Transcript Senate Meeting
March 3, 2015

Patricia Duffy chair: Good afternoon, I am Patricia Duffy, Chair of the University Senate.

If you would like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go to one of the microphones at the side of the room and wait to be recognized.  Then please state your name and the unit you represent whether you are a Senator or substituting for a senator.

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 I am going to ask that people limit their comments or questions to no more than 4 minutes of time, but if anyone wishes to speak a second or third time please be sure 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 February 3, 2015, 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 motion carries. The minutes are approved.

Our next agenda item will be comments from President Gogue.

Dr. Gogue, President: This is the first day of the legislative session. I think I was telling you there are 30 legislative days, they have to complete the 30 days within 105 days, so they are on vacation about two-thirds of the time. They are in legislative session about one-third of the time. For new members of the Senate, Alabama is one of the few states that has 2 budget pools, completely separate. The Constitution says you have to retain them as separate, one is the General Fund and the other is the Educational Trust Fund. The ballpark number, the General Fund has about 1.5 Billion dollars in it. That is the fund that you read in the newspaper that the Governor is calling for a tax increase of about 700 million dollars that he wants to see, raise taxes to go into the General Fund. The other is the Educational Trust Fund, which is where we receive our money. The numbers are roughly 6 Billion dollars in the Educational Trust Fund, with roughly 70% going to K–12, and 30% or slightly less going to higher education. 26, 27, 28, somewhere in that ballpark number. If you look at their anticipated new revenue it’s somewhere in the Educational Trust Fund of about 55 Million dollars. [3:10] of that Higher Ed will get 20, 10, and 15 so that’s sort of the ballpark in terms of where they go into the session come out find other sources that’s what they are talking about at this point.

The top picks that we know are going to be one the agenda; charter schools, big topic in Alabama; prisons; gun control at churches; and job creation, some of them have been around for quite a while. On the educational side the number one issue will be making sure additional funds are provided into the retirement system to fund those that have retired in Alabama

The other issue really deals with veterans. There is a cost figure associated with the veterans bill that was passed last summer which all veterans receive in-state tuition, as a veteran, their spouses and their children, so there is efforts to try to calculate the cost of that. The institution, 2 million is sort of the number we looked at or somewhere in that ballpark. Those are some of the issues that the state is looking at.

Second thing I want to mention to you is the new classroom facility that will be in front of the Library facing Mell Street. Construction will begin this summer. So I mention this to you because when construction will begin, disruption will also begin. My guess is, I think they are going to close Mell Street all through that particular area for the normal length of construction at Auburn, which could be from 2 to 4 years. So I want you to be aware of that. We are excited as I reported last meeting, the Board also approved the removal of Allison and Parker as well as the creation of the two, the laboratory and the additional part of the Central Classroom facility. So that’s good news for us.

We have a new Vice President for Alumni Affairs with us. Her name is Gretchen Van Valkenburg. Did I get anywhere close? Stand up, please everybody say hello to Gretchen. Gretchen, what’s her name, has had about 20 years of experience in higher education. She has worked in both the development side – the fundraising side – as well as the alumni side. We are delighted to have you (here), she started her first day yesterday. Thank you for being with us.

Auburn was ranked 2 times in the last month since the Senate last met that I wanted to share with you; one was Business Journal national ranked Auburn as the best university in the state of Alabama. Secondly, we received the Alabama Green Ribbon School Award, which was the only university that received it for sustainability, both things, again, very indicative of the fact of the quality. The Business Journal right there is on selectivity and retention rates and prestige of the university.

The final thing I wanted to mention to you was since we last met, as part of our international program to bring the Consul Generals and masters to campus we have been fortunate, we’ve had the ambassador from Italy, we also had the Consul General from Italy, today I think we have the Consul General from Peru, we’ve had the Consul General from Germany and also from Isreal. So almost weekly we bring individuals to campus. They’ve had an opportunity to meet with our faculty that come from their countries, have had an opportunity to set up special programs around their interests, they also meet with their students. So I want to thank all of you for your participation in those programs. Be happy to respond to any questions you might have. Thank you.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.
Our next agenda item is remarks from Dr. Boosinger, our Provost. [7:10]

Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Thank you I appreciate the opportunity to talk for just a few minutes. I have 4 items I want to bring you up to date on. One is we talked more about the cluster hire initiative this is a program developed in the fall, there were multiple sessions trying to encourage multidisciplinary research and help us be more strategic. There have been 10 proposals, they will be reviewed this week by the Associate Dean for Research, the Faculty Research Committee and representatives from the Vice President for Research Office. The goal is to prioritize those and make a selection of one or more and have a decision made by the end of the semester, then we will decide how to proceed.

