Minutes of the Senate Meeting
10 February, 2009
Broun Auditorium
3:00 p.m.
Submitted by
Sue Barry


Present: Robert Locy, Sue Barry, Kathryn Flynn, Dennis Devries, David Cicci,  Paul Bobrowski, Timothy Boosinger,  R. Lee Evans, Anne-Katrin Gramberg, Jeff McNeil, Bonnie MacEwan, Todd Storey, Andrew McLelland, Winfred Foster, Norbert Wilson, Sondra Parmer, Werner Bergen, Michael Clay, Christopher McNulty, Paul Swamidass, Anthony Moss, Yifen Wang, Rik Blumenthal, Larry Crowley, Brigitta Brunner, Laura Plexico, Sanjeev Baskiyar, Carol Centrallo, John Saye, Dan Gropper, Jim Witte, Michael Baginski, James Goldstein, Robin Huettel, Claire Crutchley, Allen Davis, John Mazaheri, Larry Teeter, Mark Fischman, David Carter, Raymond Kessler, Ellen Abell, Shea Tillman, Edith Davidson, Bart Prorok, Howard Goldstein, Claire Zizza,  Jim Wright, Daniel Parson, Jan Kavookjian, Bernie Olin, Guy Rohrbaugh, Mike Bozack, Changhoon Jung, Robert Voitle, Chris Correia, Peggy Shippen, Scott Lewis, Emily Myers, Gwen Thomas, M. Scott Phillips, R. D. Montgomery
Absent sending a substitute:  Jim Saunders (Bill Hames), Constance Hendricks (Kim Raines), Don-Terry Veal (Lisa Bradly), Jon Segars (Patton Pickens)
Absent no substitute: Richard Brinker,  Larry Benefield, Barbara Witt, John Mason, Lauren Hayes, Lindsey Stevenson, Valerie Morns-Riggins, Joe Molnar, Ruth Crocker, Charles Mitchell,  Barbara Kemppainen, Paul Holley, Ronald Neuman, Allen Davis, Robert Bulfin, , Andrew Wohrley, Casey Cegielski, Steve Stuckwisch,   Del Epperson
Bob Locy called the meeting to order at 3:00 p.m.
Approval of Minutes:  The minutes of the January 13th Senate meeting were approved by a voice vote without opposition.
Remarks from the President:
President Gogue made several announcements.

  1. Mary Ellen Mazey has been named Provost, and she will begin her responsibilities officially on Monday, February 13, 2009.
  2. Seaman’s Corporation, the German instrument company, will locate in the Research Park.  They will bring us capabilities in MRI imaging. They will be locating a seven tessler unit in Auburn making us the first institution in the southeast to have this capability.  This unit will be available to several different departments on campus.

Dr Gogue also presented several charts comparing Auburn to our peer institutions.

  1. The first chart from the US Department of Education compared tuition for public educational institutions vs. private institutions. The cost for a public university in our class was $6,400 and for the same class of private institution the cost was about $33,000.  These are basically sticker prices.  Auburn students actually pay about $5,300.  However, we actually discount our tuition about 44 percent; so if we deduct all the support funds, the actual cost is $2,300-$2,400.  We are about in the middle of the pack.
  2. The second chart shows three main costs within an institution, Instructional costs, support costs, and academic support costs.  This chart shows student costs, and student services costs. Our peer public institutions spend $10,000 and we’re spending $7,600 in terms of instruction costs.  However, where we are spending less is really in academic support and student services.  It looks like our increase was more, almost 8 percent, but we are still $1,000 less than our peers and considerably less than private schools.
  3. Data for anxiety about cost shows that 40 percent of the students had no concern about cost, 51 percent had some concern, but felt they could make it with a part time job, and 9 percent of the student said it was a major concern. Of course, generally students aren’t paying these costs.
  4. All universities look closely at projections of high school graduation rates.  There is no growth in the number of high school graduates over the next 12 or 13 years in Alabama. Georgia and Florida are growing, but Alabama is flat. There are also demographic changes.  By 2020 more than 50 percent of the K-12 population will be Hispanic in the US, but there is no increase in the graduation numbers.
  5. Another chart showed the amount of student financial aid from state to state. Our state supports students at about 4 percent and the average is over 40 percent.  This is due to the lottery in certain states where they support students up to 100 percent.  However, even in states without a lottery, the numbers are better, but we are working on improving scholarship support for students.
  6. The final chart showed level of degrees that we offer compared to our peers. If you look at professional degrees, such as pharmacy and vet medicine, we’re about same as our peer groups. When you look at doctoral and master’s degrees, we are at about two-thirds of the average, but we produce more undergrad degrees than our peer institutions.

