Transcript Senate Meeting
January 19, 2016

Larry Teeter chair: I am Larry Teeter, chair of the Senate. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Senate.
Don’t forget to get a clicker when you are signing in in the back. If you are a senator or a substitute for a senator make sure you sign in in the back and pick up a clicker.

We have one vote today, we will be approving some nominations from the Rules Committee.

If you’d 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 the senators have had a chance to speak guests are welcome to speak to the Senate.

This is a version of an agenda we have probably had about 4 available this weekend. In this one I left out remarks from the President’s Office and the Provost’s Office, but Dr. Don Large is here to speak for the President today and I’d like to invite him up to the microphone. [bkup1:06]

Dr. Don Large, Executive Vice President: President Gogue is still recovering from surgery. He had over the holidays some neck, spine, fusion type of a surgery so he is walking around in a neck brace which is pretty restrictive. He is making it in now for an hour or 2 per day and says he will be pretty much back to work full time in a couple of weeks. Just wanted you to know and he said I could share that kind of information and now you know, he’ll be fine, but that’s why he is not hear today.

I asked him what he might want to share and he suggested a couple of things. One is the Legislative Session starts February 2. That’s a challenge and tricky for all of us we are facing the fact once again that the general fund is underfunded with no apparent plan to fund that so that makes our education trust fund a target and we’ll do our best to work with other higher ed and other education to protect that. But they do seem to be chipping away at that some.

There is talk about gun legislation and guns on campus and we’ll do everything with everybody else to fight that, hopefully we will be successful and there will be a host of other legislative matters we will either discover or deal with along the way. More to come next month we will give you, at this meeting, an update on where we are and maybe we can have Shari Fulford to tell you what she’s seen so far.

Also, February 5 we have a Trustee meeting at AUM. Annually we have our February meeting at AUM. It’s a pretty light agenda, one thing that may be of interest to you, we will be talking to the Board about some modifications to the Public Safety Building. For the last 11 years we have had and still do, have a contract with the City of Auburn to provide our police services and will continue with that. In today’s world and time the last thing I would want to be doing is trying to manage a police department, but what we would like them to do within the contract to start is have a resident on campus. We want to have police and police cars out there, so we’ll be working on that.

On the Academic Affairs Committee there are several things the President wanted me to share, and all these items have followed the proper university process to get to the Board. There will be a proposed Bachelor of Science Industrial Design Studies, a proposed Master of Arts Degree in Counseling Psychology, a proposed Master of Social Work Degree, and some proposed changes to faculty personnel policies. Not sure what that is, but I guess someone here knows. There will also be an audit committee; every year we have our financials audited by Price Waterhouse Coopers and they will be delivering their report and there will be no surprises. It is a good, clean audit and favorable results.

Those are the things he wanted me to share. If there is anything else I might be able to help you with I’d be happy to. [4:07]

Larry Teeter, chair: thank you Dr. Large. I realized I jumped past our first item on the agenda which is to approve the minutes from the November 17, 2015 meeting. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes that have been posted on the Web site? Hearing none, could I have a motion to approve the minutes? (moved and seconded). All in favor signify by saying aye. Opposed same sign. (none) Okay, great. (The minutes are approved.)

I’d like to introduce the Senate officers once again for anyone who happens to be new in the audience. Dr. Laura Plexico is our Secretary; Dr. Zing Ping Hu is our secretary-elect; Dr. James Goldstein is our chair-elect; Dr. Patricia Duffy is our immediate past chair serves as the faculty representative to the Board of Trustees. And Dr. Bob Locy is a previous chair of the Senate and is currently serving as our parliamentarian this year. I’d also like to introduce Laura Kloberg who assists us with every Senate meeting, preparing all the visuals you are going to see and kind of keeping us in order with the Rules of the Senate.

Before we get started I’d like to mention that we have an upcoming election. The election is in March at the March meeting. So the Senate nominations committee is currently identifying potential candidates for Senate chair-elect and secretary-elect. If you believe that you or someone you know would be a good candidate, please forward their names to either a member of the Executive Committee or to Bob Locy, chair of the nominations committee.

