Transcript Senate Meeting
October 20, 2015
Larry Teeter chair: I am Larry Teeter, chair of the Senate. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Senate.
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 September 22, 2015 Senate meeting. These minutes have been previously posted on the Senate Website, are there any additions or changes or deletions on 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]
First item of business today are remarks from the President’s Office, Dr. Gogue.
Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you Larry. Appreciate the opportunity to be with you today, I don’t have a presentation today but at out last open Faculty meeting there was a question raised about ticketing, Athletic ticketing. I’m not sure if it was about student ticketing, away visitor ticketing, or faculty/staff ticketing, or season ticketing, but there was a question about it and I really didn’t know the policy so I asked Tim Jackson, if you will Tim, come down here and go over ticket policies and try to correct anything that I may have misstated at the last meeting. Tim’s been in the ticket area probably for what, about 25 years?
Tim Jackson: Although I am not in the ticket area anymore, I am Tigers Unlimited. In Tigers Unlimited we oversee basically the priority system, of course the CIA (committee on Intercollegiate Athletics), Mary Boudreaux, that office oversees the faculty ticket system. So, I guess I don’t know…I am happy to answer any question you may have. I met with Michael for a little while last week and we discussed some of the things, I think there was some question about an article that was in the newspaper. So I guess I would just say I am happy to answer any question you may have. We do have policies that we abide by and Tigers Unlimited we have a Board that I report to as well as to Jay Jacobs. And of course we’ve got the Board of Trustees and Dr. Gogue on more of the ticket side non-foundation. I guess I will answer any question you may have if you have one about any of our ticket policies.
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: I did meet with Tim for about 2 hours on Wednesday and it was very enlightening so what I had asked last time, for the benefit of other people, I’d asked Jay and he kicked it to Don as well about if there are written policies in regard to the sale of the tickets and if so, how are they made, how are they reviewed, and how are they changed? Is there an orderly process in that. Does the CIA committee oversee it? Does the Board of Trustees of Auburn University oversee it, does some other board, Tigers Unlimited, oversee it? Does it go to the president? Is it solely up to Jay Jacobs and so forth? What’s that process look like because both the original Wall Street Journal article and that article mention things about there not being policy or being confusing and so forth, so I wanted some clarification on that.
Tim Jackson: Sure. [5:14] And I would say that if you read any of those articles if it didn’t confuse you, it definitely confused me because some of the questions they asked, I don’t know for sure that they understand the answers and then when they write it, it for sure didn’t make a lot of sense to me. So here’s what I’ll just tell you. First of all when it comes to really faculty tickets, you’ve got you committee on Intercollegiate Athletics and we look to them to set the policy for what we do with the tickets for faculty. When we start dealing with students we work with the SGA, and if we were going to change any policy with students it would be done in consultation with the president. When it comes to the tickets for the public at large or for our donors, Tigers Unlimited is the foundation. Auburn Athletics under Auburn University decides, hey, we want these donors to be able to give of these gifts. This is pretty much done at all universities. So they can give donations to this private foundation, the benefit for them is they get tax relief and they grow as donors. And by them giving to this Tigers Unlimited Foundation, they get a priority. [6:46] So I guess to make it simple the policy is that our seats that aren’t faculty or students or comps for student athletes or coaching staff or what ever that may be, the Tigers Unlimited member gets the first opportunity for those tickets that are available. Within there the priority system decides where they sit. Where it can become a little bit complicated is that we don’t reseat every year; so if somebody got a ticket in 1960, they may still be in that seat today and maybe they’ve given a total of $25,000 and they are sitting next to somebody who has given a million. So the policy says they don’t get kicked out of their seat as long as they are maintaining the minimum contribution, but they can get jumped. So those are policies, that basis policy has been in effect for many years. Who started that Michael, I am not sure. If we changed any policy it would go with the Tigers Unlimited priority system, it would go before our Tigers Unlimited Foundation Board. We also would not change any policy there without getting approval from the President’s Office. In 2006 we made a change. A pretty big change, first one in years and it was where we changed to where you pay one price donation for every seat in the stadium that’s not scholarship to be able to buy that seat we changed it to a tiered system, that we think’s a lot more fair and generated a lot more revenue for us. We vetted that for about a year before we changed that policy. So, I hope that kind of answers the question.
I think some of the things that were said in the paper about there really is no policy is misunderstood. When we’ve gone through our Tigers Unlimited priority system and we no longer have, for instance 3 years ago, unfortunately we had about 10,000 tickets that weren’t consumed in that Tigers Unlimited priority system. We would liked for them to have been but they weren’t, so then we sell those at face value to the public. And there are going to be times where you have visitors that don’t use all their tickets and return them. Texas A&M only used 4,500 of their tickets last year., so now we have 4,000 of their tickets. How the ticket office manages that inventory that’s kind of left over that is non-priority, that can kind of evolve, I guess.
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: When you sell these left over tickets at face value have you had a policy on how they were sold? Because if you look at the articles one of the claims is that some people are getting unequal access to purchase them at face value. And at the time you were selling them at face value are you aware that the face value is no longer the market value of the ticket?
Tim Jackson: Yea. You can definitely debate market value for sure. We talked a little bit about that. What weve traditionally done in Athletics is we sell the ticket for what is printed on the ticket. If we can get more than that for the ticket, we are getting it as a donation. That’s just been the way we’ve operated for years. That doesn’t mean that we can’t change and we’ve changed a little bit in the last couple of years to more dynamic pricing and maybe when we get down to our last 1,000 tickets maybe we sell those for $5 more. Nothing wild and crazy like some are doing with dynamic pricing, but what we would do there, Michael, is go to our priority system. If we think it’s a real, it’s not normal that you have these left over tickets and there is a real demand for them. The normal thing is if they are left over, they are available to everybody. Occasionally you will have some that you are going to limit and try to sell them to your priority. I think some of the issues in there go back to ’13 (2013) when we were trying to sell tickets, well I’m sure everybody in here thought we were going to win all but one game and go to the National Championship; thought we were going to go play Texas A&M and beat them with Johnny Menzel. Maybe we all weren’t that positive over selling the tickets and so we’re trying to sell our tickets and as time progressed now those tickets we were selling definitely were probably a lot higher market value, but out goal has always been to get the face value for the ticket, not bump prices all around, not confuse our folks and try to build loyalty by people paying donations to keep those year-in and year-out. So the single game stuff in not real normal for us like it is in some of the Big 10. You know we’re trying to get people to buy the whole package and then buy that year-in and year-out.
