Transcript Senate Meeting
January 13, 2015
Patricia Duffy chair: Good afternoon, I am Patricia Duffy, Chair of the University Senate.
This is our fifth meeting of the 2014–2015 academic year, and it’s our first meeting in the spring term. Welcome back everyone from the break. If you are a senator or a substitute for a senator, and have not signed in at the back of the room, please do so now. Also because we will have votes today, please get a clicker if you have not already picked one up.
If you would like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go to the microphone and wait to be recognized. Then state your name, whether you are a Senator or substituting for a senator and the unit you represent.
The rules of the Senate require that Senators or substitute Senators be allowed to speak first; after Senators have had a chance to speak, guests are welcome to speak as well. In addition we would ask that people limit their comments or questions to no more than 4 minutes at a time. People may speak again, but if anyone wishes to speak a second or a third time please be sure that others have had a chance to speak at least once first.
The agenda for the meeting was set by the Senate Steering Committee, it was sent around in advance and is now shown on the screen. So, if we would now please come to order, we will establish a quorum. There are 87 members of the Senate and a quorum requires 44 Senators. If you are present and a senator or substituting for a senator please press A on the clicker. A quorum has been established.
Our first item of business is approval of the minutes from the November 4, 2014, Senate meeting. These minutes have been posted to the Senate website. Are there any additions, changes, or deletions to these minutes? (no response) Do I hear a motion to approve the minutes? Second? We have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say "aye." Opposed like sign?
The minutes are approved the motion carries. Our next agenda item will be comments from President Gogue. [2:41]
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you, I hope everybody had a good break. We arrived back here last Monday and the first order of business, Dr. Large got together a group and we worked on the holiday schedule for 2015 and it will go out Friday of this week. It’s basically the same as last year in terms of days, times and so forth, but the new holiday schedule will be out.
Number two, I wanted to mention that, we have merged as I think you are aware, Human Resources and Employee Benefits and both units are now located out at East Glenn, the old Bruno’s building. So they are there. From what I have heard it has been a smooth transition. If you have individuals that have trouble for some reason since this is off campus the bus service does run in that direction but if there are issues please let me know and we are happy to accommodate. They are going to retain some space on campus to be able to address individual concerns as they occur.
The third thing I wanted to mention is we are nearing the completion of the Vice President for Alumni Affairs. We are down to 3 candidates for that particular position. We will have all 3 interviewed on campus and we are in the range of the 2nd interviews. Hopefully we will have a decision on that by the Board Meeting which is in early February.
I won’t go over today all the items on the Board of Trustees agenda for the February meeting because we do have a meeting just prior to that event, so we will be able to tell you specifically anything that’s on that agenda. Over the last month or so one of the things that has occupied a number of people in the university has to do with the concept of how do we house our freshmen? Auburn is one of the few universities, I think the only one in the Southeast, that does not have mandatory housing requirements for freshmen. We actually don’t have enough beds if we wanted to do that. We have somewhere around 3100-3200 beds that are actually available for new freshmen, the rest are handled by students that are already here. So there was an RFP that went out to look at private sector residence halls, if you will, to see if some sort of concept of affiliated housing. No decision has been made on any of that. Probably will not make one from what I understand for this year, but we are still looking at ways to how do we better accommodate freshmen students as we bring them to campus.
I appreciate all of you being back, thank you.
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue. Our next agenda item will be remarks from Provost Boosinger.
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Thank you. I have 3 things I’d like to talk with you about. First I’d like to thank all of you for your cooperation in completing the training for the IT security. We are right at 99% completion, so that leaves us with just a few. We discovered that there are some technical problems, people who are not employees here anymore, so that is all getting cleaned up. Thank you for doing that, it’s important to protect the integrity of our information systems across the university and we have already seen positive benefits from that training. I just have 2 slides, real quick.
The first one is following up on the comments I made at the last meeting about how we were going to do some leadership training for heads and chairs. That’s a product of the Strategic Planning process and this is an extension of implementing that and making that happen. We invited Dr. Kathy Trower a former coPI with COACH to come an facilitate that program. It was very thoughtful, got a lot of positive feedback from heads and chairs. The focus for that session was on developing leadership skills in the academic environment. We are going to ask a steering committee to help develop topics for future sessions probably shorter sessions, 2 hour sessions to help the heads and chairs build the skills they need to be even more successful than they currently are. So you can see how that’s mapped out. Probably only 2 sessions this spring; we will go from there, but you can see that the bottom.