Our first item today of business is we have a single action item, Dr. Laura Plexico will bring forward a list of nominees for Senate Committees. And first we need to establish a quorum. Turn on your clickers and press A. We needed 44 and we have 52.

The single action item is approval of nominees for Senate Committees brought forward by the Rules committee. [7:19]

Laura Plexico, secretary: So today we have two committees and two nominees for a slot that needed to be filled. Miranda Reed for the Competitive Research Grant Committee and Jennifer Cornett for the Teaching Effectiveness Committee. Rules brings forward these names and that’s coming from a standing committee of the Senate. Is there any discussion or questions? Hearing none, I will ask you to approve the slate of nominees by pressing A for approval, and B if you do not approve. A=56, B=0.

I also want to announce that at the February meeting we will be taking the slate of nominees for the Rules Committee from the floor. So we are looking for nominees for the Rules Committee. You must be a sitting member of the Senate to be a nominee for the Rules Committee. It is a 2 year term and we will have 3 openings for that committee. If you are interested or have any questions about that committee I would love to field your e-mails or hear you interest so that we can begin the process of putting for those nominees at the February meeting and we will vote on those nominees at the March meeting.

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Laura.

We have 4 information items at today’s meeting. The first will be a presentation by Dr. Jared Russell, an update on the progress of the Strategic Plan Faculty Success Implementation Committee.

Jared Russell, ?: Good afternoon everyone. It is my pleasure to give an update on the Strategic Priority 2, the Faculty Success Implementation Committee we’ve been at it for roughly 2 years and have asked the Provost to give an update just to keep the body aware of what we are doing and hope to be able to answer any questions you might have about some of my activities.
First and fore most out of the COACHE survey that was sent out a couple of years ago, we had 3 recommendations, or 3 areas of concern that we were going to address directly; one being on-campus childcare along with training for department leadership, and salary review, as well as we are now beginning to conduct a climate study for diversity faculty inclusion as well as I want to briefly mention a little bit about the strategic hiring initiative which is ongoing. All of these initiatives most of you have probably heard about, but let me give you a little bit more background on it. [10:55]

Coming out of the COACHE recommendations there was a strong desire by the participants to assess the need for on-campus childcare, particularly that initiative was also supported by findings from the Commission on Women in Academic Careers, so the Provost had the committee come together and actually go about the process of surveying the faculty, staff and seeing their perspectives on the need for on-campus childcare as well as looking at some of the limitations and obstacles we may encounter going forward.

The Provost’s Office received our report from the committee. He engaged with a consultant from the Mills Consulting Group, he has now obtained the final report and he is going through that report and will be passing on his general recommendation to the President and Executive level leadership. At that point I can see him coming back and doing another update to further give us ideas about what’s going on with that. [11:58]

Secondly, looking at the need for department leadership again, this came out of the COACHE Survey and the Biggio Center has now established a Biggio Center Faculty Fellow for Transformational Leadership. At some point we are going to get an acronym for that so it is a little bit easier to say but the Biggio Center, Diane Boyd and her sub-committee Faculty Success Committee work really hard to come up with this position. The Provost has agreed to fund and support this position and an internal search will begin in spring particularly in February and the recruitment process will start. You will see a brief description of what’s involved there. Again that position will be for 3 years and it’s to basically be the spearhead of our initiative to try to get more departmental leadership in ways of faculty evaluation, developing a culture of support and so forth. Again, those are things you are going to hear more and more about going forward in the next couple of weeks. [12:57]

Another one of the COACHE recommendations lead to the creation on Academic Careers of Women at Auburn University. That commission went about their business of doing a survey of female faculty, getting their perspectives on issues, concerns, obstacles, and successes and strategies to enhance their academic career here at Auburn University. One issue that came out was a concern about salary and equity. With that the Provost has decided to implement a review of salaries of faculty and that salary review will start some time in the spring. He will definitely be able to give you more information about that. Again, that came directly out of the COACHE recommendations and certainly look forward to hearing more about that myself.

