Transcript Senate Meeting
August 25, 2015
Larry Teeter chair: I am Larry Teeter, chair of the Senate, this is our first meeting of the academic year. I’d like to welcome everyone to the Senate. Some of you are returning members and some of you are here for the first time as a Senator and if you are here for the first time and you don’t understand the protocol, it’s to sign in at the back of the room and make sure that you get a clicker. So if you haven’t picked up a clicker, go get one of those right now and then also make sure you test it. If you test your clickers now we can exchange them before the actual vote. Try the power button see if it lights up and if it does it should be good. I am not familiar with using clickers, we don’t use them in our curricula very much, but I understand that you can’t vote more than once on the clicker, but you can change your vote, so if you happen to hit no and you meant to hit yes, go ahead and hit yes and it will record that second click. [It records only the last click.]
Some of the general procedures of the Senate: if you’d like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go to the microphone and wait to be recognized then state your name, whether you are a senator and the unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first, after the senators have had a chance to speak guests are welcome to speak as well.
The agenda for the meeting today was set by the Senate Steering Committee, it was sent around in advance and is now shown on the screen. So if we would now please come to order we would like to establish a quorum, there are 86 members of the Senate a voting quorum requires 44 senators. If you are present and a senator or substituting for a senator please press A on the clicker. Okay we do have a quorum to at least proceed.
Our first item of business is approval of the minutes from the June 16, 2015 Senate meeting. These minutes have been previously posted on the Senate Website, are there any additions or changes or deletions to these minutes? Do I hear a motion to approve the minutes? A second? All in favor please say aye. Opposed? (none) The motion carries. [3:28]
Our next agenda item will be comments from President Gogue.
Dr. Gogue, President: Thank you Larry, I echo your words of welcome we are delighted to have each one of you back. I hope you had a productive summer. I want to mention a couple of things to you. Number one, since we last met together there has been a special legislative session, it focused on the General Fund. There was discussion on the General Fund about whether or not monies would be taken out of the Educational Trust Fund, which is part of what obviously funds us. That session closed with no action. What that means is that in the General Fund area there will be another special session probably called between Labor Day and the end of the year that would allow those non educational agencies within the state of Alabama to receive funding starting October 1. [4:22] So no change at all in our budgets at this time.
Second thing I would mention is Dr. Large and a group went through and looked at certain bonds the university had and we were able to do some refunding on the bonds it’s a favorable economic sort of thing for the university. I think the important thing for us that don’t really understand completely all of the bond aspects of it would be that you have to go through the rating agency. So you have to spend time with Standard and Poor and with Moody’s and they ask a variety of questions, they are interested in the stability of your Board, they are interested in your enrollment numbers, they are interested in how many kids want to come to your institution, they are interested in your graduation rate, they are interested in what you are doing in economic development, they are interested in what you’re doing in terms of a comprehensive campaign, a variety of issues and I am happy to say we got a favorable rating from both of those agencies in terms of where the university is and so feel good in a time in which the economics are still somewhat shakey out there. I think the net present value on the bonds you sold is about 3 million? 37 million, so that was good news for us. [5:33]
Third thing I want to mention to you and you may have read about in the last month or so, there was an article or two from Vanderbilt that focused really on the cost of audit and compliance work. If you recall, I don’t know Vanderbilt’s budget, but they indicated they are spending about 150 million each year on compliance and audit. They carried it forward and said on every student if you broke it down on an addition to tuition is about 11,000 plus dollars, just to meet the requirements on the Federal side and the compliance area in terms of the way you manage your money and the way you conduct your work. Our folks would tell us we are somewhere around 80 million dollars in compliance cost at Auburn. So there is an effort for us to try to look at audit and compliance in a different way. Try to be more strategic in what we do and certainly more comprehensive. So you will probably see some organizational structural changes to try to look and see if there is any way that we can do a better job and get the most for the resources we have to spend in that area.