Increasing faculty awards and recognition that’s one thing we’d like to work on together with heads and chairs. Especially important right now is as we make some transitions with HR that our heads and chairs are as well trained as we can help them be and anything we can do to improve the culture in academic units to be more productive, more helpful to the faculty, that will be on that agenda as well. So pleased with that. [7:59]
Lastly I just wanted to remind…a lot of communications went out about the cluster hire sessions that were held in the Library. I appreciate the Library hosting those events. I was not able to go to all of them. The ones I attended were very well attended by the way. There were I think, 50 presenters, probably over 200 or 300 faculty attended, at least one of those sessions, and as you might imagine the discussions centered around; what are the opportunities at Auburn for collaboration, for interdisciplinary proposals, and how can we be more strategic in the future when we hire faculty. This grew out of recommendation from a group of the deans that got together and said, which all of us already knew, that we hire approximately 50-60 faculty a year, as those vacancies come open, let’s be as thoughtful and strategic as we can as we fill those to enhance all of our mission, not just research, but also instruction. So I hope some of you had a chance to go to those cluster hires. I think they were very well done and very thoughtful. It was a great opportunity to see all the wonderful work being done by faculty at Auburn University.
Thank you very much, any questions?
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Boosinger. We have a fairly full agenda today, so I will try to keep my remarks brief. First I will introduce the officers. Dr. Gisela Buschle-Diller is our secretary; Dr. Laura Plexico, secretary-elect; Dr. Larry Teeter, chair-elect; Dr. Larry Crowley is the immediate past chair who serves as a representative to the Board of Trustees; Dr. Connor Bailey is our parliamentarian. I’d also like to introduce our very helpful administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg. Miss Kloberg assists with every one of these meetings and also between meetings she does a lot to make sure the business of Senate is conducted as smoothly as possible.
Nominations are still open for Chair-elect and Secretary-elect of the Senate. Faculty vote for the new officers electronically in advance of the spring faculty meeting. If anyone would like to nominate themselves or another faculty member please contact someone on the nominating committee. This year the nominating committee is Ann Beth Presley, Chair; Anwar Ahmed, Bob Cochran, Bruce Gladden, Bob Locy, and Hillary Wyss. Alternatively you could certainly e-mail me and I can forward it to a member of
the nominating committee.
Another upcoming event is nominations for the Rules Committee. Nominations for the Rules Committee are made from the Senate floor at the February meeting, with a vote to follow at the March Senate meeting. Nominees must be sitting senators as of the date of the election at the March Senate meeting. Senators may nominate themselves or another senator may nominate them on the floor of the Senate in February.
I’ve had questions from a few folks about the start date for the semester. I referred the question to Robin Jaffe, chair of the calendar committee. There are a lot of rules and guidelines concerning the calendar and Robin is familiar with all of them. I brought them with me (4 pages) if anyone would like to take a look at them after the Senate meeting I’d be happy to share it. I cannot say that I remember every single one off the top of my head, but there are a lot of them. One of the guidelines for the calendar is there should be 5 full weeks of classes following the spring break, another is that when possible the semester should begin on a Wednesday to allow students to see advisors on Monday and Tuesday of the week. Further, faculty members tend to want the spring break to line up with the Auburn City School break, so all these things together resulted in a start date this term that is a little bit later than what we have often seen in the past.
Are there any questions or comments on my remarks? Hearing none I’ll move on. The first action item we have on our agenda is coming from the Faculty Research Committee and Dr. Art Chappelka the chair of that committee will present the item which is a revision of the Conflict of Interest Policy. [12:40]
Dr. Art Chappelka, chair, Faculty Research Committee: Thanks, Patricia, I really appreciate it. A lot of this is basically a rehash of what I gave in November, but I wanted to go over it very quickly with you and then if there are any questions we can do that. I believe that we vote on this item. [13:05]
COI Policy Goals, and all of you have probably seen this so I will go over this very quickly.
The (Conflict of Interest Policy) Outline of this, and you’ve seen this; a statement, principles, effective date, applicability, policy management definitions, policy procedures and you have a link to that and believe you’ve hopefully seen that, sanctions, exclusions, and interpretation.
The statement, I will read this.
I really would like to acknowledge the FRC committee. They spent a long time on this, a lot of different members; Larry Crowley was instrumental in this; Chris Newland I can’t thank Chris enough, Chris really was the architect; Martha Taylor and Niki Johnson spent a lot of time on this; and John Mason. Questions? [17:20]
Patricia Duffy, chair: The proposal comes from a standing committee of the University Senate and does not need a second. I’d like to remind everybody, this will require a clicker vote, if you have not yet picked up a clicker and you are a senator or a substitute for a senator please pick up a clicker. Hearing no discussion we will call for the vote. Press A if you support the motion, and B if you oppose it. A=53, B=7, other=1. The motion carries. Thank you Dr. Chappelka.
