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 because we have 1 action item today.

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 or not 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 that others can have a chance to speak.

The agenda today was set by the Senate Steering Committee at our last meeting. The first order of business is to establish a quorum, so we need to have our clickers out. We have 86 members of the Senate and we have to have 44 to establish a quorum. Okay we have a quorum.

First order of business today is to approve the minutes of the January 19 meeting. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes that have been posted on the Senate Web site?  So moved, a second?  We have a second. All in favor please say aye.

Group: aye.

Larry Teeter, chair: opposed same sign. Okay the motion carries.

Our next agenda item is comments from President Gogue. [bkup1:29]

Dr. Gogue President: Good to be with you. I apologize for not being with you last month.

The State House Legislature is in session and has met 3 times this week. There are 5 or 6 six things on their agenda that are interesting. Number one is guns big in their minds, they are looking at 2 different bills, one is to allow you to put a gun in your car the same as if it were your house. Apparently that’s common in most states. There is a bill working its way through allowing without a permit to have a gun in a car.

Second one relates more to higher education. Since both Auburn and the University of Alabama exempted on campus the right to carry guns, there is a bill going through that, if passed, would have to be a constitutional change to require Auburn and the University of Alabama to allow guns on campus with a concealed permit. We are following both of those bills carefully.

There is a longitudinal study with kinds from kindergarten to all the way through higher ed to see what kind of data we really have relative to graduation rates. [bkup-2:50] Some of you may have seen data in the last month that said 89% of Alabama kids graduate from high school. There’s a belief that that may not be quite the correct number in terms of graduation rate.

They are debating and discussing performance funding. This is not a new concept in higher education. Those of you from many states is probably 30 years old in Alabama and a lot of discussion about what should go into performance funding models to allocate resources to institutions.

If you noticed that gas prices are a little lower, so what they’ve decided is 52 cents per mile is too much now so they want to use the triple A model which gives a lower rate than 52 cents per mile. The idea would be that once gas prices go back up then we’ll adopt the 52 cents again. I don’t know that, but will probably be of that sort. The only good news is there is a little bit with all of the rolling reserve for a little bit of additional money that will come to higher ed this year. Don’t know exactly the amounts. Probably the most substantial increase, according to them, since 2006. So a reasonable good budget year we hope.

The Board of Trustees met in early February. I think we’ve gone over the items that were on the agenda. All items on that agenda were approved. I’ll mention a couple of things and I think the Provost is going to mention a couple of the academic things that were on that agenda. The Mell Classroom building, we increased the amount of funding for that by 2 million dollars, I think it went from 33 to 35 million dollars as they got in the final plans to do the things necessary.

The other thing that I’ll mention is Auburn had a clean audit through the audit partners. So a good financial report on the health of the institution. The only thing that you may see that is different this time, and those of you that are in finance would know more about this than I understand, but we are underfunded in our pension plan. So there is a pension liability. Roughly 10 billion dollars is underfunded in the Alabama Pension Plan. What we had to do on the financials this time is go through and apportion the unfunded portion for each organization that has retirees. So ours was 550 million dollars that had to be apportioned to the underfunded Alabama Pension Plan.

On campus, Wayne Alderman reported yesterday that they expected freshman enrollment on campus to be about 4,500 next year. So a little bit less than this past year. That may not sound like a big deal to you but if you look nationwide, almost 3 million fewer students in higher education this year than last. As the economy improves invariably students drop out of higher ed and go to work. So for us to maintain similar numbers and similar quality is a real testament to Auburn.

Tomorrow you will receive an e-mail from me and it will look very strange, I think the title of it will be “Alabama Unites.” What that is, is an effort in the state to ask people, voluntarily if you are interested, to join a particular site to proved information to you on the legislative session. With current legislature to get traction, you need to be able to say we have 8 thousand, or 10 thousand, or 20 thousand folks that are interested in this particular issue and we have e-mail addresses and they are willing to respond to you if you wish. Look at it. If you are not interested in that sort of thing, just delete it, but if you are interested, join up on that and we’ll try to keep you posted relative to that.

Two searches underway that I share with you; one is the Chancellor’s position at AUM. They are down to their final 4 candidates, 2 interviewed last week and 2 will interview this week. John Veres is retiring, so there will be a change at AUM. And the other is we just initiated a search for the General Council position for the university, that’s Lee Armstrong’s position. Hopefully to fill sometime this summer.

I’d be happy to respond to questions. Thank you. [6:27]

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue. Next on the agenda are comments from Dr Boosinger, the Provost’s Office.

