Transcript Senate Meeting
September 16, 2014
Patricia Duffy chair: Good afternoon, I am Patricia Duffy, Chair of the University Senate. This is our second meeting of the 2014-2015 academic year. 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. In addition we would ask that people limit their comments or questions to no more than 4 minutes at a time. People may speak again, but if anyone wants to speak a second or a third time please be sure that others have had a chance to speak at least once first.
The agenda for the meeting was set by the Senate Steering Committee. It was sent around in advance and is now shown on the screen. So, if we would now please come to order, we will establish a quorum. There are 87 members of the Senate and a quorum requires 45 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 August 26, 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. [2:37]
Dr. Gogue, president: Thank you, good to be with you today. Appreciate each one of you taking time to be here. Since we last met the Board of Trustees had a meeting. I think I went over most of the items on the agenda with you prior to the meeting. All those items were approved so the budget beginning October 1 was approved for the next year. Couple of items that I think we mentioned before were salary increases both at a permanent level as well as a one time level that were included in that budget. So that was done. There was one item that was added at the Board meeting, so it was not discussed prior to the Board meeting and I don’t think it was discussed with the Executive Committee or anyone else with the Senate. It was an acquisition of a piece of property that is at South College and Donahue, about eight-tenths of an acre was actually purchased. Those items usually are not discussed unless they are already signed and agreed upon prior to the meeting. So that was the reason it was not brought to you ahead of time. The academic presentation was by Stew Schneller and his group that is dealing with the Ebola, it was a well received academic presentation. We got a lot of really great comments about the entire team that is working on that.
We will initiate, it’s informal but I have seen a couple of advertisements, formal announcement for the national search for the Vice President for Alumni Affairs. Within the next week or so will appear in the Chronicle. I do want to complement a number of faculty across campus, after about 2 years of a number of faculty groups being involved, Auburn won a rather large CDC Award that deals with obesity, this cuts across a number of different departments. It’s a multi-year program close to a million dollars a year. So we are excited about that new award.
Also want to introduce: Auburn this semester has an ACE Fellow that is working with us, Dr. Melinda Gillmore. Please stand up and let everybody see you. Dr. Gillmore is from Alabama A&M, she will be here this semester, her PhD is from University of California at Davis, her area of specialty is in chemistry with a focus on STEM issues. So we are delighted to have you. She will be at various meetings throughout this semester.
Be happy to respond to questions that you may have. Thank you. [4:57]
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: I want to talk to you about 2 things today. First, a few minutes about the work that’s been going on for the last two years to improve the size and the number of classrooms at Auburn University. So I will show you some pictures in a minute. The reason this is an important moment to talk about this was that the first phase, and we talked about this before here and at other meetings. The Mell Classroom Building was approved by the Board of Trustees to go forward. So that means now the architects can do the working drawings and hopefully begin construction next summer with completion of that facility probably in early 2017. So that’s where we are right now.
I want to talk to you about 3 classroom buildings that are being planned. The first one I just mentioned is the Mell Classroom Building, right here on Mell ST. It will be connected to the Library, I’ll come back to that in a minute with some other pictures. The second one is what we are calling the Roosevelt Classroom Building located right here next to the parking deck next to the stadium. Over here is the outdoor amphitheatre. Then there will be an additional Science Success Building that’s being considered. A significant amount of work needs to happen on these 2 projects, but they are in the pipeline. Just cannot tell you when B and C will come to fruition.
So if you are standing on Mell to the south looking toward the north, this is what the Mell Classroom Building would look like, again it’s connected to the Library. Spidle Hall is over here. This classroom building will have almost 40,000 square feet of assignable classroom space; two large classrooms and then multiple small ones that seat about 36 students. They are being designed to support the newer pedagogies, they are very flexible with the exception of the 2 big lecture halls that seat about 160. Again all of this is the result of about 2 years of work by the classroom planning committee that was put in place and has been asked to move us forward on these projects. [8:05]
A different view, this is the Library, Spidle Hall. The new classroom building will then be closely connected to the Library, students will be able to go in and out of the Library and over into the classroom building, then come and go on Mell St. One question we’ve been asked frequently is, will this entrance (front of the Library) remain open during the construction? Yes it will. We are going to accommodate that so we can still get into the Library from Mell while this building is being built during 2016 and early 2017.
