Minutes of the Auburn University Senate Meeting
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
238 Broun Hall Auditorium
3:30 P.M.

Attendance

Officers:
Larry Teeter, Chair; James Goldstein, Chair-Elect; Laura Plexico, Secretary; Xing Ping Hu, Secretary-Elect; Patricia Duffy, Immediate-Past Chair

Administration:
Bobby Woodard, VP Student Affairs; Bill Hardgrave, Dean, College of Business; Gregg Newschwander, Dean, School of Nursing; Calvin Johnson, Dean, College of Veterinary Medicine

Ex-Officio
Timothy R. Boosinger, Provost ; ; Arthur Taylor, Staff Council Chair; Vic Walker, A&P Assembly Chair; Sara Wolf, Steering Committee; Kevin Yost, Steering Committee

Absent, sending substitute:
Jim White for Betty Lou Whitford, Dean, College of Education; Charles Israel for Joseph Aistrup, Dean, College of Liberal Arts; Dale Watson George Flowers, Dean, Graduate School; Nancy Noe Bonnie for MacEwan, Dean of Libraries

Absent, not sending substitute:
Nicholas Giordano, Dean, COSAM; Chris Roberts, Dean, College of Engineering; Walker Byrd, SGA President; India Napier, GSC President; Emily Myers, Steering Committee; Lisa Kensler, Steering Committee

Senators, by Department:
Robert Cochran, Accountancy; Anwar Ahmed, Aerospace Engineering; Michelle Worosz, Agricultural Economics & Rural Sociology; Don Mulvaney, Animal Sciences; Dean Schwartz [2nd], Anatomy, Physiology & Pharmacology; Rebecca O’Neil-Dagg, Architecture; Barb Bondy, Art; Mark Dougherty, Biosystems Engineering; Doug Goodwin, Chemistry; Cliff Lange [2nd], Civil Engineering; Ed Youngblood, Communication and Journalism; Allison Plumb, Communication Disorders; David Umphress, Computer Science & Software Engineering; Karla Teel, Consumer & Design Sciences; Melody Russell, Curriculum & Teaching; Muralikrishnan Dhanasekaran, Pharmacal Sciences; Jung Won Hur, Educational Foundations, Leadership & Technology; Hulya Kirkici, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Hilary Wyss, English; David Held, Entomology & Plant Pathology; Jung Park, Finance; Rusty Wright [2nd], Fisheries & Allied Aquaculture; Traci O’Brian, Foreign Lang & Literatures; David Lucsko, History; Jerod Windham, Industrial Design; Sean Gallagher, Industrial and Systems Engineering; John Quindry, Kinesiology; Gregg Schmidt, Library; Peter Stanwick [2nd], Management; Dmitry; Glotov [2nd], Mathematics and Statistics; Daniel Mackowski, Mechanical Engineering; Matthew Hoch, Music; David Crumbley, Nursing; Kevin Huggins, Nutrition, Dietetics, & Hospitality Mgmt.; Vicky van Santen [2nd], Pathobiology; Eric Marcus, Philosophy; Michael Fogle, Physics; Cathleen Erwin, Political Science; Tung-shi Huang, Poultry Science; Daniel Svyantek [Tracy Witte], Psychology; Marilyn Cornish, Special Ed. Rehabilitation Counseling/School Psych; Captain, Paul Michael Esposito, ROTC Naval; Kristina (Kriste) Shuler, Socio/Anthro/Social Work; Adrienne Wilson, Theatre

Absent, sending substitute:
Salisa Westuck for Brent Fox [2nd], Health Outcomes and Research Policy; Daniel Wells for Amy Wright, Horticulture; Wesley Lindsey for Spencer Durham, Pharmacy Practice

Absent, not sending substitute:
Paul Brown, ACES; Cliff Defee, Aviation Management & Logistics; Bob Locy [2nd], Biological Sciences; Mark Taylor [2nd], Building Sciences; Allan E. David, Chemical Engineering; Beth Guertal, Crop, Soil, and Environmental Sciences; Liliana Stern, Economics; Latif Kalin, Forestry & Wildlife Science; Ming-kuo Lee, Geology & Geography; Tom Smith, Human Development & Family Studies; James Carver, Marketing; Chippewa Thomas [2nd], Outreach; Jeffrey Hemmes, ROTC Air Force; Scott Copeland, Lieutenant Colonel, ROTC Army; Annette Smith [2nd], Veterinary Clinical Sciences

Minutes

At 3:30 PM Chair Larry Teeter called the meeting to order and reminded the Senators of the rules of speaking at Senate meetings. In addition, he asked the members of the senate to sign in in the back of the room and get a clicker. He then established a quorum using iclickers. There are currently 86 members of the Senate; therefore, for a quorum to be established 44 senators are required to be present. A quorum was established with 47 represented. The minutes of the January 19th, 2016 Senate meeting were approved without modifications.