Dr. Boosinger, Provost: I’d like to start by reminding all of you that this is the time of year when we start to look at appointments to Senate and University Committees for the next year. As an example we’ve been working on a budget, Dr. Large will be convening the Budget Advisory Committee as a part of our study of ways to improve the allocation of resources at Auburn University, there will be a couple of new committees, so take a look at those and see if some of those are a good match for you.

That’s a good segue into the Academic agenda from the Board of Trustees. Every time I present and academic agenda item to the Board I remind the Board that all of our academic recommendations that are presented to them begin generally at the Department or sometimes at the graduate level begins at the Graduate School, but never the less, when you look at it there are a lot of committees involved in the final presentation and approval of new academic programs and modifications of academic programs.

A rough estimate, we have approximately 1,300 faculty, there are at least 4 or 5 hundred faculty involved in senate and university committees, that does not include college or department committees. So developing the academic recommendations and getting them approved is truly a shared governance process. We should all take pride in that and embrace that concept.

At the Board meeting, there was a proposal for a Bachelor of Science degree program in Industrial Design Studies and that was approved; the College of Education, a Master’s of Art in Counseling Psychology, also approved; and from the College of Liberal Arts a Master’s in Social Work, which is a new program, also approved by the Board of Trustees. Again all of these came up through the college department and university committees. In addition, there was a request from the administration, my office, asking the Board to give the president the authority to set tuition rates for distance learning. The reason for that rather than just recommend that the tuition be at a certain rate like we do with other tuition rate recommendations, distance programs are very much a part of the market place and we need to have some flexibility to make adjustments. We will begin at 1.25 times the instate tuition rate, current rate, and see where that leads us and how that positions us in the market.

You may remember before the holidays we convened a committee to study diversity, equity, and inclusion at Auburn University. That committee meets almost every 2 weeks. We have already had 30 listening sessions and 40 interviews, facilitated by Joyce Gossom, a very experienced facilitator and interviewer for this kind of work. Doing a great job. In about 2 weeks we are going to have campus-wide sessions, larger open invitation sessions again facilitated by Dr. Gossom. I look forward for all of you taking an opportunity to participate in that. Also if you looked at my most recent letter to the faculty, for those of you that would like to have a private interview session with Dr. Gossom those can be arranged. Contact my office, specifically Julie Huff, and we’ll set those up.

There will be a survey, and I want to emphasize that survey is just part of this study, not necessarily the centerpiece, but a survey will go out on February 29, so all faculty, staff, and students asking questions relative to the climate at Auburn University surrounding diversity, inclusion, and equity. We did a study like this approximately in 2003. So this survey is being studied so we can make comparisons to the findings in 2003. I think that will be helpful, but we are also going to look at some other considerations in that process.

I also invite all of you to come to the open forum next Wednesday in Foy Hall at 3:30 to talk about the Mell Street corridor. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about that, but how we’re going to configure Mell Street for the future from Ross Square down to Samford. That’s what will be presented and discussed. Decisions have not been made, the architects will present different options and open it up for discussion trying to give anyone who wants to comment on that study a chance to do so.

I have 3 searches that I’d like to update you on. We have completed the search process for the Dean of the College of Agriculture and Director of the Experiment Station. The appointment of the Director of the Experiment Station requires a vote by the Board of Trustees, that will happen this Friday in a special session of the Board of Trustees, immediately after that meeting there will be an announcement of who the new Dean and Director will be.

We have searches underway, one for a new vice president of Business and Finance, that has been posted as has the national search for Chief Information Officer, so those out and posted and available for people that want to read about them, apply for them, whatever they think is appropriate. Both of those we are using a search firm to help us find the very best candidates.

Are there any questions for me? Comments?
Sara Wolf, member of Steering Committee: Dr. Boosinger, could you clarify the tuition information please? Is that all distance ed tuition efforts, graduate and undergraduate?

Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Undergraduate.

Sara Wolf, member of Steering Committee: Only undergraduate? So graduate ones will be able to set their own rates, they way we’ve always been?

Dr. Boosinger, Provost: That’s correct. Thank you very much. [13:45]

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Boosinger.

Before we get started I’d like to introduce our officers. Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary, Dr. Xing Ping Hu is our secretary-elect, Dr. James Goldstein is our chair-elect, Patricia Duffy is our immediate past chair and serves as our representative to the Board of Trustees. Laura Kloberg, our administrative assistant and helps us keep things in order, she’s the one that has institutional memory of the Senate and keeps everything running very smoothly.

