Transcript General Faculty Meeting
October 29, 2019
Nedret Billor, Chair: Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming today. This is the fall General Faculty Meeting. I am Nedret Billor and I am the University Senate Chair. I also act as the chair of the General Faculty.
First, we are going to call the meeting to order. Our first task is to approve the minutes from the March 26, 2019 General Faculty meeting. These minutes have been posted on the University Senate Web site. Are there any additions, changes, or corrections to the minutes? (long pause) Hearing none, do I have motion to approve the minutes?
Someone: Motion to approve.
Another someone: Second.
Nedret Billor, Chair: All in favor of approving the minutes say aye, please.
Group: aye
Nedret Billor, Chair: Opposed? (pause – no response) The minutes are approved. Thank you.
Next, we will have remarks from Interim President Gogue and Provost, Bill Hardgrave. As Dr. Gogue mentioned in his remarks of October 15 Senate Meeting, they have been summoned to Montgomery to meet legislators to discuss performance of ? based on the upcoming State budget cycle. Because they were hoping to be back on time for the General Faculty Meeting we kept the agenda as is. Of course, there was a possibility that they wouldn’t be back on time and they recorded their remarks. We will be watching the videos recorded by Interim President Gogue and also Provost, Bill Hardgrave. Bill Hardgrave will be talking about the strategic plan.
Interim President Gogue: I want to welcome all of you to the fall Faculty Meeting. I appreciate you taking time to be here today.
Also, I have been back at Auburn a little bit over 3 months in my role as Interim President and I simply want to say thank you for the encouragement and support you have given me. This is the first General Faculty Meeting that I have missed in my time as President. We received a call several weeks ago from the Speaker of the Alabama House and from Del Marsh, the President Protem of the Alabama Senate. There really was a command performance for all Presidents, Chancellors, Provosts, and Chief Operating Officers to be in Montgomery to discuss next year’s budget, and I made the decision that I probably needed to be there to do that. So, I apologize that I am not with you, but Bill Hardgrave, our Provost, is going to offer comments on the Strategic Plan and if we get back from Montgomery we will join you later in the session. So, thank you all for being here today.
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: Good afternoon everyone. The fact that you are watching me on video means that I am stuck in Montgomery at a meeting an apologize that I couldn’t be there live to unveil the Strategic Plan or talk about the KPIs of the strategic plan.
We’ve been working on the Strategic Plan for some time. Back in February we took it to the Board of Trustees and they officially adopted the mission and vision statement. We have a new Web site and the Web site will provide all the details of the Strategic Plan. I am not going to go through the plan, you can find it at auburn.edu/strategic plan, but I do want to take just a minute to go through a few things here. [4:02]
First of all, on the mission and vision, one of the things you will notice from, compared to the previous strategic plan is we really focused the mission. Narrowed it down, shortened it and one thing I do want to call everybody’s attention to is we were very purposeful about the beginning of that mission statement where we put as a land-grant university. We really wanted to make sure that we own that, that we kind of reclaimed it. The other thing I will call your attention to is our vision. That is, we see ourselves as this land-grant institution as a model institution that can shape and lead higher education. There’s a lot of changes that are going on in higher education, I think we stand at the forefront of that and do great things as a model institution.
So, let me jump back over to our six goals. These are right there on the home page and will start with those. Four of the goals are really what you’d expect to see from most any major research university. There are goals around students, goals around faculty, goals around our outreach and service, goals around our people. There are two goals which are different, I think actually differentiate us certainly in the next 5 years for this plan and will set us up for the future. One is around strategic enrollment and the other is around operational excellence.
Let’s talk through each of those just a bit. I am going to go through the key performance indicator, what we call KPIs. [5:46] Is the data we’ll use to track our progress toward achieving those goals. I don’t want to take a lot of time, all of these are on the Web site, but I do want to talk through some of these things. I will go into “Elevating the Auburn Experience.” As you go through and read about our goal, toward the bottom you will find some graphics that illustrate what we are trying to do.
Let me talk through some of those key KPIs here. The first one is around our 6-year graduation rate. Right now, we are in about 78%, our 5-year goal is to get us to around 84%. Our first-year retention rate is right now around 90%, our goal is to get to 93%. The student faculty ratio, we are 19:1 and want to work that down to 18:1 over the next 5 years.
A couple of other things I will draw your attention to without going into detail. You can go into the Web site and see all of these for yourself, but our first destination data, that is something that we’ve really haven’t had good insight into prior to this year, now we do. For the first time this year we’ve collected that information on our graduate and undergraduate students. And we will be doing the same thing for our graduate students in the near future. We are trying to get an understanding for every student what’s happening when you graduate? So, we are collecting this data several weeks before they graduate; are you going to graduate school?, do you have a job?, are you looking…what’s the next phase for your life? We are getting some good information now that we didn’t have before, so we’ve got some metrics, stats around that and helps to center our targets as well.
We also have some information around high impact practices, internships, coops, and study abroad. You can see from the data there where we are trying to go. So, all that around our students and the experiences they have and making sure that we have great outcomes for our students.
I am going to go back then to our goal number 2, which is Research. Again, if you look at the Web site it will talk about what we are trying to do with research, it will talk about the impact of our research. By the way, that is something I want to call out just broadly about our Strategic Plan, is one of the things you’ll see that runs through our plan is “impact.” What is the impact we are having on our students and the outcome for our students, what’s the impact that our research is having? What’s the impact of our service and our outreach. It’s not enough just to be doing things, what’s the impact of that, so you will see that really as a theme throughout each of these.
Let’s talk about our Research. As you all know we have done a great job with our research over the last several years with obtaining that R1 status recently, but we’re not satisfied just being there with the R1 status, we want to keep improving. Some of the key metrics we’ll be looking at as we go forward would be the total research expenditures. We are about 215 million or so now and we want to work that toward 347 million. Our Federally financed research expenditures, we are about 60 million now and want to work over the next few years to about 83 million. Looking at the productivity of our faculty not only with research grants but also Journal articles and we have made great progress there with the number of Journal articles that are being produced by our faculty and the targets that we have there. Also, an indication of the value of our research is the citations by other researchers. We’ve made great strides there, we can do more, and we have that 5-year target. So, those are some of the things you’ll see as you look at the KPIs for research.
