February 9, 2010
Senate Meeting Transcription
Kathryn Flynn, chair: I’d like to call this meeting to order. If you haven’t already done so please remember to sign the roster at the back of the room and pretty much like I do every month I’d like to remind you that if you come forward to make comments or ask questions please go to one of the microphones on either side of the room. (can you hear me, adjust microphone) Please sign in at the back of the room on the roster if you haven’t done so already, and I’d also like to remind you that if you are going to make comments go to one the microphones on either side of the room, state your name and the department that you represent and then whether or not you are speaking as a senator. The rules of the Senate require that senators be allowed to speak first followed by any guest who is with us so I ask that you be aware that senator do have the right to speak first. Also if you get up to speak more than one time, it would be helpful if you would restate your name because we do type up a transcript and it’s very hard for Laura Kloberg to identify just by voice having heard your name once, so it would help a lot in terms of making sure the transcript is accurate.
The first items on today’s agenda is approval of the minutes for January 12, Dennis DeVries, the secretary, has posted these online and sent a link to all senators and they are also posted on the Senate Web site. So at this time I’d like to ask if there are any additions or changes to the minutes from January 12? Hearing none the minutes will stand approved as posted.
I’d like to invite Dr. Gogue to come forward to make his comments. [2:00]
Dr. Gogue, president: I’ll be brief today, I had gotten my e-mail I thought today was your Special meeting not the regular meeting, but let me mention just a couple of things to you.
At the Board of Trustees meeting last week, one piece of action I think is noteworthy, they did approve and remember they go through about 6 approvals on a building, but they did approve in concept a new small animal hospital within the Vet College. I can’t remember Don is it $70 million dollars or somewhere in that range? It allows that college now to go forward with it’s private fundraising and also part of their funding plan is to increase the number of Vet students, also to try to get specific appropriations out of both Kentucky as well as Alabama to help support that particular facility. It’s one of those that early phase approval. Probably several years or so to see how successful in the fundraising effort to be able to actually have construction.
Second thing I would mention to you is the PACT program that you’ve asked about in the past. There’s a new scheme being proposed in the legislature. The new scheme would define tuition increases for PACT Students not to exceed 2.5% for the next 30 years. What that basically would mean if you look at all the kids going to college in the state of Alabama, probably about 5% at any one time would be PACT students. So what you’re going to do is to hold their tuition at 2.5% and then you’re going to raise everybody else’s to 7% or 8% or whatever it is. So you know, you’ll be sued by the regular students. The PACT membership is somewhere around 96–97% white with about only 3–4% ethnic minority groups. So it’s a scheme in our judgment it won’t work but never the less it ay pass. The House is debating it and indications are that they may well pass it, but we’ll try to continue to explain why it’s a difficult sort of thing in the Senate.
In terms of budgets that I mentioned last month–really no change. Revenue for January, Don, was?
Don Large: (no microphone) It’s down 4% from the prior year since January of last year.
Dr. Gogue, president: So it’s not good. In a way you can argue that’s bad news and it is but remember your down about 7% in October, down about 7% in November, up 13% in December, and at least a lower rate of being down. That’s about all we can say on that part.
Final thing that I want to mention to you is, we unfortunately had another member of the Auburn family hit crossing the road by a car on Magnolia St. We’ve met with the city, we’ve talked with the city, we’ve charged the facilities group to step up our efforts as much as we possibly can. Somebody, I think it was from engineering, shared with us on this kind of issue it’s the 3 E’s that are critical for you being able to have success. Education, enforcement, and engineering solutions, so we’re trying to work with the engineering solution, but one of the things that concerns us and I don’t want to be offensive in saying this, but somewhere around 40% of our pedistrian/vehicle interaction accidents have been international students. You have to point out that it’s on Magnolia, it’s my understanding that a large population of our students that are international live on that side of the campus. So it may mean absolutely nothing, but it does tell me that we need to make sure during orientations that we really need to explain what our rules are in this country, because I suspect that there may be some of it and I don’t say that in any way to be offensive, but it may just be different. We’re trying to look at that to see what we can do, and trying to look on the engineering side. There are street walks that end in the middle of nowhere that don’t relate to crosswalks, so we’re trying to look at how you can correct that and then for those of you who drive, and I know that this is an issue, sometimes you pull up to the crosswalk and there’s a group of students standing there and you don’t know if they are going to cross or not come across and you’re not sure, so we’re trying to look at: is there a way, and we understand that there are on some campuses, that you come and stand on this pad and then this pad send lights up and you get so many seconds, you get 15 seconds and people cross. But it allows the flow of traffic a little better because it doesn’t just come on instantly and it’s a vehicle that we are trying to look at. I’d be happy to respond to questions. [7:42]
Thank you all for being here today.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Dr. Gogue. I have a few announcements and then we will move into action items. Just an update, several years ago we, as a Senate voted to become members of the Coalition on Collegiate Athletics and I attended the annual meeting for that about two weeks ago. It’s a very interesting group dealing with the interaction of academics and athletics and I think there’s a chance that in the next month or two we’ll have a document put forth from that group that you will be asked to either vote to endorse or not. I don’t have a copy of the final version yet, when I get it and they see that a majority of the members have approved allowing a vote on it then I’ll have it distributed to everybody. Provost Mazey and assistant VP for Facilities, Dan King will host and update and discussion concerning future academic facilities tomorrow afternoon at 3 p.m., this will be in the auditorium of the Library in room 1106. The forum is open to everyone and I encourage you to attend if you have the opportunity. The Forums I’ve been to so far have been really informative, very relaxed atmosphere, and lots of back and forth information.
This year’s call for professional improvement leave funding garnered nine candidates or nine applicants. They have been reviewed and four have been notified that they’re funded, I do not have the names, but I know that there are 4 people that have received professional improvement leave.
Earlier today you all received the announcement of a special called faculty meeting for next Tuesday at 3:00 in this room. I like you to try to attend if you can and also encourage your faculty to attend. We have a couple of items that are the purpose of the meeting. One is to vote on a resolution that will affect the start date of faculty officer terms, in effect moving the terms from the mid-semester to beginning on July1. We will have open discussion on this and then a vote because that does require a change in not the Senate Constitution but the Faculty Constitution. A quorum is whoever attends, there’s no minimum number of people, but I’d like as many people as possible to attend.
