College Senate
Minutes of the meeting of December 13th 1999
Chair George Browder called the meeting to order at 4:06 PM.
1. A quorum was present and the Agenda was approved unanimously as amended.
2. The minutes of the November 11th 1999 meeting were approved unanimously.
3.President Denis Hefner (President's report):
Today there are actually two milestones going on. One effects the campus, and that's the fact that the request for bids went out this morning for the new natatorium. We are finally at the bidding stage, and in about five to six weeks we will have a contractor. Hopefully we are going to get a good low bid from a quality contractor. We will be moving forward on that project. It's finally reached that particular stage which is always, I think, a milestone.
The second milestone you'll probably be reading about in the paper tomorrow is that we will have a countywide chamber of commerce. I just came form the chamber of commerce meeting, and in the North County the vote in favor of a countywide chamber of commerce is running two hundred and ninety something in favor, ten opposed. In the South County, where there was more opposition to going forward, it's about two hundred and forty-five in favor and fourteen opposed. Now there still could be a few more ballots that can come in before five o'clock tonight, although most people have filled them out and sent them in already. So there is no doubt that we will actually have for the first time in the history of Chautauqua County a countywide chamber of commerce and the Mason-Dixon line is starting to get a little finer out there and going away a little bit. I thought that was good news.
Now tomorrow we will have the board of trustees voting on a chancellor and there is no doubt that Bob King, the state budget director will be appointed as the new SUNY Chancellor. I've been on the phone calling and talking to a lot of people and trying to get some information on Bob King. What I've learned so far is that apparently he does have a record of being a pretty good listener. He's been successful in the positions that he's been in. During the interviews he was very much an advocate of rethinking SUNY and of not continuing with the movement that's been occurring towards centralization, but looking more towards decentralization. Obviously, I think that all of us would have preferred, and I hope that even the board would have even preferred to have been able to name someone who almost immediately would have to spend some time defending his qualifications. I don't think that's something that he necessarily wanted to be doing either, but based on the cast of finalists that we had, apparently it was pretty slim pickings. Most of the best candidates who were nominated were not willing to come in to SUNY at this particular time. We all know some of the reasons for that, but whatever the reasons, he is going to be a person who is going to be our chancellor. We are going to hope that he is very successful as a chancellor, because if he is successful as a chancellor that's going to help us to be more successful on this particular campus. That will be going though tomorrow. Then a few weeks later there will actually have to be a confirmation hearing in the senate, but the senate is a republican body and clearly he is linked with the Republican Party. I don't anticipate that there are going to be any surprises there. But for tomorrow, it should be a unanimous vote, I think, by the board of trustees.
One of the good thinks that I did want to point out, was that at least the chancellor-to-be has been fairly consistent in the last couple of interviews that he's had with the press. He's been stressing the fact that he doesn't think SUNY has been a terribly effective advocate for public higher education in this state, at least for the last few years since he's been in Albany. I would say that that's been my greatest concern with the SUNY system. I think SUNY advocacy is almost nonexistent, quite frankly. If he's willing to tackle that problem and move forward on some effective advocacy, it could be that this would work to our benefit, at least with the current governor. When governors change, that could make it a little tougher for us, but we've got to get through the current governor, so at the moment that is kind-of where we are.
I did also want to report that next Monday the presidents for all of the appointed campuses are still planning to get ahead. This is without any SUNY representatives, although we are going to extend an invitation to the new chancellor to come to the meeting with us, if he so chooses. This will be in Albany, and we are going in and putting together a lobbying strategy for the entire legislature. We'll be assigning different presidents to different legislatures and just going forward to be fully supportive of the request that the board of trustees have put in, which would at least provide us with a baseline funding and keep us on track, at least for where we are now. We wouldn't have any more slimmage.