Let’s look at service. The word impact that I mentioned earlier is very much in the title here, focusing on that land-grant mission. A lot of that land-grant mission is about the outreach, being in every county and making sure that we are helping the citizens of Alabama throughout the state, region, and country. In service some of the major KPIs are around the students that we have involved in these engaged courses, the sponsored projects that we have around outreach activities. But a big one and a number that gets reported widely is what is our economic impact to the state of Alabama? Over the last 3 times we’ve looked at it from 5.1 billion to 5.6 billion and we are looking to continue that about 6 billion over the next few years. [11:13]
Let me go back here to our faculty and staff, goal 4. There’s a couple of things about our faculty and staff, of course we certainly exist in who we are because of our great faculty and staff, so, some of the goals around our faculty and staff deal with our pay, our environment, so when you look at the KPIs here you will see a couple of things. One is our faculty salaries as a percent of our SREB, the Southern Regional Education Board’s schools. It’s a group of 24 schools that we compare ourselves to. Most of the SEC schools are in that group. It’s a really good benchmark for us. Since 2014, when we look at our faculty salaries we’re about 90% or so of the SREB average. We are now at 95% and our goal is to get to 100%. Something very similar to that is we measure satisfaction on the faculty side using our COACHE survey. That’s an area where I think we’ve made really great progress in looking at key elements of the satisfaction of our faculty in the areas of teaching and service and research and environment. We don’t have that same thing for our staff. My understanding is that HR will start that process then for our staff early into 2020.
Now let’s turn to the last two. I mentioned when I started that those are very typical for what you see for most major universities. The last two are unique and one is around strategic enrollment. There was a lot of discussion as we were looking at the strategic plan, talking to a lot of people on campus, off campus about the size of Auburn University and the future of Auburn University. When you take into consideration what we know is happening in higher education, what we know is happening in population and the number of high school graduates that we are going to have, the decision was made to manage our enrollment to our current size.
We are about 25,000 students now and our projection for the next 5 years is to maintain that level of enrollment. So, we are going to hold our size to about where we are right now because we are right about 25,000 undergraduate students. There is some flexibility for transfer-students to transfer into programs that have the capacity, maybe a couple thousand students over time to those programs, so we could creep up over that number, but it would have to be very intentional to specific programs. We want to manage our enrollment for first-time freshmen to about 5,000, again we are right at that number now, so we are going to manage to that number going forward.
Then the other thing we want to do, owing that land-grant mission is to ensure that at least 60% of our undergraduate students are from the state of Alabama. We are there now, and we want to make sure that we maintain that and don’t slip down below that as we go forward.
The other is on the graduate students, we are around 6,000 graduate students now and we will look at what that growth looks like going forward. Certainly, as we grow our research, that could grow our graduate program, but we will have to be very thoughtful about what that looks like as we move forward. Again, those KPIs are in there. That’s probably, if you look at the impacts on Auburn University in the foreseeable future; that decision to manage our enrollment to the current size is perhaps the biggest decision that’s in there. I think it’s the right decision and certainly an important decision and as we look at what’s going to happen with high school graduates over the next several years I think managing to our current size puts us in a good position going forward.
The last one that I will mention is operational excellence. [15:28] That’s really just the recognition that as we are managing our growth to our current size that we have to be good stewards of the resources that we have because we won’t have those additional funds coming in from the growth of students. So, how do we make sure we are efficient and effective with what we do. Really taking a hard look across campus at how we transform things through technology? How do we make processes lean and efficient? How do we make it easier for our faculty and staff and not let processes get in the way of those things? How do we become good partners with industry? A lot of things are around that operational efficiency side.
So, some of the KPIs that you’ll see there are around administrative labor spending as a percent of total operating cost. Right now, we are a little under 10%. We don’t have good benchmarks with other universities so we’re not exactly sure where we ought to be, but we know where we’re at and where we’ve been over the last few years and we don’t want to get any bigger than that 10%. That’s one we will look at going forward as to whether we maintain that or need to alter it. [16:49]
Also, expenditures for students, we’ve been trending fairly stable with that over the last few years and we want to make sure don’t slip down below where we’ve been, maintaining that. The other deals with the resources from the development side. We just came out of a great campaign, 1.2 billion dollars, and we want to make sure we maintain that momentum with our annual gifts and commitments and also continue to work to grow our endowment with those KPIs.
Well, I think I’ve taken enough time today. I know if future meeting I will be around and happy to answer questions about any of these KPIs. We are all in this together, we all have to work toward these KPIs. Let’s make an impact, let’s remember our true land-grant mission. Thank you all very much, have a great day.
[17:48]
Nedret Billor, Chair: We thank Dr. Hardgrave and Dr. Gogue for their remarks. General Burgess is here with us as well in case you have some questions regarding the Strategic Plan. I think he may answer your questions. (pause) Alright hopefully next time when Bill is around then you can ask him questions.
Now let me go ahead and introduce the officers since not everyone is a senator you may not be aware of who we are. I am the chair, Nedret Billor, as I mentioned before. The chair-elect is Don Mulvaney, he is from the College of Ag and I am from COSAM. The Senate secretary is Adrienne Wilson from College of Liberal Arts. The immediate past chair is Michael Baginski, he is from the College of Engineering. Greg Schmidt is the secretary-elect from Libraries. Of course, Laura Kloberg is our administrative assistant and we are grateful to her for holding these meetings and activities of the University Senate together. And finally, our parliamentarian is James Witte and he assists us on procedural issues.
I have a few remarks and announcements today. [19:21] My first remark, actually, I made these remarks before the Senate meeting, but because it’s a General Faculty meeting I just thought it would be a good idea to summarize some of the remarks that I made earlier.
We, the University Senate Leadership have been working on strengthening shared governance developing an effective working relationship with the Board of Trustees and the Auburn University community. Therefore, we sent a memo to Wayne Smith, president pro tempore of the Board of Trustees. In this memo we made two requests. These were the University Senate should be directly involved in all stages of the selection process of our next president, and the second request was again the University Senate should be directly involved in his or her annual evaluation. We really appreciate that president pro tempore Wayne Smith responded positively to the Senate Leadership request.