The other items that we’ll discuss deal with proposed policy changes. Most of you may have noticed the faculty mail that you received, I think about a week ago that we gave you a link to go online and comment on proposed changes to promotion and tenure, a number of kind of general changes in the Faculty Handbook and then a proposed draft policy on Conflict of Interest, that is significantly I think in large and different than what we have in the Faculty Handbook now. [11:20]
So the agenda that went out was linked to each of those suggested changes. In at least two of the cases you have the current policy next to the proposed policy. So I encourage you to look at those prior to attending that meeting. Any actual changes will come back to the Senate for discussion and a vote, this is just to try and get as many faculty members as possible engaged in the discussion.
Finally I’d like to announce the candidates for officers. For chair-elect the elections will take place the week prior to the March regular Faculty Meeting, so the candidates for chair-elect are Roy Hartfield from engineering and Ann Beth Presley from Human Sciences, secretary-elect, Robin Jaffe from liberal arts and Larry Crowley from engineering. The candidate statements that are put out each year will be published in the Auburn Report later this month and then again we will do online voting the week before the March General Faculty Meeting. Does anybody have any questions or comments on any of that?
If not we will move into the action items portion of the agenda and the first item on our list is a proposal to change the membership of the Senate Faculty Reseach Committee to include one member from each academic unit on campus. Dennis DeVries is going to present that information.
Dennis DeVries, secretary: Everybody should have had a link to this. This is a proposed change to the Senate Faculty Research Committee. This was a committee that was formed, approved by the Senate in November of ’08 and members of that committee were put in place and approved by the Senate in March of ’09. The development of that committee was, the attempt was made to keep that committee at a manageable or reasonable size and the decision was made at that point to have nine faculty representatives and they would rotate around the colleges and schools. Feedback from that committee in time since then was that they would prefer all schools and colleges be represented as well as some of the smaller colleges and schools wanted to be represented as well. So I bring this forward as an amendment to the constitution which will require a two-thirds majority vote. And it’s simply the changes that are described here are to change the membership instead of being nine faculty to be 12 faculty, one from every college and school. This comes from the Rules Committee so it does not require a second.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Is there any discussion on this proposal/resolution?
Bruce Smith, chair of the Faculty Research Committee: I would just ask you all to vote for this. This is something that has come from the committee’s discussions. The original intent I think was very good in terms of keeping the committee small, but this committee has become an informational committee and we share information between the Vice President for Research and the colleges and as a consequence those colleges that are not represented miss out on that informational timely information. It’s something that cant’ be…, It can be dealt with a little bit by people taking on the responsibility of a second college, but it would be a lot more efficient, I think we’d have a better discussion, and better dissemination of information if we did have members from all colleges present at those meetings. [15:11] And it’s not a situation that could be remedied by that college being represented next year as they rotate on, this is something that happens monthly. We meet monthly and that information is disseminated monthly and some colleges are being left out and not included in a timely fashion so I would simply urge all of you to vote for that and I’m happy to answer any questions if you might have any about how this impacts the committee.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Bruce. Any further discussion or questions? If not, all those in favor say aye.
Group: Aye.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: All opposed (pause) The motion passes.
The next item on the agenda is nomination for Rules Committee members and Dennis DeVries again will present this item.
Dennis DeVries, secretary: Al right, each year we have to fill 3 vacancies on the Rules Committee. Some of the rules that are associated with that; individuals that are nominated must be current members of the Senate. You do not have to be a member of the Senate during the entire two years that you’d serve on the Rules Committee, you simply have to be a member of the Senate now at the time when you’d be nominated. For those who are familiar or aren’t, the Rules Committee is probably one of the most important committees on campus, it’s affectionately called the Committee on Committees, it’s involved heavily in the spring with staffing all, providing nominees for the committees as well as a slate of nominees to you in the Senate for Senate Committees and today we are receiving nominations and the goal then is to get, nominations today, biographies for those who are nominated will be sent to everybody in the Senate, and then we will have an election next month at the March Senate meeting. The people that are elected to sever will begin two-year terms in August. And with that we will open the floor for nominations.
Andy Whorley, from the Library, senator: I nominate Andrew McClellon from the school of Accountancy to be on the Rules Committee.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: thank you, do I hear a second?
Someone: Second.
Constance Hendricks, senator from the School of Nursing: I nominate Eduardus Duin from the department of chemistry.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Do I hear a second?
Someone: Second.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Any other nominations? (pause) Okay we do need a third nominee and what I propose that we do if there is no one going to nominate from the floor we’ll approve these two nominees for voting for next month and then we’ll come back next month and ask for additional volunteers or nominees. We could postpone the voting until April and vote on a full slate if we get a third nominee. I would like to encourage you to think about it. The Rules Committee is a fair amount of work, but it’s a very, in an odd way I guess, rewarding work because you do actually have some input into how the committees function. It’s a very important role. So if we don’t have any other nominations from the floor right now I’d like to ask that you approve these two nominations by voice vote. All in favor?
Group: Aye.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Opposed? Okay that will be our two nominees for right now and we will be coming back to you, so be thinking about it. If you’re interested in the Rules Committee but you’re a little hesitant feel free to call anybody on the Rules Committee to ask questions. Our names are on the Web site the Senate Web site under Senate Committees. Thank you Dennis.
The next item on our agenda is endorsement of a retention statement from the Retention Committee and I’m calling on Jeffrey Fergus who is chair of that committee to come forward.
Jeffrey Fergus, chair of Retention Committee: good afternoon. I’m here on behalf of the Retention Committee, so first of all I just want to recognize the committee. It’s been a good committee to work with and I particularly want to note the two students. I’ve been on a number of committees and there’re often student representatives and they often don’t show up. Both Sarah and Lindsay showed up to every meeting and contributed quite a bit, so I’d really want to point that out. We have other people who have contributed in different ways, Drew Clark and Cara Mia Braswell in terms of some statistical data and also from the Education Support Services we’ve heard about a number of activities and also some of you may have received e-mails from me requesting information from colleges and I appreciate that as well.
So first of all, the importance of retention and really there are a lot of reasons but these are kind of two main ones; one is more philosophical and one is more practical. The philosophical is that we are a land grant university and we have an obligation to provide education to Alabamians who come with a wide variety of backgrounds and skills and we need to accomplish that. The other is more practical in these difficult economic times that it is a lot more efficient to when you accept a student to have the graduate and not have students come in and take up dorms rooms and classrooms and faculty time. So these are two of the main reasons, but there are of course a lot of reasons.
In terms of where we stand. This is where we stand in the southern regional education board schools. Two numbers that are often used to describe retention; one is freshmen retention which are those who matriculate and then are still at the university the following year as sophomores; and the second is the 6-year graduation rate and obviously those are that started and graduated in 6 years. [22:04] So this doesn’t take into account things like transfer students and so forth, it’s just that you have a cohort of students and see what they do.