One good thing to report about the new chancellor is he has sent out letters to all of the presidents already and he has set up a series of meetings. One in Buffalo, on in Albany, and then one that will be out on Long Island inviting presidents from the SUNY campuses. That will be Thursday and Friday, there's a series of meetings to at least meet with the presidents and for us to bring in issues that we want to discuss with him. I think that was at least a good first step.
In terms of enrollment for next year, we just received from the system our request to submit what our enrollment targets will be for next year. Our target for this year was 4850FTE, currently on the books our target for next year is for 4950FTE, I haven't heard of anyone saying that we need to change from that particular target and so at this time we probably won't be making any changes. We will probably be going in for 4950FTE for next year. If I go in at 4950FTE that will get us some growth money, assuming growth money is funded this year and will allow us to close some of the current budget gap that we have. We clearly came in fairly low this year, and so we have a little catch-up to be doing next year. We are looking at that.
I did want to wish everyone happy holidays, as you finish up finals and get those grades in and then go out and have a wonderful holiday. I also wanted to express my great appreciation to George Browder for the job that he's been doing as chair of the College Senate. I think he's done a wonderful job. George, we're going to miss you as chair, but Nancy we welcome you as coming in as chair.
4. Dr. Una Mae Reck (Vice President's Report):
I have two items. In your packet there is a handout of the Assessment Subcommittee. These are people that are going to be working with Jackie in the Campus Assessment Center and fulfilling the mission for that. The other piece of information is that I've been appointed to be on the Provost Advisory Council of General Education. We had our first meeting on Monday December sixth, a week ago today. You have the membership of the group in the handout here. Basically that meeting was an organizational meeting and we talked about how proposals should be formatted. Also the deadline for submission of general education proposals was postponed to January 31st. The advisory council will be meeting once a month, at least, in Albany and our next meeting is January 24th.
They have received our request for a waiver. It was not acted upon because nothing was acted upon at this organizational meeting. It will be acted upon at the January meeting. The main discussion of the meeting was dealing with community colleges in terms of the ten standards to competency. Basically, the Provost has given the chance for community colleges to only meet seven of the ten standards, in other words twenty-one of the thirty minimum hours. This caused a lot of discussion because it's going to cause a major problem in terms of transfer students. I tried to point out that this would just involve students trying to move from one SUNY institution to another. Generally the idea is when you have a core General Education program the bonus of it, or one of the perks is it is usually to facilitate transfer. Nothing was resolved and I do believe it's going to take a major effort of the state op. presidents in a uniform fashion to make an impact on this. That's where we are.
5. Dr. George Browder (Chairperson's report):
I have five items. We can deal with them fairly quickly except for one. First of all, as you charged, I have appointed a recycling committee, but in a fine reading of the bylaws I discovered that when you charge me to create a committee you have to approve it. So I give you the names and hope you approve them, since I already sent out the letter. The candidates are: Jack Berkley, Geosciences; Adam Brown, Psychology (he is the adjunct faculty member who brought the petition before us that precipitated all of this and therefor appropriately informed); Susan Braylson (nominated by the Student Associates); Sylvia Clarke, Environmental Health (who will provide liaison with the administration); Terra Kabinov, Project Direct Environment chairperson (in conformance with your suggestion); Phoebe Reeves (another Student Affairs nominee); and Jefferson Westwood, Arts Center.
The committee was approved unanimously.
Also for your information, we have finally been able to compose a faculty student consensual relations ad-hoc committee to provide some draft policy guidelines for the faculty handbook to help faculty avoid ethical snares in any consensual personal relationship that they might develop with a student. The committee consists of Nancy Gee and myself as the chairs of Senate. I assume now Arleen will replace me. Gene Harper and Dick Reddy representing the UUP and Ellen Litwicki and Susan Royal representing the Professional Services Committee. They will be providing you with a draft statement presumably either at the first or second council meeting in the spring semester.
