Faculty Council
Minutes of the Meeting of April 15, 1996
1. Chairperson Robert Deming called the meeting to order at 4:02 in Room 105 of Fenton Hall.
2. A motion to approve the agenda was passed. The Minutes of March 11, 1996 were also approved with no corrections.
3. President's Report:
a) I will be meeting with the Planning and Budget Committee on Wednesday, April 17 to discuss a budget reduction contingency plan. When I reported to the faculty on March 8th at the Faculty Meeting, I spent some time talking about the state of the budget. I indicated then that as soon as clarification of some of the loose ends took place -- that is the level of State funding and financial aid for students, and tuition, and our own enrollment, etc. -- that I would plan to share with Planning and Budget a budget plan that we could consult on, to the extent that contractual arrangements would allow us, and I did indicate that my intention was that it would include some significant re-structuring and consolidation of administrative services, among other things.
That clarification has not taken place yet. Nonetheless, I would like to present to the Planning and Budget Committee Wednesday, in a sense somewhat more within the contours of a proposed budget, some of the elements of that budget, as specific as we can be at this point in time, both with the uncertainty of what the final budget will be, and with due attention to personnel matters and so forth, but I think fairly specific in some areas.
What I would like to do is to do that so that prior to commencement, which is only now a month away, I do have a chance to alert both the planning body and then it would be up to that group and the faculty council, the extent to which they would like to have further discussions on the campus.
It is not appropriate to go into the substance of the plan now since that will be discussed on Wednesday, but it will then be available for Planning and Budget's discussion and any that might follow. It will all be within the context of the priorities and strategies planning document that I think has been circulated or is in the process of being circulated, which is a general two year context that was open for some comment from Planning and Budget Committee earlier.
b) The Academic Affairs Office is now in negotiation with the potential first Maytum Lecturer, supported by endowment funds for the Maytum Lecture. A presentation that can take place in the Fall, as part of an academic convocation. It will be funded by Maytum Lecture funds. The intention is not that those two be linked in the future necessarily, in fact I propose that they not be linked. I think it will provide an outstanding academic occasion for us this year, and then you all can discuss the future of an academic convocation during the Fall. I hope you will decide to continue some sort of academic convocation, but that will be your decision.
c) The third item, while we are on the subject of endowment funded academic activities, let me mention the status of a couple more. The Williams Visiting Professorship, funded by a gift from Kirk Williams and family, we expect that we will be able to send out an RFP before the end of the year, inviting proposals from departments and groups of departments. There is no subject matter limitation on that visiting professorship. You may recall in my discussion and negotiation on that one, we decided to leave that one open as a visiting professorship as the funds grow during the first 5 years. Then it would be for the campus and the donor to decide after that whether it would be appropriate to make it into a more conventional chair attached to a department or group of departments, but it will be open during the initial years and flexible and in fact during the duration of that appointment can be flexible at the outset. I think that lead time for that kind of appointment probably suggests that the occasion would be in 97-98 rather than in 96-97, but that will depend on the way things proceed.
The Carnahan Jackson gift which was our early lead gift from the Carnahan Jackson Foundation in Jamestown: that is tied to the Arts and Humanities. The first funding for that gift is being paid in installments, so I think the first event could be as early as Spring '97. There will be information on that, and we will seek proposals also for that.
The first Landford Prize will be given at this commencement, to graduating senior Aimee Pickhardt. I urge you to attend commencement.
d) Finally, regarding the question which has been raised regarding SUNY Distinguished Professor rank: We've done some checking, particularly with Geneseo, who we learned targeted a couple of people. The practice had grown up, especially in recent years, to have this rank limited almost entirely to University Center faculty. Geneseo took that seriously and pushed a couple of candidates and they were successful. We had five or six in the past. I will consult with Bob Deming and we will try to decide on a process and get an invitation for nominees out before the end of the year.
4. Chairperson's Report (Robert Deming):
At the next meeting the Executive Committee, we will review those members of Faculty Council who have missed two consecutive meetings. I have five names, and I will be contacting those people to see if there were any extenuating circumstances. With that in mind would you be sure that you do initial the attendance form. No other report.
5. Vice Chair:
No report, except that Planning and Budget, of which I am a member, would like ideas of where you think we can cut.