The next item is from the Graduate Council. This one is also an action item and will require a vote. This proposal was brought forward in November so it is scheduled today for a vote.
Dr. George Flowers, Dean, Graduate School: What we have is a a resolution from the Graduate Council asking for a standing member of the Graduate Council from the Libraries. We have representatives from all the other colleges and schools, this request is in parallel with a similar request that was approved at the last Senate meeting for the undergraduate Curriculum Committee. So we are asking for a representative from the Libraries in a similar fashion to be able to review curricular and other items through the Graduate Council. That’s the proposal that is before you. There is some change in wording in the makeup of the Graduate Council. [Lost microphone pick up-basically he read the correction to the Handbook description adding a member from the AU Libraries] [19:52]
Patricia Duffy, chair: This proposal comes from a standing committee of the University Senate and does not need a second. Since there is no discussion we are ready to vote. Same as before please press A to support the motion, press B to oppose it. A=60, B=1, other=1. The motion carries. Thank you Dr. Flowers.
We now come to the next agenda items, which are pending action items. These are items that will come forward for a vote at the next Senate meeting. Dr. Xing Fang from Academic Standards was scheduled to present, but he could not be with us today. Dr. Constance Relihan, who is the Undergraduate Studies Associate Provost and a member of Academic Standards will present these 2 proposals today. Thank you Dr. Relihan.[20:53]
Dr. Constance Relihan, Undergraduate Studies Associate Provost and member of Academic Standards: Thank you for entertaining these proposals.
These proposals come out of the strategic planning process ultimately and the first priority goal which is to eliminate any undo barriers to student success. Obviously we are trying to hit student success from any number of directions, but one means of furthering that goal is to review academic policy, so it’s been in our review of academic policies that’s led to the proposals.
Currently we have a course repeat policy that permits students who have earned a D or F in a course to repeat that course as often as they would like, assuming it’s a non-repeatable course, that is to say not a special topics course. Currently a student who earns a C, B, or A can’t repeat that course unless they have special permission to do so, but if you get a D or an F in it you can repeat as many times as you like.
We asked OIRA to look at student records, as you can see there are approximately 6% of our students had taken a non-repeatable course 3 or more times. Listed there are some of the courses that typically fall in this category; they tend to be lower level courses that are pre-requisites to the major, they tend not to be 4000, 5000 level courses typically.
In addition looking as selected transcripts I found students who had taken the same course up to 7 times. I think we would be hard pressed to see that anyone’s academic interests are being served by permitting a student to do that without consultation. Generally speaking a student who has repeated a course and failed it more than twice is probably, and I say probably, not in the major he or she should be in. Probably. So those are the circumstances that have led to consideration of this proposal.
So what we’re proposing is adding the language that is in bold there. “ Students may repeat only courses in which they earned a D or F without written permission from the student’s academic dean. The student is encouraged to seek career counseling from the Auburn University Career Center prior to meeting with the academic dean.” In other words and academic dean could still determine that the student’s repeated failure of a course was within such circumstances that it made sense for the student to be given a third try at it. But what this revision to the policy would do is make sure that a conversation occurs so that the student can have the unpleasant and difficult conversation with someone about whether they really have what it takes at this point in their life to succeed in whatever the major is. [25:02]
Again the revision would limit the number of times a student could take a course in which they earned a D or F up to twice without special permission and it would insist upon that conversation; if a student had gotten a W in the course that would not be included in the calculation.
The 3rd point that’s there is worth emphasizing. There have been discussions with the academic associate deans, with advisors, with the registrar’s office and generally this policy proposal has received support, it’s also been considered by the Academic Standards Committee and by Senate Steering. So that’s the first proposal we are bringing forward, the other proposal is to revise the language in the preamble to the CAP Policy. Currently you may be aware that there are some majors on campus that have limited enrollment in them either because of specific accreditation standards through their professional organization or perhaps because of limits on actual physical capacity on campus perhaps the number of internships that are possible perhaps the number of studio spaces, so we have a policy that let’s a department come forward with a proposal to specifically limit the number of student permitted to enroll in a major.
In the preamble to that policy it says that if a student is in good standing he or she should be permitted to transfer into any program that does not have a CAP policy. [27:15] (It’s really hard to work from somebody else’s slides.)
