Minutes: September 28, 2012

ATTENDANCE

Present:  Beauty Bragg, Scott Butler, Sandra Godwin, Karynne Kleine, Holley Roberts, Mike Rose, Jeff Turner, Bill Miller

Regrets:  Carol Christy, Carrie Cook, Leslie Moore, Tom Ormond

Guests: Lee Gillis

Activities and Actions:

The meeting began, on time, with a vote to approve the agenda.  The next order of business was to review minutes; this was followed by a motion from Holley Roberts to approve them.   Minutes were approved. 

The next agenda item was unfinished business which included a clarification of the request from Dr. Liao-Troth regarding FAPC’s attention to the matter of Student Opinion Surveys.  Rather than conduct a series of focus groups, as was originally thought, the Interim Provost requests that we reactivate/reconstitute the working group and follow the work that they had begun through to its completion.  Some questions that remain to be addressed include:  What are the cost differences among the processes identified by last year’s working group? What specific content do they measure?  What is the mechanism for open ended feedback?  Many of the answers to these questions we expect will be presented in the Webinar sales meeting, which previous members were prevented from attending. 

In order to bring everyone up to speed, Mike Rose, acting as chair for that meeting, distributed some of the documents that the previous group had produced.   He emphasized the need for speed in determining the membership of the working group which should consist of members of FAPC as well as other campus constituencies.  To that end, from the FAPC committee Leslie Moore, Sandra Godwin, Mike Rose, Bill Miller, Scott Butler and Holley Roberts (provisionally) have agreed to be members of the working group. The question remains as to what form the product of this working group should take.  Some options are: present it as an action item for senate approval or produce a white paper which would be presented to the Provost.  Another possibility is sending a report to Deans for recommendation.

Another item of unfinished business was the discussion of how/whether to procede with a review of the Pre- and Post- tenure review processes.  Some rationales for taking up the issue were proposed.  Members expressed concern about the lack any address of administrative accountability and oversight of the present guidelines.  Others drew attention to the lack of provision for an appeals process in the case of post-tenure review.  We considered that it might be advisable to work on the post-tenure guidelines issue before taking up the pre-tenure issue, but no decision was reached.

Finally we circled back to the issue of the SOS project and Mike took a survey of working group members availability on Fridays after subcommittee meetings so that the webinar might be scheduled during this time.  Scott Butler, Bill Miller and Jeff Turner all indicated that they have other meetings subsequent to that one.  Sandra Godwin and Holley Roberts thought they’d be likely to be available.

New Business: 

A new request from the Provost’s office is that the committee consider revising the language in the handbook policy regarding faculty rank, which presently extends the right to vote at University Faculty Meetings (which apparently includes Senate)  to anyone with faculty status.   This language opens up the possibility of undue influence for administrative personnel who also have faculty status (even though they may not have rank).  It was suggested that we alter the language to read: “Individuals holding positions with faculty status are eligible for the Optional Retirement Plan [the apparent original intention of language] and may attend and speak at any faculty meeting, but may not vote.”  By this point, we were at the end of the designated meeting time so we did not call a vote, but there was support for this language and we agreed to put it to a vote in our next meeting.

We were also asked to anticipate the introduction of “faculty input on faculty evaluation” at our next meeting.

Adjournment:

The meeting adjourned at 3:16.