Before we get started today, there are several important agenda items today, but I’d like to highlight one and that’s our announcement of the slate of candidates for next year’s chair-elect and secretary-elect officers. Their names will be announced later in the meeting and I hope that between today and when the election begins within a few weeks, you take some time to learn a bit about each of those candidates and what they would bring to the Senate as future officers. Encourage your colleagues to vote. Notices as to exactly when and where the online voting will take place will be announced during the first week of March. And the election results will be announced at the General Faculty Meeting in March. So don’t forget to vote.

Are there any remarks or questions? Okay, we have one action item today. Laura Plexico our Senate secretary will call for approval of a replacement Senate committee member.

Laura Plexico, secretary: Today we have another Senate committee member replacement for Academic Computing. Leslie Goertzen from Biological Sciences has volunteered his time to serve on this Senate committee. The term will end in 2018. Questions or discussion? Hearing none, this is coming from a standing Senate committee and requires no second. If you approve I would like for you to press A, and if you do not approve please press B. A=52, B=3. It passes.

I am also doing a pending action item. Every year we seek nominations from the floor for the Rules Committee. Rules Committee is a standing Senate Committee, this committee has 11 members, six of which are voted on and come from the Senate floor. The remaining 5 members are from the Executive Committee and include the Chair, Chair-elect, Secretary, Secretary-elect, and Immediate Past Chair, per term. Once we have our list of nominees they will be voted on during the March meeting of the Senate.

At this time, I would like to call for nominations from the floor for the Rules Committee.

Patricia Duffy, immediate past chair: I would like to nominate Melody Russell, Curriculum and Teaching.

Sara Wolf, member of Steering: I would like to nominate Greg Schmidt from the Libraries.

Kevin Yost, member of Steering: I would like to nominate Bob Cochran from the School of Accountancy.

James Goldstein, chair-elect: I would like to nominate Traci O’Brien from Foreign Languages.

Laura Plexico, secretary: Any more nominations? Self nominations? We have Bob Cochran, Greg Schmidt, Traci O’Brien and Melody Russell as our nominees. Their bios will be posted to the Senate Web site and we will have that vote during our March meeting. [18:39] Thank you.

Larry Teeter, chair: We have 4 information items today. The first will be about an upcoming campus event, hosted by the students, organized by students, AU Relay for Life and this will be presented by Cassidy Starling

Cassidy Starling: War Eagle y’all. My name is Cassidy Starling and I am Auburn’s faculty and staff recruiter for Relay for Life. When I was 10 years old my dad checked me and my siblings out of school and told us news that would kind of rock our family for years to come. My mom had been diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer that had metastasize in both her breasts. Through help from the American Cancer Society and all their research and knowledge she made the radical decision to have a double mastectomy. I am blessed and incredibly lucky to have her in my life today. However, there are so many families and friends and people who aren’t as lucky as my mom and my family was. And that’s what Auburn’s Relay for Life wants to do. We want to fight back to help those families and people.

Relay for Life is a signature fundraising event for the American Cancer Society. The way Auburn’s works is that there is a fair set up in the green space with a theme. This year our theme is holidays, at every booth, table, game, food, place on campus green space will have a theme associated with it. Arbor day or world fair day, there are so many different odd holidays, for instance pancake day is actually making an appearance in the green space, kind of excited about it, but everyone will have a different holiday or different theme that it will correspond to. Each one will correspond to its own charity and its own cancer that they are researching for.

More than 4 million people and more than 20 different countries across the world all participate in Relay for Life. Their main slogan is “Celebrate, Remember, and Fight Back.” Celebrating those who have survived cancer, remembering those who weren’t as lucky, and helping fight back for those still suffering. This is a student led organization and we have a committee. 50 to 60 students and 8 to 10 committee groups. What is really fun about our committees is that each of us are all in competition for the entire time. My team is kind of winning at the moment, all of us are competing to raise money to help reach our overall goal which is $100,000 raised for Relay for Life. Last year we raised $76,000 and what we really want to do is bring all of the Auburn community in. We’ve come to realize that there’s a gap between student led organizations that try to get the Auburn community involved and faculty that actually helps us get involved. We want to do every thing we can to involve the students, but get all the faculty and truly all of the Auburn community involved with us to help us reach our goal.

Auburn University faculty and staff can be involved simply by donating auburnrelayforlife.org/auburn or creating a team among each committee yourselves kind if like we do or just creating your own team among your friends and your family posting in your Facebook or twitter accounts. It’s really simple, it’s how we’ve been doing it all semester and I really hope to see all of you out there. [22:03] Thank you very much for your time.

