Transcript Senate Meeting
September 22, 2015
Larry Teeter chair: I am Larry Teeter, chair of the Senate. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Senate. If you are a Senator or substitute Senator and haven’t signed in and picked up a clicker, please feel free to do that now because we are going to have 2 items to vote on in this meeting.
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 as well.
The agenda for the meeting today 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 would like to establish a quorum, there are 86 members of the Senate a voting quorum requires 44 senators. If you are present and a senator or substituting for a senator please press A on the clicker. Okay we do have a quorum to at least proceed.
Our first item of business is approval of the minutes from the August 25, 2015 Senate meeting. These minutes have been previously posted on the Senate Website, are there any additions or changes or corrections to these minutes? Do I hear a motion to approve the minutes? A second? All in favor please say aye. Opposed? (none) The motion carries. [1:49]
Our next agenda item will be comments from President Gogue.
Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you Larry, delighted to be with you today. I want to share with you just a couple of things. I think most of you may have followed in the last week the General Fund budget was approved. It’s the budget that started out at about 800 million dollars, then it went to 600, and then went to 500, then 400, it ended up at 166. I’ll remind you that’s not a budget that we get higher education money out of. So it is the general fund budget, it was approved at 166; they added 25 cents on cigarettes that generates about 66 million dollars of 166. They put a tax on prescription drugs for 8–10 million. They put a head tax on nursing homes, folks that are in nursing homes, that generated 10 million. The big issue was the use tax, they took a percentage of that our of the higher ed or out of the education trust fund, 80 million dollars. Don’t know if that is a one-time allocation or whether it is ongoing, but that was the final impact of the general fund on the educational trust fund.
The second thing I want to mention is the Board of Trustees meets this Friday, there are a number, maybe 16 or 17 different facility and property related items on that agenda. There are 3 or 4 that deal with the sale of timber, both within the School of Forestry and also within the College of Agriculture. [3:26] There is a road project that deals with Mell Street, remember that’s the road that runs in front of the Library, they are looking at changing the entry point on Thach into Mell Street to try to reduce the amount of cars through there for pedestrian usage. And they are looking at what I call a round about down at Samford and Mell Street, for late afternoon traffic to hopefully move traffic a little bit better.
There is an infrastructure project that is in the Health Science area, if you think of the area where V-Com is, you’ve got 2 buildings that have been approved for that area, one is the School of Nursing and the other is the Pharmaceutical Research Building, so there is an effort to provide the appropriate infrastructure so you can build those buildings, electric, sewer, water, what ever. So that’s a major project.
The library has a project to actually build a warehouse to reduce some of the holdings within the Library to allow more space for students and people to interact while they are in the Library. There is an addition to the Leach Science Center, that as I understand will allow Physics faculty members to be relocated to that site as we take down Parker and Allison for the second phase of the Central Classroom Facility. The Engineering side is the Engineering Enhancement Center that they receive private money for, that will cause the removal of the L-building and the Shop Buildings to allow that facility to go into place. So that’s on the agenda.
There is a private gift that will allow the removal of the Poultry buildings that are out on South College in the Research Park land to North College to a different location. So that’s on the agenda. An academic proposal out of the Business School that deals with a graduate certificate in data analytics. There is also a modification in the College of Veterinary Medicine for a Federal Code that changes it from Veterinary Medicine to, what is it Provost?, to Biomedical Sciences that more adequately reflects one of the graduate programs.
The other thing is this is the Board Meeting which the budget for the university is approved. The guidelines are approved in June, the budget is put together during the summer. In terms of salary increases, it’s a 3% permanent salary increase on average, there’s a 2% one-time increase for the December timeframe. I think those are sort of the key areas. About a 40–50 million increase in the budget over the previous year, is that right, Don?
