Academic Senate Meeting

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

(Approved)

Call to Order

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

Roll Call

Senator Borg called the roll and declared a quorum.

Attendance and Motions

Approval of Senate Minutes of April 11, 2007

Motion XXXVIII-51: By Senator Broderick, seconded by Senator Miller, to approve the Academic Senate Minutes of April 11, 2007. The minutes were unanimously approved.

Chairperson's Remarks

Senator Crothers: I went to Indiana State University in Terre Haute yesterday. It made me feel quite good about things at Illinois State University. They are in a very difficult context there with a hostile administration, a hostile faculty, students being squeezed in the middle and many of the issues and pain that we had to work out, they are beginning the process of trying to work out. I particularly was struck by the fact of how fortunate we are to have a relatively open-minded administration, but moreover, a whole set of faculty, staff and students who are willing to do the work to make shared governance work well. I think that this is a very rare thing to work as well as it does and we should all be quite proud of it. I think it is also great that we now have a reputation for doing it well.

On Monday, the Council of Illinois University Senates will be meeting at the University of Illinois in Urbana. I will attend, along with the newly-nominated Senate Chairperson. He will have to report to you on what occurs at that meeting. In general, the faculty have nominated a solid set of leadership for next year that will be able to carry on the work of the Senate very well.

Student Body President's Remarks

Senator Horstein: Last Wednesday, we conducted our chairperson elections. Heading Civic Engagement will be Jason Nippa, Finance and Allocation, Tom Krug, Programs and Recognition, Leslie Bixby, and Policies and Procedures will be an interim-appointed chair at next Wednesday’s meeting. We held our memorial service for Virginia Tech on the quad on Monday. We estimated that approximately 1,000 people attended. I would especially like to thank Drs. Bowman and Paterson and Vice President Adams for their participation and support to make that event happen. We worked together with the University Programming Board and the Association of Residence Halls, with some additional funding from Student Affairs, so I would like to thank all who helped to put that event together.

Today, we went to Springfield for Lobby Day. We met with several representatives and senators and talked about keeping higher education in Illinois affordable and a few of the capital projects that we are pursuing on this campus. We were very well received by the legislators.

Administrators' Remarks

President Bowman: I want to thank the student leaders for organizing that vigil on Monday on short notice. It was very well attended. Our home page contains some information about campus security. We are reviewing, literally, everything about campus safety and security to address any opportunities for improvement. The campus is patrolled 24 hours a day, on foot and by bicycle and squad car. We have a variety of surveillance cameras at strategic locations. We will be working with consultants as we go forward.

University Advancement Vice-Presidential Candidates were on campus and those interviews are complete. The Search Committee is putting together their assessment of the candidates and we expect to make an announcement before the end of the semester. If you would like to review the vita for the candidates, they are still available on the web. The Provost Search Committee is scheduled to meet next week. After that meeting, we will talk about a timeline and what stands in front of us. Obviously, the first step is putting together an ad, which we would like to place this summer. I have decided to hire a search firm, the same one that we are using for the Health Services Director and a firm that has managed searches at a number of top tier institutions. We will use them primarily to identify talent and get a good, broad spectrum of candidates. We will have those files ready for the committee to look at when they come back in the fall; then we will get candidates in fairly early.

I am glad to hear that some of you went to Springfield today. It is always helpful to remind people where we are and what we are doing. We have appropriations hearing by the Senate tomorrow. It looks like both sides have come to an agreement on the need for a tax increase to generate new revenue. As you know, $22.4 million was appropriated for the Stevenson-Turner Project; unfortunately, bid prices for the work were over $1 million higher. We assumed the university would be asked to cover that increased cost, but as luck would have it, the Governor’s Office released the additional money a few days ago. I am just astounded, to say the least. Good news on the quality of our 07 freshmen class. We have a clearer picture of what that profile looks like because we have received over 2,700 enrollment deposits so far. Unless something unusual happens, it looks like we will set a record of an above 24 ACT composite.