The other, I wanted to make you aware of a project we are working on with the educational advisory boards student success collaborative. People working on this called it a big data project. It’s a project where we will look at the history of ten years, using that algorithm, ten years of transcripts at Auburn University in order to better understand what some of the barriers might be to student success. So we are hopeful that this will help us make better decisions about the number of seats that need to be assigned to classes, how classes will be scheduled, and information from that will be incorporated possibly into a curriculum design that would be appropriate with committees input from all of you. So I think that will be exciting. It will also provide academic advisors and faculty that do advising with specific predicted information on how a student may be successful. The goal being to try to lead to their strengths, help them graduate on time, in a way that’s logical and thoughtful in accord with their interests.

The third item I just wanted to let you know about the successful completion of the site visit of the AALAC accreditation. That’ the American Association for Laboratory Animal Care, that was completed this week. It’s the gold standard for how an institution takes care of its laboratory animals and we passed that with flying colors. And thanks to all of you who have worked on that including Dr. Liu and Pat Ryder the University Veterinarian. [9:43]

Finally, we will have 3 candidates on campus for the Dean of the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. That will be occurring over the next 2 weeks, the 3rd candidate inches up on the 18th of March. Any questions for me? Thank you.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Boosinger.

On our agenda today we have 4 action items, 2 pending action items, and an information item, so this will be a fairly busy meeting and I will endeavor to keep my remarks brief. But first I will introduce the Senate Executive Committee. Dr. Gisela Buschle-Diller is secretary, Laura Plexico is the secretary-elect who’s term will start in July, Larry Teeter is the chair-elect also starting his term as chair in July, Dr. Larry Crowley is our immediate past chair and serves as a faculty representative to the Board of Trustees. Our usual parliamentarian, Dr. Connor Bailey could not be with us today, so Dr. Bill Sauser graciously agreed to be a substitute for today. Thank you Bill. I’d like to introduce our helpful administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg. Miss Kloberg helps us with every one of the Senate meetings and also does much more for us to ensure the business of the Senate is conducted as smoothly as possible. In a minute I will tell you some of the many things she and Gisela and I have been working on most of the day.

Voting for the new Senate Officers started this morning. For chair-elect we have as candidates…If you are here and a candidate please stand up so people can see what you look like, I know we posted your pictures. For chair-elect we have James Goldstein and David Cicci. Stand up and wave if you like. For secretary-elect we have Michael Baginski and Ping Hu. So these are the candidates, voting started today and results will be announced at the General Faculty Meeting next Tuesday.

I want to apologize for the problems many of you had when voting at the site earlier today. That is what Miss Kloberg and Gisela and I were working on much of the morning. I tested the site at 8 a.m. when voting was supposed to open and I could not vote. The problem should now be solved, there were a couple of steps at fixing the problem, however Gisela is still getting e-mails from a few people who are having trouble voting. Please let us know if any problems persist. We also learned this week that the e-mail address for the senate [univsen@auburn.edu] is not working, we believe that is also now corrected. Some people couldn’t vote then tried to send an e-mail and the e-mail bounced, so it was a good morning. Those e-mails should now be coming to Dr. Buschle-Diller.

I wanted to comment on one of our agenda items today, this is the Resolution in support on including language in the University Bulletin in compliance with Alabama ACT 2013-350. The Act concerns evaluation of credit earned in the military. And this act specifically requires that each university’s Board must adopt a policy about the credits, and it further says institutions can set policy in line with their own standards of admission. Because the Board of Trustees must vote on this policy, Steering deemed it appropriate for the Resolution to pass through the Senate first, because it has to go to the Board.

The Bulletin language to be adopted isn’t part of the Resolution itself, but it’s included so you can see what the language will be. The Resolution comes from the Steering Committee.

March is a very busy month for us. In addition to this regular Senate meeting we have a spring Faculty Meeting a week from today and Steering has also scheduled a special called meeting on Tuesday, March 31 for the presentation of the report by the Ad Hoc Strategic Budgeting Committee. Please mark these dates on you calendar.