Another major initiative that is definitely going to impact our campus, particularly in light of other issues around the country, particularly the University of Missouri and Hart University, looking at our climate. Particularly at our climate from a perspective of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the Provost has decided to go ahead and start a…conduct a climate survey and he has a steering committee established regarding that and I will ask you from my position, please if you get a call or e-mail, or request to take part in a focus interview, an individual interview, please take part because we really want that information. Personally, I think we need to do this. It is a long time coming and we can get some really good information and build a supportive climate for all of us across the board. But when you get that request or survey, please take time to do that.

Four key areas that we are going to looking at with the survey and the actual interviews and focus groups; diversity and equity and inclusion, recruitment and retention of our students and faculty population, cultural competency, respect and collegiality and how we deal with a climate of support for our faculty and staff as well as our students and also develop strategies to work with students to make sure they are in the best environment for learning and so forth going forward.

Last is the teacher hiring initiative. You can see here the 5 areas that have been outlined by the Provost’s Office; support strategic cluster hiring. Right now there’s 31 searches in progress. As these searches progress the Provost will give updates to keep us all informed. If you have any direct questions for that I ask that you funnel that toward the Provost’s Office.

I am happy to entertain any questions that you may have. Thank you.

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Russell.

Our second information item today is a report from AU’s Cuban Outreach Initiative. A lot of you have probably heard about trips to Cuba and Chippewa Thomas will present an overview of that program.

Chippewa Thomas, University Outreach: Good afternoon. It’s very good to see each of you here today and to be standing before you. I serve as Director of Faculty Engagement, I am also a faculty member in the College of Education in the Department of Special Education Rehabilitation and Counseling. And it has been my pleasure certainly also to serve as the University Outreach Senator. So today I would just like to bring some information to you about the engagements that we’ve had in Cuba and to bring you all up to date with respect to the work that we’ve been able to accomplish.

First of all, for information I want to share with you all that just last year when the travel ban was lifted, President Gogue had the foresight to engage certain members of our university campus community with the idea that we would like to be more engaged with Cuba over and above some of the initiatives that we already had ongoing. To that end Dr. Royrickers Cook was charged with putting together delegations to explore opportunities in Cuba. Certainly that lead us to have a first trip in February of last year, continuing with a trip in June and October of 2015 to explore opportunities to engage with Cuba.

The activities that we have been engaged in have taken place in the capital of Cuba which is Havana. [18:19] We are continuing to look at those opportunities, certainly not just in Havana but all over the country of Cuba. Our thoughts are not necessarily limited to those trips, but our delegations have included faculty from Auburn University, certainly community leaders professionals, educators, as well as alumni from Auburn University. We wanted to bring you some information to get a little orientation into some of the things we’ve been thinking about and want to engage you in thinking about future opportunities with Cuba.

I just wanted to let you know that the place that we visited so many times so far was founded in the 1500s. We would like you to know that in the city of Havana, certainly we don’t interact with all of them but have the opportunity to interact with the 2.1 million individuals that live in the city. This is a 2013 statistic, but there’s an estimated over 11.27 individuals who live, so as a result there is an opportunity to travel under what’s called an OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control) license to the United States. We have an opportunity not only to see the place and experience the people but meet primarily with some other individuals; educational professionals, industry leaders, ministers of educations, ministers of tourism, ministers of commerce to talk about possible collaborations, even though certainly the embargo with the United States still exists.

The activities in Cuba have particularly focused on exposure. So the cultural aspect of seeing the place meeting the people, hearing what individuals have to say about not only the country, but even the relations with the United States and certainly how Auburn University could play a part in building relations in Cuba. There are a number of things that happen on the trips to Cuba. At this point meetings with those key officials are primary because certainly in the next explorative circumstance we want to hear and share information. The educational aspect, we have a number of lecturers that speak to us on each day of the tours, and by the way just to get a sense of how long this takes, each tour has typically taken about 6 days, beginning with a pre-departure meeting for the delegation in Miami, Florida and then travel from Miami to Cuba, which is about 45 minutes. It’s really, really close. Then 4 days of activity and concluding certainly on a Friday to travel back to the U.S.