The Roosevelt Classroom building, you can see if you are standing on the green looking to the west. Here is the stadium parking deck, so it will be located in that vicinity. All the detail planning on this piece of the project has not been worked out. The committee will continue to work on this. This is from the southeast, again from the green to give a perspective on what that building would look like. This is a larger building than Mell but again it is almost all classroom space, I don’t think there is any office space in this building; it is surrounded by other buildings that have office space.
I wanted you to see this. To get you oriented here. You can see this is Duncan Drive, so those of you who walk this way to go to a football game across the green, a lot of people go down Duncan; this is the parking deck so Roosevelt will be positioned right here and then the Science & Math Success Center, when it’s built, will be positioned right there. Completion of this project of course requires the demolition of Allison and Parker. So this will significantly change this area of campus. It will also significantly increase our classroom inventory and will give us a lot more flexibility.
One of the challenges we have is that we are at about 97 or 98 percent of capacity, best practice for classroom and laboratory space is about 85 percent so that you have the flexibility to accommodate different size classes in different parts of the campus. So once these projects are completed we will have a lot more capacity to help us plan and better deliver courses and curricula at Auburn University.
This if from the southwest, it is a slightly different view of the Science and Math Success Building. Again you are standing on the campus green. It’s and L shape building but you can’t really see that from this view, and then there is the Roosevelt Building Classroom right there.
The Classroom Facility Committee has worked on this for almost 2 years. That is the membership. I don’t know if you can read that but the slides will be made available and you can go to the Senate Web site and look at these slides again and look at the composition of the committee. We are excited about the opportunities. We can predict with reasonable confidence the timing on the Mell Classroom Building. We can’t on the others because of planning and budgeting for Roosevelt and for the Science and Math Success Center. It’s exciting news. Any questions on that before I move to one other quick topic?
Hilary Wyss, senator English: What happens to Haley?
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: There actually are a number of plans that have been considered on what to do with Haley in the coming years. But it is unlikely that there will be any significant changes made in Haley for 5 to 10 years. One thing you have to remember is we have to have some surge space for the activities that are currently going on in Allison and Parker in order to tear them down and build these new buildings. So some space in Haley will probably be made in Haley to make that transition. I guess the short answer is we really can’t do anything to Haley until these 3 projects are complete. Then we can start to think about changes. There are some interesting options that are being considered in order to make better use of that space over time.
Mike Stern, senator, economics: You partially answered one of my questions. You mentioned to do the Sciences, you have to tear down Parker and whatnot, so where would the people in Parker go if you have to tear it down before you build this additional building?
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: We’d have to find space for them on campus in other areas. One piece of this that is not just classroom buildings would be to build, and again this is in the planning stages, would be to build a new building for the College of Education. So if we are successful and we are optimistic that we can make that happen, then we just have to get all these things coordinated. If Education can move to a new building that is being planned then that opens quite a bit of space in Haley and that could then allow the activities in Allison and Parker to move there temporarily until they can move back.
Mike Stern, senator, economics: I remember, this is my other question, at the academic retreat in August, Dan King made a presentation from Facilities. He had a couple of other buildings that you didn’t mention here; one was the building for graduate education and business, that they had already secured funding for so…
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: They are working on the funding. They have approval to do the planning, so Dean Hardgrave and his staff are trying to raise the funds to build with the understanding that that building will be built with private funds. We are working on raising leadership gifts for these 3 buildings, but these are buildings that will be funded in large part by central resources.
Mike Stern, senator, economics: What about the Nursing Building?
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: It’s in the…same answer…we’re looking for a donor, we would like for Nursing to move out on Donahue as a part of the vision for Health Science Campus, but it’s not interlinked to this. When they move doesn’t affect this project. So when they move is more about funding and private giving. Good questions. [15:32]
Traci O’Brien, senator, Foreign Lang. & Lit: I cannot tell from the picture, what is the total impact on parking in that area for the Mell building?
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: The Mell Classroom Building won’t loose any parking. We won’t add any but we won’t loose any.
Traci O’Brien, senator, Foreign Lang. & Lit: That’s good, thank you.
Dr. Tim Boosinger, provost: With the Mell Classroom Building the target audience would be first and second year students, so most of what we expect to have happening in that building will be core courses.
