Transcript Senate Meeting
June 16, 2015

Patricia Duffy chair: Hello, thanks for coming out for our June Senate meeting on this very warm afternoon. If you are a senator 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. We have votes today so please pick up a clicker in the bag in the back if you haven't already done so.

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 a substitute 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 please 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 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. Today however we plan a vote on the composition of a Senate Committee; this is a constitutional change that requires a two-thirds majority of all senators or 58 votes.
If you are present and a senator or substituting for a senator–please press A on the clicker. We have a quorum but we do not have a two-thirds majority. We will run this again when we get ready for that vote to see if we have enough people come in to make the 58 person necessary vote.

Our first item of business is approval of the minutes from the May 19, 2015, Senate meeting. These minutes have been posted to the Senate website. Are there any additions, changes, or deletions to the May 19 minutes? Hearing none, do I hear a motion to approve the minutes?  Second?  We have a motion and a second. All in favor, please say "aye."  Opposed? The motion carries.

Our next item is remarks from President Gogue. [3:16]

Dr. Gogue, President: Just have a couple of things to share with you today. The Legislature completed its work. Three or four things I call you attention to; number one on the budgetary side the increase for all 4 Divisions at Auburn (that means AUM, Experiment Station, Extension, and the Main Campus) is about 1%, 2.5 million dollars. So that was the efforts on the budget side for the legislature during this session.

They also approved the age of consent bill which reduced the age for students to be involved in research from 19 to 18. Dr. Witte, this is about the 5th year you worked on this? Fifth year, so finally after 5 years it got done. Congratulations, thank you for all your good work. (They were going to applaud for you.)

The reciprocity bill passed. For programs that are very engaged in distance education it’s helpful, the Provost’s serves on that committee statewide.

One other thing, a constitutional amendment relative to Auburn went through and will be on the ballot in 2016 in the November period is what we expect. This is a constitutional amendment relative to the Board of Trustees. It was put in to avoid the year 2019 in which actually 9 trustees rotate off of the Board in that single year, plus you have a new governor the year before, so a pretty dramatic shift in numbers of trustees. The bill says two things. Basically that no more than 3 will rotate off in any given year. It gives a little bit more stability and number 2 there will be two dedicated positions at large to encourage diversity of the Board. So I think it is an important thing for Auburn. It will go on the ballot, it’s a constitutional amendment and change and expect it to go in the general election next November (2016).

The Board of Trustees meeting I want to at least cover a few things with you from that meeting. We have initiated 2 really important projects that a lot of us have a great deal of interest in. One is the Performing Arts facility and the other is an Engineering Achievement Center, both funds were provided by the same family, John and Rosemary Brown. So pretty exciting times for us on both of those. Those were approved by the Board, they will be approved 3 different times, but this is the first approval that says these are real projects and we expect them to go forward.
The Auburn University Memorial that was driven by students is in that park area in front of where the President’s house is. I am not sure of the correct name of it, but it’s an area that would honor students and faculty and staff and alumni and veterans and people that loose their life and there is a location for some reflection. That’s been approved by the Board.

Broun Hall Renovation, architect is selected so I am not sure when they will actually do the work on this Building. Larry it may be next year but at least the architect is now working on that. The Mell Classrooms I wanted to mention to you, I think I shared with you before that the Mell Street classroom complex which was scheduled to begin this summer, they have actually moved the date back to January 2016. Part of the reason was they were able to go within the Library and actually create about 40,000 sq. ft. that would be component to this classroom facility. I think there’s 17 new classrooms that will be a part of that complex. So to get that work drawn and designed they moved the project back, but it’s a tremendous opportunity for that central classroom facility to be a little larger than we anticipated in that area. We are excited about that.

Budget guidelines did come out. I’ll remind you that the Board approved general guidelines on how to put the budget together at their June meeting. Those then are spent all summer, the actual budget is put together and hopefully approved by the Board in September at the Board meeting for the October 1 start of our next fiscal year, 2016. The guidelines were approved.

The one thing I would mention to the faculty there was a pool of about 10 million dollars, 3% created for salary and permanent salary increases and also a 2% pool for a one-time increase. So a total of about 5%.

They also approved a dual enrollment or concurrent enrollment program at the meeting. There’s some excitement, but we met with Senate Leadership Monday and also there is some caution that we need to be sure that we use that correctly. So some more work to be done in that particular area.

A BS in Food Science was approved and a graduate certificate program that deals with distance education in the College of Education was also approved.