A student is in good standing if they have a GPA of 2.0 or above. If a student has a GPA below 2.0 they are technically on academic warning. So when the language of the policy says a student needs to be in good standing technically what they are saying is a student needs to have a 2.0 in order to transfer. What that means is that there are students who are currently enrolled and may have realized that they don’t belong where they are, but they may not be able to transfer to where they would get better advice on the courses they should take or where they’d fit in better because perhaps their GPA is only at 1.9.
What the proposal before you asks is to revise the language in the preamble to say, remove the language “in good standing” to what you are seeing there as “currently enrolled.” In other words what we’re suggesting is that if a student is not suspended, if a student is eligible to take classes at Auburn he or she should be permitted to transfer into a major as long as that’s a major that does not have any specific cap on it.
So those are the 2 policies before us. Both were unanimously approved at Academic Standards in October and I ask you to consider them.
[28:49]
Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication & Journalism: Just to make sure I’ve got this right, particularly in Communication & Journalism we don’t have specific caps for majors, we do however have an application process.
Constance Relihan: You have an application process because your majors were approved for limitations under the cap policy. So you technically do have a cap even though you may not have a number associated with it.
Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication & Journalism: Okay, so this would not affect our program?
Constance Relihan: It would say that a student is eligible to transfer into majors that don’t have a cap if they are able to take classes. All of the majors in your department have a policy, so your majors would not be affected. The goal here is not to alter the current approved enrollment limitation policies for majors that have good and legitimate reasons to have them, it is to make sure that students who are currently enrolled are able to transfer into any other major that is an open enrollment major.
Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication & Journalism: Thank you for the clarification.
Larry Crowley, Immediate Past Chair: I appreciate the work that you all do on this and the intent. I have a couple of questions and some comments.
What about the gap policy? How does that work with a repeat course?
Constance Relihan: It doesn’t have any bearing on it. A student could gap the course twice. If they failed a course twice they could gap it twice. They should still have a conversation an advisor or their academic associate dean about whether it’s the best use of their time and talents to take that course a 3rd time.
Larry Crowley, Immediate Past Chair: So it would be independent basically. Another thing, when this was coming up I asked some students in one of my senior classes what type of effect that would have on the students reaching the challenging courses in the curriculum. Because that’s what I am concerned with, not the intended outcomes, but the unintended outcomes and what they said is in terms of the calculus class and those types of things. They said they would take them in a community college, that would be one way to get around the challenging course on campus. Another option that they chose was to take fewer hours when they are taking those classes. And one of the comments that really struck me in terms of promoting student success, one of the better students said the third reason or thing they would do is go to a college that was more interested in their success if they hit up against this policy.
One of the things I want to know is have you talked with any student groups in terms of what their thoughts are on this?
Constance Relihan: There’s a student on the Academic Standards Committee who was in support of this policy and who had discussed it, as I understand it, with members of the SGA.
Larry Crowley, Immediate Past Chair: With any other of the student government people that may outnumber the faculty in their committees?
Constance Relihan: I have not. We were working from the reports that the student rep on the committee brought to us.
Larry Crowley, Immediate Past Chair: Okay, thank you. [33:00]
Mike Stern, senator, Economics: Nothing about the cap policy but in the limiting repeats for grades of D or F, why the academic dean?
Constance Relihan: That’s who currently has to approve students taking other classes. Again if a student wants to take a class in which they have gotten an A, B, or C they have to gain permission from their academic dean. Usually the academic dean which is in a lot of other contexts the associate dean for academic affairs is the individual to whom this responsibility will fall. Because that is the person who tends to work most closely with the advisors and with the students and probably has the gravitas to have the hard conversation that frankly some of our advisors don’t really feel they are appropriately equipped to have with the student.
Mike Stern, senator, Economics: A broader comment I have about that is Auburn is different than my experience as an undergraduate, so all of my advising intervention and whatnot when I was undergraduate would occur at the departmental level and with the faculty. So I don’t recall my undergraduate days meeting with a professional counselor/advisor, never met with anyone with the label of dean in any part of their title, but I always discussed my curriculum of particular courses, performance in courses and whatnot directly with the relevant faculty or the unit that would oversee that curriculum. I don’t see much of that going on at Auburn it seems a lot of it in the advising has been divorced from the front line and turned over to a third party that may have little direct expertise or experience with many of the things that they are then being kind of forced to advise students to make decisions about. It just seems to me that the best advising about particular grades and particular courses are the people that teach courses or the people that directly schedule the courses or manage the curriculum in question. I guess it’s a little bit broader than just the D, F issue, which isn’t that big of an issue compared to some others.