In terms of freshmen retention you can see we’re at 85% which is a little bit below halfway down in terms of SRAB [22:22] tied with (Univ. of) Alabama in that respect. The third bullet indicates what are the top schools, Virginia, North Carolina, at the top, Florida, Georgia, Maryland also in the top 5. In terms of 6-year graduation rate we’re at 64%, which is also tied with Alabama and in a similar range in that ranking. And you can see it’s basically the same 5 schools that are at the top, jumbled around a little bit. The graph shows the historical data in terms of these two numbers. There is a general increasing trend, I guess we hope that the trend in 6-year graduations is real and the dip in the freshmen is an anomaly, but we’ll wait to see. So this just shows where we’re headed, obviously we want to see this get higher. I think the target is 85%, (asking of someone in the room) Is that what we’re setting for a target?, but anyway we certainly can do better than what we are.
So one of the things the committee wanted to do to try to help that is to develop a statement that could be used to demonstrate that the university does have commitment to retention. And this would be important for all of us to think about that in terms of faculty and retaining students is very important, also in terms of recruiting students and their parents that this is an institution that if they are admitted that they are very likely to finish. And so we think it is very important and we are hoping that this statement will help to promote that.
As we were developing this statement there were 3 things we wanted to include; one is that the retention is not at the expense of academic standards, rather that the efforts for retention should be to help students to attain those high standards. That’s the first principle. The second is as we talked it’s easy to get into kind of a blame game where faculty can blame students, students can blame faculty and the point we wanted to make is that it’s really everybody’s responsibility. Staff has responsibilities, faculty do and students do as well, and we wanted to include that in the statement. In supporting that we, again our student representatives took this statement and rearranged it into the form that they use and it’s passed the SGA Senate to support retention, so we thought that was important that it is university wide. And building on that that it requires administrative infrastructure to support those activities as well. [25:13] And those are really the 3 things we wanted to be sure to include in this statement. So the next 3 slides, the statement as you know has been posted, hopefully you’ve had a chance to look at it, as I’ve divided it up in the next 3 slides and the underlines are added to point out those principles you wanted to emphasize. Again this comes from the mission of the university to prepare Alabamians who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and some, may need more help than others and in the end they can still succeed. And again that the retention is to be more effective in use of our resources and that it is not at the expense of academic standards. This is to help students to reach those standards, to attain those standards. So that’s kind of the preamble and then again we wanted to emphasize this is a coordinated effort that requires contributions from faculty, staff, and students. Faculty to engage the students, to have the appropriate balance of encouragement and cajoling where that’s appropriate, staff there’s the education support programs which I’ll mention a little bit later to help these students as well, and students have to put forth the effort to meet the standards and take advantage of those support programs that are made available. So it really requires everybody’s contribution and communication and cooperation among those groups and support from the administration. So that’s kind of the overall, we want to set it out there to say this is what we see that retention is and what Auburn should be striving toward.
Finally I just have a few examples of what’s happening because it’s not that we don’t think there are efforts being underway, but we want to kind of focus those efforts. Almost a year ago tomorrow you heard a presentation from the Graduation Taskforce which is obviously very similar to retention and in that there were several recommendations which the committee’s been looking at over this past year and the result of that is that the retentions plan that’s, as I say, developing, because there is a plan that’s written down and it’s still being adjusted and improved and Nancy McDaniel is the one leading that, and I think she is here to answer specific questions, and some of the items that are in that; one is the Learning Communities which have grown significantly over the last several years and I have some data to show you that right now. It’s over 1,200 students, which is about a quarter of the freshmen that are involved in Learning Communities, which provides support and will help to retain students. Other is supplemental instruction to help particularly in some of the difficult classes to provide additional instruction, students helping other students to do better in those classes. The Common Book, which you are going to hear about later in the meeting so I won’t say much about that. We also looked at the some of the UNIV courses, which have been shown to improve the student engagement and improve retention. Some data here, the 2007 freshmen that were in UNIV courses, the retention rate was 90.5%, those that were not it was 87%, so that’s at least one data point that shows that there’s a positive impact.
Just as an example, the supplemental instruction is an example of how these efforts really require faculty, students, and staff, the programs themselves developed by the staff and educational support services, but faculty need to work with those students that run those programs and also encourage the students in their class to participate, and students need to take advantage of it. Again it’s an example where there are roles for everybody.
Just one data point here from the fall 2009, some professors provided their individual test scores of students in their class where there was supplemental instruction, and of those that used the SI programs their scores were 47% higher than those that did not. And actually this underestimates the effect because I would presume that a lot of those who did not probably didn’t need it and so that score is probably the differential in terms of the effect of the program is probably even greater than that. So this is one example of how these programs can help. And again, the students are still doing the work and passing the class and doing well on the exams, but they just need a little bit of help.
Another example of the importance of the student/faculty interaction, a recent survey, the National Survey of Student Engagement which is a, I forget how many questions–many, many questions on various student opinion and the one factor that correlated most strongly with retention was the relationship with faculty members. [30:38] These are the two endpoints, there was a range of response from 1–7 and the highest number, those that said the faculty were available, helpful and sympathetic, 98% were retained. Those that said they were not, only 83%, so again it shows the importance of that interaction. And also in terms of the Learning Communities the opportunity to interact with faculty is one of the top benefits of those communities.
Just to finish, this is a plot that shows the growth of Learning Communities at Auburn and you can see over these 5 years that it’s grown so now there’s 50 Learning Communities with over 1,200 students, that’s about a quarter of the population. Hopefully these efforts will increase those numbers that I showed in one of the earlier slides. So with that I’ll finish and answer any questions that you have. [31:46]
Werner Bergen, animal science, senator: I just have a comment. Lot of students, and this relates to the point on student engagement by the faculty, never ever should anybody that gets in front of a class say, “I’d rather be working on something else.” This happens especially in some of our basic sciences departments, is absolutely inexcusable. I have grants on my desk too and whatever, but this, a lot of students tell me this, so this may be something you ought to consider.
Mark Fischman, kinesiology, senator: Do you know if there’s a difference in the 6-year graduation rate between students who come in as freshmen verses the transfers from 2 year schools? [32:46]
Jeffrey Fergus, chair of Retention Committee: I don’t believe, Lisa ? didn’t have the transfer students, but Drew (Clark) would know.