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: In terms of the building loyalty one of the things in the Advertiser article was a claim that thousands of tickets had been withheld in the Tigers Unlimited Donors area to be sold to people without the benefit of a contribution to Tigers Unlimited, the loyalty apportion of it or the 2-part price. Now in that article it said somebody seen your person with 3 other people present, confirmed that that was the case, provided their name would not be utilized. So you’re in charge of Tigers Unlimited right? Were thousands of tickets withheld in those donors areas for sale without the benefit of the Tigers Unlimited contribution?
Tim Jackson: No. [12:41]
Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you. Any other questions for Tim? Thank you.
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue, now we’ll have comments from our Provost, Dr. Boosinger.
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Good to with you. In December we will be half way through our 5-year Strategic Planning cycle, the one we are currently in. In previous meetings I’ve updated you on different pieces of that Strategic Plan. We have 5 strategic priorities. The one I’ve really not said a lot about recently was strategic priority number 5 which has a number of things in it, but one of the center pieces of that was we tried to be more strategic at Auburn in how we allocate resources to our priorities. And toward that end we started about 2 years ago with a strategic planning process that focused on how to achieve those goals or look at different ways to allocate resources through our priorities. So as you remember, that resulted in a model that was reviewed by the Senate. We got feedback from the Senate after they studied it for a number of months and multiple meetings. That committee was chaired by Larry Teeter. The original strategic planning committee with a couple of faculty additions looked at the Senate recommendations this summer, incorporated those into the thinking on how best to move forward. We took those recommendations and presented the president with a recommendation that we proceed with a parallel year in FY16, which we just entered. So I want you to know that we.ve begun the process of looking at that parallel year to see how this model might behave. But we did that in the spirit of including the recommendations that came from Senate Committee and were discussed in this room of the Senators. I just wanted to bring you up to date on that. I will follow up at upcoming meetings and let you know of our progress.
Are there any comments? Questions? [15:25]
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: Are there any senators that have any questions? No, okay.
Tim, we’re going to have presentation by Dan Svyantek at the end about clustering that you asked him to do. I have a question related to this that isn’t specific about probably the clustering you wanted to talk about. We’ve talked about that before at the May meeting, the athletes and Public Administration, but there are some other programs that I’m concerned about going forward besides this and I just wanted to see what was going on with that. Specifically there’s an e-mail between you and Gary Waters from 2014 that I wanted to ask you about, particularly about some other programs in this e-mail and what was going on with them going forward. I could read it to you, but maybe it would be better if I put it up on the screen so you can see what I am referring to. Is that alright?
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Sure. How long is it?
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: So, I believe this is correspondence from him to you after the February 2014 Senate meeting. So I had had a conversation with Mary Boudreaux in this forum about clustering in the Public Administration Program, so I guess you had requested some information from him and he’s getting back to you. That’s what it looks like.
He’ of course reporting 2013 or 57 athletes in there and that 51% of enrollment in that program. And we talked about that stuff before. What we haven’t talked about is the last part of that e-mail I wanted to ask you about, where he says, “as we move forward with the plans for adult education, criminology, and interdisciplinary studies/sports management, the number of student athletes enrolled in public administration is expected to decline.” Now, if I recall correctly, we used to have adult education and criminology here and those were both closed in the fallout from the Petee scandle in ’06. If I remembered due to specific issues related to athletes special topics other kinds of things, so I wanted to know what the status of those were and why the senior athletics director in terms of academics is able to predict ex-anti the forward flow of athletes into academic programs and also why he would use the word we when referencing curricular development?
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: I think he is using we in the broadest sense, but it’s my understanding, at that time, College of Education had proposed developing an adult education minor and bringing that program back online. There is no proposal on the table to reactivate criminology. Some people have expressed interest in it, but I’ve not seen anything. Then the Interdisciplinary program has been looking at sports management major or possibly a minor. But none of those programs are initieated by Dr. Waters. He’s just aware of that from different meetings that he’s involved in. So all of those are coming forward from academic units with the exception of criminology.
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: So the administration did not or your Office did not ask for adult education or criminology to be brought back?
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: No. There was a discussion about was there any interest in reactivating a program like that, but the decision to go forward or not is entirely theirs.
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: I mean, decision, do you speak to deans about curriculum that you would like to see brought forward or reopened or does it come from the faculty up?
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Generally comes from the faculty up.
Mike Stern, Economics, not a senator: Alright, that’s my question.
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: Anything else? [20:12]
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Boosinger.
To begin the meeting, we have a full agenda, but I would first like to introduce our officers. Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary, Xing her? Xing Ping Hu is not here (actually she was sitting in the back and not noticed when she raised her hand), but she’s our secretary-elect. Dr. James Goldstein is our chair-elect, Dr. Patricia Duffy is our immediate past chair, who serves as our representative on the Board of Trustees, And Dr. Bob Locy is our parliamentarian for this year.
We have a fairly full agenda today, we have one action item and for that I will call up Dr. Laura Plexico to present new committee members we would like for you to approve.
Laura Plexico, secretary: Before you you have 2 names for committee slots that need to be filled for Senate committees. These nominees come from the Rules Committee which is a standing Senate committee and therefore will require no second. These were posted to the Senate Web site last week and I hope you had a chance to review them [21:28] Does anybody have any questions? Is there any discussion? [b21:29] Hearing none.
Larry Teeter, chair: Question in the Back? Xing is here.