Constance Relihan: It’s an interesting question and the different colleges on our campus handle advising differently and some do delegate more advising responsibilities to the faculty than others do. We also know from surveying students about advising that faculty advising (and this isn’t just at Auburn) is a very uneven proposition. Some faculty are exceptionally good advisors, some of us are quite happy to advise on policies we really don’t know anything about, which does not serve the students well. So it’s a big question about advising philosophy and as I say different colleges can handle the specific delegation of advising responsibilities differently and I would encourage you to have that conversation in your college if you want to restructure it at the college level.
Alan David, senator, Chemical Engineering: In a discussion with one of my colleagues, there was this question of whether there was a discussion about how to handle courses that are graded S/U, satisfactory/unsatisfactory and maybe courses where there is a minimum grade requirement, for example; getting a B.
Constance Relihan: S/U courses don’t fall into this policy at all. A student would have 2 tries to get the minimum required whether it’s a C or B. Again permission could be granted to let the student have a 3rd go at it. I think if a student’s not able to meet the minimum standard after 2 tries, I think probably a conversation is warranted about whether the student is in the right discipline.
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Relihan. These are pending action items so they will come forward at our next meeting for votes.
We are now moving to an information item. Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research, will give us an update on Federal Regulations affecting research. I understand she is just back from Washington, D.C. so she has all the latest news. [38:24]
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: I want to thank the senate leadership for inviting me to be here today and take this opportunity to give you a little bit of an update on some new regulations that are going to be impacting all of us.
The title is Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards. In February 2011 – President directed OMB to reduce some of the unnecessary regulatory and administrative burdens that was imposed on Federal funding and Federal Contracts and Grants.
In October 2011 OMB created the Council on Financial Assistance Reform (COFAR)
That Council was charged with improving the delivery, management, coordination and accountability on federal grants and cooperative agreements. In December 19, 2013 released the new Uniform Guidance
The guidance itself is supposed to be a Partnership of all of the entities that receive Federal Grants and Cooperative Agreements from the government. That would include state governments, Indian Tribes, universities, non-profits and also the audit community that comes around and looks at all of us to make sure we are following the guidance.
It was supposed to rethink the rules that govern our stewardship of Federal dollars, but when it came out there was some stuff in it that was not previously in other documents. And some things surprised universities when we saw it. They took 8 different circulars for all the different entities associated with their cost principles and their administrator requirements and combined them into one big document. In some cases it looks like they took it and combined them into one big document and in other places they actually made some changes to make it appear to be more uniform.
The document itself and the guidance and the regulations took effect on Dec. 26, 2014, so technically and new awards that we receive and any modifications that involve money to existing awards have to fall under the guidance. But it wasn’t until Dec. 18, 2014 that the agencies, at all different executive levels, released their implementation guidance for what the actual detailed daily grind rules were going to be for us to follow. That was 1139 pages, and to be honest I just didn’t spend my holiday break reading it. I printed it out, but it is still sitting on a stack on my desk. As was discovered at the Federal Designation Partnership Meeting in Washington in the last few days, very few universities have had a chance to read through that yet either.
We are working on implementation and we are a little bit late, as are all the universities in the country, and I think some of the non-profits don’t even realize that this is coming down the pike. It is going to be an interesting time for all of us.
At Auburn we established an implementation Committee back last January or February to get started looking at the guidance. We have been to lots of meetings and heard about it before it actually hit the street and were getting prepared for it. Some of the changes we have already been able to implement, because in the guidance there is language associated with things that we should do, or things that we must do. So we tried to focus on those that we must do. The shoulds are best practice, the must are things that an auditor is going to pick at you for in the future. It’s going to require us to write some new policies, evaluate policies we have, update them, but I think the biggest thing is we are probably going to have a little bit more educational opportunity for people that engage in sponsored project activities because the regulatory compliance framework is just getting more complicated, and I think we need to have a better communication between the faculty and investigators, the directors of centers and institutes, and then the central administrative people that are pushing buttons and pushing paper around.
Some of the pertinent changes I wanted to talk about; there is a lot of blah-blah in the guidance but these have a direct impact on us initially. The first one is emphasis on internal controls. This definition of internal controls came out of a Security and Exchange Commission accounting report on fraudulent financial reporting. So it’s a lot of accounting blah-blah-blah, but essentially what it means is that from the very top of the institution down to the daily grind “in the trenches” worker bees we have to have a culture and an environment for compliance. There’s a lot of rules and regulations, some of which we just cannot avoid, some we can stretch, some we just can’t ignore and so we have to show in our policies and procedures from the top of the institution down that we are trying to do a good job in our research programs and our sponsored programs activities and be good stewards of the Federal money. [43:55]
So Internal Controls has always been a factor in any accounting system, but in the new uniform guidance the term internal control is mentioned 103 times. There are some other things that concern us about internal controls that have come out of the guidance.