6. Faculty Senator's Report (Moj Seyedian):
The Senate is now engaged in drafting a document which will go counter to the Re-thinking SUNY document. The initiative has been commended and complimented. The report will be known as the SUNY Academic Agenda. This Academic Agenda will be very similar to our own institutional plan that we have at this college. The plan will address the important conditions, circumstances, resources and environment that will be conducive to an excellent job in both teaching and research. We welcome your ideas.
7. Presidential Search Committee (Ray Belliotti):
The committee interviewed eight semi-finalists and from those interviews, and our ongoing investigations, four finalists emerged. You've read about that, and you should have some idea who they are. There is a good article in the Leader, in fact today, about them. You should have received schedules in your mail boxes. Resumes are available from your chairs, your supervisors, and they are on reserve at the library. We really encourage your input. When you meet with these candidates, when you size them up, I've got our e-mail address up on the blackboard. You can also get written memos to us, in care of Heidi Mahoney. The committee will of course continue its own general investigation of the candidates on their present and prior campuses as well. We will make our decision at the end of April, and will then forward a ranked list to the college council for their approval.
8. Governance Committee (Steve Rees):
During the month of March we held elections for replacement seats on Planning and Budget. Minda Rae Amiran will now represent Arts, Education, and Humanities; Jon Kraus will represent Natural and Social Sciences. Their terms expire in 1999. This month we are running elections for Governance Committee and Student Affairs Committee. Those ballots are now being prepared and will be going out by the end of the week. The decisions should be made by the end of the month.
9. Academic Affairs (proposal included on agenda):
Recommends the following change in the next edition of the college catalogue. Change the description for the D-code from "Courses offered on occasion" to "Courses offered at least once every five years," and remove the description and listing in the catalogue of any course that has not been offered in five years.
Discussion: Mac Nelson: I have some doubts about what looks like a very simple pruning job. It's probably a good idea, but I do know that, especially in the particular exigency that we're working now, certain courses that are offered in our department every two or three years, are now not being offered every two or three years, and indeed may never be offered again. But I'd hate to see them banished from the catalogue just because at this moment in time we don't have enough staff to offer them. So I guess I'm speaking against it, though not very strongly.
Minda Rae Amiran: Do you know if it is the intention of Academic Affairs that some special procedure would be required to reinstitute a course that had been removed from the catalogue? Answer: It turns out that courses although they would be removed from the catalogue they are not removed from the master list, for at least ten years. So you retain the course number, name, and such. Even if they weren't in the catalogue, you would still have it there on the master list. So the next edition of the catalogue if you wished to offer the course again, you could do that.
Kenneth Lucey: Just for clarification, if a course is purged from the catalogue and is subsequently offered, that wouldn't automatically put it back in the catalogue? Answer: No.
Motion passed with one opposed.
10. Planning and Budget: No report.
11. Professional Service (Joan Burke):
The committee's job-related time survey was previously sent to Faculty Council members by campus mail. We have one correction on our report, and this correction involves page 2. Under Institutional Data, line 6, the line that starts with "Librarians as you might expect....," we are top heavy, but we are top heavy with a percent of 55% instead of 68%, "who have worked at Fredonia for 8 or more years" it changes the way we perceive our balance or close to our balance anyway.
We have a clarification for page 3. Under General Results, on the 4th line we indicated that the "vast majority" of Fredonia's faculty, etc., work at least 40 hours per week. That "vast majority" is actually 89%. This may make a difference in how you think about that majority since it is pretty large. On page 4, under Total Work Hours/Years of Employment: the third line, only figure there, we indicated that the figure is "more than" 50% of employees spend 51 or more hours/week. That "more than" is actually 64%.
I have a few observations, and then my committee is here, and we will answer questions should you have them.
If you didn't get a chance to read this, then you should know that our charge was to survey faculty members, professional staff, and librarians. We constructed an instrument to survey all of those groups. After 16 months of working on this project we are in unanimous agreement that it would have been more effective had we had three instruments for three separate groups. We followed the charge, but some of our findings, and I think that some of you picked them up, some of the findings in some of the areas are not terribly conclusive.
The second comment is about the most general finding, perhaps the most conclusive remark here. The general finding warrants repeating, and that is that 89% of Fredonia's faculty, professionals and librarians work at least 40 hours/week, and 64% of a ll of us work at least 51 to more than 60 hours/week.
