Transcript Senate Meeting
August 26 2014
Patricia Duffy chair: I am Patricia Duffy, Chair of the University Senate. This is our first meeting of the 2014-2015 academic year, so I'd like to welcome everyone to the Senate. Some of you are returning senators and some of you are at your first meeting as 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. Also, as we will have a vote today, please pick up a clicker if you haven't already.
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 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.
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 86 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.
Our first item of business is approval of the minutes from the June 17, 2014, Senate meeting. These minutes have been previously 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?
The motion carries. Our next agenda item will be comments from President Gogue.
Dr. Gogue, president: I want to welcome everybody back, but the Provost told me that 91% of our 9-month faculty taught this summer. I’m sure some of you didn’t get away very much of the summer, but we are delighted to have all of you back. From all the reports that I have gotten we had a very good first week so I appreciate all the hard work you are doing.
This summer there were a couple of announcements that are particularly important and faculty played a key role in these announcements. One was the expansion of GE Aviation in the area of Additive Manufacturing in the College of Engineering. The Dean and a variety of faculty were absolutely critical in that company deciding to expand their operations in Additive Manufacturing here in Auburn.
Second one had to do with faculty from the School of Pharmacy. Last week, Baxter, a drug company that makes renal filters as I understand for kidney issues, with a 300 million dollar expansion. When I went to the openings and talked with the people, the comments that I got were about how favorable faculty had been at Auburn in assisting them in their relocation during the expansion of their facilities.
Third thing, I got a very nice letter from Kentucky State University, relative to Constance (Hendricks) and it goes on and on…she spent a semester up there on leave from our institution and a senior presidential fellow at that institution and they talk about the tremendous advise and counsel to be able to expand their Nursing Program in areas that they had not been able to do. The President wrote a nice letter and Constance I mentioned it to you before, but we are proud of what you were able to do at that institution.
We have a Board of Trustees meeting next week. There are 3 items I wanted to mention to you, one is that you will begin to see some changes around Cater Hall, the old white building at the center of campus, about 100 years old. There will be some exterior work done. Facilities tells us that when you take a residential property and you use it as an office building, the weight of the various file cabinets ends up where the building sort of begins to sink in the middle. So there will be some efforts to deal with the exterior as well as the interior over the next couple of years.
The second thing we will take to the Board is approval of the first phase of the Central Classroom Facility that we have talked about a number of times. Remember the change from a single facility to two facilities. This is the component that is referred to as the Mell Commons portion, that is in front of the Library. It’s about 75,000 square feet of classroom space that will go in. Selection of the architect, construction manager, and schematics will be addressed. So we feel good about that particular project.
The third thing I wanted to mention is the guidelines for Auburn’s budget that begins October 1, is approved by the Board or gone over by the Board in detail at the June meeting of the Board of Trustees. They approved guidelines, so over the summer a group of people put together the actual budget and the only thing I would share with you is the budget is basically going to by all the guidelines that were presented. There is some increase in compensation both at the permanent level as well as the one time level, the December time period, so there is some compensation increase in the budget. In fact that’s probably three-fourths of the budget increases for the institution.
Two vice presidential changes that I wanted to mention to you. One through a national competitive search, Bobby Woodard, where’s Bobby? He’s back in the back, the new Vice President for Student Services. We are delighted to have you, he started back in early August. The second one is Debbie Shaw, who’s been the Vice President for the Alumni Association for 11 or 12 years, Debbie will be retiring in early 2015, the January, February time period. [7:00] So there will be a search that will begin shortly to try to fill that particular position.
The final thing that I want to mention. I was asked by the Executive Committee to talk just a minute about the SEC Network. Some of you have been seeing all that stuff on television. The Southeast Conference chose to select a partner, ESPN, to put a channel on for your sporting events. I forgot the number, roughly 1,000 live sporting events on that channel. The goal of the Conference when we started was that we get 20 million households to be able to be a part of that. The footprint of the Southeast Conference, all the states that have an SEC school in it is about 29 million. So our goal, we hope, would get it up to 20 million by the second year. It actually opened last week with 92 million households. So, shows how good our planning was, but never-the-less, it allows an awful lot of the Olympic sports, women’s sports as well as football and basketball and men’s sports to be on, but it’s an effort to try to generate additional revenue, but also showcase a variety of sports that are often not showcased currently through the CBS and ESPNs.
Be happy to respond to questions. Thank you. [8:40]
Patricia Duffy chair: Thank you, Dr. Gogue. Our next item on our agenda is to have remarks from our Provost, Dr. Boosinger.