Laura Plexico, secretary: Alright, I will ask that you press A if you approve and B if you do not. A=57, B=5. Motion carries with 92% in favor. [22:21:] [b22:38]
Larry Teeter, chair: Next we have 2 pending action items. The first will be brought by Lisa Kensler, who is chair of our Academic Standards Committee, and it has to do with a proposed policy on undergraduate certificates.
Lisa Kensler, Academic Standards Committee Chair: Good afternoon everybody. We had a proposed policy come through our committee, Academic Standards, and we felt that it was worthy to bring to the full Senate for your consideration.
We see the undergraduate certificate as consisting of 12 to 21 credit hours. This is an optional program to say that upfront and I will say it again later. It’s an optional program for units to choose to participate in or not. For undergraduate students to have the option of an undergraduate certificate it would appear on their transcript.
The reason that the proposal is brought to us and we agree with a strong rational was it provides a way for you and your program to allow students to market specialty areas of their degree that may be of interest to employers, graduate schools, other state certification folks, whomever. So that’s the idea.
This is how the certificate would be set up. Again it would be 12–21 semester hours. At least 50% of the credit hours should be at the 3000 level or higher, no more than 50% course credit should be attained through transfer credit and at least 50% of courses should follow the standard grading practices. We would expect that the minimum overall GPA should be a 2.0 or higher, and the offering academic unit may choose the count toward undergraduate certificate, those credits taken toward Auburn University’s general education requirement in an academic minor or a major. We do consider the certificates as allowable for double dipping, because it’s a way to repackage and communicate special areas of a student’s academic experience. That is standard practice, by the way, at universities now.
In order for a student to be able to participate in an undergraduate certificate program, they must be a regularly admitted student and that includes degree seeking students, second degree students, and post-baccalaureate students. [25:41]
In order for a unit to decide or to get a certificate program established they would follow the standard process through the Auburn University Curriculum Committee and the the Office of the Provost and any other off campus approvals or notifications that may be required. Then the offering academic unit becomes responsible for advising students, for assessing, and for certifying the completion of the requirements.
Any questions?
Charles Isreal, substitute senator for CLA Dean: My questions is about the optional part of counting. You can count courses, or you can double dip courses, that’s up to the individual program?
Lisa Kensler, Academic Standards Committee Chair: No, a certificate would allow, you would be able to double dip because it’s not a degree in an of itself, it’s more of a packaged way to market or show that imbedded in the 60 hours of degree courses or whatever the hour number may be, there is this special group of courses that equate to a skill or a knowledge base or something like that.
Charles Isreal, substitute senator for CLA Dean: I may have misread your slides but can we go about 2 slides back? The offering may choose to count towards…I am reading that as they are making that option, so I could propose a certificate conceivably in I don’t know what and I would say you can count anything for this. Or someone else may propose a certificate and say you cannot double dip and count toward a certificate?
Lisa Kensler, Academic Standards Committee Chair: Does anybody have a response to that? This is my perception. I have interpreted all of our conversations as being you have your credits that count toward your degree and that the certificate is on top of that, next to that; it repackages some courses that are part of that degree. So it’s not, … whatever your graduation credit hours are, the idea of this certificate is not to add time and courses and length onto a students experience at Auburn. It’s to package pieces of what they’ve done in a way that communicates a special skill set or knowledge base.
Charles Isreal, substitute senator for CLA Dean: We currently do that with minors and with majors and if you want a second major you would have this many more hours or a minor would be this many.
Lisa Kensler, Academic Standards Committee Chair: This is meant to be different than that. Does that answer your question?
Charles Isreal, substitute senator for CLA Dean: It does and I should read that second paragraph as saying, by default these courses can count.
Drew Clark, Dir. Of Inst. Research and Assessment: I guess for recompense for sins in a previous life I am the accreditation liaison for Auburn University. I am responsible for monitoring how we comply with regional accreditation requirements. I just wanted to comment briefly, it’s on the next slide if you would show it. Any off campus or approvals or notifications, I want to call attention to one type of those. For Auburn to initiate certificate programs using existing course work for programs that have already been approved there is no accreditation implication at all, we can just do it. However if we initiate [30:19][b30:07] a certificate program that differs in meaningful respect from existing approved programs of study, such as for example, if we offered a certificate in something I will just make-up and call international, that would require prior approval by the Commission on Colleges and the submission of a prospectus in advance. That’s fine we can do that, but just want people to know that there is an accreditation overhead cost associated with inaugurating certificate programs. The other case in which prior approval by the Commission on Colleges would be required would be when and if half or more of the credits for a given certificate can be earned at an off-campus site. That’s a threshold difficult to meet for a full degree program, but when you are talking about a program that might be as few as 12 credit hours that would mean that somebody would have to be responsible for monitoring for a 12 credit hour program when 6, that is 2 courses, could be earned at a site off Auburn University Campus. That’s just an implication of of the S4 short credit hour completion credentials. Thanks.
Lisa Kensler, Academic Standards Committee Chair: Okay, thank you.
Bob Cochran, senator, Accountancy: I have a comment in support of the proposal. The Harbert College and specifically the School of Accountancy strongly supports an undergraduate certificate program in Accounting. Based on our market research and we’ve looked at this extensively in the past, this program would allow us to expand upon our proven success in online education by serving a larger student population. And if an undergraduate certificate program is approved by the Faculty Senate we can forward and submit a program proposal to UCC within a very short time period. [32:16]
Lisa Kensler, Academic Standards Committee Chair: Thank you very much. Any other questions? Comments?
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Lisa. The information is on the Web site and will remain there between now and our next meeting. At the next meeting we will vote on this proposal.
Our next pending action item are suggested Handbook revisions and James Goldstein will present these. He is chair-elect but also chair of the Handbook Review Committee.
James Goldstein, chair of the Faculty Handbook Review Committee: Good afternoon everyone. There are 2 sections of the Faculty Handbook that we’re recommending for revision. For convenience these are divided into 2 separate documents, but the committee would propose that this be done as one action item, one vote next time if someone wants to divide the question we can do it that way if it seems wise.