The only other final thing I wanted to share with you is there was an interesting article in the last week that talks about student debt. So the amount of debt that students have when they graduate. It was interesting because it sort of listed some of the schools that most of us had seen data showing very high debt levels. So I want to read to you the top debt schools. Schools where their students had the greatest debt. University of Pheonix, Walden University, Nova Southeastern University, DeVry University, Capella, Strayer, Kaplan, Argasey, Grand Canyon, ITT, DeVry Graduate School, American Intercontinental, they are all for-profits. So you go through the list and they’re all for-profit institutions. [7:18] So then I got a list of what are the highest regular universities in terms of debt. So which schools that are public and private, more traditional. So the highest debt load is New York University, Liberty University, Univ. of Southern California, Penn State, Arizona State is 5, Ohio State is 6, Temple, Univ. of Minnesota Michigan, and Rutgers. Those are the top 10 for debt loads for their graduates. The interesting point in the article was, it those 10 regular universities, they have less debt collectively (all added up) than the University of Phoenix, Pheonix campus, so one campus of the University of Phoenix. Phenomenal if the data is accurate.
We often hear from our parents, we often hear from our students about debt, but it’s a pretty different picture when you look at it from a national perspective.
Appreciate you all being here. We have a graduate lecture that starts at 4 o’clock that several of us are going to go to Larry, but I certainly appreciate being here today. Thank you. [8:33]
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue and our next item on the agenda will be comments from Dr. Boosinger.
Tim Boosinger, Provost: Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to continue to update you on the Strategic Plan. Our 5-year Strategic Plan we are well into the 3rd year. At the last meeting I talked about some of our research programs specifically detailing some of the information on the cluster hiring. If you don’t remember that information it was put on the Web today and it’s been released to the media if they have an interest in reporting on that. But I did want under student success I wanted to talk to you about some of the metrics as we enter the 3rd year. Our goal for the 4-year graduation rate was to increase that number to 50% and we have increased that now to 49% from 47 just a year ago. [9:36] So that’s good news.
We’ve also seen an increase in our 6-year graduation rate, it’s now at 73%. When we started we were at 68%, our goal is to get to 78%, we’ve got a ways to go to get there by the end of the 5-year cycle. Our ACT scores are up just a tick, they are up to 27.3 for freshmen and we had an out-of-state enrollment of this fall’s class of 41% out-of-state students. That is right at our goal. Enrollment Management Council and the university is looking at a balance of about 60% in-state, 40% out-of-state. Our international student goal for undergraduate enrollment we are on track to meet our goal there. If you are interested in learning more about AU Global they are going to have a program next week at 4 0’clock, it’s a Tuesday afternoon in front of Cater, outside weather permitting. So take a look at that.
You should have already seen some publicity about the Exploratory Advising Center, it’s on the first floor of Mary Martin Hall. You enter from the Library side from the big patio area there in front of the Library you can go in that entrance. You are welcome to visit anytime. They had a grand opening or open house.
Outreach and Extension are making significant progress. They’re getting close to their original goals for the 5-year plan, lots going on, I will report more details on that later.
Some areas where we need to continue to work, make more progress in the next year or two; increasing student and faculty diversity. We are going to come out with a more clearly defined plan on spousal and partner hiring. And of course, continuing to try and increase our research profile, our research enterprise at Auburn University. [11:47] I think that the cluster hiring initiative that we just announced with the hiring of the strategic hiring of 41 faculty, I think that will give us a boost. If you may remember, that’s a cooperative process between the colleges and schools using vacant positions hiring in a strategic way with funds being supplemented centrally to make that happen. Both funds for salaries and start-ups, we’re excited about that.
Does anybody have any questions? Comments?
Mike Stern, not a senator: Are there any senators for the question, because I am not a senator. May I ask you a questions?
Tim Boosinger, Provost: Sure, okay.