Further, we are also working with the Board of Trustees to develop a closer and more effective relationship, therefore I will meet with president pro tempore Wayne Smith in November to do that. Your input is very important to us, please share your views with the Senate Leadership.
My second remark is about the nomination committee. One of the requirements for the election of officers described in the Faculty Constitution is the creation of a nomination committee to be formed early in fall semester. The charge of this committee is to recruit 2 candidates for the two offices for election in the spring semester. These offices are the University Senate Chair-elect and University Senate Secretary-elect. This committee has been formed and will begin the process of finding individuals willing to run for these two offices. The members of this nomination committee: Mike Fogle, chair, from COSAM; Chad Foradori, Vet Med; Lisa Kensler, College of Education; Ken Macklin, College of Ag; Beverly Marshall, College of Business; and Rich Sesek, College of Engineering. The candidates will be officially named during the February 18, 2020 senate meeting and the election will be held during the next month. The results of these elections will be announced during the spring General Faculty meeting. And this meeting will be held on March 31, 2020.
If anyone is interested in serving as chair or secretary of the senate please contact the chair of the Nominating Committee, Dr. Michael Fogle, he’s here, from Physics Department. Furthermore, I would like to encourage everyone to participate in shared governance by volunteering for Senate and University Committees. We have a URL for volunteers <cws.auburn.edu/senate/volunteer/volunteerhome> you can actually get information about volunteering from that Web site.
My third remark is an announcement. The second Critical Conversation for the 2019-20 calendar year will feature Anthony, who goes by Tony Jack. Dr. Jack is a sociologist and assistant professor of Education at Harvard University. The title of his talk is “Students, Poverty, and Academy” and he will present on November 7 at 5 p.m. in 2550 Mell Classroom Building. There will also be a micro-learning session to engage further with Dr. Jack at 3 p.m. in RBD Library room 3129. Because of the limited available space, registration is required for the micro-learning session
My final remark is about survey. First of all, we would like to thank everyone of you who participated in the initial Senate Survey in September. Several areas of concern were identified, but because of low response rate we felt that a second survey was necessary. Therefore, we sent the second survey this time to all faculty last Friday. We hope to see more responses from all of you, please take 5 to 10 minutes to help the Senate develop a better sense of the issues that you feel are important. The survey will be closing on November 11, 2019. Thank you for support on this.
Are there any questions on my remarks? [24:48]
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: How many faculty (members) are there at Auburn University? Roughly speaking.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Two thousand I guess.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: Two thousand, where are they?
Nedret Billor, Chair: Not here.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: Right. So, what does that tell us? Well, I bring this up, we have to re-survey because they don’t respond. There’s low participation in voting. They don’t attend meetings and so forth, right? So, I wonder if because of that it can actually be said that either the Senate or leadership actually represents the faculty or not? I bring this up in relation to the letter that you wrote to the Board, where you say that Senate and its leadership and so forth should be involved in the search for the president. Well, they were involved in the last search for the president, and I am of the opinion that they did not represent us very well in the last one. Just as I am of the opinion that the Board didn’t do a good job in the last one. And in order to do better in the future we have to hold people and institutions accountable. I have not seen that the Senate Leadership over the past number of years has held the leadership and the Board of Trustees accountable. And because they are not doing so again I do not believe they will properly represent us in the future. Just my opinion.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Thank you very much for your comments. We will do our best to change your views.
Any other questions? Alright, thank you.
Now, we will move on to the remaining items on the agenda. As you all know the Parking working group was formed in August and chaired by Bobby Woodard. Also, he is Senior VP Student Affairs. I would like to give you a little bit of information on the committee; this committee is chaired by Bobby and also we have the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and two reps from the university executive (Senate) committee, and two reps from A&P, and 2 reps from the Staff Council, SGA President, 5 students from undergraduate and graduate, and Don Andrae from Parking Services, and Ben Burmester from Facilities Planning.
Bobby will give us updates on future parking. [27:30]
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: Thank you all for having me today. You have probably seen this presentation before if you came the September University Senate meeting. This is actually General Burgess’s presentation, there was no need to update it. I am going to go through it very quickly because it has been done before, then I am going to tell you about our working group and our deadlines and so forth.
This is currently what we in ’18 and ’19. As you can see in ’18 the A zones we actually issued less A zones but offered more parking in ’19. In the B zones you can see that we actually did provide more B zones, but we also increased the number of B zones we offered to campus.
The parking task force. We were called together and have to give a recommendation to the university administration about what we think should go forward in parking for our institution. You can see our number one goal was to eliminate a hunting license that we have on campus. I hope we can get number 2 which is to reduce the stress of parking on campus, that has when you come and where you want to park on that one. [28:51]
Elimination of A, B, C we have that zone parking now. We talked about that there currently and permits would be lot specific. If you remember what we discussed or proposed was to move to a zone; blue zone, orange zone, and so forth and making it zone specific or lot specific meaning if you had a lot for Lowder, which is on the north-west side of campus, that might be NW08. You get a permit for NW08 and that is the only place you can park on campus. With the caveat of saying that there will be pay by the hour slots in more locations that you could do that also to come in there. That was one of the options proposed earlier. We also require the parking would be by HR designation. So, if you are faculty or staff and students, how we designate someone would be through our HR system of how you are in Banner. [29:50] You can see some of the other parts of that, we do oversell some of our parking lots because of the time difference. Students aren’t going to be here the whole time, some of the faculty aren’t going to be here the whole time, and same thing with staff. There are certain lots that we can oversell because you are only going to be here from 2–5 and we might can oversell it because somebody is going to be here at 7:45 or 8:00 teaching a class and be done by noon depending on their schedule. That gets to be a little more tricky. This was one of the early proposals that came our last year. If you can see by this, this is the zonal parking that I talked about. The color is a little distorted up there, but there is a blue, orange, yellow, and green that we would go to reduce the stress of finding that hunting license. As Nedret said, you know who is on the committee, you have 2 of your own in here, Michael Baginki and Don Mulvaney, dean Aistrup is on there, their job much like you were just pointing out is to go and get information from their constituents which would be the faculty and the deans and bring it back to that committee. Same thing with the students, undergrad students, graduate students and also with students that are coming part time, they are on the committee, as well as A&P and Staff are on the committee. We meet bi-weekly on Thursday. We are meeting this Thursday to decide how to go forward. We have studied about 35 different institutions similar in size and the locations that we have in the areas we’re in to see what they do. There are some best practices out there and also looking at the transportation study that was done and sent to the committee to have a look. We will have our recommendation to senior administration by the first of December.
