Transcript General Faculty Meeting
October 28, 2014
This is an incomplete transcript due to a failure in the pick-up to the recorder.
Only 19 minutes were captured.

Patricia Duffy, chair:  Welcome to the fall faculty meeting. I’m Patricia Duffy, chair of the University Faculty. If you’d like to speak about an issue or ask a question please go to the microphone and wait to be recognized, then please state your name and your academic unit so that we can get that in the minutes.

The agenda for the meeting was set by the Senate Steering Committee, it was sent around in advance and it is now shown on the screen. So if we would please come to order now. Our first item of business is approval of the minutes of the March 25, 2014 Faculty Meeting. These minutes have been previously posted to the Senate Web site. Are there any changes, additions, or deletions to these minutes? If there are no corrections the minutes stand as approved.

Our next agenda item  will be comments from Dr. Jay Gogue, our president.

Dr. Gogue, President:  Thank you all. I have only 3 or 4 things I want to share with you. I hope you will tell you colleagues how much we appreciate this; we got notice over the last couple of days, we have 2 more Rhodes Scholar finalists. They will be interviewed in the next couple of weeks. That’s really important for a university and I don’t have to tell you, the Honors College and faculty do a great job working with developing them. We have a number of finalists in a variety of the others, whether it’s Gates, Cambridge, or Marshall, or whatever, Truman, but we have 2 new Rhodes Scholar finalists and we are excited about that.

Secondly, I want to thank those that worked hard to make sure the world affairs conference or symposium that was held last Friday went off without a hitch. We had 4 star admiral with us as well as Senator Jeff Sessions, discussion of diseases that are from a world wide perspective, ISIS, Middle Eastern questions, but from comments we received and based on participation it was well received with a lot of interest.

I’ll mention to you that the School of Kinesiology is moving forward in being able to form a partnership with the U.S. Olympic Committee in which we will actually be designated as a U.S. Olympic training site. I think in the last couple of weeks we had the first matches of team handball that was played over at Beard Eaves. We are excited about their work.

The Southeast Conference has selected 3 individuals for their academic leadership development program. It’s a year long program that interacts with all 14 schools within the SEC. The ones selected from Auburn were; Dewayne Searcy from the Harbert College of Business, Bret Smith from the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction, and Ann Franco-Watkins from the College of Liberal Arts.

I want to mention 2 other things. We have a Board of Trustees meeting next week there are no issues that relate to the academic side of the university that are part of that agenda. There are some academic issues but they all relate to AUM.

The final thing, and I guess I would encourage you to help us share the message, if you will, in the last week or so there have been political robo calls that have gone out from the college campus. Now I don’t understand this but they are able to do something called “ID Spoofing” and it makes the receiver of the call believe that it is coming from the White House or Auburn University or where ever, so you are able to do that. It’s a felony offence to do it but people are doing it, which has brought a lot of criticism from elected officials and those running for office that Auburn has selected this candidate or that candidate and we are advertizing. Please be sure you know, Auburn has not done that. But it’s apparently something fairly easy and I’ll tell you…no I won’t…

I appreciate you all being here. Thank you. [4:06]

Patricia Duffy, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue. I have just a few remarks this afternoon. This is the fall meeting of the General Faculty. There are 2 General Faculty meetings each year, one in the fall and one in the spring. Typically the spring meeting is in March. In addition there are 10 meetings of the University Senate one in every month except for December and July. Everyone is welcome to attend the Senate meetings, you don’t have to be a senator to attend and to speak at the meetings. The faculty meetings and the Senate meetings are important aspects of Auburn’s shared governance. In addition there are numerous Senate and University Committees with faculty representatives. Early next semester you will receive a call for volunteers for these committees, please consider volunteering for a committee that matches your interest. The committee provide faculty the opportunity to have influence on the development of Auburn’s policies. To see the full array of committees you can go to the Senate Web site and click the links to take you to a description of the committees, which will include their charges and also the current membership.

The faculty officers also serve as senate officers. Dr. Gisela Buschle-Diller is our secretary, Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary-elect, who’s term will start in July, Dr. Larry Teeter is our chair-elect and his term will also start in July, Dr. Larry Crowley, the immediate past-chair serves as the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees. Dr. Connor Bailey is our parliamentarian. He is out sick today so he could not be here this afternoon.