I’d take just one final minute to say how much we appreciate…, I say this on behalf of Don and the Provost and all of us to work with the Executive Committee of the Senate. I think this is Dr. Duffy’s last meeting, but she has done a remarkable job, really appreciate your leadership. I have to tell you, you probably won’t believe it, but the meeting that we have usually on the Monday before the Senate Meeting is the most fun meeting we have. We learn all kind of things about what’s going on, so I appreciate everything that you do. Thank you. (applause) [9:25]

Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you very much Dr. Gogue. On our agenda today we have 2 action items, both from Senate committees and 3 information items. As always with respect for you time I will try to keep my remarks brief. [9:40]
First I’ll introduce the Senate Executive Committee. Gisela Buschle-Diller is our secretary. She is at a conference and can’t be with us today. Laura Plexico is the secretary-elect, who’s term as secretary will start in 2 weeks on July 1. She will serve as our secretary today so she is getting an early start on her term, thank you Laura. Larry Crowley is the immediate past chair, serves as the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees. Larry Teeter is our chair-elect and his term will also begin in 2 weeks on July 1. Connor Bailey is our parliamentarian, but he couldn’t be with us today so Constance Hendricks has agreed again to serve as our parliamentarian. James Goldstein, I saw is here today and he will begin his term as chair-elect also in 2 weeks. I’d also like to introduce our helpful administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg. Ms. Kloberg assists with everyone of the Senate meetings and is always very exciting at the beginning to be sure that the technology is going to work. She also does a lot more than that for us between meetings to make sure that the Senate business is conducted as smoothly as possible.

I have a few things I’d like to mention. Steering is authorized to act for the Senate between meetings and there is one recent action from Steering I would like to talk about. The Faculty Handbook Review committee brought forward a revision to sections 3.7.1 and 3.7.2 of the Handbook dealing with the annual review and the third-year review. The revision involved reorganization of the material for better flow. Steering determined that the revision did not involve any policy changes and thus approved the revision. It you’d like to see a track changes version of this revision, so you can see what’s been moved and how it now flows, you can e-mail me or James Goldstein and we can send you that version so you can see all of the changes in detail. James is chair of the Handbook committee.

Rules has worked busily this spring to fill spots on Senate Committees, which were voted on at the May meeting, and to make recommendations for faculty spots on University Committees. The Rules Reports for Senate Committee spots remains posted on the Senate site attached to the May agenda, so if you’d like to see who the new members are of Senate Committees you can go to that report since it was approved and that will give you the membership of the new committees. I have been getting some questions about that. Although Rules has input on faculty appointments to the University Committees; these spots are filled by the Central Administration. Appointment letters for all committees will be sent out later in the summer.

This is the last Senate meeting for academic year 2014–15. The Senate doesn’t meet in July. As warm as it was today, I am grateful that we don’t meet in July. The next meeting will be on August 25. Larry Teeter will be the new Senate chair at that time and the full schedule for academic year 2015–16 will be posted soon on the Senate Web site, but I wanted to let you know when the August meeting would be. [12:44]

Are there any comments or questions for me?

Gwyneth Thomas, senator, Polymer and Fiber Engineering: Thank you madam chairman. The one comment I want to make was in addition to something Dr. Gogue said. On June the 5th Polymer and Fiber Engineering was voted by the Board of Trustees to be closed officially. I wanted to say a few things about our department since we are going away. The department of Textile Engineering at the time was established at Auburn in 1928. The building was erected in 1932 by the WPA, so it’s one of the older buildings and departments on campus. Actually Auburn was 30 years late coming to the party, Georgia Tech established their Textile Engineering in 1897, Clemson and NC State in 1898. But Auburn was the first at the party in one thing–they chose to completely dissolve the department. Tech and Clemson merged their departments with Materials Engineering, NC State still has a viable department.

I have to say it affects me deeply because this is in my DNA. In the 10960s when I was very young my dad used to take us to conventions of the American Textile Chemists and Colorists Association in Callaway Gardens and I got to know Auburn textile graduates, and I knew what kind of education they had there at the time. In 1982 I delivered my first paper here at what used to be know as the Auburn Slashing Conference. Sounds rather vicious, but what it means is that you could coat yarns with chemicals so that they would go through the weaving process easily. In 1984 I made my first lecture over in the Textile Building as a representative of a Swiss Textile Machine company. Then 11 years later I joined the faculty as an assistant professor. So I have been here for 20 years and it is really very much a part of my life, it’s even more than I thought. In WWII my dad was wounded and did his rehabilitation in Ashville, NC, his mentor in reestablishing him into work was a textile chemist graduate from Auburn University.  [15:32] So even before I was born I was part of this place.

I want to thank all of my colleagues, fellow faculty members, friends who I’ve worked with over these last 20 years. I want to thank all of you, members of the Senate, while I’ve served here for 13 years, 4 terms and one year of an unexpired term. And I want to note that this will be my last meeting as a Senator because we won’t have a department here anymore.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you very much Dr. Thomas. I would like to also like to just extend my own appreciation for all of the hard work you’ve put in on behalf of the Senate. As I recall very clearly, when I was secretary of the Senate you were a member of Rules Committee, which is one of the more challenging committees in terms of workload. So I really appreciate all of your devotion to the Senate during your career here at Auburn. Thank you very much.

Gwyneth Thomas, senator, Polymer and Fiber Engineering: Thank you and goodbye.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Are there any other comments or questions for me?