We are able to sample the cuisine at local restaurants, which are called paladars, see wonderful architecture, and get a sense of Cuba as a place that really kind of has been stuck in time, in that period for most of us is the period of the 1950s. So to be able to see 1950s old classic cars and to ride in taxis that they are primarily used for, to visit the University of Havana and speak to individuals who are teaching all kinds of wonderful subjects that are comparable to Auburn; to visit a cigar and rum factory, to find out the history of those 2 things being produced in Cuba. And then even to experience the culture to that which is found in New Orleans, which is to visit some cemeteries.

So, I want to let you know also that the individuals that have traveled so far in these delegations have included members of the faculty in the College of Human Sciences, the Harrison School of Pharmacy, the McWhorter School of Building Science, and if you are not aware Auburn already had a presence before these tours began by way of an MOU established by the College of Agriculture, certainly study abroad program that the College of Human Sciences has, we’ve had a number of dignitary visitations from Cuba to the U.S. to give lectures to not only the campus community but certainly to our community at large. We are at the point of developing an idea of what’s next?

So what is next? One of the things that Dr. Cook and I have talked about envisioning for the future of these trips, certainly they are good for explorative purposes but the thought leadership around what we could possibly do with this information is still open. With that I would like to just simply invite those of you who are interested in traveling, we have a number of tours and trips planned for 2016. There is one already established by the College of Human Sciences that is closed at this time, but the other 3, in April, June, and October, are open. We’ve had some thinking around the establishment of an institute in Cuba, not to be in competition with the other university in Tuscaloosa, that has a center there already established. We really want to give some careful consideration to the purpose and to be purposeful about what collaborations could be possible. Just to give an example of one, there’s been faculty from the Harrison School of Pharmacy that have participated as keynotes in Pharmacy Conferences that have taken place in Cuba, there have been a number of specific engagements, and we want to see if we can target our efforts through an institute, again through featured tours to help develop a concept.

We would like you to join us on one of the tours to Cuba for the ones that are upcoming. The timetable for determining if you want to travel is about 6 months out to these dates that we saw. If you are interested in actually traveling with us on one of these, especially the April trip, right now is the time to let us know. For more information, you can click on this Web site that we have at the Office of Faculty Engagement at University Outreach. We’ll hopefully develop a much more robust engagement and activity and continue with the work that has already been done.

I’d be happy to entertain any questions if anyone has any. I thank you so very much. Please do contact me or using this information you have in you are interested in more information and insight on traveling to Cuba, and if you want to go we can make that happen for you. Thank you.

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Thomas. [27:34]

Our third information item today is a presentation of Department of Emergency Management’s  Active Shooter Program, presented by Chance Corbett.

Chance Corbett, Assoc. Dir. Emergency Management: Good afternoon. I appreciate having the opportunity to speak to you today. Larry asked if we would come to speak to you about the Active Shooter Program that we have in the Department of Public Safety and Security here on campus.

I don’t know how familiar you are with that program that we’ve been doing, it’s several years now. We have enhanced it a little bit, we have a video out there and we were just talking, I put a link to the video at the end but in transition the link may have been broken. I am not going to bore you with the video, but I will tell you how to watch it. The main reason for being here today is we want to promote preparedness and awareness of what we are doing on campus for anything emergency wise whether it is an active shooter or a person with a weapon, whatever that situation is, but also the other incidences as well so as I do with most presentations I try to put a few other things in there about what we are doing for safety and security on the campus. The first thing I want to note is all of you know this already, and I will reiterate, when you dial 911 on this campus that call goes to the City of Auburn. The City of Auburn’s Police Department is going to respond, Police Division is actually their title. They are going to respond, the City of Auburn Fire Department and also the EMS is run out of our Hospital over in Opelika, they are all dispatched by the same dispatcher.

