A&S Senate Meeting
Tentative Agenda
February 20, 2017

 

3:30 - President’s Report (M. Schedel)

3:35 - Honors College (A.  Moyer)

3:40 - FRRP Teaching Observation Guidelines (C. Davidson)

4:00 - Discussion on Tenure File Bloat

A&S Senate
Minutes 
November 21, 2016

I.  Approval of agenda:  approved.

II.  Approval of minutes from October 21, 2016:  approved.

III.  President’s Report (M. Schedel)

• I have put the document on teacher observations on Google Docs so that Senators can add input.  (A suggestion was made from the body to send this document to the Chairs which M. Schedel agreed to do.)

IV.  CAS Dean’s Report on Analytics (S. Kopp)

• Strategic Plan:  Very high level set of goals and objectives.  The next phase is to develop what the scope would be of some of the elements of the strategic plan.  I continue to have faculty involvement.  I have reached out to Chairs for their suggestions.  I will begin  tasking various committees to speck out what the various elements of the strategic plan should be.  They will develop a document that will look into the scope, cost and timeline of each objective. They will be charged next week.  Requested completion by March.
• Promotion and Tenure:  I would like an expedited review of senior faculty candidates.  We are mandated to do a tenure review of these individuals.  When they arrive on campus it could take up to six months.  I urge that we find some way of finding a very expedited review for these kinds of senior faculty.  The size of Dossiers is a problem.  They keep getting bigger.  It’s a monumental task and the staff in my office estimates that it takes about 20 hours to make sure that the order of all the documents is correct before we send it off to the Promotion and Tenure Committee.  I wonder if we could do some work together on defining this calendar.  It’s not serving us well when the most complex cases get the least amount of time.
• Budget:  Summer revenue was higher in 16/17 than in 15/16.  Online courses made a big impact.  Several departments are in the “black” and were able to spend their revenue surplus.  We have 21 faculty searches for next year.  Our goal is to get the College deficit down.  I want to include an increase in graduate student stipends.  My hope is to see $1M in growth each year.  I want to start funding elements of the Strategic Plan.

Program/Department Assessment:  I will be seeking quantifiable metrics to diagnose features of departments and programs.  I’ve given the chairs a draft of lists of metrics that we could use.  What kinds of things will help us assess whether or not we are making progress.  One of the handouts is a tentative list of things I know cannot be collected without a significant amount of work.   We need to talk about the various ways which our programs and departments contribute to the overall vision and mission of the University.  Things like what are the credits that we teach in all of our programs.  What majors and minors are being served by the programs?  What’s the graduate rate within these programs?  Do we have an experiential learning opportunities for undergraduates in these programs?  Metrics can help with resources.  My hope is to be able to accumulate these metrics in such a way that it’s not burdensome to the departments and in many cases the Office of Institutional Research can collect this information for us.  This can be a diagnostic tool. 

P. Bingham:  Can we not turn this into another unfunded band aid for the underfunded CAS?  Can we instead fund Institutional Research to do this?  There never seems to be enough employees in Institutional Research.
S. Kopp:  They are making some progress there already.  The Provost’s Office, the School of Engineering and I have already helped bring funding for positions in the Office of Institutional Research.  
C. Marshik:  Doctoral student numbers are so constrained by TA lines.  In a certain sense measuring that is partly a function of how limited the department is to students but it’s also limited by ??? and for many degrees it doesn’t make sense to encourage people to come and pay for a doctorate without the support.  The master’s students seems to be ?? under revenue generating.  Don’t understand why those numbers would be a helpful metric given the constraints on how many doctoral and masters students we bring in.
S. Kopp:  It’s a helpful metric for me to have on my mind all the time because if you are coming, hypothetically, to talk about what your faculty are doing over the course of the coming year, and I say how come you can’t offer more SBC seats in lower division English, you would remind me that you have a graduate student population of 20 and we have a certain amount of seminars that we have to teach for that graduate student population.  So some fraction of your faculty are fully engaged delivering their graduate program.