Mike Stern, not a senator: It’s not a hard question just a general one, you’ve been in Auburn a long time, probably been Provost for 4 years but you were in Vet Med before that. I read an article back from February this year in the Charlotte Observer and it has a quote from the previous Chancellor of North Carolina and it mentioned Auburn in it so I was wondering what your thoughts on it would be. So I’ll read it to you. This is just a snippet that is relative to Auburn; it starts off and says
“It’s difficult to imagine UNC avoiding stiff NCA punishment for the systematic and enduring academic fraud outlined in last year’s Weinstein Report. Already the school has become an exemplar of breaking faith with it’s basic educational mission in order to maintain athlete’s eligibility to compete.” And it goes, “We thought we were different from Auburn, but now we know that we’re not.” Says Thorpe. “That’s a hard thing for people to absorb.” And Thorpe is of course currently the Provost at Washington, in St. Louis which is a very good school, but he resigned as UNC Chancellor back in 2013. And given you long career here at Auburn, obviously longer than mine, I was just wondering what your reaction, this is back from February the previous year, to someone of Thorpe’s stature saying those kind of things?
Tim Boosinger, Provost: I would argue that that was an inappropriate analogy given our situation currently at Auburn University.
Mike Stern, not a senator: Maybe it was about the past. It was February of this year that that article came out. Do you think it was an issue for Auburn in the past that may no longer be appropriate to analogize Auburn to these types of situations?
Tim Boosinger, Provost: Possible yes. I think Auburn enjoys a very reputation in all of our academic programs, including the integrity of our academic programs at Auburn University. [15:09]
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Boosinger. I’ll just be brief and make the standard introductions that I like to make at the beginning of each meeting. I’d like to first introduce our Senate officers, Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary. Xing Ping Hu is our secretary-elect, but she is currently off campus. Dr. James Goldstein is our chair-elect, so he will take office July 1. Dr. Patricia Duffy, our immediate past chair serves as the faculty representative on the Board of Trustees and Dr. Bob Locy, a previous chair of the Senate will serve this year as our parliamentarian. I’d also like to introduce our administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg, who assists us with every one of the Senate meetings. Is always here in advance of the rest of us setting things up for the meeting, does much more to ensure that the business of the Senate is conducted as smoothly as possible.
Are there any questions for me? We have 2 action items today, the first is approval of nominees for Senate Committees sent forward by the Rules Committee. We still have some vacancies due to people leaving campus and we often do not learn that they have left campus until they are no-shows at a committee meeting. Dr. Laura Plexico will make the committee report.
Laura Plexico, secretary: In front of you, you have a slate of names. For the Administrator Evaluation, University Writing, Core Curriculum and General Education committees. When we have these vacancies the Senate Constitution asks that the Rules Committee nominate members to serve on these committees. I hope you’ve had a chance to review them. Because this is coming from a standing Senate Committee it does require no second. Is there any discussion or comment on the nominees? Hearing none, I ask for you to get out your clickers and if you approve of the slate of nominees press A, if you do not, press B. A=60, B=2. Alright, the motion carries.
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Laura.
Our second action item today was presented at last month’s Senate meeting as pending action item, and concerns updating our campus copyright policy. Sara Wolf, a member of the Steering Committee will present this item. [18:24]
Sara Wolf, Steering Committee member: Good afternoon. Last time we were here I presented a general overview of the policy and there were very few questions which was wonderful. But hopefully you’ve had a chance to read the policy in its entirety. It is here for you; do we need to scroll through it? How quickly can you scan on the screen I guess is the question? If you do have questions we’d be happy to entertain them.
For those who were not here last time, this updates our current policy which was last adopted in 1984. Bringing us into the 21st Century allowing some of us to graduate from high school and college since the last time we did it, so it was very, very needed and if there aren’t any questions can we move on to a vote, is that how we do it? Any questions? Yes?
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: I did have one question and that was, Auburn gains no benefits to the university, no financial benefits to the university for copyrighted materials? Is that the way I am reading this as opposed to patents? In patents there is a big sharing of profit.
Sara Wolf: Jan Thornton is the director of the Office of Innovation Advancement and Commercialization, she actually is an attorney, I am going to give my kind of lay persons answer to your question and then I am going to let her give one from an attorney.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: I think I know why, but…
Sara Wolf: In general and historically the university is really not interested in benefiting monetarily from the scholarly work that you do on a day-to-day basis. However, there are certain circumstances that would be covered under this policy where you get an amazing amount of support from the university in terms of resources, money, personnel kinds of things, assistance, in which case the university would expect to share copyright and/or any kind of monetary benefit from that. But as a default and in general the university is not interested in making money off of your books.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: There isn’t a whole lot of money to be made off of books (laughing).