The new budget model that’s been discussed now for a year and a half or so, in the last few days I have received a recommendation from the Provost and from the Executive Vice President, so hopefully by our next Senate meeting we will be in a position to have additional discussion of where we are on the new budget model.
The final thing I will say and it’s just really a thank you to faculty everywhere. The comprehensive campaign that we have underway is moving very nicely. We are around 800 million dollars toward a one-billion dollar goal. I think Don always reminds me to tell you that it’s about 450 million in real cash. So a lot of activities in that area but certainly a team effort across the campus and I appreciate everybody’s work. Be happy to respond to questions if you have any. [7:32] Thank you.
Larry Teeter, chair: thank you Dr. Gogue. The next item on the agenda are remarks from our Provost, Dr. Boosinger.
Dr. Boosinger, Provost: I’d like to thank all of you that participated in Convocation for helping that event get better every year. A special thanks to the Convocation Committee that tweaks that process and gets the students off to a great start. We estimate over 90% of our students participate in Convocation and it’s very impressive to sit in the arena and look out at the incoming first year class. Probably over 5,000 of them in the arena, all arranged by college and ready to get off to a great start. Thanks again for all of you that helped with that.
I wanted to update you on 2 things. We talked in the past about the strategic hiring initiative of cluster hiring is what we’ve been calling it from the beginning, a reminder this was a very inclusive faculty driven process. It started last fall, there were numerous forums. Through those review processes it got narrowed down to 5 cluster areas that are going to strengthen our research programs and I think do great things for the university. It’s built around the idea that the colleges and schools will make a commitment to hiring in a strategic way. If you are in one of these clusters the university will provide 33% of the support for those individuals, so everybody is investing in this. Colleges and schools are investing the hiring process will follow our normal pattern, but there will be a line with these priorities. The 5 cluster groups are: health disparities, omics and informatics, pharmaceutical engineering, climate health and earth systems, and scalable energy conversion science and technology [9:51] We had a final meeting yesterday, approved those budgets, so those search processes will begin shortly. Many of you are very much aware of this because looking around the room a lot of have been involved in this process since last fall. Thank you for your good work on that.
Finally, I just wanted…and item on the Committee for Intercollegiate Athletics, they meet in September, because Mary Beaudreaux has announced that she is going to retire this fall one of the agenda items will be to elect a new chair for the CIA. Does anybody have any questions for me?
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you, Dr. Boosinger. In know everybody is busy and we do have quite an agenda today, but I do have some remarks that I would like to start the year off with. First I’s like to introduce our officers; Dr. Laura Plexico is our secretary; Dr. Xing Ping Hu, who is not here, but she is our secretary-elect; Dr.James Goldstein is the chair-elect he will take office next July as chair; Dr. Patricia Duffy, our immediate past chair, serves as a faculty representative to the Board of Trustees, and Dr. Bob Locy has volunteered to be our parliamentarian this year. I’d also like to introduce our helpful administrative assistant, Laura Kloberg. Ms. Kloberg assists us with all of our Senate meetings and keeps us on track throughout the month as we approach the meeting, what documents need to be delivered to her and what agendas need to be in a presentable form so we can put them up on the screen and not be embarrassed.
In addition to Senate meetings, Senate Steering Committee functions between times via its committees, so the Steering Committee sets the agenda for the Senate meetings and also acts for the Senate in any matters that come up between meetings. Steering meets on a regular schedule which is posted on the Senate Web site along with the committee’s agenda and minutes. Steering committee includes the Provost, 5 Senate Officers, and 4 additional faculty members. These additional faculty members are Lisa Kensler, Sara Wolf, Emily Meyers, and Kevin Yost.
The other important committee is the Rules Committee. The committee on committees, Rules is responsible for providing nominees to Senate committees which then go to the Senate for final approval, and faculty nominees to the university committees for central administration for approval. Rules Committee includes 5 Senate Officers and 6 additional faculty members elected by the Senate. These faculty members are Vicky Van Santen, Rusty Wright, Peter Stanwick, Dan Mackowsky, Jada Kohlmeier, and Evert Duin. Rules has been very busy this summer and you will be shortly be asked to approve some additional nominations to Senate Committees. The committee structure is an essential part to shared governance at Auburn and I would like to thank everyone who is serving or who has served on Senate and University Committees. Early in the spring we send out a call for volunteers so please consider volunteering at that time.