The other topic I wanted to you about before Bliss Bailey gives his presentation was to ask for your support and cooperation as we try and improve our position relative to securing our information systems. As you know if you listen to the news and read the papers, there have been a lot of beaches in big companies, universities have had serious problems across the country. They are very expensive to solve and they are hard on your reputation. We’ve had 3 incidences that we’ve dealt with in the last couple of years, again they are expensive to work through. One of the things among a list that we are asking everybody to do is to get involved in training and have a better understanding how to protect ourselves against breaches. If you look at breach problems and hackers getting in, it frequently has to do with their ability to get passwords and gain entry that they shouldn’t otherwise be able to gain. So simple things like having strong passwords can provide us a lot of protection. So that’s why we are asking you to spend an hour and go through those training modules. Bliss will talk about it a little bit more, but I just wanted to let you know. I want to emphasize that since I sent all of you a letter asking you to cooperate on that training. I appreciate your support and cooperation. Thank you. [17:49]
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you, Dr Boosinger. Thanks to everyone for coming out on this very, very warm September afternoon. Before I go any further I would like to introduce the officers. [18:09] Dr. Gisela Buschle-diller is our secretary, Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary-elect who’s term will start next July, Dr. Larry Teeter is our chair-elect and his term will also start next July, Dr. Larry Crowley is the immediate past chair and he serves as the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees, Dr. Conner Bailey is our parliamentarian. And also I’d like to introduce our helpful administrative assistant Laura Kloberg. Ms. Kloberg assists with every one of the Senate meetings and also does much and more for us to insure the business of the Senate is conducted as smoothly as possible.
On our agenda today we have one action item, a vote for a replacement member of a Senate committee which Dr. Buschle-diler will present. We have 3 information items; an update on fall enrollment presented by Drew Clark, a discussion of security awareness training presented by Bliss Bailey, and an update on Auburn’s Sustainability Initiative presented by Mike Kensler.
Between Senate meetings the Senate Steering Committee meets regularly. We’re always happy to hear from members of the faculty or from 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 will move now to our one action item for today, approval of one nominee for the Senate Teaching Effectiveness Committee sent forward by the Rules Committee. This is a replacement member. We have throughout the semesters we occasionally have people who leave Auburn or resign from a committee and we will need to have replacements and votes for those replacements. Dr. Buschle-diller will make the report on behalf of the Rules Committee.
Gisela Buschle-diller, secretary: Thank you very much. I would like to take the opportunity to thank everybody. I sent out a call for volunteers and I was flooded with volunteers, I was just totally amazed for all the committees we were looking for. Now we need only one replacement member in this case for the Teaching Effectiveness Committee, the others were University Committees.
This comes from the Rules Committee so it doesn’t need a second. I hope you had a chance to look at the name that is up there and I would like to ask for a vote. If you agree please press A on your clickers, if you don’t agree press B. A=51, B=0
Patricia Duffy, chair: The nomination has been approved by a vote of 51 to zero. Thank you.
That was our only action item for today. Our first information item is the update on fall enrollment from Drew Clark, Director of Institutional Research and Assessment. [21:20]
Drew Clark, Director of Institutional Research and Assessment: Thank you. Last week we took the official enrollment snapshot for Fall 2014, and I am happy to provide the Senate with a brief overview.
Officially, Fall 2014 enrollment is 25,912 students, up 1,048 students (4%) from last Fall. This is Auburn University’s highest ever total-enrollment by 433 students. The previous high was set in 2011.
At the school and college level, some units have registered notable gains over Fall 2013. The Harbert College of Business is up by 400 students (10%), the Ginn College of Engineering is up by 360 students (7%), the School of Nursing is up 106 students (13%), and the College of Agriculture is up 100 students (8%). The largest and even notable decline in enrollment at the School or College level occurred in the College of Liberal Arts, which is down 165 students from last fall (4%).
The number that you find for Auburn’s enrollment if you look in the annual Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac is and FTE enrollment, a figure full-time equivalent, which takes into account the fact that some students don’t go full-time. So for that reference point let me tell you that FTE enrollment is 23,436, up 1,022 FTE students (4.5%) from last Fall, but still comfortably below a 25,000 FTE level.