We do put a lot of numbers out there, our office numbers, our main numbers, on-call numbers, but anytime it is an emergency it’s one number, 911. We don’t want people fumbling through to try to find a different number to call, every second counts and we think that is very important. I put these pictures up here to reiterate as I went through.

Something else I want to mention, if you are not aware of some of the safety training we do across campus for employees, we really have pushed in the last few years to train employees on campus to respond to an emergency or any type of disaster. Whether it’s a fire alarm going off, whether it’s a severe weather incident, or other types of emergencies in the building, smell of smoke or whatever it is. We have started training employees on a program called Campus CERT, Campus Community Emergency Response Teams. Employees that step up on their own for 16 hours worth of training and they receive equipment and at that point they are the point of contact in their building. We would love to have teams, but we will take individual employees as well, so that they can be prepared and they can help the first responders when they arrive. We’ve seen some very good results in this. When we started it was questionable from the Fire and the Police, shorty after implementing it worked and the firemen now ask when they pull up if there are CERT members in the building. We think it’s a good program, some of you may have already been through it I see some heads nodding and I know you are familiar with it. We want you to go to it. If you have employees that are ideal for this please send them our way.

We do have a course coming up February 10-11. We would love to see them in those courses it does not cost anything to the departments, we cover the cost of the equipment. The trainers are within our department, I’m a trainer and we have several others as well. We also bring in the City Police Divsions, Fire, EMS, we bring those folks to help get a bit of the training aspect of it but also to buy in that goes with that. We hold most of our training at the Public Safety Building which is the the old Credit Union down the street from Momma Goldberg’s on West Magnolia.

I’m getting to the Active Shooter Program, but the last thing I want to mention is the AU Alert. I know you’re familiar with AU Alert, hopefully everyone in here is signed up and given us a phone number for the AU Alert System. We are still struggling to get everyone to give us their number. Percentage wise it fluctuates, but obviously the faculty and staff are numbers that we want to get increased because for every faculty and staff member countless students are covered. As far as the students go we have a little more participation from the students, probably due to parents, not sure on that. The last test we did we had 98% of the text messages were delivered within 3 minutes, it says 2 there but that’s a typo. The next test of that system, we do e-mail it out an try to give as much information as we can, but the next test is Tuesday, January 26 at 3:20 p.m. I will tell you we don’t just pick that number out of a hat, we do work closely with Dr. Winn in the Provost’s Office to make sure we have the most ideal time we can find. Don’t be alarmed when that pops up. You know if you are teaching classes or on you computer at that time, this is the screen that will pop up when it goes off, all you have to do is hit the acknowledge button at the bottom. Through multiple tests with Bliss in the OIT department, we’ve discovered that this will not interfere with any of your work or knock anything off, so should not be any threat of that. Just please hit the button and move on.

So the Active Shooter Training. Just to talk to you about that, obviously when an incidence happens in this country we start getting phone calls. “What are you doing on campus? Is there any training we can take? Can someone come to our department and talk about safety and security?”  We get these on a daily basis. The answer to this is yes to all of them. We do have training, we’ve had training in place since 2009 on this campus. We’ve actually led the state in teaching this training. I developed that course that we teach across the campus and has been copied by many institutions and departments across the state and across the United States. The video we created, which is the one that’s has a broken link at the end, that video has been shown all over the country, we’ve been asked for the script for it and we have done anything we can to help any other institution. We’ve had several different agencies in Australia that want to show that video as well, so we are pretty proud of that and think we have a good program going.

You may have heard of Run, Hide, Fight. This is a question I get a lot about; “how different is this from Run, Hide, Fight and I can explain that. Run, Hide, Fight was created in Houston, Texas. The idea behind that was that the Federal government, Homeland Security, gave money to Houston, Texas to make a video. It’s made like a Hollywood video, a very good video, informative, made in 2012. Shortly after that Alabama was trying to find a system to train different entities, whether it be a local jurisdiction, a school, whoever it was and Run, Hide, Fight came on the scene for them because when they train their instructors they didn’t have to pay to get the instructors trained. They came up with their training program for Run, Hide, Fight and I am happy to tell you, after about 6 months they had not created their PowerPoint. When they created their PowerPoint, they used ours. So if you look at the PowerPoint of Run, Hide, Fight across the state of Alabama you will actually see us in the training because they used our exact same PowerPoint. We are happy to provide that because we want people to be safe, we want people to have something to do and we want them to have an answer. The biggest thing is as you’ll see is making a decision.

