transcript_genfac_10_06

Transcript General Faculty Meeting
October 6, 2015

Larry Teeter chair: Welcome to the Fall General Faculty Meeting. I am Larry Teeter, chair of the Faculty Senate. If you’d like to speak about an issue, move to a microphone, wait ‘til you are recognized and state your name and affiliation, the department that you represent.
The agenda for today’s meeting was set by the Senate Steering Committee. It was sent out in advance and now you see it on the screen. If we would come to order now there is no voting or clickers for senators to worry about.
The first item of business is approval of the minutes of the March 10, 2015 General Faculty Meeting. The minutes were previously posted on the Senate’s Web site. Are there any changes, additions, or deletions to these minutes? Hearing none, the minutes stand as approved.

Our next agenda item will be comments from President Jay Gogue.

Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you Larry, I appreciate you being here today. I wanted to mention from a National perspective 3 big issues that certainly Auburn is engaged with; one has to do with both the cost of compliance and audit. I think I’ve shared with the Senate recently that at Auburn that is about an 80 million dollar a year cost tag when you look at a lot of positions in the non-academic portions of the institution that have really evolved since the Regan administration since the last 30 or 40 years, they’ve been in that area. So there’s an effort by Auburn to try an look at compliance and audit to see if there are ways we can be more efficient in that. Second area has to do with National issue has to do with student debt. I won’t cover it today, but again as we have shared in the past, student debt issues for the most part reside within the for profit institutions. Over 70% of the student debt is within those programs, probably not within your public and private institutions.

The second year of the Strategic Plan is out and there’s a document that really does a very nice job, the Provost’s Office was able to provide this, I assume it’s online as well as in hard copy, but covers a lot of details about the institution and what has happened in the last year–year and a half. I want to call your attention to just a couple of the items.
One your freshman ACT this year is 27.3. I believe that’s the highest that we’ve had, but certainly it has been growing in quality over the last few years. The area that I guess I’m proudest of, it took a lot of faculty and a lot of work for this to happen, we’ve gone from the low 60s in terms of percent graduation rate to the recent numbers are 73 percent in a 6-year graduation rate. Right at 50%, it’s 49 or 50 percent, for 4-years. Still not where we ought to be, but again a lot of progress has been made. A number that surprised me that I saw when I read through the document was 7, 360 students enrolled in online courses. I was shocked by that because I can remember a few years back when that number was just at a few hundred, a small handful.

Relative to the budget. As you know we start our new budget year on October 1, the budget for all 4 divisions was 1.16 billion, that would be both this campus, Auburn Montgomery, Cooperative Extension Service, as well as the Experiment Station. It’s interesting that the new money that came from the state spread to all 4 divisions was about 2 million dollars. That was the new money that we got from the State of Alabama. While Don will get upset with me saying this, the money that came in through private giving was 200 million for the year. First time Auburn had gone over 200 million. I need to quickly add, that’s not cash, that’s PLEDGES, that’s people have to die—all kind of things, never-the-less it’s the way they do accounting there it’s 200 million dollars. Salary increase out of central is 3% permanent base, Colleges added another half percent, so the actual increase was about 3.5 as an average on campus. The Board also approved a 2 percent central pool to provide as a one-time allocation in December. As I recall, this is the 6th year in a row that we’ve had some budget increase.

Relative to Cooperative Extension I want to make a statement how much I appreciate the breadth to which they have tried to expand their programs. I don’t think they moved away from their traditional programs, but I have to give them a lot of credit to be able to expand into a little bit broader areas as we look at communities throughout our state.

Also want to compliment a number of people that are involved in the economic development activities really of state. They are invited they participate as new companies or new organizations look at Alabama, we just went over today before I came the number of new starts or business expansions that are of a certain size in the state. In Montgomery there were 15, Mobile was 12, Huntsville was 11, Auburn came in 4th in the sate with 9 (either new plant expansions or new business expansions). So we are doing pretty good work in that area.

I do want to mention, College of Agriculture I would give great credit, the House member that is chair of the AG Committee, Mr. Conoway, was on campus about a week ago and a number of faculty spent much of the day with him. Everything from the Acquatics and Fisheries program to the Old Field Rotation, so appreciate the work that was done by Agriculture.

This past week a number of faculty from College of Architecture in Washington, they were working with Federal agencies on affordable housing and also on assisted technology related programs and their reports have been very strong in terms of efforts with that visit.
College of Business, Brian Bordeaux, associate professor in Marketing is looking at using the MRI to look at the impact of labeling on consumer choices. It’s gotten a fair amount of visibility for that.

I think most of you saw about a week ago the College of Education, the Kinesiology School, became one of the sites for the Olympic Training Programs. There are 18 Olympic Training sites in the United States, 4 of them are with universities and they were selected for their work, primarily with Handball. [7:30]
Hulya Kirkici just won an award through the Electrical Engineering Professional Society. She was unanimously given their highest honor for her leadership and service over the last 2 decades. Thank you for your work.