The first one is on an aspect of the Tenure and Promotion process. This recommended change didn’t originate with the Faculty Handbook Review Committee, but my understanding is it originated in the administration in response to some concerns from the University Promotion and Tenure Committee. So it clarifies, we think this is not a new policy but a clarification of the intention of the existing process. [34:46]
So let’s make sure it’s clear that when the department or unit head or chair is writing the recommendation letter that that counts as that department administrator’s vote and that they really are expected to be explicit about whether they support or don’t support the candidate. Evidently from time to time that wasn’t always clear from the letter, so the Promotion and Tenure Committee wanted to make sure there was clarity in that letter. And the idea that you only get to vote once, so if you are in the department, but you are serving at a higher level of administration say on a College or University Promotion and Tenure Committee that you don’t get to vote twice.
So then the same clarification for the dean’s letter, that the dean’s letter gives the recommendation explicitly either in support or not in support of the candidate. And that’s what that deals with. So fairly straight forward, I hope.
The second section is in 3.9.1 through 3.9.3. I wanted to give you just a brief account or the background to this one. In January of this year (2015) Patricia Duffy, who was the Senate chair at the time, charged the Faculty Handbook Review Committee to have a look at this section and see whether the grounds for the non-continuation of probationary faculty members were clear. And in a follow up e-mail, she asked us to look to see whether those were clear and whether there were protections for probationary faculty who may have been terminated, not because of poor performance, and not because a program was closed, or because the university had financial exigency. So the Faculty Handbook Review Committee studied the issue and did some reading and looked carefully at the language and worked on this and we completed a draft in April and before we were to send it to the Senate Executive Committee, Dr. Winn, who also sits as the Provost representative on the Handbook Review committee, so he was party to seeing all the discussions and revisions and so on, he suggested that since this is part of the Faculty Handbook that requires Board of Trustee approval, to modify it since it involves dismissal or non-continuation that it would be prudent to have the General Council review the text to see it there were any concerns with the idea that there was no point in forwarding our draft if there were some legal concerns about any of the clarifications that we were proposing. It took longer than we had hoped to get feedback but in August we finally got a response and then there was a process from August through early October with multiple drafts and revisions. I wanted to thank Emmett Winn for assistance in facilitating the back and forth there. So we finally came up with some compromises in the language where the was some concerns and were reasonably pleased with the outcome.
Again we don’t view these changes as new policy recommendations, but clarifications of existing policy. This one [39:16], oh I’m there in some versions it just says CLA user, but nicely my name appears there. So I was responsible for formatting this and I put in comment boxes to explain the rational for all of the changes to the language, such as for example, making it clear because it wasn’t as clear as it could be in our Faculty Handbook, even now, non-continuation is the term that’s used for a probationary faculty member who’s not kept on pre-tenure. Where as dismissal, and there is a separate section for dismissal, is for tenured faculty and there are rigorous and complicated processes for dismissing a tenured faculty member. So just getting the nomenclature clear between non-continuation and dismissal seemed like a good idea. [40:22]
So it was suggested that under non-continuation we’d make it clear since in the existing Handbook the last sentence of 3.9.1 refers to non-tenure track faculty, so now we’re making it clear by having a sub heading there that you can non-continue probationary faculty but also non-tenure track faculty. That’s why we’ve now got, it’s a little inelegant to have down to 4 decimal points but it’s logical if not elegant.
So the biggest change of the wording and one that took a certain amount of back and forth, we’re trying to be explicit about the reason that could be invoked for non-continuing a probationary faculty member because there was a certain amount of uncertainty whether in the existing Handbook that could only happen because of performance related issues or whether there were other situations as well. So we’ve come up with maybe not the ideal language but at least it gives a little bit more of an understanding of what possible reasons could be. So of course, unsatisfactory performance could be a reason, and we’re explicit about that now. There could be misconduct, I think that was implied because for tenured faculty members there is a specific for cause misconduct if you murder your neighbor for example, but that could be a reason to have a dismissal policy. And why would a non-tenure person be immune to that kind of reaction? So that seems not a new idea just making it clear that there is parallelism there. Or other reasons that don’t violate university law or policy which to me seems neutral, that seems to go without saying, but university policy does involve if you read down further in this paragraph; if a probationary faculty member thinks that this was an unfair decision, there is an appeal process. That’s part of existing university policy that you can make a case that the relevant standards of the institution were not being applied. So that’s the biggest change.
Now if we could scroll down. So there is that little .2 that makes it clear, again not elegant, the double negative, it just clarifies that someone for example, lecturers are considered to be on continuing appointment until they are given written notice that they are no longer on appointment. So then 3.9.2 we are just inserting tenured faculty just to clarify, as I mentioned a moment ago, that the term dismissal only applies to tenured faculty, but we have the policies already in place for how that works with the Dismissal Hearing Committee and so on. And then 3.9.3, that’s the current section on the termination because of financial exigency. And as our committee was looking at this we realized that although there has been a policy and a procedure for what happens in a case of financial exigency, that’s a term that I’ve heard thrown around in a lot of contradictory ways, and it came to my attention that the Faculty Handbook for all these years we’ve had policies that conform with AAUP recommendations about what happens under financial exigency, yet our Handbook never defined what we mean by financial exigency. [44:57] So I don’t think of this as a new policy just a clarification of what must be the intention of that term given the procedures themselves are very closely modeled and much of the language is borrowed from that famous AAUP document on institutional regulations on academic freedom and tenure. So that puts and end to any uncertainty, but what do we mean by financial exigency. Would that be if one degree program suddenly lost students and there were more tenured faculty in that unit than there was any reason to have any more for instructional reasons, is that financial exigency? Well no. That’s not financial exigency, but there are procedures for dealing with a situation like that, that fall short of a declaration of financial exigency.