That video, I was at the University of Alabama, up in Tuscaloosa, getting on an elevator dressed as I am now and a Police Officer stopped me and said sir can I ask your unit Active Video and Training, I said yes sir. We show it all over campus. That makes us proud in the sense that what we’re doing is being used by others with our permission.

So, Lockdown is the word you usually hear when you go in to an active shooter situation or a threatening situation, you hear the word lockdown. And your students that are coming out of school they heard it as well, since 1999 when Columbine happened, students have been locking down in schools for years. They would go into lockdown drills. And prior to Sandy Hook there never was a mandated lockdown in Alabama. You didn’t have to do lockdowns 2 or 3 times a year. Now there’s a mandated 2 times a year. When you hear the word lockdown as a student, even in some cases as faculty members and professors, you think, hey, I’m locking the door, cutting the lights off and hiding in the corner, which is what our students are used to. When I teach students, which we teach a lot of student classes, I’ll mention those here in a second. When we teach the students, I have yet have anyone tell me they really did much different than what I’m describing now. Our students are engaged in this class, they learn from it, they welcome this class when we teach them as well. The hardest thing we have, and we need you help with this, is getting them in the class. We have done everything we can. We did first year Greek life, I had 1,500 people in the Auburn Arena. Loved it wish I could do that every semester. Would love to get that many students or even more. Would love to fill the Auburn Arena up. Problem is have the time when we have our classes we’ll take Foy Ballroom (auditorium) and schedule it 6 p.m., after hours, just so we can get them there and sometimes we’ll have 10, 15. I’ve had classes where 4 people showed up. And that’s after advertising, handing out cards, trying our best to get them there. How do we do that? How do we get the students there? We may have to push back to you, can you help us get them there?  Can you give them credit, can you encourage them to come, what can you do to help us get them there? I promise you this and we start that class off by saying, the classes we teach are not about Auburn University, we hope it never happens here, we hope they never experience anything like this in their lifetime. What we teach them they take with them the rest of their lives. When they are in the workplace, when they are in church, where ever they are at they can use the things we talk about in this class to try to keep themselves and others around them safe. We think it’s a good program.

Again, what we teach in this class is your response. It is either going to be based on what we’ve taught you or someone else has taught you, or your natural reactions. Unfortunately, if someone came in now into this room as a threat to you, most of the people in this room would hide under the desk. I know you laugh and I know we all do, but that is the reality of it. Unless we have something else can use, get up, scream, yell, throw things and try to get away people will do that. We’ve seen it time and time again. In the churches we’ve had shootings, one representative came on the news and said they hid under the pews and waited on their turn. Well, we need to fight against that and that’s what this training does. I tries to put tools in your mind that you can use so when something like this happens. When something like this happens that is not the time to think what can I do to survive this, the time is today. Watch our video, show our video in you classes, show it to your family, your friends. We know it works. One lady actually took the course almost identical to the one we teach at Kent State University. The story, and I saw the copy of the e-mail she sent to the company that trained them said that I went home and told my daughter about this class. “Don’t you just hide under a desk , you’re a sitting duck.” And one week later her daughter was in the cafeteria when a guy came in with a gun, her and her friends went under the table and all of the sudden it snapped what her mom had told her, she grabs her friends when the guy starts reloading his gun, starts screaming, yelling, and running and the entire cafeteria followed them out the door.