A few remarks relative to Senate meetings in general, it is important that all senators attend all senate meetings, if they can’t they need to send a substitute from their unit. There is a constitutional rule that if a senator missed 3 consecutive meetings with no substitute the unit will be asked to elect a new senator. So it’s import for Senators or their substitutes to sign in so we know you are here. As I mentioned before if you’d like to speak, go to the microphone, state your name and whether you are a Senator or not, and your academic unit. Although everyone is invited to speak, Senators should be allowed to speak first. In addition we would ask that people please limit their comments or questions to no more than 4 minutes at a time, people may speak again but if anyone wishes to speak a second or third time, please be sure others have been able to speak at least once first. I am always happy to hear from members of the faculty or the broader Auburn community, if you hear about someone who wants to talk about a faculty issue just give me a call.
At this particular time are there any questions or remarks for the chair? Okay, we have 2 action items today, the first is approval for nominees for the Senate committees sent forward by the Rules committee. Although we have approved most of our new committee members last spring some committees still need new members so we have additional nominees. Dr. Laura Plexico will make the committee report. [14:58]
Laura Plexico, secretary: When we have these vacancies the Senate Constitution asks that Rules Committee find and nominate members for those Senate Committees. The list of committees are on the screen and their nominees, I hope you’ve had a chance to review it. It has been posted on the Senate Web site. This is a motion coming from a standing committee of the Senate so it needs no second. Is there any discussion. Hearing none I will now ask if you approve the slate to press A, and B if you do not. A=61, B= 1. [15:49] The motion passes.
Larry Teeter, chair: The second action item was held over from the June 16 meeting when we failed to have a quorum. The proposal is from the University Writing Committee to add a Graduate School representative, and it’s because of language in the Constitution that requires all Schools and Colleges to have a representative but it was never implicitly understood that that included the Graduate School. So now we are going to explicitly recognize that. Margaret Marshall will make the presentation. [17:00]
Margaret Marshall, co-chair, University Writing Committee: It’s actually pretty self evident because of the confusion about whether the Graduate School counts as a School or College we were told that we could not continue to have a Graduate School representative, but the Graduate School has been represented on the University Writing Committee for its entire existence as it was on the Faculty Taskforce that established the Writing Initiative to begin with. You might remember if you were here in 2010 when we presented the formation of the committee and the Writing Initiative was endorsed by this body, the question was asked well and good for undergraduates to be encouraged to write and for departments to focus on improving undergraduate writing, but what about graduate students. And you urged that we do things for graduate students as well. So we in fact have developed a whole slate of programs for graduate students and for graduate teaching assistants and many of those are a result of the review and the process of the University Writing Committee that has included both a student (graduate and undergraduate) and a member of the faculty of the Graduate School.
While we were making this change to make sure that a Graduate School representative continued on the committee we thought we should clean up some other inconsistencies in the language, that’s why we’ve changed the director or designee from first year composition to match the director or designee of other continuing units that are represented on the committee. And because our committee has never voted on anything we arrive at consensus, we thought we could drop the language about non-voting members. So that’s it. [19:00]
Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication and Journalism: I am wondering if where it says Colleges and Schools it needs to say separate schools? I ask that only because Communication and Journalism is a School technically, but obviously we are in the College of Liberal Arts, so we’re not the kind of school you are referring to but I wondered if you want to put separate in there to distinguished from the few units that have the title school?
Larry Teeter, chair: We have talked about a general cleaning-up of the Handbook and the Constitution to address that issue probably with language like, degree granting schools, but we weren’t ready to do that at this time. I think we could go with this at this point and then clean that up when we do all of the rest of the committees.
