Transcript Senate Meeting
May 20, 2014
Larry Crowley, chair: Come to order please. Welcome to the May 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 we will confirm a quorum shortly.
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 senators. So while we are getting settled in I want to hold off on the approval of the minutes and call Dr Gogue forward to make remarks from the Office of the President.
Dr. Gogue, President: I just have a couple of things. About two weeks ago the group that’s called VCOM, the Edward Via School of Osteopathic Medicine they had their accreditation visit in Chicago and they were totally accredited so that means you will see advertisements for the group of students for fall of 2015. I understand it will be about 140–150 medical schools in the first class. That’s good news for them keep in mind it’s not really an Auburn program but certainly a program in our community. And we are excited to see that happening.
Second thing I’d share with you is you may have seen in the newspaper, the Harbert College of Business was successful, I don’t know if recruiting is the right word, but working with a group with RFID work from the University of Arkansas through Auburn about 5 professionals came over. They are located in the renovated Brunos area at some point this summer. [2:38]
The final thing I’d mention is last week was the 100-year anniversary of the Smith Lever Act, which is the basis of the Cooperative Extension Service nation wide. Certainly an important function at Auburn we still have offices in the county and the state, Smith was from Georgia and Lever was from South Carolina, basically they use the word Extension to explain how they extend the programs from a Land-Grant university to rural areas or to all areas within that state.
Appreciate you being here today and I’d be happy to respond to questions.
Someone, not identified: President Gogue, could you just repeat what you said about the College of Business, I didn’t quite catch that. [3:22]
Dr. Gogue, President: A new research program is the RFID, Radio Frequency ID Program that has been at the University of Arkansas for a number of years, pretty much involved in Supply Chain work. And my understanding was prior to them coming to Auburn the College of Business wanted to be sure that you worked out with the Wal-marts, the main suppliers that fund that operation, that they would be supported by being here at Auburn. Am I correct John, they will be supported by coming to Auburn?
Larry Crowley, chair: Any other questions? We will now have remarks from the Provost’s Office.
Dr. Tim Boosinger, Provost: I want to update you on Coach Survey that’s a faculty job satisfaction survey. [4:15] We invited over 1,000 faculty at Auburn to participate in the survey, 526 chose to do so. That’s a great response rate, about 52%. Especially strong response rate with pre-tenured faculty 63% responding, and female faculty with 64% response rate. On a satisfaction scale of 1–5 with 3 being either satisfied or dissatisfied and 5 being very satisfied, in all 3 areas of our mission we had a positive response. I teaching it was 3.75, in research it was 3.26 and service 3.37.
There was strong …This is just a preliminary report we will get the full report later in the summer. The preliminary outcome, department of collegiality university health and retirement benefits a very high level of satisfaction. It appears that we have some additional work to do in the area of creating an environment of disciplinary work and also with the university personnel and family benefits. That was interesting.
The next step in the process is to get the full report back from Coach. This is just kind of raw data. When we get the full report we’ll have compariters with other institutions (our peers) across the country specifically Clemson, Kansas State, ?, Arkansas, Washington State. So as soon as we have that. Information we will share that with you. Thank you.
Larry Crowley, chair: Any questions for Dr. Boosinger?
The next item of business are my remarks and what I’d like to do since there was a little bit of controversy about the rollout of the institutional requirements of the Clery Act, Melvin Owens, the executive director for Public Safety on the campus has agreed to give a 2 minute update. He’ll come back to the Senate for a full report in early September. He agreed to come speak.
He has a meeting next week and what I heard or what I thought at the beginning of some of these discussions was not really what was being asked.
Melvin Owens, the executive director for Public Safety: Thank you for the invitation to come and discuss Clery. I want to present Susan McCallister, associate director for information who handles Clery. At the end we brought a sheet that gives current information and ask to respond to any questions
Susan McCallister: I know I just have a few minutes so I will be brief. The Clery Act is in place to encourage people to report crimes and for us to collect data on crimes that occur on campus. In order to try and give perspective students, perspective employees a picture of the crimes that occur on campus outside of what is reported to the police. [7:43]
We have been working toward establishing a more robust Clery Compliance Program and we hired, Jenny O’Connor, who is passing out the handout, she is our Clery Compliance coordinator and she has been here for a few months, but as a part of that we are working to identify campus security authorities. There has been some concern as we rolled this out about a lack of communication and we apologize for that. Really, I think that the requirements are a lot less than a lot of people think. What a campus security authority is as you can see on the sheet that someone who people might report a crime to. [8:22] So you are identified as a campus security if you are a faculty advisor to a student organization, that’s where we had a lot of questions, as well as of course if you are a Student Affairs staff, Residence Life staff, or work with students on a regular basis.
