Transcript Senate Meeting
October 15, 2019
Nedret Billor, Chair: Good afternoon. I hope you are all enjoying the cool weather, it is really nice outside. Thank you for all coming.
Welcome to the October 15, 2019 meeting of the University Senate. This is our third meeting of the 2019-20 academic year.
We have some procedures we need to follow. First, if you are a Senator or a Substitute for a Senator please be sure you sign in on the Senate roll sheet at the top of the room and take a clicker. Next, we need to establish a quorum. We have 87 Senators in the Senate and we need 45 for a quorum. Please press A on your clicker to show you are present.
Let the record show we have 52 present (senators), so a quorum is established.
I now call the meeting to order.
I would like to remind you of some basic procedures for the Senate meeting for Senators and sustitutes. If you would like to speak about an issue or ask a question, please go the microphone on either side aisle. When it is your turn state your name and whether or not you are a senator or a substitute and the unit you represent. The rules of the Senate require that Senators or substitute senators be allowed to speak first, and then after they are done guests are welcome to speak.
The Senate is not a time for personal conversation with a speaker. Please limit yourselves to one or two questions, unless you are making a motion or an amendment to a motion before the Senate. For additional discussion you should meet with the speaker after the meeting.
The agenda today was set by the Senate Steering Committee and posted on the Web site in advance. It is now up on the screen.
The first order of business is to approve the minutes of the September 17, 2019 Senate meeting. Those minutes have been posted on the Web site. Are there any additions, changes, or corrections to the minutes? (pause) Hearing none, the minutes are approved by unanimous consent. Thank you.
I would now like to make a few remarks for the Senate.
As we all know, the University Senate provides an opportunity for faculty, staff, students, and administrators to participate in shared governance. As the Senate Leadership, we are FULLY dedicated to strengthening shared governance and developing an effective working relationship with the Board of Trustees and AU community. To that end let me summarize what has transpired:
Firstly, the University Senate leadership sent a letter to Wayne Smith, President Pro tempore of the Board of Trustees’, with a recommendation that the University Senate be directly involved in all stages of the selection process for our next president and be directly involved in his/her annual evaluation.
These recommendations were previously mentioned and endorsed by the Interim President Gogue at the August Senate meeting, and because of significance of this action I will restate them now.
I wanted to share this information with you.
Secondly, we are working with the BOT to develop a closer and more effective relationship. I, personally, will be meeting with President pro tempore Wayne Smith in November to do just that! We are now seeking input from everyone about this so please share your views with the Senate Leadership. Your input is very important to us!
In addition to this, we plan to upgrade the Senate Website and therefore, have formed an Ad Hoc committee to do that chaired by Chair-elect Don Mulvaney and consisting of nine members listed below.
Two steering committee members, Robert Norton & Jared Russell, Mark Bransby (Chair of A and P), Robin Jaffe, Charlotte Tuggle (Communications Editor at AU), Sara Wolf (College of Education), Laura Kloberg, Michael Baginski (past Chair), Trace Donald ( Office of Accessibility).
This committee is tasked with assessing what the needs of the Senate website are, evaluate the functionality and aesthetics of the current site (i.e., what are its shortcomings, what are the concerns commonly expressed about the site, what do we need to change?).
We also would like to anticipate likely future requirements (What are the goals of our future webpage – how to best serve the audience/stakeholders/subscribers, What features are needed, What information/messages are we interested in communicating/providing, What are some legal/accommodation requirements?). We will be sharing the developments on this task as they come in.
I also would like to make one announcement regarding Professional Improvement Leave.
Beginning October 25 through December 2, the Provost’s Office will accept Professional Improvement Leave proposals for the 2020–21 academic year. Proposals will be reviewed by a faculty committee appointed by the Provost, and awards will be made for professional improvement leave commencing Fall Semester 2020. More information about Professional Improvement Leave can be found in the Faculty Handbook. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask Amanda Malone, she is here at the Senate Meeting.
I would like to end my remarks by emphasizing one more time that we, the Senate Leadership, are the voice of you, AU Faculty, and we are fully committed to strong shared governance. You elected this leadership to be your voice. Our responsibility as the Senate Leadership is to assist your voices be heard. In order for us to accomplish this, we need your assistance in this mission.
The first item of business is some remarks from the Interim President Jay Gogue.
Dr. Jay Gogue, Interim President: Thank you. I appreciate the chance to be with you today. I want to cover just 3 things.
Number one, Drew (Clark) is here today and he’s provided some 15th day enrollment in data and will share just a few of them with you. The actual head count enrollment was 30,460 students, FTE numbers 27, 513, new freshmen 4,808. Then some other data that I was interested in; retention rate, first year retention rate is 91%. That is remarkably better than it was 10 years ago. Graduation rate 79%, ACT is 27.7 as I recall, SAT 1235. In the enrollment area I was just told today that the applications are nearly double what they were last year at the same date. So, a lot of things going on data wise that I wanted to mention.
Second thing I wanted to mention was the leadership of the House and Senate has called for a meeting on the 29th of October, which is the day we are scheduled for a General Faculty Meeting. They have invited, not invited, told us to show up, the President, the Provost, Kelly, and Drew and our colleagues from all schools in the state. The purpose of the meeting is to focus on, and I have visited with some of you, on outcomes-based funding or performance-based funding. So, that is what the purpose is and we will keep you apprised as we go forward.
I thought I might today on the third item, I visited with about 40% of the academic departments at this point, so, I thought I might share with you some of the general things that I’ve seen. The plan is when you get through the lists of things and see which ones of those make sense that we could possibly try to address.