Larry Teeter, chair: Our second information item today will be presented by Dr. Yasser Gowayed, who will describe the upcoming online administrator evaluations.

Dr. Yasser Gowayed, Administrator Evaluation Committee Chair: I presented some of this work in November and today we will do a quick update on where we are. This is from the Administrator Evaluation Committee and the committee charge is to oversee or conduct periodic evaluation for university administrators. These are the committee members. We have members from faculty, from staff, members from A&P, as well as student representatives. These are the committee members for the past 2 years to which the work I will be presenting today and shared with you in November, with a quick update today.

The committee came up with this policy where we agreed that the survey would be conducted by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and will be conducted each year during the month of February except for the year that the administrators are being evaluated which happens every 3 to 5 years.

All full-time employees within academic units would be, will have a survey this year to evaluate their administrators and there will be a comment section, with a big warning on top, if you want to remain anonymous in the survey please don’t include personal information in the comments section. The data will be shared with 3 people, the chair of the committee, the Provost, as well as the chair of the University Faculty Senate. The survey has 4 parts, administration, personal management, budget and resources, academic program management. And we have 5 levels of evaluation and they cannot judge just in case somebody is not involved in specific activity of their administrator.

In November we presented to you that until February we will utilize campus resources to my survey as well as communicate with the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (OIRA). What we did until now is we consulted with Professor Joni Lakin from the department of Education Foundations, Leadership and and Technology and she was able to help us reword the survey, put it in a format that would be easy to understand and quickly to respond to. We also met with OIRA, talked about it and was informed yesterday that the surveys will go out on February 25. Hopefully that will be a target date, it may be a day or two later, but the target date is Thursday of next week.

This is the survey itself, I will not go through it, but it is basically 30 questions with 5 levels of evaluation and a column of CJ, where you say I Cannot Judge that. The 4 parts I talked about as well the comments section, my expectations, 5 to 10 minutes at the most in filling the 30 questions, the comments what ever time it may take to be done.

The idea here is that this has been tried before. There have been at least 2 attempts to do that. So what’s different? What’s different is that we would like to do it consistently every single year in the same month. What will it get us? It will get us consistent data. So the administrator will be able to say well, I’ve improved or whatever. There will be consistent data that will come one year after another, and I think that is valuable.

We also understand that this is our first attempt at this as a committee. We asked experts, we tried as much as we can to reach a good level of proficiency in sharing that with you. In response to the survey we would like to hear some positive feedback or this would be better if… if each full time employee that works in an academic unit will get 2 surveys, 2 e-mails from this committee on Thursday, one for his or her Chair and one for his or her Dean. It will come as if it is coming from my e-mail. So if you don’t like something, didn’t like the wording, didn’t like the survey, took a long time; please share it. I will make sure that every comment I see will be shared with the committee.

What we hope from you is that you go back to your units and encourage you colleagues to respond to these surveys. They will come on the 25 of February and will close on March 22. Within this period there will be a couple of other e-mails for reminders. We are looking for a higher level of response otherwise the whole process is always ? (could not understand). The higher the response the better the feedback the more we can put into the system and improve.

I am now open for questions. Please.
Someone not at a microphone: Commenting on the anonymous survey.

Patricia Duffy, immediate past chair: I just wanted to thank Yasser for all the work he and his committee have put into this. It didn’t come across in your presentation, but I know how many hours you met and how much effort you all put to make this the best survey possible that we could have this year. Thanks. [29:04]

Larry Teeter, chair: Thanks Yasser. Our next information item is about a new addition to campus, the Hooper, and Bliss Bailey is going to present some information on it.

Bliss Bailey, Interim CIO: Thanks Larry. So the Hopper Community Cluster is a high performance computing cluster that a bunch of our researchers and research groups have invested in together to provide better quality, higher speed computational resources that we’ve ever had on campus.

Hopper, well it’s not named after grasshoppers, it’s named after Grace Hopper, who was a ground breaking computer scientist. Her work laid the ground work for much of the work we do today and shaped modern coding and computing, so it seemed fitting to name this after her. It’s a cluster because it is a collection of computers that are configured to work together. Essentially it is a collection of Intel, PCs, they are high end intel pcs but they are connected together in such a way that our researchers can choose to use one or more of those computers at a time. It’s a community cluster because it’s a joint effort. There have been a lot of people that work together to build this system, we’ve had investments on the part of the Office of the Provost, from the Office of Information Technology, the College of Science and Mathematics, Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, and we also had research groups from all over campus that participated in this. Some of this is grant money, some of this is start-up money, personal money from funds that are available to faculty members or department heads. So it is really a group effort from across multiple disciplines on campus.

