48:07]
Beverly Marshall, FAR: I don’t have any further comment. I think that’s the information that I planned on presenting is the Federal Graduation Rates. No further point coming from me. In that regard we are we have moved University College to the College of Liberal Arts and there are changes in the structure of that program and I am going to meet with the Dean of Liberal Arts. We are interested with academic integrity and making sure that our students are successful to the degree they can pursuing their college education.
Daniel Svyantek, Chair: This concludes our formal agenda for today.
Is there any unfinished business? Hearing none, is there any new business? Hearing none, I now adjourn the meeting. [49:10]