Some surprises: One of the areas that we marveled at was an area on page 6 of the report, which is about course reduction options, and we talked a little bit on page 8 about how few people had actually any information about course release options, and how few people had taken them. This is some data about that. It may interest you to know that in the past three years, and the questions were about the last three years, 11 faculty members in what we would term the research area of our employment have taken course reductions to work on their research. One of them has been, one associate professor, who has taken the reduction every other year, in addition to that there are 5 full professors who have taken this reduction every semester in the past three years, that means 6 course reductions, and then 4 others, 1 assistant, 2 associates, and 1 full who have been granted a course reduction each year. For creative scholarship, there are very few of these, one associate professor has taken a course reduction once, and two full professors have taken the reduction every semester in the last three years. Since most of us did not know anything about course reduction options we marveled at all this information. 89 or 90 percent of the people had not heard about this.
My last comment involves service, pages 9 and 10. The figures are there, but what we thought was more noteworthy was the perception of the value of this service. 70% of us felt that committee service had little or no influence on campus policy, campus life, and had very little effect on tenure and promotion decisions. We have balanced that information with the fact that 60 percent of faculty and librarians serve on three or more committees, and 73 percent of assistant professors serve on three or more committees. When you go past 3, 4, 5, and 6 this is pretty heavy territory, especially for women. Some of the women have been doing more service on committees.
Questions: Tom Malinoski: I looked through the results some time ago and some of the information is very interesting and perhaps even compelling, but what do we do with this information? To whom does it make any difference? In other words, SO WHAT?. This is not a question to you; this is to anyone who knows the answer. We have lots of information now; what are we going to do with it?
President MacPhee: There have been lots of studies similar to this that show that people work 40, 50, 60 hours. Politically it won't help us much, to be honest with you, because we are saying that we are working very hard, faculty and professional staff. I'm not surprised. The study confirms what I think you all know. If Tom is talking about politically, it might make an interesting piece for Chris [Davis- Mantai] to deal with, but I don't know whether that would impress people or not, if we tell them we are working hard. That's just an observation. I'll be happy to, because I read the report with great interest, and I think we could maybe do an interesting piece in the paper, but I'll predict to you it will lead to further questions that may be more sensitive than that. I think it confirms what I think you all know.
It might be useful to have some further discussion with people, deans and others. For example, the reference about the importance of service or lack thereof and I think is a reference that people felt that service wasn't taken as important as teaching and research. In fact the Faculty Handbook says that it is not supposed to be taken as seriously. So although I know it was not the intent, I thought the way it was phrased might lead to misunderstanding that they are to be treated equally in matters of promotion and tenure. The policy in the Handbook is quite clear that there is kind of a rank order of significance: teaching, research, and service. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be considered.
Dr. Burke: Remember that there were two questions. The information I gave about 70 percent was in response to a question addressing not the the hierarchy for promotion and tenure, but a question about the influence of committee service, i.e., do we make any difference here; does it affect campus policy?
Dr. MacPhee: That's disturbing.
Dr. Burke: On the other question, the percentages were different and lower, because more people know that service is ranked third.
Dr. MacPhee: My final comment is about what you refer to as the course reduction option. This may need further discussion. It has to be seen in the context of our policy statement that we worked on with you the last couple of years, in terms of faculty workload or in response to teaching workload. I think this is what is referred to as course reduction option. But it is the negotiation that goes on between the chair and the dean and others within the range of 9-12 units of teaching, and there is presumably some rational basis for that which has been approved. As far as I know there is no other course reduction option.
Dr. Larry Maheady raised a question concerning the original charge to the committee, and why Faculty Council had asked for the study.
Chairperson Deming: Let me say on behalf of the Council, to clarify one issue, that the Council thanks the committee for the long service in preparing this document. That's not an issue; we do thank the committee for this work. The issue that Joan is raising is, o.k., now we've done it; here it is. What next? That's the issue that Tom [Malinoski] and President MacPhee are raising. It occurs to me that since Council receives and accepts and approves a document, therefore it becomes a part of Faculty Council action, which is a recommendation to the President. The President can do with it whatever he sees fit. It would be, I think, more appropriate for the President to review what political purpose this might have, than for the Council to review that.
President MacPhee: Going back to Larry's [Maheady] question, what was the motivation? I made the comment that it may have some use politically; it may not, but was that the motivation? Or was it that there was some feeling that internally the work was not understood or appreciated? I don't recall.
