ACADEMIC SENATE MINUTES

(Approved)

 

April 17, 2002                                                                                     Volume XXXIII, No. 16

                                                                                                                                                           

Call to Order

Chairperson Curt White called the meeting to order at 7:00 p.m.                                                         

 

Roll Call

Senator Crothers called the roll and declared a quorum.

 

Approval of Minutes of April 3, 2002

Motion XXXIII-123: By Senator Mitchell, second by Senator Albrecht, to approve the Senate minutes of April 3, 2002. The minutes were unanimously approved.

 

Chairperson's Remarks:

Senator White: As you are all aware, this is my last meeting as chair and I have a lot of thank yous, if you will indulge me for a few minutes. I certainly want to first thank the Senate secretary, Cynthia James, for her hard work over the last three years. She is really substantially responsible for the quality of work that I was able to do and I think that we owe her a round of applause. I really want to make a point also of thanking President Boschini and Provost Goldfarb for the way in which they have worked with me over the course of the last three years. It was really very constructive and actually a lot of fun working with them. I also want to thank the staffs of the President and Provost, Jill Call, Georgia Bennett and Nancy Hiltibidal, in particular, for being so kind to me on the fourth floor. I want to thank the deans as well. I also want to thank the members of this Senate and Senates over the last fifteen years. I will look back upon the years I have spent on the Senate as being my richest experiences here at Illinois State. I thank you all very much for the way in which you have worked with me and for the friendships I have because of the Senate. In relationship to tonight's business, I want to thank the Faculty Affairs Committee for the extraordinary job that they have done with the Non-Tenure Track Faculty Report. This report is one of the best reports I have seen in my time on the Senate and it in some ways brings me full circle. When I first joined the Senate, I thought that it might be a place where I could do something about non-tenure track faculty and their role within the University.

 

Vice Chairperson/Student Government Association President's Remarks:

Senator Bathauer: We have been busy these past few weeks transitioning and getting the newly-elected members acquainted with the student government. Some of the new students members are in the gallery and I wanted you all to recognize them. They will be seated on May 1st. To those of you not returning to the Senate, thank you for a great year and for those who are returning, we are looking forward to working with you all. The SGA will be electing its assembly officers this evening after the faculty caucus, so we will forward those names onto the Senate, as those are the students who will sit on the Executive Committee of the Senate.

 

Administrators' Remarks:

·        President Boschini: Tomorrow evening at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Center, we will have the installation our newest Distinguished Professor, Dr. Butler.

 

·        Provost Al Goldfarb: Excused Absence

 

·        Vice President of Student Affairs:  Excused Absence

 

·        Vice President of Finance and Planning: Excused Absence

 

 

 

Committee Reports

·        Academic Affairs Committee

Senator Borg: The Academic Affairs Committee did not meet this week. However, I would like to thank the committee members for the work that they have done. I am especially pleased with the student involvement. This has been the best group of active participants that I have seen in my years on the Senate.

 

·        Administrative Affairs and Budget Committee:

Senator Wells: We met this evening to just to tie up some loose ends and to pass on recommendations to the next iteration of the Administrative Affairs Committee. I would also like to thank the members of the committee, particularly the student members, who participated very impressively.

 

·        Faculty Affairs Committee

Senator Deutsch: Faculty Affairs met this evening to finalize the Report on Non-Tenure Track Faculty. We have worked very hard on that, but most of the credit should go to Senator El-Zanati. It is coming up as an Advisory Item this evening. I would like to thank the members of the committee for their hard work and I would like to say farewell to Senators Chang and El-Zanati who are leaving the Senate and the Faculty Affairs Committee.

 

·        Planning and Finance Committee

Senator Kurtz:  Planning and Finance has no report. However, I, too, should like to take the opportunity to thank the members of the committee for their work, particularly during the fall semester. It was a particularly difficult and even brutal semester. We were meeting two hours every week during the entire semester and the eyes of the campus were on us. I think the members of the committee worked extremely hard, with good humor and even I would say courage to carry out our charge. I want to extend particular thanks to the Provost's staff, Georgia Bennett, Jan Shane and Betty Chapman, who took notes for us and who kept track of the oftentimes extremely complex discussion.  Also, thank you to our student member, Adam Corelli, who attended every single meeting and was always a voice of reason and sanity. On a personal note, I would like to extend my thanks to my good friend and colleague, Curt White. It has been an enormous pleasure working together over the years and we have stood together in many a difficult time.

 

·        Rules Committee

Senator Reid: The Rules Committee met this evening at 6:00 p.m. We, hopefully, made final revisions to the academic freedom and ethics document, which we have been working on all semester. I also want to thank our committee. It has been an enormous amount of work this year and there is a lot that we didn't get done; but we spent the semester meeting every week working on the integrity in research and the academic freedom documents. These are really important documents. The academic freedom document will come before the Senate in the fall.