Senator Ellerton: It was announced on Friday that the School Street Parking Garage would close from May 14 until August 1. This would mean that there was absolutely no access for faculty who are trying to move out of Stevenson and have to take personal items home because we are not allowed to take them into Williams Hall before the fact. In the initial negotiations with Parking, they responded to the first inquiries by saying they knew nothing of the Stevenson move, which was quite a concern. There has been subsequent negotiation and it has been conceded, but under considerable duress, that faculty in Stevenson will have access to School Street parking on May 14.

I needed to give that preamble to raise the points that I think are important to make. There seems to be a lack of communication between Parking and those coordinating the move. Secondly, the closure is the day before evaluation results are due and that also seemed to raise questions about how an official parking allocation could be closed off when large numbers of people are required to have access to technology to submit results.

The third point was that a rebate has been suggested to those who have reserve parking in School Street, but instead, we are being told that we should park in various places that compete for parking spaces. When I raised the questions about moving our personal belongings into Williams for teaching classes, I was given two alternatives. One was to park in the lane next to the School Street garage and have a colleague stand by the car so that we did not get a ticket or we could park at Watterson or the Alamo and feed the meters. If we have a three-hour summer school class, are students to go out and feed the meters? I think that there was need for more thought in that.

My question is, therefore, could some consideration be given to giving residents of the School Street parking garage a choice of having a rebate or having an allocation of some other area, within reasonable proximity, where they could legally park for summer school classes, etc?

President Bowman: I will follow up on it and communicate an answer to the Senate. I don’t know the details of how that decision was arrived at, but we will look at it again and try to come up with something better.

Provost John Presley: I have three announcements to make. One is that all of the dean evaluations on the review cycle are now complete. I want to thank the college councils, particularly some of the senators here who are members of the college councils, for the very good jobs that they did in that regard. This was a year in which there were no five-year reviews undertaken for deans because no one fit on that cycle. I did some consultations with councils before completing letters of evaluation, and at this point, the letters of evaluation are out to all of the deans.

I want to announce that, after consultation with both the elected faculty leaders in the College of Business and with the administrative leadership in the College of Business, President Bowman has accepted my recommendation that Assistant Provost Charles McGuire be named as the Interim Dean of the College of Business. He will probably serve a two-year term and a nationwide search for a permanent dean will begin in January 2008.

The deans now each have a federal agency budget summary that was prepared by our lobbyists in Washington, D.C. This is important to you if you are involved in grantsmanship or if you are involved in anything that is federally funded. The summary is about 12 pages long, so I will give you just a couple of highlights. For example, the Department of Agriculture, hopefully, will be funded by the President’s budget at $341 million to continue efforts to protect the nation’s food supply and agriculture from threats. Many of our agricultural faculty have research agendas that feed directly into this. There is an emphasis on nanotechnology. Another example is that we feared that the TRiO Program would be slated for cuts, but it appears that that program will be level funded under the new budget. There is an increased emphasis on energy efficiency and renewable energy, another area in which we have many faculty working. The National Institute of Health, unfortunately, is going to be facing a decrease in their budget, but the National Science Foundation is expecting a 6.8% increase, particularly in areas of research and related activities in biological science, computer and information science, engineering, GEO sciences, $8 million for social, behavioral and economic sciences and $18 million for the Office of Cyber Infrastructure. There, too, I think that we will see an emphasis on cyber security. It is a very detailed analysis of the federal budget. Each of the deans should have a copy and if you need a copy more quickly, Ed Mason in the Research and Sponsored Programs Office or Rod Custer can make a copy of this available to you.

Vice President of Student Affairs Steve Adams - Excused

Vice President of Finance and Planning Steve Bragg - Excused

Committee Reports

Faculty Affairs Committee Chairperson

Senator Preston: We met briefly tonight and discussed two things. First, was the tragic Virginia Tech situation and, as the Faculty Affairs Committee is to represent and promote faculty affairs, we would just like to encourage that the faculty component, in the consideration of security, be thoughtfully considered and that communication with the administration be facilitated. Apparently, communication about students was part of the problem at Virginia Tech. We do understand that there are legal limits.