The only requirement there is if you become aware of a Clery crime that occurs on Clery geography, which I’ll tell you about in just a second, then you have an obligation to tell Public Safety about it. Of course we want to encourage people to report crimes directly to the police, there is no change in that. We always want victims to report directly to the police, but if you are not certain that a crime was reported to the police we want to know about it through the CSA crime report form so that we can capture that crime in our statistics and in our crime log.
The things that have to be reported are things that happen on campus and non-campus properties, that’s where we get a little bit of confusion, that’s places like Fisheries and the Experiment Station Operations; Fraternity houses because they are officially recognized student organizations operating those; Alpha Psi Rodeo, that’s one of my favorites; and public property is the other. Those are the types of locations we are looking for. Public property is just what surrounds campus. Then the crimes that have to be reported are listed there at the bottom of the sheet, you can read those for yourselves, but they are really more violent crimes and any hate crimes, any crimes that are motivated by bias. Hopefully that helps you understand a little bit more about why we are doing this. There is no requirement to report a victims name or the person who reported it to you name. It is an anonymous reporting form basically that says someone told me this happened on campus. It is for alleged crimes so you don’t have to do any investigations to confirm that it happened. If it was given in good faith you need to make sure we know about it. Does anybody have any questions? [10:28] [9:19 in ljk]
David King, senator, geology and geography: (difficult to hear) I am also an advisor to two small campus groups that are situated in my department. So I look at the Clery Act and it lists; dean of students, people under Housing, Director of Athletics, team coach, resident advisor, coorrdinator of Greek affairs, position and a campus health center counselors… I am not any of those things and I think I speak for the hundreds of other advisors of small groups on campus and have very little contact with students, I have much more contact with students as a faculty member for example, I have a strict attendance policy. Something about a story from students, something important in a Clery Act, but I don’t get those things by being an advisor so I just want to know what it is specifically that being a club advisor that makes you think that I need to be a campus security authority.
Susan McCallister: I appreciate your concerns and I hear what you are saying definitely. [10:54ljk] We are not the ones that decided that advisors of student organizations are considered campus security authorities. That is in the department Eds Handbook for Clery compliance and that is the way they interpret it when they audit schools. So we have consulted with our Clery consultant who is an expert on this issue and she has confirmed that all advisors to student organizations are automatically CSAs. [11:21ljk] We really don’t have any wiggle room there.
David King, senator, geology and geography: I’d like to ask that question to that person because I don’t really think that making this rule what ever it is, understands what an advisor do and don’t do. There is a huge miss understanding. I would like to see that cleared up before this becomes established university policy or job description. I think we need to have a dialogue about this.
Susan McCallister: We are certainly open to talking about it. I don’t know how much control we have over that because we do have to do what The Department of Ed requests of us for our title 4 funding is potentially in jeopardy and we certainly don’t want to deal with that situation. [12:08ljk]
Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you for your question. As I understand it, we had a meeting over lunch, and thank you fro the lunch by the way, where we came into the meeting thinking we were actually going to be part of the police force reporting crimes, but what I come to find out is the law is just an attempt to collect statistical information so that we can right size the crime that is happening on campus. [12:42ljk] I don’t mind being part of that process I think it’s important for my kids to know what types of things are going on.
David King, senator, geology and geography: (difficult to hear) I don’t necessarily as an advisor, I’m not going to know what’s necessarily real or not real, who did what to who and why. These things, they may be rumors but you know, and then there’s a liability issue, if I know something and don’t report it, if I don’t know something and so don’t report it, there are all kinds of issues, associated this is why we need to really talk because there are hundreds of (something I cannot hear) involved with this. This is a major sea change in the way we’ve been doing things. Instead of just getting an email one day saying hey you better show up for training…we need to talk this through first.