Dr. Karen Mills-Courts: Part of the answer to this question may lie in the very honest response to the question about committee work. There has indeed been some critical discussion on this campus about how much work we do or don't do, and what the value of that work is. I think we might want for the general talk period after the meeting ["off agenda"] to discuss this business of committee work. When I think of how much committee work assistant professors are doing, it's a great deal. And if I were an assistant professor I would certainly be questioning right now why I was doing any of it.
Tom Malinoski: Just to follow up on this, is there anything within the charge to your committee that might imply even vaguely the possibility of not just presenting the data, but actually presenting some things to do with the data? That could then go on to the administration.
Joan Burke: In that charge, no.
Minda Rae Amiran: If my memory serves, the charge was given at a time when we were hearing a lot of noise from Albany on Faculty workload, and there was all the argument about the number of faculty-student contact hours, etc. There were also rumblings about having to increase that load. And even more recently we have heard from the governor suggesting that we should all work one more hour a week, defined as one more class a week, I think was part of the context of the charge.
Dean Zablotney: I believe that two Januaries ago we received a charge from the President to review our institutional workload statement, and each of the departments was in the process of developing their departmental statements which then we put then all together to come up with the final document that would be forwarded from Fredonia as our response to the chancellor at that time.
Dr. Burke: There's one of the findings that we have no verification for, but we know is real. We received many correspondences attached to these sheets or instead of filling out the surveys, and there is an attitude especially in the professionals taff that nobody really wants to hear what they have to say, that the instrument was not geared for them, and they were feeling alienated from all the rest of us, and I think that perception and the perception about committee work, some of the grayer areas would be areas worth tackling.
Chairperson Deming: Perhaps the report should be distributed more widely, to the whole campus.
President MacPhee: I really do think there are several issues that could be identified and perhaps in small groups talked about some. For instance, the general attitude of professional staff. Maybe this should be part of discussions which I assume you will be having in the Fall. There is good information in the report to be used, but I think probably more internally than externally.
When the issue of faculty workload comes up it is always redefined as it should be to not faculty workload but faculty teaching load -- that's the issue that gets sensitive politically. The board of trustees and governor are really talking about teaching load, and it looks self-serving when we talk about how many hours we work, because that's sort of assumed.
It was moved and seconded that the job related time survey be made available to all members of those groups surveyed. Passed unanimously.
12. Progress Report of the General College Program Revision Committee: (Joe Straight):
[A report, dated March 28, 1996, had been distributed with the agenda.] We have been meeting for some time, and are hoping to make a final recommendation to Faculty Council by the end of the semester so that there would be time to go into an implementation phase in the Fall semester if that is what the faculty wants to do. What we see our charge as being at this time is to come up with a broad outline for General College Program either a small or significant change.
Under our proposal, there would be two parts to the GCP instead of the current three. Similar to what we have now, our Part I is the skills part. The new Part II combines elements of the current Parts II and III. The new Part II is called "Exploring and Integrating the Disciplines."
In Part I there are five areas -- A, B, C, D & E -- with a three hour requirement in each area, and in Part II there are three areas -- A, B, & C -- which are the present areas, but organizing the courses somewhat differently within the areas into clusters, which have some common theme. We are hoping that the students will see more of a relationship between courses in an interdisciplinary approach. I think in some sense we cause the problem because we like to put knowledge in various categories, and so we have academic departments and we have courses broken down in our subject areas, etc. In mathematics, for example, there are 60 areas within the mathematics subject classification, and these are broken down into sub-areas. We say "this is the way knowledge is," but we know that that's not the way problems are. When you take a problem, you very often have to bring to bear on that problem knowledge from many different disciplines, so that's why we hope that the cluster approach will be more effective.
A question was raised regarding the meaning of I-D ["A course furthering the development of knowledge of a foreign language including an understanding of cultures associated with that language."]
Dr. Straight: I think what we are envisioning in I-D IS a language requirement. We would hope that a High School preparation of a certain level might waive this requirement. We have not talked about this in detail yet; we would like entering students to be well prepared in a language.
Vice President Hess: If they did not take a language in high school, what would they be expected to take in college to fulfill the requirement?
Dr. Straight: We see this as similar to the way Part C is now: We take the student where they are and try to advance them. So we would evaluate what they had had in high school and try to move them up.
Mac Nelson: I applaud the fact that you have stayed so close to what we have now, but I question your assumptions on page two, number 6, in moving from 36 to 42 hours (which I approve of). I have deep doubts about your envisioning that most departments would develop courses for Part I-B, and I have some doubt that an incrusting number of students would place out of one of the Part I requirements. That being the case, I think your final proposal might get some resistance from some parts of the campus community on increasing the GCP, particularly from students.