Okay we can scroll down, there are some minor things, just so that you can see them. While the committee was working on the initial draft for this I discovered, I didn’t realize, last October there was a new link, there had been an ad hoc committee on how to discontinue a degree program. So now there’s a link to the charge up above in the Handbook for the charge of the Academic Program Review Committee, there’s a link where that committee is defined for this new procedure for how to discontinue programs. Basically it would have to go through that committee, so that’s been clarified and have updated that in the Handbook language.
That’s all I’ve got, I’d be happy to take any questions. Thank you very much.
Larry Teeter, chair: So you will have a month to take this back to your constituents and discuss it and we’ll vote on it next month and since it comes from a Senate Committee it doesn’t require a second.
We have 2 information items on the agenda yet today. The first is by the Higher Education Partnership. Gordon Stone, executive director will make the presentation. [47:38]
Gordon Stone, executive director of the Higher Education Partnership (HEP): Good afternoon. I know you’ve had a full agenda so I’ll be brief. For those of you who don’t know of our organization, we represent you in Montgomery. We serve as a voice for the combined 14 public institutions of higher education. We represent the 4 year institutions in the state. Our job is to work with the voices of all those institutions from students to faculty to staff to alums to administration to all different levels and what we do if find those issues that we share commonly and try to find ways to increase our capacity as an entity to generate positive change in the legislature. That is not an easy task, but we do enjoy the opportunity to make sure that your voice is heard. By that I mean we frequently find that we represent one of the most misunderstood engines in the whole economic process throughout this state.
If you take what we do, we meaning the collective Higher Education model in Alabama, one of the things that you’ll discover is that we provide about 20 billion dollars of combined economic impact. That number is gathered by taking the economic impacts that are done by the different institutions and simply adding those numbers up. We didn’t compile that, we took and added all the different ones provided by those institutions. But just think about what that means, think about some of the other key characteristics of where our institutions are located and some of the things we do for the economy of our state.
One of the factors I think is most interesting is in there in the second bullet point. This is a number that came from the Higher Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama that did a study and analyzed the impact of our institutions and found that for every $1,000 increase in Higher Edcuation funding, just at the state level, we could generate over 8.7 million dollar increase in total per capita income across the state. One of the things that we struggle with as a state in Alabama is we are consistently right in the 45th, 46th, 47th, 48th, 49th, and 50th when it comes to per capita income and that’s not the grouping you want to be found in particularly in a state like Alabama where the majority of the taxes that are produced that help fund education are directly related to income. Our state, the Education Trust Fund, which is the healthier of our 2 funds, the Education Trust Fund is provided for by 2 basic components of our economic tax revenue model. That is sales tax and income tax. If you add those 2 components together, the purple on the far right (the largest part of the pie chart) is about 60.8% and sales tax is 27.2%. So income and sales tax are over 85% of the total revenue that is produced to support public education in Alabama. [51:11]
Now if you look at Alabama’s total revenue production as a whole counting what we spend on public education and on our general operations we have about 6 billion or close to 6 billion in the Education Trust Fund and less than 2 billion, give or take, in the general operating fund that are state generated. So just think about the very significant role that sales and income tax has in funding state services in Alabama.
As you all know we just completed the second our special sessions to try to determine how our state would address general operational programs. We’re still dealing with a lot of undefined consequences of our decisions to fund the general services the way we have. My home county, Wilcox county doesn’t have a lot of features that draw people there; hunting for instance is one, but another would be the river and what is available through the river as a tourist draw to the county seat of Camden. And they just closed the state park. Well the state park in Camden may not be a big deal to most folks, but in Camden, Alabama that’s the campground. So if you are bringing people in who are going eat at the restaurants or stay at the motels and do various things, that’s a significant hit. Now, my family is from Pine Apple, Alabama and my brother runs a hunting lodge. If you take out that revenue that comes in non-hunting season that keeps those motels and restaurants open and you take that out of Camden because they don’t come to fish then how does that impact the private industry, private landowners who are trying to do other things? See, it’s a vicious cycle. And it’s a cycle that begins and ends in many ways in how we produce revenue. It’s not so much about what we do with our general dollars, it’s about how we generate more opportunity. And the more opportunity we generate is directly proportional to what we do in higher education.
So that’s the message that I am able to have the opportunity to deliver. Unfortunitely we don’t have a lot of listeners sometimes on the other end. That’s one of the great challenges that we have. As a result of that we encourage you and your colleagues to help us by becoming members. We have a very extensive membership fee of $12 a year. So we’re not here to try to cause any kind of crisis. What we’d like to do is have you in a position where you can be aware of some of the global issues with Auburn University and Dr. Gogue, Sheri Fulford, CJ Henesy, do a great job. One of the strongest parts of our whole process is what they do. And we couldn’t do what we do without the institutional lobbies. They do a marvelous job of representing the specific interests of Auburn and that’s not my job although I am an Auburn grad and proud to be that’s not what I am hired to do in Montgomery. What I am hired to do is bring the larger picture into some focus with those elected officials. But I would tell you that we need you and others to help us remind, and we’re fortunate here because the delegation from Lee County is supportive. And they do stand up and defend and thank goodness that we have some leadership from here and from Tuscaloosa County where we have Chairman Ways and Means Committee, Bill Poole. But we work hard to try to help those people stay in positions so they can help us in key times when we need them because we tend to have troubles sometimes getting the message across to people in rural areas, much like my home county, who could truly benefit from increase in income, but sometimes they may just not quite understand how it all works. That’s what we do. Thank you for giving me a few minutes, Dr. Teeter, to come and share that. My colleague, Brett Johnson, is here. Brett is our membership coordinator. He works with the grassroots campuses and Brett would be happy, I’ll be happy, I love to come to Auburn I have a freshman over here so it’s always fun to come see my daughter. I or Brett would be more than happy to come visit with your department or with your college and talk to you more specifically about membership. It’s very simple you go to our Web page. When you get to our Web page you can click on and join with credit cards or bank draft or whatever methodology you want but Brett will be more than happy to be available. And he’s going to take just a second to tell you about level 3 because he had been asked some questions at our preview meeting with the Executive Committee, so I am going to let Brett come. Thank you very much for your time and War Eagle.