Ones that get lots of comments; the new budget model, particularly the graduate student component; interdisciplinary related issues; and decreased cooperation. So, a lot of discussion on the new budget model. Re-award as far as grants and contracts, slowness with the IRB came up a number of times. One that I particularly enjoyed, we have something called e-cover on the forms that are submitted, one poor faculty member had to have 39 signatures before it would work for collaborative work, so kind of interesting. Animal care approval is still pencil and paper at Auburn but most schools are online. Post-award: actually had a case in which I am told that faculty were asked on an industry grant that the industry did not pay and they needed to go out an collect the money and become a collection agency. So, that was kind of interesting. To get some things approved I am told that a particular department had purchased sandwich bags and to get that approved they had to take pictures of the insect in the bag, where people didn’t believe that they were buying sandwich bags (for departmental use). So, kind of interesting stuff.
Heard about some work that was done for us at Yale University in which probably the unique analysis was 150 or so thousand dollars, they agreed to do it for supplies only, but Yale then refused to fill out the vendor form because they wanted to know all of the contracts they had with every state organization in the country and they (Yale) said that is more trouble than it’s worth, so we just didn’t pay them.
Some small mention so far, the Global students and English skills has come up several times. In-state travel came up and I thought I might could do something about that, but I found out that is a state law. But I did find out some creative things that people are doing. I had a faculty member tell me they had to go to Huntsville routinely and they really could not stay up there on $85 a night for a hotel and food and had to go several times a month, so they stay in Tennessee where you get direct receipts and come back. I mentioned to another group and they say every time I go to Tuscaloosa I have to stay in Mississippi. And I understand that when you go to Mobile you stay in Florida and come back. So, you are a creative lot out there.
Lot of discussion on differential ways that distance related courses are provided. Some units consider part a load some do not consider part a load, so some strong differences there.
Study abroad related programs came up several times about can you use scholarships for short term study abroad? According to them, we could not.
The most interesting one was, I stood up at one meeting, and I won’t tell you who it is, but they actually had ropes, and I said what is this all about? Apparently, there is no fire escape from their building, so General Burgess has got a charge to figure out how to get a fire escape in a building.
I will report back to you when I finish, but it’s been interesting. and I’ve learned a lot. Michael, I appreciate you suggesting it, it was a good idea. Appreciate it. I’d be happy to respond to questions. (jokingly, as he sees Michael stand) Michael, I don’t have time to do another visit.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: Thanks for the great remarks and thanks for doing those visits Mr. President. I’ve wondered about something for a long time, actually more than a decade, we have a very involved and scripted process in which a professor goes from assistant professor to associate professor. So, if a faculty member wants an upgraded title it is a long process and in fact ends with the Office of the President, right? So, you actually have to approve the promotions ultimately, if it comes to you?
Dr. Jay Gogue, Interim President: I think so.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: So, I was wondering if the same is true for administrators? That is, can you be in an assistant position and be upgraded to an associate or something else without any process or procedure or so forth? Can it just be done by decree?
Dr. Jay Gogue, Interim President: (asking someone in the room) I see no.
(? not at a microphone.) There is a process on the administrative and staff side.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: If I am an assistant dean, can I be reclassified to an associate dean?
General Burgess, Exec. Vice President: (not at the microphone) No, I don’t’ think so. On the administrative side of the house there is a process for anybody on the administrator side. Ultimately all those come to me for a decision. On the Dean’s side of the house, your side, all that is handled on the Provost’s side of the house. [18:03]
Dr. Jay Gogue, Interim President: Bill, do you want to comment? I guess the question is can an assistant dean be promoted to an associate dean without a process, is that basically what you are asking?
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: (off microphone) I guess so.
Dr. Jay Gogue, Interim President: Michael, I guess so.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: Now I know. Thank you.
Dr. Jay Gogue, Interim President: Are there other questions? (pause) Thank you.
Nedret Billor, Chair: We have a pending action item. Our Senate Secretary, Adrienne Wilson is going to present on revisions to Senate Committees.
Adrienne Wilson, Secretary: We have revisions for the Faculty Handbook, recommending revisions for 2 of the committees. The first one is Curriculum Committee, the second one is Lectures.
On the Curriculum Committee as discussed at our last year’s Senate meetings, since the University College has been merged into the College of Liberal Arts we no longer need a representative in the Senate Curriculum Committee. This revision would remove the University College representative from the committee description in the Faculty Handbook and it has been approved by both the College of Liberal Arts and the Faculty Handbook Review Committee. In the Handbook, it would read like this (on screen display) taking out one representative from the University College.
The Senate Lectures Committee was decided to be a little bit too cumbersome and the projects are not all that big, so they are now being referred through the Provost’s Office to fund those grants directly. Also, the Faculty Handbook Review Committee has approved this revision. All of this (referring to the screen display) will be stricken from the Handbook.
These are pending action items, so we are counting on you to be here at the next Senate meeting. They will come back as action items. Any questions? Thank you…and I am here for the next item. [21:07]
[21:43]
So, we have the results from the Senator Survey that went out in September. A special thank you to Greg Schmidt (oh, perfect timing, he just walked in the door) for setting up the Qualtrics survey, which would have taken me another year, not part of my work.
Our participant pool was 17 Senators and 58 individual members, as we had the option if anyone wanted to have more anonymity about their feedback, that they could submit the responses themselves. So, a total of 75 which gives us about a 5% response rate.