Well this is a little bit different situation than our last vote. It does imply a Constitutional change and requires a two-thirds vote of the entire Senate so we need 58 positive votes for this proposal to pass. So if you fire up your clickers, press A for a yes vote and B for a no vote. A=64, B=3. The proposal passes, great. Thank you very much.
We have one pending action item brought forward for today by an Ad Hoc Committee on Developing new policy on Copyright. This item is just going to be introduced today, next month it will come forward as an action item for you to discuss and vote on. Our presenters are Sara Wolf, Bruce Kurten, and Jan Thornton.
Sara Wolf: Thank you. I’d like to introduce Jan Thornton for those of you who may not have become familiar with her yet. She is the director of the Office of Innovation Advancement and Commercialization, formally known as Tech Transfer and Bruce Kurten who is the director of the Media Production Group.
One of the things that we were charged to do was to examine and revise the current university copyright policy. The people who are on that committee ; Jan and myself are co-chairs; Betsy Gilbertson who represents the Biggio Center; Bruce Kurten, Don Mulvaney from Animal Sciences and he is also representing the Teaching Effectiveness Committee; Bob Norton from Poultry Science, who just had an interest in it; and Andrew Whorley representing the University Libraries. Like I said we were charged with reviewing and revising as appropriate the current AU Copyright Policy. [22:39]
The rational for doing this; most importantly our current copyright policy was last updated in 1984. I will go ahead and say I was in High School in 1984 so it needs some updates. The United States has entered into some significant international treatys since then. Major changes to the copyright law have taken place and so it’s time to look at it again. Also, not up here, but Jan was the chair of the recently updated patent policy which is closely related to this policy as well, and that was updated in 2012. Also there has been an increase in distance education efforts on campus and that has some copyright implications that just right now don’t fit very nicely into our current policy and also we felt it important to bring the university into compliance with Federal Law. One of the aspects that quite frankly we are not doing right now is a really good educational effort for faculty and staff dealing with copyright, that’s something that’s important.
So as we looked at the current policy what we noticed is first of all it’s inadequate. It’s inadequate because it fails to address many common questions that arise, it’s extremely out of date, and it also fails to address the use of copyrighted material. [24:04] It does address the production of copyrighted materials, but not so much the use of copyrighted materials.
The efforts that the committee did were to revise the policy into two separate documents, one for the production and one for the use of copyrighted materials. We looked at other policies across other institutions and it’s basically 50/50 on how they handle it so we chose the two separate document route. We are today showing you the draft of the creation of copyrighted materials policy. It is just a draft, it has not gone through all of the specific administrative steps it needs to go through in order for it to be a firm policy. But the policy on policies says we need to get information from all the various constituents, so that’s what we’re doing.
The use of copyrighted materials policy is still in development, it’s about 50% of the way finished, and then one of the other things that the committee determined would be important would be to establish a Web site on campus that could be used for people who had some basic questions about copyright. Jan’s office has agreed to host that. She’s even agreed to have interns to be the ones to put it together and we will supply the materials and everything. That way units like, who ever wants to, the Biggio Center, Libraries, Grad School, Colleges, can just link to it that way.
So in a nutshell, and the policy has been linked to the Senate Web site itself if you want to have the document to read, but in a nutshell here’s what we have done. First of all, in general, as is current in the policy, Auburn University disclaims copyright ownership to the scholarly works of what professors do. The university is not interested in the copyright for your Journal articles. That is pretty standard across the country. However, there are certain circumstances in which the university would share, possibly own copyright. One of them is when those duties are a part of your assigned tasks. Okay there is still some murkiness about how you define what your assigned tasks are, but for instance, Bruce in his role as the director of the Multi-media Group, he doesn’t own the copyright for the materials that he creates, the university does.
Other places where there might be sharing of copyright is if you are creating copyrighted materials under the auspices of a sponsored agreement, a grant, a contract, or something to that effect. In that situation, whatever the terms of that grant or sponsored agreement says, would control the ownership or the sharing of copyrighted materials.
