Academic Senate Minutes
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
(Approved)
Call to Order
Senate Chairperson Lane Crothers called the meeting to order at 7:00 p.m.
Roll Call
Senator Crothers called the
roll and declared a quorum.
Attendance and Motions
Approval of Minutes of August 31, 2005
Motion XXXVII-5: By Senator Parette, seconded by Senator Alferink, to approve the Senate Minutes of August 31, 2005. The minutes were unanimously approved.
Chairperson's Remarks
Senator Crothers: Please welcome a new faculty member to the Senate, Senator Adel Al-Bataineh from C&I. The remaining senators from Arts and Sciences will join us shortly. I want to compliment the students who organized the relief event yesterday for Hurricane Katrina victims. To have raised well over $30,000 in 48 hours was extraordinary and also to have embraced and accepted so many new students late in the semester is something that we ought to be very proud of. This campus has truly distinguished itself for its student activism.
I want to thank the President for the State of the University Address and the question and answer session yesterday. I think that it was useful to have the President interact with the audience to give people an opportunity to raise whatever questions and concerns they might have with the President. Additionally, I need to thank the President for his prompt action in resolving a situation involving amplified music and speech for a commercial organization selling its career services. This was amplified speech and music directed into a classroom building, Schroeder Hall, during a class day. This was a clear violation of the Amplification Policy, which this body reviewed and updated last year and was originally passed in 1982.
Senator op de Beeck: You mentioned the hurricane relief. A faculty member asked if there is any sort of program set up for professors who are working with these students who are now on campus.
Vice President Mamarchev: We have a total of 18 students who were displaced by the hurricane, who are now enrolled at ISU, and our staff is communicating with them. True to our core value of individualized attention, we are responding to individual needs. We are in communication with the local Red Cross, which is ready to help people with specific situations. We have talked to a lot of the parents of these students and told them about the various services and answered specific questions for them. We are planning to have a mini orientation activity for them to further welcome them to campus.
Senator Crothers: I think Senator op de Beeck was asking if there is any effort underway to help the faculty deal with these students.
Provost Presley: Not directly, but indirectly; we are making sure that the University College advisors and the resource people have the names of these students and are contacting them.
Student Government Association President's Remarks
Senator Garrison: Last Thursday through Sunday, nine members of the Student Government Association attended the National Student Government Association Conference in Washington, D.C. where we attended various conferences and lobbied for education bills. Overall, it was a productive trip. If we learned anything, we learned that Illinois State University’s shared governance system is one of the best around. We saw many students, as well as faculty, who had no say in their various governing bodies. On Thursday, we were relaying messages about how Redbirds 4 Relief was going. When we were discussing this with the various members who attended the conference, they were amazed by what were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. We were thanked directly by Senator Durbin’s office for our efforts and he was amazed that we were able to raise over $30,000. I would like to thank the students, administration, faculty and staff who all helped to set up that event and also those who donated money. Lastly, we are continuing to work on our tenant-renter petition. This week, productive talks have started with various rental companies. Hopefully, by the next Senate meeting, I will have a formal proposal and solution to present.
Administrators’ Remarks
· President Al Bowman
President Bowman: I, too, would like to echo the thanks both to the students who organized the Redbirds 4 Relief effort and to the faculty and staff who helped us accommodate students who needed to move to another institution. The situation in New Orleans is still terribly chaotic, particularly in terms of higher education. Dillard University has announced that all of its financial records have been destroyed. Students who need refunds so that they can transfer to other institutions will have to wait until they sort that out. Two of the students that we admitted last week are from that institution. Tulane is not offering refunds now, but will offer them to students who chose to not return in the spring. The fall tuition presumably would be moved to cover the spring tuition. I have had some e-mails and phone calls about how we are handling tuition for these displaced students. We made an institutional decision to charge these students in-state-tuition, regardless of the fact that their home residence may be out of state. We also decided to allow that in-state-tuition to remain in effect until they leave ISU. We did not decide to offer free tuition and fees as some institutions have. We did not feel that it was something that we wanted to do, given our budget situation.