Next we have an item from Academic Standards, which is a more detailed policy on Military Credit than the one adopted by the Senate in March. Xing Fang presented this as a pending action item at the last meeting. He is not available today so Dr. Relihan, the Associate Provost will now present it for a vote. [16:57]

Constance Relihan, Associate Provost: Good afternoon, happy to be here. As you may recall the gist of this proposal is to bring Auburn into compliance with law. [17:40] We’ve had a committee that’s considered how to ensure that our veteran service people get appropriate credit for their military experiences. A committee comprised of faculty and advisors came up with a proposed policy. The gist of this policy is that students will be eligible for up to 10 hours of credit. Currently they’re eligible for 4 hours of credit, which is essentially PE activities credit. This would expand that by 6 additional hours.

What will need to occur is that the student will need to meet with their advisor to determine what might be appropriate credit. Submission of the request would be given to the appropriate department to see if the faculty concur. We’ve set a limit of 10 hours because when you are dealing with veterans credit there are strict limitations on what the VA benefits will cover and you want to be very careful that you don’t give people too much credit. That inadvertently ends up hurting them and their ability to complete their degree through funding mechanisms and at the same time you want to make sure that you’re only giving credit for what is appropriate. Odds are that most of the credits that will be awarded will come in as general elective credits. But this with the exact articulation of the 10 credits will be at the discretion of the faculty in the appropriate units. [19:51]

This slide just summarizes what I’ve said, probably 6 hours, but a maximum of 10 hours total of military credit. Once these credits have been awarded to a student they will not be rescinded.

One concern that the Academic Standards Committee has was that we didn’t want to get into a situation of awarding credit for courses that are below college level. So that was a concern that found its way into the specific language of the proposal that would exclude low level technical courses. But as I say any course that would be granted credit would be granted credit with the approval of the faculty and the appropriate disciplines.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Does anyone have any questions or comments on the proposal from the Academic Standards Committee? Bring up the word document to see what you are voting on. It is a little bit long but it was presented last time and it was sent around in advance. Are there any questions or comments? This is not a constitutional amendment so we need a majority vote so hearing no comments or questions I will call for the vote. This is a Senate committee and doesn’t need a second. Please press A to vote for the proposal and B to vote against it. A=53, B=0. Unanimous approval, I think that’s unusual, so congratulations to the Academic Standards Committee.

Because the next item will require a Constitutional change I would like to call again quorum count for such. Press A if you are here and a senator or a substitute for a senator. A=52, B=2, total 54, not quite the 58 needed to vote.

We will go ahead and have the presentation, and then possibly a motion will come forward to postpone. We will hear from Dr. Margaret Marshall who is the co-chair of the University Writing Committee, again this is a Senate Committee. [23:26]

Margaret Marshall, co-chair of the University Writing Committee: I think this is pretty straight forward. the Writing Committee has always had a representative from the Graduate School even before it was the Writing Committee, when it was only the Writing Initiative Task Force. We have recently discovered that the Graduate School cannot have a regular faculty member, because they don’t have regular faculty members, I guess, so it needs to be changes to be a continuing representative. So that is the core of this change, a representative or designee from the Graduate School as a continuing member of the committee.  While we were making that change we thought it sensible to make a few other minor changes at the same time. One of those is the Director of First Year Composition to make it parallel to the other continuing members, it would be the Director or a designee. It just makes it consistent with all of the other continuing members. And finally because this is a committee that rarely votes on anything except for adjournment we thought that everyone should be a regular voting member. It also means that those continuing members can help shoulder some of the workload of this very busy committee. So that’s it. I am happy to answer any questions.

Patricia Duffy, chair: I just wanted to make one comment about this proposal the request to add a Graduate School representative comes about in an unusual way. There is some lack of clarity in the Constitution about the meaning of all schools and colleges, which is the definition of a number of the committees. Typically this is construed to mean all academic schools and colleges so that would exclude the Graduate School, the Honors College, and the newly created University College, which don’t have tenure track faculty members. However, when the initial conception of this committee was developed Rules put Dr. Crandell on as the representative from the Graduate School and by all accounts he has been an incredibly valuable member of the committee and input from the Graduate Council is highly desired for this committee’s work in the future. So this proposal comes about in that way. When Dr. Crandell’s second term was up our parliamentarian and the Rules Committee looked at the language and realized that in other cases where we said all schools and colleges the Graduate School was not represented unless it was a specific membership ex-officio. I just wanted to give a little background on how we got where we are. [26:09] Maybe sometime, James where are you, for a look at the Constitution and some clarifying language. Thanks.

Larry Crowley, Immediate past chair: I move that we postpone this until the fall.

Patricia Duffy, chair: At the August meeting?

Larry Crowley, Immediate past chair: The Steering Committee could schedule for the August meeting

Patricia Duffy, chair: To postpone it has to postpone to a definite time. It could be postponed again in August.