Turning to new students, let me start with freshmen. The Fall 2014 freshman class is Auburn’s largest ever. It comprises 4,592 students, a total that is 866 students or 23% more than last Fall, which was the smallest new freshman cohort since 2004. These new freshmen are well prepared for college study: Their average ACT score is 27.0 (the scale maxes out at 36), and their average high school GPA is 3.77. By residency, 62% of the new class is composed of Alabamans, with 38% coming from out-of-state. This ratio is not quite the 60%-40% balance that we have set as our ideal mix, but it is an improvement over last fall. Maintaining out-of-state enrollment will be a continuing area of focus. Needs to be.
As for other types of new students:
I’ll close with a couple of observations based on trend data, comparing Fall 2014 with Fall 2004.
You have important presentation to hear and those are simply facts but I’d be happy to field questions if you’ve got them. Thank you.
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Clark. Our next information item is on Security Awareness Training and it will be presented by Bliss Bailey the Interim Chief Information Officer. [27:02]
Bliss Bailey, Interim Chief Information Officer: Good afternoon, I appreciate the Senate Leadership for asking me to do this presentation. I am going to talk to you a little bit about a program that we have called Securing the Human. It relates to cyber security awareness training.
The barbarians are at the gates, and they want your loot. Okay, it’s a real issue. So the barbarians don’t look quite like this anymore, but we really have to take the cyber-crime community seriously. They don’t look like this anymore either. They are more likely to be state sponsored actors. This is a propaganda poster for the North Korean Army and North Korea is actively looking for good intellectual property. The fact that we have nuclear science center on campus, they might be interested in that.
There are folks with political agendas and they are very willing to shut your systems down if they don’t like your opinions. Harvard University had an unfortunate incident with the Syrian Electronic Army. But the most common group that we have to deal with is organized crime.
So, organized crime wants your identity information and they want your money. They are very sophisticated, they are perfectly willing to go around any measures that we try to put into place and they are willing to customize their attacks to get to our information, not only university information, but your personal information. We have seen this. We have had faculty members at this institution that have been targeted and their paychecks have been taken. So it is a very real threat and it has happened.
A few years ago we started trying to tighten things up. We began putting in firewalls. We thought when we began putting in these counter measures that what we would see is that things were calm most of the time and then every once in a while there would be an attempt to get information and we would either know about it or be able to stop it using this technology. What we learned was that actually the threat is constant. It is continuous, it is ongoing, we see as many as a half a million attempts to gain information about our network and break into our systems in a single day, a very real threat.
Another thing that we learned when we put these firewalls in place and began observing traffic patterns on the network is that we saw actually a lot of bad activity emanating from Auburn University and attacking other people out on the internet. These were not from student hackers or nefarious characters that are on our campus they were simply from PCs that had been compromised from folks off campus. They were being used to generate spam, they were being used to generate denial of service attacks, so we got a good view of what was going on, on campus, and we have been able to act very aggressively to try and stamp that out. [30:38] It’s still an issue for us.
The insider threat, you hear about insider threat a lot when you talk about cyber-security. There is two different types of insider threat. There are people who are actively, they are insiders, they are part of your organization, they are employees, and they are trying to steal information from your organization. There is another type of threat and that is people who simply are not following the rules and therefore they create vulnerability for your organization.
That’s what happened in South Carolina. A very smart guy, a system administrator, an IT person, fell for a phishing attempt; his credentials were stolen. Organized crime stole 3.6 million state tax returns. That was the mother-load from a personal information standpoint.
The world has changed, the threats are much more severe than they have been. The hackers are much more sophisticated than they have been. The stakes are higher, not only is there a lot of money at stake but our reputation is at stake as well. [31:44]
the press is full of these types of breaches. The regulatory environment is stricter. The regulatory environment takes several different forms of federal government, there is regulation there, there’s FERPPA, there’s HIPPA, there is a whole raft of financially oriented regulations; 48 state governments, because we have students and alumni that live in essentially every state of the union, well we have people that live in all 50 states, only 48 of those states actually have laws that deal with these issues; so 48 states we have to be aware of their laws and we are subject to some degree to their legal requirements should we have a breach.