This is an overview of the issues that kept coming up through the survey whether is was Senator’s combined information or individual faculty. Salaries and the faculty annual review and the student teaching evaluations were the biggest. As you can see in salaries they continue to be below market value, compression inversion, inconsistency in promotion pay. Going on to the faculty annual review, again more inconsistencies, lack of transparency for some with no criteria, unfairness in salary determination and departmental politics playing a big role. [23:09]
The student evaluations of teaching: unfair, especially to women. From the Teaching Effectiveness Committee (TEC), we learned that last year, this undermines teaching rigor, faculty felt that if they didn’t coddle the students that would reflect poorly on them in the reviews. Inappropriate for determining merit pay and because these are now done online there is a very poor response rate. So, again, unfair in determining what actually is going on. This is still being worked on by the TEC so stay tuned.
Parental/family leave was another category. Feedback was lack of clarity in leave pay, it should match the state policy, lack of consistency, more options needed like flexible work options. The CLA policy was cited as being the standard for all and not enough info on FLMA rules. There is currently no formal leave policy at Auburn, but this is being addressed by the Faculty Salaries and Welfare Committee.
*An Ad Hoc Committee is focusing on the issue of parental/family leave.*
Gender Equity and Diversity. Disparity in equity, subtle and not so subtle discrimination against women, women’s invisible label service gap, gender pay equity needed. Overall the sense of lack of diversity among faculty and students and not enough diversity and inclusion training. [24:44]
Service. The number one reason for not being involved is lack of time. And then, no recognition for participation. We are discussing this and trying to get some buy-in all across campus that we are involved in faculty governance and cannot do this without buy-in from everybody, but also, we realize that not every department, not every faculty member is being recognized for their service and some feel they have been abused by being overloaded with service. Other feedback was, it’s a waste of time and basic indifference. [25:28]
Other issues that came up across the survey. A lot of the treatment of non-tenure track faculty, unclear about pay, committee work, recognition for contribution to the university and lack of grant opportunities.
Promotion and Tenure. There seems to be confusion and inconsistencies in policies across campus. And then concern about enforcement of Handbook Policies, retaliation was one of the bigger ones.
The Senate. The Senate is perceived as being neutral to positive to ineffective. More communication needed, Web site needs work, and that is already being addressed with the ad hoc committee that Chair Billor has already talked about. The response is less information items and more action items, bring more initiatives to the Senate floor. So, Senators, you can help with this and other faculty, staff, and students, again as Chair Billor said, we need everyone to buy-in to shared governance.
There is a sense of betrayal of shared governance if there is no transparency. For example, with the presidential search, communication with the Board of Trustees. The executive Committee, as Chair Billor has already stated today, is working to open lines of communication and transparency.
And last but not least, Parking. We know from last meeting, General Burgess presented on that, so stay tuned.
And thank you to all who have participated. Also, because we were a little disappointed, no, a lot disappointed in the response rate, so, Greg Schmidt has kindly composed a new survey that will go out to all of the faculty whether Senator or non-Senator. So stay tuned for that. Comments, thoughts, questions?
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: Does any Senator have any questions, comments, thoughts? ‘cause you are supposed to speak first. [27:50]
I did not respond to the survey so none of the things in there are related to, but I have a couple of questions to some items in your slides. You mentioned being unhappy with the new promotion raises, percentages, or something like that. What exactly is that?
Adrienne Wilson, Secretary: These are not our responses, this is the faculty response. So these are things that are coming up in various responses.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: So, we have a new policy in regard to promotion?
Adrienne Wilson, Secretary: There is policy being worked on.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: In the past is was like a fixed dollar, have we changed that now?
(? BH not on microphone) We have, I reported at the Senate some months ago. It’s 10% from assistant to associate, it’s 12% from associate to full. [28:51]
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: That is now uniformly enforced across the institution?
(? BH not on microphone) Correct.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: and you have to be actually promoted to receive that raise, right? Yes. So, it cannot be applied retroactively
Bill Hardgrave, Provost: not applied retroactively.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: I am just wondering, when you make a policy change, sometimes you grandfather or do other kinds of things. I am just saying, back when I was promoted I didn’t get 10%, so if you want to do it retroactively, I am all for that.
In some other comments I see something I brought up a number of times over the years at this microphone with the President, which is, the way raises were distributed, faculty annual evaluations, and so forth, and the order of them, supposedly by merit that we observe the institution and sometimes some interesting outliers, but I am wondering in general because you brought up at the end there about enforcement of policies and so forth. The university every year publishes written guidelines of governing the merit raises and supplements if there are. I am wondering if those are enforced? The written guidelines that are written each cycle and if that is some of the concerns that are being expressed here whether our written guidelines are enforced as written as they are published for each cycle?
Adrienne Wilson, Secretary: Part of the issue is that it doesn’t seem to be clear and consistent across departments
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: So, they are not enforced?
Adrienne Wilson, Secretary: That seems that that is happening.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: So, we don’t know if they were enforced or not?
Adrienne Wilson, Secretary: According to the responses. We don’t know what departments they are, we don’t know where they are coming from but there seem to be a sense that it was not fair and consistent across the campus.
Mike Stern, not a senator, Economics: Okay.
[31:16]
Roger Rice, architecture, not a senator: Hi, I am Roger Rice, non-senator, non-tenure track faculty in the College of Architecture. I think all professors deal with trying to get the best response rate they can. I agree with the speaker’s disappointment in only a 5% response rate. I will tell you that, I teach 3 or 4 classes a semester and when I have a very low response rate, really that doesn’t predict what the greater students actually want. For example, you have 17 senators and there’s 52 senators in the room. So, I think having people get together and talk about ideas about how to get a better response rate is a very worthwhile thing to do. Thank you.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Thank you. We have some information items. I know you don’t like information items, but we have to talk about them and I think these are important. The first one is on Field Trip Guidelines. I am very happy that these guidelines have been put out. Today, Cathy Cooper, Patrick White, and Jessica Covington, as a team they will be presenting. Cathy is the Director of Risk Management, and Patrick is the University Risk Manager, and Jessica is Safety and Health Program Manager. [32:59]
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Hi, good afternoon, thank you all for having us. We want to take just a few minutes today and go over our newly released resource, the Field Trip Guidelines.