Patentable Works. Patentable works fall under the patent policy. Sometimes patentable works also have copyright associated with them and so if you are one who creates patentable works you’re going to be in those 2 worlds. And then if you are creating copyrighted materials and you are relying heavily on university support, and that’s beyond the Library, beyond air-conditioning, beyond power, beyond your regular computer and things like that then the university would probably share ownership in some of the copyright that you are doing.
So in a nutshell, that’s basically what the university or the current policy says. So the determination though of substantial resources that our policy suggests is that needs to be written down in writing, both parties, the university and the author need to have that in writing prior to the completion of the project or the dissemination of that project. Because what we want, and this was a big recurring theme, was we want both parties to come to the table ahead of time to negotiate the terms of what’s going to happen. Too often things happen after the fact and then somebody’s upset. [28:15]
So, everyone is worried about getting paid, right? We’re going to make money, we’re all going to write best-sellers. So if you have not used substantial university resources, again, any royalties or re-numerations that result from that, they are yours. That ten cents on every copy of the book that you sell, that is your dime. If the university has not invested substantial resources they also don’t have any claim to ownership, which means you are in control of how it is distributed how it is reproduced, things like that. Where Auburn has committed substantial resources there would be a sharing of those re-numerations, and absent a written agreement to the contrary, that sharing would be 50/50, the university and the author, after the university recoups its investment. Does that make sense? So we have to pay back the university for what they do for us and then we share what we do 50/50 with the rest of the money that comes as a result.
That’s it in a nutshell. We are happy to answer questions. Any questions that have to do with the law itself I am going to defer to Jan because she actually is the attorney who helped us with this. [30:00]
Dan Mackowski, senator, Mechanical Engineering: I don’t know if this is relevant but is it okay for a student to video a lecture and then sell that video? Can I copyright my lecture material?
Jan Thornton: You can copyright your lecture material. The student is actually creating the work that you are talking about and he would have that right unless you said that that is not allowed in your class and that would be my…
Dan Mackowski, senator, Mechanical Engineering: So if I ? circles is he on board?
Jan Thornton: If the lecture contains materials inside, take a picture of it, you have copyrighted the minute you put the chalk down or the dry erase marker down, but what they are doing is creating a separate work. So you’d have some copyright interest in what they are creating. I am assuming you don’t want them to do that. I wouldn’t.
Dan Mackowski, senator, Mechanical Engineering: And it does happen.
Jan Thornton: My thought is that you would make those decisions and would be rules of the class from the get go.
Sara Wolf: You asked if that student could sell that?
Jan Thornton: Oh, sell that. If he sells that you have had your copyright infringed. It won’t stop them from doing it, but then you will have some rights.
Ed Youngblood, senator, Communication and Journalism: I am trying to wrap my head around substantial resources. If you have a semester leave to write a book, is that substantial resources?
Sara Wolf: Right, our current policy has a definition in there that says things like sabbaticals or release time are not considered to be substantial assistance. The revised policy also has it as a defined terms portion where that definition is in there. Substantial assistance, Bruce can you tell them what…
Bruce Kurten: Yes, sure. A good example of substantial assistance would be if you came to my unit and we spent $50,000 creating a distance course for you, that would be substantial assistance. Where the dividing line is, is that what we are doing is we are fixing your work in tangible form, so that the moment the work is fixed in tangible form then it is copyrightable. If the university makes a substantial investment in fixing work in tangible form the university may have a claim on that work.
Sara Wolf: Other questions? Thank you. [32:48]
Larry Teeter, chair: Now we have 2 information items. The first will be presented by Dr. Emily Myers and Susan McCallister. They will be talking about the Green Dot Bystander training program.