We've made significant progress in committee streamlining, which was of course my goal for the year, and Nancy has asked me to continue to serve ex-officio, the old tradition on the Council for the spring semester, so I can help bring closure to that process. Essentially, as I explained on Proftalk, the major change that we are considering making is replacing the Governance Committee, assuming the responsibilities for elections under the executive committee, and replacing the chair of the Governance Committee with an elected at large elections officer who would supervise that. This will be possible because the President is providing adequate clerical support to assume all of the paperwork and busywork that committee people had to do in the past in running elections.
We're hoping that the Executive Committee with an officer who stays on top of this will be able to maintain that process without a committee having to do it. The other role of Governance Committee was coordinating committees, and they were trying to do this by appointing a liaison officer to every committee. The liaison officers were supposed to attend the standing committees meetings, which bumped their size up by one and changed their representation. Then those liaison people presumably would come back to governance committee to tell each other what was going on in all of the committees and then they would feed back to the committees and also to Executive Committee, and the result is of course nobody is doing any of this.
We had a terrible problem this year on Executive Committee of really knowing what was going on. What we tried as an experiment was to create a Coordinating Committee that consisted of chairs of the standing committees, and Vice President Reck, plus the chairs of the Executive Committee. We had one meeting just recently in preparation for this meeting and had a very good idea among ourselves of what's going on, so it seems to work very effectively. That's probably, unless we hear static, what we will recommend in the way of the bylaw change early next semester.
Aside from that, the Academic Affairs Committee is going to condense its subcommittees considerably into very few and we are also considering eliminating the Professional Services Committee. It meets very rarely; its two major chores are to award professional development and research creativity awards. We have a number of awards committees, it seems that chore could be better condensed. The other major job is to stay on top of some policies for promotions, tenure, and leave. That sort of thing happens only sporadically, and once again it seems Executive Committee should assume that responsibility and create ad-hoc committees any time an issue has to be dealt with, just to deal with that specific issue. This will all considerably reduce the size of the committees under council, which comes to something like twenty at present.
By the same token, President Hefner has charged his people to look at the other thirty committees, which come under the administration, and we hope to considerably reduce them as well.
Once again, I hope to have this before you within the first two meetings of next semester. Any questions, comments, or suggestions on that?
Ok... as part of bylaw revision, we are also going to take a look at guidelines for the review of vice presidents. President Hefner has set up a timetable for reviewing them on a regular four-year sequence, and we will take the guidelines for presidential review, which have come down from Albany and make sure the bylaws are consistent with those. We'll probably use them as partial inspiration for setting up a standard and hopefully effective process for review of vice presidents. If anyone has any suggestions or comments on that, I would appreciate getting them in writing, but don't hesitate to say something now if you like.
The last item, is the question of voting faculty and the status of adjuncts as such. Our bylaws are once again problematic on this subject. The intent on this campus is to include all full-time and part-time faculty in governance and that's the way the bylaws were originally written. The wording however does create some ambiguities and we would like to correct that.
The problem that arises from full participation on the part of adjuncts is sort of two-fold. (1) If an adjunct is not really a long-time adjunct, a regular adjunct, and he or she stands for a three-year term and then of course is not here a semester later, that just simply creates all kinds of problems in terms of holding office. I've been told that past practice was that the Governance Committee just sort of carefully didn't put them on the ballot for three year positions, but that's a violation of the bylaws and I would hate to say we intend to include people, but have a de-facto exclusion. (2) I think part of the problem we've had in getting bylaws passed, for instance, where we need something like a two-thirds vote is if we have a very large number of part-time faculty, they are much less likely to feel compelled to study and vote on such issues. That's probably a reason we're having such a hard time getting such motions passed. We're torn between the desire for inclusiveness and the problems, which such inclusiveness creates. Therefor I would like to hear some suggestions or comments on this.
I have already received one email from a long-standing adjunct who holds, after having been here for six semesters, that gives this person the status of a term appointment, which therefor according to the policies of the Board of Trustees would qualify them as voting. It would seem to me that that is good for inclusiveness, but what do we do with truly short-time people in terms of this?