The first one is, in the past when we submitted invoices to the government or submitted expenditure reports to the government for them to pay us for our expenses we said something along the lines of: “I certify to the best of my knowledge that all these expenses are okay and we have not be already paid for them, so we need to be paided for them now.” That has changed, effective Dec. 26, 2014 to this statement.
I certify to the best of my knowledge and belief that the report is true, complete, and accurate, and the expenditures, disbursements and cash receipts are for the purposes and objectives set forth in the terms and conditions of the Federal award. I am aware that any false, fictitious, or fraudulent information, or the omission of any material fact, may subject me to criminal, civil or administrative penalties for fraud, false statements, false claims or otherwise. (U.S. Code Title 18, Section 1001 and Title 31, Sections 3729–3730 and 3801–3812).’’
I don’t know who on Auburn University’s campus wants to sign that certification, Dr. Large, for every invoice or financial report that we submit without having some comfort that we have policies and procedures in place that people are aware of, that people are following, that we are able to monitor, that people have been educated on; so I think it’s really going to be an interesting year for us and learning experience as we all come to grips with the fact that the government sort of relaxed some things but they are pretty serious about us minding our business and doing a good job for them.
The second concern I had is that generally Auburn’s policies and procedures are pretty much the same as every other university in the world. None of us are that creative that we go and ask all of our peers, what are you doing about this and what are you doing about that?; and we borrow and share each others policies all the time because it makes it easier. But Auburn is kind of light on sanction. Some of you may not feel that way, but I’ve been told by a lot of people that life at Auburn is pretty good. You are allowed to do whatever you kind of want, there’s occasionally scraps trying to get something purchased through the purchasing system but for the most part, nobody’s gone to jail, nobody’s been fired, everybody does their programs, and does a very good job by the way. Auburn has been audited on a regular basis and we have not been found to have any major significant problems, so we are in a good place. But I think education is going to be really important and the problem with that is we are all really busy. Everybody is gainfully employed and has a lot to do. So when we talk about Internal Controls there is some concerns that I have and I think education…(voice dropped out) [will be important.]
One of the other changes that they made was in procurement. This came from where they combine the state regulations into the university regulations. Purchases of supplies AND services under $3,000 do not require quotes. But anything over $3,000 up to $150,000 require quotes (from an “adequate number of qualified suppliers”) before you can procure it. Well nobody likes that. Some universities had purchase cards that had $10,000 limits on them before you even had to think about getting quotes from anybody. So Auburn has raised their threshold from $2,500 to $3,000. And we are going to be determining over the course of the next few months what we consider adequate documentation. Most of our investigators shop around anyway, but now we are going to be required to document and have those quotes and that documentation available for audit.
Purchasing has already made a couple of changes; the small threshold from $2,500 to $3,000 and the preferred vendor contracts like Gov Connection, Enterprise and National, and BWR. Some people on campus don’t like that but those contracts are going to prevent us from having to get quotes for certain purchases because those particular contracts have already been competitively bid. So this $3,000 rule kind of goes off to the wayside as long as we use those preferred vendor contracts. Purchasing is looking at our various spending policies and practices with different commodities and trying to come up with more of those kinds of things to lighten the load so that maybe we won’t have to do so much of this getting bids and quotes and backup documentation for $3,000 purchases. Which is quite frankly a very low threshold. [48:40]
This one on performance reporting is a little bit disturbing for me because historically we haven’t really pursued with our investigators on sponsored projects; how they are doing on their progress reports, their final reports, or any of their technical reporting. They are all getting the work done and occasionally we’ll get a letter from a sponsor that says a report is delinquent, and we will contact the investigator and they will give us the report or give us a copy, or it’s possible that it got mailed to the wrong person at the sponsor, but now we are going to have to monitor performance through having copies of progress reports and technical reports and making sure that the performance that was addressed in the proposal in the award is actually being achieved. I don’t know about you all but I have no idea how to do that.
One of the things is that the government is going to have to put clear performance goals in some of these sponsored awards instead of saying here’s $50,000 for an NFS grant go and do good things; they are going to have to be a little bit more specific so we know when we’ve met those goals. Then there is a push in the government for us to try to relate some of our financial data to the performance goals. And I not sure exactly how we are going to do that either because I don’t think there is much of a correlation.