 

Illinois Board of Higher Education-Faculty Advisory Council Report

Senator Crothers: We met on April 5 at Rend Lake Community College. The meeting was mostly dominated by a discussion on how the University of Phoenix has come to Illinois and what implications it has. One of the IBHE staff members joined us to talk about how programs are approved in the State of Illinois. Private and out-of-state institutions, who wish to offer programs in Illinois, are essentially evaluated under Illinois law as kind of a consumer protection process. The underlying variable is 'do you get the education you are paying for?' Once they meet that standard, there is very little to prevent a program from coming to Illinois. Toyota National University is seeking to offer programming in Illinois. It seeks to admit 20 students a year, has an endowment of $100 million and is likely to be approved.  The Career Education Corporation is apparently buying private campuses in Illinois and offering programs in Illinois. In some Illinois programs, private schools are 'grandfathered' and don't have to go through any approval process at all. The city colleges of Chicago have privatized almost all of their support functions through, interestingly, a contract with American Express. The competition is pretty intense. Also, apparently, there is the problem of buying fake degrees on the internet; some of these degrees are actually from Illinois State University. The State is trying to tighten those standards. The next FAC meeting will be at Eastern Illinois University at the end of this month and future senator Ken Jerich will be my substitute there.

 

Action Items:

04.01.02.01     Integrity in Research and Scholarly Activities Policy Proposal (Rules Committee and Faculty Affairs Committee)

Senator Reid: I would like to ask Pat O'Rourke, Chair of the University Research Council, and Nancy Latham, the Assistant Director of Research, to join us in this discussion. We went over the document in reasonable detail at the last Senate meeting, so I am not going to repeat it. If you have any questions about the content of the document, please just ask those questions.

 

Motion XXXIII-124: By Senator Reid, second by Senator Crumpler, to accept the proposed Integrity in Research and Scholarly Activities Policy.

 

Senator White: Can you clarify where this policy will be located?

 

Senator Reid: I believe that it goes into the Policies and Procedures Manual.

 

Senator White: Is there a section of policies and procedures that is relevant to research conduct or ethics in the Faculty Ethics and Grievance Policy?

 

Professor O'Rourke: There is a current policy on misconduct.

 

Senator White: Is that policy in the Policies and Procedures Manual?

 

Ms. Latham: No, the current policy is not in the manual, but that is where it should be.

 

Senator White: Does this document replace a section of the Faculty Ethics and Grievance Policy?

 

Ms. Latham: No, the current policy is very brief and refers to Ethics and Grievance Policy and the Student Code of Conduct.

 

Senator White: The Senate should understand that should this policy be approved, it can be found at a later date in the Policies and Procedures Manual. I do want to comment on the document. It seems that definitions of misconduct lend themselves to certain areas and to certain disciplines more than to others. What would a failure of integrity and research in scholarly activities in the fine arts look like or does this document simply not relate to the fine arts?

 

Senator Reid: Fabrication of data could apply to the social sciences or the hard sciences. Plagiarism could apply to all areas.

 

Senator Borg: In the fine arts, there are distinct areas in which we evaluate ourselves. One is more traditional, research-oriented writing in which we share all of the responsibilities that the humanities generally do. The other area is called creative activity, to which I think Senator White is referring. To the extent that creative activity is not precisely research, I do not think that we have these definitions clearly embodied in the evaluation of a fine arts.

 

Senator White: Since we do usually group creative activities and research together in other documents, are we consciously excluding creative activities from the scope of this document?

 

Prof. O'Rourke: I consider research to be a creative activity and many times, what we call creative activity includes research. Over the last year, this document was made available to those that do research and those that are involved in creative activities and there were no specific problems brought up that would not be covered by this document. If there is such a category, then we should consider adding it to the document.

 

Senator Reid: There is always going to be an interpretative problem here, particularly in creative work, in terms of quoting. It is going to be up to the judgment of the committee.

 

Senator White: It might have been forward thinking for this document to reflect that.

 

Senator Orlando: I think all of these concerns could be addressed simply by stating that if it can be proven that there has been a copyright infringement, then it is obviously a violation of the policy.

 

Vote on Integrity in Research and Scholarly Activities Policy: The Senate unanimously approved the policy.

 

01.29.02.02          Student Code of Conduct-Draft 9 (SGA and Academic Affairs Committee)

01.29.02.02A  Recommendations from Academic Affairs Committee

Senator Bathauer: We have looked at the changes to draft 8 of the document and have accepted those changes, which appear in draft 9.

 

Motion XXXIII-125: By Senator Bathauer, second by Senator Albrecht, to approve draft 9 of the Student Code of Conduct.