Dr. Straight: It may be true that not all departments would want to expand their own Part I-B offerings, but departments with a large number of credits in the major who felt impacted upon by the 42 hour requirement might elect to develop one of their required courses into a I-B course.
Question: Given the way part I-D is described, could the language be fulfilled by, say, a course in the history of France in the Middle Ages?
Dr. Straight: We haven't made a final decision on that but at this point a majority of the committee wants this to be a rather strict requirement in foreign language. -end- Ken Lucey: Regarding the issue of Part I-B, in a climate in which our enrollment is down by double digits, if your committee was presented with the following: "If you put in place a foreign language requirement at Fredonia, that will exacerbate the decrease in enrollment to the college." Is the attitude of your committee then "So be it."?
Dr. Straight: I can't speak for the rest of the committee, but my own opinion is that I would argue that point.
Dr. Karen Mills-Courts: You seem to support a foreign language requirement that has all kinds of implications, including staffing implications, but the proposal seems to give up the international focus present in the current Part III and I don't qui te understand this. You seem to undercut your own argument.
Dr. Straight: Many of the ideas of the various clusters which have been talked about include international aspects.
[Additional discussion centered around the staffing implications inherent in the Part I-D language requirement, the ability of departments to mount courses for the I-B writing requirement, the importance of factoring in program cost when designing th e program, and the importance of calculating the impacts of any changes made.]
Vice President Hess: Let me make an appeal supporting what Karen Mills-Courts talked about earlier: the development of our multi- cultural and diversity courses, which we have worked long and hard to develop all over this campus. We are proud of w hat we have accomplished and we need to accomplish more. I am concerned that we not make these courses into part of an option of clusters. We should try to protect this segment of our program in some fashion that people are required to have some mu lti-cultural or diversity in their education. We have come too far to give it up.
Jon Kraus: The percentage of students in high school taking two years of foreign language is incredibly low. Much lower than I ever anticipated, but data is available for you. The other point I want to make concerns Part 3 of the GCP. I teach abo ut four courses that fit one of those areas, and did before it was created. Prior to the time we added part 3 to the GCP, I had almost entirely Political Science majors. After the GCP started, it was the first time that I really started to see a si gnificant number of students from any other disciplines in these classes. And now in many of them, half or more, are non-majors. When I speak to students, what I think we can anticipate at least with part 2, as it is written up now, we will not hav e students taking courses outside of their discipline above the 200 level. The difference was that was specified almost all of them in part 3 are above the 300 level and it was obviously a pretty good adventure which normally they tried to avoid. A nd they were now required to take some upper division courses in some discipline other than their own, and I think that will entirely disappear with this proposal.
Dr. Straight: The classes that you teach in part 3, are they in part A or part B?
Dr. Kraus: They are in B.
Dr. Straight: Do they have pre-requisites at the lower level?
Dr. Kraus: No, but they sure ought to.
Dr. Harry Jacobson: I think we really are strapped in the Arts. Expanding the number of hours to 42 could be a problem for our majors. Exposure to different cultures is important.
Dr. Deming: Is the committee assuming that all courses in part 2 are going to be inter-disciplinary courses?
Dr. Straight: No. We think that many courses that currently exist in Part II could be used in clusters, and probably most of them will not be inter-disciplinary, but there will be an attempt made to find out what the other courses in the same clust er are doing and how they are contributing to the cluster which is involved.
Ken Mantai: Have you determined how large these clusters should be? Students have a horrible time now getting courses. In biology, they would take whatever courses were open, at the only hour they had available. Have you considered these kinds of scheduling problems in determining size of the clusters?
Dr. Straight: Yes, we thought about that. Most of the sample clusters people came up with have been on average five or six courses in the cluster of which the student would choose 3. We couldn't find all the courses that we wanted to find in the c atalog. Dr. Deming: How many clusters did you find?
Dr. Straight: There were lots of ideas at all levels. Looking at a theme, and developing a cluster around that theme. (Dr. Deming: Out of existing courses?) Out of existing courses. Take Canada, for example. You could offer a course on the His tory of Canada, Canadian Literature, etc. But then something like the environment, of course, our cluster could be bigger.