At this time, I’d be glad to take any suggestions, questions, or comments. I would say I understand in this if there is a long suggestion I can stay afterward, or you can e-mail me. We can set up a time talk about any questions. I’ll take that now.
Mike Fogle, senator, physics also chair of the Faculty Research Committee: From the Provost’s comments about research growth, a lot of that is going to be interdisciplinary in our department. We have cases where research faculty need to go out to the Research Park, they need to go across campus; having one place to park is difficult in that scenario. How do we overcome that? [32:15]
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: I like that overcome, I do appreciate that because there is not going to be a fix. It’s hard to fix something that has so many facets to it. I will say some of our similar institutions use a transit system, where you would come and park, let’s say the Lowder lot and you need to get to Research Park, you take transit. We have to change or transit system to run quicker on more direct routes on what those are (the most traveled routes). They can be set by semester on that. The other one is the pay-by-hour spot, so if you come to a guaranteed spot in the Lowder lot and want to go to Research Park for a 1:00 meeting you can go there where there is a pay-by spot. Now you may say, “well I have to pay to park,” but you pay to park either way. That’s 2 options that we have. A 3rd option is there a place to have a departmental pass. So, if you are personal you park in Lowder, I am making this up, then you get a departmental pass purchased by the department, there would be a limited number of those, there will be a check out for checks and balances, you take that pass (a DP pass, departmental) hang it on your mirror and go where you need to go and come back and turn the pass back in. [33:31]
That’s an option that could work. There are a limited number of those. They will be at a higher cost that the department would pay or the College, and then again, a limited number. I can’t say that enough if we go to that method, but that’s how we can get you back and forth.
Mike Fogle, senator, physics also chair of the Faculty Research Committee: Well I can go ahead and tell you one question you’re going to get with a pay for parking is charge it to my grant. If it is required for me to go back and forth, can I charge it to my grant?
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: I and I don’t know but I will take that back. That’s a good question, I don’t know the answer to that. If the provost was here, I was going to say I think that you could not.
Yes sir?
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: I concur with the issue. I think it is a very significant potential problem, but I think also that sounds like a good series of potential answers.
I am always interested in trying to determine how the university can fundamentally reduce its carbon footprint and increase accessibility in a general sense across the campus by encouraging bicycle use and alternate types of transport like that. I think there is an enormous advantage to doing that. The university has made major strides in that direction so far, but I think it could go a lot farther. Maybe it could work effectively with the town to try to improve access, improve the quality of access and the safety of access. Unfortunately, although many of our students, mostly students, decide to take advantage of bicycles on campus are doing so in a big way and that’s a great thing, but unfortunately, they share the same places that pedestrians walk, and they make for very dangerous and uncertain circumstances, particularly with our mobile phone connected students these days. So, I think it would be nice if we could work out a way to improve access for bicyclists, maybe find ways to keep traffic speed down, maybe find ways to compartmentalize the movement of bicycles in town and across campus. This would have an enormous number of impacts. One of my fellow faculty members pointed out that this would have significant impact with employee health. If everyone is bicycling into work that would certainly be a lot better than everyone bringing one vehicle into work with one driver. It would go a long way to reducing the massive amount of emissions that are beginning to really show up around town here. I’ve noticed once earlier this summer a distinct beer smell that I used to recognize in Baltimore, which is not beer, it is photochemical pollution. And I was shocked. I think it’s a combination of very high temperatures and the huge amount of heavy construction equipment across town, but our numbers are only going up and it’s going to get worse.
And there are a lot of other advantages to encouraging bicycle traffic. In many different ways it could work into employee health programs and that sort of thing to encourage.
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: I think some of the emissions of the cars back when it didn’t rain for 38 days or whatever it was to help defuse some of that. I will tell you a couple of things we are looking at. Again, understand these are options we are discussing, nothing is down in concrete just yet. We are working with the city; how can we work with the Lee Russell Transit System to do that? What about a park and ride? If we do a park and ride out by VCOM and get you to come in, and run the bus service every 15 minutes, but give you an incentive parking wise; so, if you do need a ride a car, there is an option for you there, instead of it being $100 per year pass it’s an $85 per year pass or something like that. Same thing with bicycles, we are looking at how we take bicycles and our ride-share program and move them further out? And encourage our students to do that. We also looked at, and everybody thinks this is just for students. And this was a little harder, so I will go ahead and put it out there is: if you live within a mile of campus, does not matter if you are a student, staff, or whatever, if you live within a mile of campus you cannot register a car on campus. But here’s the thing, a lot of our students don’t register their Auburn address, it’s their Atlanta address, or their Birmingham address. So, there are a lot of nuances, we have a lot of great ideas to look at. We also have to look at the logistics of how to make those happen. [38:34] We are trying to look at the ride-share program, jumping on park and ride, where we would do a park and ride and how we would run that back and forth and incentives for both of those.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: I realize this is not a heavily urbanized area, but most urban universities and this is becoming one, freshmen cannot bring a vehicle on campus. Unless they are commuters.
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: We thought about not necessarily going with freshmen cars on campus, but that has come up and hasn’t been deleted yet. If they do all freshmen on campus would have to park (out on) Hemlock and not interior to campus. They could still get a parking pass, but they would be out in a satellite lot.
Chris Kieslich, not a senator, Chemical Engineering: I have kind of a related question as far as connected to the emissions stuff is electrical vehicle charging. Is that something that is being considered at all or introduced into this plan?
