Transcript Senate Meeting
March 4, 2014

Larry Crowley, chair:  Come to order please. Welcome to the March meeting of the Auburn University Senate. I am Larry Crowley the chair of the Senate.

A short review of the rules of the Senate, senators or substitute senators please sign the roll in the back, and get a clicker,  we are going to be voting 3 times this afternoon.

If you’d like to speak on an issue go to the microphone and when recognized state your name indicate if you are a senator and state what unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first, after all the comments by senators on an issue are made, guests are welcome to speak as well.  [1:28] There are currently 88 members of the Senate a quorum requires 45 members. So if you would pick up your clicker and register that you are here we will do the count. Make sure it turns on, the blue light comes on and you just hit A to register your presence. We have a quorum (63).

The first order of business is the approval of the minutes of the minutes for the February 4, 2014 Senate meeting. The have been posted online are there corrections to those that are posted? If there are no corrections the minutes stand approved.

I’d like to call on Dr. Gogue to come and make remarks from the Office of the President. [1:19]

Dr. Gogue, President:  Thank you Larry. I appreciate all of you being here today. Yesterday we spent about 2 hours going over the strategic plan, sort of the 6-month point within the first year. I would say it was my first chance to really see the work that had been done through a variety of groups throughout this campus. Most impressive in terms of where we are  and certainly in the first 6-months of the plan.

Second thing I wanted to mention is you should have in the last week or so received something from the State of Alabama about a statement of economic interest. Just remember that’s due April 30 to return that document to them. [2:05]

Third thing I want to mention is sort of an update on the Legislature. I talked with Sherry Fulford today and sort of have the most current information. This is the twentieth day of the Legislative Session of a 30 day session, they plan to adjourn on April 7. As is normally the case they take up most things in the last few days, but the educational trust budget where we receive our money, it has passed the Senate at a 5.9 billion dollar range total. It will be taken up on the House floor next week. Obviously it will come down to the first part of April before it’s all approved but at this point our expectations are in the 4 lines that Auburn receives. Remember we receive a line for the university here, we receive one for AUM, one for the Experiment Station, and one for the Cooperative Extension Service. All those lines from what we know at this point will be level funding or slight increases in the O&M, so we don’t anticipate any cuts within the budget.

You will see in the paper over the next few weeks lots of discussion about the general fund budget. That has passed the House at about 1.8 billion dollars, there will be lots of discussion and lots of articles written about road blocks and difficulties on the general budget. It will be over corrections and Medicare, that’s not a part of the budget lines that we deal with, but you will see that in the paper. [3:43]

The age of majority that I think a number of you have worked on for several years trying to get it through, that allows a student to participate in research on campus before they are of the age 19. The House Bill was introduced by Mark Tuggle, Alexander City, and it is expected to receive favorable report out of Senate Judiciary tomorrow, would be considered on the Senate floor within the next week or 10 days for final passage. They feel optimistic about that particular bill.

The reciprocity bill is one in which it allows the state of Alabama, the institutions, to participate in regional distance education agreements among the 12 or 15 SREB States, Drew? What is it? How many states? (pause) In the Southeastern States, all of them have passed this Bill except Alabama, so we are hopeful this year that we get that passed. The report is they expect favorable support on it.

There is also a Bill that has been introduced by representative Gaston called the competitive Bill. This Bill raises the limit on using State bids from $7,500 to $15,000, so a little bit of flexibility assuming that passes.

In general things are about where you would expect them in the middle of the session. I’d be happy to respond to questions.

Larry Crowley, chair: The Provost has indicated that he doesn’t have remarks to give as those were covered in the President’s remarks.

I have a few things to talk about here in terms of Senate Officer elections. The AU Report, tomorrow, is going to announce the nominees from the committee that we appointed to come up with Senate officers for the coming term. The chair-elect position, we have 2 candidates: one is Robin Jaffe and the other is Larry Teeter. Those will be the people you will be voting for when we open it up for online elections the Monday after spring break. And for secretary-elect we have 2 candidates as well, Don Mulvaney and Laura Plexico will be the choices for secretary-elect officers.

If you would like to run there is a way for you to do that and I would encourage you to look at the Senate Constitution there’s a [petition?] that you would have to work with, but you need to notify the Secretary within 14 days of the date of March 25 Spring Faculty Meeting. So the time will come pretty quick.

Two other issues that I want to talk about that came up at the end of the last Senate meeting. There was one about Teaching Effectiveness. Can we re-aggregate the data so we could have a better look at our individual results relative to what other people do. That’s been directed to the chair of the Teaching Effectiveness Committee and he will be taking a look at that in a couple of coming months.

The other item had to do with parking and the concern that if you are going to bring a rental vehicle or another vehicle to campus, if we do away with hangtags how is that handled. So we referred that to the parking office and the e-mail part of that is really just to log in, there has always been an e-mail component. So if you’ve got another car that you want to bring to campus and we don’t have hangtags anymore, just shoot a line in an e-mail notifying the parking office that you are bringing a different car and they will log it into your system. Then if you do get a ticket with that car they will see that you e-mailed in a request to change the license plate associated with your parking rights on campus and they would waive your ticket. Does that satisfy the question?