An investment like that gets you a lot of boxes. It’s a lot of gear. All of this equipment came from Lenovo, they were our provider of choice. It ends up looking like this, it’s not particularly impressive to look at. It’s a lot of blinking lights and a lot of cabling, what’s impressive is the work that we can do with it. I can’t talk about a high performance computing cluster without sort of giving the obligatory speeds and feeds, I’ve got to talk about how fast it is and how big it is and all the work that you can do with it. So I’ll do that but I will try to get through it quickly. If you have detailed questions about that I am going to refer you to a guy named Jeff Stallworth, he can talk with you all day about it and go into as much detail as you’d like.

Essentially it is 120 computers, each one of those computers, each one of those nodes had 2 processors on it. It is a collection of about 2,000 cores. Each processor is divided into virtual sub-processors referred to as cores, so 2,000 cores, 15 terabytes of memory across the entire cluster, and 1.4 petabytes of disc storage. Just to put the disc storage in context, one petabyte, you all probably have some filing cabinets still hanging out in your offices. You haven’t digitized everything you do, so you have some 4-drawer filing cabinets sitting in your office, so one petabyte is estimated to be able to contain the contents of 20 million 4-drawer filing cabinets. I don’t know what you could do with that piece of knowledge other than regurgitate it at a presentation like this, but 20 million filing cabinets is a lot of storage. Infiniband storage network, that’s really part of the secret sauce in order for the 120 nodes to work fast you have to be able to move data quickly between them. They all tie into the same storage, that big 1.4 petabytes of storage and that infiniband storage network is the secret sauce that makes this cluster fast. It’s not the biggest on the planet but in terms of the way we move data between those computers in that storage it’s probably in the top 1% of the planet. Day after tomorrow, it won’t be there anymore, the way technology moves. [33:35]

It gives us about 102 teraflops of computer capacity. We’ve also got some nodes that are specialized so there are a couple of nodes on there with GPUs and co-processors that will allow the researchers that use this system to, those are expensive co-processors, there are certain types of work that work well in that environment but they are fairly new and we wanted to provide our researchers with an opportunity to dip their toes into that technology to see if that is something they would want to invest in on a larger scale.

The real strength of the Hopper is not all the technology, it’s not the speeds and feeds, it’s the fact that researchers have come together to pool their resources. We’ve got central technical supports, so your researchers don’t have to spend their time being system administrators, they don’t have to install and patch operating systems, they don’t have to worry about creating accounts or doing security patches, or making sure that the networking works; all that is taken care of for them. The infrastructure is in place they don’t have to have special air-conditioning, or go to department heads looking for a room with special power, all that is taken care of for them, the system has room to grow, so as we bring in new faculty members and talk about start-up packages, we can expand this to provide resources for new researchers as well, and we’ve got support from the administration. Not only financial support but there is buy in, we’ve got John Liu, Associate Vice President of Research, not only is he a support of this system, he bought in he is still an active researcher and he’s invested in this as well, Nick Giordano, Dean of COSAM, he’s an active researcher still. And he’s bought in, he’s invested in this and wants to make it work as well.  And we’ve got researchers that are defining the usage policies. OIT runs the system but runs it according to the specifications of the research community.

Just before this meeting, I came from the first governance meeting that will help us define the usage policies and determine how those resources are allocated among the users. The most important things is that researchers are working together to pool these sources to get the best value for the university.

If you’d like more information: HPCPortal@auburn.edu
There is information in great detail there, graphs of the build. Are there any questions? Thank you.

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Bliss. I think that’s an exciting thing to happen on Auburn’s campus. I know from some earlier projects that I had when we were working with a computer in Huntsville and constantly trying to get time on that computer and it was really a pain and people don’t have to go through that anymore, now they can use the facility right here on campus.

Our final item of business is Dr. Plexico announcing the slate of candidates.

Laura Plexico, secretary: The slate of candidates for the 2016-17 Senate Officers. I believe most of them are here, so when I say your name you can stand up. Dan Svyantek from Psychology and Jerod Russell from Kinesiology are running for chair-elect. For secretary-elect we have Tony Moss from Biological Sciences and Don Mulvaney from Animal Sciences.

We will as of March 1, send out the call for the vote and that will be open for a week and close on March 7 and the winners of the election will be announced at the General Faculty Meeting. Any Questions?

Larry Teeter, chair: We got through those items pretty fast today

Is there any new or unfinished business? Hearing none, the meeting is adjourned. [BK-39:35]