No one knows better than this group the advantages that Field Trips bring to our academic programs. They greatly enhance the student learning experience. It allows students to maybe experience things first hand or acquire new skills or learn practical applications, but along with this there are risks involved. There’s the risk that we can’t always eliminate and that’s what the Field Trip Guidelines are intended to do.
They are intended to be a very simple resource that faculty can turn to, to help incorporate safety and risk management practices into your as you begin to plan your field trips. We did work on these in conjunction with the Provost’s Office and several other academic departments to be sure that your thoughts and ideas were incorporated. I do feel like they’re very simple, they include very practical, very manageable steps that anyone can include in their programing, but still include safety and risk management best practices as the core of the planning process.
With that Patrick is going to go over some of the key concepts of the document and some of the forms and checklists that are available.
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: Alright, I want to spend the bulk of our time today going over the actual Web site where all of the resources are housed, but before we get into those resources on the Web page that we developed I do want to go over what we are defining as a Field Trip.
It’s kind of a long definition there. Some key take-aways when you are trying to decipher is this something that we would call a field trip? Number one, is it off campus? So, it does need to be a journey or excursion away from campus. Number two, is it serving an academic purpose? And number three, does it involve students? If you meet all 3 of those criteria you’re most likely dealing with a field trip. Even if you’re not, it’s probably something that we would want to discuss with you if you have any questions regarding the nature of the field trip or some of the activities that might be taking place.
Things we are not considering a field trip are going to be more of your long-term activities away from campus. So, your internships, your practicums, coop education and service learning, volunteer activity, international travel, all of that needs to go back through OIP. One other exception that we did add after consultation with the task force is anything that is considered out of classroom laboratory experience of a routine nature. We know we have some departments across campus that are going in Lee County and doing out of classroom labs, such as Forestry and things like that. Those are not things that will fall under the field trip guidelines as we have on our Web site.
We will pull up the Web site so everybody can see it.
https://cws.auburn.edu/rms/pm/fieldtrip
As Cathy was going through earlier, the objective of this is to have a resource for field trip leaders and planners to effectively plan and execute a safe field trip. Anything on here that anyone has questions about or confused about, really what we want to happen is for people to reach out to us, so we can walk them through some of the considerations that need to be had with regard to potential risk associated with field trips.
Cathy, if you would scroll down to the bootstraps, these orange bars here is how we organized the information to get it to fit on one page. The meat of the information is going to be in the BEFORE YOUR TRIP section and there’s eight (8) items there. Another good thing we’ve done in our resources that I will show you later is that we have summarized this in a pre-trip checklist, so you are not having to go through all this information and internalize it. We have a checklist for you for things you need to take into consideration.
Basically, item number 1 deals with a notification to someone outside of your course that a field trip is occurring, at the dean or department level. In the course of that notification if it’s determined that you need to take a deeper look into something, you can always request a hazard assessment with Risk Management and Safety and we’ll go through and Jessica is going to speak to what that Hazard assessment entails, later. Just kind of walk through the different things that might be entailed in a field trip that you might want to be concerned with.
We want to make sure that we are orienting our students early in the semester, so they know there is a field trip happening. Especially during the drop/add period if that is something they would consider not participating in. We want to make sure field trips are disclosed in the syllabus. We can provide sample syllabus wording if you are looking for that.
Then item number four (4) is just making sure we have a list of participants and emergency contact information for those participants for those higher risk field trips to have way to contact the emergency contact should something happen on the field trip. [39:01]
Items 5–8 are really more informational than anything else. We talk about a waiver and when that might be necessary, number 6 talks about the hazard assessment that ? will cover, 7 really just touches on making sure students understand that they do have to abide by campus policy whether they are on campus or off campus during a field trip. Number 8 is just some more information about the CDC and some resources they may have with respect to insect borne or other types of diseases.
Our second bootstrap talks about accommodating students with special needs. It has some bullets points there on what a student can do if they do have questions on accommodations.
Our third bootstrap talks about coming up with emergency plans. We include a link to our accident/incident report if something does happen during an emergency on a field trip. [39:59]
The title IX Cleary Act came straight off that little card that the title IX people hand out with regard to who is a responsible for reporting and CSAs and that kind of information.
Transportation touches on the use of a university owned or rented vehicle, charter operators and then at the bottom we have a section about private vehicles on field trips (that we get many questions on).
The last section touches on medical insurance and personal property. And that goes for students that may be taking personal property on the trip and faculty that may be taking personal property on the trip that we may need to secure some extra insurance coverage on.
Down below that, under the bootstraps, we have our list of resources. We will touch on a couple of them. This is the checklist that I was talking about earlier. This summarizes everything that we talked about up in that orange area. It makes it a little easier to read and digest about the different things to go through when planning a field trip.
Student hand out, number 8. We’ve developed a handout to give to students early in the semester that summarizes the information that is on the Web site. We know it can be a lot for someone who is just checking out the Web site for the information, so this summarizes everything.
The other resource I wanted to touch on next is the hazard/assessment form and Jessica, our safety manage, is going to go through that with you.