The School of Forestry noticed a black bear population study for a little over a half million dollars was recently awarded. Human Sciences, and you need to know Human Science from a research perspective per faculty member probably has the highest research performance of this campus. Dr. Francesca Adler-Baeder, 10 million dollar award on Healthy Marriages, that’s from HHS, so certainly a big award. From Liberal Arts I want to thank a number of faculty that have been very helpful as we begin really serious planning on the Performing Arts Center. A lot of folks have been involved in that and certainly it’s an area that we need help and assistance and their expertise if very helpful.

I want to mention Nursing, they have adopted the New Schmid Elementary School out of Chicago for support. That was the group that came here a week or so ago that came to one of the ball games.

Let’s see, Pharmacy, we’ve got National Institutes of Health Award, $255,000; Aging: as you age your risk for alzheimer’s. I’ve noticed as I get older I pick up on those that deal with aging and older folks. And the next one is an assistant professor in Science and Mathematics, Wendy Hood that just won an award from the NFS and it’s on the study of aging. Vet Medicine, one of our faculty members has just received the honor of one of the 20 most outstanding farm animal veterinarians in the U.S., Dwight Wolfe. [9:33]

I would just simply say thank you to all of you. Appreciate the work that each one of you do, it’s important to the university and let us continue to do the best job that we can in terms of shared governance for the institution. I’d be happy to try to respond to questions. [9:48]
Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Raises just went through because we went into the new budget year, so the Board Meeting on the 25th, I think it was very late this year and we just got letters. Some of my faculty members had some questions about that, in particular how they work on he athletics side. So I thought you might know the answer to it. I know how they work on the academic side. So we submit something and we get a pool from the Provost’s Office and then submit some stuff it goes to the Provost’s Office and they review and eventually gets approved and goes through and once the Board Meets, issues a letter. Is it a similar process in athletics? I mean in terms of Jay Jacobs and the associate athletic director and those people, do they get a pool similar and then it comes up through your office to approve.

Dr. Gogue, President: Let me ask, Don can you help me on that? {not talking about coaches because they are on contracts.)

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Athletics is the same process (for administrative employees). Outside of the contracts the process is the same guidelines, so if we were allocating a 3% general fund to our academic areas, we don’t allocate any to athletics but they are expected to identify a 3% base fund of their own monies for allocation following the same guidelines so that their process would be within their departments, and their department heads would have approval up to the same amounts that would be in the general fund and ultimately anything that for, like a Jay Jacobs, athletics director, would have to come to the President. So it’s exactly the same process.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: So somebody in Samford Hall does review at some point before it becomes finalized, so they do submit something to someone outside athletics.

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Absolutely, yes. I would normally look at everything except for Jay Jacobs, I would actually look at that too, but the president would have to sign off on that.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: So we’ve been told that we’ve had in policy for awhile about adding our own reserves to the allocation that comes to central and a limit is put on us of 8%, anything above that we’ve got to get special permission, so athletics would also have to produce additional justification letter for employees getting over 8%.

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Absolutely, it would have to go up, anything over 8% in their area would have to go up to Jay Jacobs. If Jay Jacobs were to go over 8%, which did not happen, would require further approval. The president could not even approve that, it would have to go to the Board, I guess.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: But what about and AAD, associate athletics director, gets more than an 8%, that would just stop at Jacobs Office?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Um, yes, I think it would. As long as he approves, the next level up would have to approve that.
[13:34]

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Our next level cannot approve our 8%, it goes to the Provost’s Office or typically rejected if they are not we again have to submit it to the highest level in the academic (?). Does any more than 8% raise go above Jay Jacobs in athletics?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: I don’t think they are any different than us, so if that’s what’s happening…

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Ours go up above our directors

Don Large, Executive Vice President: I guess it would have to, but I don’t remember seeing those that were above that.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: But in theory they’d have to go to the president or yourself?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: That’s correct.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: They would have metrics and justification letters?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Oh yea. Other than their funding source which is their own revenues, the HR Policies and Procedures and the Guidelines are intended to be exactly the same. So, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t the same consistency there.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: So those justifications should exist?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Yes.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Okay. Second question, I don’t know if you saw in The Montgomery Advertizer and article about tickets over the weekend. The ticket revenues, the blocks of tickets, the ones that Jimmy Cleveland were buying and some other ones. I do know you oversee athletics and Jacobs and some people connected to him are mentioned in the article, the only person, I guess above him relavent to him is yourself. Is there any type of review that we’ve undertaken of ticket policies, like how they are handled…

Dr. Gogue, president: I am going to ask Don also share the comments we looked at internal as well as external.