Dr. Deming: If I were a chair, and I were contemplating a year in advance putting together a schedule of English courses, how would I know what other appropriate clusters might exist where else? If I have my faculty doing GCP, major courses, specia lty courses, etc... But I also have to be planning for part 2 clusters. How do I know, now, for the Fall and for next Spring what's going to be in the cluster? I mean do all the chairs get together and say I've got a cluster forming in A, and then the chair in Arts says I've got another cluster forming over here. I don't see how this could work.
Dr. Straight: The clusters would be approved ahead of time, much as the current courses for the GCP are approved ahead of time. So chairs would know which clusters have been approved, and which courses have been approved for the clusters. It's a l ittle more complicated than it is presently.
[Additional discussion centered on the concept of clusters and how it would work, and the idea of making all of part II interdisciplinary and including multi-cultural components.]
Dr. Kraus: I see so many courses in part 2 that could be in clusters. They could be taken sequentially instead of all at once. Let me say something about Foreign Language. I was required to take two Foreign Language classes in college. I found ou t I had to. I got a lot out of them, and I still do. But requiring just ONE foreign language course of all in-coming students doesn't seem to me to be academically respectable. If we are serious about foreign languages, I don't think that one cours e does it.
Dr. Deming: Let's say that 50% of Fredonia's students don't come with a foreign language. What is one course -- Introduction to French -- going to do? Virtually nothing. I was required to take 2 years of language. At the end of the 4th semester I knew quite a bit about that language, had developed quite a reading fluency in that language. Which I immediately lost, because I never used it, but I could see there was some value over a 2 year. I don't understand 1 course.
Dr. Straight: You're probably right if the numbers of freshman who know a foreign language is so small a number. We'll have to look at those numbers.
Dean Hurtgen: I don't want to extend the discussion into Part I-E, but I think that the concerns about part I-D, in terms of impact of our staffing as a whole, may also apply to Part I-E, so I would urge the committee to review I-E along with I-D. I would also ask the committee to consider what virtue it sees in clusters as opposed to non-clusters. There is a presumption in your early comments, that a grouping of courses that show no particular common thematic orientation is somehow less pref erable than a grouping that does. The cluster idea sounds well and good, but I'm not sure on its face if it's more commendable than the breadth and options that we have now. Also, we should move to the point of requiring individual departments to o ffer I-B courses. Many times, Department chairs ask me to waive this requirement for particular students.
Dr. Larry Maheady: My reading of the literature suggests that of the 80 to 90 important student outcomes at the end of undergraduate education, that the core curriculum, or GCP, contributes very little, either to satisfaction or effectiveness by its completion, whether its mandated up to 72 hours or almost completely elective. I'm not sure we need to be worried about 42 vs. 36 per se. I think the important things to consider are those things that DO impact students, and that is the availabili ty of courses and the sequence in which they can get them. I hear more dissatisfaction now over trying to get into courses and make complete schedules. All the other stuff that we've made more complicated -- moving from 36 to 42 hours I think will have a big impact on attracting students. The big difference will be not only on staffing implications but student perceptions, because ultimately we're in a position now where we have to be very aware of these things. We need to be extremely cautio us about the things we do that make it difficult for students. Dr. Amiran: There may be some advantages to the cluster idea, but right now the Council as a whole does not have much of an idea about what you have in mind by way of clusters. I can imagine clusters all of which would have some international compo nent. I can imagine clusters that would be mixtures of 200 and 300 level courses which would include current part III courses.
Dr. Deming announced it was 5:30 and called for a motion either to adjourn until 4 p.m. on the 22nd or extend the meeting until 5:45. A motion to do the latter was made, seconded and passed.
Mac Nelson: On I-D, when this college dropped its foreign language requirement, a lot of us thought it was a bad idea. I favor having a requirement, but I remind you that our old requirement was only for students pursuing the BA degree, not the BS or BFA. Therefore, the proposal before us is not to go back to what we had before, but to establish something much broader than we ever had in the past.
Jon Kraus: If the idea behind clusters is to build more coherence within the course groups that students take, it is a good idea. I presume students could take courses sequentially. Perhaps a provision could be made for those that have trouble get ting in and they could be allowed to take a course outside a normal cluster.
Jefferson Westwood: When the committee comes back next month, I would ask you to describe what's wrong with the current GCP. I guess right now that I'm in the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mode and maybe everyone else knows what's wrong and I d on't but if you're looking for support and votes from the Council you might want to consider describing what problem you're attempting to solve by the revision.