Now we have 3 action items. We are postponing the Parental Leave discussion until next month, but we have 3 action items, the first one has to do with the vote for additional Rules Committee members. So I will turn that over to the chair of the Rules Committee, which is Judy Sheppard. (funny feedback) [8:34]

Judy Sheppard, secretary: Hello everybody. You can see the candidates. We are very fortunate in having these 5 people volunteer for the Rules Committee, which is a critical committee in our shared governance. We have a new system of voting, not paper ballots, but instead a clicker system. From what I understand from our genius, Laura, you will simply vote for a candidate one by one. [9:07]

J: We are not going to call them out one by one
L: Yes we are
J: Okay then we will do that

If you want to vote for let’s say Peter then you vote at that time, but you can vote only 3 times. First vote, Peter Stanwick. Use your clickers please, the numbers will not appear on the screen.

J: Does everybody have working clickers? Okay we are waiting for Patricia to vote now. [10:45]

Okay, A for Peter Stanwick, B for Emily Myers, the way it’s set up. [10:52] If it says A up there punch A if you want to vote for A.

J: Have things not worked? Can we reset?
L: Yes.

Talk among yourselves while we reset.
Okay everybody. Each one of these candidates has a letter assigned to them, so if you want to vote for a candidate hit the letter beside the name.

(More Laura confusion)
J: That’s my introduction.
L: okay, got it.

Okay right now if you want to vote for Peter Stanwick punch A.

Okay, everybody ready for B? If you want to vote for B, please hit B.

Are we ready? For C. Hit C if you want to vote for C

Someone’s clicker has failed. Replacement is provided.
[15:32]

If you want to vote for D, hit D.

Okay, last vote if you want to vote for E, press E. [18:07]
All right, thank you, the results will be announced at the end of the meeting. Be sure to keep your clickers.

Larry Crowley, chair: the next action item that is being brought to you is a non-controversial issue is the Calendar Committee. Thanks to Robin’s stewardship through these many years is no longer as controversial as it used to be so he will come an introduce his resolution and we’ll vote.

Robin Jaffe, chair, Calendar and Schedules Committee: Good afternoon everyone. This is the Calendar and Schedules Committee, I am Robin Jaffe the chair and we’re going to propose the academic calendar for 2016–2017.

These are the members of the 2013–2014 Calendar and Schedules Committee. I would like to thank them for their work they have done very well this semester. We met once for about an hour and developed the calendar and went through all the rules that were set up for us and we came up with a calendar, then we voted online.

As you remember in October 6, 2009 we set up the specific calendar rules so that fall and spring semesters are between 70 and 73 days, and the summer semesters are 48 and 49 , between those days for the summer. This was set up by a resolution by the Senate and approved October 6, 2009.

I’d like to go through some of the rules that we have for the calendar. As before the calendar for fall/spring semester is 70–73 days. The calendar for the full summer term is 48–49 and we try to have 7–10 days between semesters. Graduation has been decided to Saturday for fall and summer, and graduation the preferred days are Saturday and Sunday, the weekend, for spring. There are 5 days for finals for fall and spring, two reading days after classes for fall and spring, and at least one reading day for each mini term and the full term in the summer. The fall break was added last year and we will have 2 days for fall break, unless 72 semester days are not available then the fall break will be one day and that is after mid-semester.

So here is the calendar. [21:32] It starts in August on the 16th. We have a September Labor Day  on the 5th is our first holiday. Fall break is on October 16, it’s a Friday, just one day. Then we go through November with Thanksgiving break the full week. One of the things we talked about with the fall break committee and the agreement was that a lot of people wanted to have the fall break and if they had to give up their Thanksgiving they didn’t want the fall break. We have 72 days. We end December 2. We have 2 reading days, 5 final days and graduation on the 10th, with 10 days for the registrar.

Then in January we start on the 11th, I don’t know what it’s going to do with the football team, but we’ll find our when we get there. The 23rd is Martin Luther King’s birthday as our holiday, we go through to March 13th which is our spring break. Going through to April, 72 days, 2 reading days and then in May, 1–5 we will have our finals, the 6th and the 7th will be graduation. We have 10 days in between the semesters. We will start our first full term and our first mini term in the summer on the 18th. Memorial Day on the 29th is a holiday. We will then go to 24th day, which is on the 20th of June. There is a reading day and two finals. Then the 2nd mini term will start on June 26. July 4 is Tuesday. We go through to the July 28 then we have 2 reading days, 3 final days and graduation on Aug. 5, with 10 days left for the registrars office.

These are all the words, that’s 1,000 words for a picture, is that how that goes or is it the other way around? But it’s the same thing. August 16 through Dec. 10, 72 days.

Spring semester starts on January 11 and goes through April 28 with commencement on May 6 and May 7, this is 72 days.

Full term of summer starts on the 18th and goes through August 5 of commencement, 48 days, class days.

First mini semester is May 18 through June 21 with the reading day on the 22nd. June 23 and June 24 the final exam period for that; During the reading day, the full semester group will not be meeting.

Then last, 26th of June through August 2 and August 4 for the finals and commencement should be there, but it’s not, and it will be on the 5th.