Sara Wolf: Everybody needs their 10 cents, right?
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: Yes, that nickel that we would have got, but what did come to mind was software. Software development can be quite lucrative.
Sara Wolf: We are getting into straddling between patents and copyrights.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: Yes, that’s why I wanted a little clarification there.
Jan Thronton: On those, this policy as does the patent policy talk about if you’ve had funding from a sponsor to develop. So if Auburn receives funding, whether it’s to develop software or a patentable thing, it’s going to be owned by the university because the funding came in and came through that way. What we would do then is, there is no set percentage, we would look at all the resources that were put in there and come to some agreement on how revenue (depending on our obligations), but if we went out and we licensed it or sell it to someone, even back to the sponsor, whatever revenue came in we would come to some agreement on how that should be distributed.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: Would that be on a case by case sort of basis?
Jan Thronton: In the patent policy itself, it has since, as long as I have been aware, been the very oldest patent policy and then forward there has always been a Board approved distribution. And those, because that is a patentable thing it is not traditional scholarly work per se. I guess maybe why that’s the difference why the original copyright policy was written differently. Everybody kind of does copyright, but not everyone does patentable.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: So software would fall kind of in across boundaries between
Jan Thornton: What we’d love is if you come up with some software that has some commercial potential, a lot of times it will just be used in your program, but we would love if you do to come and talk to us about it because it could be you may have not thought of ways it could be used and we might be able to with your help go forward and actually bring in and realize some revenue that could then come back and go into your lab and into your personal end or whatever. We invest in the marketing of that kind of thing.
Rusty Wright, senator, Fisheries: Thank you.
Sara Wolf: One of the biggest differences between this policy and the previous policy is the emphasis on coming to the table early and having these discussions with your department head or your associate dean or whom ever is the appropriate person to have it, so that issues such as that can be determined ahead of time and out in the open so that nobody at the end goes, “what do you mean I did all this work and I get nothing” or on the other end, “we helped you to do all this work and we don’t get anything.” The idea is to negotiate ahead of time and come to an agreement. Those agreements are really flexible in terms of if both parties agree to it and it’s not actually illegal [voice dropped out]. If you are perfectly happy developing things for free and not getting compensated, the university is not going to be upset by that. But most of us want to get compensated to some extent.
Other questions? Okay.
Larry Teeter, chair: Move to a vote. Press A for approve and B for disapprove. A=59, B=1. Great only one opposed, the motion passes.
We have one information item today, a very interesting presentation that I just heard last week discussing some concerns that some female members at Auburn University brought forward by Dr. Beth Guertal, chair of the Commission on Women in Academic Careers. [25:24]
Dr. Beth Guertal, chair of the Commission on Women in Academic Careers: Good afternoon everybody. My name is Beth Guertal and I am a faculty member in Crop, Soils, and Environmental Sciences, it was previously named Agronomy and Soils. [25:43] [25:06]
So the reason why this commission was developed was because the COACHE survey, which you all have been taking for the past 3 years which looks at faculty impressions at Auburn University and then compares those responses over a wide range of things to other universities. So what happened was in the last year when the COACHE survey results came back and these COACHE survey results were for all tenure-track or tenure accrued faculty it does not include faculty on the research track, it does include Libraries. So what happened was Auburn University women faculty members were giving statistically lower scores for 5 key areas that the COACHE survey assayed. And maybe even more importantly, the scores of the women faculty at Auburn were lower than comparable universities; like University of Alabama, Washington State, Kansas State. So what it looks like is that. That’s a very complicated figure it was created for me from the folks at the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. But if you see in the green boxes, promotion, departmental collegiality, nature of work in terms of service, nature of work in terms of teaching, and personal and family benefits. Those 5 areas, by 2 different statistical analysies both median and the mean the women were given consistently lower scores than the men in satisfaction for those areas.