Susan McCallister: Good afternoon. I’m here with Emily Myers to share some information with you about a very important initiative that we are going to be implementing on the Auburn campus starting this semester. I am sure that over the last year or two you have all seen something in the news, probably lots of things in the news about sexual violence on college campuses. It’s risen to a national level of attention all the way to the White House, we’ve had some actual legislation that’s gone through regarding this and some proposed legislation, but we know that this is something that is very hard to put our arms around. We know it’s hard to define how much this is happening because a lot of incidence of sexual violence, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking are not reported. Even though it’s hard to fathom the magnitude of this, the statistics from the CDC and other organizations show that this is happening at really an alarming rate. For example, one in three women and one in five men will be a victim of violence at the hands of their partner sometime in their lifetime. Probably all of us can sit here and say, wow I can’t even imagine that’s accurate, but when you start doing this work you start hearing stories and realize that it is accurate.
So how do we address this? Our past methods have been doing things like lecturing about consent and doing consent campaigns and targeting men as potential perpetrators and those have not been effective. So what really is more effective is getting bystanders involved. The Green Dot Bystander Intervention strategy is a way to empower everybody on campus to take simple positive actions to change our culture.
So what exactly is Green Dot? Green Dot is a violence prevention strategy. It was developed at the University of Kentucky and it is specifically intended to eliminate sexual violence, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking. The goal is to create that campus culture that emphasizes everywhere that we do not tolerate violence and that everybody has a role in preventing it.
This initiative is being coordinated through Student Affairs through Eric Smith’s office. He asked me to come speak for him today because he had another commitment, but the Office of Health Promotion and Wellness Services is spearheading this. There are a lot of other departments on campus that are also collaborating. It’s very hard to put numbers on bystander intervention, there is not a lot of research about it, but there is a 5-year CDC study that found that Kentucky high schools that implemented this strategy had a 50% reduction in sexual violence and a 40% reduction all other forms of power based personal violence. So the strategy we’re using has been adapted for college campuses and you can imagine what that could do here for us, so we are really excited about it.
Why is it called Green Dot? If you look at a map of our campus and you think about whenever there is an act of power-based personal violence, someone doing harm to someone else or a behavior that could lead to that, you think of that as a red dot. That might be someone arguing in a parking lot. A boyfriend and a girlfriend and a girlfriend strikes the boyfriend, or it could be someone following someone to class and waiting for them until the class is over. It might be a husband and wife arguing in a parking lot and someone threatening the other, it might be a fraternity party where someone is pushing drink after drink on somebody that has already had enough to drink. You notice the fraternity is in a field because I am not going to target any fraternities, it’s just an example. It could be any bar downtown, where someone slips something in someone’s drink. It could be in a residence hall where someone is making unwanted sexual advances, or at the library, somebody texting someone else repeatedly when they don’t want to receive those texts. So you see this is kind of indicating that prevalence of power-based personal violence on our campus with these red dots. But what if we turned those into positive interventions? And that’s what a Green Dot is. It’s someone stepping in doing some action that’s very simple to change that dynamic and eliminate that Red Dot.
So in that first example it could be that a bystander oversaw the argument and stepped in before the girlfriend struck the boyfriend. Or it could be that a classmate stands up to the professor and says somebody’s been following Jane and they are standing outside the door, I think that’s kind of sketchy. It could be somebody stepping in when the husband and wife are arguing or telling their friend that it is not appropriate to be sending text messages to somebody who doesn’t want to receive them. So you can see, giving a friend a ride home if they’ve had too much to drink instead of leaving them in a potentially vulnerable situation, and that’s what the Green Dot behaviors are.
As we develop that culture these Green Dots start taking over and we no longer have the Red dots and we become more and more covered in these Green Dots. And it can be proactive too, like I am giving a presentation today or spreading information about bystander intervention through social media and eventually we have a campus that does not tolerate violence. So that is the goal with the Green Dot strategy. [39:30]
So what’s our implementation plan, how do we do this? Earlier this month 45 people or so were trained as instructors, they are from all across campus we even had some people from the City of Auburn from the Police Division that participated, which I was really excited about. So next is identifying peer leaders. If you know of students who are peer opinion leaders, please let Eric Smith know so he can get in touch with them. We’re going to give bystander training to those peer leaders and then they’ll have the tools to go out and actually start implementing this type of behavior in their day-to-day lives. Simultaneously we are educating faculty and staff, like we are doing here today, and then in late October there will be a public launch associated with Green Dot to make it a campus wide initiative.