President Bowman: It’s probably coming to a conclusion too early, but at least right now, it appears that everything that could have been done on the prevention side was not done at Virginia Tech. In the four years that I have been in Hovey, I have felt pretty good about the communication that flows between the Student Affairs and Academic Affairs Divisions and the administration about people who are a risk to themselves and to the campus. When it has become apparent that an individual has become a danger to the campus, we have acted quickly and have gotten them out of here. In the case of foreign nationals, we have had INS actually escort them out of the country. That has happened twice since I have been in the President’s Office. It is not perfect, but everyone knows that you can’t just let those things go and hope for the best. You have to be proactive. The Critical Incident Team that works out of Student Affairs does a good job, too. When I met with security and safety staff earlier in the week, we talked a lot about communication between people in departments and on up the chain and I think that that is an area that we are going to spend some more time on so that everybody knows who to call when we get people on our radar screens.

Senator Preston: Thank you; it is reassuring that that is being addressed. The second issue concerning the Faculty Affairs Committee was that I talked briefly to Chuck McGuire and I believe that he has a few comments about the childcare center developments.

Assistant Provost Chuck McGuire: There is a joint task force between Illinois Wesleyan University, BroMenn Hospital and Illinois State University dealing with the issue of providing a three-institution-wide childcare/adult-care facility. We are represented on that committee by Vice President Bragg, Associate Provost Shane and myself. We are working towards the hiring of a consultant in the very near term to look at the needs, funding models and some of the locations we can explore. We have identified a couple of potential sites that look promising; I don’t want to identify them at this point for a number of reasons, but it looks like we will be making progress in that respect very shortly. During the summer, we intend to visit some of the intergenerational child and adult care facilities in the immediate area to determine what the possibilities are for this program.

IBHE-FAC Report

Professor Curt White, IBHE-FAC Representative: The FAC has actually had a couple of meetings, one in Springfield and one here at Heartland, since I last talked to you. The Board of Higher Education has a new chairperson, Carrie Hightman, former CEO of SPC. She was brought on, in part, to provide business experience to the Board, as if the Board did not have enough of that already. We had lunch with her and I think that she is going to be a more active chair than the last chair; I think that she really wants to help. The Faculty Advisory Council continues to work with the Board’s staff on issues related to teacher preparation. We also, and this should have been distributed to you some time ago, forwarded to the Board a paper on student debt. If you did not get that paper, please let me know and I will ask Cynthia to send it around again. It is a fairly detailed analysis of the current situation, both nationally and in the state, of student debt. One of the more interesting recommendations that we made to the Board was that they consider creating student debt relief programs focused on professions that are socially valuable, but have fairly low beginning pay. We think that sort of meshes with our first paper on the need to encourage good students to go into teaching. Right now, people coming out of school with very high levels of debt are obviously discouraged from going into certain areas that are socially valuable, but which are rather low paying early on, like teaching and social work.

We have also begun making strategic alliances. We are now meeting regularly with the Illinois Higher Education Alliance, which was largely responsible for a lot of the organizing today at Lobby Day in Springfield. We have also begun meeting with the members of the Student Advisory Committee to the Board and I am fairly optimistic that in the next year, for the first time, the Faculty Advisory Council and the Student Advisory Committee are going to be able to work together on some papers. The FAC will be working in the next year on at least two more important position papers, one of which will have to do with public relations, attempting to broaden the way in which higher education in the state is described, even by the Board, as primarily as an “economic engine”. We are going to be encouraging the Board to begin to think and describe the importance of higher education in Illinois in terms of the equality of life that it provides for the people of Illinois and also the public goods that it provides.

Also, another issue that we plan on addressing in the next year is what we generally call our mental health crisis paper, the mental health crisis for students in particular. This is something, I think, that is going to get some momentum because of the events at Virginia Tech. You may have noticed in the news recently that the Senate has begun hearings on the events at Virginia Tech and one of the first sort of expert witnesses was a Professor Federman from the University of Virginia. One of the astonishing things that he told to an astonished Senate was that at the University of Virginia, their studies reveal that 94% of students feel stressed to the point of not being able to manage the pressures of their responsibilities as students and that 50% of the students experience depression to the point of being incapable of performing their responsibilities. Both of these are very alarming statistics and are the kinds of things we hope that the Board will take just as seriously as its concerns for the budget.

Senator Crothers: We appreciate the broad range of work. I have been asked if you are planning to continue as the Chairperson of the FAC.

Professor White: I am standing for reelection, so we will see.