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: We’ve got a couple, and Ben I don’t know if you know, I know we have a couple on campus and at the mall.
Chris Kieslich, not a senator, Chemical Engineering: I have been using the ones at the Stadium and the 4-hour limit makes it challenging at times to be able to get there and come back. I was previously at Georgia Tech they also had the option of having what they call these level one slower chargers where you could just buy that spot and be there all day. And it only needs a normal outlet. I didn’t know if that’s something you guys could consider or…
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: I know, Don Andrea, director of Parking who is not here today, he is looking at that and Ben of course is on the Committee and Ben helps us with all that. We’ll take that back and see. I know we have some, but I am not educated in the area to know how many and what voltage they take and so forth. So, we will look at that and see.
Chris Kieslich, not a senator, Chemical Engineering: The ones I have used so far, the faster, uses 220 volt and all that kind of stuff, but the issue of being 4-hours you have to be pretty strategic in you day to be able to move there and move to another spot and all of that.
Bobby Woodard, Senior VP Student Affairs and chair of the Parking Work Group: That’s a good comment. We’ll take that back. Any other comments or questions? If not, I will say again, we have to have our report to Samford Hall by the first of December, which means this week will be one of our wrap-up meetings as we have to put the proposal together. If you have any concerns, any comments, any great ideas, we love great ideas, we like ideas, but we really like great ideas, we have studied a couple of schools, you can send them to me. It’s bwoodard@auburn.edu and thank you for the time today.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Thank you. Next, Dan King, Associate Vice President for Facilities will give us updates on construction. As we all know there are several constructions going on around campus. Some have already been completed and had opening ceremonies, such as Broun Koppel Engineering Student Achievement Center, beautiful facility. I hope that all of our students at Auburn University will have such centers [41:59]
Dan King, Assoc. VP Facilities Mgmt.: Good afternoon, thank you for giving me the opportunity to come speak to you. I thought what I would really try to do today is not so much give you an update of the existing projects on campus or just what we’ve completed that I will touch on briefly. The far more interesting question that I thought I would take time to share with you is what’s under consideration. What might be coming up on campus? I think that is far more interesting and a better use of your time. So, I will focus on most of that today.
First a quick look back though. Auburn University has been around for 163 years. In the last 9 years we have grown the space on this campus by 28%. So, if 5% of the life of this university we have grown it by almost a third or a little over a quarter anyway. So, there has been significant, as you noticed, from hassles with projects underway and things like that. Significant construction significant investment in campus facilities in the last decade or so. Just this past summer we completed 210 million-dollars-worth of construction projects. Which is pretty unprecedented, there have been some other periods where we finished a lot, but this one with the Leach Science Center and Broun Koppel Engineering Student Achievement, the Grad Business Building, the Performing Arts Center, the new parking garage on South College, some work in the suites at the Stadium, a new Equestrian facility for the equestrian team, and a Poultry Science Infectious Disease Lab, which we had to build to create space for the Performing Arts Center. We had to relocate that laboratory. It’s been a pretty busy period over the last decade, if you’ve been here the campus has really changed and transformed.
It’s a significant investment. I’ve been here about 11 years and we’ve invested or built almost a billion dollars-worth of projects in just that time-frame.
I will talk to you today about various areas on campus. What under consideration in those various areas? What are some of the requirements and what are some of the challenges? I’ve got all these little bubbles lined out there. I will walk through them, there are 6 or 7 of those, and be fairly quick. I’ll give you an idea of what’s going on with all those. [44:46}
The first is student housing. As faculty you may say, hey why are you telling us about student housing, I don’t really care about student housing. Well, here’s the reason all of us have to care about student housing, it is hugely land intensive. Specifically,…my general theme I am going to go back to the bigger map and talk about it, then blow the map up and talk about details inside of that. For student housing the strategy of the campus was we want to grow 1,000 additional beds for the university under Provost Boosinger, that what his strategy. Since then we have really backed off of that and the current strategy is we really want to replace the Hill, so we are not going to grow overall housing capacity for students, but they want to replace the Hill because it is pretty dilapidated and not worth investing in the Hill too much further.
So, we looked at a bunch of site all over campus, some in parking lots, some in other areas. Probably what will happen is the replacement of the Hill is going to happen in 2 or 3 different phases. The first phase will be about 300–500 beds and still trying to figure which site to do that on. You can see some candidate sites there. Overall the Hill has about 1500 beds that would have to get replaced. It is a pretty significant undertaking to do that. The university may also consider leasing an apartment complex or two out in town rather than spending capital dollars to provide housing, spend operational dollars that you can accrue from room and board revenue and pay for it that way. So, student housing will be a driver on what land is available to do other things such as academic and research facilities. That’s why that is important.
I’d like to talk about the Hotel and Cambridge block. This is on the intersection of Thach and College. This is Samford Hall. This is Thach, South College, this is Gay Street. So, about 3 years ago we bought this parcel right here (Thach and Gay) probably one of the best pieces of real-estate in the city. Then we bought this parcel right over here and we ended up owning a whole north end of this block. This area is really an interesting area for future campus growth and development. We are going to run utilities to this area of campus, currently the South College boundary is where utilities stop, but we get lower rates if we extend the utilities over here. So, we are going to do that.
We built the parking garage this summer, this is the Hotel, the Rane Cullinary Science Center project. We are going to rebid over the winter and begin by next spring. There will be some utility work going on there starting after Christmas time. This is the Cambridge Residence Hall, probably the long-term or maybe near-term impact on this is to demolish it. So, if this goes away, the Rane Cullinary Science Center goes here with additional hotel rooms and food service. This is sort of a food hall thing right here. That lot is very important and what you could do on this is really pretty interesting. The city generally has a plan that they want downtown to extend to Gay Street. They are really kind of capped out on North College and want to extend retail more to the Gay Street side. Up in this area over time there should be additional growth there that may make this a super prominent corner on into the future.
They may demolish this, this is the Alumni building Development Center and feel they’ve outgrown it. What are some options for them, that is a problem to be solved here. So, a lot going on in this sector. It has a lot of potential for the university. That is what the Rane Cullinary Science Center is going to look like, architect rendering.