Jan McVicker: Well I feel pretty strongly on that issue, that the part-time people should be represented on the council outside. I absolutely agree with that. I think we need to amend the bylaws to say that they should be elected for one-semester terms. It shouldn't make any difference whether or not they've been here for a number of years or a number of semesters; we never know what the adjunct pool is going to be like from one semester to the next. Simply having had many semesters of service doesn't guarantee that they will be able to fulfill a term that's longer than a semester. It seems that we need to be vigilant about making sure that all part-timers who wish to serve, and they should not feel compelled to serve, that there be a slate of candidates circling every semester. I know it makes work for whoever is in charge of elections, but it seems to me that we need to come up a creative solution to include them and also understand the terms under which they serve.
Chair Browder: The system for allotting seats for determining representation includes the part-time people, in other words they count as partial lines, and when they add up to a full line then that counts as a full line in that area. Are you suggesting perhaps then that we should have, within each area of representation, a number of part-time seats that's proportional to the part-time faculty and that those be short-term seats?
Jan McVicker: Yes.
Chair Browder: That would be one possibility, I suppose. It's kind of complicated, since that ratio is going to change every year, but...
Nancy Boyton: I totally agree, and sympathize with your finding representation for those people but if we have a certain number of slots designated isn't that almost like forcing people whose job definitions don't include that to then do it? I would be nervous about that aspect of it, although I think it's very important that we continue to value their service.
Dick Reddy: I think there are at least two problems for that. One of them is that in general, certainly on our campus, and every evidence that I have is that it's also true throughout SUNY is that there is a major difference between academic part-timers and professional part-timers. Professional part-timers, via the number on campus, some of whom are working four days a week and who have been here for years and years. Others are working the equivalent of a half time. They are more likely to have more time, and on the basis of the job market here they are more inclined to have a fairly strong identity with the institution. On the other hand in terms of academic part-timers, there is an enormous diversity. There are some people who are only here for a semester and that's it. They know that from the beginning, and that's their expectation. There are other people who have been teaching, even though technically they are thought of as being part-time people, the equivalent of full-time loads. So in terms of our ratios they are showing up as the equivalent of full-timers. There are just tremendous differences there that we have to recognize.
Another dimension of this though, and that's the second point I wanted to make, is that UUP as an organization has found that it's very difficult, not only on our campus, but also statewide to be able to get adequate involvement and adequate representation of part-timers. Part-timers, particularly academics, but sometimes professionals as well, have a lot of other things to do in their lives. The reason in the case of academics is they may be teaching one course, but it's because they are teaching other courses elsewhere or they have professional practices of one kind or another. There is not a real strong identity, whether we like it or not, at this point between those people and our institution. Whether it's in terms of voting, or whether it's in terms of service in various positions, it is very hard to get part-timers willing to put in a good deal of time on issues that are institutional issues. We do find them, but we don't find them in proportions to the numbers that do exist, and we've seen a substantial increase in the number of academic part-timers in the past two years or so. I think we all know what we'd like to have; we'd like to have full involvement and full participation of everybody, however realistically speaking, I don't think we are going to be able to accomplish that.
Ted Schwalbe: I don't see why Jan's suggestion, taking into account your concerns, can't still be accomplished by having, for example, the concept of a semester by semester slate with a number of positions based upon however it works out. We would in a sense make them all general, so that if there are part-timers that are interested in participating they go on such a slate, and if there aren't there aren't. I don't see what Jan, Nancy and Dick said as being necessarily at odds with each other. Dick Reddy: Just an observation, right now for example on the Senate, no one is elected to be either a part-time or a full-time representative, we are elected to represent our areas. We are elected on the basis of the full-time equivalencies within our areas. What that suggestion would do, would mean that some people would automatically become full-time representatives, assuming that that's what they were. Other people, we have a new category of part-time representatives and at this point the elections that are done, that we currently have, are elections where the electorate is everyone within that area: part-time or full-time. What we would have to do under the circumstances is to run two separate kinds of elections. One for three-year terms for full-timers, another six times during that three year period every semester for people who are part-timers.