Drew Clark, director of institutional research and assessment and not a senator: the 6-year graduation rate by definition is calculated only for students who begin as first time full-time freshmen at this institution. So no such rate is computed for transfer students at all. That’s the direct answer to Mark’s question. While I’ve got the mic, if I could add a couple of points to what you’ve said. The 85% figure you showed for proportion of students who come back for their second fall represents a blended average of 3 years. Our most recent figure was actually 82 and that’s in a year when the average ACT score went up by a full point. To illustrate that the fall of 2007, ACT score was about a 29, fall of 2008 25.9, retention went down. All of the loss of students occurred in our out-of-state student population, so we need to be realistic that not only as an efficiency measure as part of our mission, but as a revenue measure for the standard of living for which we would like to aspire as an institution. When we depend on out-of-state students for that revenue we have to recognize that they have alternatives in their home states. Just to illustrate we had 11 freshmen from fall 2008 cohort who began their college careers here as first time full-time freshmen and in fall ’09 were enrolled at Kennesaw State, north of Atlanta. We mapped the home addresses for those 11 students and they are tightly clustered around the zip code for Kennesaw State. I think it’s an important part of thinking about retention that we realize because of our very strong investment in out-of-state students we are likely to have more retention challenges than the typical university. That’s the next point. Let me put one other thing forward to you, Jeff has mentioned retention to the second year and the 6-year graduation rate, let me talk for a minute about our 4-year graduation rate. Now Auburn University has a school of Architecture and we have a number of academic programs that are very popular with our students that are tough to finish in 4 years. So putting that into the equation means that other things being equal the 4-year rate is probably going to be a little lower than the 4-year rate at, pick a school, Alabama for example. Than said our 4-year rate is about 10 clicks behind Clemson’s and probably is one that we could address, I’m not a senator I won’t vote on this, but certainly it’s an important issue whether or not the group votes in favor of it. Thanks. [36:11]
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Okay if there are no further comments, what we’re doing is voting to endorse the statement on retention that the committee generated that was the 3 slides that he had. This is coming from a Senate committee so it does not require a second, so at this time I’d like to ask, all those in favor of endorsing this statement say aye.
Group: Aye.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: All opposed? (pause) The motion passes. Thank you Jeff.
That completes the action item portion of our agenda, we are going to move now to information items and the first two items are linked, although they will be presented by two separate people; the first is a report on the 2009 Administrator Evaluation Survey and that presentation is going to be made by Michael Baginski who was the chair during 2009 for the Administrator Evaluation Committee.
Michael Baginski: Hello. [37:17] First the members of the committee I’ll give you. There will be a link on the Senate page if you cannot read this in the back, there will be a link to it; Ellen Abell, Ulrich Albrecht, myself, Terry Byrd, William Davis, Robin Fellers, Valerie Mornes-Riggins, David Robinson, and Maria Fulmar. I would especially like to thank Maria because she was not a member of the committee and she spent a lot of time helping us. I don’t know if she’s here today, but she really went out of her way to help. The other special thanks would be to Collin Stevens, he’s a graduate student who had no dog in this fight and he spent some time helping me organize data. He didn’t get paid for it either, and he’s not my grad student.
This is what I was charged with by Bob Locy. Can you read this all right? The University Senate Administrator Evaluation tool is being used in an effort to improve the quality of leadership and direction of Auburn University by providing a standard and anonymous method for obtaining direct ratings that are frank. Now I want to say one thing about this. Everybody that did surveys told me in the very beginning to get more than 25% was going to be difficult, 35% was really going to be tough and it’s based primarily on their experience. So we went out of our way to try to make sure we did everything we could to get a high response rate. And a lot of people, I recognize several, but I’m not sure they’d want me to, people took the time to go individually to their departments and encourage people to respond because there was a promise made by me and several others that something would be done with these. This was not something that was just done for the sake of doing.
These are the things that are listed, there’s a long list of things that were pointed out to me of concerns, suspicions about confidentiality of the survey. I can assure you I’m the only person that had access to that material. It was done on a tool that we just decided on, we will get to that later. Unresponsiveness of previous administrations, possible retaliation from deans, the list goes on, or department heads, survey complexity and length, comments were communicated to me primarily by e-mail or phone, usually the phone. And nobody seemed to be shy about contacting me at any time. I’m not kidding about this either, if you ever do this you’ll see what I mean. [40:57]
All right we chose Survey Monkey based on a lot of discussion and because it was something that was not on the university, and so it was separated. And really as far as I know until Ulrich took over, there was no way for anybody to get at this data, so I was the one and only person that could get at the data and I had all the raw data and I was responsible for doing everything with that data. I’ll say more on that later. Anyway each survey, this is what we concluded. We had ten quick hitters, radio button questions. This is what it boiled down to, limit the survey length and just hit the high points. It was 4 (10) radio button questions you simply had to make a decision and you didn’t have to do any one of these, you could skip any question, didn’t count against you, you could move on. So there were 10 quick questions, 4 essays if you wanted to take the time. Now all these things are listed and very similar to what Ulrich is about to present after I’m done, similar to his, but the one thing I will say is that they weren’t decided on just by me, a lot of thought went into this. We ran it by Provost Mazey and we talked to a bunch of people about this it was not something we took lightly and there were a lot of people that in the comment section spent a lot of time doing it and I appreciate that. I didn’t read them all, I can tell you that probably made a significant difference in some way. Our overall response rate was 34% and I can only blame myself for that being so low because I didn’t take the time to ask people in individual colleges even though I tried to go about and rattle everybody and do it. Now I will say one thing, there is at least one individual here who did take the time to ask and his college was very responsive, you will see what I mean in a minute. There were 4 e-mail reminders, and by the way there was an increase from 24% the last time this was done to 34%, so that’s 10 points but that should be at least 60 or 70 because this is important, Provost Mazey uses this stuff. As far as the response rate of the colleges [43:39] you can figure out, (can you see this in the back? Discussing problem with display) This is overall about 34%, 33.85%. Vet med was 38%, Pharmacy was 46.9% about 47%, Nursing was 25%. Library was about 34% almost 35, Liberal Arts was 25.57%, Human Sciences 39%, Engineering 34% and I’m responsible for that being so low, Education 47.25%, COSAM 35%, and Business was 55.7% you can figure out who did the petitioning, in what colleges at least, Architecture was 24.56%, and Agriculture 26.71%. (I apologize for that I’ll try to go swiftly.)