And there are industry groups. We do a lot of credit card transactions here. We move about 170 million dollars a year in credit card transactions. That makes us a big target for organized crime, it also means that we are required to follow some fairly stringent standards related to protecting that information. So industry groups like the payment card industry, they are pretty serious about protecting their data, and our data, and their customer’s data. And insurers…when I talk about costs and I talk about risk; one of the ways to mitigate that risk or reduce our exposure is to buy insurance. We do buy cyber insurance. It is expensive, but once you get insurance the flip side of that coin is the insurers then want to have a say in the way you protect the resources that they are insuring. So we have some regulation there that we need to deal with. So our responses have to change. We have to have more effective tools, technology is certainly is something that we are always looking at, we have got to have security by design in the systems that we adopt, everything needs to be built from the ground up with security in mind, but remember we are the weakest link, so to speak. So we’ve got to have more aware users. And that’s the point of the security awareness training that we are rolling out that Dr. Boosinger mentioned to you. [34:02]
So an organization called SANS, a well respected security organization, it’s been around a long time, specializing in cyber security and the program itself is called “Securing the Human.” It’s easy to get to; log into AU Access and choose the employee services tab. Scroll down a little bit and you’ll see the “Securing the Human” icon, you click on that and go right into the system and it presents you with a bunch of videos (23 videos). Don’t be intimidated by that, they’re short, 2–5 minutes each. It takes about an hour, a little over an hour to complete. Watch each of the videos, there is a question at the end of each video. It doesn’t take long to go through them. You can break it up into pieces and it’s pretty effective. Now, if you are a cyber-security researcher, you may not learn anything, but most of us learn something from it. There are tips and tricks that are of value to most all of us in the room.
And when you complete your training you get one of these nifty certificates. And if you are really hard core about it like I am, you can have it printed on a t-shirt. I’m proud to be cyber-secure. If anybody wants a link to the company that will do this for you I’ll be happy to get that for you.
So we’re not trying to turn you into a system administrator. We don’t want you to be an uber geek, we do want you to be a savvy user. We want you to NOT click those suspicious links. We have compromised user accounts that we deal with every week. Many of those are student accounts, but not all of them are student accounts. We think that the security awareness training has a value, we think it can help the institution. The benefits are both personal and professional, because not only are you protecting institutional data you are protecting your own personal data as well. Your credit card numbers, your credentials that you may use for off-campus sites as well, so we can educate ourselves, and I can delete this cartoon and won’t have to use it ever again. Are there any questions? [36:30]
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you very much. Our last information item is an update on the campus sustainability efforts presented by Mike Kensler.
Mike Kensler, Dir. of Campus Sustainability Operations: {37:00] Good afternoon. Thanks for letting me tell you about a project that we’re kicking off. The goal here is to explain what we’re doing and our thinking behind it, tell you a little about the process, why we think it matters, and invite you participation in what we have in mind.
Auburn’s made a lot of commitments to sustainability and we are recognized for those commitments. We are recognized at the national level. There is whole list of things that are not on the list that are here other things that we are doing that reflect that commitment. We’ve been asking ourselves, so what does it mean to fulfill those commitments? What does success look like if we actually do achieve everything that we have committed ourselves to?
Now, if you think of this baby girl here, her goal is clear, it’s right there, there is nothing distracting her and if she can get her whole system moving she’s eventually going to achieve her goal and reach her desired outcome. For us it’s not that easy because we all have all kinds of stuff on our plate today that constantly roll off of our plate, so it’s pretty hard for us to look down the road. And it’s not just us. Politicians are rightfully criticized for just thinking about the next election cycle and a successful outcome and we don’t have the kind of serious long-term conversations we need to have about really important issues. Since the 1960s we’ve recognized, since the Nixon administration, we need a national energy policy. We are still not talking about that very much. For the last 20 years it’s been recognized that we need a national water policy. This crisis that’s looming regarded to water, we aren’t talking about that.
Same thing holds true for business, there’s round criticism over short term thinking that it’s all about earnings, the next quarterly report, what kind of story is Wall Street going to hear that they need to reward or punish what ever that story says. [39:08]
I put that picture of the train tracks on there because when I worked for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the president of CBF (it was a large multimillion dollar organization) would talk about fundraising, he’d says, you know we are laying the track down just before the train shows up. And I think we all feel that way, getting stuff done just before the train arrives. I love that imagery, but it always makes me wonder, well as we are laying those tracks, where are they taking us? Where are we going to end up? So given the fact that we are dealing with all this short-term stuff in front of our face, the fact remains that a key fundamental principle of sustainability is the ability to think long-term, to look past the horizon and figure out where we want to go and what we would like the future to be when it shows up. Not what we think we can get, not what we is realistic based on current thinking, but what’s the future we want to move into both personally and professionally; for individual lives, for institutions, for our communities.