Larry Crowley, chair: I think we are in the process of doing this, thank you David. Melvin and you all will be back in the early part of the fall semester to talk about this a little bit more formally in a presentation and individually be able to address some of these concerns. I look forward to it.
We haven’t voted yet in terms of whether we are here or not. Take your, I always call it a booper that gets my TV remote control found, but if you click your booper and indicate your presence by pressing A. We need 45 people. We have a quorum with 46.
The first order of business is the approval of the minutes of the minutes for the April 8, 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.
We have 2 action items. The first action item is ratifying the nominees that were presented by the Rules Committee. I’ll ask Judy Sheppard, the secretary of the Senate, to make their committee report.
Judy Sheppard, secretary: Thank you. As some of you might know just as prefatory to this, by background is in daily newspapers and every day it was the same. We would start out with kind of a blank slate and then the rest of the day we would run around in a frenzy trying to collect information, somebody would start crying, somebody would get drunk, there’d be fist fights and by the end of the day we’d have a newspaper and it would just go out on the street and it looked like normal people had been involved in this. Well after it came down to, in most papers where I worked, said that the paper’s name no matter what it really was, should be called the Daily Miracle, because it just really was.
Well after an eye-opening year on the Rules Committee, I think we may have an annual miracle going on with the filling of these Senate Committees. There were some differences in the processes. Yeah, we didn’t twist too many arms, we didn’t threaten anybody, we didn’t send but 2 ransom notes to make people sign up, it was pretty collegial overall, but it was a very time consuming and difficult process. And I have to say that for all of you who did answer the call and have agreed to sign up and serve the university, we really appreciate it. I don’t know how many members of the Rules Committee are here, would you stand up? There are few of them here, but they did a wonderful job. It’s a difficult thing. I have a hint for you, if the phone rings in your office at 5:01 p.m. and it’s Patricia Duffy, don’t answer it. I respect so much the people who agreed to serve and the people who have done so much to fill these committees. The Senate Committees, which are so important the governance of the university.
Now, Laura has the list online. They have been online now for a few days. I hope you’ve had a chance to review them. The university constitution asks that the Rules Committee find and nominate members to fill out the Senate Committees. And now I am going to ask you after having seen the committees to, I make a motion for you to approve (the nominees for) the Senate Committees.
Larry Crowley, chair: The motion has been made by a standing committee, so it needs no second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none I will call for a vote. Press A if you agree with the selections and B if you vote no. A=46 , B=1. The nominees are overwhelmingly ratified by a vote of 46 to 1.
The next action item is Patricia Duffy who is bringing a motion from the Steering Committee that was presented by the Faculty Handbook Committee.
Patricia Duffy, chair-elect: This is a policy on External Residential Fellowships, things like Fulbright Fellowships and this is actually a new policy, it is not replacing anything and it puts into the Handbook something that we’ve been doing in practice for a while. It allows people to take the opportunity to do an external residential fellowship and if there is…if the fellowship does not pay the full salary and if there is money available it would allow the person to receive their normal salary, with the difference made up between the unit and central administration.
Are there questions about the policy?
Larry Crowley, chair: The Faculty Handbook Review Committee has met and discussed the language of the External Residential Fellowship Policy and proposes that is was accepted with no changes. They reported that to the Steering Committee and then Patricia is presenting that on behalf of the Steering Committee. Was there any discussion? Hearing none, we will call for the vote.
If you vote yes, press A. If you vote no, press B. A=43, B=2.
The action items. There are 2 actions items. Stephen Lautz of the athletic department is going to give a presentation on compliance. [22:27]
Steve Lautz, associate director of compliance: Thank you very much for having me, my name is Steve Lautz, associate director of compliance. I’m just about here 5 years. In the past I’ve tried to do this about once a year with an opportunity to talk with the Senate and I give you the opportunity to ask any questions that you may have.
I know Dr. Boudreaux spoke before the Senate a couple of months ago and in the past I have sort of piggybacked off of her talking about the academic thesis, I will tough on a little bit of academics but also do some general oversight.