Right next to that I’d like to talk about, for lack of a better title, East Campus and Ag Hill. This is the Library, this is the Library parking deck, this is Comer Hall, this is Funchess, that’s Upchurch, that’s Rouse, South College, Mell Street. This right here I would probably argue to you is the linchpin of everything we are going to do on campus in the next 10 years.
So many things can happen here that are really going to be critical. There is a requirement on campus, certainly a strong desire that we need to do a much better job of taking care of our visitors, taking care of our enrollment services and the families that come here, having a better bookstore, so somewhere in here could we build a visitor’s center-bookstore that is accessible from parking and proximate to the core of campus for tours. So, a lot of potential for something there. Can it go here on the old Mell Hall site? If we replace the Library parking deck could it be a wrapper around that, the first floor there?
Funchess Hall is a key building with what we do in the future. It’s pretty wore out, really needs to go away. If you take the two major tenants of Funchess Hall which is COSAM and build a replacement building for that it would fall in the Interdisciplinary Science Center. And AG has a big footprint in Funchess and that replacement might be an Ag Research Science building. So where would these two go? Would you put them in the parking lots here? Does Upchurch stay or go? What happens with Spidle Hall, Human Sciences has kind of outgrown their space and they particularly need studio space, so would they expand, replaced, or move somewhere else? Again, problem to be solved for the future. In the long run this parking deck is undersized. It is only 3 floors and probably ought to be 4 or 5, bigger capacity. Part of the reason we built this parking garage is that would be in place for whatever was going to happen around here in the future. Extra parking would help when the time came for something in this lot or the Library parking deck. [51:58] So again, a key part of campus. Solving this and getting the right answer is really important. We’ve got all kinds of combinations and permutations about what you can do there
Next is the Academic Classroom and Lab Complex, underway at the site of…this is Parker, that’s Allison Hall. Alllison is gone as you well know. This is going to be a large classroom facility, central dining hall right here. This is really the sister project of the Mell Classroom building and it’s twice as big in terms of classroom space. This and Mell were really intended originally to replace the classroom space in Haley, so one day we’d eventually have enough classroom space to be able to get rid of Haley if we are disciplined enough to not reuse it immediately. Pretty critical academic projects here, this could be about 60–70 million bucks, something like that.
The new dining contract is paying for this one. Again, Allison Hall is down, Parker needs to go down, but the key for that is we have to figure out where to relocate the Mathematic and Statistics Department from Parker Hall. Pretty challenging problem because they’re the biggest department on campus in terms of faculty. It’s a huge department, so getting that right and we are talking about some options with the Provost. Some good options some bad options, but this is really one of the top priorities to solve because it just…if this building gets built (the Academic Classroom and Lab Complex) and parker hangs around for a while after that it is going to be a huge eyesore. And people are going to wonder “why did you do that?” We are really motivated to get rid of Parker Hall. The statistics department is pretty motivated too. Eventually we want to tear that down.
This is the site for Classroom and Lab Complex and Central Dining facility as of yesterday. A lot of earth work going on. This is the storm drain that, used to…currently…it’s a replacement storm drain for the one that used to go under Parker Hall which used to flood where the big IT network room was, which is why we built the IT building 10 years ago to avoid that problem. Eventually we will get that out from under all that. And that is why it is such a big earthwork project at the moment. [54:41]
We haven’t awarded the contract for the building yet because we awarded the site work first to be able to make progress there. That’s what it should look like when it’s done, Academic Lab Complex and Dining facility with staircase landscaping. This is like you are flying in a helicopter over the Student Center showing what it would look like.
The Hill Residence Hall Complex is a big site, 1500 beds, 14 different buildings. I told you that the priority for housing is to replace the Hill Residence Hall Complex. The consensus seems to be, do not replace it on the current site, whatever we replace, move it somewhere else. Here’s the reason why we think that is a smart strategy. If in 5 or 10 years all these Hill Residence Halls were replaced and torn down, what we think should happen and working to propose to the Campus Leadership is that you would then save this space for future academic growth. This area here, “The Hill,” this is W. Samford here is proximate to the core of campus students could come here and get to other classes and go to The Student Dining Hall, the ACLC, but in 2030, 2040, 2050 there are not that many opportunities anymore in the core of campus for us to put academic buildings. Unless we tear one down, and those opportunities are limited. So to have academic facility growth proximate to the core of campus, we think the Hill might be a very good solution for that. So, we are encouraging the thought that moving the replacement housing for the Hill somewhere other than the current Hill Residence housing area.
We will do about 500 beds out of 1500 in maybe 2 or 3 phases to get all of that done. The College of Education will come in here at some point. Currently there is some thought down here, if we can get rid of some of these residence halls there might be an opportunity to bring it up onto W. Samford which would make it a prominent building on a prominent street, which I think would be great. Another thought is, coming from the Provost side of things, is to build a facility called a faculty commons, not specifically owned by any given College, School, or department, but a building that the Provost would own, it would be pretty large and could put a lot of faculty in there, whether a whole department or a mix of faculty…the Provost has given a lot of thought to this idea at the moment. This may be in play with the Math and Statistics solution. The general idea as a long term is to save the Hill for future academic growth.
Right next to the Hill, this is S. Donahue and W. Samford. This is the current USDA site and, I think it was the 1930s or 1940s, we sold that USDA site to the Federal Government for I think one dollar. They have had it ever since. They used to say the value of that piece of property has really increased since that time. The good news is the Department of Agriculture, USDA, has gotten like a 45 million federally funded project to replace their facility. Potentially here or somewhere else. They want to stay on the Auburn campus though. So, with Dean Patterson with the College of AG there is a lot of discussion going on with USDA about where do they go? Do we leave them kind of on this side, but they really want to do some co-location and collaboration with university faculty and there’s a bunch of joint professorships, that’s not really the right word, but I can’t think of what it is real quick here. But anyway, they share faculty members that work there and do research, so they are really interested in continuing that collaboration, so, could this be sort of a joint USDA and College of AG set of facilities here? These are the Patterson Greenhouses here, so could you sort of optimize that site a little bit better? Then you have a lot of academic and research functions here next to another, what might be an academic area here, so that kind of flows pretty well. Anything we do on this corner here would be better than the tillage lab for USDA, so that’s a real potential thing. If you were to come down a little bit further, is that a potential site for a College of Ag mini campus? If you are going to get rid of Funchess Hall for the Agricultural Research Science Facility could you co-locate that with the USDA facility and have two relatively new facilities focused on research and scholarship at a hugely prominent site on campus here?