Dr. Gogue closed his remarks with the budget. The cuts due to proration will reduce the budget by 68 million dollars. If the state apportions the monies as they have in previous years, our shortfall could be about 100 million dollars. He reported that until we know what the Federal Stimulus Package will be, it is difficult to make any plans.  The Senate and House bills have different numbers in terms of what education will receive, plus there are items that deal with academic facilities and extension as well as Pell grants and students with disabilities.  Therefore, it is difficult to know how the numbers may ultimately be allocated.  After doing the multiplication Dr. Gogue figured the numbers could be between 2 and 3.2 billion dollars that would come to Alabama. On the other hand, the Governor used numbers such as 3.5 billion.  Once the bill has passed and the legislature works on it, Dr. Gogue will have a better feel for exactly what Alabama will get.

Remarks from the Chair
Bob Locy, (Chair) made several announcements:

  1. The nominating committee for Senate officers was chaired by Connor Bailey and consisthaired of Bruce Gladden, Debra Cobia, Jim Bradley, David Carter, and Isabelle Thompson.  Our nominees for C hair-Elect are Claire Crutchley from Finance and Larry Molt from Communication Disorders. For Secretary-elect, our nominees are Russ Monteferring from Animal Sciences and David Shannon from Educational Foundations and Leadership Technology. The nominees and the committee will be posted on the Senate Web page.  The results of the election will be announced at the General Faculty Meeting in March.
  2. The University Senate Web site has been remodeled by Sue Barry, Senate secretary and our part-time Senate administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg.  Faculty can get there by clicking on Administration and then University Senate.
  3. The Administrator Evaluation Committee will be doing evaluations of deans and department chairs in the near future.  There is also a survey of the student teaching evaluation forms in the pipeline.  Therefore, we should have some information for our new Provost soon.

Action Items:
Consulting Policy : Bob Locy (Chair, University Senate)
Bob reminded the Senate that the Consulting Policy and the Conflict of Interest Policy were presented at the January Senate meeting and that the Consulting Policy section was postponed for consideration until this meeting.  Since everyone has had a month to review the policy Bob opened the floor for discussion.

Questions and Remarks

Rik Blumenthal ( Senator, Chemistry and Biochemistry) commented that few faculty members are following the current policy and that his faculty would like to see everyone filling out forms for University approval. However, he pointed to the first sentence in the third from the last paragraph on the second page, “Faculty members should not commit specialized University facilities and equipment or other resources to external consulting  …  unless such use is specifically approved in writing in advance by the department head or other appropriate administrator”. He contended that the wording was too open and that it implied all equipment with the exception of what was specifically stated later to be your office, your computer and office equipment would be a road block for people wanting to obtain approval from a chair.  People currently don’t ask for approval because they fear getting a “no.”  Therefore, if they don’t ask, they don’t get a “no”.  For this reason, he wanted to change the wording where it says “specialized University facilities.” 
Rik  moved to strike the word “and” from the third to last paragraph after the word ‘facilities’, University facilities, comma, shared and strike the ‘and’ and then insert the word ‘shared’ between other and resources.
Rik clarified his amendment by stating his office computer was completely under his control, that he should determine how it is used, and it shouldn’t be under the control of his department head when he asks to do consulting.  Instead he should only have to ask for permission to use shared equipment