So to pull out an example; this would be an example of an area on the nature of the interest or quality in terms of teaching. So you see the types of questions that were asked on the left the number of courses you teach, the level of courses you’re teaching, how equitably your teaching work was distributed. I am highlighting those 3 first because they are in red for one and secondly the little asterisk shows that statistically the women were less satisfied with their role at Auburn University in these areas than the men. But on the good side, overall as faculty at Auburn that answered the COACHE survey were very happy with the discretion of the courses that we have to teach, we don’t feel like there is anyone telling us what we can teach, the nature of content of those courses and the quality of the students. The women are a little more unhappy, statistically so, with the number and the level.
So because of that, because we have these 5 areas that we were lower and because we’re lower than key other institutions, the Provost developed a commission on women in academic careers. We kind of had a few things that we wanted to step through as we looked at this, which is look at the COACHE survey a little bit. Which is really already done for us, I reported to you just a moment ago, and then look at what the working conditions are like for female faculty at Auburn. What are the barriers to success with female faculty at Auburn, what sort of things prevent them from advancing, and then figure out what could we do to ensure better success for female faculty. [28:15]
So one of the first things we wanted to do was look at the data that was already there. What does the data say? There is a lot of anecdotal stuff being thrown at us, oh, women don’t get promoted as quickly as men, it’s harder for women, there was a lot of tales but we really hadn’t picked apart the data that we had. So luckily I have a stealth statistician in my department who’s name is Dr. Van Santen and we sort of did a little quid pro quo and he agreed to analyze the data set for me and I somehow agreed to perform a 3-year evaluation of one of his new putting greens in a trial, but that’s okay. So what we did was the Office of Research and Institutional Assessment gave us all the data that we had for time to rank from Assistant to Associate and Associate to Full (professor). So overall we looked at the various types of data that we had with the 2 different groups of individuals.
Without showing you all the data of the statistical analyses, what we found was the mean value for assistant to associate were exactly the same for females and males. On average for promotion for assistant to associate it does not matter for gender, the average of 5.5 years is exactly the same. Now for associate to full we had female to male, it was similar, 7.8 per 7.4 years. But the problem is this is mean data, this is saying what is the mean and the distributions were skewed. And if you know with statistics, means aren’t really great when the distributions are skewed, so you kind of like to look at the median. [30:01] So these are our distributions that you see here and at the bottom is associate to full prof and the top is assistant to associate, and you see how everything is skewed.
So instead of looking at the mean data we took a look at the median and used a wilcox and 2 sample median test and the part that’s important is down here in bold. So the probability value for female vs. male, assistant to associate professor is .14, so that means it’s not significant. That’s not a really small number it’s not smaller than .1, which in our area of science is what I tend to look for for P-value.[30:45] So assistant to associate we don’t really tend to have a problem, looking over all the population of faculty, regardless of when they started at Auburn University. Now associate to professor the P-value was .046, so there is some slight statistical significance that it does take longer for women to be promoted to professor from associate than men over the entire population that we have. Everybody with me? Okay.
Let’s pull it out by decade because this is really when you start to see differences. So on the left we have assistant to associate and on the right we have associate to prof. Now what Dr. Van Santen did was take these in 10 year blocks. So assistants to associates starting in 1963 up to 1973, ’83, ’93, 2003, so in that date is dumped the 10 years of the cohort when they started.
Now assistant to associate back here, you see our n’s, so there are only 3 females in that block. You really can’t statistically look at that. We have a P-value that says that’s not significant, but the sample size was so small. So really we have to get up here to 1983 until our sample size gets big enough to look at do we have differences. And in the cohort anybody that started between 1983 and 1993, do we have significant difference in time to promotion in women and men? Do we? Yes. I teach like this, I stand for long periods of time until I get an answer. So look, women average on 6 years to associate at 5.2 and the P-value is .001, that is highly significant. So if you were hired between 1983 and 1993 there was a clear statistical discrimination against women for promotion from assistant to associate. But look at how good were doing, 1993–2003 these last 20 years the numbers fall on top of each other. So in the last 20 years from assistant to associate we have not seen a problem.