So that is kind of the strategy of what we are doing and Emily is going to talk about how faculty can get involved.
Emily Myers: My name is Emily Myers and I have been teaching here at Auburn, this is my 28th year so I have been in contact with many, many students over the years. My personal interest in this topic would be making the campus climate a more, calmer climate, less violent climate, less subjected to bad things happening. None of us want bad things to happen to our students much less ourselves. I have a 19-year old daughter who’s currently a semi-freshman/sophomore in college and it would kill me to think that she would be a victim of some sort of violent act of any kind. I guess over the years I’ve had probably 30 students talk to me about having been the victim of some sort of personal violence or having a close personal friend or family member be a victim. So it does happen. Many of you probably have not encountered that, nor would you want to encounter those sorts of events. So this type of program is meant to get ahead of the curve, do some preventative work, educate ourselves as faculty members so we can be there as supports for any students that want to become bystanders and we can become proactive bystanders or Green Dots ourselves. So some of those things that I plan to do: I teach a community organization course, it’s a senior social work course. I’ve got teams of students that identify needs in the community. I’ve got two teams that are going to become trainees or trainers for Green Dot Bystander Intervention and they in tern will educate some of the campus leaders to go out and make this sort of culture change happen quickly and then assess whether or not to the degree we can assess violence on campus whether or not is has decreased over the course of the year.
No this event at the end of October is the Old Miss game, and it’s going to be really green. So if you want to wear green and you don’t feel like you are a Tulane fan or something else, this is the Green Dot thing that we’re going for.
So what can you do as faculty members aside from the kind of thing I’m doing? You could invite someone who is trained in this to come to your faculty meeting and give a 10 minute presentation like this about how new faculty particularly can get up to speed and become supportive Green Dot folks. You could also host a faculty lunch and learn, you could put a tag line on your e-mail which says somewhat like Susan’s tag line; “At Auburn we do not permit violence.” You could offer extra credit assignments or assignments around this issue. You could be mindful if you see some distressed student in your class and reach out to them and try to connect them to the appropriate resources. Which brings up, how many of you know about the appropriate resources on campus? Well, every single department on campus was given at least 2 of these booklets which is the Title 9 Resources and Information for Support for Addressing Sexual Misconduct booklet, which has the numbers for every possible resource related to sexual violence on campus. I brought some extras here, you can download them from the EEOC Web site, or Title 9 Web site as well, or you can call Eric Smith directly at the Health Wellness and Promotion Office. His number is 844-1528. And Eric Smith’s Office will do something really cool. If you have to be away from class, not that you’d ever be away from class, but let’s say something happens and you have to go present a paper somewhere, well you can call or get online with the Health and Wellness web site and there’s a program called “Don’t Cancel that Class” and you can ask someone from Eric’s shop to come and actually teach your class and they can do a presentation on this very subject. [44:58] Or whatever subject you want, I’ve had them come in and talk about alcohol prevention and treatment in my addictions class. It’s kind of up to you but if you need ideas you can got to Eric. Safe Harbor now, which is where victims typically are sent is open 24/7, which is a very new deal and that’s a great thing because we know many of these incidents happen after we’ve gone home.
I hope that you will consider getting involved in the Green Dot movement, you might even get one of these magnetic green dots you can put on whatever name tag you may wear, but more importantly we want to see positive change at Auburn. So thank you and answer the question before you leave here, “What am I personally going to do about this?” Did anything we said resonate with you that’s going to make a difference and do you have any questions for us about how you can get involved? Nope? Okay, see you dressed in green at the end of October.
If you need one of these, I will put them in the back if you didn’t get access to one.