We have a new SGA President, Walker Byrd, who is a junior majoring in Finance from Birmingham, AL. He had a conflict arise suddenly today and could not be here, so you will meet him at the April Senate meeting. His term started yesterday.

Are there any comments or questions for me? Hearing none we will move to our first action item to vote for new members of the Rules Committee which is presented by Dr. Buschle-Diller. [14:19]

Gisela Buschle-diller, Secretary: All right, this should go relatively fast. We have 3 openings on the Rules Committee and we have 3 candidates. Their bios have been posted for some time on the Senate Web site so I hope you had a chance to look at the bios. Since we have 3 slots and 3 candidates, the Steering Committee suggested that we vote on the whole slate at once if there are no objections. So I would like to propose that we vote on all 3 at one time, unless somebody has an objection. I don’t see anyone, so I would like to start the vote. If you would like to vote for all 3 press A, if not press B. A=50, B=1. Thank you, the candidates have been approved. [16:30]

Patriciaia Duffy, chair:  The Rules terms will start in August at the beginning of the fall semester. [16:49]

Next we have Larry Teeter, chair-elect and member of Steering will present the resolution concerning Alabama ACT 2013-350.

Larry Teeter, chair-elect and member of Steering: Our reading has to be on record because it’s required. Thank you Drew Clark for word-smithing with us.
Resolution in Support of Including Language in the University Bulletin
for Compliance with Alabama Act 2013-350
Whereas, Alabama Act 2013-350 directs each Board of an Alabama public educational institution to adopt a policy governing the award of educational credits to students who are military veterans for courses that were part of their military training or service; and

Whereas, the Act stipulates that any credit awarded for military training courses or service must meet the standards of the American Council on Education or their equivalent and be based upon the institution's admission standards and its role, scope, and mission; and

Whereas, Auburn University has established policies that include criteria for evaluating, awarding, and accepting credit in transfer, consistent with its mission and with the principles of its accrediting agency, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges; and

Whereas, the Auburn University Bulletin has long included language on credit for military science and physical education.

Therefore be it resolved, that the Auburn University Senate supports the addition to the University Bulletin of clarifying language consistent with Alabama Act 2013-350 and with Auburn University’s established standards and procedures.

[18:55]
This is the language that will actually appear in the University Bulletin.
University Bulletin Language for
Policy on Military Service Credits
Auburn University awards academic credit for courses that are part of an enrolled student’s military training or service, provided that the military training credits accepted are at the collegiate level and have resulted in learning outcomes comparable to those students would achieve through the Auburn University's own instruction. In determining the academic credit to be awarded, Auburn University uses as a guideline the standards and recommendations of the Guide to the Evaluation of Educational Experiences in the Armed Services published by the American Council on Education.

This does not need a second but we do need to take a vote. Do we have any comments or questions?
Press A if you are in support of the Resolution, press B if not in support. A=64, B=0. Thank you.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: Thank you, I believe this will go to the Board at the April meeting. I would like to thank Drew Clark too for taking the sow’s ear that I wrote and turning it into a very nice Resolution.

Our next item will be 3 items from Calendar and Schedules. We have to vote on a change to a previously approved calendar, 2015–2016 Calendar, we are going to vote on a new calendar, 2017–2018. If you are wondering where is the 2016–2017 Calendar that one was approved last year, so we don’t need to vote on that one. Robin Jaffe is the chair of the Calendar and Schedules. Committee, he will present these and he also has one other item, which is a pending action item with a policy recommendation concerning make-up days. [20:53]

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: Thanks Patricia. Everybody, this is my seventh time doing this, so let’s see how it goes. The Calendar Committee is proposing two changes, one proposal for the 2017–18 calendar and a change to the academic summer calendar 2015–16. We will talk about the summer calendar first.

This proposal presented had full consensus of all the members of the committee. here is our committee and I’d like to thank everyone for working so hard on this committee. Selected guidelines: on the calendar as you know fall and spring semesters need to be 73 days, the full summer calendar needs to be 48 to 49 days, 7–10 days between the semesters, graduation on the preferred day of Saturday for fall and summer, and the graduation preferred days are Saturday and Sunday for the spring; 5 days for finals for fall and spring, 2 readings days for classes of fall and spring and at least one reading day for the mini-semester and the full term in the summer. Fall break will have two days unless 72 days aren’t available, then the fall break will only be one day.