You can survive it, you just got to think past it. You’ve got to be able to make a decision quickly because people will freeze. Ask yourself, if you are in a classroom or an office and you hear a loud noise, sounds like a shotgun went off, what are you going to do? Because I can tell you, in a classroom I can tell you what most people in that room are going to do. They are going to freeze, they are going to look around and they are going to look for somebody to tell them what to do. And if one person took our training, stands up and says I know what to do, guess what’s going to happen, everybody in the room is going to follow. We’ve taught 25,000 people. We need to get this in everybody’s mind, everybody’s class. What if someone walks in with a gun and starts shooting? What are people going to do? I’ll be honest I think most are going under the table or under the desk, and we’ve got to do more than that because you are giving them nothing more than a sitting duck, a target that now they don’t have to fight for they just walk right up to you. That’s what our training class is about. The training class we give employees is 2 hours long. I’m going to tell you we teach it for an hour and 59 minutes and it is solid. And most of the time people come out of our class and say it felt like 20 minutes because we are engaging them the entire time. It’s good information, okay. Is hiding enough? That’s our motto in the class, we’ve got to do more than just hide. We’ve got to have information that we can make a decision. Our goal, stay safe, keep away from the aggressor, and notify law enforcement. The way we do that on this campus and I said it when I started, and I always say it at the beginning and the end, is  dial 911.

You ask students on this campus sometimes, what’s the quickest way to tell the rest of the campus when there’s a guy with a gun in one of the buildings? You know what they tell us, tweet it. Twitter, facebook, that’s the answers we get and we have to push it back to them, no, you let us do that. You dial 911, we send the AU Alert. We start notifying everyone every way we can.

We’ve come so far thanks to the administration on this campus, we not only use AU Alert for notifying people, from our walkie-talkies we can talk over everyone of the sirens on this campus. We are now going into every building on campus, any building that has a new fire alarm or upgraded fire alarm system, we can take over those fire alarms and do messages. If you don’t believe it come in on Christmas or the Holiday breaks while we test while nobody is here because we don’t want to scare everybody to death. I promise you it works it’s a really good system. We do it every year. Hope we never have to use it. The biggest thing I am trying to tell you is. In a situation like this you need to have training, you need to have a plan, put a plan together, and be able to make a decision. We have found though our experiences and training that people are not prepared to make a decision. People have never thought about it, they have the attitude, it will never happen here. How many of us have heard, it hasn’t happened in 30 years, it will never happen here? I promise you we hear it every day and we try to push past it. I agree with you I told somebody from facilities one day, I hope I get to retire and you come up and hit me on the back and say you wasted 2 hours of my life in that class and I’ll be happy with that, but that one call that I get one day, Hey I made it out alive because of that. That training is going to be worth it, right? That’s what we’re here for that’s what we’re trying to do.

So I want to give you the dates on the employee sessions and the student sessions. We’ve already started pushing this out. We will continue to push it out. We’ll have people standing on the concourse handing out cards for the student sessions. The employee sessions are listed in Fast Train. As I said a minute ago, the active shooter training is 2 hours long, we do also have an emergency preparedness session that’s an hour long. We typically tell people to take both together, it a 3 hour dedication, they get a lot of good information and we tell them all about what we do on campus, how the Police, Fire, and EMS are going to respond. Student session are starting in late January, one late February, and one in March. Again, we’ll push those out so you will have that information. We asked Dr. Winn to help communicate that with you.

If you’ve got a way to get the students there, please help us. We really need the help. We are not getting the buy in that we hoped for, but we are getting a lot of calls from parents asking why we don’t have sessions like this, even though we are putting it out there. I am not going to play the video for you.

If your department wants to have a training class directly at your building with your folks, please let us know. I can honestly tell you in my years here at Auburn University, we have never turned a class down. We do not care if it is night-time, mornings, weekends. For the last 2 Saturdays I’ve been on campus teaching folks at the Library classes. We don’t mind, we are dedicated, whether it is the emergency preparedness class or active shooter. All we ask is that you get group, but if we need to only teach one person we can do that too.