Brett Johnson, membership coordinator HEP: Briefly, if you didn’t receive one of these 2 brochures up there at the top when you came in, they are at the table at the back. So on your way out you can grab one. So we have a basic colorful brochure that you can pick up that tells about all of our 3 membership options in detail and what you get for that $12 or $60 that you pay, but we also have an unintentionally crimson colored brochure that’s in the back as well and it talks about our level 3 membership option that is $120 a year which you can pay at $10 a month or however you’d like to break it down. It provides educators, faculty members, university employees, with a 2 million dollar professional educators liability insurance policy. That’s a really valuable tool that you can have, it protects against liabilities, it has to do with your performance and your job duties as an educator at the university level. This brochure in the back tells you about all the coverage that comes with that, both brochures have forms you can fill out and mail in to us if you want to join. You can also go online as Gordon said, but more than anything, more than the benefits that you can get personally from paying $12, $60, or $120, we really would love to have you as a member of our community of advocates so that when Gordon and I talk to legislators or talking to people across the state they know that we’re backed by the very important faculty and staff members here at Auburn University and other universities across the state.
What we do depends on numbers, it depends on you all being our connections in all the corners of the state. So we want to give you this opportunity to join and help us convey that message at the state level. We’re happy to answer any questions. [57:48]
Gordon Stone: Let’s go beat the Razorbacks.
Larry Teeter, chair: Thanks guys, lot of information there. Our next information item is a presentation from the Ad Hoc Committee on Clustering in Athletics, Daniel Svyantek was the chair of that sub-committee.
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: I will take this opportunity in front of a large group of people to say the pronunciation of the name is “Swan-tek, s-w-a-n-t-e-k,” it is not zanik or anything like that, but now you can you can call my home and you’ll get through. Thank you.
On May 8, 2015 the Provost formed an Ad Hoc Committee. The charge of the committee was to look into whether or not clustering of athletes in major has occurred at Auburn, to compare Auburn University to peer institutions to look into reasons for why such clusters at present occur and to make recommendations. We were primarily from the athletic committee, looking at it from that perspective, from the NCAA and those type of issues.
Committee makeup, I was asked to be chair and accepted. Barb Struempler, Brian Connelly, Tina Loras, Mary Boudreaux, and Larry Teeter were on the committee. [59:46] [b59:30]
Some basic information, Clustering, the definition of clustering is simply a grouping of a disproportionate percentage of athletes into selected majors when compared to the overall percentage of non-athletes in the same major. Our 2 definitions that are used in the clustering literature. Number of players on team with same major divided by the total team number of players > 25%, So this would be all football players all 4 or 5 years depending on what you’re looking at. [b1:00:09] None of the clustering definitions include graduate students.
The second definition in the literature is the number of junior and senior players on team with same major divided by the number of junior and senior players and that is > 25%. [b1:00:25]
Clustering in a major is not considered a violation of any rule that the NCAA has. The fact that the representatives that the Football Bowl Schools believe clustering is actually a function of the NCAA progress toward degree requirement. So it comes about because NCAA has laid down a rule called the 40-60-80 Rule and student athletes have to by the end of their 3rd year have 40% of their major done, by their 4th year 60, and 5th year 80. So this adds, is believed to be one of the primary reasons you see clustering.
There are a lot of other causes, I won’t read them all, I will start at the top. The italicized ones actually occur for any student. [1:01:44] So if you read the top one Student-athletes may be underprepared for some majors upon entry to college. You could simply say students may be underprepared for some majors upon entry to college. The first 6 ones are seen as reasons why people might take certain majors, but not just athletes.
The bottom 3 are related to being an athlete the first one is, College major choice may be affected by the NCAA’s 40-60-80 rule, we’ve discussed that. And student athletes often have unrealistic career expectations. I am going to go pro for example may affect the choice of their major. They all believe they are going to be pros. The final one which doesn’t come off very much in there is in bold because that’s the only one that the NCAA would recognize as problematic for clustering. Student-athletes may receive favoritism in certain majors. If that occurs, that’s an NCAA violation. The rest of them are causes that the NCAA would accept, basically.
Some basic information on clustering in peer institutions, we looked into this. In the SEC this was a report in U.S.A. Today, I believe, in 2008; Auburn has 26.5% of its football players in Criminology; Texas A&M at the time had 51.5% in AG Leadership and Development; and Vanderbilt had 64% in Human and Organizational Development.
A study of the Atlantic Coast Conference found that for the football teams range from 25% in Sports Administration on to one school where 73% of the football players were in Business Management. Any guesses? They are only about 100 miles away. Georgia Tech has about 73% of their football players in one major.
The Big 12, the study found similar clustering in this study and basically also found however that when clustering occurs and 50% of the players are in one major it may be related to the rankings of the teams. So there is a correlation between clustering and ranking at least in the Big 12.
Clustering at Auburn, we used the data presented at the May 19, 2015 Meeting of the University Senate, 28 football players in Public Administration. If you use the first definition, which is the original one from 1987 that would be 28 over 120 which is 23%, no clustering. If you use the second definition which has been used starting in the late 90s; 23 over 48 equals 48%, so you do have clustering. So we looked into it, by one definition, no clustering, by another definition there was clustering. So we looked into it. [1:05:10]
Our main concern was on favoritism and was favoritism sown toward athletes in PUBA? We had a very small sample and one of our recommendations at the bottom is that a full analysis be made. But in that small sample we found that, and it was one basic class, athletes received an average grade of .94 less than non-athletes. And if you actually looked at the grades received 7 out of the 8 athletes (football players) received grades that would affect their eligibility if they weren’t balanced by a higher grade in another course. So there is no evidence for favoritism in this sample. However, it is a very small sample and we recommend that a full analysis be made of they type of thing.