Here is the change to the academic summer calendar we are requesting. I have the 2015–16 calendar here and this is the proposed change, so I am going to put them both up so you can see them both at the same time. The one on top where we started classes on the 16th, went to the 17th of June for the first mini-semester, starting the 20th of June and going to the 25th of July; it just seemed awkward, so what we wound up doing was changing it so that it starts on the 19th and goes to the 22nd of June. The second mini-semester will start on the 27th of June and go to the 29th of July with the reading days put back in place. So what we will do is return a reading day to the summer mini-semester that was not there, as you can see on the top calendar, and we’ll also return the second reading day to the summer second mini-semester. They will now have 2 reading days in August before the finals. And we will increase the registrar’s office days between spring and summer to a larger number.

So are there any questions to this change of the 2015–16 calendar for the summer? So if there are no questions, as the Calendar chair I would like to make a motion that we accept these changes.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: This comes from a Senate Committee so it doesn’t need a second. Press A for yes for this calendar change and B for no. A=50, B=1 [25:00] The motion passes 50 to 1.


Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: All right, so our second proposal is the 2017–18 Calendar. You see the rules and guidelines we had to follow and what we decided to do is to start classes on the 18th of August and go through the 9th of December, having reading days and then the 5 final days with graduation on the 16th. By moving it forward into the semester we actually gained a week, so we will have 2 full weeks after the Thanksgiving break and giving us 13 full weeks instead of just 12 as we’ve had in the past. This also includes the fall break.

In January classes will start on the 10th, go through the spring break, the 12th and the 16th of March, which will now be coincided with the Auburn (City) School System which will be changing back to when we have it normally; then going to the end of April, two reading days, 5 final days, and graduation on May 5 and 6. Then we have 10 days for the registrar; summer will start on Thursday, May 17, have one day off for Memorial Day and go to the 20th of June. Then the second mini-semester will start on the 25th of June, Independence Day on the 4th, going to the 27 of July, 2 reading days and 3 finals which ends the semester on August 4.

We have 73 days in the fall, 72 days in the spring, and the 24, 48 full in the summer. And this is how it plays out by words. Are there any questions? Wow. As Calendar chair I’d like to make a motion that we accept our new 2017–2018 calendar.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: This comes from a Senate Committee so it doesn’t need a second. Again press A for yes and B for no. A=60, B=4 [28:12] The motion passes 60 to 4.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: For any of the 4 that don’t like the calendar, I really would like to hear from you and talk with you, and then put you on the Calendar Committee. So please, contact me.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: We are now moving into the pending action items and this next item is also presented by Robin. It is a policy change so we will look at it today and vote on it in April.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: You have to remember, it’s in the transcripts, if anybody reads those transcripts for the Senate, last year Michael Stern got up when I was presenting the calendar and asked, Why don’t we have a policy for make-up days? And the President asked the same question and came to Larry Crowley to create a policy for the make-up days.
[29:36]gbd [30:08]sen

A policy for assigning make up days when dealing with university closings, class cancelations and exam postponements due to inclement weather or emergencies. If the university closes the process would be: With any cancelation in a month, the last Saturday of said month would be assigned as the make up day. Any additional cancelations in a month would be assigned the next Saturday in succession until all class days missed have been made up.

If you slide up to the calendar I can show you this. So if we have a cancellation on the 21st or the 28th of January this year, we would make one up on the 31st and then we would make one up on the next Saturday which is Feb. 7. And if we have a cancellation on the 25th of Feb. we would be able to make it up on the 28th.

If a cancelation takes place on the Thursday or Friday before the last Saturday of said month or after the last Saturday of the said month, the make up day would be considered in the following month and will take place on the last Saturday of that month.

So in March if we have a day that we cancel on the 27th because of a tornado, or the 30th, then the make-up day would be on April 25th. But there are no more class days after that, so we have to accept that there will be no make-up days for December or May for the fall and spring semesters respectively.

This is a proposal from the Calendar Committee to try to make the best we can…someone asked me about football. About a decade ago we had a day off because of a tornado, Opal. Classes were cancelled, but they still had the football game. I don’t know what we can do about fall, spring is a lot easier to deal with and this is the best thing we could come up with to make sure that we have some sort of plan so that everybody knows what’s coming down the pike.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair:  If you have comments or questions for Robin, please go to the microphone and remember to state you name and department unit and whether you are a senator.

Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication and Journalism: I get a feeling this doesn’t affect very many students, but I’d like to see and I’d like to ask if there might be wording in there about religious observance or religious restrictions on Saturdays.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: That’s interesting. Then why do we have graduation on Saturdays?

Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication and Journalism: I’ve wondered that myself many times, but graduation typically isn’t required, but on a make-up day might be required.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: Maybe.

Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication and Journalism: I don’t know but I understand what you are saying. I was thinking you might need some language in there about that.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair:  In the list of university approved excuses of religious obligations would be an excuse for missing, they just need to tell you in writing.

Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication and Journalism: I would like to see in a policy like that that we have that included. Not because of issues we’ve had that at this university, but at a previous university where professors were not as willing to make religious accommodations.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: Okay.

Andy Sinclair, senator, aerospace engineering: In this example here I think this is this calendar this semester May 1 is the last day of class and May 2 is the Saturday, a reading day, so reading days are not considered make-up days

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: Yes we were trying to figure that out. Although last year it was, but the we have 2 make-up days on the reading day, so, I would rather not let the reading days go by.

Mike Stern, senator, economics: I think I asked you this in an e-mail, but this applies to the fall semester as well, right? So it could force a make-up day on a Saturday that contains a home football game.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: It could, but what do you do with that?

Mike Stern, senator, economics: We could go forward and hold class during a football game, and open facilities and parking and whatnot.

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: It’s a big question. I don’t know. All I know is that every faculty member will need to apply to have a pass to get on campus, it would be really hard pressed to do all of that. If I put in the policy that it will only qualify for non-home games or away games, what’s that do for the people that are actually participating in the away games? I think faculty should suck it up and get it all back in the regular days. That’s what we had to do this past year. It’s unfortunate but that’s the realistic thing. To have a make-up day, this is not high school everybody, this is college and you could squish in a little bit more. That’s the way I did it. They asked be to do a policy so that is what I am putting forward.

Constance Relihan, not a senator: So just to clarify, just because there is a make-up day no one has to use it. Is that correct?

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: That’s correct. It is a choice by the professors the last time that it happened. I wish facilities could tell us why we are not having days like what happened last year. The reason they had cancelled an extra day was because the campus had to be prepared so people who could not get in from facilities to get to campus prepared, that was the reason why we didn’t have the third day. But getting that knowledge out to the faculty would have done a lot for us.

Hilary Wyss, senator, English: Another clarification. Would that mean that whatever the time was and the classroom work that you were using would end up cancelled and would transfer to Saturday?

Robin Jaffe, Chair of Calendar and Schedules: Yes. [37:16] Any other questions?

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: This will come back in April for the vote.

Our next pending action item is from the Handbook Committee, presented by the Handbook committee chair James Goldstein.

James Goldstein, Faculty Handbook Review Committee chair: Good afternoon. Okay, so this has some background. The motion was made, actually I made the motion to the University Senate two years ago to delete 3.7.2 which was on the Annual Tenure Review. This was a new policy that was captured during the Handbook revision of Phase II from the Provost’s Web site, something that had been a guideline into a policy. The Senate voted to refer that matter to the Faculty Handbook Review Committee and then next thing I knew I was on the Faculty Handbook Committee (not on the same day). Then there was a bit of a communication gap and my committee was supposed to be looking at this, so in December of 2013, Larry Crowley as Senate Chair gave us a charge.
So we wanted to find out how people were handling this thing that was technically in the Handbook and what could be done to minimize the labor involved. To study what the advantages of doing this are for pre-tenured faculty but also what the cost was to the tenured faculty and to do a study of other peer universities to see whether they were doing something similar or not. So last year’s committee was chaired by Barbara Bishop–so she was leading the process. We tried to get information on campus for how this was being done and then we looked at 19 peer institutions, and the short version is that there is a lot of variation both on campus and off campus including whether including whether it was being done well. So if anybody wants to see the results of that investigation, shoot me an e-mail and I can send you a document that shows what the peer institutions do or don’t do. I forgot to give my e-mail: goldsrj@auburn.edu.