Jessica Covington, Safety and Health Program Manager: Looking at the hazard/assessment form. This is a guide as a process to identify the hazard associated with the trips that our faculty and students are going to be on. Once identifying the hazards and seeing how we can mitigate that and/or eliminate that hazard. Like Cathy touched on before there are times that we cannot completely eliminate hazards, so we have to figure out what can we do to keep our faculty and students the safest while on this excursion to make sure they are still getting the full experience that’s intended with the field trip as a whole.
When you look at the form itself, it will give you several different prompts, basically looking at several different hazards. It’s going to prompt you to have a communication plan. If you are going to be somewhere that does not have cell service, going ahead and getting that plan in place before going out there and realize that you could have a potential problem, and how you need to notify individuals if there is an emergency.
Other different prompts: looking at the field sites. The travel distance, are you going to be walking, do you have students that have asthma? Their symptoms could be exasperated if they are going to be on this trip. How are you going to mitigate that should you have an issue there? Things you are going to be working on; are you going to be coming in contact with animals. Do you have to have PPE, certain vaccinations, etc.? Then also looking at the weather condition. Again, if you are going to be outdoors, having your plan from that standpoint as well.
We have identified a section for situational emergencies. If your car breaks down, what are you going to do? What will be your communication plan, how are you going to make sure you are taking care of your students? Basically, that is our whole intent with this hazard assessment is making sure that we are taking care of our students from the beginning and identifying the hazards that we can before we actually get out there to the field, if you will.
As always, as Patrick mentioned, if you have any questions about how to fill this out or if you need help identifying hazards, that is what our office is for, so obviously reach out to us and we can help you identify hazards and come up with a mitigation plan.
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: I can give you that Web address. It is basically <auburn.edu/rms/pm/fieldtrip> it will take you right to it.
Again, this was developed as a resource. We had a lot of phone calls, a lot of people asking for field trip resources. If anyone goes through this and has questions or sees things we might could make better, we’re open to field those suggestions and doing what we can to make a workable solution for field trip safety. With that are there questions or comments?
Brian Anderson, senator, Civil Engineering: When student organizations go on a trip to a conference or something is that considered a field trip?
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: It wouldn’t necessarily consider that an academic field trip. It kind of goes back to the specifics of the situation, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t use some of the same resources in helping that student organization go on that trip.
Brian Anderson, senator, Civil Engineering: I don’t know how everyone else feels, but I am not going to go on a lot of field trips because this is a lot for every trip we are going to do. It just seems like putting the burden back on us to, I might have 30 students that go on a trip, and all these medical forms and stuff, will push us back on field trips. We don’t’ get the support from departments to get vehicles and things, a lot of times we do take personal vehicles, just so we can. It seems like a lot.
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: I guess the comment I would have to that is we’re going to look at the level of risk involved. Really the only item that we really want to drive home is just notifying someone outside of the course like the dean or department head level, to make an (assessment) determination. If it is a high enough risk that we need to be doing these extra things. That we need to be doing a hazard assessment or things like that. If it’s just a trip down to Montgomery to a museum for a day, that is not something that will warrant a hazard assessment.
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: Now I am confused. Who makes the call whether we fill out one of these forms?
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: Again, this is a resource. It is not a…
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: So, we don’t have to do it. (laughter from room) I am just saying that (interim) President Gogue was saying we needed 39 signatures…you’re getting me to do one more thing is something I don’t want to do, and I don’t have time to do. This could be preemptively stopped if we don’t need it. Right? I am saying this…I am never going to take a student on a field trip, but I see someone else having to fill out this form, is one more thing we don’t need to do.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: And we completely understand that. That is why we did try and simplify it and make…
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: I just saw that form, it didn’t look simple to me.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: If you go through it I don’t think you’ll find it as cumbersome as you think it will. A lot of it is using common sense and thinking ahead. Having an emergency plan in place, letting somebody else know that you are going to be going on this field trip. We do need to remember that there is an expectation that we are considering the safety of our students and all participants.
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: Adults, right?
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: But we are directing their course work
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: We do need to fill this out if we go on a field trip?
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: Which forms specifically?
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: Any that you just showed us. No? We just need to tell somebody that we are going on a field trip?
Patrick White, University Risk Manager: So, they can make a determination as to any hazards.
Chad Foradori, senator, APP, Veterinary Medicine: We need that form. Okay. [47:53]
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: I actually teach safety and at the beginning of the semester we have a class where we do projects with different companies, so they are basically field trips. We don’t know where we are going to go at the beginning of the semester, it’s working with partners. How do we work around that? Do I just notify and say we’re going to go to places we don’t know yet? I know what my chair is going to do, essentially what you said, you don’t need to do it. We’re safety guys, we always do something, we always have somewhat of a plan in place, but this looks pretty onerous I think for most people who have not done a JSA or JHA and it seemed pretty comprehensive to me. Which philosophically I am not against but practically I think it’s going to curtail a lot.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Well, again I would really encourage everyone to really look at it an read through it. I don’t think it’s going to be a cumbersome as you think it’s going to be. The biggest thing is to let someone else know what you are planning an if it falls to the level of a medium or high hazard risk, then consider doing the hazard analysis. [49:12]
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: I echo all the comments indicated earlier. We do have field trips with our marine biology club and that’s going to set off alarms in your mind immediately because kids go to various locations, aquatic locations and marine locations, we go out to islands, we even go out aboard ships. When we do that we fill out the necessary safety forms that are required by that institution, but they are on site. For instance, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, if we go out with their ship we have safety materials we have to fill out with them. Again, if I am trying to handle 25 students going out on a, that would be a maximize size trip, going out on a trip on a ship and all this has to be fill out, that is a lot of stuff. [50:07]
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Well, it sounds like you are already doing a lot of these things.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Yes. That’s kind of my point. It would be downright idiotic not to.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Right. In that situation there is no need to duplicate efforts.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Okay. But there is the trip down there too?