This is our overall philosophy of the compliance department. We were solution conscience not problem oriented, kind of code speak for what our major philosophies are, but we represent the university as a whole. This is a question that comes up quite often in dealing with coaches dealing with a particular student athlete. The athletics department, we represent Auburn University. It is important for us and our student athletes and our coaches and everyone to know that the image of Auburn is first and foremost for us. That means all of you as faculty members are part of the university as well and that we are looking out for you as well. [12:07]
Compliance is an educational area. We do roughly 108 session throughout the course of the year. Those are the student athletes, there’s the coaches they are groups like this, there are boosters, we’ve got twitter page, facebook page all of the opportunities to provide additional information to our fans, friends of the program student athletes, coaches, etc.
Compliance is also a service area, 24/7 I get phone calls, text messages, and e-mails throughout the day. We are helping to serve our student athletes with any questions that they may have. We share in the department’s vision. And maintain a balance, sometimes we serve in conflicting roles to try and explain what’s best for the student athlete and overall protecting Auburn University as a whole. So we get to wear some of these educator, defense attorney, prosecutor, judge, jury; so far no executioner, but we’ll see.
These are the 5 major components of the Athletics Compliance Program. Education as I talked about what we do; a significant amount of educational opportunities throughout the year. Many different diverse groups. Monitoring, we attend practices, we have a number of forms that travel with teams periodically just to make sure that what’s going on on the road is consistent with NCAA legislation.[25:35] Enforcement that is not always the fun side of things but that includes telling a coach or student athlete that she/he has done something wrong; reporting that to the SEC and reporting that to the NCAA. Hopefully turning it into an educational piece that they don’t make the same mistake too often. Structural integrity that’s basically our reporting line understanding that the athletics director knows what’s going on within the different sports and that Jay Jacobs has the opportunity to talk to Dr. Gogue about the importance so we maintain that structural integrity. And then that last piece, communication. We are a growing department we have 7 full-time compliance staff at this point, we have 2 graduate assistants, we have one part-time employee and we are right now in about 3 or 4 different areas of 2 different buildings. So some of that stress and strain that we talked about trying to communicate with each other, trying to use technology to the best of our abilities so we can communicate effectively in those areas. ]26:40]
Institutional Control is an NCAA term that has never been defined, it tells us what it is when schools mess up and fail or lack institutional control but they don’t tell us if you do A, B, and C you will have institutional control. That’s a few points of what we’ve learned from bad actors to determine what we should not be doing. Basically we talk about how it’s an institutional responsibility, but compliance is everyone’s responsibility. It starts at the top with the president has the ultimate responsibility and final authority. The Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics (that should be capitalized, I made a mistake after I sent it in.) Athletic Director, Faculty Athletics Rep, the compliance staff we all are part of the same team so we use co administrators, it is not just the compliance team, I don’t like to get into the term policing, but it’s not just our job to follow those rules.
That said, these are what some of the rules look like. I won’t hold all of you to this, but this is NCAA Bylaw 10.1 deals with ethical conduct. It is actually written in the negative, it is unethical to do a number of different things. I won’t go through this whole list but unethical conduct by a prospective student athlete, current institutional staff member, any number of individuals can be sited for unethical conduct. The big one that we have bolded there is: b) Knowing involvement in arranging for fraudulent academic credit or false transcripts for a prospective or an enrolled student-athlete. Prospective student-athlete, that could be someone who is transferring in from a 2-year college transcript or high school transcript. Then of course for enrolled student-athletes, once he or she is at Auburn what that academic record looked like. Any manipulation on that transcript or a course could result in academic fraud. Like I said I won’t go through this whole list, but involvement with runners is one that stands out. Using banned substances, failure to cooperate or provide true or complete information to the NCAA all results in in unethical conduct.