Every year we have elections for a new secretary-elect and a new chair-elect. This year’ nominating committee consists of Anwar Ahmed from the College of Engineering, Bob Cochran from the College of Business, Bruce Gladden from the College of Education, Bob Locy from Sciences and Math, Ann Beth Presley from Human Sciences, and Hilary Wyss from Liberal Arts. If you would like to nominate yourself or another faculty member for office please contact one of them or you could contact a member of the Senate Executive Committee to pass that information along. [6:17] If you do you have any questions about the responsibilities of the officers please feel free to contact me or one of the other officers and we will do our best to answer your questions.

Finally I’d like to introduce our helpful administrative assistant Laura Kloberg. Ms. Kloberg assists us with every one of the Senate and Faculty meetings and also does much more for us between meetings to ensure the business of the Senate is conducted as smoothly as possible.

For our agenda today we have 3 items. We will have an update on the Strategic Plan from our Provost Dr. Boosinger. Dr. Hankes, our Director of Student Counseling Services, will then provide us with information on services available to students. And for our third item we will get an update on the Internal Grants Program (IGP) from Art Chappelka, chair of the Faculty Research Committee and John Liu, Associate Vice President for Research.

Thank you for your time are there any remarks or questions for me? If there are no comments or questions I will call on Dr. Boosinger to give us an update on the Strategic Plan.

Dr. Boosinger, Provost: [7:30] Thank you Patricia. What I hope to do is  in 7 slides summarize the implementation that’s taken place in our Strategic Plan during its first year. So as we go through this know that it is not comprehensive but I am just trying to point to the highlights and make sure you are familiar with our progress to date. We will continue over the next 4 years to do the best we can to achieve the strategies and goals laid out in the Strategic Plan.

This is available on the Web site if you want to look at it later. You may remember that we started out with 5 broad strategic categories, 8 strategic goals, and 23 continuing institutional commitments. I am not going to go through all of those but I wanted you to know in the first year we had made satisfactory progress on 75% of our goals, I think we can take pride in that. The limiting factors in achieving those goals, they were twofold, one is that we have to secure additional benchmarking data and two we still have to identify resources to put some of these things in place, but resources have been indentified for some of the ones I am going to talk about.

Under strategic priority number one, which focuses on student success; I think we can take great pride in what’s been accomplished in the last year or two years as we look at first year student retention is at 9.3%, we look back to 2009 it’s 86% so we’ve made significant progress on first year retention. [9:17]

4-Year graduation rates have increased from 36% in 2009 to 46.8%. I think the thing we are most proud of is that our 6 year graduation rate is currently 70.9% rounding off to 71% if you will. In 2004 we were at 61%, 10% that is a significant accomplishment over those years. In 2006 we were at 67%. So we are making significant progress on our 6-year graduation rate and that is good for all of us. You might be asking, well how did we do that? We took a number of steps and I won’t go though all of them, but we put a high priority on academic advising, on career counseling–trying to help students make good decisions in their majors because the earlier they make a good decision the more likely they are to graduate in 4 years. [10:15] We’ve done, with your support, we now require mid-term grades for core courses; we put in, again with your support, an early alert program which we think we are seeing significant advantages to that. Degree works now works. We have strongly encouraged, Dr. Relihan and I and anyone that will listen to us talking about finishing in 4. We have the support of the student leadership and achieving that goal over time so we are proud of that.

Then finally I wanted to mention Camp War Eagle, we’ve invested time and resources in working with appearance and explaining the importance of graduating in 4 years and how that is going to save money and reduce student debt and that it is reasonable to take 15 credit hours every semester in order to earn a bachelor’s degree in 4 years. So we are proud of those accomplishments.

We’ve maintained the academic profile of freshman students with all of these other changes, even with the increase in enrollment we saw this year our average ACT for incoming students is right at 27. We stayed close to our percentage of distribution between residents and non-residents, we are currently at 62% residents and 32% non-residents. Our Pell Grant eligible recipients at Auburn University are 13.2%, we haven’t moved that very much but we hope to move that to 20% in order to do more to help students with financial need that have the academic skills to be successful at Auburn University. We have expanded our recruiting efforts into Chicago, St. Louis, and Dallas. We are continuing to work to enhance our relationships with 2-year colleges, again hoping to recruit and retain the very best students from the 2-year system.