Paragraph below indicates the change.
[Faculty members should not commit specialized University facilities, and shared equipment or other shared resources to external consulting projects unless such use is specifically approved in writing in advance by the department head or other appropriate administrator.”]
The motion was seconded and Bob asked for discussion.
Sanjeev Baskiyar (Computer Science, Senator ) said  the word “shared” was too generic because really your personal computer is actually shared, and we should consider something that is probably ‘specialized’ equipment rather than ‘shared’ equipment because there are others who can log on to your computer.
Bob Locy called for a voice vote, but he was unable to determine the result.   Therefore, he called for  a hand count, and the motion passed 27 for and 11 against.
Rik Blumenthal (Chemistry and Biochemistry, Senator) wanted to make a second amendment concerning word order. In order to clarify that a faculty members had no restrictions on the amount of consulting they could do on their own time, such as in the summer when they are not being paid; he proposed to take that final sentence, make it a separate paragraph and put it before what is currently the final paragraph.
Bill Sauser (Provost’s Office): wanted to clarify personal time.  Generally a faculty member’s personal time includes weekends, evenings, and if they are on 12 month appointments, annual leave.
Bob Locy called for discussion.
Ron Montgomery (Clinical Sciences & Veterinary Medicine, Senator) wanted to make it clear that people on 12 month appointments are in a little different situation.  For them weekends and annual leave are considered personal time.

Bob Locy (Chair) clarified the objective of the Faculty Welfare Committee.  It was to 1) encourage consulting within the purview of the policy rather than under the table, and 2) clarify the language concerning one day per week to make it clear that it was one day averaged across your semester’s worth of time commitment.  We are trying to focus on policy in this document, and perhaps a separate document on procedures related to policy should come later. There needs to be a way to standardize procedures and make them consistent with the intent of the policy. However there are different problems across campus.  For example, those in Extension Service are not allowed to consult for in-state businesses in order to avoid a conflict of interest. There may also be conflicts in the Vet School.

Bob call for a vote of approval for the policy as drafted and amended here today.
The motion carried by a voice vote.

Amendment of approved Summer 2010 Calendar and Summer 2010 proposed revision Robin Jaffe (Chair, Calendar and Schedules Committee)
Robin moved to revise the calendar in order to equalize the days during Summer mini-semester 1. Therefore, June 24 would be the only change.

The motion carried by a voice vote.

Calendar for Summer 2011 Robin Jaffe (Chair, Calendar and Schedules Committee)
Robin moved to accept the Summer 2011 Calendar giving us 25 days for each mini-semester and 50 days for the regular summer semester.
Questions and Remarks
Claire Crutchle (Senator, Finance) reminded Robin that when it was first proposed in May that the Calendar Committee had switched a day.  At that time the Chair of the Calendar Committee was asked , ”Are we going to review this and make sure it works well?”

Robin affirmed that she was correct..

Claire Crutchley wondered why we were going ahead with this vote before the review.
Robin responded that after discussion with other senators that the committee decided to go ahead with this now and get it in the books.  He believed that that they could always change it back later.
Claire wanted to know when would they propose a revision for 2011 if this calendar proved to be a disaster in 2010.
Robin said that the committee wanted to try it and then change the 2011 calendar if it doesn’t work.
Bob Locy: called for the vote and the motion passed on a voice vote.