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Yes, I mean we’ve pretty well beat that one to death and yet it keeps getting reported by somebody else by feeding off another press clipping, but internal audits looked at it, we have external auditors look at ticket allocations, the Tigers Unlimited receipts and allocations; there’s no evidence that there’s been any kind of wrong doing.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: No, I mean just the policy because every other university has a policy on how they do tickets priority, all that kind of stuff. Do we have a regular review process or how is that policy determined because they say it’s very complicated, it’s very opaque it’s a lot of places. Do we have a regular review process of the priority system and how it’s done? It’s not just athletics that has this type of complexity in ticket sales. All the performing arts do in some sense, even an opera, it has donors with priority seating and other kinds of stuff. Many things, even Sam’s Club, have 2-part pricing where you pay a certain amount and then you get to buy at lower margin; the tickets the 2-part pricing is normal, not just like in performing arts or performances, even selling tickets on airplanes, cause you don’t want it to take off with empty seats, just like you don’t want empty seats at the stadium, you also want your fan base there to increase the experience but that’s true at rock concerts and everything else where they try to manage the demographics or who some of the tickets go to. So there’s a lot of private companies and a lot of different systems and things that are used out there to manage this type of thing. I mean, do we have a process that determines these type of things?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Well we have an annual audit.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Not where the money goes but who decides what the priorities are and the way we’re going to handle them and tickets in general? I mean the system that we use to allocate or sell them, is this purely and internal athletics decision?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Well it pretty much is with their policies that each of the levels of giving have certain criteria that have to be achieved and certain funds that have to come in to meet that criteria. That’s reviewed and audited every year to make sure everything was in the requirements have been met. Certainly they can change the criteria for contributions required to get to a certain level and that kind of thing.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: But just the general way of rewarding loyalty a certain way and other kinds of things. They’re just allowed to internally determine what system they are going to use to sell tickets? It’s purely an…

Don Large, Executive Vice President: It’s their system. [18:28]

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Is the any committee outside? There is the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics (CIA), are they involved in the decision making or is it purely and internal athletics decision about how ticket sales will be managed?

Don Large, Executive Vice President: It’s pretty much an athletics…there is an oversight of the CIA on certain things, but they don’t usually get into determining actual policies within Tigers Unlimited on what $500 contribution should get you vs. $1,000 vs. $2,000 vs. 10,000.

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: Or even using any type of priority system in that way. As I said there are many venues in performing arts that have system ticket sales even 3rd parties that they hire to contract the ticket sales and execute various systems, but there is no…it’s purely an internal athletics matter as to what system or how they’re going to sell tickets to football games.

Don Large, Executive Vice President: Well, I’m still not sure what that question…

Mike Stern, Dept. of Economics: We have all kinds of policies at this institution. We have processes for determining those policies, we have committees and other types of stuff. So if I were to ask, how are certain HR policies reviewed, how are they managed, how are they determined, who determines them and so forth…We have processes, just like if I asked how the policies for raised are determined or anything else, right? We have all sorts of policies at this institution, we have a process, like how are tenure and promotion policies carried out, we have a Faculty Handbook, we have a process by which we amend it; it goes before the Board, so on and so forth. So you know who the parties are in the determination, you know when they meet, you know what the process for determining and changing policy is. So I read all these things and I have about, and everybody says it’s very vague, nobody knows…well shouldn’t we have a process by which it’s determined? And everyone knows what that process is, when it occurs, who’s involved in review and how the decisions are made? I mean, you can answer that with regards to most policies at a public institution. You know if we are going to sell theatre tickets, I’m sure they can tell you how the policy of how they do the pricing or the sale of those tickets are. Somebody’s in charge or they have a process or review for it. I mean I read all this and nobody seems to know how anything is determined. Okay, who decides all these things? Is there a process or a date they meet? Is there a committee? Do they review it? Who do you contact if you object to something and so forth. Or if you want to petition to be part of it. We have open board meetings when the board meets and they vote on things. We have open Senate Meetings, we have a process by which policy is determined.

Okay if somebody has feedback to give on that process or wants to know how it’s determined or any point in time what the exact policies are, you think everybody would know but I never seem to read it anywhere when it relates to the football tickets.

Don Large, Executive Vice President: on their expenditures and their revenues for all of athletics they follow the same policies that everybody else here would. Same type of restrictions on expenditures, same type of review, same type of requirements on receiving, same type of requirements on timely reporting. I am comfortable we are good there. On the Tigers Unlimited part, which is a 501-C3 separate corporation, they do set their own criteria for gift recognition and what that gets you. We have that reviewed and audited every year. I am comfortable that we are doing things right there.

Dr. Gogue, president: Don, why don’t we get David Benedict with the ticket office come and make comments. You raise good questions. You hear this discussion… I will give you one example of the difficulty with it; the University of Georgia…so remember we have to hold a certain number of tickets for each home game for the visitors, but they vary by which school is coming. San José State you don’t hold very many tickets. University of Georgia, the contract calls for certain ones; University of Alabama, contract calls for certain ones. So you’ve got a differential between 1,000 tickets for San José State and 10,000 for Alabama or Georgia that are going to change your whole ticket dimension in what you do from game to game. They look at what Georgia charges our fans when they go to Georgia and help determine what they are going to charge for their visitors tickets when they come here. So all that goes into it, but David or Tim would be best to explain the process and how it’s evolved. I’d be happy to invite them to come.