And that means doing these things: reading trends, analyzing data, strategizing, and planning for preferred outcomes. [40:30] I am about halfway through this book called The Big Pivot, and it’s getting a lot of play in the business community now. In fact I met with a new director of sustainability initiative at the Georgia Tech College of Business and he was at a conference where Coca-Cola had just purchased 1,500 copies of this book and distributed it to everybody at the Conference. One of the big pivots he says that business needs to make as we move into the future is to stop the focus on short-term thinking. A lot of other things as well, it’s a really great book, a terrific read if you are looking for something interesting. It gets at the future of business and he also talks about his vision. What sustainable business will look like as we achieve the goals we are trying to set for ourselves.
Well, if we are trying to plan for preferred outcomes, what are our preferred outcomes in fulfilling these commitments. What’s it look like over the time horizon that we can see? So this is the conversation we want to have across campus and even include folks that we work with off campus to help us answer these questions. What will it look like when Auburn is a model of sustainability? And in recognition of our land grant mission, what will we be providing for society? What will we be contributing? You know higher education I would not say targeted, is acknowledged as a real opportunity leader for creating this kind of a future, because we are not only about teaching existing knowledge but we are about innovating and creating new knowledge, creating leaders of tomorrow and applying it to the State and around the world to make the world better.
So this is a conversation we are going to convene over probably a year or two. The process we are going to use…oh, before I get to the process, I want to address those out there who say yes that’s fine to look over the horizon, but what are the next steps we are going to take? It is a valid point. Somebody once said you can’t just stare up the steps, you have to step up the stairs as well. In fact the CEO of Kimberly-Clark was quoted in this book The Big Pivot who makes that point. He said that great teams not only have a big vision, but they also get there by hitting their shot-term milestones.
So this visioning process we want to do is one part of 3 interdependent phases. So articulate the future we want. Set long-term goals, and they will probably come out of the visioning process. And then, that next steps, to be added to the current steps that we are already taking. I put this image up here specifically because it’s an impressionist painting. I am not an artist but I know enough to know that making this kind of a painting you put a little dab of paint here, a little dab of paint there and you keep at it and after a while an image appears and it becomes this beautiful work of art.
So Auburn has started its canvas, it’s nowhere near complete, and we are talking about creating this image of what it is that we are trying to accomplish. In fact in our last strategic plan, we said we will establish sustainability goals based on national metrics. I think that last phrase was put in there so I couldn’t just make stuff up on what I felt like we should be doing. The good news is we have national metrics. These are the metrics that are used in higher education and in business all over the country, all over the world to get us to the next phase. You may remember me explaining how we think about sustainability, it’s not just about being green, it’s about the economy, it’s about society, and it’s about human well-being. So there isn’t a discipline on campus that doesn’t relate directly to this work in creating this future. [44:29] So health, well-being, and work are just as important as the energy efficiency of our buildings.
Our office wants to facilitate a range of processes to get input. We recognize this is a challenge. We don’t often have the space or time, or make the time to step back and think and reflect at a deeper level to get off that surface of thought thinking that one thing goes from one to the next, but it will require those kinds of conversations. So we will have large groups, small groups, formal, informal. We are talking to folks in Communications about doing some online simple 5 minute surveys to help bring data into this conversation. So we will put all of this together and paint a picture, but the way this will serve a real purpose beyond our own needs. There is really not a lot of a positive vision out there about what a sustainable future looks like. A lot of it people think, so greater regulation, less freedom, my life isn’t going to be as rich as it is now. I don’t know why that’s the thought that’s out there, but it certainly is the kind of flourishing future I think we want to show up. So we have a real opportunity to put a future out there that’s very compelling that really will help draw us forward.
Peter Senge is somebody I really respect. He is an expert on organizational learning, on leadership development and on systemic change and he says we can’t just focus on where we are, we really need to create attention between where we are and where we want to be because we may be able to push ourselves, but if there is nothing really pulling us to the future we want. The best example people use is the commitment to land on the moon by end of the decade of the 60s. President Kennedy said, “we will land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade.” He didn’t say, well let’s see what we can accomplish between now and 1970 and see how far we get. And at the time he made that commitment, I don’t know what the ration is but a fairly high percentage of the rockets that were launched in the early 60s blew up before they passed the launch pad, so it wasn’t like we knew how we were going to get there. That kind of aspirational thinking really does create a power that draws us forward and that’s the excitement we think of this conversation.
