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Meeting Minutes, April 21, 2020

The Arts and Sciences Council (ASC), April 21, 2020, 3:30-5:00, Zoom Conference

Representatives present: Stephen Mojzsis, GEOL; Andrew Cowell, LING; Angelica Lawson, ETHN; Barbara Buttenfield, GEOG; Christina Meyers-Denman, SLHS; David Stock, EBIO; Françoise Duresse, AAH; Juan Herrero-Senes, SPAN; Julia Lundquist, ATOC; Leslie Irvine, SOCY; Lonni Pearce, PWR; Matthew McQueen, IPHY; Rebecca Wartell, JWST; Robert Kuchta, BCHEM; Roger Pielke, ENVS; Sebastian Casalaina-Martin, MATH; Michaele Ferguson, PSCI; Mike Zerella, RAPS; Ding Xue, MCDB; Alison Jaggar, WMST; Michela Ardizzoni, FRIT; Ramesh Mallipeddi, ENGL; Daniel Kaufman, PHIL; Cecilia Pang, THDN; Deborah Whitehead, RLST; Erica Ellingson, APS; Tania Barham, ECON; Gerardo Gutierrez, ANTH; John Gibert, CLAS; Annjeanette Wiese, HUMN

Representatives & ex-officios not present: Tanja Cuk, CHEM; Hanna Rose Shell, CINE; Tim Weston, HIST; Patricia Rankin, PHYS; Tim Kuhn, CMCI; Samantha Martin, ��������ƵSG; Matthias Richter, ALC; Hunt, CLAS; Daniel Jones, HONR; Shuang Zhang, IAFS; Jenny Knight, MCDB; Ralf Norgaard, PWR; Daniel Appelo, APPM; Elizabeth Huard, SPAN;

Ex-officios present: Hillary Potter, A&S Leaf Van Boven, PSYC; Roshanne Ebrahimian, SAC

Also in attendance: Robert Rupert, PHIL; Anna Jensen, A&S Noah Finkelstein, Committee on Teaching; James White, A&S Mackenzie Teepen, ALTEC; Terri Baldridge, PHIL;  Brian Gordon, IPHY; Kirsten Apodaca, PHYS; Danielle Salaz, CAS; Joanne Corson; Giulia Bernardini, HUMN; Adam Norris, APPM; Ryan Rich, BIOCH; Karen Hawley, GSLL;  Yazzmynn Martinez, A&S Hope Clark Saska; ��������ƵAM; Allison Hatch, WGST; Robert Clark, A&S Jennifer Ho, CHA; Judith Packer, MATH; Oliver Gerland, THDN; Casey Koehler, GSLL; Alex Jernigan, AAC; Steph Preo, APS; Markus Pflaum, MATH; Robert Ferry, BFA; Sarah Morehead, MCDB; Jean L. Balch, MCDB; Carmen Jura, RAPS; Martin Walter, MATH; Kenneth Hopping, A&S Alicia Turchette, WGST; Angela Branson, BIOCH; Nicholas Schneider, APS; Amy Lavens, A&S Dale Miller, ENVS; Barbara Middlebrook, RLST; Lily Board, AAC; David Braz, A&S Janie McKenzie, BIOCH; Lauren Stockwell, A&S Haruko Greeson, PSCI; Vilja Hulden, HIST; Ruth Seaholm, PSYCH; Denise Bender, PSYCH; Matthias Steup, PHIL; Stephen Martonis, ��������ƵAM; Mary Kraus, OUE; Keller Kimbrough, ALC; Francisco Salas, FISKE

Meeting called to order: 3:30 pm.

Chair’s Remarks

Chair Stephen Mojzsis welcomes all and thanks all for meeting together remotely. This is the last meeting of the ASC for AY 19/20. Mojzsis would like to thank Marysia for her help as program administrator and would also like to recognize standing and adhoc committee chairs for their hard work over the past academic year.

Mojzsis also wishes to congratulate on the success of the academic advisory board and thank ex-officio members.

This is Mojzsis’ final All Hands meeting as chair of the ASC. He will be concluding his time as chair on June 30^th, 2020 and will be passing the baton over to the chair elect.