So we are going to provide some costing information in some cases with the progress reports and see what happens. The government agencies at the FTP meeting on Monday don’t exactly know how they are going to do this either. So that gives me a little bit of comfort that it might just be more of a check box on somebody’s list, but it is something for us to keep an eye out on as you start dealing with new grants and contracts that might come down the pike over the next couple of months. [50:35]
Subrecipient Monitoring: they have increased the requirements on us again for subrecipient monitoring. It’s not as bad as it could have been but they did add the performance monitoring piece into the subrecipient part as well. Like I said, historically the faculty are watching what their subs are doing and what their collaborators are doing. They are staying on top of that because they have to have that information for their own progress reports. But we are going to have to work out some sort of a way for us to be able to show that we’ve got evidence that those recipients are doing what they are supposed to be doing.
The next one is on compensation and this has to do with our effort certification program. they have placed more emphasis on internal control and what that means is that instead of the government telling us what to do in all cases, we are supposed to govern ourselves. So they have placed a little more emphasis on monitoring personnel expenditures rather than very prescriptive documentation on a monthly or quarterly basis as to exactly who got paid on what and how they did it. We have a really good effort reporting system. Some of you may not really like it, but it is electronic and based on what other universities are telling me about the way they still do it on paper, we are really ahead of the curve in effort certification. There are some things about our system that are clunky and so we are going to take advantage of the slight decrease in the requirement in the new guidance and take some of the clutter and clunkyness out of our system.
The next one that is important, at least it is important to me, is indirect costs. We have a lot of Federal Agencies that…they game the system with regards to paying us indirect costs or not paying us indirect costs, which is bizarre because they are the ones that created the concept of indirect costs, so the new uniform guidance says they have to pay us whatever our Federal negotiated rate is. There are a couple of exceptions for example, USDA has a statutory limitation on what they will pay in certain grants, but for the most part all the other agencies are going to have to pay the negotiated indirect cost rate.
Another benefit to us at least with regard to indirect costs is the 10% de minimus rate for organizations that do not have rate agreement with the government. When we have a subcontractor now if they don’t have a negotiated rate with the government we either have to sit down with them and go through their books and negotiated a rate for them that makes sense and get approval from the Feds or we don’t pay them anything at all. This allows us to at least give our subcontractors, some of whom are small businesses and can’t really afford to do a rate proposal, we can at least give them 10% if they don’t have a rate agreement. [53:35] So that’s a good thing at least in our eyes in helping to support our subreciepients.
Believe it or not there were some changes that were helpful. Funding announcements if you ever had to go through large RFPs or solicitations you know that they can be confusing, and you can do one for USDA today and another one for USDA next week and they are completely different and you don’t know why. So they are going to standardize them and have a minimum 60 day window before you have to submit your proposal. Some of them that we received recently have limited submissions and they have a turn around of about 3 weeks. It’s just really not fair, it’s almost seems orchestrated for a particular respondent.
The are also going to standardize the forms across all programs because once you figure out all that data then needs to go into those forms it would be nice to be able to clone that from sponsor to sponsor.
They are going to have unique identifiers and award notices so that we can figure out from one agency to the next what we are dealing with. I don’t know if any of you have NIH funding, but the numbers are this long (indicating very wide), and every year they add on a 01 or a 02, depending on the program it can be an R01, and R15, and R21, whatever. It’s a mess so they are going to come up with some unique identifiers that are used across all agencies to help us. [55:01]
They are working on some standardized terms and conditions for research. We’ve had some for a while but not all the agencies adopted them and that was one of the big topics at FTP yesterday, is trying to come up with the final version of some standard terms and conditions so you know what to expect from on Federal award to the next, and not have an odd requirement over here and risk missing it.
Cost Sharing: they do not want to see voluntary cost sharing. Auburn is really bad about over committing on cost share. And if they do require it in their program they have to include it in the RFP. There is a requirement in the guidance that they cannot use cost share as a review criteria. I think most of the panels that I’ve sat in on, they look at the scope of work and the technical merit long before they ever look at the budget. So I am hoping that this is just an extension of what they are already doing in terms of proposal review.
This last one is good for a lot of our faculty at Auburn because they have extended travel where they go on an extended cruise or go to Antarctica or they to work in Washington for some period of time. It used to be that if they were away from their home base for 3 months you had to put the project on hold. The government has finally recognized that it’s a very electronic world and you could be about any where, except Antarctica, and you can communicate with your lab and you can still work with your grad students and you can still be very active on your projects. So that’s one that’s been very helpful. I think that is going to help a lot of our researchers that travel a lot.