Last week, there was an awful
lot of generosity on this campus. An event I attended on Saturday really brought
that home. The ISU Habitat for Humanity Chapter is one of the most active in the
country.
They had a groundbreaking ceremony on Saturday morning for their 11th
home. The chapter is made up of students, faculty and staff. The houses are on
the corner of Fell and Vernon.
Over 350 freshmen in the fall 05 class had an ACT of 28 or better and 115 had ACT scores above 30. These are students who could go to just about any institution in the country and that they chose to come to Illinois State University says something about our academic reputation and the quality of our academic programs.
Since Dr. Bragg is not here this evening, I will mention a couple of items concerning facilities. The Stevenson-Turner project is still in the design-engineering phase. The construction funds have not been released. At this point, we don’t need them in hand because we are still doing the design work. A decision has not been made on which of those buildings will be done first; facilities people are still grappling with that. There is a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on to try to get planning money for the fine arts complex for CVA and Centennial. I want to reiterate that that project has not fallen off the radar as we turn our attention to planning the Gregory Street property. The other project that has not fallen off the radar is the wellness-kinesiology building. We are exploring ways to finance that project so that the state-funded portion could be added later. Those discussions are ongoing.
Every year, we have a number of inappropriate messages either scrawled on walls or on sidewalks and I think, given the size our campus, there is probably less of it than you would expect. When you do see that kind of thing and you find it offensive, the Office of Diversity and Affirmative Action will get involved. They will work with Facilities Management to get the site cleaned up. If they can figure out who the author is, even if it’s a website, then we will deal with that.
I did enjoy the question and answer format at the State of the University address. Although, there were not a lot of questions, I know that people have lots of questions about what we are doing and why we are doing it. Feel free to send me an e-mail or give me a call.
· Provost John Presley
Provost Presley: I want to report to the Senate about the official tenth day census figures. They can’t be exactly precise, as usual, because we did enroll 17 students, as Vice President Mamarchev indicated. There has been a noticeable trend of decline in total on-campus enrollment over the past five years mainly due to a continuing drop in total graduate enrollment, a drop in continuing students and, in fall 2004, a drop in new freshmen.
This year, we have a total on-campus population of 20,265 students—plus 17, so don’t take these numbers as absolute for that reason—undergraduate 17,827, graduate 2,438. It is not clear why the continuing student number is dropping. Perceived and reported difficulties related to course availability or access to majors may be among the factors, but we don’t know that. The decline in the undergraduate student population is in its fourth year, probably because of the smaller freshmen classes in the last couple of years. Graduate enrollment has experienced a three-year decline from 2,623 in fall 2002 to this fall’s total of 2,438. It is significant that the number of non-degree seeking students, 269, is the lowest in nearly 15 years. It has dropped from nearly 600 in the early 1990s to its present level. Master’s degree candidates declined as well from 1,824 to 1,766. We don’t know the precise reasons for this, but there are many contract and cohort courses taught in the distant cities that are in periods of abeyance right now. You also probably know about the difficulty of foreign students getting visas to study in this country. Those are two possible answers.
A recovery in new freshmen enrollment resulted in a substantial increase in all new students. There are 345 more freshmen on campus this fall than there were a year ago, which is a 12% planned increase. After last year’s freshman class of 2,834, the University needed more new freshmen to maintain a total enrollment above 20,000. That was offset to some degree by a drop in transfer student enrollment, which has been described as a rollercoaster for the last few years, and that widened the freshman-transfer mix from 6,139 to 6,436 for the fall 2005 term. Some of the good news is that this larger freshman class is comparable in almost every detail to the academic preparation shown by last year’s freshmen. We did not see the huge increases in average ACTs of previous years, but they stayed steady. More than 11,000 applications were received and we are beginning to the see the results of our campaign to become an institution of choice. The show rate of admitted-to-enrolled increased from 36.9% to 39.4%. This year’s target minority student enrollment total reflects an increase of 20 students, which is 1% over last year. The quality indicators there reflect an average ACT score of 20.5, an average GPA of 3.18 and an average high school percentile rank of 66.8% and those quality indicators are holding.
Senator Coleman: Given our dwindling resources, is a little bit of a decline in enrollment an awful thing in terms of our ability to deliver?