Dean’s Remarks

Interim Dean White would like to spend this time thanking the faculty for a tremendous job taking us from an in-person to a remote university in a very short period of time and doing it well. There are still some issues to attend to, such as exam proctoring, but what we’re learning this semester will be very valuable for the future.

We don’t anticipate having a vaccine for this virus in the fall, so “business as usual” is the one model that will not happen this fall. But we do still want to give students a great experience at ��������Ƶ.

Ruth Ellen Kocher is stepping aside as Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities. A search is being conducted right now for a new Divisional Dean. White would like to encourage anyone who would be good for that job to apply.

White reached out to Mojzsis to put together a search committee for the new Arts & Humanities Dean. White hopes that we will soon have an idea of who to interview and will quickly set up interviews with chairs and directors, the ASC, deans, and the other usual groups that interview the Divisional Dean.

The bottom line is that Assoc. Dean Kocher was interested in spending the last year of her term in a different way, in a way that she felt would be more productive and White agreed with her. White and Kocher have been working on this new position a while and believe that there is a lot of work to be done in the areas of teaching at an R1 university.

White would like to now open the floor up for questions.

Question: will staff be a part of the search process? White says that yes, we’ll have Zoom interviews that the staff will be invited to participate in.

Question: how will this effect restructuring? White says that as things were, two of the Divisional Deans would have been finishing their terms next year, which would have created a pacing problem in terms of hiring new Divisional Deans. Hiring a new Arts & Humanities Dean now would help that out and sets the college up for a year-by-year transition between Divisional Deans.

Question: will this new position interact with the Center for Teaching and Learning? White thinks that this position will definitely interface with CTL, but they’re not quite sure yet all the ways in which that will happen.

Question: Will there be any furloughing of teaching staff or change in salary? White explains that this is a campus-wide discussion of which he is not entirely sure. He knows that ��������Ƶ took a substantial hit this spring but does not know how we are going to deal with that. There are other institutions around the country planning for furloughs but ��������Ƶ is not exactly the same as those other institutions. The medical schools on university campuses have taken the largest hits. Our strong goal is to avoid layoffs or firing people. White would rather see a smaller cut across the board.

Question: Is this new Associate Dean position another level of administration? White says no, this is just a one-year stint, Kocher will be going on sabbatical afterward.

Question: What exactly would Kocher be doing in her new role? White explains that her duties would be fairly broad and include re-evaluating interdisciplinary teaching and coordinating a lot of the college’s efforts on re-envisioning the value of teaching.

Mojzsis expresses concern over plans to move around administrative positions when most of us feel that the college is administratively top heavy at the moment. This is an interesting and complicated topic that is important to tackle and may warrant a separate meeting once we know more about the chancellor’s plans to accommodate the university’s hit. Many would like a hard look taken at administration and layering in the college.

Question: How many Associate Deans do we have? White says that we have 3 Divisional Deans, an undergraduate dean, an inclusive practice dean, and a research dean.

White says he would be happy to have the discussion that Mojzsis referred to earlier about the college’s administration.

Committee Reports

Budget Committee

Andy Cowell is stepping in for chair Patricia Rankin; would like to thank everyone for their work.

Some issues that the budget committee focused on this year include paying for course fees and creating adequate models for addressing issues as we move forward. Cowell does not feel they were completely successful with this, but did make some progress.

��������Ƶ wants to move the payment of benefits down to the college level. Currently, we are not at a resolution of that issue but the budget committee has worked hard to get central administration to understand that there needs to be good communication if this happens so that there can be adequate planning ahead of time.

College restructuring has a lot of budget implications and the committee reached out to the provost to suggest that hiring an executive dean should come first. In addition, the committee has been worried about the cost associated with restructuring, such as more staff to support new deans.

Another issue the committee has been looking at is the inequities in the way that money comes to Arts & Sciences. The college generates a lot of tuition revenue but only part of that comes back to the college. Some colleges are getting much larger shares than others and there seems to be some willingness from central administration to work on this.