Dr. Deming: Regarding the statement under 2 in the "notes," namely that courses in Part I will be required to incorporate used of appropriate technology (word processors, statistical packages,) the committee should keep in mind that not all incoming freshman have computers or word processing software. This needs to be addressed.
The committee should also address the issue in 6.2, what is meant by "placing out" of at least one of the part I requirements? The English Department has a long history of opposition to accepting "advanced" high school courses which say that student s can write. There is a great deal of literature that shows that there is no correlation between placement tests and students ability to write.
The committee should also address the issue that Jim Hurtgen raised about the history of I-B. If you are going to mandate departments to offer these courses, you need to talk to Dean Hurtgen and to Dean Zablotney and to the Vice President.
Dean Zablotney: One of the caveats of putting in any foreign language requirement is this: The current planning seems to assume that although courses are available in high school many of our students are not taking them. Test that assumption. Wha t courses ARE available at the high school level? ARE there three year blocks of a foreign language that would provide the competency that you are suggesting they may have? I think you need to look at the high schools that our students are coming f rom.
Greg Prechtl: When I am talking with prospective athletes and parents, they want to know, "What's my kid going to be able to do when he gets out of here?" The parents don't care if he is liberally educated or if he is a Renaissance Man. They want to know, after they've paid their $11,000 a year for four years, "Is my kid going to be able to get a job?" I suggest you consult the admissions department as to whether the move from 36 to 42 hours is a good idea or a bad idea, given the enrollment picture.
Moved and Seconded to have the committee continue its work for one more month. Passed.
13. Petition by 11 Faculty Members:
"Resolved that administrators and chair must not violate catalog requirements in registering students."*
Discussion began on the merits of the proposed change, but it was discovered during the course of the discussion that a quorum was not present, and thus the meeting was adjourned at approximately 5:40 p.m. without action being taken.
*This sentence was amdeded at the May meeting to insert the word "knowlingly: in front of the work "violate." -- JW, F/C Secretary
Attendance:
Professional Staff/Management Confidential:
[x] Sylvia Clarke
[ ] Fabrizio Daloisio
[ ] Susan Maloney
[x] Kevin Michki
[E] Timothy Murphy
[ ] William Ortega
[x] Martha Smith
[x] Charlene Wiles
[x] Vivian Garcia Conover
[x] Thomas Malinoski
[x] Lisa Marrano
[ ] Jerome Moss
[ ] Richard Notte (Not on attendance list)
[x] Patrick Rocheleau
[x] Terry Tzitzis
Arts, Education, and Humanities:
[x] Minda Rae Amiran
[x] Robert Deming
[E] Carl Farraro
[x] Rose Klassen
[x] Robert Klassen
[x] David Ludlam
[x] Lawrence Maheady
[x] Malcolm Nelson
[x] Stephen E. Rees
[x] Candice Brown
[x] Janet Fairbairn
[x] Harry Jacobson
[x] Kenneth Lucey
[x] Ringo Ma
[x] Karen Mills-Courts
[x] John Onufrak
[x] George Sebouhian
Natural and Social Sciences:
[x] Nancy Boynton
[x] Jon Kraus
[x] Kenneth Mantai
[x] Tom Pencek
[ ] Amin Sarkar
[ ] Mario Vassallo
[ ] Nancy Gee
[ ] Gary Lash
[x] Peter Mattocks
[x] Greg Prechtl
[x] Brenda Joyce Stephens
[x] Deborah Welch
Ex Officio Members:
[x] Moj Seyedian (Faculty Senator)
[x] Gina Malinoski (Interim VP, Development)
[x] Greg Harper (Acting Dean, Educational Studies)
[x] James Hurtgen (Dean for Liberal Studies)
[ ] Peter Mooney (SA President)
[x] Jefferson Westwood (College Senate Secretary)
[ ] David Burdette (VP, Administration)
[x] Michael Dimitri (VP, Student Affairs)
[x] David Hess (VP, Academic Affairs)
[x] Donald MacPhee (President)
[ ] Stephen Rees (Chair, Governance Committee)
[x] Sharon Zablotney (Dean, Arts and Sciences)
Guests:
Ron Ambrosetti
Carol Blanchard-Rocheleau
Nancy Bowser
Rebecca Conti
Ellen Litwicki
Karen Poznjlia
Peter J. Schoenbach
Joseph Straight
Respectfully submitted,
Jefferson Westwood, Secretary