Anyway, some interesting developments here. We’ve been talking about this for 10 years about getting USDA out of here and it’s eventually going to happen in the next 3–4 years. That’s really good news.
Finally, Research Park. A pretty good amount of stuff going on there. Childhood Development Center was recently completed, taking care of kids of folks that work on campus. That is a great amenity for the university and faculty and staff who work here.
(not facing the microphone so much voice is dropped) This is the current Poultry Farm, we relocated the entire Poultry Farm to the North. The hope is we are pretty well Auburn and we all these facilities down here [1:01:35]
Currently a research building probably administrative Auburn road here
Alabama Medical Center is going to build an ambulatory maybe by a second project. All with the thought of having a
Research building one and research building two, large building sort of like Casic
Hopefully they would be game changers
That’s sort of the “hey, what’s going on in different areas of campus” I did not cover every area. I skipped athletics. I did not think you would be that interested in athletics and in the interest of time I cut it out. There is a service area out by Facilities, way out on W. Samford and did not think you were that interested in that either. A couple of projects here, driving along Lem Morrison, Wire Road and South Donahue there are projects underway. This is all artificial turf….farm and the construction that is going on there.
The Goodwin…..This is out on the far west end of campus… Department of Civil Engineering with… columns and all that kind of stuff….
Really, there are a lot of possibilities. Most of what I just told you is not firmly locked down, there is not a firm commitment to any of it so, we kind of have like 20 equations with 30 unknowns and trying to solve that. Some of you in this audience could actually solve that equation. I can assure you, I am an engineer, but my days of doing that stuff are long, long past. What we are trying to do is move the university from what used to be, if I were to characterize it, a bit of a helter-skelter way of capital projects and prioritization and move that to a more planned process, a 5-year capital plan. Which is done at many universities and many university systems, where you lay out for 5 years what you need to do. We are trying to work with the Provost, the Chief Financial Officer, VP of Student Affairs, Athletics Director to try to set some of those priorities. Really the key thing is in it is it is a resource constrained prioritized set of projects. We have never really had that before, particularly resource constrained. So, what that would entail is that the Chief Financial Officer figures out how much in gifts, university reserves, what can we afford to borrow, what percentage of tuition increase funding could be applied to bond debt service to pay for all this stuff?
Many of these projects are a mix of gifts and bonds or gifts and unit reserves, but to try to have a resource constrained plan that controls all of those. so we don’t over spend our bonding limit and we don’t take on so much bond-debt capacity and create so much bond-debt service that when we have tuition increases there’s no money for pay raises. The CFO is trying to balance all of that. Again, in the financial model, she, sort of dictates to us then what we can afford and what the constraints are in terms of total project funding.
That concludes what I have and I am happy to take questions. [1:08:00]
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: (not at microphone) Question about how much Funchess will cost to replace.
Dan King, Assoc. VP Facilities Mgmt.: Good It is the two replacement buildings, We think 50–70 million each so that the total to replace Funchess is probably in the 120 to 140 range. It is really a matter of priorities. He’s not here and my intent is not to disparage him, but President Leath was more about research and so those 2 big research building projects were a response to that. And there might have been a little more priority placed on let’s do break through research facilities rather than take care something we know has been a long standing problem, like Funchess.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: (not at microphone)
Dan King, Assoc. VP Facilities Mgmt.: There is a long answer to all this. Overall the CFO between 2018 and 2021, unless something really changes, and the enrollment numbers that the Provost talked about may change, is planning to borrow 500 million dollars. Then you can take all the gifts we think we might raise and unit reserves, there’s a bunch there. The issue is, given all of these competing priorities, and you’ve seen some of those, where does the leadership place the replacement of Funchess and those 2 buildings relative to that other stuff? And that really is not a Facility call.
So, They’re (Funchess) on the list, the need is well known, and the Deans, respectively Dean Giordano, Dean Patterson are arguing hard for those. Funchess just got bumped from priority, they are not at the bottom by a long shot, but they are not like next year either. Anything else? I appreciate you time.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Thank you. Finally we have Mitchell Brown, President of AAUP. I am so happy to have her here. She will give us some updates on the AAUP.
Mitchell Brown, President of AAUP: I will try and be brief. Again, my name is Mitchell Brown from Political Science. I am here as the current president of AAUP. I am here because I asked Nedret if we could come and present for informational purposes. I am sure most of you have heard of AAUP before. The national organization has gone through some major changes in the past year and I wanted to let the faculty know about it and also invite you all to attend our meetings and encourage you to possibly join the organization.
I will start with a caveat that AAUP is often regarded as a union organization. In some places it is. In the state of Alabama, it is not, we are not allowed to have unions here, so, we exist as an advocacy chapter not as a union organization. I understand through some back channels that the political leadership in the state consider us to be a union and think of the leadership of the organization in that way which is its own interesting political calculation.
I will keep my remarks as brief as possible. I thought I’d give a very brief overview and no doubt to the historians in the room a complete history on this campus talk about the changes from the Supreme Court decision that is referred to as the “Janus Decision” and what that means for us and give a brief overview of what we are doing and what our priorities are.
So, Auburn’s had an AU Chapter for over 50 years. We used to have a state chapter and there used to be other campuses within the state of AAUP. We are the last remaining stronghold of AAUP in the state of Alabama. That brings its own issues.