So that’s the calendar [24:49]

There has been discussion with the alignment for the Auburn City Schools, summer of 2015 the graduation exam will not be given anymore after that. They will then align with our calendar and we will have the same week off. I haven’t talked with Opelika yet to see if they will change theirs. But that’s gone. Next year we will align with them when the semester is, and the next year after that they will align with us.

So that’s all I have to say. Any questions? [25:27]

Larry Crowley, chair: The motion has been made by the chair of the Calendar and Schedules Committee, it doesn’t need a second. We will open it up for discussion.

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: Could I get you to put the calendar back up there? The issue that some folks in biology have is the fact that by taking that Friday that you do for the fall break, we teach labs on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays in our general biology class. These are large labs with like 1,000 students in each of 3 or 4 classes and in order to accommodate that we have to have 4 laboratory days a week in each of 14 weeks or else we have to remove a laboratory for everybody from the course which radically alters the laboratory aspects of our course. So is there any way of coming up with a calendar that has a balanced number of Tuesdays, Wednesdays,…

Robin Jaffe, chair of Calendar and Schedules: When we met with the fall break taskforce before we set up this calendar the idea for a fall break. It was agreed upon that there would be 12 full weeks for those laboratories that we are talking about. I believe this calendar has the 12 full weeks.

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: Okay. So we have what is approximately a 15-week semester and we re throwing away 3 of those weeks?

Robin Jaffe, chair of Calendar and Schedules: No, we are not throwing away 3 full weeks because we can’t start before the 16th, so the first week is only 4 days and we can’t do anything about that. And every time I’ve presented a calendar for the past 6 years I’ve said that as long as the administration is willing to pay us an extra day we can come in at another time. Labor day there is nothing I can do about that, that’s a national holiday, but that’s the second week, the third week is the fall break that the students have asked for. And it is either 2 days or 1 day because this calendar can only go up to 72 days, 71 days with the 2 fall break days, then we’s have to make it a one day break and have 72 days.

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: Robin, I’m not sure where the idea that 12 weeks, full weeks was enough came from because we have 14 full weeks and this has 13 Fridays, so we can’t work it in around that. [28:29]

Robin Jaffe, chair of Calendar and Schedules:  We were told 12 full weeks for the laboratories. That was the agreement and I know the College of Science and Math were represented by your associate dean on that committee.

Bob Locy, senator, biological sciences: Thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: Any other questions or comments?

Mike Stern, senator, economics: Just a side question to this after some experiencing complaints that my faculty had in regard to the missed class days and then the make up days this semester. Has the Calendar Committee thought of actually, ex-anti before the fact every year having pre-declared makeup days so everybody knows when they are even if we don’t end up needing to have them or something like that? Because there was a period of time that we are uncertain if we are going to have them, if so, when are they going to be? So a lot of people had hesitation. If we already pre-declare as a part of our official calendar, some makeup days if they need it; I know it may happen more in the spring semester, the bad weather, but  I would say it was back in ’04 or ’05 a hurricane came through in the fall so the university had to close for a day or two and there were similar kind of uncertainties. So I don’t know if it’s routine every couple of years we may have these events, should we sort of pre-declare if makeup days are needed where they are going to be?

Robin Jaffe, chair of Calendar and Schedules:  I think that’s a great idea. I don’t know…the main issue is that it would have to be on a weekend and if we want to schedule, to write that down someplace I am sure that can be done. That’s not a problem. The issue is that we have so many days and you can only get so many days in a calendar. It starts out on the 16th, goes 72 days. We can start splitting things up but I am sure we can schedule so you can know ahead of time when the snow days (makeup days) are going to be.

Larry Crowley, chair: Let’s go ahead and take a vote. Press A to support the calendar and press B to vote against the calendar. A=67, B=4  It passes 67 to 4, thank you very much Robin.

The next item on the agenda is a 6-hour exemption from the core that will be introduced by Constance Relihan.

Constance Relihan, Assoc. Provost for Undergraduate Studies and chair of Core Curriculum and General Education Committee: Most of what I am about to present you have seen before if you were here at the last meeting. I want to reiterate that this proposal started with curriculum proposals in the College of Engineering. It was approved there, came to the Gen Ed Committee, where it was discussed and voted on and approved there, when to the Senate Steering Committee where it was voted on and approved there. I don’t want anyone to think that this proposal came out of a desire to see any of our students get less education. This proposal was a result of a desire to balance a lot of competing needs, but I want to be clear that this is a proposal intended to make it easiest for our students in engineering to graduate in a timely fashion.

Just as a reminder, we in the State have a general core. All 2- and 4-year public institutions have a general core that was mandated by legislation in 1994 and that governs the curriculum for all 2- and 4-year public institutions, all majors, all departments. The one exception that the State permits is for engineering. [33:12]

This is the general core that has been determined by the State’s General Studies Committee (AGSC) the Articulation and General Studies Committee. It requires 6 hours of composition, 12 hours of humanities and fine arts, 11 or 12 hours of science and mathematics and 12 hours of history, social and behavioral sciences. All students are required to complete a sequence in either history or literature. All students are required to complete a 3-hour course in a fine art. At the state level students are required to complete 8 hours sciences with lab, Auburn goes a little further and says it needs to be a sequence, that was our decision, not the state’s. But these are the requirements that the state sets up for everyone in the state. Okay?