Larry Crowley, Immediate past chair: Postpone until August.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Is there a second? Okay. Is there discussion? This would be discussion of the postponement. The reasons are clear, we do not have 58 voting members in the room. The proposal to postpone to a specific time only requires a majority of the vote of those present. So if you support the postponement until the August meeting, please press A. A=52, B=2. The motion passes. Again this can subsequently be postponed at the August meeting; a vote to postpone if for some reason we do not have the numbers in August it can be postponed again to a definite time.

Any discussion now of the proposal itself? We will be bringing it back in August.

We next have 3 information items. Haven Hart is with us, she’s the director of Student Conduct, Case Management and Student Advocacy from Student Affairs. She will let us know about some services from Student Affairs that can help faculty with with students of concern.

Haven Hart, Director of Student Conduct, Case Management ,and Student Advocacy: [28:35] Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak with you for a few minutes. I want to tell you about a service that we have out of our office. If you want to call it a service, we have an online report form that I want to direct you to and encourage you all to report students that you are concerned about to our office. It does circumvent any process that you have in you particular college or department, because if you are used to reporting up through your associate dean or what have you, we want that to stay. But what we are finding is sometimes we will have student behaviors or concerns that will occur in different segments of the campus, maybe in one class in one department and the residence hall and maybe somewhere else and it’s being handled in those specific areas but we might not be able to best and most effectively help that student if we are not aware of what those behaviors are.

So I am going to show you where this report form is, and will actually take you to the form. On the Student Conduct Web page we have an option where faculty, staff, or students can report an incident or concern. When you get to this page you’ll see that there are several different options. One is to report a conduct violation which would be non-academic; one would be to report an academic violation which is not through our process but we put is here to make it easy for folks; and the third would be to report a concerning behavior that you have about a student. This would not mean an incident that would trigger a 911 call. Don’t feel like you have to complete a form if it is an emergency. This is to collect that information in a different way.

We are going to show you how to get to this page, faculty can link this through AU Access, that might make it easier so you are not remembering Web addresses and such, so we will work on that, I know there are some steps to take. But if you can just remember go to <auburn.edu/studentconduct>, go to that page and click on the far right tab which is report incident or concern. So for today’s purpose we are going to look at the report concerning threatening behaviors tab. [30:48]

If you scroll down, you don’t have to report your name but you can. What that does is it allows us to know who to call back to get more information about this. This for will actually come to our office, so several of us receive it and that will trigger a call to you to find out. Now sometimes you might decide, I’ve got this covered, I’ve addressed this behavior, the student’s not a problem, but I just want to make sure another office other than mine knows about it. So sometimes it’s information for us. Sometimes it’s, I need your help. Can we brainstorm, can you give me a call, can we talk through what resources might best fit for that student. So I won’t go over all the details but here you can see you can enter the date of the incident, the location, the time–scroll down a little bit–then this can show you the type of behaviors we’re talking about. This can be anything from the student was rude, to there was an emotional outburst, erratic behavior, you can see what those categories of concerns are. And this is not so much a checklist, but just to give you and idea of the types of categories that we would want to provide support for a student. Obviously if you get down to some of these in the threatening behaviors category, you probably would have already called either the threat assessment team or 911 on those. But still this report allows you to mention some of these behaviors too. Probably the most important would be the suicidal behaviors. We want to make sure that we are addressing students that are of most concern; to you to those in residence life, to those in the classroom and beyond.

Once you submit this you have a little bit of room to actually write more about the incident and give us a little bit more detail. And then you can say, do I wish to remain anonymous and do I want you to do anything about it, basically. Again this will trigger…this will document it in our system and then trigger a call from us to you to brainstorm about how we might want to respond from there.

So I hope this is helpful to you. Again, it’s not to get in the way of anything you are already doing, it’s really for us to better keep track of trends and behaviors that are happening and how we can provide that best support to students that we’re concerned about. Thank you so much.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Next we have an update on Interdisciplinary Studies from Kathryn Flynn, director of the program. [33:23]

Kathryn Flynn, director of IDSCU: It’s nice to be here today. I’ve been serving as the director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program since August of 2011. And what I’ve got here, first I wanted to give you an overview of the faculty advisory committee. This committee serves primarily to review special admits, people that have more than 90 hours and they also approve all of the capstone syllabus proposals. I’ll mention that I am looking for someone from the College of Liberal Arts and I also need to have someone replace Bob Nelson from the College of Agriculture. So if you are interested or know of anyone who is I’d love to hear from you.

I want to give you a quick recap of the program. Currently the Program has just like every other program on campus the university core, which is 41 or 42 hours depending on whether the math course is 3 or 4 hours. We have 9 hours of what we call IDSCU supporting courses, this includes our fundamentals course, the capstone course, and an advanced writing course; either tech, or business writing, or advanced composition. We also require all of our students to take com1000, but that’s included in their core. The major consists of 45 hours. We changed from 36, which is what we had when it was first approved, to 45. This allows us to give students who want two areas of emphasis to build a bit more bulk to those two areas. They have to have at least 21 hours in one of the emphases and no more than 24 in the other. Sometimes it will be 22 and 23 it just depends because there are some oddly number hour courses.