Other questions? [b23:25] [23:17]

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue.

Just a couple of comments before we get started with the main part of the agenda. This is our fall General Faculty meeting and we also have a spring meeting each year, in addition we have 10 regularly scheduled Senate meetings. The Senate does not meet in December or July, but otherwise we meet every month. Faculty Officers, the General Faculty Officers are the same as the Senate Officers. Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary, Xing Ping Hu is our secretary-elect, she is not here today. Dr. James Goldstein is our chair-elect and he will take office July 1 of next year. Dr. Patricia Duffy is our immediate past chair and serves as the Faculty’s representative on the Board of Trustees. Bob Locy is also not here today but he is generally our parliamentarian for the Senate meetings. And finally, I’d like to introduce Laura Kloberg who helps us keep our Web site and our meeting running smoothly. [24:37]

Those of you who are new to these venues I’d like to remind you that participating in shared governance is an important opportunity for faculty at Auburn. There are 21 separate Senate Committees and 34 University Committees and all need volunteers to do their work. A recent example of their work is the new policy on copyright approved by the Senate last month, updating a woefully outdated policy from 1984, long before electronic publishing was popular. Current committee activities include development of a policy on undergraduate certificates. It will help our students markets themselves when they leave Auburn and may encourage non-students to enroll for additional training. Many of our peer institutions are already doing this. Policy supporting these certificates will appear as a pending action item on the Senate’s agenda later this month.

We also have a committee investigating competency based education, a method for awarding credit for what students already know, which is gaining traction across the nation. Another committee is reviewing annual leave sharing plans at peer institutions and trying to determine how one might be implemented at Auburn. These sorts of plans can be invaluable to faculty or staff who have exhausted their own leave dealing with long term illness or disability of a family member. We are also trying to find out how we stack up relative to other institutions with our 403B plans at a time when job seekers do not have a lot of faith in the longevity of state pension plans. Finally we are even involved as something as mundane as parking. Working with Traffic and Parking Committee to gain a better parking access to offices for faculty and staff after hours and on weekends.

There will always be little things that can be done to make Auburn a better place for faculty, staff, and our students. If you are interested in effecting change, make sure to volunteer for the committees of your choice when the call for next year’s volunteers is made early next semester. [26:46]

Are there any questions for me before we move on with the agenda?

Mike Stern, economics: Larry at the May Senate meeting it was announced that Tim had formed an Ad Hoc Committee to look at clustering in Athletics, I think you were a member on it, I was wondering if that committee had completed its work?

Larry Teeter, chair: That committee has submitted a draft to the Provost. I haven’t seen the final draft but I was involved in the early drafting of the report.

Mike Stern, economics: So your committee’s done or it still has work to do?

Larry Teeter, chair: We haven’t met again since it went to the Provost the first time. It possibly come back to us, but I am not sure.

Mike Stern, economics: So when did you submit the draft?

Larry Teeter, chair: My last meeting was late August. So I am not sure when it went to him because there was tweeking we recommended before it went to the Provost.

Mike Stern, economics: So you guys met throughout the summer?

Larry Teeter, chair: Two meetings as a committee as a whole, it was in July and August.

Mike Stern, economics: Two meetings?

Larry Teeter, chair: late June and August.

Mike Stern, economics: But you may have more additional work to do?

Larry Teeter, chair: When we get comments back from the Provost if they would like to see us do any more work.

Mike Stern, economics: Were you guys able to question athletic officials?

Larry Teeter, chair: I did not. We were looking at transcript information.

Mike Stern, economics: So you didn’t receive any information from athletics officials?

Larry Teeter, chair: Yes we did.

Mike Stern, economics: From the athletics officials?

Larry Teeter, chair: No, not from officials, you mean officials on the field or are you talking about NCAA or…

Mike Stern, economics: No, what I mean, did anyone from the Athletics Department ever meet with your committee?

Larry Teeter, chair: In the initial meeting. Actually there was a meeting in May. The committee formation meeting in May had Athletics officials at it.

Mike Stern, economics: I don’t mean as for the formation of the committee, but as you were preparing the report were you able to question and get answers from Athletic officials?

Larry Teeter, chair: Only at that meeting that’s the first time we had anybody invited to the meeting.

Mike Stern, economics: So subsequent to that you haven’t had any communication with athletic officials?

Larry Teeter, chair: Right.

Mike Stern, economics: But it’s a report about the clustering of athletes?

Larry Teeter, chair: Correct.

Mike Stern, economics: Alright, will since this was proposed to the Senate will the report of that committee be released to the Senate? Or…

Larry Teeter, chair: It’s the CIA, it’s not a Senate Committee it’s a University Committee.