Again we are still under strategic priority 1: Enhancing student success, you may remember in the plan that we made a commitment to increase our undergraduate enrollment of international students to 1,000 over 5 years. To do that we are going to partner with a company called Shorelight. While we are nearing that completion of that agreement and plan to put that process in motion this year hoping to have some students begin that, what we call a pathway program which enables them to make a transition into the Auburn University population next fall. We are excited about that opportunity. Again, shooting for 1,000 undergraduate international students by 2018. [13:13]

You should know that we currently are over 300. While we were writing the plan the Office of International Programs has continued to work on international Students, so we are already seeing some increase during this transition.

We are striving to strengthen our role in the development of e-learning and distance learning. The highlights, and there are a lot of details there, but the highlights are shown up here. we signed an agreement with a company called Everspring that will help us develop 3 undergraduate programs. Negotiations are still going on and we haven’t decided yet exactly what those 3 programs are going to be, those decisions will be made soon and I will update you at a future meeting, but we are still working with the colleges and schools to identify those.

You may remember we talked about this, the vision was there would be opportunities for what we call completer students, students that have a desire to finish college but for reasons of life were never able to complete it through an on campus program. So we are optimistic that is going to grow and prosper in the coming years. One of the things that Everspring will do is support instructional design, program marketing, student recruitment and student services partnering with Auburn University in multiple areas.
Then finally, under this category I wanted to mention the Eagle Classrooms, this is an engaged active student learning laboratories. I visited one today, Dr. Locy allowed me to come this morning and observe his class in action. I am very impressed by the technology and the opportunity for active learning, or what some people might call a flipped classroom. We have 2 of those one in Haley and one in the Science Center. Actually there is some discussion about building a 3rd one giving that the demand for the space is high.

We have initiated a process to develop a common mobile platform or at least to evaluate it. To do that we have a 100 student pilot place in one of the Biology courses, so we will assess that at the end of this semester and decide how we might or if we might see down that path in 2015 and 2016. Well that’s a lot of material but a lot has been done. More has been done than I can cover this afternoon, I don’t want to take up too much of your time.

This slide focuses on enhancing faculty success or if you look at the strategic plan it comes under faculty vitality. I talked about these points previously when I updated you on the COACH survey, a faculty job satisfaction survey. These are the 6 points that we’re taking action on. Remember if you look at that survey, overall the outcome was very positive, but these are 6 areas that we thought, based on trends, this survey and the previous 2 surveys you participated in that these required attention.

So the first on has to do with spousal and partner hiring. You should know that on a case-by-case basis we negotiate spousal hires, but we don’t have a broader program to help spouses of faculty that hire, find employment at Auburn, in the broader community. So this will be a proposal to broaden our ability to support those.

There continues to be interest in and demand for additional childcare at Auburn University. So we have a committee on assessing that need. Address the need for increased faculty appreciation and recognition. We do a lot of different things at Auburn University to recognize the accomplishments of our faculty, the survey suggests that we are not doing enough, so we are going to study what it is we need to do more of.

Also the COACH survey suggests that we need to invest more time and energy in helping our heads and chairs and other administrators be more successful in their roles, so we’ve planned a session of training opportunities for heads and chairs and deans to enhance their skills. There will be one December 3 and then there will be 3 in the spring. The first one involves bringing an outside expert in to help focus on the general broader skills that a head and chair needs to be successful. Then the others will probably be more focused in the spring, those have yet to be developed fully.

There was a desire for us to do more to help faculty with their research, so we’ve put in place a process to improve our support systems for research from sponsored programs through post-award concerns and issues that need to be addressed. So a number of people working on that, John Liu is taking the lead on that.

Then finally, we created a commission, already got that in motion to look at the academic careers of the women at Auburn University. Again the COACH survey suggests that we are not doing what we need to do to mentor female faculty in order to make them successful, especially at the mid-career point, that transition from associate to full professor. So we are going to take a look at those issues. [19:13]

Under Research just a few things that focus on the economic impact of the partnerships that we have in place. So the first one that we highlight is with GE Aviation. There are plans to develop a high volume additive manufacturing facility for jet propulsion industry. [19:39]


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