So why are we doing this besides the reasons that I’ve already stated. Well, I’ve talked with a lot of folks around campus about the importance of doing this and these are the kinds of things I heard back. As I said we made these commitments. It is in service to our land-grant mission. I think the more we fulfill these aspirations, the more directly we will be of value to our students and the communities we serve. It is a necessary response to the world we live in. There is no getting around that and we really do want to create a picture of what we want.
Beyond that, every year The Princeton Review does an annual survey of prospective students and their parents of their hopes and worries for the future. They ask a question, I think it’s poorly worded because it continues to paint sustainability as just being green, but never the less they ask how, is it a consideration when you think of a school in terms of academics when it comes to this stuff, and it comes to university operations. For the last 5 years 60% of students and 60% of parents have said yes. Anywhere from yes it’s a consideration to it’s a really important consideration. It just occurred to me, if we rounded this question out to talk about economic activity, social engagement and human wellbeing these figures would be even larger than they are right now. By the way this year more than 10,000 students and more than 4,000 parents.
We are already being evaluated. The Princeton Review every year produces a list of the groups of green schools and we’ve been honored for a number of years. We are evaluated through our STARS, sustainability assessment program, the president’s climate commitment, have we made a commitment about becoming carbon neutral and we have as of 2009 we made that commitment. We do this sustainability assessment every year. We completed our first one a couple of years ago and we will be doing our next one next year and one of the things they evaluate: Have you articulated a vision? Do you have goals and objectives? So we want to be able to answer yes to that. [49:09]
You may have seen this map, it was on the campus Web site. Somebody asked the question, so what’s the greenest college in every state. Well there we are, Auburn University. I can tell you from my own experience getting to know the other campuses around the state, right now nobody is even close to Auburn. The closest is UAB and they just opened a sustainability office.
I put this one in because it is just kind of a strange one but this for profit energy company wanted to look at the top 25 football schools and say, they are good at football, but how green are they really? And they looked at these criteria. In looking at their review it was pretty quick and sloppy and stuff like that but who know how valid it is, but the point is, and this is another point made in the book The Big Pivot, people are looking it’s a transparent world and what we do is recognized and measured. So here is where Auburn came out, number 22, I think that’s debatable I don’t see much difference between that and number 15. Clearly the schools at the top and there is a lot behind these numbers that indicate that we really are moving quickly in the right direction.
Another little interesting thing is where the University of Alabama comes out, they actually come our number 25 and it’s the only school that the assessors made this comment about. They really need to step it up. So that’s not very good to have on your résumé as an institution. So with that in mind and when you think of quotes like this from Dan Estes, a former law professor at Yale and the Director of the Department of Energy and Environment, it’s recognized that sustainability going to be integrated thoroughly throughout every kind of firm, every business line, every function, every employee, and every firm that has this vision and the capacity to implement it those are the firms and it’s the same point made in the book The Big Pivot and a lot of other books, are going to be the ones that make money in the future and are going to be successful and viable. I don’t think it’s true just of businesses, I think it’s true of institutions of higher learning, of communities, and of societies.
So why in the world would we at Auburn University relinquish our leadership position in higher education in sustainability in this state? More and more businesses, more and more communities, more and more organizations are going to be looking for the expertise to help them move forward. And why in the world it shouldn’t be Auburn, it is Auburn. Our capacity to do this should only grow and we think that is another reason to have this compelling conversation because it will help us keep us exactly where we are.
I am happy to entertain any comments and questions. We invite you, we urge you and encourage you to participate in these conversations. One of the principles of sustainability having the whole system in the room everybody engaged, so we really would like you to participate. If you have advice and counsel on how we can best do this, we will welcome that as well.
Last thing. I was asked by Nannette Chadwick to invite you all when this meeting is over to come over to the Hound because there is a faculty mixer to have conversations about sustainability and what is happening with the faculty. The academic sustainability programs is sponsoring this over at the Hound. There will be appetizers, a cash bar, goes on to 6 o’clock. The one held last year was a lot of fun. I know as soon as this is over that’s where I’m going. So please join the crowd over there. Hope to see you there.
Any questions or comments? Thank you.
Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you very much. That concludes our information items for this afternoon.
Is there any new business?
Is there any unfinished business?
Hearing no new or unfinished business we stand adjourned. [53:30]