V.  Creative Writing and Film:  There will be a vote at the December meeting

M. Schedel:  I have to apologize.  I was trying to find a way around creating a department and I was the one who suggested the language of a program not realizing this body needed to also vote on that.  I talked to the University Senate Executive Committee about this. If we go forward with this program, the University Senate committee also look at the impact including Capra.  They said it’s not a problem if in a year or two years or however long it takes if the body wills that this should become a department.  It’s important that this goes through the A&S Curriculum Committee.  I want you to bring the wording to your departments for input.
P. Bingham:  I will not vote on this.  People in my department have made it very clear that until they see the details of the cost of this transfer, how many dollars is this going to add or subtract from CAS deficit.  They do not want me to vote on it.
M. Schedel:  Capra is the committee that usually looks at it. 
N. Goodman:  This goes to the University Senate first not Capra.  It requires comments by departments that will be affected.
M. Schedel:  What I thought happens is we expressed our will and it went to Capra and then the University Senate for a vote.

N. Goodman:  Capra would need information.  That information comes from the Dean’s office in terms of what the resources that are required, etc.
P. Bingham:  There are deficits in CAS.  This puts the health of departments at risk.  We have an obligation not to add to that deficit without knowing what we are doing.
S. Kopp:  That’s an appropriate request.  It would be great if the body would gather all those requests and I can come prepared to this body with the exact information you want.  I can say where the money for this program comes from and how it does not.
S. Kopp:  How do we want this academic area interfacing with our current academic programs?  Bringing it into the college allows us to give some intellectual oversight into something that is currently completely independent.  Financially we have to make sure it doesn’t encumber us more than we already are now.  
P. Bingham:  Would it be under the umbrella of an existing department?
S. Kopp:  No, it will be a program in the same sense that we have a program in Writing and Rhetoric. 
N. Goodman:  When this moves from Provost to Dean, is there any commitment from the Provost for including resources with it?
S. Kopp:  Yes all resources will transfer to the College.  Some of the chairs have seen something that I have put together as a proposal so that we could defer the curricular questions because we don’t have curricula at the undergraduate level, a creative writing major or a film minor yet.  I am happy to refine that further and bring that back as a document that would address some of these questions.
John ??:  Are these three searches part of the 21 CAS searches?   S. Kopp:  No.
J.  Souza:  Under the guidelines for the Guidelines for the Creation, Modification, Combination, or Closure of Departments, Programs, Institutes, Centers, Schools, or Colleges, on page 3, IIa, it would seem like those five items would be a good place to start.  S. Kopp:  Could you please send me that?
S. Marsh:  The language people have been using at the last few meetings about this has been completely unclear.  
John ??:  This is happening at a fast pace.  We need to anticipate what the impact would have on the College.  Need to see what the administrative support would be.  What about space?  I think there have been insufficient discussions with the disciplines that are going to be impacted.  
S. Kopp:  I welcome you to be participating in those discussions and I urge you to do that.
John ??:  I think that those should not come from us but they should come from you as part of the person who is helping to propose these decisions.
M. Schedel:  Currently it is under the Provost and the Provost has signaled his support for it by being able to hire these three faculty.  I personally believe that bringing them under the College as a program will then let us start those dialogues more concretely.
C. Marshik:  In the spirit of transparency, I want the Senate to know that when we first saw the original proposal, that if they were to come in, they do so under English.  That’s because these three faculty they currently have hold tenure in the English Department.  We made a proposal to them and it was rejected it.  They are interested in having their own identity as a freestanding department.
P. Bingham:  Are these people physically migrating onto the campus?
S. Kopp:  No. They are working to lease in Brooklyn.   That is where the MFA would be delivered.   They do offer the minor here on this campus.  I don’t anticipate the space demand to be terribly substantial because they would mostly visit this campus in order to deliver undergraduate courses.
N. Goodman:  One minor point is that both proposals should include some comment upon the adequacy of Library holdings for the program.

VI.  Old Business:  no old business.

VII.  New Business:  no new business.

Meeting adjourned.

Submitted by:

Laurie Cullen
Secretary