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Well, okay, yea, are you looking at how that transportation is being arranged? Is it in university vehicles? Are the drivers…have they had defensive driving training?
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Yes, generally when students are driving, yes, they do have the defensive driving. So, we do look after those things. But this is wall of rules. Maybe if those which are the most important can be emphasized on the Web site people may actually follow the rules.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Right, and that is why we developed the short checklist that Patrick did show.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Okay. Thanks. [51:07]
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: So just to be clear, if you are doing like a carpool up to UAB to meet in an academic classroom setting or whatever, we don’t need to do this? Although it behooves us to have contact information, which we do anyway for all our people. It’s when we are going to go to industry or outside that we do have some plan. Another concern would be from a HIPPA standpoint, I can’t ask everybody what their medical conditions are, are you allergic to bees and all these sorts of things, I don’t know what kind of paperwork that’s going to take. Someone can volunteer that, but I can’t necessarily go ask that.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: That’s exactly right. They can volunteer that. Of course, if they divulge any information that is confidential we would have an obligation to protect that information.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: That there is a nightmare part for me, asking people…do you have a condition? How do they know unless you say specifically…I don’t…I heard someone say adults…at some point here’s the risk associated with going on this? It sounds like too, if you don’t put it in the syllabus then you can’t make them go on a field trip.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: What we’re recommending is that the students be advised that there will be a field trip in some details or information about the field trip early in the course. And the other thing is I think it is important to, and you probably do this already, is if a student does not want to participate in that field trip for whatever reason that you give them an alternative activity.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: Yea, a lower grade?
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Well there could be times where for whatever the activity is may be extremely frightful to them or reasons they don’t want to do it.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: If someone had a disability or couldn’t do it, but for the most part the field trip is a critical element for us for field training for safety and health. So, they have to be there, it’s in the syllabus if you miss one of these things, unless you are getting married or buried, those are reasons that you miss class, otherwise it’s a big chunk to their grade and they know that. They know going in, it is in the syllabus, but it sounds like we should also be formally notifying the dean and the chair of our department that there are going to be field trips in our class. And I don’t know what they are going to do with it. I think they are going to get inundated with it if everybody did this. So, what’s their determination? Is it done or…?
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: We are recommending that at least someone at the higher level know that there are going to be field trips. What you are going to be doing.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: Okay.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Somebody else needs to know that.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: Is there a form that we can do to cover our butt, because it seems like this is all about covering liability.
we didn’t do a form, but the item 1 on the Web site basically outlines the thing that you would put in the notification. It’s real simple, it’s just the date, the duration, the location, and the transportation plan. Just those 4 things would be sufficient notification.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: Okay.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Tony Moss again. But you know how organizations deal with this? They have waivers of responsibility. That’s how they handle it in the real world, and people don’t fill out massive numbers of forms. I understand your concern and I agree with everything I’ve heard here. It all makes good sense, but to be honest, anything that increases workload for the faculty I think is a mistake. We have way too much burden as it is here. It is one of the reasons that we lag, generally, behind other universities in productivity and functionality, you know. It’s a real problem, okay, so, adding even more to the workload of the faculty makes it even tougher.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Chances are you are doing a lot of these things already.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: We are not doing as much as you want.
General Burgess, Exec. Vice President: If I could, part of what you see today, I will not disagree with anyone in the room that what you’ve had laid out for you by the Risk Management side of the house, if I am sitting in your chair, would be considered somewhat onerous. Okay? We reviewed our policies because most in this room ought to know that 2 years ago we had a field trip. I am the individual that had to talk to both parents. One parent of a student who died on a field trip and the other parent of the student who has come back to Auburn. When the parents request, they only had one request was; have you, Auburn done everything you can to ensure that our children are safe when they are out on these (field trips)?
So, we’ve done what we consider best practices. We’ve gone out and taken a look, we try to be inclusive in terms of doing that. We’ve laid out some guidelines. Also, to be sure, our insurance carrier had a lot to say about this at the end of the day. Whether our rates were going to go off the charts or whether our insurance was going to be cancelled, and therefore you wouldn’t be able to do it. We are also trying to provide protection for you at the end of the day because the focus in some case, focus down on the particular entity, the professor and the college. So, yes, I don’t disagree with your comments on it. Some of it we are having to do, you can call it CYA if you want to. It is following best practices and we’ve laid it out there realizing that it’s going to put the burden on you, but it’s in reaction to an event we had specifically happen here to us on a field trip.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Thank you General Burgess for those comments. And the one thing I will add to that. We did develop this as a guideline. It’s a resource, it’s not policy. It’s a working document, we can change it so as you all look through it if there are things that we can add, change, or delete from it that you feel would be beneficial, we would be glad to entertain that. [52:42]
Roger Rice, not a senator, Architecture: I would comment that a lot of the comments we’ve heard are college or school specific. In the College of Architecture, they really jumped to help us on this kind of an issue. So, it’s a question of what your college has been doing in the past, it is hard to get your college to change what they are doing. So, for me I am in an easy position, they would do most of this for me, all I have to do is tell them we want to go to this log mill to tour. For some colleges it is very hard because there has been no administrative help. So, it is hard for the professor to change what his college has been doing.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Thank you. We’ll be glad to work with any department that would like maybe some special hands on assistance. We just got back from the Rural Studio in Newborn, AL reviewing their safety program and we will be helping them to make some changes in their processes.