Remarks and Announcements

Office of the President, Jay Gogue, President
There are 5 or 6 six things on the State House Legislature agenda that are interesting. Number one, they are looking at 2 different bills, one is to allow you to put a gun in your car without a permit and the second one relates to the right to carry guns on campus. If passed, Auburn would have to allow guns on campus with a concealed weapon permit.

There is also a longitudinal study of K-12 and higher education to evaluate the data on graduation rates. Last month there was a report that 89% of children in Alabama graduated from high school. There’s belief that the graduation rate reported may not be accurate.

There is also a debate and some discussion on performance funding. Specifically, what should go into performance funding models to allocate resources to institutions?

Because gas prices are a little lower, it was decided that 52 cents per mile is too much for a reimbursement rate. They want to use the triple A model which gives a lower rate than 52 cents per mile. Once gas prices go back up then the 52 cent rate would likely be adopted again. The good news is that there is a little bit of additional money in the rolling reserve that will come to higher education this year. The amount has not been indicated but there is hope for a reasonably good budget year.

The Board of Trustees met in early February and approved all of the items on the February agenda. At the meeting the amount of funding for the Mell Classroom building was increased by 2 million dollars.

Dr. Gogue also mentioned that Auburn had a clean audit through the audit partners. The only thing that you may see that is different is that the pension plan is underfunded and so there is a pension liability. Roughly 10 billion dollars is underfunded in the Alabama Pension Plan.

On campus, Wayne Alderman reported that they expect freshman enrollment on campus to be about 4,500 next year. The president will be sending out an email titled “Alabama Unites.” The email asks for those interested to join a particular site that will provide information on the legislative session. For current legislature to get traction, you need to be able to say you have thousands that are interested in a particular issue.

Two searches are underway: one is the Chancellor’s position at AUM. They are down to their final 4 candidates. And the other is a search for the General Counsel position for the university, that’s Lee Armstrong’s position, to be fill sometime this summer.

Questions: None

Office of the Provost, Tim Boosinger, Provost

This is the time of year when we start to look at appointments to Senate and University Committees for the next year. Dr. Large will be convening the Budget Advisory Committee as a part of a study of ways to improve the allocation of resources at Auburn University. There will also be a couple of other newly developed budget committees.

With regard to the Academic agenda from the Board of Trustees. The Board was reminded that all of our academic recommendations generally begin at the Department or Graduate School level and developing academic recommendations and getting them approved is truly a shared governance process. At the Board meeting, the following proposals were approved: a Bachelor of Science degree program in Industrial Design Studies; the College of Education, a Master’s of Art in Counseling Psychology; and from the College of Liberal Arts a Master’s in Social Work.

In addition, there was a request from the administration asking the Board to give the president the authority to set tuition rates for distance learning. The reason is that distance programs are a part of the market place and some flexibility is needed to make adjustments. Auburn will begin at 1.25 times the current instate tuition rate.

Before the holidays a committee was convened to study diversity, equity, and inclusion at Auburn University. That committee meets almost every 2 weeks. There have already been 30 listening sessions and 40 interviews, facilitated by Joyce Gossom, a very experienced facilitator and interviewer for this kind of work. There will be campus-wide sessions facilitated by Dr. Gossom. For those who would like to have a private interview session with Dr. Gossom contact the Provosts office, specifically Julie Huff.

There will be a survey sent out on February 29 to all faculty, staff, and students asking questions relative to the climate at Auburn University surrounding diversity, inclusion, and equity. A study like this was completed in 2003. So this survey is being conducted and there will be comparisons to the 2003 data.

An update was provided on 3 searches. There is a search for the Dean of the College of Agriculture and Director of the Experiment Station. The appointment of the Director of the Experiment Station requires a vote by the Board of Trustees, immediately after that meeting there will be an announcement of who the new Dean and Director will be. We have two searches underway, one for a new vice president of Business and Finance and the search for a Chief Information Officer.

Questions:
Sara Wolf, member of Steering Committee: Asked for clarification on the distance tuition information? Whether all distance education tuition efforts, graduate and undergraduate are included?

Dr. Boosinger, Provost:  Only undergraduate.