Another issue is transparency from central administration on budgeting. The committee wants the college to know exactly where money is going and coming from. They met with budget people at Regent Hall and pushed for a more transparent budget model.

In relation to COVID-19, the committee would like faculty consultation on any decision that can be made. They would like to think about two to three ways to save money and there should be a discussion around these different possibilities.

Budget committee will continue to meet over the summer, as COVID-19 will put a huge hit on the budget.

Curriculum Committee

Chair Juan Herrero-Senes thanks everyone for their hard work on this committee.

The Curriculum Committee reviews proposals from different departments regarding major and minor certificates and nominations of courses. They have had 10 meetings this year and have two more to go.

The committee has reviewed 120 proposals, which fall within the following categories: revision of majors, revision of minors, creation of new minor, new course, new certificates, revision of certificate, general education distribution requirements and structuring of minors.

Diversity Committee, Cecilia Pang

Cecilia Pang has only served as the chair since January. She wants to start by thanking Stephen for his assistance and thanking Associate Dean Potter for her guidance.

The committee began this year with aspiration, determination and motivation. They held excited and lively discussions and conducted research on what other universities are doing in terms of diversity.

They put together plans, which included: the establishment of a college-level diversity & inclusion postdoc program, the formation of a collaborative interdisciplinary colloquium series, and the institution of ASC Diversity & Inclusion/ASCEND awards. 

As this committee was about to roll out action plans, COVID-19 happened and unfortunately, and unfortunately their plans were put on hold. But they look forward to reconvening as soon as there is a more regular structure on campus.

Grievance Committee

This committee takes cases only on referral from the dean, so these cases have already gone through the unit level. The committee then generates a report and sends it back. This has been done a total of three times this academic year.

Online Education

Leslie Irvine has been chair only since January, but served on the committee before that. This committee ensures the role of faculty in the development of online education.

The committee carried out the following tasks: they met with the chair of academic futures and financial futures to put together plans for online hub for remote faculty; they researched and reported on goals of the survey conducted by Parthenon.

The primary goal of this committee is always to make sure that the control of the curriculum remains in the hands of the faculty.

Personnel Committee

Leaf Van Boven has only been chair since January. This was the first year that the personnel committee has moved to all dossiers being online in a single PDF document. This has been much easier on the committee members.

The committee has handled about 100 cases total throughout the academic year, which have been roughly equally split. It is a tremendous amount of work for the Personnel Committee to review these dossiers each week. There are four remaining cases for the rest of this year and then they will be finished.

Planning Committee

Chair David Stock explains that the Planning Committee advises the dean on aspects of planning for the college.

The main topic this year was accommodations for students with disabilities. They have been looking at feedback from other policies and they are preparing a series of recommendations to the dean that they hope to complete by the end of the semester.

Their suggestions include: centralized testing facilities, electronic portals, website language that emphasizes shared responsibility among students, faculty and disability services.

The Planning Committee’s chair for the next academic year will be chosen at their meeting next week and they will be recruiting 1-2 additional members for the fall.

Faculty Advisory Board

David Stock introduces the Faculty Advisory Board, which is an ad hoc committee created by ASC vote in February of 2019. They have been meeting since September 2019. The ASC Executive Committee voted last week to extend FAB another year. This committee has representatives from Arts & Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences.

Lily Board, member of the Faculty Advisory Board, explains that the committee has been meeting every two weeks for an hour. Board & Dale Miller meet in the off-weeks.

FAB is trying to articulate a student success framework for the college: recruit, retain, launch.

They are specifically focusing on a launch strategy, which includes collaboration between the advising and career center. The purpose of this collaboration is to improve students’ professional development.

Next fall, their focus on strategic plan will continue.

Dale Miller, chair of FAB, would like to add that it is nice for faculty to be included in these discussions to have recognition for things faculty do regarding launching students into their careers.

Mojzsis concludes that the long term vision is to see FAB spin off into an independent entity that is not formally tied to the ASC.

Faculty Affairs Committee

Chair Lonnie Pierce explains that this committee was a recommendation from the Instructors Task Force.