Provost Presley: It isn’t awful, but we wish it didn’t happen. If Vice President Bragg were here, he could probably tell you to the dollar the effect. Variations in campus enrollment have to be taken seriously.
· Vice President of Student Affairs Helen Mamarchev
Vice President Mamarchev: Just to finish up a little bit on the 18 students who have come to our University as a result of the hurricane, they are underclass, upper class and graduate students. They come from 8 different colleges and universities. We are very excited that the open house for Wilkins Hall has finally come. It will start at 3:30 p.m. and I hope all of you can come out. Then we are going to have tours of the residence hall so you will be able to see a lot of the changes that we have made and talk to the students who are living in this facility.
· Vice President of Finance and Planning Steve Bragg – Absent
Committee Reports
· Academic Affairs Committee
Senator Borg: The Academic Affairs Committee met and set our agenda for the year. We will be looking into the policy that has to do with the number of hours required for a baccalaureate degree and the method by which exceptions to that limit might be granted.
Senator Crothers: Did you discuss the Academic Planning Committee Senate representation?
Senator Borg: We have an appeal out to our students, one or two of whom are considering joining the committee.
· Administrative Affairs and Budget Committee
Senator Smith: We also met and set our agenda for the year. Among our responsibilities for this year are the reviewing of the Solicitation Policy and the Administrator Evaluation Policy.
· Faculty Affairs Committee – No Report
· Planning and Finance Committee
Senator Burk: Our charges this year are to produce a proposal on faculty and staff salaries, a proposal for enhancing Senate participation in planning and budgeting, as well as our usual priorities of the university document.
· Rules Committee
Senator Holland: We also met this evening and looked at revisions to the Faculty Associates Code of Ethics and also questions about membership on the Panel of 10. We should have those as Information Items at our next meeting. We began thinking about the new Faculty Code of Ethics. If anyone has any comments on what they would like to see in a Code of Ethics, please feel free to contact us. Our tentative plan is to have a draft document by November so we can get it out for comments.
Action
Items:
Election of Academic Senate Secretary
Senator Eileen Fowles was nominated by the Faculty Caucus as a candidate for
Secretary of the Senate.
There were no
other nominees; Senator Fowles was unanimously elected.
Election of
Executive Committee Faculty Representative
Senator
Farzaneh Fazel was nominated by the Faculty Caucus as a candidate for the final
faculty position on the Senate
Executive
Committee. There were no other nominees; Senator Fazel was unanimously elected.
IBHE-FAC Report
Professor White, IBHE-FAC Representative: The last meeting was held at the university in Quincy, Illinois. Its function was basically to set up committees and give the committees a sense of what they are supposed to do. It seems to me that a lot of what we are intending to do is not going to yield much of anything. One of the things I learned last year is sort of the peculiarities of advice in these state organizations. The Faculty Advisory Council advises the Illinois Board of Higher Education, but the IBHE, generally speaking, does not care what the FAC thinks. The IBHE advises the legislature, but the legislature doesn’t care what the IBHE thinks. The legislature tries to tell its leaders what it wants, but finally, the leaders, especially the governor, don’t much care what the legislators think. So, what you get at the end of the year is what three or four people want. We talked to representatives last year, all of whom seemed to be very sympathetic to our cause and very interested in helping us in anyway that they could, but they voted for exactly the opposite of what they said they believed in. It is with some irony that I present to you what FAC sees as its agenda for the year.
To some degree FAC has fallen into a familiar trap of assigning itself white papers. So, it is going to commit itself to certain kinds of investigation and reporting on issues that are legitimately important, but the papers that we produce won’t have any particular consequences because of the failure of advisement that I just described. The one thing that I am more interested in is really going to be the work of the chair and the former chair, Alan Karnes. They have drafted me to help them. The chair is going to be making his usual reports to the Board of Higher Ed and we are then going to use that report in a more editorial way. The chair is going to be making more aggressive and opinion presentations to the Board. We are then going to have different versions of those comments—letters to the editor, letters to legislators, e-mails to all of the Senate chairs. For some reason, FAC has never attempted to branch out in that way. The chair has always reported directly to the board and we are going to use that opportunity to present a rhetorical piece that we will try to disseminate more broadly.