Calendar for Academic Year 2011-2012 Robin Jaffe (Chair, Calendar and Schedules Committee)
Robin said that the Fall 2011 Calendar would begin on August 16th and would run through December 16th.  The calendar will treat Tuesday, September 6 as a Monday in order to equalize the number of days.  Spring semester doesn’t have this problem.  Therefore, he moved the Senate accept the proposed calendar.
Questions and Remarks
Howard Goldstein (Senator, Music) wanted to know if this was purely to equalize the number of class days.
Robin responded that he was correct.
Howard wanted to know if that meant that the Tuesday class wouldn’t meet that week. 
Robin agreed.
Howard pointed out that in the fine arts if you have a concert with an ensemble that only rehearses on Tuesdays, you can’t have that rehearsal that week, unless you schedule an extra one.
Robin pointed out that he would have one on that Monday which is a holiday.
Howard replied that the Tuesday rehearsal for that week would not occur and that this would be a class that only meets one day a week. In other words, an event that’s outside of class may not be able to wait for the makeup.
There was no further discussion and the motion carried by a voice vote.

Information Item:

Graduation Task Force Committee Report Susan Villaume (Task Force Chair and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, College of Education)
Susan reported that the charge of the committee was to identify strategies for moving Auburn to the top 25 percent of land-grant institutions relative to graduation rates. The report was completed on December 19 and posted on the Provost’s web site.

Susan gave highlights of the data collected.

  1. Our current graduation rate is fluctuating between 62 and 68 percent.  In comparison with SREB schools and land-grant institutions we are in the middle, but our goal is to reach the top 25 percent. Since all institutions will be trying to improve their rates, Dr. Gogue would like us to aim for 80 percent.
  2. The disaggregated data show females graduating at a higher rate than males, 5-8 points.  We have a significantly lower rate for black non-Hispanic students than the SREB average – SREB average is 62 percent and ours is 44 percent. Also the gap between the graduation rate for white and black students has widened to 22 percentage points.
  3. Good News - Withdrawal rates are decreasing and hopefully graduation rates will increase, but some action is still necessary. In a study of cohorts from 1999-2001 63 percent graduated within six years, 34 percent left AU prior to graduation, and 4 percent were still here after six years. The interpretation is that we need to keep kids at Auburn and address their academic, financial and social/personal needs.

Susan addressed recommended actions next.

  1. We are already increasing our institutional grants; therefore, average ACT scores are increasing. However we have had trouble with minorities, the office of enrollment services is taking steps to rectify this and we anticipate a more diverse Fall 2009 freshman class. This leads us to recommend an increase in academic advisors.   The National Academic Advising Association recommends a 300:1 ratio for general advising, but a 100:1 for at-risk students. Auburn’s average advising load is 541:1 and we have one college functioning at 949:1. So we recommend sufficient staffing to allow frequent contact with students, particularly those at risk. We also need an early warning system to flag students. It may flag incoming freshman with low ACT scores, those with significant financial needs or those with a mid-term averages below a C. There are many different reasons that we would need to flag students, but we have to have the resources to respond to those needs.
  2. Even though we are increasing the average ACT scores according to the [Office of Institutional Research and Assessment] OIRA data the Fall 2007 cohort after their first semester, nearly 20 percent of them would have been on academic warning if it hadn’t been for the Grade Adjustment Policy (GAP), and these are well prepared students. Currently, we don’t have the staffing to help students with problems transitioning to the college environment. It will be expensive.  If just 20 percent of the freshman class were to need more intrusive advising, we would have to add 8 academic advisors at a cost of approximately $350,000. If you provide more intrusive advising for the sophomores, juniors, and seniors, the cost increases to about a million dollars. Therefore, the committee is recommending a university council that focuses on a student advising system in general to be housed under the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies.
  3. Many of our students GAP themselves off academic warning which delays the intervention they need to be successful in college. The committee recommended that the GAP not be allowed until the course had been retaken. We need to consider an attendance policy, and for those classes with a high failure rate, we might consider reporting the mid-term grades. For example, Clemson has increased their graduation rate to 79 percent, and faculty members are required to report mid-term grades five days prior to mid-term. Another example is at the University of Connecticut where faculty members teaching a 1000 or 2000 level course must report mid-term grades for students with grades below C.  In this way, it is possible to identify students with problems before it is too late.
  4. In terms of Student Engagement and Commitment, we are well aligned with best practices with our learning communities. However, Nancy McDaniel’s office would like to increase the number of freshman participating in these communities. The goal is to have 50 percent of the freshman class in a learning community within five years.
  5. We need to have advisors encouraging students to take 15 or 16 hours a semester.  Without this kind of advice, students will not graduate in four years.  Other options might be to eliminate the additional tuition that is tacked on if you register for more than 15 hours and to incentivize summer enrollment for students who didn’t take up to 30 hours a year or who needed to retake a class.  Another problem is bottleneck courses. Students frequently complain that they can’t get a seat in a required course.  This has to be investigated more thoroughly to see if we need to allocate resources to remedy the problem.
  6. The sixth recommendation has to do with teaching and learning.  Some institutions identify courses or course sections that have higher than average failure rates.  If we were to do this, we would have to investigate why. Maybe required attendance would make a difference.  Maybe there is inappropriate curriculum alignment. Whatever the cause the committee felt it was important to investigate.
  7. We need to use our data efficiently.  We can’t wait six years and find out that our graduation rate has not improved.  We have to look at the impact of our innovations on a yearly basis as well as at the sub-groups within our data.  Also we need to explore different ways of gathering data. Most of all we need a process and structure for collecting the data, for analyzing it and then we must respond to that data. We see the enrollment management council as having an important function in developing this system, but again everything would need to have oversight through the office of the Provost in conjunction with the Office of Undergraduate Studies.