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: At the last meeting I gave you just a little bit of information about where we are with COACHE Survey, this is a faculty job satisfaction survey. Now I want to present a little bit more information, hopefully that will encourage you to go to our Web site and read the full report. At the end maybe most importantly I want to show you what we are considering doing about some of the weaknesses that were identified, but I want to emphasize that overall this report was very positive about how faculty feel about Auburn University. [9:34]
I won’t read all of this to you but the important thing is to know that strategic goal #4 The University willing to reach productivity by supporting faculty vitality and ongoing faculty development. One of the ways to do that is to have a better understanding about how faculty feel about their work at Auburn University and what we can do to make faculty more productive and happier in their work environment.
So we are using this instrument from the Harvard School of Education. There are over 90 participants involved in this. The primary reason for this slide is I wanted you to see that we have been participating in this program now beginning in 2005, we participated in 2008, 2010; and now we are looking at the 2013-14 survey. In this cycle we had the opportunity to look at not only tenured but untenured faculty and pre-tenured faculty, so it is more comprehensive than it was in the past. [10:57]
Just to give you a perspective on the participants, this is just about Auburn, a population of over 1,000 faculty, we have 526 responding for 52%. You can see down this column in all these different groups right around the 50% mark in most. Pre-tenured faculty have the highest participation rate along with female faculty, but I think those are great numbers if 52% we significantly exceeded the participation rate of our peer institutions. I know you can’t read this but I’d like for you to go to the Web site and look at this table because it’s just what it says it is when you get it right in front of you on your computer screen, it’s the COACHE results at a glance. This gives you a chance real quick to see, when you get to where you can read all of this, the green bar is the top 30% the red is the bottom 30%, we’re the diamond. So you can see on this particular one, nature of work, we are in that top 30% and it goes all the way across and you can see how we relate to the whole cohort. It gives you a perspective if you are a visual learner. Like I am, it gives you a great place to start before you look at the rest of the data.
These are some selected results related to the research, again I won’t read all these, you can look and see some patterns. These are time spent on research, generally a high level of satisfaction compared to our peer institutions. Expectations for external funding, the satisfaction level is lower. These are very high numbers, influence on focus of research, good number; Support for obtaining grants there is a low level of satisfaction, so we need to do some work in that area. And then course release for research, also a much lower level of satisfaction.
Again selected ones related to personal and family policies, which are a part of the 20 criteria that were being benchmarked. So you can see that the level of satisfaction with tuition waivers and remission is not very high even though we have very competitive tuition waiver policies. [13:30] I thought is was interesting and I am going to talk about this at the very end, the reason we need some committee to work on this is is to help us better understand why our faculty that probably don’t have college age children are the least satisfied with that particular policy (and there may be very good explanations), but the least satisfied with that particular policy.
You can see from this I think, very quickly that the areas of concern center around issues related to work life. That’s going to be a focus of moving forward in order to address some of these. I won’t go through each one of those now.
Selected departmental quality items, again pretty straight forward these are high scores. Faculty are generally satisfied with intellectual vitality, all the way to scholarly productivity in pre-tenure, like I said I don’t need to read all those to you but you can look down through those and see that there are high scores in all of them but particularly intellectual vitality of a pre-tenure experience.
Global satisfaction at the department level, again good numbers compared to our peers. Above the mean for these, and same for the institution. Overall we should feel very good about the results of the COACHE survey. Having said that. These are 5 areas that jump out of this survey where we need to invest some time and thoughtful consideration about how to move forward. What can we do to continue to improve Auburn University. I’ll read these 5.
This benchmark was on research within that benchmark support for obtaining grants for pre-award experience. Under personal family policies, one that jumps out is spousal hiring, spousal and partner hiring-programs. We will come back with more data on that. We do that, on an ad hoc basis recommendations are developed in the departments to the dean to the Provost’s Office and we do what we can to be competitive relative to placing spouses that are a good match for Auburn University. [15:58]
However, some of our peers have a more structured process than ours, I mention that because that’s one thing we might look at compared to where we are right now. But I wanted you to know that we do spousal hiring whenever it is reasonable.
This one under the leadership benchmark there were concerns, we scored low under fairness in evaluating work by heads and chairs, also concerns in department quality about addressing substandard faculty performance. So that’s something that needs further discussion. And under appreciation and recognition by faculty there was a low score, people did not feel like the president and the provost fully appreciated what was going on in the Colleges and Schools. We’ll come up with strategies to address that as well.