It also gives students who want to do three areas of emphasis the option of using existing minors and so they will be able to take an existing minor and do the 15 hours there. If a minor requires more than 15 hours we require the student to complete the entire minor. They don’t get to cherry pick and leave out the hardest course in the minor. They have to use elective hours to complete the minor. That course we have them identify, it’s exempted or not included in their major GPA calculation however. Then they have 25 to 26 hours of electives and what this allows them to do is take prerequisites for courses that are in their areas of emphasis. If you have a student who comes to you from Interdisciplinary Studies, you do not have to exempt them from prereqs. What we do is if they come to us, they’ve already taken a course that has a prereq., someone else has waived it, if they don’t have it we don’t worry about it. But if they haven’t taken the courses when they come to us and the unit wants to enforce the prereq., we have no problem with that.

It also allows students who come to us early enough to add potentially and additional minor to their major, because the emphases, while they may use existing minors, those do no show up on the transcript as minors, they are the major. So for example, if you have a student who was doing biology, geography, and something else they might decide to a Spanish minor as well because they want to work in Central or South America. The other thing that it will allow them to do is to actually take some true electives, just some things because they are interested.

In terms of admission students can’t just sign up and become and Interdisciplinary Studies Major, they have to take (I’m going to go a little out of order here), but they have to take IDSC2190. It’s our introductory course and they have to pass that with a grade of C or better. During that course they will create a plan of study and an application essay that they submit to the committee. They have to, if they’ve earned less than 90 hours, they would submit their application to me and I’ll review it and make the call on whether they are admitted or not. We do have students that have more than 90 hours and we use the faculty committee to determine whether or not their application is appropriate.

The application includes a plan of study. Currently faculty advisors from each emphasis area must sign approving the courses that are on the plan and then they have to create an application essay, we used to call it a goal statement, and in that they have to explain why this is a logical major for them, why the emphases that they have are going to allow them to do or accomplish the goals that they have set for themselves.

We have the final course in our supporting courses is the capstone course. This is a 3-hour course and students have two course options: they can take IDSC4930, which is a graded thesis option, or they can take IDSC4980, which is pass/fail, and they can either do an internship or a service learning option. We actually have a few students that do kind of a hybrid and then we assign the course number depending on where the bulk of the work is; whether it is hands on or writing. The capstone students must identify a faculty member who’s willing to work with them and that student, typically I tell them to develop a draft syllabus and then go talk with the faculty member, recognizing that the faculty member may want to throw that one out or make major changes to it. But it helps to start the conversation. Once they’ve got the syllabus built with their faculty member and have a signature to show that that faculty member is in fact willing to do the work, then they would submit it to us and the committee looks at all of the students who submit a capstone syllabus proposal, they get a copy of the plan of study and application essay to look at as background for the syllabus and to show that the syllabus is not out in la-la-land, what they are proposing to do actually relates to the course work that they’ve had and their professional goals.

The committee can look at or has consistently asked for clarification on things. Typically if it’s an application, the course work they don’t worry too much about they are pretty comfortable with that because they have worked with faculty member on it, but they often ask for revisions in essay and fairly often ask for revisions in the syllabus.

So now I am going to give you a little update on the status of the program. The program was approved by ACHE in June of  ’09. The first student was admitted the following spring semester of 2010. As of last week we’ve admitted 277 students to the program, 178 students have graduated as of May 9, 2015. We currently for the last year and a half or so we’ve had on average 50–55 students enrolled in the intro course, not all of those student apply. I always tell the students if they decide they don’t want to pursue interdisciplinary studies they don’t have to hide from me when they see me in the Student Center, because it doesn’t hurt my feelings if they found something else that works better for them. They still hide, but I can’t do anything about that. But we are looking at 50–60, when the program first started when I first started having involvement with it, it was around 30 maybe, so we are looking at a doubling of interest I think right now and I expect that to go up a little bit. With the approval of the new University College, Interdisciplinary Studies will be moving into the University College.

Now I wanted to give you a little bit of information about some of our students. Initially there was a lot of fear that Interdisciplinary Studies Program would kind of be a dumping ground for people who couldn’t graduate. We have a range of students, we have everything fro 4.0 to barely making a 2.0, but I wanted to kink of give you an overview of some of the accomplishments of some of our students.

Back in fall of 2012, Phi Kappa Phi began to consider interdisciplinary studies students for invitations to join Phi Kappa Phi. Since that time we’ve had 10 students who were invited to join. Most of them have actually done that, but not all of them. We also have had both a male and a female recipient of the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award. We had the male recipient in 2013 and the female this past spring. In addition we worked very hard to identify students in their major who fit the description for Who’s Who and over the last 2 years we actually had 10% of the universities who’s Who’s Who have been IDSC students. Now realistically part of that is because we’ve gone out and recruited them to send us their résumés and work up the applications, but we’ve been very pleased with that.