One thing that I want to mention real quick is about allowability of costs. This is a definition that has always been around since 1976. It hasn’t changed and they didn’t change it in the new uniform guidance. I was kind of hoping they would. For a cost to be allowable on a Federal project it has to be treated consistently as either a direct or indirect cost; has to comply with all of the blah, blah, blah in the guidance; and it has to be documented as being in compliance with our policies and procedures as well as the guidance. I think it’s important to note those few things when we get to the next slide.
They’ve relaxed a little bit on the administrative and clerical salary prohibition that they put in place in the mid-90s. If you can show that the services are intregral to your project then they will allow you to put it in your budget and get our approval from the agency to charge secretarial admin/clerical to support the project. That will help a lot of our faculty who’ve been trying to justify and write massive amounts of justification. Also on computing devices like tablets and laptops, they will allow those. In the past they have been considered to be a general purpose supply, because they are below the equipment threshold and they have multiple purposes you can use them for, so unless they were tied to a piece of equipment or could be easily identified as being only used for this thing we couldn’t charge any of it to the project. Now what they are saying is you can prorate it if you buy a laptop for a certain dollar amount and 50% of it is going to be used on this project you can charge 50% to the project.
Publication costs; it never made sense to me that they wouldn’t let you charge publication cost after the end date because that’s usually when you incur the cost. Now they will let you do that in that first 90 days before closeout. NFS has always allowed that, but nobody else would. So now everybody is going to let you do that. And then Visa costs if you have to go overseas to countries with visa costs.
There’s a lot that we still don’t know, the government still doesn’t really know, but it is in effect now and we will be implementing new things over the next few months. It’s going to take a lot a patience. There will probably be some confusion at the beginning. There is going to be lots of conversation with the Office of Management Budget and the COFAR, the Council on Governmental Relations of which Auburn is a member is in constant contact on a daily basis with representatives on the COFAR trying to get them to make a commitment one way or the other to interpretation and we really…our implementation committee really wants to have some input from faculty on some of these changes that are coming down the pike. So as we encounter an issue that we need to do something about we will be contacting the Senate leadership and looking for volunteers for people to help us walk through how we can implement something that is not going to be a burden to something that was supposed to be guidance to reduce the burden.
Any Questions?
Mike Fogle, senator, Physics: Does this apply to current grants? For instance, the computer one is the one that sparked my interest because we purchase those out of ICRE now because we haven’t put them in our grants, but if we purchase computers as a part of our, for me for experimental purposes for data acquisition, does that apply to current grants now?
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: This is what we heard yesterday from NSF and NIH representing the committee of Federal people. Anything that is a new award after Dec. 26, 2014 or any current award that gets modified with new funding after Dec. 26, 2014.
Mike Fogle, senator, Physics: Does modification include, if it’s a multi-year grant and your next year is considered a modification…
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: That’s when it will take effect.
Mike Fogle, senator, Physics: Okay.
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: So that means for a short period of time we’re going to be trying to figure out if the old rule applies or the new rule applies. We’re pretty comfortable that we can start to slowly implement this. One thing that they did allow is the audit section of this doesn’t take effect for another year. They are giving us a chance to kind of goof up some this first year and then they will audit us next year.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: This is for Federal grants, is this correct? Will Auburn choose to apply these same standards to other grants?
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: We have a direct cost policy that addresses what you do when it is non-Federal. Procurement is looking at that right now, how to make sure that we. We actually have a policy that delineates between them. A lot of discussion and how much risk as an institution we want to take because of this idea of internal control; and that thing that Dr. Large has to sign.
Don Large: made some comment but not at the microphone.
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: But it’s a financial thing I think it should be delegated. There will be discussion on that very thing.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: Tell me if I’m wrong but on that bullet, it’s the word omission, that is the real hang-up, right? Because we don’t know what’s being omitted. Fraudulent we get, it’s stuff that’s omitted that could be…
Martha Taylor, the assistant Vice President for Research: That’s a big…How do you know what you don’t know? Until somebody points it out to you and you say Oh my gosh I didn’t know.
Feel free to call if you have any questions. I’ll find an answer even if I don’t know what it might be. Thank you very much.
Patricia Duffy, chair: Those of you that are in departments with faculty who do get Federal Grants we would appreciate it if you would spread the news that there was a presentation on these changes and that the minutes will soon be available. The presentation is currently available, and the minutes and the transcript will soon be available on the Senate site so it will be helpful, I think if those folks would read through the transcript to see what changes are coming.
Now I am going to ask is there any new business? Hearing none.
Is there any unfinished business? I don’t want to rush in case somebody would like to get to the microphone.
Hearing none I will now call this meeting into adjournment. [1:03:53]]