Mike Stern, economics: Right, but you’re not on the CIA Committee it’s an Ad Hoc Committee, it’s not the CIA Committee.

Larry Teeter, chair: Of that committee. It’s a Provost’s committee.

Mike Stern, economics: Yea I know, it’s an Ad Hoc Committee so it’s not the CIA Committee. I was just wondering because Tim told the Senate that he was forming a Senate Committee so is it reporting to the Senate or is it just for the Provost himself?

Larry Teeter, chair: Unless he chooses to report it here, we could ask him to.

Mike Stern, economics: So you guys weren’t asked to give a presentation, like the CIA gives it’s annual presentation to the Senate and all that kind of stuff.

Larry Teeter, chair: I was invited to be part of that Ad Hoc Committee as the Senate chair, but otherwise everyone was already on the CIA. [30:01]

Mike Stern, economics: Alright, thanks.

Larry Teeter, chair: We have 2 information items today, one on changes in the course materials process in the landscape for Auburn University Bookstore. Russell Weldon will present that. Our second one will be an overview of Auburn Global and Dawn Sherman will present that.

Russell Weldon, Asst. Dir. AU Bookstore: Good afternoon everybody. I want to thank Larry and the Steering Committee for giving me a few minutes to talk to you this afternoon about some really exciting changes that are coming in December. First off I want to say this is the time of year where I either get met to the eye or not to the eye depending on whether or not you’ve turned in your vocal order. So I’m glad to just talk if front of you and in a non-threatening situation.

You guys don’t hear this from us enough; this is a graph that is not Auburn specific but I certainly from knowing as many of you as I do feel like it represents what you do for this university. And as the bookstore, especially in the course materials part of the bookstore, we work hand-in-hand with so many of you that we want you to know we thank you for what you do. We know that you spend so many hours investing yourself and your time toward what you are doing for this university and what we work with you for is a very small part of that time, but it’s a very important time. So just remember that you were thanked today because we really appreciate the time that you spend accomplishing what you do here on campus.

That being said, what we do for you when we get your book order is also a process that saves greatly in the last several years. There’s a lot more options and a lot more things that the bookstore is able to do for you and for your students when we get those orders, and we’ll talk to about that.

You’re the first group on campus that’s seeing this announcement. We are going to be making this to parents and students through many, many, many channels, but starting in December we will work with the Bursar’s Office and your students will be able to charge up to $1,000 toward course materials and supplies to their e-bill every semester. We feel like as the cost of course materials increase this may be a very practical solution for a lot of your students to be able to anticipate the cost of those materials and also be able to pay for those in an extended manner. So we are excited to be able to offer that.

What does this mean? Well, for us at the Bookstore it means we have to change our schedule of getting in books, because what we’d like to do is have most everything in and on the shelf by this time in December. We hear a lot of scholarships students especially, but a lot of students in general are looking very early for their course material. So it is going to cause us to shift a lot of the timelines that we’re comfortable with, to push us into a lot of different ways of getting materials in. We feel like this will address all 3 of these projects.

Affordablilty. A lot of scholarship students have money directly deposited into their e-bill account. And this will actually for the first time at Auburn allow that scholarship money to explicitly cover the cost of their books. We hear this from parents and have heard it from parents year-in-and-year-out at Camp War Eagle trying to understand does that. So for the first time parents will be able to charge against those scholarship monies that are intended to cover course materials for them.
Accessibility. What we hope for you guys is that this will allow more students to have books on the first day of class. We understand that when 40% of students in your class has a book and you need for that to be 100%, there is a big problem in the way your semester begins. And we hope that this initiative with the e-bill will allow more students to have access to that book on the first day of class and hope that you will encourage them to use this option on the first day of class to get their material so they don’t fall behind.
Availability. We want to make books available for students when they want them. [34:28] This will cause us to shift our processes a little bit with your help.

So specifically how does this involve you guys? Right now our traditional deadline has been October 15 for book orders. We didn’t change that even though we knew that this change was coming for us operationally. What it does beg is that you guys really begin to work on your book orders and get them to us as quick as possible. We billed the e-mail system that all of you get when you’re teaching, we bill that off of a report from the Registrar. It’s basically a one-time operation. So when we bill that it’s fairly early in the process and a lot of you may not even have assignments yet. And certainly part-time teachers don’t have their assignments a lot of times on Banner, so if we can get more people assigned and at least we send out an e-mail to department heads this semester and got a great response back because a lot of departments know who those part-time instructors are going to be and if we can get that information in the Bookstore, we can send them that information and have those book orders flow back in to us more quickly.

The 15th, we’d like for that to be the deadline and anything you can do to talk to your department chairs and talk to your fellow faculty members, we will have more time to do what we need to do to have your books in time.

Something a lot of you might not know is the day that we get your book order we begin to work on it. There is a very competitive market to find the lowest cost books and literally the day that you send your order to the Bookstore we begin our work on it. A lot of times that requires communication to faculty members and right now we have a 2-person operation dealing with 2,500 to 3,000 book orders every semester. We want to do a good job with everything single one of your book orders and making sure that we’ve got the right information and the right books on the way. But in order for us to do that we’ve got to have that information early enough where we get a chance to do that well.