Information Items:

04.11.07.04 CAST Bylaws-Revised (Rules Committee)

Senator Alferink: The bylaws from the College of Applied Sciences and Technology were reviewed by the Rules Committee. There were features in the bylaws that were procedural issues. If included in the bylaws, they would have to come back to the Rules Committee if CAST desired to change them. To simplify their structure, we suggested that CAST remove some of those elements and just have them within their college procedures. We changed a few things with respect to wording and a few other things. CAST agreed with those changes, sent them back to us and they have been approved by the Rules Committee.

Motion XXXVIII-52: By Senator Alferink, seconded by Senator Nippa, to move the item to action. There was no debate and the motion was unanimously approved.

Motion XXXVIII-53: By Senator Alferink to approve the revised bylaws from CAST. There was no debate and the bylaws, as revised, were unanimously approved.

09.21.05.02 Student Services Programs - Policy on Review Cycle (Student Government Association)

Senator Horstein: The Student Services Programs Policy has been distributed to Student Government members and I have not yet received any proposed changes.

Motion XXXVIII-54: By Senator Horstein, seconded by Senator Miller, to move the policy to action. There was no debate on the move to action and it was unanimously approved.

Motion XXXVIII-55: By Senator Horstein to approve the Student Services Programs Policy without revision. There was no debate and the policy was unanimously approved.

Advisory Items:

04.20.07.01 Academic Plan (Jan Shane, Associate Provost)

Senator Crothers: As a reminder, Advisory Items are those which are simply informational to the
Senate in the sense that we do not debate or vote upon them.

Associate Provost Shane: The Academic Plan represents the work of a number of groups on this campus, including the Academic Affairs Committee of the Academic Senate, the Educating Illinois Coordinating Team, the college deans, the college councils and, of course, the Academic Planning Committee. The Academic Planning Committee is an external committee of the Senate. It reports to the Academic Affairs Committee. We had a really outstanding group of individuals who served on the APC this year. I would like to recognize those individuals. I serve as chair of that committee. Rod Custer and Kimberly Nance represent the Graduate School. Mardell Wilson serves as the Director of the University Assessment Office. The faculty on that committee are Lane Crothers, Margo Coleman, Sandra Klitzing, Diane Dean, Sara Semonis, Pam Lindsey, Eppa Rosa, Edgar Norton and Kay Weir. We had two amazing students on the committee this year. Jason Reid is a graduate student from the School of Art and Joanna Schmidt is an accounting major.

Some of the components of the Academic Plan are particular to note. We always include the University Mission State in the plan. Our mission is five years old and has not been changed. It still seems to represent the university well, but that is an Academic Affairs Committee obligation. We have institutional priorities in the plan that come from the colleges. Most notable for me in the institutional priorities are the educational programs that each of the colleges or departments are working on or considering for the future, as well as the college goals and objectives that come from the college councils. The second half of the document is the program reviews. All states require their academic institutions to go through ongoing cycles of program review. In the State of Illinois, we do that by degree and on eight-year cycles. We also review any of our centers that are approved by the IBHE. I really see program review as one of the most important mechanisms for quality and for accountability of our degree programs.

Each of the program reviews in the plan is a fairly short executive summary of some fairly significant documents. The faculty, involving students, go through a self-evaluation and write very lengthy, self-study reports. The Academic Planning Committee then spends a tremendous amount of time over the course of a year reviewing those documents, asking questions and then making recommendations for improvements back to the departments.

This year, I saw some of the finest program review reports I have seen in the five or six years that I have been doing this. All of the programs reviewed were found to be in good standing. The Illinois Board of Higher Education requires us to make one of three final determinations: the programs are in good standing, flagged to say that we will review them further, or flagged to say that we are going to suspend enrollment. So, there is nothing better than “good”, however, that does not preempt us from making recommendations for further study, which is not the same as flagging them for concern. Typically, those recommendations are formative in nature and are discussed with those departments.

Senator Mallory: On page 7, there needs to be a comma after “just” in the mission statement for the Mennonite College of Nursing.

Senator Borg: Can you fill us in on where this goes now.