So academic standards, eligibility for competition, this is what a semester by semester basis we work very closely with the registrar’s office for providing the eligibility for all of our student-athletes. What this says is basically you are required to pass at least 24 credits over an academic year and that’s for student athletes in their first year. So you have to pass 24 credits before you can compete in your second year. The first year you get a little bit of a break in that you can use the summer prior to your first fall and you can use the summer after your first spring. So you really get summer, fall, spring, summer to get those 24 credits, a little bit of an advantage from there. In addition to those 24 hours, 18 of them need to be earned within the traditional terms of the fall and the spring. So you could get 3 in your summer prior to fall, then 6, and 6, and 3 on the back end, oh that’s not 24, that’s only 18 you would be ineligible. That’s and example of someone who is ineligible. So if you go 3, 9, 9, 3; you get the 18 in the fall and the spring and you get the 24 for the first year. That was a test. The third piece is that you have to have 6 credits in each academic term in order to be eligible for the subsequent term, so you have to pass 6 credits in the fall in order to be eligible in the spring additionally you have to have 6 credits in the spring to be eligible the following fall. [30:30] That’s a general rule there’s a couple of unique rules out there in baseball and in football that are ? credit requirements, and in baseball in particular you have to pass the credits in spring in order to be eligible the following spring, so you can’t take a playing season off basically and that is still relatively new legislation.
This is a percentage of degree requirement; I talk about this, this is the credit hour requirement, I’ve got the percentage of degree requirement, after 2 years student-athletes have to have 40 percent of their degree completed, after 3 years, 60%, and after 4, 80% to stay on track to graduate in 5 years. This legislation is about 8 years old so it’s known by all of our student-athletes, but it was a significant change; it used to be 25%, 50%, 75%. So having 40% of your degree completed after 2 years is a significant change from the 25% that it used to be. I may have been in the minority but I was on that path, my brother was no where near that (make fun of him) I think after 6 years he was quite to 80% yet. But regardless of that it is a hightened standard for our student-athletes and the NCAA requires that they are making progress toward graduation. I know that there are a number of individuals, students in particular, who don’t really care how long it takes them to graduate and we certainly don’t have a problem taking money for 5, 6, or 7 years but we do from an NCAA standpoint monitor their progress toward degree., percentage of degree requirements. The last note here is just that those credits must be in a specific degree program, so they are making progress toward that degree.
Changing gears completely, I want to talk briefly about some benefits. The NCAA has a term described as Extra Benefits. Basically it is not something that is not generally available to the entire student population. If it something being given to a student athletes because of his or her performance that that would be an extra benefit because of his or her standing if she is on the Volleyball team we want to give her a benefit, that would be considered an extra benefit. If it is available to all students or a segment of the student population there is no problem with that. [32:51] I’ll give you an example there is a number of places around town where you buy one get one free, because that’s being offered to all students or all individuals with that card, that’s not an extra benefit, but if there was a gentleman on the street corner handing out t-shirts just to those who are student-athletes that would be an extra benefit. Those benefits are not just tangible items but they could be transportation, a ride out to the airport, a loan of money, any of those items for services could be considered an extra benefit. Any questions about that? I’ve kind of just been talking but certainly would be happy to answer any question along the way.
I think the last, these are a couple of examples of prohibited benefits. We do talk to our academic staff, our tutors and our mentors about all of this. Some of the typing services (wording) is still leftover in the NCAA legislation. And as I say we talk about our academic tutors, mentors, our academic staff about what they can provide from an academic standpoint. The question that always comes up is, are all of these academic services considered extra benefits? Technically maybe, but it is actually mandated by the NCAA that we provide academic assistance, we have to have these academic resources to help them succeed.
The last slide that I have is best practices, we get questions from faculty, from staff, from employees within the athletic department; these are 3 of the topics that we get asked about very often. Our student-athletes should not be asked by faculty members or staff to be placed on their pass list for tickets. It puts them in an awkward situation, puts you in an awkward situation so I just want to remind you of that while I’ve got the opportunity. Additionally autographs, there was one student athlete that was asked to autograph something for a Christmas present from her professor, that was a unique situation that put her in an uncomfortable situation, so we ask that you won’t do anything like that, and then birthday cakes and gifts. Our student-athletes are not permitted to receive cake, gifts, cupcakes, unless you are doing it for the entire class.