So now we look at associate to professor and we do see a long term and significant again in the same decade 23 women in that 10 years that were promoted from associate to prof and it was significantly longer, averaging 8 years compared to an average of 6. But again that 1993 decade they are starting to fall on top of each other. And this is a little bit of flaw data don’t pick that apart and say Oh it’s significant because we still have to dump another year of data in to complete that 10-year cohort. And we will have that data at the end of this year to finish that out and we’ll see what that does. [33:34]
There is a slight significant difference in time to professor for women as compared to men. The average is about 7.8 vs. 7.5 I think, there are differences by decade. Now the thing we kept hearing, I am not going to show you the statistics for the interest of time, we did an odds analysis; what are the odds of a woman who has been an associate professor for a long time making full prof. So this last bullet point came about because we kept hearing, Oh the associate professors were a long time the associate professors were 8, 9, 10 years, I can’t get promoted to full. So we looked at the odds of anybody who’s been an associate professor for 10 years making that up to prof, men vs. women. And if a female faculty member is an associate prof for a long time there is no difference in the odds of being promoted. In fact, it was slightly significant that it was harder for the men. So if the men had been associate professors for a long time it was very slight statistical odds that they would never make full.
But, okay, so you can go away right now and say it’s not a problem, but the problem is there is a problem. The perception, the surveys, the personal expression of the women on the COACHE survey says, we have a problem. So the data does not access ever, or track the difficulties or the fact that the women just got it done because they had to get it done. That’s not in the survey. It’s not in the data. Additionally, it does not include information about leakage. Now I long say to my dean and my department head, “I don’t want to talk to the students about a scholarship and came to Auburn about why they came to Auburn, I want to talk to the students that got a scholarship offer and then went somewhere else.” Why did they not come to Auburn? So what we have to do is get a committee that goes out and finds the faculty who left. For that matter a comparable matching pool of male faculty, why did you leave? You were an associate professor here, what made you go somewhere else? What are the factors that lead to the potential of leakage from the system?
So, to try to get a better handle on it we formed focus groups. In the spring and summer of this year we formed 6 specific focus groups, we got every discipline in a specific focus group. We wanted the specific so if there were research specific topics they could be covered, in other words, a librarian didn’t have to listen to me wander on about why I couldn’t get a combine. So we kept this all very separate. They were separated by research and teaching. If a person felt that they could not say what they wanted to say in a focus group because there was another senior woman sitting next to them, they could request individual interviews. So the committee would do those.
What we have to put this into perspective, we have 368 tenure-track female faculty at Auburn University. Approximately one quarter of those female faculty were selected at random and sent an invitation. So that’s about 25% of all the female faculty in a tenure or tenure-track appointment. [36:49] 72% of all the women we invited either attended a focus group or came to us or we came to them for individual interviews, so that’s about 18% of all female faculty at Auburn University. We had 3 trained staff and faculty members that know how to do this, know how to not ask leading questions that did the focus groups.
So the questions were things about where does Auburn excel, where do we fall short, what aspects of your department supported your success, what are some of the barriers, what kinds of things would maybe help you succeed more at Auburn University?
I am going to summarize the results based under the areas where the COACHE survey responded that women were unhappy. One of the areas was the nature of work, teaching. And based on the focus groups the perceptions are that women are teaching more undergraduate courses and they are teaching over their load. One of the recommendations of the committee is that we need to look at teaching loads. Because it really comes down to two different things. Do women faculty consistently get handed more teaching above and beyond their budgeted load? That’s one problem. Or, and this may not be a problem it may just be a cultural barrier, are we actually hiring more women faculty into positions that have a greater teaching appointment. So that’s kind of two different things that we really need to pry apart. [38:18]
Personal and family life policies, more flexibility, maternity leave, child care, balancing family life, lack of on-campus child care was frequently mentioned as a problem. That is the number one most mentioned thing. Here’s a really good point to point out what I am going to say several times, the problems or concerns that women often have, have nothing to do with being a woman. They have to do with quality of life and managing a family. Certainly guys are just as worried about proper child care and balancing getting your kid.