Associate Provost Shane: This first goes to the Board of Trustees as an Information Item. Then this summer, the executive summaries of the program reviews themselves go to the Illinois Board of Higher Education. We are usually due to send them that document on August 1. These are not documents that just sit on a shelf. We have a Provost who reads the program reviews. We refer back to those program reviews when we are thinking about the quality of programs because they do provide good evidence of the quality of our degree programs and they also tell us in what areas we want to continue to improve.

10.12.06.01 Academic Calendar for 2011-2012 (Administrative Affairs and Budget Committee)

Senator Crothers: The Academic Calendar for 2011-12 is indeed only advisory. You can make whatever comments you wish to make about it, but we do not vote on it.

There were no questions or concerns about the calendar.

Communications:

04.16.07.01 Green Team Follow Up on Schroeder Hall (Ron Kelley/Chuck Scott)

Senator Crothers: Chuck Green, Chairperson of the Green Team, has forwarded us a follow-up from Ron Kelly about the questions I had asked, during the Green Team presentation at the last Senate meeting,

regarding cost and energy savings after the Schroeder Hall renovation.

Sense of the Senate Resolution Regarding the University Writing Exam

Senator Kalter: You have before you a Sense of the Senate Resolution concerning the University Writing Exam. Last week, I was contacted by the Director of the Writing Program, Bob Broad, with a complaint about the procedures that we followed that lead to the vote to eliminate the current University Writing Exam. Dr. Broad had asked for the memo from the University Writing Exam Board to be distributed to the full Academic Senate regarding where that Board was in the process of revising the assessment of writing here at ISU.

After I read this memo and realized that the information should have been made available to the Senate, I no longer agreed with the outcome of that vote. In particular, I am actually against suspending the exam prior to its elimination in the 2008-2010 catalog and I am dissatisfied with the vagueness of the timeframe defined by that catalog. Both items are in disagreement with the recommendations of the University Writing Exam Board, which I believe we should have followed. I also believe that we moved too hastily in shifting this item from an Information Item to an Action Item and that either the Director of the Writing Program or the Chair of English should have been asked to be available at the Senate meeting to answer questions on the night that we discussed the Academic Affairs Committee’s proposal.

However, we are willing to concede to the suspension of the exam, despite the fact that it will likely result in the graduation of a certain number of students with insufficient writing skills. I am requesting that the Senate clarify the timeframe for the University Exam’s elimination and confirm that our vote two weeks ago corresponds as closely as possible to the University Writing Exam Board’s recommendation so that the Board may institute a new assessment mechanism. I would also like the Senate to reconfirm its commitment to writing assessment and to the reconstitution of the Writing Exam Board towards designing a more dignified and academically sound method of assessing writing skills on this campus.

As background, I would also like to note that there are six or seven faculty lines dedicated to the specialty of writing or composition and rhetoric, but because of the recent budget cuts, there have been years in the recent past when as many as four of those lines have gone unfilled, which is what has resulted in the delay that both faculty and students have experienced to get reform of the exam. I would say that there is absolutely no one who is more interested in reforming that exam than the current Director of the Writing Program. In addition, the elimination of FOI put an enormous burden on that Director in the past year as English 101 and COM 101 were redesigned to accommodate the shift in the inner core.

What I am asking in the Sense of the Senate Resolution is that, based on the incomplete information that was available at the time, the Academic Senate pass a Sense of the Senate Resolution that reconfirms the vote, but which specifies more carefully that the exam will officially end at the end of the summer of 2009, but will be suspended between the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2009 and that the catalog will be written to reflect the 2009 end date.

I would also like us to reconfirm that the Senate affirmed its commitment to university writing assessment as a powerful and valuable support for a measure of the learning of the teaching and writing across the disciplines at ISU; that we resolve to recommend that the University Writing Exam Board be freshly reconstituted for the specific purpose of developing a proposal, including a realistic budgetary request, for a new approach to university-wide writing assessment to replace the current, outdated University Writing Exam; and, finally, to resolve that this proposal will be developed during the 2007-08 academic year to be submitted to the Senate by April of 2008 and will be consistent with the current scholarship in the field of writing assessment.

Motion XXXVIII-56: By Senator Kalter, seconded by Senator Stewart, to approve the Sense of the Senate Resolution regarding the University Writing Exam.