I did teach a class this semester, I gave donuts at the final. I don’t know if I was supposed to do that or not, but they didn’t rank me any higher because of that, but because I gave it to everyone, the two or three student-athletes that are in that class are permitted to receive that because I gave it to the entire class. But if it were something that were just given to one particular athlete on his birthday, or a cake or a card on her birthday, gift card, something like that, that would be impermissible. It would be an extra benefit.
That is the end of my presentation, I do appreciate the time. I am happy to answer any questions, but I also know how much our time matters and I am okay moving on. Great, thank you very much. [36:13]
Larry Crowley, chair: Our next presentation is from Constance Relihan. She is diligently working on student success in terms of a strategic plan. I have commandeered a booper for her, Melvin deputized me to begin so I feel comfortable.
Constance Relihan, Assoc. Provost for Undergraduate Studies: In a way this presentation could be titled “How I’ve been spending my year.” I am glad my boss is in the front row. As you know we passed the new Strategic Plan and the first goal, our first priority is to enhance student success, first by enrollment and under that is to emphasize student retention and achievement by encouraging and expecting timely degree completion and clearing pathways to student success. [37:24] Further down in the document we have some related strategic goals (SG1.A) improve retention and graduation rates to surpass regional averages for flagship public universities. There’s a metric effect that means increasing our rate from 90 to 94 percent. We also have strategic goal (SG1.D), develop a freshman advising center for undeclared students. We also have a document with certain strategic commitments that are related (SG1.SCA3), Regularly assess the effectiveness of academic advising; (SG1.SCB2), Revise first-year orientation programs to emphasize not only academic success, but also career and professional development; and (SG1.SCB5), Establish interdisciplinary degrees between various departments that focus on “gaps” in existing degree options. Those commitments goals/priorities lead me and the Provost to put together those 3 groups that you see listed there (Ad Hoc First Year Advising Center Committee; Ad Hoc Orientation Review Committee; Ad Hoc University College Committee) who worked this past year on developing recommendations that would address these goals. And the University Retention Committee, a standing committee, this past year also worked on developing a clear retention plan that would help address these goals.
So what I want to do is to present the recommendations that these committees have put forward. These are just recommendations. Nothing has been approved, many of the recommendations will require the submission of specific proposals to various standing committees and bodies, but it seemed important to get the ball rolling by having diverse groups come up with ways to flesh out certain elements of the strategic plan.
So the first group, Ad Hoc First-Year Advising Center Committee, you can see there the list of membership with a wide range involving faculty, administration, representative from facilities, administrators, students, met during most of fall semester into spring semester and these are to make major recommendations that they developed. They recommended Auburn move to allowing some students to choose to be “Exploratory” on their application to Auburn at Camp War Eagle. In other words, these students, if this recommendation were approved would not enter in any specific college but would enter outside of the college structure. These would be students who really don’t know what they want to major in, like many 17 year olds. Remember most of them filled out the application during the fall of their high school senior year.
Second one, Do not align these students with an existing College/ School or a “University College.” Third major recommendation, Provide intensive advising and career counseling for these students. The idea would be that you have low ratios, say 150 students per advisor, providing multiple advising sessions during the semester to help students choose a major. You would have a career counselor on site as well to help students take inventories assess their strengths and goals and help direct them. Then the idea would be all students in this program would be required to select at least a college if not a major by the time they have completed 30 semester hours. Get them in, get them advised, get them situated, is the strategy here not to be a dumping ground, not to be a repository for people who don’t know what they are doing, but to help students find their place. If students get into a major that is suited to them in their first 3 or 4 semesters, they graduate on time. If they are changing their majors in their 6th, 7th, 8th semester odds are that they are going to be here rather long. So we would like to help them get situated as soon as possible.
The next group that operated was the Ad Hoc Orientation Review Committee. Again a list of membership up there, a broad based group involving faculty, staff, administrators, advisors, and student representation. Again it met during the fall and into the spring to look at ways to improve orientation, which we took to mean the entire first year of a student’s experience dating from the time when the put down a deposit committing themselves to going to Auburn through the end of their first spring. If you work with freshmen you know that entire year is filled with elements of transition and orientation. It doesn’t end with Camp War Eagle.