So we made 2 recommendations. When we get to the text itself I’ll point out that there is a logical inconsistencies and redundancies and so on. So we wanted to pull in the business that was on annual tenure review into the preceding section, but remove redundancies, make logical consistencies and last but not least to give the individual units the responsibility for deciding how to implement this. [41:44] And then, at least at the time, not lately but that old Provost document was up on the Web site and needs to come down if it hasn’t yet.

So here’re the brief reasons in favor of what we are recommending. The head or chair annually uses all the available data over all pre-tenured faculty, so they know everything there is to know. In a large department, like mine for example, it would be very laborious because last year we have about seven of these to do and you multiply that times the number of years people are pre-tenured other than third-year review.

If you do a streamlined review say a tenured faculty just look at a CV, well that’s just bean counting, it doesn’t tell you about their teaching effectiveness or the other criteria for tenure. [22:33] When this was presented to the Steering Committee the question came up when I was presenting this, if the proposal passes and it is no longer mandated that the tenured faculty participate, what if the candidate would like to know from the tenured faculty whether they are making appropriate progress and there is nothing in the language in the Handbook that would say for a candidate can’t request for the department chair, have the tenured faculty look at this. Similarly for annual reviews it says there should be at least one, but the Faculty Handbook provide the possibility to have more than one a year if you wanted.

This whole language about annual tenure review, it went back, 2 years ago I gave the whole history of where this came from, so on and so forth, but is all predated when under Dr. Mazey’s leadership all the units clarified and made much more explicit what their tenure criteria are. So this was something that was addressing the problem or perceived problem before all of this clarification. So it’s a lot less of a mysterious process now for candidates what is it that I need to do to make tenure and promotion. Finally the idea that individual departments are in a better position to decide what kind of review process they need to use rather than having a one size fits all model.

So this took a while. We forwarded a draft last year, it went to Steering and they made some recommendations, we didn’t have time to act on all of those before we ran out of the year. So this year I became the chair of the committee and all but one other member of the committee were brand new so I had to bring them up to speed on all of this. Then we finished the draft and sent it to Steering and they made some recommendations, so it was a real collaborative effort between the Faculty Handbook Review Committee and Steering. We want to thank Steering for their wisdom and suggestions in that collaboration.

Finally we forwarded, after it made it through Steering, to the Senate Leadership. This year’s committee, they flew in just for this, I want to thank them for their help with this and then I will present the actual text and point out the differences. (so that other document, please). [45:52]

One of the logical problems was that 3.7.2 in the current Handbook is Annual Tenure Review, but that section can’t decide whether it is really about that or whether it’s really about Third Year Review. So we pulled into 3.7.1 the abbreviated more economical version of the Annual Tenure Review. The most important part of that is that the department head/chair may consult with the tenured faculty, so basically up to the unit then to decide whether it works for them to have all of the tenured faculty involved or not.
I did some touching up to make things a little bit consistent and clear and very minor improvements, and then we are proposing redoing subtitles 3.7.2 and make it third year review because if you look at the current Handbook, most of what’s said under Annual Tenure Review is actually specifying how Third Year Reviews work. So we wanted to separate those for logical clarity.

Thanks to the suggestion from Steering, they wanted to keep this numbering series, so we kept that, and made clear that this was for Third Year Review for the procedures. And we would delete the current text of 3.7.2 because we’ve either imported it into the previous section or else we’ve renamed it for Third Year Review. That’s what I’ve got. I’d be happy to answer questions or clarifications.

Mike Stern, senator, Economics: Excellent work James, this is a good improvement. Along related lines, we have the same review guidelines when we have the Third Year Review guidelines, but what about cases of termination prior to tenure time, not related to the Third Year Review, do we need to have any policy or statements about for instance in the Third Year Review it can lead to termination on committal letters that requires the third year review that you go to the faculty as a whole and get a vote from them and so forth. Should we have some policy about any other attempt beside the Third Year Review to terminate prior to  some type of process that should also be followed like the third year, maybe not as rigid but some way language in regard to that?

James Goldstein, Faculty Handbook Review Committee chair: That’s probably not directly relevant to this particular proposal. I’m glad you did bring that up. As a matter of fact our committee has been charged this year to look at that very issue. So we are in the process of looking at that. It is possible now, through the Handbook, to terminate someone before they come up for Third Year Review, it is possible to do that, but the question we are looking at is whether it’s clear enough in the Handbook, how that might work. So, stay tuned, I don’t know if we will get it done this semester. It may have to carry over past this semester because it is a complicated issue, but we are at work.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: Other comments or questions? [50:42] Thank you. This will come back in April for the vote, this is just information today.