Senator Crothers: As I understand the intent of the resolution, it is to clarify the effect of the prior decision, but without changes. With that, it is open for debate.

Senator Horstein: Is this asking that we still have a waiver for all students beginning this summer?

Senator Kalter: Yes, as I said in my remarks, I actually don’t agree with that, but after discussion with the Writing Director and my Chair, we decided that it was probably best to go ahead with the suspension, especially since it seems that the word has gotten around already to many of the students and it would be confusing to pull that back.

Senator Horstein: So, this is basically just saying that we will continue to waive it, eliminate it, but we are going to leave it in the next academic catalog?

Senator Kalter: We are switching to a system in which instead of printing the catalog every year, we are printing it every two years. According to the letter that the University Writing Exam Board wrote, they were on a time table to replace the exam by August 2009, so that is what I would like to have confirmed, that the old exam will officially end in the summer of 2009.

Senator Borg: I am interested in the concerns here. The memo that you have in front of you was indeed addressed to the Academic Affairs Committee. The Academic Affairs Committee took its own decision on this and so the memo is not something that was proposed to the Senate. The Academic Affairs Committee discussed the issue having in our possession the entire memo and we made our proposal to the Senate. I will point out that they suggest that the current changes might go into effect starting August 1, but they say ‘we hope to deliver a detailed proposal’. The Academic Affairs Committee had no proposal to consider when we dealt with this more than a month ago. Indeed, the part that we offered to the Senate is #3 in the statement you have in front of you, which was quoted verbatim. I am not really eager to have the Senate reconsider matters that ought to, in fact, be dealt with in committee. Otherwise, why do we have the standing internal committees of the Senate? I pointed out in the discussion last time that this is something that might have come through a committee which we abolished at the last meeting, the Academic Standards Committee; so, the direct connection comes through the Academic Affairs Committee. I am not convinced that the process was breeched in any particular way.

Senator Richards: I have to disagree with you, Senator Kalter, in that it is the students who have the greatest interest in reviewing this writing exam. We have gone through this process in I believe a fashion that has really held up what shared governance is all about. It has been a year-long process. During that year, we were able to get the University Writing Exam Board to meet, which is something that it had not done in the three years previous, as well as got them to review the program, which it had not done for at least ten years. I believe that the recommendation that we had made before was appropriate and that, from a student viewpoint, we are actually registering for the exam, paying $7.00, taking the exam and from that point on, there is no contact. You can check on ICampus to see if you either passed or failed.

This is not benefiting our students, so when you said that a student might be graduating not having the proper writing skills, I completely disagree with that. I think that our English Department, through English 101, is appropriately examining student skills. The university is charged with reviewing writing skills and it is, in fact, the university that needs to be reviewing the English Department, not the students that need to be reviewed in their senior year just before they graduate. To find out many of the reasons that I think that it is inappropriate to schedule a timeline with this and the reasons why we do not need a writing exam, I think it would be appropriate to call upon Associate Provost Jan Shane to answer any of the questions that any of the senators may have.

Senator op de Beeck: I wanted to confirm that I am very much in favor of Senator Kalter’s Sense of the Senate Resolution. I am in the English Department and I had been under the impression that the current exam is outmoded. The practice of paying $7.00 and getting a check yes or no in your inbox at the end of it really isn’t the kind of assessment that the English Department is currently in favor of. That is an outdated way of doing things, but at the same time, we do need to make a commitment to writing excellence and assessment and that is something that the current Director of the Writing Program is very much committed to. So, I wanted to state my support for reconsidering the way that we are instituting this exam.

Senator Kalter: The exam is meant, according to our faculty and my chairperson, to assess writing beyond English 101. That is why the mechanism of 101 is not adequate to access writing and that is why the Writing Program is moving toward a portfolio type of assessment system; hopefully, one that is in the major.

Senator Wang: You mentioned in your remarks that you would like to confirm this Sense of the Senate Resolution, but you are not going to change the resolution that was passed last time. So, what is the purpose of this resolution, since you also mentioned that you are going to continue waiving the exam for the current students? The second question is in regard to your remarks about a portfolio. Is that something the Writing Board or the English Department is thinking about, a portfolio type of assessment? The costs associated with a portfolio type of an assessment are tremendous.