The other thing that we wanted to make sure of is that students who are pursuing this major actually are employable and are employed. So last August we conducted a survey of the 132 students who had graduated at that point in time. We had 78 students who responded to the survey, which is not a bad response rate. Of those 78, 72 were gainfully employed, 4 were in graduate school, and 2 indicated that they were unemployed and looking for a job. So the career councilor that we had on staff at the time, contacted them to help them with their résumé to see what could be done to move them along. I don’t know who those 2 students were so it’s entirely possible that they could have been out of school 2 weeks, but they could also have been out a year, I don’t know.

I think you can see that we have students who are being successful. Even students who don’t graduate with the best GPAs in the world are contacting me to say I start my new job 3 days after graduation. So we have been quite happy with what the students are able to accomplish.
There are some challenges. Every program has challenges and ours, I would have to say from a personal perspective but also from a student perspective, one of our biggest challenges is the application process. It is very time consuming. We are working to minimize the number of signatures required. We are trying to streamline some things, my personal goal is to have the application process all in a workflow. Right now if a student goes out and gets signatures and then makes a change to something they have to go back out and get more signatures, that type of thing. So we are working on that. The other thing is that we often have students who are on the higher end of hours who take the 2910 class, particularly in the spring, and then they want to do their capstone right after they apply and are admitted or they are applying simultaneously to submitting a syllabus, we do it, but that kind of goes against the grain. So one of the things that we’re looking at is proposing the addition of a seminar class that would be positioned between 2190 and whenever they take the capstone. During that class they would work on the ePortfolio that we have had them begin to start building in 2190 and also to develop a capstone proposal. So go into a little more depth in terms of what they are going to do. Do more planning in that semester before they do their capstone. That will go through the committee for review and then to the UCC, assuming the committee approves it.

The other thing, and I’ll back up one there, is we’re proposing right now when students do their capstone, each student has to identify a faculty member to serve as the supervisor for their internship and right now this summer we have 23, 24, somewhere in there, students, so that’s 25 individual one student classes that we have set up. And it is 25 faculty members who have graciously agreed to work with our students. When they are doing an internship that may not be necessary that they have a subject matter person who is getting their log sheets, that type of thing. So we are looking at what other schools do, is having a class, and internship class with a single coordinator type person who processes all of the paperwork and make sure the students are meeting the hours and that they are submitting their final reports, that type of thing. Then there is a writing component and so we could look at either committee review or something like that to get that reviewed.

If they are doing the thesis option however, it’s our belief that the subject matter specialist as an instructor is essential and if you are doing thesis research you have to have a faculty member working with you on that class who knows something about neurotoxicity, which that’s not me, so we will not change that for the thesis option. And then the other thing we are working on is recruiting faculty who are interested in teaching the Interdisciplinary Studies 2190 course. We do have options available to help compensate either the faculty member or the unit the faculty member chooses. So if you or someone you know is interested in finding out more about that, if you’d let me know we will be doing some type of workshop or training to get people ready to teach that class. [49:14]

Than completes my presentation. If you have questions you are welcome to contact me, or Nicole Gerhard, who is our academic advisor. If you have questions, I’d be glad to answer. Thank you. If you have any suggestions along the way that would make the program better, please e-mail me.

Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Flynn.

Finally we have a report from the Teaching Effectiveness Committee, which is one of our most active Senate Committees. They’ve been very busy this year and Don Mulvaney, committee chair will provide the report.

Don Mulvaney, Teaching Effectiveness Committee Chair: Well it’s good to be here. I have a bunch of slides, but I don’t want this to be a seminar so I am going to pretty much distill it down in terms of what we do, who we are, and those kind of things. Before I start I want to thank our Senate Leadership, Patricia especially for encouragement throughout the year and her leadership and support as well. It’s always good, she kind of pokes us a little bit, but also want to thank our upper administration, Provost’s Office and the Office of Undergraduate Studies and also the Biggio Center for what they do to support our committee work.

Three things for the next several minutes would be to just kind of talk about what this committee does, in essence, our purpose and then review our composition, which will be changing in July I guess or the fall. Each year we tend to have some charges put forth by the Steering Committee on top of or to be parallel with our standard charge within the Handbook. And then talk a little bit about what we will probably try to do this coming year in terms of a body of work.

So if you read the description of our committee, there’s a lot of moving parts to it, but basically anything involving teaching, effectiveness, some of the scholarship activities and programs, we have some grant-in-aid programs. We’re involved in reviewing proposals and sometimes sudo-administering those then handed off to the Biggio Center to do that work. Then an ongoing effort of trying to work on faculty development issues and recognizing excellence in teaching across the campus, so by virtue of regulation we have these required memberships, which really totals up to 18 people. So there’s representation across each school or college in terms of faculty membership, then we have our ex-officio continuing members from the Biggio Center, Instructional Technology, the Council, and a Provost designated person, which is Constance Relihan; then we have an undergraduate representative and a graduate representative. You probably can’t see that from far off, but this is all on the Web site, so you can see what our composition has been. There in lies, our biggest challenge has been getting this many people together to have a conversation about some of the teaching issues.