The number 10 question was the most important one by far, “With the department head or chair to what extent are you satisfied with the department head/chairs overall effectiveness?” and the dean had a similar question on ten. And this is exactly how we get rated if you’re faculty members, at least in the old survey. The Dean, “To what extent are you satisfied with the Dean/Associate Dean’s overall effectiveness?” Now that was important because that really sort of tells it all right there. How good is the person doing the job? Now the Deans and unfortunately I should have used white and I didn’t (referring to slide), very satisfied 35%, and satisfied 25% for deans; that’s 60% you are either satisfied or very satisfied. The rest in here, there’s 15% that are very unsatisfied, 11% unsatisfied, and 14% neutral, but that’s saying a majority of the deans are doing a good job. For Department heads it’s even better, you get very satisfied at 47%, satisfied at 19%, so I’d say most department heads on average, obviously the individuals I cannot talk about or colleges but I can tell you overall we’ve got good people. Overall, and I know I’ll get arguments about this and please when you do ask questions, don’t ask any details, specific details to me because I won’t answer. Now I’ll take questions. That’s it, that’s about a summary, anything you want to talk about you will have to speak with the Provost. Any questions at all? No questions? I didn’t see that coming.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thanks Mike. Okay I’ll now call Ulrich Albrecht he’s the chair for 2010 Administrator Evaluation Committee and he’s going to give an overview of the committee survey he is sending out this week.
Ulrich Albrecht, chair for 2010 Administrator Evaluation Committee: [47:44] First of all what I want to say is the Committee this year very much benefited from all the hard work Mike did last year. It made things very easy for us. What we basically were able to do was to build on his questionnaires for the deans and department head surveys and working with the Provost and the Steering Committee after we had discussed the initial version came up with final questionnaire which also has 10 questions and 4 essay questions on it and we decided to trim down the number of people of people who would be reviewed to about 25–26 in order to hopefully increase participation by not having too many questions. Where people appeared like last year in a list it is not exactly random but what the data was I took an administrative shot of the university and then in some way from the top to the bottom took a shot, and the way that the people show up basically has no real system behind it except for [48:52] what the university charted somewhere on the Web page. We will start this week as Drew said and it runs until May 12 (March 12) and I would like Drew to send out a reminder every week again, like last time I sent out every 4 weeks a reminder e-mail so hopefully we are going to get participation at the same rate or better than we had last time. We will go over the questions, hopefully they can be seen, but of course you will get the e-mail this week. We discussed in the committee and we try to basically keep questions along the spirit that was developed for the Deans and Department Heads survey to get a feeling how the administrator evaluated [49:43] is actually doing the… having permission of the university, this is our second set of questions and that’s basically all I have to say and I want to ask to encourage all members of your departments to participate in the survey, since more people take part the more weight and more data we will have. Any questions? Thank you very much.
Kathryn Flynn, chair: I’d like to thank both Mike and Ulrich. Doing this survey is truly a lot of work and I think it is valuable and I do encourage you to…I’d like to clarify, you said the end date is May? It’s March 12. So you will have right at a month to do this.
Now at this time I’d like to call Patricia Duffy forward. She’s assistant provost for undergraduate studies concerning recommendations regarding final exams. [50:50]
Patricia Duffy, assistant provost for undergraduate studies: I’m here to talk about final exams and there are some questions that arise every year and there are some policy issues that maybe the Senate would like to address with respect to finals. Background for this is every semester there are questions from faculty and students about final exams. The questions may go to department heads, very often to associate deans, and every once in a while they are kicked up to the undergraduate studies office if it’s a complicated question or someone just calls us directly. The questions generally tended to cover the same issues so last fall as they started coming in I started writing them down, and then after I wrote them down I brought them to the Academic Affairs Committee, this is an administrative committee which is composed primarily of the associate deans for education in the colleges and some other folks who are related to those functions, and we discussed it in Academic Affairs.
So here are some items to address. The first one is: Students that have more than 2 finals exams on the same calendar day. And this is actually a policy issue, and I’ll explain why this is a policy issue in a minute.
The other one is faculty, scheduling exams late in the term. I’m handing around a handout that Kathryn Flynn and Dennis are handing around. This will explain why we need some clarification. On it there is some language that actually doesn’t conflict, but appears to conflict. It just needs a little bit of clarification.
And then, final exam requirements in undergraduate classes. There needs to be [52:47] some clarification of the existent policy and possibly some modification of the existing policy if the Senate would like to change it. The first one is the more than 2 final exams on one day. I’ve been here since 1985 and since 1985 we have not made the students take more than 2 exams on one day, however when I got into the office of undergraduate studies I was surprised to find that I couldn’t find this in the Bulletin, I could not find this in the Tiger Cub, I could not find this anywhere except on the Parent’s Page, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. So it’s actually a practice, but it’s not really a policy because the Senate has never endorsed it as far as I know. Maybe they did before 1985 and it was lost in historical records and never got written down somewhere, but as far as I know this has never come to the Senate for a vote. So a Senate vote is needed for this practice to become official policy. And why do we want to do that?
Published only on the Parent’s Association Page and if you folks are reading the Parent’s Association Page they will find that students [53:56] don’t have to take more than 2 finals on one day. When you consider that the finals are 2.5 hours long and if someone took 3 finals on one day they would be writing for 7.5 hours which is a sure recipe for at least hand cramps and at worst possibly the start of carpel tunnel syndrome. It might be good to make sure that they don’t have to do that.
But some advantages of making this practice official policy [54:16] is, we could publish it. We could put it in the Tiger Cub and we could post it on the exam schedule or make it know somehow. Students and faculty all would then be aware of the policy rather than some of them knowing about it and some of them not knowing about it, which is what it is when it is a practice. Also this is important, deadlines could be established. [54:35] I actually got a phone call on the Thursday of final exam week about a student who just realized that he or she, I won’t even give away the gender, had 3 finals on one day the next week and could that student still move the exam. And that’s a little late to be thinking about moving a final, but fortunately the student had a very accommodating faculty member who was willing to move one of the exams and said he/she could take it later, so that student was very fortunate, but if we have an official policy we can also have deadlines and let students know that they have to get the request in by a certain date. And the deadline could be established by the Calendar Committee, when they do the calendar for the semester. I just picked a day, the 65th class day or whatever the Calendar Committee deems as appropriate, late enough in the semester that students would be thinking about finals, but early enough that it would not come as a major surprise to an instructor who finds out that a student who has a final at 2 o’clock is requesting to move it to another day.
We could also put a form in Tigeri that would be easy for the students to access that would include that deadline. And it would be a standardized form and then we could hopefully, I don’t think we could ever eliminate the late in term request, but we might be able to reduce them substantially.