They had one organizational meeting before COVID-19 and have been busy recruiting members.

Pierce says that the conversation has gotten a little side tracked since COVID-19 and have decided to convene one more time before the end of the semester to establish priorities before the fall.

The committee’s priorities include considering items from the instructor task force.

Mojzsis asks if there are any questions for the committees. There are none.

Noah Finkelstein, Committee On Teaching

In December of 2019, Interim Dean White commissioned an ad hoc force to define parameters of quality teaching and to identify how those might be measured.

The Committee on Teaching started meeting in January of this year and Noah Finkelstein co-chairs this committee with Associate Dean David Brown. Finkelstein anticipate having a draft of an answer to their charge by early June.

Finkelstein shares that the current draft of the document is roughly two pages in length with supplementary materials (guidance on how units might achieve this, resources for administration, etc).

The committee identified three parameters: inclusive teaching, goal-oriented teaching and scholarly teaching practices.

The overall goal of the Committee on Teaching is to establish college-level goals and expectations.

Finkelstein opens the floor up for questions.

Question: How will this relate to research? Finkelstein says he does not want to think about teaching versus research. Instead, they need to expand all of this and figure out how they can enhance each other.

Question: How do you envision relating to Dean Kocher in her new role? Finkelstein says that he thinks this will be a great outcome for Kocher to enact & establish in her new role.

Question: Will there be support provided for college-wide implementation of these recommendations? Finkelstein hopes so; and says that this is a priority for the dean.

Question: How do you convince people tasked with writing letters of reference in personnel cases that more emphasis should be placed on teaching ability? Finkelstein says that the peer review is the hallmark of our scholarly enterprise, and we can do this in terms of teaching. We have the right tools to conduct peer reviews, there are lots of different approaches. An example is having materials reviewed by experts in pedagogy and education.

If anyone has any questions later, feel free to reach out to Finkelstein.

Mary Kraus

Mary Kraus is sharing a report of the status of first year seminar program. Since the program started in Spring 2018, it has grown to 20 sections.

To go beyond 20 sections, it is critical to have additional faculty able to teach as part of their normal course load. The Provost just promised the normal amount of funding for FY 2021; very interested in first year programs

The number of sections able to teach have been declining since 2018. This is because there are fewer faculty volunteering to teach as part of their regular course load.

The impacts of COVID on FYS include:
1) holding off on any training of faculty until the end of the summer; faculty are in a challenging situation and they don’t want to overwhelm them. They would like to collaborate with the Center for Teaching & Learning on training.

2) Holding off on new proposal submittals until we are further along in the summer to allow faculty some breathing room to get through this challenging time.

Kraus expects this fall’s first year seminars to look different than ones before and we do not know what they will look like yet.

Kraus opens the floor up for questions.

Question: Why was the position of Faculty Director eliminated? Kraus explains that this role was not something that was planned in the original program. This has never been a job for a single individual and is instead a huge collaborative endeavor. Currently, there no funding for the director position and the workload will be absorbed and spread within undergraduate education.

Mojzsis says that the ASC remains committed to faculty’s control over curriculum, but also participating with FYS.

ASC Chair Voting Results

Mojzsis explains that he was elected chair three years ago. This has been the best, most fulfilling growth experience in his service to ��������Ƶ in his 20 years here and he would like to thank everyone for that opportunity.

As parliamentarian of ASC, Barbara Buttenfield takes over.

The nominations opened in February and the election was run through electronic ballots which went out on April 16^th.

In total, there were 23 ballots in favor, one abstention, and one invalid vote.

Robert Rupert is the new ASC chair.

Buttenfield thanks Mojzsis for 3 years of ASC leadership.

Rupert would also like to thank Stephen for his work over the last few years. The situation with COVID-19 will be tricky since we do not know what we are facing. Matters of interest moving forward include: the balance between research and teaching, the evaluation of tenure and promotion cases, the balance of the college’s administration as a whole, the role of online education, and what the fall-out from COVID-19 is going to look like.

Mojzsis thanks everyone for joining.

Meeting is adjourned at 5:02 pm.