Susan concluded by emphasizing the need for a campus wide commitment from the President’s Office to the individual classroom. We need to carefully select the strategies and vigilantly evaluate what we are doing. We need to be good stewards of the limited funds we have and move forward in an integrated and comprehensive way.
Questions and Remarks
Mark Fischman(Senator, Kinesiology) wanted to know if  when you talk about failure rates in a particular class do you include just the students that came in as freshman or does it include transfer students.
Susan Villaume responded that the committee felt strongly about identifying those courses with high failure rates and then investigating the reasons for the failures. She suggested that they might find out that students coming in from junior colleges are having a more difficult time.
Mark Fischman: thought that these graduation rates were based on kids who start as freshman.
Susan agreed with his assessment.
Mark Fischman: wanted to know if the committee found out anything at all about graduation rates for transfer students.
Susan Villaume responded that the committee didn’t look at that data. She added that when looking at graduation rates it is important to understand how the game is played and who counts and who doesn’t. However, she added that we do need to be concerned about all students. She thinks that we can move forward on all fronts, not just improving our rates for US News and World Report.
Bob Locy responded, as one of the committee members, that they were most interested in what would improve the graduation rates. Their feeling was that whatever helped the freshman class would also help transfer students.  However, there was no separate effort to look at the special needs of transfer students. 
Tom Sanders (Library, not a Senator) noted that 1997, the year the entering freshman class had the best graduation rate was also the smallest entering freshman class that we had during that 6-7 year period. Therefore, he wondered if they had looked at capacity problems. Was the University simply not able to provide satisfactory service to the increased numbers of students in the other years?
Susan:  responded that they had no specific data on that, but that looking at the optimal size of our student enrollment probably does make a lot of sense.
Tom Sanders wondered about the fact that individual departments and colleges have been raising the bar for GPAs in their majors. He wondered if the committee had looked at this as a factor. Some students come in the summer and take easy courses just to raise their GPA.
Susan told the Senate that one of the concerns talked about in academic affairs with associate deans and on this committee is that you can graduate from Auburn with a 2.0, but there are becoming fewer and fewer programs that you can enter into with a 2.0 and that certainly could impact our graduation rates.
Chris Correia (Senator, Psychology) was curious as to the research examined by the committee concerning   medical or psychological illnesses or conditions that might contribute to attrition rates in college students. He wondered if in universities where their rates were significantly higher if they were providing more services for these students.
Susan replied that her committee didn’t have access to any of that data. However, one of the recommendations is that we look at different groups of students, first generation students, students with significant financial need, students entering with particularly low ACT scores, but perhaps the students that you just described may be a target population that we need to pay particular attention to, but they had no data on that.
Mike Baginsk (Electrical Engineering, Senator)wanted to know if they had any data as to how many kids flunk out vs. drop out for financial reasons, or transfer out.
Susan replied that they had some data on that.