What the state also permits and what all of the other public 4-year institutions that offer engineering in our state have adopted is a 6-hour exemption for colleges of engineering. Under this exemption engineering students are required to take only 9 hours of humanities and only 9 hours of social sciences. They are still required to complete a literature course, they are still required to complete a history course, they are still required to complete a fine arts course, they are still required to complete a sequence in either history or literature. Please note, as it says there, the AGSC the state does not permit this exception for any other fields. We’re not opening the floodgates to a series or proposals to reduce the core. It is only for engineering that the state permits this as an option.

Also I would point out that any student who starts in engineering and then transfers out of engineering is no longer eligible for that exemption. So it couldn’t be a back door to having a smaller core. You come in engineering and then you shift into English, where everybody ought to be anyway. Sorry, English major. If you do that you’ve got to take the additional core hours.

An additional concern is our general education student learning outcomes. [36:08] SACS requires that we have outcomes and assess for them. The Senate and the Gen ED Committee approved these 11 outcomes. We have asked that all of our students take at least one course that is assessing for each of these outcomes. Right now that’s what we’re doing. All of these outcomes are being assessed in the core courses, one exception is SLO7 the oral communication outcome which some students are assessed for through a core course, COMM 1000, and because of capacity issues some are assessed for within a course in their major, but regardless all of our students are assessed for these individual outcomes. And this past summer we reported to SACS that our students in general are at intermediate level of competency in all of our outcomes except for information literacy and fine arts appreciation. In those cases we said basic, but what we did to determine our assessments was we looked very heavily at the course level data, that’s the best source of information, along with some standardized testing and then we supplemented it a bit with some satisfaction surveys or self reported data which is probably less useful. But that’s where we are with the outcomes.

If you look at how students meet those outcomes, here’s how it breaks down. I wanted you to see this breakdown because with the exception, engineering students are still addressing all of the outcomes that we as an institution have said our students need to be addressing at least once. In many cases they are hitting them multiple times. Because for instance the core literature courses assess for both reading analytically and the ability to critique and construct an argument, and actually this is an omission on the slide, also assessing for aesthetic appreciation. A student who takes a literature course is being assessed for those outcomes. The student takes a core philosophy course they are also being assessed for outcomes 2  and 3. All of our social science courses address either 8 or 9 and all the history sequences address both of those outcomes which have to do with diversity appreciation and engaged and informed citizenship. So students are hitting those outcomes still multiple times even with the reduction.

A further point I want to make about this slide and about this process in general is that if this exception is approved the next step will be that each engineering curriculum will have to revise its curriculum model and send it to the university Curriculum Committee for its review and approval there. [39:29] This decision is a step in that process, but we will need to make sure and we will make sure that we are still addressing all of these outcomes with the state mandated core, mandates the distribution that makes it inevitable that a student will take courses that are assessing for all these outcomes at any rate through their general education.

Why adopt this now? Our strategic plan calls for an increase in retention and graduation rates. The Provost has asked deans to look at their curricula and reduce the number of credits overall so that in as much as it is possible given accreditation requirements curricula are at 124 hours or below. Right now in engineering most of their programs are above 123, some of them, 5 are at 130 hours or above, 2 of them are at 134 hours. Which is very large. If you look at the graduation rates for students who begin in the college of engineering and graduation rates are in some ways hard to track down at a very specific level because students change majors a lot, but if you look at students who begin in the College of Engineering, in 4 years only 24 percent of them will graduate.

In 6 years, 62 percent will graduate. If you are a parent paying that tuition, I think you would like them to be able to graduate as quickly as possible. An extra semester for an in-state tuition right now is costing more than $14,000 if you add in living expenses with tuition expenses for an out-of–state student it is closer to $22,000. So the time to degree matters for our students. [42:03] Certainly matters in terms of accountability, governmental emphasis on getting out students through in a timely way. I would also add, as it says up there, this is only one piece of the puzzle. There is no silver bullet to increase graduation rates and retention rates. We’ve restructured tuition, we’ve gone to the early alert grade system, thank you all for your help with that, We’ve looked at ways to improve training for advising, we are increasing tutoring opportunities for our students. There’s no silver bullet but mathematically reducing the number of hours to a number that it is easier for a student to complete in 8 semesters of 15 hours a term is certainly a part of piece of helping our students finish in 4 years.

Just last time we talked there were some questions about benchmarks and comparisons, so I’ve added a little bit of data here. Here are some 4- and some 6-year retention rates from a range of schools. Because some people wanted to compare us to Cal State and MIT, which are very different institutions, I have added them to our list here. This information all comes from <collegeresults.org> which is using slightly older ipeds data, but it’s consistent data across institutions which makes it useful for comparative purposes. You can see where we rank in terms of our 4- and 6-year graduation rates with a number of schools who might be considered relevant to this discussion. And I think significant too is that final column of the percent that are still enrolled. Which says to me, these are not students who have given up, these are students who are still working on degrees after 6 years, which I think is not a goal any of us would set out for our students or for family members. [44:22]

If you want to go to the next slide there is more comparison about core courses. What you see here are the number of composition course hours, the number of humanities and fine arts hours, history, social and behavioral sciences hours, and then in that second column from the right, the total number of hours in the humanities and social sciences grouped together including English composition as a humanity, that these institutions require in the core. You can see there that in general we have more. Aside from Cal Tech, which has about 22 percent of its required units in the humanities and social sciences, everyone else, except for us is below 20 percent of the total hours required for graduation. So we are an outlier in this regard.