Major issues addressed by this Chapter specifically, have focused around what you would expect it to focus around on shared governance and academic freedom issues. When we look at some of the shared governance problems that the organization has focused on. There are 4 big ones that come to mind. Some of the work of the organization has been about responding to overreach by the Board of Trustees or perceived overreach by the faculty. Other issues around faculty involvement in both presidential searches as well as other administrative searches, then academic due process. I list academic due process as last on this list because if we look at the major faculty problems that we’ve dealt with as an organization in recent history, most of them have had to do with academic due process problems that often stem from department levels but sometimes from higher level administrators. These revolve around either issues with faculty around unclear rules of the department level, inconsistent application of those rules at the department level, or situations in which, I will be very generous, in which perhaps the administrator in charge was uninformed or not fully trained about personnel issues as opposed to malicious.
As a national organization AAUP will censure campuses for particularly egregious violations of shared governance and academic freedom. In the history of AAUP and Auburn the organization has had 4 major investigations from the national organization. Two of these have resulted in censure of Auburn University. One of them resulted in an addition to the censure of Auburn University that already existed, and the forth kind of went away quietly with no action. They’ve all been resolved, and I will say more positively that for the past 15–20 years as a faculty we’ve had largely positive relationship between faculty and administrators. In the history of Auburn, university faculty involved in the administration some faculty here have served as leaders in the national organization and really pushed the organization.
Some years ago, probably six or seven, the state legislature made a change which forbid automatic deductions from payroll for membership in organizations like AAUP. We since, lost a lot of our membership. It’s why most of the other chapters in the state folded at that point. Being a member requires that the people go to the Web site and sign up and give a credit card number and it’s a step too far, a bridge too far for a lot of people. So, we lost a lot of membership. The strange little wheel you see here on the screen represents the different colleges we come from. The green is the College of Liberal Arts. We are overwhelmingly represented by the College of Liberal Arts followed by distantly by COSAM. Within the College of Liberal Arts, most of our members come from English and History, this make sense because they are very large departments. Our membership today is slightly more male than female, but about equivalent. We are primarily a white organization on this campus which probably also reflects the racial and demographic breakdown of the faculty on campus. In terms of rank, our membership primarily comes and is equally split between associate and full professors. And our smallest category of members perplexingly is contingent faculty, lecturers, instructors and so on. They would be the people who probably benefit the most, but that’s who we are. [1:17:15]
As a national organization AAUP functions to represent faculty to shape higher education in the country by developing standards and procedures to maintain quality in education, shared governance, and academic freedom. Last summer the Supreme Court gave a ruling in a decision that’s referred to as the “Janus Decision” which held that non-union members who share in wages, benefits, and protections under collective bargaining contracts may not be compelled to pay union dues. This was important for the national AAUP organization because the organization is functioned with an essentially a sister organization for the union states and the union colleges and universities where collective bargaining is allowable and that’s where most of the revenue for the national organization came from as opposed from organizations like ours. As a consequence of the Janus Decision the national organization will lose a lot of revenue and made the decision this summer at their summer meeting to restructure.
The changes that were voted on in the restructuring of the summer meeting this year, you see here up on the board, were designed to make the organization less expensive, more efficient. They came up with a very provocative tag line for the organization and in the restructuring it is: “one faculty, one resistance.” So, we all carried around one faculty one resistance meetings in D.C. at the annual meeting this summer which was fun. I think that is par for the course in the collective bargaining chapters, but not so much for chapters like ours.
So, the organization has a new constitution, dissolved the collective bargaining chapter, dissolved what was referred to as the assembly of state conferences, created new regions by size in terms of how many faculty there are with respect to membership. Because most of the south has collective bargaining we’re in the largest region in the country in terms of states and universities. And new rules about voting and a move to a biennial meeting, all of this is effective with the dissolution of the collective bargaining chapter on January 1.
So, I won’t go into the details about the new structure and the voting rules, but in short chapters send delegates to the national meeting and the size of the chapter then depends on how much influence their vote has in the national organization. What this means for us is pretty minimal, the collective bargaining chapters have historically had more influence in the national organization because they brought in more money. To have a chapter you have to have at least 7 active members. We keep around in the low 40s at any given point in the last year or two, but it does impact our voice at the national meetings to an extent. the collective bargaining chapters have lost numbers, but they still have significantly more members than we do. So, we are making an appeal for a lot of reasons. We want to keep the last chapter in the state of Alabama alive, we need membership to do that.
The national organization also recommends that we do some of this by having issue campaigns. Two years ago we did a survey of our membership about what they thought we could do an issue campaign around. The 3 big contenders from the voices of the Auburn faculty we heard from were about compensation issues, which the university administration has been addressing for some faculty. Continuing issues and problems around shared governance, largely around due process issues and the state of contingent faculty at the university. We’ve not decided to do that yet, but we may in the future.
So, what do we do? Who are we? The national organization, if you choose to be a member, and please join us, provides a lot of information and support about academic freedom and due process. If you are interested in what their positions are we refer to what folks call the “Red Book” all the time. This is the cover of it that you see on the screen. It has the positions of the people in the national organization. As a chapter we have 4 primary functions; we have meetings at least one a semester, sometimes two where we bring in usually administrators to talk about issues of concern to faculty. We meet with the president and whomever the president chooses to bring with him to talk about issues of concern to the faculty at least once a semester. We have a group called Committee A, whose job is to work with faculty who have experienced problems around academic freedom, shared governance, due process to investigate, provide peer support for those faculty if they so want it, and to work with the national organization in particularly egregious cases if a situation is so bad that national censure might be on the table. So again, that hasn’t happened in quite a while.
We advocate for certain things. Right now, the issues we’ve primarily been working with the administration on have focused on faculty representation on administrative positions in the searches including changing the NDAs that faculty representatives are required to sign. Issues around emeritus status, the continual increase in student credit hours that are taught by non-tenure-track faculty and other issues like that. [1:23:05] so, those are primary concerns, right now.
With that, if you want information about our local chapter, the Website is: <https://auburn.edu/aaup>. Robin promises that the updates are coming today. He just gave me the thumbs up from the back of the room. If you look right now they are dated. And certainly, you can reach out to me. Thank you.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Thank you Mitchell. This will conclude our formal agenda for today
Is there any unfinished business? Hearing none,
Is there any new business? Hearing none, I now adjourn the meeting. [1:24:12]