Advising, one question that came up with some of the information received were whether athletes were being advised to take a Public Administration (PUBA) major. We asked the athletics representative, Dr. Waters, we were told there is no formal push to PUBA by athletic advisors. Asked Dr. Waters why they go to PUBA and we were told that PUBA is seen as appropriate for careers in city, county, state or federal government. He also noted that he believed that athletes talk to each other. And there is some indication that clustering is based or develops when one athlete who is seen and is respected, goes into a major and others follow him. Another thing that we found when we looked at the PUBA requirements is that it is very flexible and no quantitative course is required. You can actually get your degree in Public Administration without taking a stats course. For many people that’s an advantage whether you be an athlete or not.
Okay, we also looked into some issues of person group fit and student profiles and the back part where it’s italicized is something since I spent my summer vacation doing this I thought I would try to write a journal article for it, some of the things I found is there is some literature on student profiles and there is one group of people who are called unprepared in terms of academic skills and career-oriented. They tend to be people who are below the mean in ACT or SAT requirements, they tend to be people who need help in development in learning how to be a college student, but they are very career-oriented. This profile I believe fits the athletes. They tend to be leaders in their social groups, they tend to be very oriented towards the group in terms of a concept called organizational citizenship, they basically help the group. And once again, athletes play on teams. So it seems to be that that may be what’s going on.
Communication between Athletics and University officials, was there communication between the athletic department and the university? Yes. It’s been out in the Wall Street Journal, yes there was communication. Did it alter the decision? We were told no, we were told there was no money given. That’s basically what you see in the responses in the newspaper to the story. We also looked at the idea of alternative explanations existing. They were consistent with administrative and organizational theory. There were 3 of us who were basically business people, Brian Connolley is in management, I’m in Industrial Organizational Psychology, and Tina Loraas, I forget her area, but in the school of business. My favorite explanation is all organizations are organized anarchy. This model of decision making in organizations is a basically not irrational model, but there are non-rational aspects of decision making one of which is as participants change the problem gets defined differently and solutions get developed differently. One of the things we found was that both the chair and the dean, chair of Political Science and Dean of College of Liberal Arts, were changed at this time. [1:10:15] Once again, related to the Journal article some of the stuff on leadership and succession and strategic change argues that when some people change they come in and alter the decisions that have been made in the past. So that may be the kind of thing that was going on, not sure, but there are alternative explanations [1:10:41]
Related to the idea of money for the program, was money offered to PUBA to support the program? Yes, the offer seems to made, you can’t deny it, it’s in e-mails, however the university turned this offer down. However the university has accepted money from athletics in the past. The purposes that were given for acceptance of this money seemed to be consistent with practices at other universities. Arkansas, LSU, and Kentucky give money and they publicize it.
We’ve got the recommendations related to that is the athletic department should publicize when they support academics. Second recommendation; a complete analysis of the grading patterns in PUBA for the football players. One of the things that comes up is related to practice time and the general issue of when we offer courses in morning, afternoon, Monday-Wednesday-Friday, Tuesday-Thursday, that type of thing should be looked into again. We should have realistic career previews; basically if you are on the 3rd string at any major university you are probably not going to go pro. We recommended that you create an athletic “Talons” and that the student-athletes have access to this every year. One of the things with the 40-60-80 Rule is it’s hard for them to change majors. If we had a “Talons” where students could come in and look about majors and everything every year so they could do that, they might be able to change better and make better plans.
Annual student-athlete and student-athlete alumni surveys; here we wanted them to tell us about their major or we believe they should tell us about their major and how their major helped them get jobs. Developing majors may be a possibility. A lot of other places have majors, formal majors and things like Sports Administration, Park and Recreation Management, Texas AMU with agricultural leadership is my favorite. I don’t know what they do but I have this vision of an offensive tackle with a bell on his neck. (jokingly-we could do that). And finally utilize the Interdisciplinary Studies degree more effectively. Essentially what we were proposing was that the Interdisciplinary Studies program be strengthened, almost like the certificate description. That one of the things I found as former department chair, was that when students would come in with an Interdisciplinary program for an athlete they just wanted to take X number of hours. Well, if they wanted to take it in, once again in psychology, be minor, {1:13:56] wanted to take it in work psychology they should take it in a certain set of classes. If they wanted to take it in clinical issues there is another set, they wanted to take it in animal behavior there’s another set. So not formally creating certificates and things like that we were advocating that the actual different majors that they took their courses from, they get some rational thinking in it and do that.
And that’s our report. Do I say questions or does Larry?
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Any senators have any questions? Of course not.
Can you roll back a few slides to your literature about clustering in other universities? In any of these programs that you mentioned at these other universities, were any of them put under and external review that recommended their closure Were any of them voted upon by the faculty recommending closure? Were any of them processed by curriculum committees recommending closure? And then were any of them signed off on by any relevant academic office or in writing recommending closure?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: There was noting about that in any of the articles.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: so you don’t know if any of those actually occurred at other institutions
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: That’s correct.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Okay, now when did you write your report?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: It was finished, actually it was in process when, we finished the day after the Wall Street Journal report.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: So when you wrote it or, since then have you ever been provided any of the written correspondence between athletic officials regarding this program?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: I was given a group of e-mails and we were given a group of e-mails at the start in early June, I believe.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: That was from Provost Boosinger?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: Yes.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: But that did not contain correspondence directly between Gary Waters and Jay Jacobs?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: No.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Let me be specific. Can we put this on the screen? [1:16:35] So you don’t recognize that e-mail?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: No. I did not receive this e-mail.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Okay, that’s between Gary Waters and Jay Jacobs Saturday, June 1, 2013 at 10 a.m. so it’s a Saturday morning. So you’ll notice the language inside of there particularly the use of the word “confidential” which is their choice of words. Now push that e-mail up. What he’s sending is correspondence between the Provost and the Department chair telling him he’s going to continuing running the BA in Public Administration, this is after completion of the internal process, and they are going to study enrollment trends and blah, blah, blah. Pull down a little bit more and see the time on that; so that’s at 9:40 a.m. on Saturday morning June 1. So in a matter of minutes, correspondence between a Provost and a chair regarding curricular governance is confidentially in hands of the Director of Athletics himself on a Saturday morning. Now I don’t know how we can be reviewing what happened between athletic and academic officials in regards to this program if the committee that is supposedly reviewing this is not even provided correspondence between the man in charge of academics for athletics, Gary Waters, and his boss, Jay Jacobs, who I’m not sure why he would ever have any role in curriculum, given that Gary Waters is hired specifically for that purpose to work with us. But the use of the word “confidential,” if you scroll that back up, the use of the word “confidential” is very telling. It is similar to correspondence you did review when the athletics officials offered to pay faculty salaries and other types of things in that program, when asked whether that should be shared with other people they do not want other people told that the money is from them, so it is a language of concealment. Just as the word confidential is the language of concealment.