So that is our presentation. Here is the resolution. That the College of Engineering be permitted to adopt the AGSC core exception as stated there so students are required to complete 9 instead of 12 hours of humanities and fine arts, and 9 instead of 12 hours of history and social science. Still required to complete a sequence in either history or literature, still required to complete the math and science requirements. I will say again if we approve this, you approve this, then the next step will be for College of Engineering to present all of its revised curricula to the Senate’s University Curriculum Committee for their consideration and approval. So with that I make the motion.

Larry Crowley, chair: The motion is made by a Senate Committee and does not require a second. Before we get started, I apologize for my side conversation, but I realize that we are not broadcasting the vote up on the screen and that was done for confidentiality on the Rules Committee, but what we will do when it it time to vote is put the computer up here and project it.

Dean Roberts made a comment that he would like to begin the discussion, so I will call him to speak first before I open it up for discussion. [47:02]

Chris Roberts, Dean of the College of Engineering, senator: I appreciate that Larry. As a matter of note I serve as one of the administrative senators. During the last presentation of this there were a number of items that were brought up that I wanted to take the opportunity to provide some clarity to those and to initiate this Constance had mentioned how we started this proposal and bringing this forward. It stemmed from a meeting that was held during the Provost Council where the Provost meets with the Deans and direct reports in a discussion about the Strategic Plan, specifically 6-year graduation rates and asked us to really look hard at programs that were above 124 hours. It was clear to me sitting there that almost all of our programs are above 124 hours. Most of them are above 130 hours.

So I carried this back to the College, learned about this articulation agreement that has been in place in the state for a number of years where the other schools in this state that have engineering colleges have taken advantage of this articulation agreement. So I brought this to the attention of our Department Chairs. Our Department Chairs then went back and met with each of their departments and the curriculum committees in those departments. I asked them to bring back to me their thoughts on how we were going to approach this toward 124 hours as our target for each of these degree programs. 2 to 1 they came back requesting the use of this articulation agreement. This has received very broad support in the College of Engineering, not only from our faculty but we have also had many discussions with our advisors about this and how this would affect their ability to get students to degree. And that’s been overwhelming support from our advising staff as well as our faculty in the college. I want to stress a couple of things because there were comments during this meeting and people have asked me other questions about it.

I want to reassure everyone that this is not a grab for more technical hours. I have talked directly to the Provost about this. I am committed to not have this turn into an opportunity for the College of Engineering to then go back and backfill technical hours. Our mission here with this is to try to reduce the total number of hours so that these students can reach graduation in a timely manor. [49:28] Many of our programs are listed with very large number of hours, some of them are listed with more than 8 semesters in the curriculum models that we use during advising. We do that as a mater of truth of advertising. Now that runs in conflict sometimes with our interests in having our students during summers take internships or coop opportunities or participate in undergraduate research. On one side we are encouraging them to do that and on the other side we have a required summer semester for many of these students.

I also want to stress that we started this conversation long before there was any discussion on this campus about proposed new budget model. So this is not driven, again, by credit hours, this was driven entirely by in the spirit of providing a program that our students can graduate in a reasonable amount of time while balancing the breadth of the education that we all want. I will note that there are two programs, in full disclosure, that started out close to the 124 hours, in adopting this resolution it would actually have those particular programs fall below. We will work with the Curriculum Committee so appropriate courses are filled in that, but we would ask that one resolution be adopted here. One articulation agreement so that the only change that’s occurring to the university core is this singular exception that is noted by the State Legislature for Engineering that we don’t make further exceptions to that. We want to keep it as straight forward as possible for us going forward.

I will note that we did check that all of the other schools in the state are using this. I know in the last meeting there some questions about have we benchmarked against the very top programs in the country and indeed we have. Constance, the numbers that she showed you was homework that was done outside of our college by Constance and others. Steve Duke and I did a very extensive benchmarking against the top schools as well as all of the schools that are in our SEC and the schools within our state. Very uniformly, we stand out as having somewhere between having 5 and 7 hours more in the humanities/social sciences, compared to what we see with our peers. Not everyone, but definitely that is a trend. We also had others in our college that took on that same task when we brought this up at the departments, several faculty members took it upon themselves to do that, some of them are actually prepared to talk about that today if you would like to have more of that data not just from me but from my colleagues who have investigated this. [52:18]

I agree that this is real time and real money for these families who are paying for these additional semesters. For example when Auburn University issues scholarships to students, we issue them on an 8-semester basis. I cant tell you how many letters that we end up writing indicating that, I am sorry about that ninth semester that’s in your curriculum program, but Auburn only provides an 8-semester scholarship. So this would certainly help to bring those students back more timely in terms of time to degree we are committee to making sure all the student learning outcomes in the College of Engineering are met. If fact, those student learning outcomes map up very nicely with the ABET required outcomes. They too have 11 required outcomes from ABET, and many of them match up very nicely. So we are committed to do that within our own courses and we’ll ensure that they get a breadth of education with that, but we feel that we need to balance that with the time to degree and also the technical content that ABET requires. This offers the best solution, I think the state recognized that, so we’re requesting the adoption of this to provide our students a manageable load in 4-years while keeping technical depth and breadth of education.