How does it work now if a student wants to reschedule a final because they have 3 in one day? [55:56] How it normally works is a student negotiates with the most amiable, in their opinion, faculty member and that faculty member says, “Okay, you can take it another time.” – no problem. The problem comes in if no instructor is willing to move the final voluntarily. Then it gets kicked to the academic dean of the student, who then works with the 3 faculty members involved to try to get one to move the final, so that the student doesn’t have to have 3 in one day. This is the informal priority system that’s being used now. The priority, keep the original time slot that goes to the class with the most credit hours. So if it’s a 4 or 5 or 6 hour class that would be beat a 3 hour class, a 2 hour class and so on. If they are equal the class at the lowest level, which may seem counter intuitive would get the priority, and that’s because in these core courses the faculty usually don’t know the students they are not in the majors, it’s a little bit harder for them to reschedule, they may have a lot more students, so the lowest one now has priority. Then if both the credit hours and the level are equal, you have two 2000 level classes, 3 hours each, it’s the class with the most students. If all else equal, believe me there will be one case where it is, the class (final) that is earlier in the day will take priority and the evening final would be rescheduled. So that’s informal, it doesn’t need to be this way. Any policy would work, any system of priorities that covers all cases should be acceptable as long as it’s know by the faculty and the associate deans and the students would find out when the see the associate deans. It doesn’t matter what it is, anything. So the Senate could establish a priority system if they don’t like the one that’s being used now, anything would work. Students would still be able to negotiate directly with the faculty member of their choice if that faculty member is amenable the associate deans do not need to get involved in looking at these priorities. However the policy would cover the situation where no one is willing to reschedule. It doesn’t happen all that often but it happens enough that the cases come to the associate deans.
Next issue is really a clarification rather than a policy issue. Scheduling exams late in the term. There’s language in the Handbook, that I’ve handed out at the top there, which appears to conflict with language in the preface in the final exam schedule. In the Handbook it says that “a faculty member is encouraged to refrain from giving announced tests on the last three days prior to the first day of final exams,” but then in the Preface to the final exam schedule it says, “Final exams in lab classes will be administered during the last lab period. Final examinations in other subjects with fewer than 3 hours credit may be administered on the last lecture day.” So that seems to conflict, but it’s really not a conflict what it is, is missing words. So with a few inserted words it could be clear what sort of exams are being talked about in each case.
So ordinary semester exams should not be given on the last few days including reading days before finals, so it’s ordinary semester exams, not little quizzes–2 point quizzes, and not a final in a 2-hour class, that’s not what’s being talked about. Final exams are perfectly OK, in fact, encouraged in another place on the last class day for courses with fewer than 3 credit hours, so it’s just a question on clarifying what sort of exam we are talking about.
Rescheduled exams, a make-up exam or rescheduled final are also okay on these days under some circumstances. And of course we do not want open season on everyone saying all my make-ups for all semester are going to be on the reading day because that violates another part of the policy which says, you are supposed to give a rescheduled exam within two-weeks if at all possible. So if you’ve got a student who missed a late in the term semester exam, it was given maybe 5 days before the last day of class, that student is sick for several days, the one good day that they have to do a make-up exam, that one individual student not your whole class, is the reading day it’s perfectly okay to give that rescheduled exam that day if both the student and the faculty member are agreeable, that’s not against policy. [1:00:06] And also if you have final and it must be moved and the only time to move it conveniently is the reading day that’s also okay.
So I wrote up something here, which probably could be much better written by someone else, but just a notion here I did some possible new language just to clarify that it’s in the Handbook. What type of exams do we mean can’t be given on the last three days, what sort of exams can be given. This would provide faculty with clear guidelines on exams during the last class days and the reading day. It would give us really good directions so the faculty members won’t be confused by what they can and can’t do.
We have one issue that has come up because the Handbook language hasn’t been revised since we switched to semesters. This is the last handout and it’s about the requirement to give finals. The language in the Handbook requires faculty to give exams in undergraduate classes unless there is permission from the department head or chair to exempt, and as reporting line from the department to the associate dean to the Provost. So it’s the department head that gives permission, but then it’s reported up the line. So with this there’re a couple of issues that arise. The first one is reporting, there’s a clarification needed. Because the associate deans handle final exam conflicts, they need to know every semester whether or not a final is given not just once and forever because different people may teach the class, the instructor may decide to give a final this term so we need to know every term whether or not there’s going to be a final, because if a student goes and says, “I have 3 finals in one day.” And they look at the final exam schedule it may not be full information if one of those classes is not giving a final and the department has given that permission not to have a final.
So there’s also a policy question; should language about notifying the Provost office be removed and have it just rest with the associate deans? Because they are the ones who handle the conflicts directly, so notification may not need to be given to the Provost’s Office. That’s a policy issue. Clarification is just putting in every semester, that would be helpful.
Now the outdated Handbook language, the Handbook exempts 600 level classes from needing departmental permission to exempt the final. It’s still in the Handbook as of yesterday. Auburn has not had 600 level classes since the semester conversion in 2000, so that needs to be changed. However it’s not simply a question of saying 600 to 6000 because most of those old 600 level classes are now 5000/6000 piggybacks. We don’t really have those old 600 classes anymore. The one I used to teach was a 600 is now a 5000/6000 piggyback. So that gets us to the question that needs clarification and possible policy action. Should approval to exempt class from a final rest with the instructor or department head for the 5000 part of a piggyback? If no approval is needed for this 6000 level class do we want to require approval for the 5000 level class, that’s a policy question. Might seem reasonable if the instructor has complete autonomy and this one part of the class that’s a piggyback that they would have autonomy and the other level and just report it. But that’s a question that the Senate could address.
That’s what I’ve got as information items and I guess there’s no voting today. I’d be glad to have any questions or comments.
David King, senator from Geology and Geography: In the existing language and in your possible language there are many sentences that have should be, could be, strongly encouraged, but when it comes to labs it says “they will be given” and the departments that have lab classes really need some flexibility there. I don’t think there is a lot of abuse going on there but I think we’d feel more comfortable if that could be changed to a, could be or should be or an advisory type statement rather than will be. I’m sure we would appreciate that.
Patricia Duffy: So give the labs the same flexibility that other classes that don’t have 3 hours?
David King, senator from Geology and Geography: Well, take for example a situation where there’s a series of labs through the day and you give the same test at 8 o’clock and then the 9 o’clock kids are going find out and the 10 o’clock will know more, so other arrangements need to be made sometimes to from a security point of view.
Patricia Duffy: That’s a good point.
David King, senator from Geology and Geography: So just take out the will be and I think that would take care of it.
Patricia Duffy: Maybe.