That would make more sense for the academics, it probably would not make much sense at all for the professionals, many of whom continue to work for extended periods of time. It's rare for a professional to be hired and then be gone in six months or even a year or two years. I'm not saying that it's impossible to do. We could of course do it. Whether it makes sense to do; I think practicality is another issue. We might end up re-electing the same people on a regular basis over years and years and years.
You also have imbalances taking place, because you'd have a certain amount of representation within a particular area that they have coming to them, but then, if you didn't have sufficient numbers of candidates, you would end up only with those people who got elected serving. In some instances you might have stronger representation proportionally than an area has coming to it and in other instances you'd have less representation. What's more we say that if a person doesn't show up for two meetings their gone. That creates yet another dimension of this. If someone for any reason happened to miss a couple of meetings, and our meeting are not convenient for any of us, but they are especially not convenient in most instances for part-timers. It would become a problem in that respect as well.
Chair Browder: I think the way the bylaws are written, the professional staff wording takes care of their part-timer problem pretty effectively, so no separate treatment for their part-timers would be necessary. The area that creates the problem is the academic staff and this business of having six elections every three years; I don't see how we could do it. I think we would have to come up with another solution.
Dick Reddy: I might also point out that with those six elections, based on observations that George made of the disinclination of part-timers to vote in the first place, we might have very low numbers of votes for the people who would be running if that were to take place. I'm not sure how democratic that would be.
Chair Browder: Yes. It's an extremely problematic approach to the problem. Are there any other ideas? Ok, thank you. We will continue to wrestle with this. I have no idea what the solution will be.
7a. David Ludlam (Academic Affairs):
We have, first of all, a motion on the back of your agenda and minutes. The proposal reads, "that any course that doesn't carry a Fredonia course number must be offered on campus by a Fredonia faculty member. That credit for any distance learning course be handled as transfer credit unless there is a Fredonia faculty member supervising the course in the presence of class discussions. Further it is proposed that any exception to this policy must be approved by the Fredonia College Senate."
I have received a great deal of email over the past few days about this proposal and the next one coming up which I think is excellent. I am going to therefor request that after a reasonable amount of discussion we send this back to committee. That way the people who are not able to be here today will have a chance to send their suggestions and so-forth to me and then the committee will take a look at all of that, and come back with another proposal.
We feel that something has to be done and the longer we put it off the more complicated the causes become. What our problem is that this past semester the distance learning courses arrived to us extremely incomplete to the degree that they had a number, title, and the word "distance learning", and that was it. They could have been courses structured in any way. When we did finally receive our proposals, the courses were already on the books, and it felt a little redundant to be reviewing courses after they've been put on the book. We did review them, and found they were very good courses. We recognize that our students need these particular courses, so were not objecting to that and we're not trying to undermine the procedure. We want to have these courses to come on campus, but we have to have some control over them. There is no guarantee that these courses will be the same the next time they're offered. They could be coming from a different college, not the same one that sent us the proposal. Our main problem is with giving them a Fredonia course number. They really become our courses and we really don't have any control over them.
At the orientation over on Veterans Day I was saying to parents that, "we support your children. We will be giving them help: they can go to professors for office hours; they can go to the learning center for help..." Usually that is not true for distance learning courses. There is no professor to go and see. It's just a person on a television screen, and there is no one in contact on campus to say, "well what can I do to help this student."
We are working on a series of problems. One possibility is making them transfer courses, but by making them transfer courses we don't get any money for them. That is something that you have to take into account. Another option is to have someone sit in on the course as a professor or graduate assistant, who would be on hand to contact the professor who is offering the course.
Nancy Boynton: Are we talking about the courses that take place in that room over in Thompson on the television? Not the Internet course? Or both?