Information Item:
09.07.05.01 Administrator Selection and Search Policies – September 2005 Draft 2 from 2005-06 Senate Executive Committee
03.17.05.03 Administrator Selection Policy – March 2005 Draft from 2004-05 Administrative
Affairs Committee (Reference Document)
Senator Crothers: I will outline some major differences between this document and the March 2005 draft. First, you will note that the September 2005 draft is coming from the Senate Executive Committee rather than the Administrative Affairs and Budget Committee. This policy came to the AABC for discussion in 2001. All policies of the University go through a regular review cycle and they are assigned, in many cases, to Senate committees. This policy was assigned to that committee in 2001 and has not been passed as of 2005. That is one reason why the Executive Committee chose to take it over. In the course of that time, we have had any number of administrator searches and for every one of those searches, different constituencies on campus have come to us asking for waivers to the existing policy so that different constituencies might be represented on the search committees. The question of whether chairs should be structurally assigned a seat on dean search committees was a central point of tension. Administrative Affairs and Budget had come to the Senate any number of times with this document in various forms, had lots of questions asked and lots of challenges of its work. The question of administrator selection is a highly charged one on this campus.
In the revised document, much of the repetitive language has been removed. The March 2005 draft is 18 pages long; the revised draft is six pages. This was done mostly by centralizing the policies and procedures regarding all searches into one section. This draft also makes some changes that empower the shared governance model in ways that the current policy does not. It defines and recognizes two types of searches that go on, but which are not governed in any way by the shared governance system. These are internal searches and targeted searches. Targeted searches would be for specific individuals, whether on campus or off, who we seek to serve in a particular role. This document requires that an administrator who wishes to engage in an internal or targeted search does have to consult with various shared governance constituencies about whether to have such a search and why a particular individual is appropriate for the role.
The third major change has to do with how the final search committee is constituted. It has been the general practice that various constituencies elect representatives to search committees directly. The old policy also insists that we have to account for Affirmative Action in the constitution of search committees, as well as disciplinary and skill variables, while at the same time requiring search committee members to be elected. That model does not lead to those outcomes; that is, the direct election of individuals to search committees does not guarantee either Affirmative Action outcomes or disciplinary, talent or skill distributions. The new model changes that in that shared governance constituencies will elect or select a panel of potential members for search committees from which the appointing administrator would select a smaller number. If the shared governance constituency picks a strong panel of potential members, it doesn’t matter who the administrator actually selects. The authority to pick the panel still lies with the constituency. I believe that it is the purpose of shared governance to hold administration accountable for the decisions that they make, not to make the decisions themselves.
Provost Presley: I began collaborating on the revision of this document first to simplify the format. Second, I wanted to include new sections on targeted searches and on internal searches to ensure the role of shared governance in those two types of searches, too. Third, I wanted to include the material on the Vice President for Advancement search as developed by the Administrative Affairs Committee last year. Fourth, I wanted to include department chairs and AP representatives along with civil service representatives in search committees for deans, specifically. That, too, was provided for by the Senate last year, but not introduced into the document until now. The language in the committee composition sections of the document was an attempt to speed up the process, which took most of the fall semester the last time a dean search committee was formed. It is faster to hire a dean than it is to put the committee together. These are complicated by the college’s internal workings, the Academic Calendar, the summer off, travel and research schedules, etc., but the process, as outlined in the earlier document, in an almost endless one.
The proposed document does not dictate to the colleges how they should choose nominees for the committee. Councils can still elect, appoint, or randomly select; it is their choice. I think that it is inappropriate for this body to dictate to the colleges how they would choose those nominees. The document does establish checks and balances, prerogatives for both the appointing officer, the president, provost or dean, and prerogatives for faculty and staff. The provost, for example, must choose from among faculty and staff names provided by the college. The provost can choose only two faculty at large for a dean search who have not had their names moved forward by the unit. The unit, itself, on the other hand, cannot simply elect or appoint all faculty representatives to the committee. In fact, I would change Lane’s comments a little; he said that the previous document charges “us” to look for representation among discipline, gender and ethnicity. It, in fact, only charges the provost to do so in the establishment of a committee for a dean search. In the old document, with two appointees, the provost cannot do that; it is impossible. This new draft places the responsibility to find a more representative panel on everybody; I don’t think that’s in the original policy.