Let me just kind of review, the next couple of slides maybe the buckets of categories or what I’ve converted into a charge and sort of our plan of work for an annual basis this past year. One of these was a special charge to take a look at our student evaluation for teaching or course evaluations, AU EVAL system and so forth. I will get into a little more detail about that particular bucket or charge.

A couple of other charges that are an ongoing basis we are involved in is to review the proposals that come in for the Daniel F. Breeden Endowment and I will tell you a little bit more about that program or elaborate if you are not familiar with that. It evaluates the ongoing existing resources, concerns for teaching and teaching effectiveness and kind of a systematic approach to maybe faculty development and recognizing excellence in teaching. I’ve got an example that we are involved in, in carrying out that.

This is a very busy slide, I’ve just got a couple of things on there, but it sets the stage for some concerns that are emerging continually on our AU evaluate course evaluation system. So here’s kind of the history that leads into the conundrums that we have. It’s fairly complex. We left the pen and paper evaluation system for the online system and fairly rapidly what we discovered in redesigning that for the university is that, I am going with AU evaluate, it saved us probably some funds institutionally, but the problem is the return rate by our students, we lost a lot of traction. So then we begin to ask the question, “How valid is this instrument to evaluate teaching or inform faculty about our teaching efforts?”

So we see things that are emerging in the current recent kinds of literature now that are very supportive of online evaluations. Most of the institutions have went to it quite frankly, but they all express the same kind of concerns. Low return rates. I can just tell you, if I asked you what do you think the return rate is? 30%, 50%. So the perception, and actually those are very valid numbers and some departments and sectors it probably is less than 50%. But from semester to semester I think we are in that 45% to 50% and some a little higher in some cases. So you begin to ask the question, “How can we statistically gage performance or put either formative or summative kinds of measures about teaching effectiveness with that kind of return?” So that’s a conundrum and a problem. The body of literature around this, suggest that there are solutions, but getting buy-in or how to mandate that is very difficult to do. It really falls on the individual instructor to carry out certain best practices that would jack up those returns and then we would get actually more information in.

The other perspective, even more concerning are the way we do these evaluations–basically having the students evaluate their opinions, are they even valid. So there is emerging data that says, as an instructor a couple of papers can teach an instructor how to manipulate, quite frankly a strong word, the return or the information and the evaluations that would come back. Now is that across the board? I am not comfortable saying that, but I know a couple papers suggest there is gender bias in some of these studies that have looked at this and in some quantitative kind of efforts to measure the effect that an instructor could change the return data based on how they influence, psychological parameters, body language and so forth. So concern about reliability is where we are at on this.

Let me skip a couple of more slides. I just want to say that the past couple of years we really looked at this and as a group that is a cross-section representation of the campus we have the ability to go back to our departments and get that feedback and come back and have those conversations. So we sort of went all over in terms of a continuum of, we’re sort of comfortable, we get comfortable with what we have going on but the reality is maybe we are at a point where we need to take a very close look and come back in with a more sophisticated, specific survey to sort of duplicate or advance what Patricia’s committee had done in 2004, oh it wasn’t yours? And get some fresh data. Examine what our faculty on the campus really think about things and see if we can point in some directions how we might improve our evaluation process for teaching. So that’s basically the essence to distil a bunch of slides down for that. You can take a look at these if you want to. There are some best practices. I don’t want this to be a seminar but you can browse through those they are extraction from some of the literature about how we can improve teaching. The bottom line is most literature would suggest that student or course evaluations of teaching should not be the single or sole source of measure of teaching effectiveness. So that’s the key. Other recommendations we need to have for this. [59:17]

Let me see if I can get a couple more slides up. If you have some questions I could respond to a couple of those. I am going to jump ahead then. What faculty could do, what students might do, here’s an example: a slide that talks about 3 or 4 things; you could make the evaluation as part of the course, give a little bit of bonus credit, that is one thing that does get results or returns, the faculty sending reminder notices. Yes?

(a question not spoken at the microphone) How do you offer an incentive if anonymous?

Don Mulvaney, chair of TEC: A tough one. An example that might be done is if you have them show you some evidence that they actually completed it, you don’t have to have the data but they show you evidence that they went online and completed the survey and then you could add the bonus point or something like that. That’s what some would do as a practice.

There might be other incentives that we could offer. We’ve tried those when we first went in to the online evaluation process where students were given prizes and so forth if they were involved in the evaluation.