So I just wanted to make those comments to you, Larry.

Larry Crowley, chair: Any other comments or discussion? [53:51]

Mike Stern, senator, economics: So you run the committee that runs the student learning outcomes of Auburn students with respect to the core, right? Why is there no data in your presentation in regarding the student learning outcomes of the engineering students?

Constance Relihan, Assoc. Provost for Undergraduate Students and Chair of CCGE: Because we assess learning outcomes directly through the courses that they take. And we do not track in the course level assessment what college students are in at the time when they take the courses. To do that would add a layer of work that I don’t think any of you want to engage in since it would be your courses that would have to break it down that way. Of course you assess it one week and a student changes a major the next week, it’s not clear how relevant that data would be down the line. There is the survey data which you talked about last time, which does look at students or does break it down by college, but that’s based on the number of respondents and it’s self reported and it’s not terribly reliable. So we work much more closely with the actual data reported by the courses. [55:29]

Mike Stern, senator, economics: So you do have some data related to engineering and SLOs? From a data set that you have used before in the assessment of the Student Learning Outcomes.

Constance Relihan, Assoc. Provost for Undergraduate Students and Chair of CCGE: I just answered your question.

Mike Stern, senator, economics: So why aren’t we being shown that data?

Constance Relihan, Assoc. Provost for Undergraduate Students and Chair of CCGE: Which data would you like?

Mike Stern, senator, economics: That data you just mentioned, but you also mentioned earlier that you have used in assessments.

Constance Relihan, Assoc. Provost for Undergraduate Students and Chair of CCGE: What we used in our assessment, I think I said this in the presentation as well, to come up with the data that we reported to SACS, we looked primarily at the course reported data plus information from the CLA learning assessment where it was relevant, plus the NSSE self reported data, plus the survey of recent graduaters. We did not…

Mike Stern, senator, economics: You used that survey

Constance Relihan:I think I’ve said that a couple of times, yes.

Mike Stern, senator, economics: I just wanted to make clear. So  you used it for assessment purposes, you have it, you did not present it. That is correct? Okay. Now can we look at the slide that shows the graduation rates and the credit hours? So these are ordered by 4-year graduation rates, right?

Constance Relihan: self evident.

Mike Stern, senator, economics: And so is the next slide in the same order? So they are also ordered by graduation rates. When we go to the next slide we see the order is the same. Next slide… so that order of universities is in the same order that the graduation rates are in. So I’m not a mathematician but I see Florida, Georgia, Florida State, Alabama, Georgia Tech, and UAB; which are all measured in semester hours. An extremely similar number of hours, yet radically different graduation rates. My guess is one will find almost zero correlation between the total hours there and the graduation rates. Now I know the  two institutions on that that have followed the Alabama exemption, that we speak of, are Alabama and the absolute bottom of the list UAB. Okay, so, you know, not following the exemption of 134 hours has lead us to a higher 4-year graduation rate than the average of Alabama and UAB, which did follow the exemption and have about the number of hours which we would have if we subtracted 6. So I am not sure from where I derive the conclusion that this will do anything to our graduation rates. [58:22]

I had the opportunity to attend the General Education Committee and substitute for our representative who couldn’t make it when the presentation was made. No information about Student Learning Outcomes was presented at that meeting. I had to learn from a student representative about the survey data that they had in fact produced, which had engineering data which showed in this particular area, engineering students had a woeful self-reported performance compared to the other areas that we are not cutting. So I am kind of wondering when and where has the data been presented that links any of the proposed changes to an improvement in graduation rate? Because if we become like Alabama and UAB, based on this data and we follow their lead and follow their exemption because you notice Bama and UAB got exactly 9 hours there in the social sciences like we want to do, and it’s got 9 hours in Arts/Humanities like we want to do instead of our 12/12. Why average them, that would be a decline in our graduation rate. And then I look at Cal Tech, who has an extraodinary 4-year rate and it has the exact same percentage of, as you said, humanities/social sciences and graduation. So if I put that into a regression, my goodness, it almost find a negative correlation. I don’t know but I can’t see any evidence here and certainly if you want to talk regionally, Georgia Tech is our preeminent institution with a lot of issues that we may face in the southeast and everything else and I say, well they have a higher 6-year graduation rate than us and slightly less than 4-year but if anybody said our engineering became like Georgia Tech that would be awesome. They are a preeminent engineering school. [1:00:11]

So I am not sure how we have trouble competing when we can beat Georgia Tech on the 4-year rate. And then I note Georgia Tech has the same number of social sciences hours that we do.

Larry Crowley, chair: We have other people that would like to come to the microphone.
Mike Stern, senator, economics: Okay, well I don’t know that there is any time limit on speech as a senator

Larry Crowley, chair: I would like to have other people come and speak as well

Mike Stern, senator, economics: Okay, I’m not sure that’s in compliance with the Rules of the Order, but Rules of Order also require that once the resolution is made that senators speak first, okay?