This is the last slide. I want to show you what we have tentively planned how we are going to address those 5 benchmarks where we scored low. Remember there is a whole lot of them where we scored really high, but we are going to approach it in this way, at least that is the recommendation right now and it’s open for discussion. Still working with the Senate Leadership on possibly some more appointments to this committee. So this committee will be asked to basically function as an implementation group for strategic priority 2 and we will work through those 6 recommendations that are directly linked with what we learned from the COACHE Survey. We will evaluate the need for policies related to spousal /partner hiring, flexible work-loads. Again, this number one and number two, those are work-life issues. Remember on an earlier slide one of lowest scores we had in the entire survey had to do with satisfaction relative to campus childcare, of course we don’t currently offer any on-campus childcare. Address a need for increased faculty appreciation and recognition, I mentioned that and we are going to what we can about that. We would actually like some more feedback and specifics on what the exact issues are and what we can do to improve. Assess a need for enhanced training for department heads and chairs. We started an annual process of having a retreat for heads and chairs and associate deans and deans in August every year about 2 weeks before classes start. We are going to look at implementing so training sessions for supervisors not just heads and chairs in the fall and the spring, probably will be shorter, maybe 2 hour sessions on better understanding the budget, conflict resolution, hiring, the kinds of things that heads and chairs are specifically expected to deal with, but also evaluation of performance, because in the COACHE Survey that’s the concern that is coming through as a pretty loud message to us is that we need to do a better job of evaluating faculty than we are right now.
Develop and enhance support to sustain increased research and productivity and then finally to create a commission that’s a proposal from my office that’s on academic careers of women at Auburn University. As you read through the survey, and I encourage you again, go to the Web site read the whole COACHE Survey Document, it’s a number of pages, it has a lot of good information in it. One of the messages that comes out of that is that female associate professors don’t feel like they are being supported and mentored to professor. Exactly what all the issues are, I am not sure, I can guess at some, but I think it would be productive to put a group together to begin to develop some recommendations on how to address those concerns [20:20] The reason I am spending more than just a few seconds on this topic is that this is the one area where since we first did this COACHE Survey in 2005 where we have trended down in every year. So that I felt like rather than just appointing a committee we are actually going to put a commission together, Probably bring in an outside consultant from another university that has addressed these issues effectively and see if we can’t make some progress on it. Because I think again it’s that downward trend that we need to pay attention to.
So this is Jarred Russell, Department of Kinesiology, has agreed to chair the committee, these are the current members, there will probably be another member or two added to this list and we will begin to work on this project in earnest this fall semester. [21:21]
That’s all I had on the COACHE Survey, any comments, questions? One last thing on a different topic, I wanted you to know that we’ve initiated the search process for a dean of the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. The committee has met, we engaged a search firm and we are launching that search. The position has not been announced yet, we are still going through some of the processes, but hope to get that announced in the next week or two. [21;52]
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you, Dr Boosinger. People in the back if you’d like to filter down and take a seat, please feel free to do so there’s quite a few on this side.
I know everyone is busy with the start of the new academic year, so I will be brief in my remarks. First, I'd like to introduce the officers. Dr. Gisela Buschle-Diller is our Secretary. Dr. Laura Plexico is the Secretary-Elect, whose term will start next July. Dr. Larry Teeter is our Chair-Elect, and his term will also start next July. Dr. Larry Crowley, the immediate Past Chair, serves as the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees. Dr. Conner Bailey is our parliamentarian. I'd like to thank Dr. Constance Hendrix for her previous excellent service in this role, and to thank Dr. Bailey for agreeing to serve in this capacity.
Also, I'd like to introduce our helpful administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg. Ms Kloberg assists 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. She tries to keep us on track, we are a difficult group, the Executive Committee, I’ll speak for myself to keep on track, but she does her best to make sure that we get things done on time.
In addition to the Senate meetings, the Senate functions between times via its committees. The Steering Committee sets the agenda for the Senate meetings, and also acts for the Senate in any matters that come up between meetings. Steering meets on a regular schedule, which is posted to the Senate website, along with the committee's agendas and minutes. The Steering committee includes the Provost, the 5 senate officers, and 4 additional faculty members. These additional faculty members are Mike Baginski, Sara Wolf, Emily Myers and Keven Yost.