Senator Kalter: They are looking towards portfolio assessment and, as you see in the memo from Professor Bob Broad, attempting to come up with a realistic and affordable way to do portfolio assessment in the major, possibly through the existing capstone courses. In terms of the first question, the purpose of the resolution is to clarify, because what we voted on was a very short blurb that essentially said that we are going to eliminate the exam as of the 2008-2010 catalog. That gives us essentially two years of vagueness in terms of when this is actually stopping. What I am asking is that the vote be clarified to conform with what the Writing Board recommended as the 2009 stop date.

Associate Provost Shane: We can embed the writing assessment in an assessment of each of the student learning outcomes and goals of the General Education Program. That seemed to us on the Academic Affairs Committee to be a very appropriate place to look to. That kind of assessment places the burden of responsibility on the university rather than in the hands of the students. So, it really becomes a university-wide process of looking at portfolios. It is an institutional portfolio-based process that we are pilot testing this coming summer and fall. We won’t pilot test the writing portion yet; we are looking at civic engagement as the first pilot test this summer and we will move on from there.

Provost Presley: If I could draw that even a bit more clearly, I would say that the commitment that this motion is asking for is the university-wide assessment of an individual student’s writing competence. It has wavered on the Writing Exam Board; it has wavered on Academic Affairs; it has wavered across the university, but what the university has committed itself to, in fact what this body, the Senate, has committed itself to, is the university-wide assessment of writing as a learning outcome of General Education, as a measurement of our programs, not of individual student competence.

I would like the minutes to record that if this motion passes, the University Writing Exam Board will be directed to cooperate with the ongoing effort to include writing as a legitimate, important, critical outcome of General Education, but not necessarily an examination of each student and their writing competence. That has been done with writing across the curriculum and with the grades, with the writing-intensive courses and the grades in them. But, the university has to stay committed to the assessment of writing as a General Education outcome.

Senator Kalter: I would say, in response to the Provost’s comments, that I do, as a former teacher of writing as a graduate student, personally think that it would be a shame to abandon the testing of individual student competence. I believe very strongly that each student should leave the university with strong writing skills.

Senator Coleman: I just wanted to echo Senator Borg’s comments. The Academic Affairs Committee took a careful look at the memo from the Writing Exam Board and made a careful decision. That is really what a subcommittee is supposed to do. Then we brought it to the Senate. You noted that if we dropped it and then reinstituted it, there would be a period of time in which students were not assessed on their writing skills. I am wondering if we have any data on what the current failure rate is on the Writing Exam. Does anyone know that?

Senator Mizanin: As a point of information, I was on the Writing Exam Board and the Writing Exam has a current success rate of 97%.

Senator Richards: The one issue I have regarding the resolution is that it calls for the University Writing Exam Board to be freshly reconstituted. I think that it is fair to say, at least from the student perspective, that the students don’t have confidence in the University Writing Exam Board. In the past several years, faculty and students have had concerns. These concerns have not been addressed. They have not been meeting the concerns. They have not been working to evaluate this system and have, in fact, been forced, through the shared governance process, to do that. So I think that it is fair to say that, as Senate members, we cannot have confidence in the University Writing Exam Board at this time.

Senator Horstein: I have one last comment about the student perspective. It is the pulse around campus that the students are in agreement with the Academic Affairs Committee and I personally would place full trust in that committee. Its sole purpose was to investigate this and should be honored by us by staying with the vote that we had at the last meeting. I have heard no complaints from students otherwise. I don’t necessarily see the need to lay out the timeline when we have already eliminated the exam, but I do respect the resolution.

Senator Aregbe: A specific point that Senator Borg made in the Academic Affairs Committee meeting was the fact that a vote eliminating the current writing exam was not a vote against further research into assessing student writing in different ways in the future. That was really pertinent to our vote on the committee and that should be considered in our thoughts concerning this discussion tonight.

Vote on Sense of Senate Resolution: By voice vote, the resolution was not approved by the majority of the Senate. Therefore, the Sense of the Senate Resolution was not carried.

Presentation of Certificates

Certificates were distributed to members of the Senate who had completed their term on the Senate for the 2006-07 academic year.

Adjournment