We tend to reify elections on this campus, while at the same time; we know that we have difficulties with them. We are still trying to elect people for this very body. Elections don’t solve problems; if you doubt that, I invite you to think about the vote count in Florida the last time. Elections can’t be planned in the sense that everybody takes the same issues into mind. They don’t always take expertise into account and they cannot and have not dealt with issues of gender and ethnicity representation. The procedures that were collaborated on this summer and that you have before you are procedures that are really very common throughout academia. Checks and balances like these I believe are the very embodiment of shared governance.
Senator Holland: I have mentioned this to a number of my constituents and the response to this selection criteria has been anywhere from ‘no’ to going straight through the ceiling. We do elect four faculty members for the dean search and we do regard these individuals as faculty representatives. You have a choice of choosing one of ten from the Panel of 10. There should be some option there. The Provost may also add up to two members in order to achieve a better representation of disciplines or to meet Affirmative Action objectives. Plus, there is a committee secretary, which the Provost appoints. So, there are four appointments to balance the four that are elected. If we wanted to have four particular people, we would just say that only four people would run or we would pick four or six truly awful people. How do you get around this kind of thing?
Provost Presley: Do you want me to agree to an election from people in which only four would run or who would screw up the process by only sending forward ten bad names. I don’t know how serious to take that issue. The group would still elect, if they wish, a panel. If there is agreement on the Panel of 10 process, why not, by analogy, agreement on the other process for constituting the committee? The issue of selection by whatever process is still there for the faculty.
Senator Crothers: The dean search is among the most charged. At least from the perspective of most junior faculty, deans sit on top of the tenure and promotion process. You get by the college and you assume you are going to do ok and so there is a lot of concern and attention paid to the question of who is dean by faculty. Hence, there is a lot of tension here. I think your numbers are little wrong. Under the dean search policy, you have the four faculty who are appointed from a 'panel of ten', however that panel might be constructed. In your math, you claim that the Panel of 10 (Administrator Selection Chairperson Panel) appointee is a provost appointee. Under the same logic, are not the four chosen out of ten then also provost appointees?
Senator Holland: Yes, if you chose four out of ten, then they would be viewed as provost appointees. We have a good relationship with the Provost right now; but in the past, we did not necessarily have that.
Senator Crothers: And what happened to them?
Senator Holland: I just don’t see any particular reason for opening this up to intentionally cause conflict, because I can guarantee you that almost 100% of the faculty are going to be against this. I have not talked to one yet who thinks this is a good idea, except you.
Senator Crothers: We also know more about it than they do. Let me go back to the math for a moment. For the short term, we’ll assume that the four are perceived as faculty. Is it your perception that the Panel of 10 person is a provost representative rather than a faculty representative?
Senator Holland: More heavily in that direction because it is one of ten.
Provost Presley: I have never known a single person on that panel until I worked with them and asked them to do something because of their being on the Panel of 10. There is a distinction to be made between appointing people at large, that’s two people on this kind of committee, and appointing people from a panel chosen by the faculty. There is a real distinction between those two things.
Senator Crothers: I would tend to agree. You made reference to the fact that the two at large were being chosen for Affirmative Action, but in this new draft document, it does not say that. Those two are at large for whatever purpose an appointing officer has in mind. It could be for the most nefarious purpose or it could be for questions of balance or whatever else.
Senator Holland: In that case, there might be less objection if those two were just removed entirely. The faculty that I have talked to sense a significant loss of control.
Senator Rahn: After reviewing the March 2005 draft and now the fall 2005 draft for the dean search, I noticed that the old draft had representation for the non-tenure track faculty. Now the non-tenures have been taken out of the new draft, specifically in the case of a dean.
Provost Presley: The non-tenure track faculty are now represented by a bargaining unit and that unit is the one that should be asking for those kinds of accommodations in my opinion and in the opinion of folks in HR and folks in the legal counsel office.