Larry Crowley, chair: If you have other comments to make…

Mike Stern, senator, economics: Well that’s what I mean, a presentation was made and did the senators speak first? I just want to make sure. I not sure there is anything about a time limit to senate speak. I notice we waste an awful lot of time showing a bunch of slides that we talked about last time when this was an information item. This is the only new thing since last time, so we just repeated ourselves with the presentation. In regards to time.

Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you Mike. Yes sir?

Shawn Gallagher, senator, Industrial and Systems Engineering: Good afternoon. I’d just like to rise in support of the proposed revision to the engineering core. I think that we’ve heard that this revision has been the result of a careful process of consideration and we believe that it will be helpful to the university as a whole to the College of Engineering, to our own department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and to College of Engineering students as well. [1:02:10]

The proposal does so in a manner that continues to fulfill all 12 general education student learning outcomes. First I think it will help to remove an impediment to the issue of graduation rates and help to increase 4- and 6-year graduation rates, which we can see from the data lag behind those of other schools in Auburn University. This is an important goal in the university’s Strategic Plan and one that will be ultimately important in terms of Federal funding received by the university from what I read.

It will help the College of Engineering from preventing Auburn from being the only school not to take advantage of this exemption. Additional hours currently required for our engineering degrees is probably a competitive deterrent for students that are looking for schools and are interested in graduating actually in 4 years rather than a longer period of time. It will help the Industrial and Systems Engineering department by reducing the current requirement of 126 hours down to 120 hours which will facilitate our students receiving their degrees in a timely manner and will help INSY achieve the Provost’s stated goal of being able to obtain an undergraduate degree in the minimum possible hours. [1:03:43]

Finally as it’s been discussed here, a proposed revision will help see a wee student by saving them time and money in order to achieve their Auburn Engineering degree. For these reasons we would strongly encourage the Senate’s support in passing this revision to the engineering core. Thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: Other discussion?

Sushil Adhikari, senator, Biosystems Engineering: I do support the motion to approve the reduction in credit hours. I wanted to make a couple of points with regard to how, by reducing these credit hours, can actually help in the graduation rate. Although we might not have the data that directly tracks, a clear correlation, but talking to a number of undergraduate students what I found was when you have a lot of credit hours in a given semester, for example 15 or 18 if somebody wants to graduate with the 4 year time period. That person doesn’t have enough time to do the other things. For example that person might not have enough time to spend in a lab, or do summer research, or summer internship, like Dr. Roberts indicated. Many of us probably know, the National Science Foundation supports a number of these recent experience for undergraduate students in order for them to excite so that they can have a greater interest in these engineering, or science, or technological education. So having a lower load and also having them have more time where they can interact or work within the lab or any other places, where they can increase their technical skills would I think greatly help in terms of the graduation rate. Thank you.

Andy Sinclair, senator, aerospace engineering: I mainly just wanted to rise to add some additional data points to what was presented by Constance and alluded to by Chris earlier. After the meeting last month there were several comments about how did Auburn compare to other out-of-state universities and particular other preeminent land-grant universities, so this is just a little analysis that I put together. Texas A&M, University of Florida, Virginia Tech I think you could argue are preeminent land-grant universities and of course our close neighbor Georgia Tech also included. So here you see listed [1:06:28] by breakdown, I’m looking at science and math core, and these are aerospace engineering curricula, some of the other data we’ve seen so far is mechanical engineering, (something I cannot make out) aerospace wanted to put together here. Of course all of these curricula require far more numbers in science and math hours in the aerospace engineering curricula, these are just the number of hours required by university requirements. You can see our core curriculum is by comparison quite weak in science and math. That might be a discussion for another day. Then in the other non-science and math, again as you see as was alluded to by others, our number is currently a far outlier in terms of the high side of number of hours required. Speaking to some colleagues at Texas A&M I can tell you that 29 for non-science and math is actually going to reduce to 27 starting next fall. Then total core added. Then you see the last column is the total number of credit hours.

So I just argue that by these comparisons the number of hours that we are currently having to fitting into the aerospace engineering curriculum at Auburn in the technical hours is having fewer number of hours available and really kind of a outlier in terms of the number of non-science and math core hours being required. Many of the senators at the previous meeting had been concerned about these comparisons so I think and hope many of you are rest assured about how our comparisons would be to out-of-state peer institutions.

The last thing I’ll add is all of the faculty, at aerospace engineering are unanimous in supporting the proposal and I encourage you to vote in support of it as well. Thanks.

Gwynedd Thomas, senator, polymer and fiber engineering: I also had some data I wanted to present [1:08:30] One of the very intelligent colleagues in the last meeting asked how did we compare to 7 of the very top engineering institutions, so I went through and had a look at the ones that were rated in the top 5 in US News and World Report, the last 3 are tied for 5th. If you take a look the first 4 columns there you see English, humanities, social sciences or social studies; then the next column is not lower Alabama but Liberal Arts and you can see that of everyone listed up there Auburn has the highest core curriculum in the Liberal Arts of any of them, and most unfortunately the weakest in the science and technologies. So what we are saying really in terms of how we would benefit in engineering is that we would come more into balance with our rivals within the engineering institutions in those top 5 by being able to concentrate a little bit more in those technical areas, but also we would have a lighter load than the others in the liberal arts area as well. Just wanted to point out those differences and there really is an imbalance as compared to the top 5. [1:09:57]

Sanjeev Baskiyar, senator, computer science and software engineering: Just wanted to add that all faculty in computer science support the resolution and we are very much in favor of it. Thank you.