I like this quote from Henry Ford, “Teamwork, it’s about coming together as a beginning, keeping together as progress, and then working together as success.” We did start tracking some of these numbers for the Provost’s Office a few years ago. I’ll just tell you about these; since fall 2011 we started tracking book requests that came in 6 weeks prior to the first day of class, overall the average over the last 5 years we’ve gotten about 38% of our book orders in the 6 weeks that lead up to the first day of class, which puts a lot of pressure to get that book order correct and to get that book order in time for you guys. [37:19]

The average number of student seats affected by this 40% is on average 29,000 seats here at the university. So we’re not talking about 1,000 or 2,000, we are talking about a large number of seats. One thing that we have seen is in the age of social media student and parent feedback and request for information have really, really escalated. That’s something naturally, they think of the Bookstore because that’s where they are looking to find the information. The first time this fall we actually had a student tweet negatively that a book order wasn’t available at the Bookstore. And we had to go to that student and explain this is the process and we are doing our best to get that in. So as social media has evolved it’s very easy for one person to have a complaint that goes out in front of a lot of people and it’s hard to manage that message if we are not being active about it.

I just put down here on the very bottom, the Bookstore is designated as the sole source point of information for all of the university to find out what you’re using in your classes. We always request that even if you are not going to select something that we carry for resale that you still let us know because students are more and more actively looking for what they are going to use for the next semester and it benefits them if we can provide that information all in one place at the store.

Nationally there’s a lot going on with bookstores across the country. As course materials begin to change, I thought I’d speak to you just a little bit to let you know how we’re doing at the Bookstore and what we’re doing when we get your orders. Most of you are probably aware that the Bookstore is institutionally owned and operated. What that means is this Bookstore is Auburn’s Bookstore. We are completely self funded and at the end of the year return everything that we make back in to the university.

Something else that the Steering Committee was not aware of that we probably have not done a great job presenting to you guys is that about 5 years ago we looked at the way course materials were escalating and cost. And found it was really difficult to sustain the traditional way of doing business and hand that to the students. So 5 years ago we move all of course materials to a low profit, almost no profit operation at the Auburn University Bookstore. We did that in the sole interest of the student to be able to better afford the materials that you were picking out. I would like to say that I think in my experience we’ve got one of the most cost sensitive bodies of faculty overall here at the university. I’ve seen so many efforts from you guys to find a low cost alternative or find the best cost alternative for your students and we appreciate that because it mirrors very much what we try to do when we sell that to your student.

We focus all of our attention on: was it good for the student? And if it wasn’t good for the student, we pushed away things that the Bookstore had done for years and adopted things that were good for your students to make sure that they had materials.

Then, operational excellence. We look at every single penny. When we moved to a low profit operation, we’re still evaluated by the university on a cash basis so every single cent has to have purpose. Returned books, extra books still cost us very dearly, so we look at every way we can be operationally excellent while making sure that we’ve got books for your students.
This is something that we presented to your students in the form a sign outside the Bookstore. These are real numbers, they add up, things like rental, things that are in the bookstore, these are things where we are ordering books from online vendors, where students used to go around the bookstore, we are ordering those lower cost books on Amazon and presenting them to your students. The result of this is that students have come back to the Bookstore in droves.

We’re members here on campus of a group of all institutionally owned bookstores. Of the 115 bookstores in that group, stores like Missouri, stores like Alabama, stores like Washington, there were 2 college bookstores that had a positive growth over the last 5 years, and your store here at Auburn is one of those. We primarily attribute that to the way we have reinvented ourself to appeal to your student and really bring them back in. The most important thing to me is that we are transparent to our student, they understand what our operation is, they also know they are going to find when they walk into the Bookstore. Over the 5 years we’ve seen it, students really do understand the best value is most times at the Bookstore and will come in and see us for that.

Cooperation and innovation. Every semester is different for us. We’re always offering something different and the e-bill for this December is going to be the biggest change that we have and think this is going to be something students really react to.
And the Relationships. One thing that we want to do better with you guys as a group is have a better relationship. As we change or model of business and change or practice we hope that you feel like you’re served better and better and that your students are served better and better at the Bookstore.

Something that you guys may not know is that all of our efforts we present on our Web site. What this is is just a screen shot of a book here on campus, and I am sorry that it’s small, but every student that looks at this Web site when they are choosing their books we actually present to them not only our prices at the top, but then we show them rental and digital options that they can purchase online from affiliate vendors that we work with at the Bookstore. Then down at the bottom we show the what Amazon will sell the book for, what Half.com will sell the book for, and I am pleased to present to you the information that when we show students this, the Bookstore wins almost 90% of the time because they can fully see what we are doing as an operation for campus and then compare with the traditional value that Amazon always has it cheaper and 90% of students are finding out that is simply not true and continue to support the Bookstore.