Another important committee is the Rules Committee, the "committee on committee." Rules is responsible for providing nominees to Senate committees to the Senate for approval, and faculty nominees to University Committees to the Central Administration for approval. The Rules committee includes the 5 Senate officers, and 6 additional faculty members, elected by the Senate. These faculty members are David King, Mark Taylor, Lisa Kensler, Vicky van Santen, Rusty Wright, and Peter Stanwick.
Rules has been very busy over the summer, and you will shortly be asked to approve some additional nominations to Senate committees.
The committee structure is essential to shared governance at Auburn, and I would like to thank everyone who is serving or who has served on Senate and University committees. Early in the spring, we will send out a call for new volunteers, so please consider volunteering at that time.
I have a few remarks relative to Senate meetings in general. It's important that Senators attend all Senate meetings, or if they can't attend, that they send a substitute from their unit. There is a constitutional rule that if a Senator misses 3 consecutive meetings with no substitute, the unit will be asked to elect a new Senator, so it's important that Senators or their substitutes sign in so we know you were here.
As I mentioned before, if you wish to speak, please go to the microphone and state your name, whether you are a senator or not, and your academic unit. Although everyone is invited to speak, Senators should be allowed to speak first. 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.
At the outset, a year can seem like a long time, but I know from previous experience that this year will pass quickly. The Senate leadership is particularly interested in the strategic priority related to enhancing faculty success. The Provost has already mentioned the COACHE survey, which is providing important input to this strategic priority. Another initiative for the leadership this year will be clarifying the role of the Senate Administrative Evaluation Committee in light of the relatively new central process of periodic evaluations of all department heads and chairs. We also have an ad hoc committee on strategic budgeting, as approved by the Senate at the last meeting, and Dr. Teeter will present the membership as an information item shortly.
I am always happy to hear from members of the faculty or of the broader Auburn community if there are issues of concern or matters that folks believe should come to the attention of the leadership team.
Thank you for your time. Are there any remarks or questions?
Thank you. We have one action item today, approval of nominees for Senate committees sent forward by the Rules Committee. Although we approved most of our new committee members in May, some committees still need new members so we have additional nominees. Dr. Gisela-Buschle-diller will make the committee report. [27:40]
Gisela-Buschle-diller, secretary: Thank you very much everyone. The Rules Committee nominates members and the Senate already voted on most of the members in the May Senate meeting, but we have some replacement or some late appointments and Laura Kloberg already posted this list of nominees on the Senate Web site. I hope you had a chance to look at it.
This motion comes from a standing Senate Committee, so it needs no second. Is there discussion?
Patricia Duffy, chair: Hearing none, I'll call for a vote. Please press A to approve these selection and B if you wish to vote no. (Count vote). The nominees are ratified by a vote of 57 to 3.
That was our only action item for today. We have two information items. First, we will hear from Dr. Relihan, the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies, who has a presentation on the revised measures for the Student Learning Outcomes in our general education curriculum. Dr. Relihan? [29:17]
Constance Relihan, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies: First of all, thank you for having me back. What I want to do is as briefly as is prudent let you know about some actions that the Gen Ed Committee (Core Curriculum and General Education Committee) took late last spring, and that is being presented to you as an information item.
As you all know for the past 3 years we have been collecting assessment data on a course by course basis and we have compiled that information along with information from surveys of recent graduates, the Collegiate Learning Assessment Instrument, the NESSE Survey of Student Engagement to come up with the information that we’ve presented to our creditors, to SACS about our student’s competency in our General Education Outcomes.
Along the way we have heard some comments from those of you that have been doing the assessments about parts of the outcomes and certain measures that were not working very well or that did not match up very well with what you were actually teaching. Of course we’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the quality of the data that we receive in areas where the assessments seem to be working and in places where it didn’t. So as a result of that 3 years of work and reflection and thinking, we determined as a committee that we wanted to make some revisions to some of the outcomes. I know there is a lot of text here, but it is all on the Senate Web site and I hope you all have an opportunity to look at it if you haven’t already.
The outcomes that are in orangey-red are the ones that we have tweaked. One of them more so than others. Outcomes 2 & 3, which pertain to analytical reading and ability to critique and construct an argument; those we simply condensed and clarified the measures that are being used to address those outcomes. That was really in response to comments that we got from people in Philosophy and English, the primary areas that are assessing for these outcomes about the overly complicated nature of the measures that we were using.