Senator Rahn: So, civil service, which is also union, has requested this and that is why they are listed in here.
Provost Presley: They have been there for a very long time since before I came here; non-tenure track have not.
Senator Rahn: So, it is just a matter of the union wanting that?
Provost Presley: Yes, they need to bargain for it.
Senator Rahn: Then this would be amended at that point?
Senator Crothers: If the union were to negotiate that, it trumps this document; but, yes, we would amend the document.
Senator Alferink: Colleges vary considerably in size. What consideration was given to colleges with fewer faculty where ten faculty would be a significant proportion of the total faculty of the college?
Senator Crothers: We discussed that extensively and the same problem exists in the current document. Unfortunately, there is no way past it.
Senator Mwilambwe: I have a question on the selection of administrative and civil service staff. For the Vice President of Student Affairs, it says one civil service employee and one administrative employee from a list of ten permanent members of the Student Affairs staff will be provided by the Student Affairs staff. If you go to the Vice President and Provost sections, it says that administrative employees will be coming from a list of five names provided by the Administrative Professional Council. So, there seems to be a difference in who is going to select that list.
Senator Crothers: The thinking at the time is that for many of these positions, it doesn’t make sense to have the list provided by the Civil Service or AP Councils because the unit involved is too small. So, why, for example, if you were talking about an AP person to a department chair search, would you have the AP Council run when there is likely to be only one AP in an academic department? It is a fair question, though, and I think it does deserve review.
Senator Mwilambwe: I would think that if it is coming from the AP Council in some sections, then it should be the same everywhere.
Senator Crothers: I am not sure it should be the same everywhere, but it might be appropriate to be the same at least at the vice presidential level.
Senator Riegle: In the distant past, I was a member of a Panel of 10 and chairing a vice presidential search committee. At no time and in no way did I ever consider myself a representative of the administration. Secondly, while it may be the case that Senator Holland’s colleagues are unanimously opposed to this method of identifying faculty, it is not clear to me that that it is true of my colleagues. It is certainly not true of me as an individual. I think the value of Affirmative Action is one worth compromising for. While I cannot speak for any of my constituents, I do wish to go on record as supporting this.
Senator Borg: I have questions about the numbers for the vice presidential searches: for Student Affairs, three faculty members from a list of six; Finance and Planning, three from a list of six—double the number; University Advancement, two from four. Then for the Provost, we have one faculty member from each college from four names. It is not a selection for half but it becomes a quarter. It is even different under college deans in which four come from ten. Where did these numbers come from?
Provost Presley: I don’t think that they are written in stone. They were attempts at simplification of the process and they were also attempts to make more palpable, if you will, the difference between Student Affairs selections and Academic Affairs selections. There is a real difficulty in coming up with a number that will do justice to a huge unit while not making it impossible for a smaller unit.
Senator Borg: Would it not be the case that some of these concerns about having the provost seeming to be dictating these be alleviated if we reduced the numbers so that there was less choice? Also, with reference to the unequal size of the units, would it not be the case that if Arts and Sciences weren’t so big and were three colleges, all of this would be moot?
Senator Crothers: All of the numbers, at some fundamental level, are going be arbitrary.
Provost Presley: They probably grew out of the previous document.
Senator Maroules: I very much like the draft of these policies and I believe that faculty, at least in my area, could be sold on it. I chair a department that is reasonably large, yet we often have this very problem of achieving the kind of diversity and inclusiveness that you would want on a committee. I do think that ultimately there is direct faculty participation in the form of election of the individuals from whom the Provost can choose. In the interest of diversity and Affirmative Action concerns, I think it’s workable.
Senator Fazel: You mentioned that if faculty elect these people, then there would be representation from the faculty and by the faculty. I definitely would agree with that. But the document does not talk about election by the faculty. The number issue is also an important issue. When you say that ten names from a college should go to the provost, how many people should volunteer so you could elect ten of those? I don’t think that in our college that we would have a rush of people who would volunteer to serve on a committee. In order to have a meaningful election of ten people, you should have at least 15 to 20 volunteers to elect from. If you only have five people who volunteer and you have to give those five names to the provost, then yes, those are faculty who would be working on the committee, but they would not be representing the whole college.