Promotion. There was a concern about a lack of information about the promotion process, about how we promote, there was concerns that maybe departmental leadership doesn’t think about moving women up to that next level in promotion, having a conversation and properly mentoring people to move up in promotion.
Salary and pay and equity, it was suggested and in fact several people who have been around here a long time, we mentioned that the last time a substantial salary adjustment and an equity resolution was made was in the era of Dr. Paul Parks. And they went through and looked very closely and they adjusted pay. That has not happened in a long time. Now when I gave this to all the department heads and deans one person said, “you know Beth, this has to happen at the departmental level,” and they are right. If it happens at college or above odd outlying results will likely get smoothed out and you will really not be able to put a finger on where there are salary inequities, if they exist. So that means that this has to be done with a high degree of confidentiality and somebody who can really look at the statistical outlying data sets to see what’s going on. But we do need to take a look at a salary compensation survey. [40:12]
Diversity and lack of female leadership, there was a lot of concern…in some of this is just simply…and this again is not necessarily a female vs. male thing it’s just cultural conventions, sort of various sexism, good ol’ boy network, stereotyping and making assumptions, and we all tend to do it. Sometimes it’s conscious and sometimes there is a lot of unconscious bias. But one of the comments that’s important is that it’s leadership that values women and don’t read that as the leader has to be a woman. Those are different.
So I made a word map. We transcribed all of the commentaries and every time a word was uttered by a woman in a negative way, in terms of we need this or this is an issue, I marked it and I marked the first time they said it, so the bigger the word the more times the focus groups said the word. To get on the word map at least 5 different people had to say it. So you can see what the biggest concerns are, and that includes childcare, that includes paternity, adoptive leave policies, that includes maternity leave, all sorts of issues with children. In fact, as your children get older, the fact that we don’t have anything to do with them once they get into 5th and 6th grade during the summer and they just go free range and run around the world. Pay is our second biggest thing, then maternity, mentoring, committee (in terms of we are on too many committees all the time) because on committees you have departments where you may only have one or two female faculty, so guess what, you are on every committee. Service, spousal hiring, and the Provost mentioned he’s working on that. The Dean and Provost mentioned in a message they sent out to us, I do think we will see a committee to work on developing university level spousal hiring policy. And then things like the good ol’ boys club, usually we have the southern-old-boy all connected together in a commentary.
So there were positive comments. Many people felt that in the past decade things have improved quite a lot. People were uniformly quite positive about the quality and enthusiasm of our students, there were very individual comments that they felt comfortable in a department and felt rewarded and had resources, that was because of the leadership of a department head. So it really is an individualized issue or problem and again, like I mentioned, high quality child care, workload issues, having resources, and mentoring, a fair distribution of resources, those apply to all of us those are not really a gender specific kind of thing they are very gender neutral.
So the action items; leakage data, we need to find the people who left and find out why. What were the concerns, why did they go somewhere else? We do need a salary data analysis, I already told the Provost this and I really do believe this that it’s not a committee function. A single faculty member who is really good at that stuff needs to be paid some summer salary to make that their project. That’s a tough one and it needs to be done right with completely coded confidential data. In the same way we need to quantify teaching loads; who’s teaching what, are they over teaching? Is this a consistent bias against women or is a consistent bias against really great teachers? So quantification of gender neutral issues were often ventured, again, mentoring, resource distribution, and workload.
So there’s my committee, and I’d like to thank them all very much for their efforts. If you want all those survey results starting at the beginning with that really awful figure and the individual questions; every one of those is available and if that is horrible to type in you can just go to the Auburn Web page and type “COACHE Survey” and it will lead you right to it. It is all on the Provost’s home page.
I’d be glad to answer questions or discussion or anything else you might like to cover about this. Anybody? Thank you.
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you very much. This concludes our information items for today.
Is there any new business? Any unfinished business? Very well, we’re adjourned. [45:00]