Outcome 8, we did revise a bit. And you are seeing there the previous unrevised outcome. We revised that outcome a bit because of 2 problems. One related to the quality of data we were receiving. In other words we’ve been asking students to be informed and engaged citizens and frankly, none of the data that we were gathering from the individual classes was able to speak much to the engagement piece. It’s the core History courses, the core Political Science courses, the core Economics courses, and a few other courses that are assessing for that and honestly occasionally someone would have a survey in which they asked students if they registered to vote, which didn’t seem terribly robust data. And as our number of international students grows it didn’t even seem to be data that all of our students could provide. So you will see we revised that outcome a bit and the measures that go along with it.
Item 10 on scientific literacy, we’ve heard for 3 years reservations about the first measure related to that outcome. And so we revised that. The largest revision is to outcome number 5, which we decided to delete. We did not choose to delete it because it was irrelevant rather because all of the other outcomes are versions of number 5. This is what we are doing in all of our majors all of the time. We are teaching our students to solve open ended complex, multi-step problems. They may be engineering problems or history problems or agriculture problems, but that’s what a university education is. We had been assessing for that in our math courses, and the department of math as related to us by the chair of that department was not convinced that they were doing a good job of assessing for it and that eliminating that outcome really posed no heartburn for the math department.
We can go through these changes in a bit more detail. Here you will see what we have done to SLO 2–Analytical and critical reading simplified from 7 to 4 measures. For the first part of the SLO 3–Ability to critique and argument, again from 9 down to 4 (measures). 8 down to 5, the idea here is to make things as simple as they can be in order to gather the data that we are currently gathering. There’s number 5 in it’s entirety. And as I say the committee voted to eliminate that. This will have no bearing on the courses that students take. Our students are required to take a core math class. The math classes were assessing for 2 outcomes, SLO 4 and SLO 5. Students still have to take a core math class and it will now just be assessing for SLO 4.
The political awareness outcome you will see we revised the general outcome to be, students will be informed about world geopolitical systems. Got rid of engagement. Though honestly our students are remarkably engaged. The number of hours they spend volunteering and thinking about the society in which they live is documented by things that they are doing outside of core classes is quite large, but this is how we decided to revise that outcome. Then under the outcome 10, understand the methods of science and technology, instead of saying articulate the philosophical and historical foundations of modern science, we revised that to, place current knowledge in the context of the development of the specific discipline. Which was really what the committee had been after all along so that students understood that science is a growing field that builds upon previous achievements. I don’t think the committee ever intended to mandate that people needed to be teaching about Gallieo, or Gaylen, or whomever. So this was an attempt to clarify and simplify what we are doing. If you are interested you can go to that link:
http://www.auburn.edu/administration/governance/senate/website/agendas/2014-2015/Aug14/Revised_SLO_measures.pdf
and you will see all of the pre-revision and post-revision outcomes and measures. The committee voted on this as I said last spring, Senate Leadership determined that this was an information item, so I am bringing it to you. If there are questions or comments I’d be happy to hear them. I do again want to thank you for everything that you are doing to assess our student’s general education competency. It is much appreciated, I am afraid it doesn’t get to go away just because the imminent visit of SACS has passed, but we may be working to find ways to make that assessment process perhaps less individually course based because the goal is not to make life more difficult. I am seeing some of my old CLA colleagues in the back and I know exactly what they are thinking I fear. But the goal is to gain knowledge and use that knowledge to help improve our teaching. So thank you for that.
Are there any questions or comments? Happy to take them.
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you, Dr. Relihan.
Our next information item is to provide you information on the membership of the ad hoc strategic budgeting committee. Dr. Teeter will present the membership. The members were selected by the Rules committee after our June meeting, in accordance with the resolution passed at that meeting.
Larry Teeter, chair-elect: Good afternoon. As Patricia mentioned this is just an information item. This happened, passing the resolution at our last meeting so subsequent to that in the middle of the summer we assembled this committee to take on the charge of analyzing current budget situation or at least becoming more familiar with it and looking at some of the budget proposals that the administration has been working on for the last couple of years now. And just trying to get comfortable with the process of moving forward with changes to our university budget systems.
As you can see it is a pretty diverse committee. We’ve got some supporting representatives from the administration and also a representative from each school or college on the list. If you have any questions about budgeting procedures or methods that are being proposed or just general questions that you have about what’s going on with the budgeting operations and processes, just give me an e-mail it’s teeter@auburn.edu and I’d be happy to bring them to the next committee meeting. We are meeting probably about every 2 to 3 weeks and our report is due at the end of March 2015. We will have our 3rd meeting next week.
Any questions?
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Teeter. That concludes our information items.
Is there any new business?
Is there any unfinished business?
Hearing no new or unfinished business we stand adjourned. [41:24]