David Ludlam: We're talking about everything that comes in.
Nan Bowser: Has the committee discussed the courses that are being sent from Fredonia that currently students at Cortland or Brockport or wherever are registering for at their schools and earning credit on their transcripts.
David Ludlam: We reviewed those courses. Those aren't a problem from our viewpoint. We know what's in them; we know what's going on in the course, and we know that the faculty offering these are available for questions. The ones coming are the ones we're having problems with. We understand that it is a problem for us to get the syllabi. It isn't like someone is trying to play a game in sending them to us late. We don't know what the solution is. We just want to be able to have some control over the courses that are coming onto campus. Even more so, we want to be able to say to the students, yes we are going to support this course. We can help you when you have problems.
Dick Reddy: I felt comfortable with the proposal that we put together. I think it makes sense because really, if the instructor is not a Fredonia faculty member and is not teaching in Fredonia, physically located someplace else in another institution as a faculty member at that other institution, it really is a stretch for us to think of that as bring a Fredonia course. It is a course that a student takes physically in Fredonia, but it is really a transfer course for all practical purposes. It really is a course where the instruction, the teaching itself is taking place elsewhere even when the instructor may be available to students via email, or phone calls or faxes. There clearly is a distance there, and the logic seems to suggest that that really is not a Fredonia course, it really is a transfer course.
David Ludlam: One possibility and I talked to Mae about it... I'll ask Mae to come up and talk about it. There may be a solution to incorporate a category into our catalog called distance learning, to clearly label these courses as distance learning courses with caveats listed. Email and telephone is the only contact that students will have and that the learning center will attempt to do what it can, and that these are courses that are coming into Fredonia. They are very useful to some students. We need them; there is no objection to that.
Dr. Una Mae Reck: We would give them a different prefix: a DL prefix. We would say they are comparable to a course that we have...
David Ludlam: We would make a non-existent department called DL and put all of those courses under it. It may be a language course or something else. These would also courses that would go under review by Academic Affairs. Normally once a course has been approved we never see it again. We just hope the department will keep the quality of the course up. This way we have no department to supervise that course. What we're really looking to be able to do is to find a way to keep the tuition.
Dr. Una Mae Reck: The other thing that we need to think about is that we are reviewing courses from other SUNY institutions. We do need to think of our fellow institutions as respectful, responsible and all that because we want to be considered the same way when we pipe our courses to them.
David Ludlam: These were excellent courses. Once we finally got the syllabi. We have no objection to them being on this campus.
Dr. Una Mae Reck: One other advantage of that solution is that I think we make it very clear to students who are signing on that this is a distance learning course, without any confusion.
David Ludlam: One of the reasons we want a faculty member present or at least a faculty member at record is that we have an interest in this. Marion Barnett was offering a course in a class at Buffalo. Her students were sitting there not asking any questions. The signal was shut down and then they started to ask her questions and it was too late, so the next meeting in the classroom she said now you ask the questions. They wouldn't, they would not push the button, because the button brings the camera to them, and they did not want to go on camera, so they refused to ask questions. I don't know how often this happens in other classes, but they just would not ask questions.
Jan McVicker: I find this whole discussion incredibly troubling and I move to happily send this back to committee. I think to say that the bottom line here is about wanting to keep tuition money is incredibly troubling to me. It seems to me that one possibly might be that we are sending a distance learning course where it's our faculty member sending the course, that seems to be much more appropriate to keep tuition money for that particular course. I'm so troubled by the idea that we wouldn't consider these courses transfer courses and stop trying to pretend that we would have some sort of control over their content or their pedagogy or anything about it. I think you're right to bring it up in committee, and I agree that it is an incredibly destructive issue. I think to simply go ahead and list it in the course-offering bulletin and warn students that they are not going to be able to meet with your professor and unless you're not camera shy you won't want to ask questions... What kind of a system are we playing here?