Rich Sesek, senator, ISE: Just to reiterate again, obviously, I teach safety, I am not against safety in any way. My feeling is, what I want to see is that there is support for this. I think, in my group it’s not so hard. It’s like a JSA, JHA, we can do this. I am looking at my colleagues here that don’t have that. And if they don’t have the administrative support as we have just heard, then it becomes more difficult. No one wants anybody to get hurt. It seems a lot of times like there is a wall of bureaucracy that flies up and I am dealing with that in a lot of other areas right now. How do we streamline that, how do we get help? Because my feeling as a faculty member is that often I find out if there’s a rule because they think I broke it. Rather than when I ask questions as to what are the rules on this? I am waiting months to hear a response, how do you interpret this? As soon as I do it because I haven’t heard anything, they say, hey you didn’t do this right. Here’s eight e-mails trying to find this out, so, I think that’s the concern that people have. Is there support, is there help, is there someone who could hold their hand and help us do this at least the first time? Having a form is a starting point which is good, but I think that’s the thing that is missing. My group, we’re a special case. We are going to do this because we are safety. But I think everybody else is going to view it as an extra burden.
Cathy Cooper, Dir. Of Risk Management: Well, Risk Management does stand ready to help in any way that we can. If we can help facilitate getting a program going or getting processes going, we will be glad to do that. [1:00:18]
Nedret Billor, Chair: As Cathy actually emphasized, and these are guidelines, and still they are working on them. I think they are open to suggestions and please, feel free to contact them. Okay, and it’s important, thank you.
Our next presenter, Patricia Hartman and she is a Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian and she’ll be talking about Auburn University’s ORCID U.S. community membership. [1:00:57]
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: Thank you all for being here. I am one of the science librarians, but I am here today on behalf of ORCID, I am Auburn’s ORCID Ambassador.
So, how many of you, I would just like to get a show of hands quickly, how many of you are familiar with ORCID? How many have an ORCID ID? How many of you have one that you voluntarily created? Okay, so a few people weren’t forced to get them but it seems like most people get them because they were forced to. Hopefully, today I am here to convince you of why ORCID is important, what their mission is, and also how integrating the Auburn systems with the ORCID API will be helpful to you. And less paperwork.
Basically, ORCID is a registry of persistent unique identifiers. They are, it is basically like a social security number for you as a researcher. It is in machine readable format, so it can connect between all different types of systems. So, you’ve got publishers and researchers and universities, granting agencies all of those can work together to use this type of information. I would like to point out it’s an open non-profit organization. They are not trying to use your data to make money or anything like that. They just are trying to streamline the scholarly communication environment.
The call themselves the plumbing for scholarly communication. They see themselves as sort of the underlying infrastructure for all of that. Their vision though I think is really lovely, a world where all who participate in research, scholarship and innovation are uniquely identified, and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time. I don’t know if you can see this on the screen, but they’ve got all of the repositories, publishers, universities, etc. [1:03:22] listed on there.
ORCID has a huge global presence. There are over 6.6 million ORCID IDs out there and that number is constantly growing. The highlighted countries are all national consortia, but there are organizations and individuals with ORCID IDs throughout the world.
The number of Auburn ORCID IDs has consistently grown over time, we are now at about 1600 ORCID IDs but it’s, yes, as you can tell it keeps going up every year. Probably not all of these people are still here, but they still have that Auburn address affiliated. As I mentioned it’s often required that’s the main reason why people get them. Particularly by journals and publishers, so it is going to become more likely that you’ll get one or you will need to get one as 80 publishers have already signed on to require ORCID IDs at the time of submission. And others are making them optional and are probably going to make them required pretty soon. But I do think there are some other compelling reasons for why you might want to get and ID. This is actually a real paper, 38th author with the last name Wang on this particular paper. That is an actual example and you can see on here the list of highlights of authors on that paper. In addition to having shared names it also has a number of other benefits. One obvious one is if you publish under different versions of your name, so maybe you use your initials on one paper and maybe you use name on one, if you publish in different languages or sometimes you have an accent on your name then that is not necessarily…if you are searching a database it’s not necessarily going to find every version of your name. So, if you want to make sure you are recognized, your work is identified as yours that is an important way of doing that. Also, if you name changes your ORCID ID will stay the same.
It also goes with you anywhere you go, so it’s not for just while you are here at Auburn, it’s something you will have until you retire, or after that. It’s not just for article either, you can include all different types of works in there. Sometimes you would be surprised at the long list of things, musical scores, of course there are things like programs, grants, software, all kinds of stuff that you can put in there. So, it is really interdisciplinary. I think a lot of times people think that it’s just for journal articles.
Most importantly I think it increases the discoverability of your work, which means that your work will more likely to be sited. Which I think we all know is an important part of academia and success. It is searchable in databases. Even if you backfill your articles, your ORCID ID you can search easily by ORCID ID like in Web of Science. I did that recently with a faculty member and we could immediately pull up all her articles because we had populated her ORCID profile. And it’s under your control, so people can see what you want them to see about your work.
Funding agencies are beginning to require it more and more and this is something that can be really helpful to you. I just heard several comments here of people being tired of filling out paperwork. If you grant NSF or NIH permission to access your ORCID profile it will automatically pull in all of your works for you. You are not going to need to enter all of that information again. So, it is very handy in that way. It also can communicate with publishers. They can pull in your information when you publish a new article that is related to that grant it will automatically do that and you don’t have to worry as much about reporting and they don’t have to pull your teeth to try to get that information. As I mentioned, more time working, less time filling out forms. That includes with the university if we integrate with the ORCID API, which I will mention in just a second.