This committee came up with number of recommendations as well. First off we need to provide consistent messaging to these students whether it’s coming from admissions, from a college, from Student Affairs, from any unit on campus. And that messaging is to emphasize the importance of getting in the right major, preparing themselves for what they are going to do after they graduate from Auburn, and getting out in 4 years. [43:26]
Just as a sideline, everyone thinks that students just don’t want to graduate in 4 years, I just met with the Camp War Eagle (CWE) counselors and by a show of hands, 80% of the CWE counselors this year are students who planned to graduate in 4 years, one of them said, “my parents won’t let me do anything else.” Which I thought was good. So there is a spirit out there among some of the students that graduating in 4 years is a good thing.
We want to require all students to complete a program such as Alcohol.Edu and Haven, which is an online program, to help educate students about sexual violence and alcohol issues, we are piloting that program with Student Affairs in UNIV courses this fall. [44:14] We also want, the committee wanted I should say, all students including transfer students to complete an orientation course, this is a tough one admittedly, we will come back to that. It’s tough because we cannot increase the number of credit hours students are taking and it’s tough because it’s…many are already taking an orientation course. So what we need to do is kind of hone in on what the specific elements are that we believe students need. The committee wanted that expansion because CWE comes and goes too quickly and students don’t remember anything. Students will tell you they have never been told that there is tutoring, they’ve never been told where the Medical Clinic is etc, etc. And we all know darn well they have, but it’s all just happened in a blur. So what we would like is to come up with an online strategy that would at least require all students during that fall semester even as part of the course or as part of a pre-advising protocol, go through certain steps that would make them find out where the learning commons is, find out where the career center is, do certain things to help get them oriented. [43:38]
Want to increase emphasis on academic issues, high impact practices, and major selection/career planning. Want to explore the possibility of creating a credit-bearing “Bridge” program for students deemed to need extra support to succeed during their first year of college. Perhaps students who are coming in as first generation students or students coming in with certain ACT/ SAT scores might benefit from having mandatory or at least strongly encouraged summer bridge experience. We might also consider some other recommendations permitting some students to be admitted on a probationary or conditional status. In other words some students who are at risk might want to say you do these certain things, complete the bridge, get a GPA of 2.0, 2.5, what ever Academic Standards wanted to set it in your first semester or you are out. Just another strategy.
Also want to emphasize the need to implement the Provost's expectations for advising, a memo that was sent to Deans last summer and I’ll get to that in just a second.(7/2013) Also want to implement a “finish in four” program to really encourage students to complete in 4 years. We will need to and have going forward a need to and we will refine what that means. There’s some finish in 4 programs that provide students with a financial benefit if they finish their degree in 4 years. There are some that are marketing and publicity based, there are some that permit students to get some kind of recognition at graduation, anyone who finished in 4 please stand up, that kind of thing. We’ll have to look at that. What Florida does is it charges additional tuition to all students who take more than 120% of the credits required for their degree as incentive to move on through. So that might be a possibility.
To go back to the advising expectations in case you may not have seen this. Last summer the Deans were encouraged to look at how advising is conducted in their colleges and strive, they are asked to reduce as a ratio so that all freshmen and sophomore students and transfer students can have at least one meaningful advising session per semester. A recommended ratio is about 400 to 1, which is a little higher even than the national recommendation that comes out of the National Advising Association. Secondly, collaborate in developing advising practices across campus to improve consistency and predictability for students in advising. Maintain electronic contact notes of their interactions with students (either in SARS or Degreeworks) to help students transfer from one place to another.
Colleges are encouraged to require their advisors to participate in campus-wide advising training activities that we started running once a month. And then colleges are asked to provide academic advising to all students on Academic Warning and all those coming back from suspension. Some colleges already do these things. But the orientation committee felt that this was really an important set of recommendations to help get first year students acclimated.
Thirdly we had an AD hoc University College Committee, again you can see the membership there, it’s broad based including faculty, staff, advisors, etc. The idea behind this was to accommodate the expansion that’s going on in Interdisciplinary Studies Program, to provide a home for some of the Distance completed degrees that may well be developed, and to help foster truly interdisciplinary programs that may be created in the future.