Please reach out to us if you have any questions. The easiest e-mail address is publicsafety@auburn.edu that will go to Melvin Owens our executive director. I also have an alias that is easy to remember it’s: emergencymanagement@auburn.edu, please let us know if we can help you. Our Web site: auburn.edu/emergency and it will pop right up for you. Thank you. [45:07]

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Mr. Corbett.

Our last information item is an update on 2016 This is Research Symposia Series. Jennifer Kerpelman and Loraine Wolfe.

Jennifer Kerpelman: I know we are getting close to the end of the day, the end of the meeting so we are going to try to be quite brief and mainly you want to pay attention to the dates and the main pints we are going to share with you about the This is Research Symposia. We are both members on the Research Steering Committee.

So important dates, coming up is the student symposium. The reason the April 13 is bolded is because that’s the main day of events, starting around 8 in the morning and going until 6 in the evening, but we may have some afternoon events on the 12th. We also have the awards ceremony on April 18. There at the bottom if you want to check out the Web site for more information: auburn.edu/thisisresearch

We will also have a faculty symposium again in September this year and September 16 is the main day,, again primarily 8-8:30 start until about 6 p.m., but on the 15th we will have a few afternoon activities. We have a little more information about the student symposium and we are really excited to be here today because the portal has just opened for submissions. So we are here with plenty to share and I am going to turn it over to Loraine.

Loraine Wolfe: We won’t keep you long, I promise. The abstract window is now open and will close on February 23. We’re here primarily to make 2 requests of you. One is to ask students and get faculty members, your colleagues, to encourage your students to submit to the Research Symposium. So this is symposium for both graduate students and undergraduate students and many students will not think about submitting an abstract unless they are urged to do so from faculty members, especially undergraduate students. So we really could use your help in spreading the word and getting your students to upload their abstracts. They upload their abstracts when the register, there is a lot of help on the Web site. To access the Web site just type in this is research and you will get there for either the faculty or the student symposia.

We will be offering awards to the students so we are going to need your help. The second item is to find judges. We need faculty judges, for the undergraduates we welcome advanced graduate students and post doctoral students and this is a good training exercise for them to judge the research of undergraduates. Please help us get judges and make the event visible. Last year we had over 300 abstracts submitted, so it was a very lively event and we hope we can increase even further this year. The event will be in the Student Center.

The last think I’m going to say about the Student Symposium is that some of the awards, particularly for the graduate students are pretty large financially, or what I think is pretty large, and we really want to make this a fair competition and the only way we can do that is to make sure that each student is judged by a number of judges. So when one student has one judge and that judge is not even in their discipline and another student has 3 judges, you can see the judging can be kind of uneven. So again, we really appreciate you help in getting judges to sign up. We will be sending a link to all of you and also to your department chairs and deans and associate deans and you can use the link to sign up at your convience.

Jennifer Kerpelman: So a little farther down the line we have our Faculty Symposium and we had it in this format last year for the first time. We had a student event in April and the faculty event in September. The survey that we held after the event for the faculty suggested that we include a lot of what we did last year, so it will look a lot like what we did last year. You can see a lot of the activities that are listed. This will be at the Hotel and Conference Center. One thing that will be different is that we will be adding on the even years, which is this year, the creative scholarship showcase. Some of that will be at the event on September 15 and 16, but then there will be activities for the rest of September. We have a committee that is working on that and we will have more information soon that will be posted on the Web site. Whe you go on the Web site you will see a tab for the student event, for the faculty event, and for the creative scholarship showcase. A lot of this information will be there for you to review.

One thing that was not clear last year, students are welcome to attend the Faculty Symposium. We would like them to come, but some thought they were not supposed to come because it’s called the Faculty Symposium. So the presenters are the faculty, but we’d like faculty, administrators, staff, and students to come to the event.

Once againg the Web site: auburn.edu/thisisresearch

In case you didn’t get it down, and the dates. Does anybody have any questions about the event before we conclude? Alright we appreciate your support. Thank you. And you can contact me at any time if you have questions.

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you very much.

Is there any new or unfinished business? Hearing none, meeting adjourned. [BK-53:39]