Provost Presley: I think that you are describing a problem of the election in a small unit, not a problem with the document.
Senator Fazel: No, I am talking about the numbers in the document. The larger the number, the harder it would be for a unit to elect people.
Senator Crothers: We disagree. I think that at least 10 or 15 business people will be interested in a dean search for business. I don’t think that that is going to be a question. You assume, though this document does not, that business will elect people to that ten. It might be that your leadership team chooses ten by some other mechanism..
Senator Borg: That is a problem within the individual unit. What would be the problem with having the college operate the way that ours does in which everyone is eligible for an election? You do not have to volunteer. That is a matter concerning college bylaws.
Senator Meister: I notice that in several of the searches, you choose from three or five students. My only suggestion is that you make the list of students for the provost much larger. Searches go on over the summer and if you have only five students to choose from, I think you are going to end up with only one or two students coming over and over again. If that initial group is larger, someone can drop out if they have to. You could choose two from ten or two from twelve.
Senator Smith: Are targeted searches necessarily internal?
Senator Crothers: No.
Senator Smith: Then doesn’t that section headed internal searches merit revision to “Internal and Targeted Searches”?
Senator Crothers: It probably does.
Provost Presley: I wanted to comment on that section. I understand the fear of a nefarious provost at some point in the future, but I would ask you what kinds of nefarious behavior would occur by a provost in staffing a search committee? What is a provost going to do that you would not approve of? I can guess that it’s probably that the provost has in mind an internal or external candidate—that the provost has in mind some kind of end other than a real search. Section C, internal searches and targeted searches, brings all of that out into the open and would make it with me and the constituencies—college councils, department chairs—a topic of discussion. This provides for a legitimate mechanism for that sort of thing to be discussed and dealt with, possibly achieved and possibly not. Internal searches are real; they are allowed; they are moral and ethical as long as they are open. I have nothing against the appointing officer being charged with a conversation with the representative council or the leadership team in the process of making these appointments.
Senator Mwilambwe: Under the Vice President for Student Affairs, it says one civil service employee and one administrative professional from a list of ten permanent members. It is possible for one to take that number ten in different combinations. It could be four civil service and six AP, three civil service and seven AP, etc. It’s separated for the other vice presidents.
Senator Crothers: Thank you; that’s a very fair point that we will review.
Senator Alferink: Let’s assume that a college uses an election process; the outcome potentially still could be ten white males. How have we addressed the issue that you were concerned about?
Senator Crothers: That is always a possibility and that is why the Provost and I are not necessarily in favor of having the colleges elect these panels, but rather have college councils ask for nominations from departments and it’s very clear to department chairs that they are looking for a range of persons. That mechanism cannot be solved by elections.
Senator Alferink: Was there consideration given about placing the responsibility for the issues with the body charged with making the selections rather than with the Provost’s Office?
Provost Presley: We could change that with one line; ‘it is the obligation of the governing bodies, as well as the appointing officer, to ensure the diversity objectives are met’.
The policy will return to the Senate for discussion on September 28, 2005.
Communications:
Updated list of Internal Committee Administrative Designees
Senator Crothers: The list of internal committee administrative designees is a list of additional resource officers, who are available to your committees to help you on various issues. If you are dealing with an issue on your committee for which this person is not the expert on the issue, they will get you in touch with the person who can help you out. So, please keep these people informed and keep them on your e-mail lists for any committee announcements or meeting minutes.
09.06.05.03 Powers and Responsibilities of the Committees of the Academic Senate
Senator Crothers: The Powers and Responsibilities of the Committees of the Academic Senate is a document that was drafted last year and sent out to everyone at that time. It is simply a statement about the authority of the Academic Senate, its responsibilities and the kinds of things that committees should feel comfortable doing. We are in a relativity unique period in which the administration wants to help the Senate. They want to inform us, use us and help us use them, so you should not feel shy about asking for information. You have the right to ask for it; you have the right to expect answers. We are not just sitting here marking time; we are here with some serious authority and we should not be shy about using it. That is what this document is intended to help you with.
Adjournment