Tony Moss, biological sciences, senator: I got a range of responses from my faculty on this, some who felt that there should not even be a 3 exam rule, but they seemed to be in the minority, to those people who felt that this really was not an issue. We’ve been doing it for a long time, why even worry about codifying it. There was one person who came up with a number of suggestions and dealt with the issue of laboratories and in his particular lab he like to finish his laboratory exam one week before the end of the course. And so by stating that they will be given on the last day it was too inflexible for him. The reason he like to do that is not to get the job over and done with so he has an early exit from the course but instead so he can discuss the material with the students before the final exam for the overall course appears. That same person had a number of suggestions.
[1:06:05] Patricia Duffy: Could I address this one first? (Yes, from Tony Moss) Just so you’ll know, I didn’t write these two things, these are not recommendations these are current policies, the two things at the top, that’s not a recommendation from me. This is language that currently exists. One comes from the preface to the final exam schedule and one’s in the Handbook.
Tony Moss, biological sciences, senator: Some suggestions he had…he felt that it was actually even though in a practical sense there is a negotiation process that takes place between students and faculty for arranging the exams he felt that it was probably not a good idea to codify a negotiation process because some students may be able to negotiate something more effectively, some faculty may be more willing to move than others and he suggested that if you are going to do it, mandate it, instead of having a complex process such as is suggested there is perhaps already written down, he suggests that since practically you couldn’t possibly get more than 3 exams in during a day, that’s really the number that we are talking about, so what he suggests is that when this policy goes into effect that the schedule be rescheduled would be determined by whether it is the first, second or third final of the day period and that way then it will rotate with successive years so the exam that will be moved in the first year might be the first and the second year would be the second and the third year be the third. And the reason for doing this is to attempt to try to take bias out of process entirely. This way by just taking sort of the faculty and human equation out of it, it just makes it work automatically and people have to go along with that rule.
Patricia Duffy: Just as a point, any process that’s acceptable to the Senate, any priority system as long as its well known and acceptable to the body of the Senate is fine, as long as we have one.
Tony Moss: I just wanted to get his idea out there in front of the Senate. I’ve covered the other ones the ones that either don’t want to see it at all or…
Patricia Duffy: Thank you.
Bob Locy, immediate past chair of the Senate: On you piece of paper and your presentation it said Handbook, I assume that’s the Faculty Handbook?
Patricia Duffy: That’s the Faculty Handbook.
Bob Locy, immediate past chair of the Senate: Okay. I know that there’s a policy in the Tiger Cub concerning final exam scheduling and such. It’s presented to the students as part of the Tiger Cub and I know that at least some of the language that we’re discussing here is not in that policy, although I have to say I haven’t read it recently enough to have looked at the exact language that’s there, but I believe it would be very important in putting defined language of any type in the Faculty Handbook concerning a policy that change be made in the Tiger Cub to be completely consistent so that all parties reading it are reading a consistent version.
Patricia Duffy: I absolutely agree. I think that one of the benefits of having the practice policy is that it could be published everywhere.
Bob Locy, immediate past chair of the Senate: There are a number of other sort of specific changes, some of which have all ready been referred to and I’ll privately give those to you rather than doing it publically here, but I think that something like this is needed, but I’m concerned that it’s really hard to write a specific policy that’s general enough to cover all of the exceptions and I wonder whether there isn’t some mechanism to turn the exceptions over to, for example, the Curriculum Committee, to review someone who wants to systematically routinely do something different with reference to how the final exam is given so that as courses are approved by the Curriculum Committee that becomes a point that the Curriculum Committee examines as to whether it fits the curriculum change and whether that’s a useful recommendation.
Patricia Duffy: Currently if there’s a faculty member that wants to do something different with the final such as move it to a different time or have all of the finals at one time for the labs, there’s a process to get approval form the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies. So we do have a process for that right now. That is I think in the preface to the final exams, but it may be in the Handbook, I’d have to look. There is a way to do that right now, it could certainly be somebody else that makes that decision, but right now we do have a process for a faculty member who wants to do something for a whole class.
The questions that come up usually involve individual students; make up tests, final exams.
Guy Rohrbaugh, senator from philosophy: All this seems very sensible, but the one that does seem non-obvious is the policy on the 3 exams in one day. I guess I’m surprised to find out that there’s such a rule anywhere. I guess off the cuff it seems sort of unwise to make that official policy. I’m sure I would bend over backwards, I’d be happy to move exams, but if 3 people really don’t want to move exams, I’m a little shocked to think that someone would be forced to. Making this policy just strikes me as a little unwise, maybe I’m hard-hearted, but this seems like the sort of thing that’s best left at the level of informal goodwill and not at the end of the day like “Oh no it’s a rule,” someone’s got to move it.
Patricia Duffy: We could certainly do a review of other universities but I did check a number of them, it’s been a while back last winter, December, I did check a number of them and I did find this published right on their Web pages or in their student information, so apparently this is something that a lot of universities do. I know even when I was an undergraduate, which was a long time ago, at my undergraduate school you did not have to take 3 finals in one day. And that was known, it was not a mystery, you could if you wanted to, but you didn’t have to.
Tony Moss, biological sciences, senator: Just a brief comment. One of the points that one of the non-supporters of this idea indicated was that it is perhaps unfair and unrealistic to try to suggest to our student that we live in a fair environment. (laughter) Well, you know, so I’ll just let it hang like that.
Patricia Duffy: Thank you. Well I’m not going to argue with that, but I always hope that we can strive for a little better. [1:13:30]
Kathryn Flynn, chair: The last item on our agenda today is information on a new activity called Auburn Connects. It’s based on Three Cups of Tea and Constance Rehihan who chairs the Auburn Connects Common Book program and who’s a senior associate dean for academic affairs in Liberal Arts is going to present that.
Constance Rehihan, chair of the Auburn Connects the Common Book program: I am going to abbreviate my presentation because we’ve already heard about retention and this program which we’re calling Auburn Connects the Common Book program comes out of all of this emphasis on student retention. A common book program is pretty common at a number of universities both large and small. It’s a program that takes various forms. It says it all of its incoming first year students are either encouraged or required depending upon the institution to read a single book. There are discussion groups, events, before classes begin, curricular and co-curricular events that may be continued throughout the fall semester, sometimes the entire year. Often the book’s incorporated into a range of classes. Often the author or someone connected with the book is brought to campus to speak. If you want more information, again there’s a link to this. Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota collects the books that are being used by about 150 schools each year so if you want to go out and see what other schools are doing and what books they are using and there are links from her page to more information about these book programs generally the link will be from the Senate. We’ve already talked about why. I was on the approved Graduation Rate Taskforce, we need to get our graduation rate up. We know that the more we can connect our students with faculty during that first year and in particular during that first semester the greater the chance we have of their persistence and eventual graduation. So this comes out of that impulse.