Allen David, senator, chemical engineering: I want to start by saying that all of the faculty in chemical engineering do support the proposed curriculum change. I have to be honest, I actually started out in the other camp when this discussion was starting, but after doing a little bit of digging into the data myself, I have changed my position.

I am going to share just a few figures that I’ve looked at. It says presented earlier the requirement in the arts/humanities and social sciences for our graduates is 30 credit hours. If you look at on average 3 credits per course it’s about ten courses. So I looked at some of the top 10 chemical engineering programs. This is specific to chemical engineering programs, you kind of need a PhD in cryptography to interpret some of them, but looking at just the number of courses required in the social sciences and humanities; Auburn is 10; MIT according to their chemical engineering Web site requires 8; University of Minisota, 6; Georgia Tech, 9; Prinston, 8; University of Wisconsin-Madison, 8; University of Texas-Austin, 8; University of Deleware requires 7. So among all of these top 10 institutes, Auburn has the highest requirements.

Initially I was thinking that might not be a bad thing. I teach a junior level chemical engineering class and I asked my students a couple of weeks ago what difference would it make and a few of them said that it really would not make a big difference, but there was a large group who are on scholarships and as Dean Roberts said earlier you can’t go through our program, ours is one that is 134 credit hour requirements, you can’t go through it in 8 semesters. So many of those students indicated that they have and struggle with how am I going to make the 9th semester? In general the chemical engineering faculty are in favor of this. We don’t feel like making this change would affect the students ability to get good paying jobs. It probably wouldn’t affect their future trajectory, but there is a good number of students for whom it would affect how long it takes to get out there and actually start the life-long process of learning and becoming productive well-rounded individuals. Thank  you. [1:13:11]

Tom Baginski, senator, electrical and computer engineering: Our department supports the resolution to permit the College of Engineering to follow the AGSC engineering exemption, not to reiterate the comments of my colleagues previously.

Larry Crowley, chair: Any other comments?

Dave Elton, not a senator, Department of English: How much time to I have?

Larry Crowley, chair: About 5 minutes, you don’t have to take it all.

Dave Elton, not a senator, civil engineering I use a safety factor of 2 so 10 minutes in my case. I apologize, my name is Dave Elton I am a faculty member in the Civil Engineering Department and no one has asked me my opinion on this thing. So we might have heard some reports on polling in different departments in the college and they may have taken place, but no one asked me.

I have been party to all the discussions here. I am please to hear that you don’t know how long it takes someone to graduate, that you can’t figure out that number. I was very pleased to hear that. We don’t know what are graduation rate is despite the numbers you put up because of people transferring in and out and a variety of other reasons. I wonder that if in the pool of information we now know how many hours a semester a student takes here in the College of Engineering?  And if that average is 15 or 18 (credit hours) for example and that’s perhaps the reason they are not getting out in the prescribed, apparently 4 years?

I didn’t think our criteria for being a university was graduating students in a certain amount of time, I thought it was giving them an education. It would seem to me that by reducing the number of hours required for a degree, we are reducing the amount of education that they get. I am open to other arguments, but that’s how I look at it. And it would seem to me that that would be the case that the more classes that they attend, the better the chances are of knowing more when they leave. I don’t think MIT’s requirement, and I speak from my own opinion and that is all, is how fast does the student get out but what is the quality of the student that is leaving.

Auburn’s vision statement is to become a preeminent land-grant university. I don’t see how making it easier, shorter, but particularly easier for a student to graduate brings us closer to the preeminence that’s the vision of our university. It would seem to me that requiring the student to learn more would bring us closer to that level of preeminence. At this juncture it seems that the Senate, the university has a choice here of leading or following. We compare ourselves to other universities. Well if we want to follow, have at it, bring us to their average, but if we want to lead and have students that know more and are more capable when they leave, I say leave the hours in and have our students learn more before they leave Auburn University with a degree in engineering. Thank you.

Larry Crowley, chair: Other comments? We will take one more.

Okay, I will call for the vote. I will ask Laura to set up her computer so that we could actually see the results on the screen. [1:16:46]

Press A if you are in support of the motion. Press B if you are against the motion. Go ahead and vote.
(some technical difficulty with the display of the vote, software acting up, so this took several tries.)
We will take another vote. Michael Stern would you come up and witness the vote?
A=44, B=19

The motion passed 44 to 19. We have one other announcement to make which is the result of the Rules Committee vote. Judy would you come forward?

Judy Sheppard, secretary:  The new members are, Vicky Van Santen, Peter Stanwick, and Rusty Wright.

Larry Crowley, chair: Any new business? Seeing none, any unfinished business? Seeing none, we’ll be adjourned. Thank you very much for your attention. [1:20:28]