So you’re a psychologist, so Dan I presume you know if a person uses certain language that tells you what’s in their mind, okay, in that regard. So I find it particularly…
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: I’m not that good a psychologist.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Right. Of course. Now one theory, you haven’t received that type of correspondence between the athletic officials. That’s very telling.
Now I asked Tim earlier, I showed him an e-mail that you had seen where it talks about the development, and you mention one proposal about the development of curricula that’s meaningful to that. So let me show you, if you will, another e-mail that you looked at. [1:19:56] My last question.
Larry Teeter, chair: Please limit to 4 minutes.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Sure.
I showed you the previous one, which is following the February 14 Senate meeting where I first asked about clustering in this program. This is following the February 2015 Senate meeting. This is between Tim and the President again in reference to this clustering. What’s interesting to me is in the first paragraph it says, “the following report points to the need for more majors that have enough elective courses, etc.” and then it says I met with Gary and Jay Jacobs to talk about things that are in the pipeline. So I questioned about advocacy of administration with respect to curricula to facilitate the needs of the eligibility of atheltes. Okay, I believe that I heard that there wasn’t any. Okay, that it comes from the faculty up except when the faculty don’t want to do it and then apparently it comes from the top down, as we’ve seen it in respect to this program. Right, since all faculty voted to close it.
Now in this one if you see if the Provost is willing to advocate to the President that we need to have more majors with enough elective courses, and I don’t know what is meant by etc. besides a lot of elective courses that you mentioned the flexibility that the athletes need, specifically in discussion with Gary and Jay Jacobs, but we’re going to have clustering right, if we are going to design and administer curricula specifically for the purpose of the eligibility of athletes. If we are doing that by design then we shouldn’t surprised if it occurs…
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: One of the issues when you design a new major is that issue or excuse me, that new major is open to other students as well.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: I am not talking about NCAA rules, I’m saying you are going to have clustering at the university if you are going to govern and design curricula specifically for the purpose of athletics. Right?
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: You are going to create majors that any student can take.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: I’m saying…you talk about reasons why we have clustering and what we can do about it. If you specifically design, engage in curricula governance decisions for the purposes of servicing athletes, is not the necessary result of that, clustering.
Daniel Svyantek, chair of ad hoc committee on Clustering in Athletics: I don’t follow the logic.
Mike Stern, not a senator, economics: Seems relatively clear, but…
Larry Teeter, chair: Let’s have a question (over there).
Patricia Duffy, immediate past chair: I was the chair of the university’s Academic Program Review Committee the year that the proposal from Public Administration came forward and it was actually a program to suspend admissions, not to actually eliminate the program. I just wanted to clarify the role of the Academic Program Review Committee. We actually had several such proposals, or to close programs and eliminate them that year. The role of the committee is not to say to the Provost, “it’s a great idea for you to close a program,” not at all. The role of the committee is to get the evidence, in this case it also included as more and more they do, it included the external committee’s report about resources. We had invited people from the department and the college to come talk to us. Overwhelmingly when it came forward to the committee it was we just don’t’ have enough resources, we had a vote, and the vote was not it’s a great idea to close the program it was just that they had a plan to suspend admissions. They had a plan they could handle the students in the pipeline, they would not be left out in the cold, that we were going to be consistent with policies and the letter to the Provost, which I drafed and the committee approved said, “it’s feasible,” not we recommend, that you close the program.
Towards the end of the year when I was getting ready to roll off as the chair, I did send an e-mail to the Provost and asked for a progress report on everything that we had that year put forward to the Provost to see what the decisions were and the decision on this one, which I heard from the Provost, which seems entirely consistent with the e-mail that we just saw was that we’re getting a new dean in and new leadership and we’d really like to wait on this one until the new leadership is in effect before we make a decision. I just wanted to clarify the Academic Program Review Committee is not in the habit of recommending closure, but merely saying it’s feasible or not feasible. Thank you.
Cathleen Erwin, senator, Political Science: I am from the Political Science Department, home of the much maligned Public Administration Program. I just want to thank you for your report. I think it’s a very accurate representation of what has occurred. I was there, we’re a multi-disciplinary department. We have political science, we have health services administration, which is what I teach in, and we have public administration. The public administration faculty were stretched thin, they proposed that we might, if you can’t be good at everything, you can be very good to great. So what do we do to be great at something? The undergraduate thing seemed to be the thing that probably needed to be let go in order to be able to be great. We fortunately did have a change in our leadership and there have been resources made available to us. There’s even more resources for the Health Administration Program, it’s economics of higher education. But we could have clustering of students from Huntsville in the program, what’s wrong with that? We’re in the business of educating students and some of those students are athletes. And we want them to graduate. We want all students to graduate.
I wish that all students had the kind of support that the student athletes have. I just would really ask that why does this conversation continue? What is the point? Be explicit about it. Thank you. (applause)
Larry Teeter, chair: Anyone else like to make a comment? Thank you very much for coming today. We have completed our agenda.
Is there any new business? Any unfinished business? Very well, we’re adjourned. [1:26:53]