We’re proud for what we are able to do for you now and we hope to be able to do better. As a conclusion today the earlier and the quickest we can get your book order, we are putting so much heart and so much work into what we’re doing for you. Trying to get more and more copies to make sure that your students find those books so that your classes start and not slowed down by any students for lack of what ever reason it might be, don’t have a book. Whether that be affordability or availability. We would love to hear from you. We want you to be invested in what you are doing because everyday, every time I show up on this campus I am fully invested in what you are doing. My job is to make sure that you do what you can do and you do it well. We always love to hear from you and always love to work with you more and more as we move forward at the Bookstore. We’d love address any questions you might have at this time. See nothing, thank you very much. [44:33]

Larry Teeter, chair: As I mentioned a few minutes ago we are going to have a presentation about Auburn Global and there is a team representing Auburn Global and Dawn Sherman will be the lead and will introduce the other members of her team.

Dawn C. Sherman, Managing Dir. Auburn Global.: Good afternoon, can you hear me back there? My name is Dawn Sherman and I have the honor of serving as the managing director of Auburn Global. We would love to spend a few minutes telling you about who we are, what we do, and what’s going on in our suite right now. So we will get to that. Before that I would love to introduce the team to you. Dr. Robert Weigle, who has been a long time faculty member here at Auburn, is our Academic Director, Nazanin Tork is our Director of Admissions; and Sean Busenlener is our Director of Student Services. So we will all take a few minutes to share with you today. [45:38]

Thank you very, very much for having us. We are very honored to be here to work with you today.
I am going to talk about international students and what is the trend in international students leaving their home country to travel to study at the collegiate level? I don’t know if you can see a lot of this detail here, but pretty much what this slide is showing us is that in 2001 there were 2.1 million students who left their country for collegiate education. In 2012 it was 4.3 million. That trend expects to continue and I’ll show you that with the next slide. The United States is still the single largest host country for international students. So you can see that in the last 14 years since 2001 there’s been a huge trend in international students traveling abroad to study.

This is what it looks like in the next few years. Right now, the last numbers that we have from cevis 2014, 886,000; by 2025 it’s expected to be a million-and-a-quarter students. So as you can see this trend is not going away. Students are still coming all around the world to go to college. The trend is expected to happen here as well and with Auburn Global our goal is to help to internationalize the campus and we’ll talk about that a little bit more. We are proud to be part of that.

So what is Auburn Global? How many of you have heard about Auburn Global? You’re familiar with us, great, wonderful. We are a partnership between Auburn University and a company called Shorelight Education. Our goal is to recruit qualified international students from around the world to bring them to Auburn University and when the get here to give them every service that we can possible and all kinds of support to help them become successful. So they will spend a half year with us, a half way program for a year and during that time they are taking academic courses but we are giving them all of the support to have them find success. Our focus is on student success, and what I mean by that is we work with them academically, we work with their student services, their activities on campus, their housing, their dining, and everything they are touching we want to offer them all the support services and success that we can to help them very comfortable move into their sophomore year as an Auburn University student. So that’s a little bit, very quickly, about what we’re doing so I’ll continue.

So why are we here and what are we doing? Our work is part of working with the university and the university’ Strategic Plan. So the Strategic Plan in which Dr. Gogue reported on the year two information is now out. There is a priority one of enhancing student success. And within that there is a strategy goal which is talking about internationalization of the campus, particularly the undergraduate level. So this is where Auburn Global comes in to support the university and what they are doing. We are looking at brining in 1,000 international undergraduate students here by 2018. And that is the goal we are working on right now. [49:00]

We have a student success model. I am going to turn it over to some of the team to share a little bit about what that looks like and how we go about it, and the services and support that we offer to our students.

Robert Weigle, Academic Director: I am going to talk briefly about the academic side. We offer several pathway programs. There are 3 different programs on the graduate level currently participating or aiding departments stretched across 4 colleges. On the undergraduate we also have 3 pathway programs, and I should say on both the graduate and the undergraduate pathway this includes many support courses besides academic courses. Support courses means the enculturation to American university life. It also means cultural differences, and then ESL, English Language courses with varying degrees of intensity depending on the English score of the incoming students. We also have intensive English Language programs, the ESL Program, which kind of serves as a bridge to the 2 pathways mentioned.

We also have tutoring. In the tutoring realm we’re partnering with many entities on campus. For example, we have a branch of the Miller Writing Center in our Auburn Global Suite in Foy Hall. We’re partnering with Study Partners, we have supplemental instruction, but we also have some of our own tutors which we hired which are Auburn graduate students, part of the integration process of the students. Our Suite is open until 9:00 p.m. with the Miller Writing Center being there and the students being able to come and look for support on the academic side. But it includes much more, so I am handing it over to Sean.