The committee made these recommendations; it should be led by a Director not a Dean; it should not have faculty. Interdisciplinary Studies, the distance “completer” degrees (as appropriate), and new interdisciplinary programs (both majors and minors) should be housed in the University College. The graduates of the University College (e.g., IDSC Students) should sit together at graduation, and be recognized from the platform by the Director of the University College. Just as an aside, for the first time this May at graduation, Interdisciplinary Studies students did sit together and it was really nice for them. They took up about a whole row. It is a program that is growing and right now the program also oversees the leadership minor, the sustainability minor, and starting in the fall, the cyber minor. So it’s a growing concern that needs kind of a growing infrastructure.
The committee recommended that the Freshman Advising Center not be a part of this they wanted to focus tightly on academic programs, they don’t want the University College to be a dumping ground for either programs that colleges want to get rid of or for students that the colleges want to get rid of. I should not have put it that way, but for weak programs or marginal students. Again, it should not include the Honors College, the First-Year Advising Center, remediation or retention centers, or distance education pedagogical support units.
Finally, the University Retention Committee, which is a standing committee, looked at everything that was going on this year and worked to develop a retention plan. There are a lot of things that obviously that we could do. There are a lot of elements embedded in the reports from those Ad Hoc Committees. The Retention Committee, I didn’t give you the membership here because it’s already available online, they voted to approve a 5 step retention plan which incorporates many elements that we’ve seen before. They supported the idea of the first year Advising Center for Exploratory students.
The second item is something new that we will be piloting in the fall with the colleges of Liberal Arts, Student Sciences, and Agriculture. What we’ll be doing is using the beginning college student survey of student engagement, BCSSE Data to help identify students who are at risk and then providing intensive advising for those students, to help keep them on track.
at CWE the Office of Institutional Assessment asks all of our CWE students to take the BCSSE. We’ve done it for 10 years or so, more or less, probably less. Eight years? Is 8 years right Drew? But we’ve done it long enough that Dr. Rena Johnson is able to analyze the data and make predictions on the likelihood of an individual student’s returning for a second year. And on the likelihood of the student’s GPA based on their BCSSE responses. So these target colleges this year are going to be using that date in helping interpreting and hopefully improve the odds of the students who are at risk.
Fourth item is to keep working on the Early Alert Grade program. Thank you all for your help with that. We’ve got one year’s worth of data, so we don’t have much at all in terms of documenting its effectiveness, but we can already tell that after those Early Alert Grades go out, tutoring visits go up. So that’s at least one positive response. We are going to keep gathering the data, hopefully to document that this is having a positive impact on student’s grades and ultimately retention. Then five, the University Retention Committee as well endorsed the Provost’s Advising Expectations.
So what is going to happen now is obviously these recommendations are just that. Many of them require various levels of formal consideration and approval and that’s the next step. So over the summer I’ll be working to get proposals in shape to submit the Academic Program Review in the case of University College, Academic Standards for some of the other elements, such as the “Exploratory” student classification and “Probationary” student classification. It’s a big process to implement these changes that we hope will have a positive impact on our student’s success.
I wanted to talk to you about them because I don’t want for there to be surprises and I don’t want anybody to feel that there is any effort to circumvent faculty involvement and faculty voice. This is what is going on thus far in terms of developing recommendations. If there are questions let me know now or here is my contact information, I am happy to talk with any of you about this later. [56:27]
Larry Crowley, chair: Thank you, Constance.
Is there any new business? Please identify yourself.
Wesley Lindsey, senator, Pharmacy Practice: It really doesn’t fall under new business. The question that came up after we already voted on the External Residency Fellowship Program but this is more appropriately for us to define but my question has to do with reading into it. it only applies to tenure track and tenured faculty, but not non-tenured faculty, such as lecturers, clinical practice, etc. So were those faculty not included in this policy with the discussion of that etc.? If they were excluded was there a rational?
Emmett Winn, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, not a senator: The committee did consider all of that because at Auburn lecturers, research faculty, clinical faculty, all of those non-tenure track faculty are actually on annual appointments. So according to the current Faculty Handbook they are not eligible for this.
Wesley Lindsey, senator, Pharmacy Practice: Thank you.
Larry Crowley, chair: Any other new business? Do we have any unfinished business? We’ll be adjourned. [58:08]