We now have a true information item, not a pending action item. This information item will be about the student and faculty Research Symposium. The items will be presented by Jennifer Kerpelman and Lorraine Wolf, but first John Liu will provide a brief introduction.

John Liu, Assoc. Provost and Assoc. VP for Research: We all know that at Auburn University we have run the Research Week for 3 years already. So this last fall we were asked to assess that process. [51:32] We had a rather large committee look at it and they made a number of recommendations. We should increase its effectiveness and increase its efficiency of such processes like Research Week. Dr. Jennifer Kerpelman and Dr. Loraine Wolf and their committee and many others were involved in that process and Jennifer and Loraine are going to give us a report of where we are today.

Dr. Jennifer Kerpelman, Assoc. Dean and professor: So Loraine and I are here to give you a very brief update about “This is Research.” Not to confuse you, this is Research Week evolving into what will be one day, very focused events, we’ll have a student symposium on April 13. It looks like it will not spill over into the 14th, so we’ll have a one day, all day symposium for the students with an awards ceremony on the 20th. Then we’ll have an event focused on faculty research, September 30, that will also be an all day event concluding with a keynote and a reception.

The reason that this occurred is what Dr. Liu said, was there was a lot of input, people met, discussed, we looked at what the strengths were, what the weaknesses were of the Research Week event, and what was really the purpose and the value of this event. [53:19] It was decided that we really wanted to focus more specifically on what the value was and the opportunities were for students and for faculty. So I am going to have Loraine talk to you a little bit more about the student event.

Loraine Wolf, Undergraduate Research Director: So we did a little morphing of the student event. As you may recall we had 2 graduate symposia and one undergraduate, and this year what we’ve done is consolidate the student symposium into one day-long event. We hope that this will be easier for faculty to manage and lead to less confusion in terms of judging and what students need to do and how many days they need to miss classes in order to attend. So this week we’ve done a few extra things. We will combine the graduate and the undergraduate symposia and the posters will probably contain both graduate students and undergraduate students but we kicked the faculty out. We’ll still do a collection of oral and poster presentations and we are making a strong effort to incorporate creative scholarship and design into the event. [54:44]

So far we’ve received a little over 320 abstracts combined between graduate and undergraduate, so we are up about 10% both undergraduate students and the graduate students in terms of involvement. We will continue with the judging of both the graduate and undergraduate so we will ask you and the people you are representing to help us with the judging for the event.

We are adding this year a mentor recognition reception to honor those people who work very hard with undergraduates with little reward except for the fun it is to work with undergraduates. So we want to have something special for them and their students, and that will occur right before the poster presentation. We are trying to focus the posters in the lunchtime hour or in the early evening. Our purpose in doing this is to allow people from the community and people from the schools to attend, and potential Auburn students, in the future, to attend. And also give some people like prospective employers or perhaps donors to also attend and interact with our very bright students.

Dr. Jennifer Kerpelman, Assoc. Dean and professor: This will be held at the Student Center in the typical places that we do it in that horseshoe area and some of the events will be in the ballroom. For the mentor recognition, we also will have recognition of mentors of graduate students as well, but near and dear to Loraine’s heart are the undergraduate mentors who often don’t get as much in terms of recognition.

So now for the faculty symposium event that will be on September 30, and this will be at the Hotel and Conference Center. Here we wanted to make sure that it was clear what the value is for the faculty to participate because we were getting various types of input that said maybe that’s not as clear as it needs to be. So I have 2 things up here but actually there are 3 things that we think this event needs to have for it to be relevant for our faculty researchers.

What you see here is recognition. That means that we are actually showcasing or featuring some of our most productive and exciting work that our faculty are doing. We’re in the process of figuring out how those folks will be selected and it will something every year that different people will be showcased. What’s not up there that actually is really important is that I want to stress the visibility. It’s important that we have people not only within the university seeing the great work we are doing, but also outside. So we’re going to work harder to bring people from the outside be it other researchers from neighboring institutions, be it industry, be it advisory board members, so a lot of this will be bringing people from the outside seeing the work we are doing. Again it’s one day so it is easier to get people in for one day and then if they want to follow us that could be scheduled if people want to talk to certain groups of researchers. So that could spin off of this event.