University Senate Chair, Larry Teeter
Larry Teeter first introduced the current and upcoming senate executive committee. He then introduced the administrative assistant Laura Kloberg who assists with senate meetings and makes sure the business of the senate is conducted as smoothly as possible. He encouraged the senate to learn about the candidates and what they would bring to the senate as future officers and to encourage the faculty vote.

Action Items

Approval of replacement Senate committee members; Presenter, Laura Plexico, Rules Committee

The first item up for vote was a vote for a new member of the Academic Computing Senate committee. There was no discussion and Laura Plexico called for a vote. The motion was passed with 55 votes and 95% in favor of the candidate. She followed the vote with an announcement that the rules committee will launch the volunteer site shortly and will be looking for volunteers for both University and Senate committees.

Questions: None

Pending Action Items

Call for Nominations for Rules Committee Members; Presenter:  Laura Plexico, Senate Secretary

Nominations for Rules Committee were sought from the floor. It was announced that once we have our list of nominees they will be voted on during the March meeting of the Senate.

Patricia Duffy, immediate past chair: Nominated Melody Russell, Curriculum and Teaching.

Sara Wolf, member of Steering: Nominated Greg Schmidt from the Libraries.

Kevin Yost, member of Steering: Nominated Bob Cochran from the School of Accountancy.

James Goldstein, chair-elect: Nominated Traci O’Brien from Foreign Languages.

Laura Plexico, secretary: Any more nominations? Self nominations? None

Information Items

AU Relay for Life; Presenter: Caitlin Miley - Event Co-Chair; Relay For Life of Auburn University 2016

Relay for Life is a fundraising event for the American Cancer Society. There will be a fair set up in the green space with a theme of holidays. Every booth, table, game, food venue, or place represented on the campus green space will have a holiday theme associated with it. Each one will correspond to its own charity and its own cancer that they are raising money for.

This initiative is being driven by a student led organization and they have the overall goal to raise $100,000 for Relay for Life. They realize that there’s a gap between student led organizations that try to get the Auburn community involved and faculty. Auburn University faculty and staff can be involved simply by donating auburnrelayforlife.org/auburn or creating a team.

Questions: None

Administrator Online Evaluations; Yasser Gowayed, Chair-Senate Administrator Evaluation Committee
The work of this committee was presented in November. He provided a quick update on where the committee is in the process. The committee came up with a policy that states that the surveys would be conducted by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and will be conducted each year during the month of February except for the year of the 3-5 year administrator review.

All full-time employees within academic units will be asked to participate. The data will be shared with 3 people: the chair of the committee, the Provost, and the chair of the University Faculty Senate. The survey has 4 parts: administration, personal management, budget and resources, and academic program management. The 4 parts should take no more than 5 to 10 minutes.

Following this year, the goal is to send the administrator evaluations out consistently every single year in the same month. The goal is to obtain consistent data. He asked that if there is feedback after taking the survey for faculty to please share their feedback on the survey with the committee.

He encouraged the senate to go back to their units and encourage their colleagues to respond to the surveys. The survey will be distributed on the 25th of February and will close on March 22nd.

Questions:

Question from the floor: It was asked whether anonymous feedback was possible.

Yasser Gowayed: Encouraged faculty to make sure their comments were not self-identifying

Patricia Duffy, past chair: Thanked them for their efforts.

The Hopper – AU’s New Supercomputer; Presenter:  Bliss Bailey, Interim CIO

The Hopper community cluster is a high performance community cluster that provides greater computational resources to the campus. Hopper is named after Grace Hopper. It is a cluster because it is a cluster of computers that are connected together. It is a community because it is a joint effort funded with investments from multiple disciplines from across campus.
It has 120 nodes, 2000 cores, 15 Terabytes, 1,4 Petabytes of disk storage, InfiniBand storage network, and 102 Teraflops of compute capacity. There are also a few special nodes for researchers to use.

The strength is it has central technical support, the infrastructure is in place, has room to grow, support from administration, and the researchers define usage policies.

Questions: None

Announcement of Nominations Slate for 2016–2017 Senate Officers: Presenter: Laura Plexico, Senate Secretary

The slate of candidates for the 2016–17 Senate Officers include: Dan Svyantek from Psychology and Jared Russell from Kinesiology running for chair-elect; Tony Moss from Biological Sciences and Don Mulvaney from Animal Science running for secretary-elect.

The call for the vote will be sent on March 1 and will close on March 7. The winners of the election will be announced at the General Faculty Meeting.

New Business: Larry Teeter, Senate Chair
None
Unfinished Business: Larry Teeter, Senate Chair
None
Adjournment: Larry Teeter, Senate Chair at 4:11 P.M.