It is very easy to add existing work to your profile. I am putting together a tutorial right now to make things a little bit easier on you, but you can import through google scholar. That’s probably the easiest way, but if you have researcher ID you can pull things in through cross ref. It’s a pretty simple straight forward way. I know people who have tons and tons of work already, we at the Library want to help you. We are starting to ask people who find that overburdensome just send us your CV and grant permission for us to access your ORCID account and we can help you populate your ORCID profile.
It also has benefits for research institutions and that’s why we are starting the conversation about integrating with the ORCID API. It’s very similar, in parallel with the benefits to individuals. Again, within the institution you still have a lot of people with the same names, so that is going to help you disambiguate one person in one department from another. It will help you assert trustworthy names with the university. So, if Auburn can access you account they can ensure that it’s Auburn that is represented consistently throughout, for instance if they are trying to show institution impact they can make sure that it’s consistently represented and then easy to pull in that data.
Again, as with other researchers it can help save time and reduce the administrative burden on the university because they are trying to pull in all of these manual productivities. They don’t have to ask you for it if we integrate with the ORCID API, they will be able to access it themselves.
We are members of the U.S. Community Consortium and 88% are R1 institutions, so, it’s a pretty big group. There’s something like 110 growing organizations within here. As members we have access to some benefits that we are not taking advantage of right now that could be really helpful to all of us. You can see there are lots of organizations. These are just in the U.S. that are already in the process or have integrated with ORCID APIs in different fashions; 58 of those are R1s, some of our SEC compatriots are also in the process or have completed various types of integrations. We can use it if we can create and connect some of our institutional accounts we can take advantage of a few things. If we do it through identity management then it would probably be through banner, then the university would be able to pull data directly. So, rather than needing to ask you all every year for information about your publications, presentations, everything else it would be able to pull that information automatically from your ORCID profile.
it is going to result in more reliable meta data. That is one thing I’ve heard from administrators, they are going through in some cases looking at Excel spread sheets, fixing things by hand. That is definitely a lot of work when you think about all the research going on here. You can display it in the directory it can automatically be updated on individual profile pages.
We would also like to integrate it with our digital repository, ARORA, and that would make that more available, it’s indexed in google scholar. That would be another way of promoting that and also ETD, the electronic theses and dissertations. It would be a helpful way for you all to track graduate students after they leave, you could easily go look at their ORCID profiles and see what they’ve been up to since they left here.
Sort of the holy grail would be integrating with the grants administration software, where basically the funders, the researchers, the university would all be talking with one another and there should be less paperwork involved for you all.
Right now we’ve got some administrative support, the Vice President for Research and the ADRs have signed off on this and said we are ready to go forward with OIT and ask them if they would start exploring the process and coming up with a code that would allow these things to work together. Hopefully we’ll have a test case for that fairly soon. As I mentioned the Libraries would like to support you however we can. It’s going to take some time to get this all going, but we want to help you populate your CVs and help spread the word about ORCID and why it will be important to you all. Hopefully continuing in the future. It’s getting bigger and bigger all the time.
That’s it, thank you. Do you all have any questions for me? [1:14:45]
Monique Laney, senator, History: While you were talking about this I remembered that I had just seen something from the College of Liberal Arts asking us to fill out and give information also on our research to connect people more. I was thinking, wow, are we duplicating efforts here and I wasn’t sure if you could speak to that or if you know anything about it, or if there needs to be more communication about it also that these kind of things work together. Do you know what I am talking about at all?
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: This was in the department of History?
Monique Laney, senator, History: No, the College of Liberal Arts basically asking, I think everybody in the college, to contribute, to basically add their research to a database that they would then essentially manage. I may have misunderstood all the details and there might be somebody here who knows more about it. but my point is just, I feel there are lots of people asking me and my colleagues to do this sort of thing, which I think is great, but it sounds to me that maybe that needs to be known even at a higher level, not just senators and professors but actually at the college level if they are doing things like this.
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: That’s why we’re gradually trying to spread the word on this and how it can be helpful. ORCID is in the process of creating universal CVs. So there are lots of different ways. I think the main thing, at least from people I’ve talked with, the most successful ways for ORCID integration to happen is for people in all aspects; administrators, faculty, colleges to all get on board and recognize the benefits of what it does. We are trying to get the word out there and hopefully it will spread.
Monique Laney, senator, History: Thank you.
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: Any other questions?
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: What are these APIs that you are referring to? You said that there were several that…largely I get the impression that we are mostly not using them.
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: Right. We are not using them at all and it…
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: What are they?
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: Oh, application programing interfaces. It’s where ORCID can connect with our systems and exchange information. Does that make sense?
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Yea, but I don’t understand the context in which
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: We could do it on a few different points, like one of them would be through Banner and that would allow for that exchange between…it’s just a matter of coming up with the current code and there is a lot of existing code out there to be able to do it, but we would be able to access individual publications, in real time, but also harvest them every year.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: Other than stockpiling or warehousing the information then, is this something that we can use to search with? Or make other connections? Cause ORCID mainly pulls information together basically in a warehouse of information that can be accessed?
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: Yes.
Tony Moss, senator, Biological Sciences: But, does it allow us to reach out and find other information as a search tool or something of that nature?
Patricia Hartman, Biology, Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, and Math Librarian: It’s more of just a registry. It’s where you can add your works to, like research gate through there. I’d love to talk about it more. Anything else? Hopefully you’ll be hearing about it more soon. Thank you all.
Nedret Billor, Chair: Thank you. This will conclude our formal agenda for today
Is there any unfinished business? Hearing none,
Is there any new business? Hearing none, I now adjourn the meeting. [1:19:22]