Constance Relihan(member of the committee) said that Nancy McDaniel’s office had a survey of students who left the University and  the reasons why they chose to leave.  The most significant reasons seemed to be distance from family and friends and things that we might really consider homesickness. In terms of the academic failure rates, the number of students who are on academic warning is at least 20 percent for our first year students.
Susan added that within the data they received for the freshman 2007 cohort, even with GAP, by their second semester there were only 3 percent that were actually suspended. However, the literature seems to indicate that there is not one good reason, and typically a student that’s having academic problems is also having social problems and may be homesick on top of that. In the future they hope to have developed a system to answer some of these questions.
Drew Clark (Director of Institutional Research and Assessment, not a Senator) pointed out that the six year graduation rate is a fairly bad statistic.  It is that proportion of first time full-time freshman who received a bachelor’s degree from your institution within 6 years of their first matriculation. It is not measured from a student’s point of view, so for example a student who begins at Auburn University spends two years here then transfers to University of Alabama and graduates is not counted in our 6 year graduation rate or in Alabama’s 6 year graduation rate. It’s just important to keep that in mind.
Drew Clark  continued that those interested in the proportion of Auburn students who transfer out after a couple of years should check the ‘college portrait’ for Auburn University; it’s part of our participation in the NASULGC sponsored voluntary system of accountability.  You can navigate to it by going to the University’s home page, clicking on the link for prospective students, and then clicking on the link for ‘college portrait,’ and one element of this standardized display for prospective college students and their parents is a table showing for a given freshman cohort, that proportion that had graduated within 6 years, who we know had transferred out within 6 years, who are still enrolled, and that allows you to get from a student’s point of view a better picture of how students are progressing.
Rik Blumenthal (Chemistry and Biochemistry, Senator) wondered if the committee had a breakdown of what various colleges have been experimenting with to improve graduation rates, such as advising.
SusanVillaume agreed that there was a great deal of inconsistency across colleges and some institutions have more comprehensive or centralized level of resources. However, we don’t want to discourage colleges from experimenting as far as advising goes. The most important topic of conversation was whether or not a college had data as to the impact of their innovations on graduation rates.
Rik Blumenthal reminded the committee that with 200 students it would be very time consuming to enter mid-term grades as we do final grades, one by one.  On the other hand, If that system could be streamlined so that he could send either his spreadsheet in or the numbers could be pulled off of blackboard it could be done without a lot of extra work on his part.
Susan realized that the warning system would not work unless there is a streamlined process for entering data easily. Another aid for failing students might be a January or May term where students who didn’t pass biology can retake the course and get caught up. There are also other innovations that other universities are looking at that we might try.
Tony Moss (Biological Sciences, Senator) wondered how many foreign students or students for whom English is a second language we were losing since he had had some experiences in this area.
Susan Villaume agreed that we may have to monitor students who are coming to us with English as a second language.  This might be another indicator of risk.
Bob Locy wanted to return to the issue of entering mid-term grades.  He wondered if it wouldn’t be easier to just enter Ds and Fs instead of all grades at mid-term for the early warning system.
Rik Blumenthal (Chemistry and Biochemistry, Senator) agreed that Bob’s idea would make the task much easier. However, he still felt that grades could be extracted from Blackboard with no effort on the part of the instructor.  However, this would depends on whether it is possible to access data in Blackboard
With no further discussion the meeting adjourned at 4:20.