The other piece that we really want to stress, we mentioned earlier the cluster hire proposals, we had events where we did the 5-5-5. Faculty were presenting their research, they had 5 slides, 5 minutes to present, and 5 minutes of questions. It was really impressive to see the ah ha moments as people were hearing each others work because that particular area that they were doing work, but they didn’t know they existed on campus. Wow, you are doing that too but in a different discipline. So we think that could also be very valuable incorporating opportunities for faculty to learn about others in other disciplines doing work around a common theme. So we probably will steal that idea of the 5-5-5 or something like it as well as posters for faculty to meet and learn about each other and hopefully connect.

Then to conclude the event we will have a keynote. We are thinking it will be about cyber because Auburn Speaks this year is going to be on cyber. So we are in the process of identifying a keynote and have a reception. Creative scholarship…how many of you saw the creative scholarship exhibition in 2014? There are a few of you that saw it. It was amazing, Karen Rogers led that with a committee and I thought it was very impressive and I got a lot of good feedback from people saying how impressive it was. But it was a lot of work and we had to take it down in a couple of days and that’s really not how that works. You really need to put up your exhibition and leave it up, so we are going to have it biannually starting 2016 and then every other year we will have creative scholarship as a part of This is Research in the fall event. That is something to be looking forward to next year, how we do that. We are looking for a venue where we can not only have it showcased but have it up for several weeks at least so others can come and see the work that our faculty has done. [1:00:16]

Loraine Wolf, Undergraduate Research Director: I guess what I’d like to do to wrap this up is to stress how important the symposium is to undergraduate students and graduate students. For many of them this is their very first opportunity to present their scholarly work. Although all of us may be a little jaded in terms of all the conferences that we go to and all the presentations we’ve made, for them its really a way they can enter the professional community and area and get feedback on what they are doing. It gives them an opportunity to try to explain what they are doing to an audience that may or may not be in that field of study. And that’s something we all know is very important to be able to communicate our research to people who aren’t in our area.

It’s really a very important event for them and because of this I would plead with you to take back or take away a message that to have your faculty members be a little lenient in terms of allowing them some slack in attending the symposium and also to excuse them if they have to make a presentation and it happens to conflict with their classes. We have 320 people to schedule in one day. It’s hard to juggle that many people and try to work around their classes, which we try to do, but can’t always do it. We hope we have your support in helping these students to enter their professional careers. [1:02:08]

Dr. Jennifer Kerpelman, Assoc. Dean and professor: I would say since the faculty event will not be until the fall semester that we would encourage you to communicate with faculty to build that in potentially to their plans for the semester and in their syllabi because having students experience a day of seeing research that our faculty are doing, being in the audience and being able to interact with the posters is a really great learning experience and can be very motivating. So it could be part of assignments or extra-credit, but again we would encourage you to talk to faculty to think about this as something to encourage for their students to participate in.

I am not going to talk about this but just to let you know there is a Web site that has the information and if you just type in This is Research, and I think Research Week also works after the regular auburn.edu you will come to the Web site. The student symposium is closed as far as submissions, but there is information about it and will be more posted including the program. There is also information about the faculty symposium.

Are there questions?

Jerrod Windham, senator, Industrial and Graphic Design: We were very excited by last year to participate in Research Week with the creative work and design work and I heard 2 things that you are a little discouraging, one is  we are going to make an effort to include that for the undergraduate and graduate forums, and then we are going to do it biannually. I guess for an undergraduate or graduate student if it is only a biannual event that may exclude a considerable amount, so I would just encourage you to maybe reconsider trying to figure out a way that it’s not necessarily such a hassel and maybe a solution to include it every year.

Dr. Jennifer Kerpelman, Assoc. Dean and professor: Let me clarify. I am glad you asked that because if you heard it that way others might have as well. The students are every year. Yes, we had the same discussion and Cary Rogers, I don’t know if you know of her in Architecture, Design, and Construction, but she won’t let us get away with anything that would be not good for our students. It’s really for the faculty showcase that we decided and this again was her input as well, saying that was a lot to do for that. She will head it up as long as we do it every other year. So thank you for asking the question and allowing me to clarify that.

Anybody else? Thank you very much.

Patriciaia Duffy, chair: Thank you for the presentation.

Is there any new business? Hearing none.

Is there any unfinished business?

If there is no new business or unfinished business we can adjourn. [1:05:12]