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you to Emily and Susan. We have one more information item today. It’s on a new OIT Server Policy currently being implemented on campus and will be presented by Bliss Bailey. [46:39]
Bliss Bailey, chief information officer: Short notes, I had considered because you made really great time we can go into great detail on how to secure Windows 2010, 2013 servers, talk about Windows 2003, the sun’s setting we’ve got 4 different versions, there’s a Linux we can talk about, or we could do something that makes more sense for this group and I will talk about a general overview and talk about ways to get more information about the work that we’re doing to address security policy.
It’s really a matter of striving for balance, it’s certainly possible for us to write a set of security policies and guidelines and best practices that will completely secure and lock down your systems so that research is just about impossible to do. And if we do that we will have failed. On the other hand, we could find ourselves in a situation that Penn State is in where they were contacted by Federal Agencies and learned that outside folks have been in their engineering research network for a couple of years. All of their intellectual property has been stolen. The integrity of the relationships with 500 research partners are now in question. Somewhere there is a middle ground that’s appropriate for us. In fact there is more than one middle ground and that’s one of the challenges here because the policies and practices that we need to put into place need to be appropriate for the kind of research data that we’re dealing with.
So as I speak with the School of Pharmacy and we talk about Health data with personal information, naturally the kind of security we need to put in place is going to be different than the kind of security that’s necessary in a field where we are dealing with publically available data and producing results that are going to be very generally published. So it’s a different world and we need to make sure that the security measures that we put in place and the policies that we enact are appropriate all across that spectrum, that we apply the right level of security.
Let me just take a moment to define a server. It will be general. It’s any device that can be accessed over the network and which provides some sort of service. That may be an authenticated service where you need to log into it with a user ID and password or it may not be authenticated, like a Web server. You go to a Web server, you don’t necessarily need to authenticate but you get access to data from that machine. I am not talking about remote desktop access. Many of you access your desktop computers from home or from remote locations. We’ve got a separate set of security measures in place to help protect that access, so your desktop computer doesn’t fall into the realm of server for the purposes of this discussion.
Generally, these servers are used by researchers for computational purposes or possibly to store or provide access to research data or results. Then of course there are a lot of administrative servers that are used for the administrative purposes. Policy needs to apply or be able to be applied based on the sensitivity of the data across the entire institution.
Now there’s a rumor that one of the goals of this policy is to eliminate all faculty run servers and that is not the case. The real goal of the policy is to ensure that the servers that are on campus are secure, so we don’t end up in that Penn State situation.
In spite of my willingness to talk all about Linux and Windows servers, this is probably not the forum to do that, but there are a couple of opportunities to deal with some of these issues in a little bit more detail. One of them is a Faculty Research Committee, Thursday, September 17 at 10 0’clock I a going to be meeting with the Faculty Research Committee. One thing you should know is I am not on this committee, I am a guest there, I cannot invite you to this meeting and this is not an invitation to this meeting because this is not my committee. But it is to let you know you are all represented on the Faculty Research Committee and it is to let you know that there is going to be a more detailed discussion of these issues related to server security particularly as it relates to research data at that meeting. I suspect that one of the outcomes of that meeting will be to set up some open forums or opportunities to speak and really dig into the nuts and bolts not only of server security but the policy that goes around that.
There’s one other venue that may be of possible interest to you as it relates to research and the data that you create and that’s coming up at the Faculty Research Symposium September 30. There is going to be a session on research data management. If you get a grant from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, USDA; more and more granting agencies are requiring you to write a data management plan. Part of that relates to how are you going to protect this data, how are you going to preserve this data, how are you going to make this data and the results available to the public in the future? That’s not just an IT issue there’ll be people from a variety of different units on campus including the Library. The Library tends to be pretty good at organizing, curating, and classifying access information. So they will be playing a large roll in that discussion as well. If you are interested in that research data, what we do with it in the long run, how we store it, take care of it and protect it, then that’s another opportunity.
So, Faculty Research Committee which will probably result in an open forum or more and that Research Data Management session at the Faculty Research Symposium. Are there any questions?
Larry Teeter, chair: Thank you Bliss.
Is there any business? Unfinished business?
Hearing none, we’re adjourned. [53:28]