The enrollment management council, which is chaired by the Provost, is the unit that asks me to take this on in the fall. So we’ve been working on it, we have a committee that is working on it with a goal of increasing student retention as well as other things. It’s a large committee and I want to emphasize this for this group because I want everyone to feel you are somehow represented. Nancy McDaniel and Ainsley Carry are essentially co-chairing it with me, Ainsley in particular because we are going to be having a convocation for freshmen students the day before classes begin, at which the themes of the book will be introduced. But we’ve got a faculty member from each college, either a faculty member or the associate academic dean, we’ve got faculty Senate, we’ve got SGA, the Honors college, the multicultural center, OCM, various student groups, the parent’s association, the bookstore, the Writing Program, the Muslim’s student association was added recently. Others are being consulted on an Ad Hoc basis, but again it’s on the faculty Web site. This is a list of everyone who is currently on the large committee to date. This is a large group and a fun one. I was told during the fall that this was the fun committee to be on. So next time you’re asked say yes.
We have split out the work into a number of small groups working on promotion, working on faculty development, on co-curricular and welcome week activities, on convocation, on outreach and service learning, and finally we will be working on assessment of the program as it goes along.
The committee initially met to talk about book selections. The process was going to be that this committee of one faculty member from each unit plus some was going to recommend books to the Provost, 3 books, and she was going to choose. And here you see the goals that we set for ourselves as our discussion evolved. We wanted to promote intellectual community on campus in order to aid retention. We wanted to help students gain a global broad perspective, this is in keeping with our goals of our strategic plan, we wanted to promote a culture of service, we wanted to emphasize individual empowerment, the need for hard work, somehow motivate students to think about the kind of difficult intellectual activity that they would have to do in order to succeed on campus whether it’s dealing with 3 exams on one day or what ever the issue might be. And we wanted our choice to be something that would have broad appeal and could be linked to a wide range of programming, wide range of courses.
We are directing this primarily at incoming students, but since what we are going to have is a range of activities the author coming various service projects, various other lectures, activities on campus, it seems to me that the more classes and the more disciplines that can link into this somehow the better the program is going to be the more enriched your students academic experience is going to be.
In short for the goals of our program we want the program to be Auburn Connects to our potential, to our community, and to our world. Those are the 3 big things that we think we should be encouraging our students to do through this program. We recommended 3 books to the provost and she chose, Gregg Mortenson’s, David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea: one man’s mission to promote peace one school at a time, which is about if you don’t know the book Mortenson’s decision to start building schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan primarily for girls. Stared in the 1990s, he’s now got the Central Asia Institute, which is continuing to build schools, he just released a new book, Stones into Schools about his continuing work.
Just learned today that we do have the money secured to bring him to campus and Ainsley Carry and student affairs is working on getting him here we hope in October. So that is the book that we are going to be working on and it’s the book that I would encourage you to consider finding a way to use it, if you can, if it’s appropriate in your classes. Right now we know that it’s going to be encouraged for adoption in English 1100, so that’s one place where a lot of students will come into contact with the book. It’s going to be used in all the learning communities in the UNIV 1000, 1050 courses. We know that there are other units that are adopting it in broader or smaller ways. We’re working on publicizing the program that we have a Web site that just went live and it’s beautiful, and I have no role in having created, so it really works. We are going to get information out to incoming students and their parents. The idea is that students will learn about this when they come to Camp War Eagle and that we will be encouraging them to read it during the summer, knowing perhaps that it’s going to be required of them in some of their courses. We’re hoping to have other incentives like perhaps an essay contest that might encourage them to get on board before they come to campus, but then we will have a series of events that will link in with that as well. Mortenson will visit, we’ll have discussion groups during welcome week to help students connect with discussion leaders to be determined at a later date, service projects perhaps counselor visits, other lecturers coming. Really the programming that can be related to this is limited only by the imaginations of the faculty who are here and can see the connections between whatever they are doing.
I talked to various groups about this and every time I do somebody says, “I know what I need, I can link this to…x or y” and I do Shakespeare, this is kind of far a field for me, I am in no position to recommend programming to anybody, but I’m amazed at the breath of possibilities that are coming forward. [1:23:35]
How can you participate? Because I know you all want to. We are starting out next week on the 18th from 9–11:30 a.m., there will be an announcement about this in the AU Daily tomorrow. With a faculty development workshop for anyone who wants to think seriously about participating in the project by including either this book in their course or somehow participating in the discussion with their students next fall. So we will have at that workshop, copies of the book for those of you who might like to know about the book before you actually order it for your fall classes. I would encourage you to think about attending that workshop and encouraging others to attend that as well, especially if you teach lower division students. But as I say, we’re going to have lectures, we’re going to have events, there’s no reason why you should shut your upper division students out of potentially enriching activities. You can also think about planning an event yourself that builds off of this. We are going to have a call that will come out sometime soon for possible programming, possibilities we do have some seed money that we can match with other funds that you might have. I you have a particular lecturer in agronomy or aerospace or whatever that you see as being connected to this book in some way, not just because say it’s a speaker who deals with Afghanistan and Pakistan, but this is also a book about cross-cultural communication, it’s a book about being passionate about achieving something and working hard to get it, it’s about education, it’s about educating women, there are a lot of ways that you might link into this. It’s about philanthropy, it’s about building an organization, it’s about a lot of things, so please let me know if you are thinking about potentially planning something that would link in.
That is my last slide, I’m happy to answer questions about this. I’ve got to say this one little plug here, I have a vision for this whole program, and this is where I get kind of sappy, but you know when it’s football time everybody is some how involved in football on this campus whether you are teaching the players or going to the games, or tailgating in your front yard or complaining about the traffic, or waiting for kick-off so you can go get the milk because you know things will be calm. We are all involved in football somehow on this campus and I would love to think that 5, 10 years down the road we are all involve in Auburn Connects in creating this kind of intellectual topic whether we are teaching the book, complaining about what a stupid choice this year’s book was, going to events, asking our students if they went to something, but that’s my idealistic vision, and I invite you to come along on this adventure. Any questions about this?
Kathryn Flynn, chair: Thank you Constance. I recently purchased and read the book and I have to say it’s a fascinating read so I encourage you to take the time to read it. It’s very interesting and found that even in Forestry and Wildlife we could work it into some of our classes.
With that it completes the formal part of our agenda. I’d like to ask if anybody has any unfinished business? Any new business? If not we’re adjourned. [1:27:47]