Sean Bussenlener, Student Services Dir.: From a student services side my student services advisors and I meet with all of our students at least once a week. To discuss 5 main topics; academics, quality of life, health and wellness, student involvement, and student engagement. Things we’ve done thus far this semester to help integrate students is we are working with the Residence Life Department with Dr. Cook there to come up with some unique programs inside the resident hall where our students are, to engage both international and domestic students and help bring them together.

We’ve been working with the International Buddy Program and supporting them. We are able to pair 54 of our international students with a domestic buddy for this semester. When we are meeting with the students we are walking them through the AU involve page so that we can help narrow their focus to things they are really interested in, then we introduce them to an involvement ambassador, which gets them involved on campus.

The last one is organization of social activities and events to celebrate customs and holidays, both on campus and off campus.

Dawn Sherman: One of the final pieces is professional development. We do this in several different ways. At the undergraduate and the graduate level we have courses in professional development. Two of them at the graduate level. So we are working with students to understand how the workplace in the United States works in case they want to do an internship or stay for an extra year for work. So what are the expectations of them, how do they dress, résumé writing and so forth.

We also have a CAP Program called the Career Accelerator Program. That is a program that is for student that maintain a high GPA can participate in, it is free for them and they may do that over several years. In fact as an undergraduate they may do it over 4 years, and that is a series of workshops and trainings and so forth around career planning and résumé writing and so forth that they are able to participate in. That just rounds out a little bit of what we are doing with them.

Recruitment and Admissions and we will bring up Nazanin for that.

Nazanin Tork, Admissions Dir.: Hello. Just want to talk a little about recruitment and admissions. So ShoreLight Education has about 50 recruitment staff located in 14 different countries. We have strategically located recruitment offices around the world, some of our recruitment staff are in those offices and then some of them work from home depending on the location around the world.

There are about tens of thousands of agents world wide. ShoreLight Education chooses to work with the top 200, so we are very exclusive with who we choose to partner with to ensure that we get the quality students that Auburn University is looking for.

This past fall intake we had over 1,300 applications to Auburn Global. Of the 1,300 applications we have 310 students on campus today. As you can see the breakdown between undergrad, graduate, and ESL. You will also see on the infographic that the majority of our students currently are coming from a specific region of the world. Now that is a national trend across the U.S. but we are working on opening up more recruitment offices in certain locations around the world so we can diversify the population of students that come to our campus.

Progression and Benefits.

Robert Weigle, Acad. Dir.: So as I had mentioned already, the 2 pathway programs on the undergraduate and the graduate level so the students are with us either for 2 or 3 semesters on the undergraduate level or 1 to 2 semesters on the graduate level. I had mentioned already the support courses clearly if a student comes in and is with us 3 semesters, that means there is high support. So there are more English contact hours than any academic hours. Once they progress through this picture changes so the academic course become more and more, the English support courses go down as they pick up the English language skills.

The progression into the university, on the undergraduate side it was set by the university, so as long as they can perform in the pathway and have the respective GPA the university expects they will matriculate. On the graduate level it’s a little different. The standards have been set by the department prior to rolling out of the program, so the progression rates are at time rather high.

As far as faculty support we’re trying to build the community of the people of the faculty and the instructors that work for Auburn Global and have Auburn Global students so we’re organizing workshops. We just had our second workshop it was kind of a follow up luncheon to the first workshop that was held with best practices, teaching international students, and in the follow up we also talk about what happens in the classroom right now but also tackling things like cultural differences so the faculty has a better understanding of what to expect from our students.

Dawn Sherman: The goal of Auburn Global for the university is to help diversify the campus and again particularly at the undergraduate level. So that’s something we are working very hard to do. The economic impact of our students is great. One of the things they need to do if they want to get a driver’s license here it they have to get a signed letter from me. I have probably signed 75 or 80 of those letters in the last 6 or 7 weeks. These students are all going out buying cars, bicycles, motorcycles. I had a student say to me yesterday, his friend just bought a $700 bicycle to get around campus. So our students are coming here and spending money and the economic development in this local area is actually very, very significant from the students who are coming.

That’s pretty much it. I think in sum we have an exciting group of students here, we are thrilled to be working with them. Many of you will start to see them in another year by fall they’ll be in your classes if they are not already. We are very excited to work with all of you with our students. We will continue to support them as they go and give them encouragement and to work with all of you. So if you are seeing our students in your classroom now, thank you very much for working with them and I am sure you are hearing from us on a weekly basis to touch base about how they are doing. And as we look forward we look forward to working with a lot more of you as our students progress to their sophomore, junior, and senior years and our goal is to make it to graduation for everyone of them. Thank you for you support to date. If you have any questions we’d be glad to answer them. I brought a box of my business cards. If you have any questions please feel free to call me at anytime about a student, about the organization, about what we’re doing. We’re here, we’re here to help you, to support you and we appreciate your support. Thank you very much.

Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you very much Auburn Global.

Is there any new or unfinished business? None? We’re adjourned. [58:50]