So there is an interesting thing that the most powerful practice that a faculty member could do to get a greater participation by students in their class on the online evaluation is talking to the students at some juncture early on about the importance of the AU evaluate or the evaluation in terms of feedback and how that influences their teaching and basically verify that it is important to that faculty member so that students get a sense of it is worth them going on and doing it. And how the information can be changed. As an example maybe, if we had a mid-term kind of deal, we could have some feedback that the faculty member could say well based on your inputs here is why I can’t make those kinds of changes, but here are some things that you said to me and I am going to try to make some adjustments and we’re going to do some things. So feedback is an important communication process.

Okay, second charge, is the Daniel F. Breeden grant-in-aid program. Please go back to your department and I encourage you to inform members of your faculty about the program. It’s not a lot of money in some respects and it can be in a category of $2,000 or $4,000 or travel grants that will help a faculty member gain some new expertise or travel to some meetings as long as the come back and it impacts others on the campus or in their department. There’s more of a scholarly oriented research oriented proposal process, set of proposals, which will award up to $4,000. Sometimes there are hybrids that tend to come in with a little from both of those categories, but it is a good dossier-building item if they can get funded for this. The percentages are pretty good for funding and typically about 30 proposals a year on average and 10 or12 will get funded, sometimes more. I encourage you to go back and do this.

We have moved this from the spring into the fall, so you will be seeing that coming around fairly quickly. So our other charge or effort is in a, just being involved in some of the various resources of teaching and attending various activities, our conference on conversations in teaching, being active and involved with that. I teach program, various Biggio Center programs, and a variety of representation of our faculty on other Ad Hoc Committees. We are doing a lot of selection committees and so forth.

This is one we have processed over the past couple of years through the Senate, is a relatively new program supported by our Provost’s Office and administered, once it is identified, administered through the Biggio Center, managed by the Biggio Center, but the Teaching Effectivness Committee does a lot of work on this actually. There’s 2 stages of the Departmental Award for Educational Excellence. One would be the initial application. Doesn’t take a lot of work per se on the behalf of your department. It’s just a few pages on a proposal, pre-proposal, the committee will take a look at those, make a recommendation of inviting maybe 3 or 4 of those for development of a full proposal. We don’t want a lot of departments doing a lot of busy work, but that pre-proposal needs to be pretty convincing. This is an interesting concept because it’s a $30,000 award over 3 years of $10,000 a year which 50% of that is sort of a hybrid of an award for recognizing all the great things that departments are doing to create an atmosphere and a culture supportive of teaching effectiveness and excellence, but also what you are going to do to continue to impact or proposal to impact our campus culture for teaching effectiveness. So that’s the essence of that grant program and we’ll have those announcements coming out at the tail end of the year. Be on the lookout, say December-ish. January then would be a call and hopefully we get the word out and everybody is going to jump in and have a pre-proposal for this.

You’ll learn a lot about your department and it’s an opportunity to really bring some collegiality together, bring some pieces that are important about teaching within your department. It’s not a single person, this award or program recognizes the whole department for it’s investment in teaching and it’s prioritization of teaching activities.

Incidentally this year the recommendation was made and the administration concurred that Biosystems Engineering was the awardee. So this is our second awardee. Mechanical Engineering as it turns out was the first awardee for the program and so this year  I assume we can move forward with another year and we will have 3 programs going sort of simultaneously. The magic will be getting the reporting and the impacts and making sure those impacts are being made across campus.

Okay, I think this is about where we are ending. Just being on the committee is something, I feel, is important to us have professional development activities as well. So a very busy year and just thank this committee. This is one of the hardest working on the campus. Thank you.

Any questions?

Patricia Duffy, chair: I would just like to mention that the survey that Dr. Mulvaney mentioned was conducted about 10 years ago by the Teaching Effectiveness Committee, when Gisela Buschle-Diller was the chair. It is still posted on the Senate Web site, but it takes some digging back to find. If anyone would like to see that 10 year old survey the results are a report from the Senate, you can just e-mail me because I do have it on my computer.

Is there any unfinished business?

Is there any new business? I have one item of new business. Larry Crowley and Gisela Buschle-Diller are completing their terms on the Senate Executive Committee. I’d like to thank both of them for their hard work and service. Larry, I think this if 5 years now on the Senate Executive Committee, which may be a record, I’d have to go back and look through a lot of minutes to see that, but I believe it is.

I’d also like to thank the members of the Steering Committee and the Rules Committee and all of the other Committees from the Senate, for all of their hard work through the past year. I know when Don says encouragement what he means is oh no, another e-mail for me to look again at something else from Steering. I want to thank all of the people who have worked so hard this year in the Senate, all of you Senator too, Thank you very much. James Goldstein and Ping Hu will begin their terms as chair-elect and secretary-elect on July 1, so welcome and congratulations once again to both of you. And as the new officer terms start on July 1 I would like to pass the magic scepter, I mean, gavel, to Larry Teeter, the next Senate Chair and let him close out the meeting. [1:08:42]

Larry Teeter, incoming Senate Chair: Thank you very much Patricia. And thank you very much for all of your hard work this year. I look forward to you as a mentor for next year. Are there any final comments for today’s meeting?

Hearing none, we’re adjourned. [1:09:00]