David Ludlam: A lot of things I don't know the answer to, but this must cost us something to do. I can't imagine that the equipment and time on-line and so forth is free. I assume there must be some sort of charge for distance learning. There is a financial aspect to this, as well as academic concerns.
Karen Mills-Courts: I would like to strongly second what Jan just said and wherever the money comes from and however we handle transferring the credit, we must find some way to guarantee the quality of those courses if we don't get a chance to approve a course structure. There has to be some way that they do that.
President Hefner: I think it'd be appropriate to distinguish between two different types of courses. Many of the courses that we have as distance learning courses, that we import in, are courses where the academic departments of this campus have gone to other campuses and said we want you to teach this course. You have a faculty member with a specialty here. Philosophy has been doing this for quite some time, foreign languages do that, and I think we want to be sure that whatever policy you come up with does not take that right away from the academic departments to be able to go out and expand upon their offerings. I consider those courses to be very similar to bringing an adjunct on this campus, but rather than bringing the person to this campus, they are beaming the person to this particular campus. I think some of these other ones, where the department hasn't asked for them and they're coming in, those I think, go along with the SUNY NET, not the actual need based courses, but those that are just Internet based courses. I think those we need to take a very careful look at. I would distinguish between the two. Most of the courses, as I understand, the committee was concerned about were courses where departments had gone out and requested those courses be offered here.
David Ludlam: One of the philosophy courses I noticed we have a faculty member with our name listed on it, which gives the students someone to go to. That's another one of our problems. Maybe we should have someone in each department who is at least a liaison to students taking these courses.
Joe Straight: That is one reason that we put in this proposed policy. This idea that things can come to College Senate for approval. There can be exceptions, like in the case of philosophy. I think what's happened in the case of philosophy, is that they have been doing this for a number of years. Most of the philosophy departments have few majors and find it difficult to offer courses at the upper level so there is sort of a consortium of, I think, at least of the western campuses. Still the fact remains, that this course in Sites and Aesthetics, or whatever, is coming from Brockport, and is being taught by a Brockport faculty member, and it's not our course. Philosophy could come to College Senate and say look, here is the arrangement that we made, and we want to be able to do this and so on, and have College Senate give them its blessing. Again what's happening is, this is offered under a Fredonia number.
David Ludlam: Also there is no course description, no explanation and no syllabus. We have to have that information. I know there's a time problem; that's one of the things that have to be addressed.
Michael Grady: I was wondering if any of the other campuses have this policy, or do they all use their own numbers. In other words, these are basically reciprocal agreements. We send courses as well as receive courses. If any change is made, doesn't it have to be made in all of SUNY to make it work?
Nancy Bowser: Yeah; that was my question. At one time there was a consortium that there was agreement reciprocity that was decided upon. I don't know if that is still in existence. I know there is no longer a grant that covers the line charges. There are line charges involved. I believe it is the receiving school that pays the line charges. The committee might want to talk to Colin Plaister to get a better handle on the expenses, particularly if we are not going getting tuition money and will be paying to bring them out to students in addition to having our students pay tuition to the other college. That would complicate things. There was an agreement that we would do this, so in essence if we say no to incoming courses, we may be bowing out of the agreement in total and not sending courses either. I don't know; does anyone know if that agreement is still in place?
President Hefner: As far as I know, the agreement is still in place.
Nancy Bowser: So it's been decided that these schools will do this by participating in this program.
David Ludlam: Obviously it would be helpful for us to know what the tuition loss would be. My guess is that were not talking about a huge tuition loss at this point even if there was some. The issue though really is this line charges issue. Many courses, for very good reasons have the equivalent of lab fees. Maybe that's something that needs to be done in order to absorb some of the cost. It can't be too large to be prohibitive, but it might be able to help out.
Dick Reddy: The second aspect of this with the tuition is the charges that then go on the student. If you take someone who is taking a philosophy or foreign language course taking fifteen hours. Suddenly they're paying for fifteen hours and the fees of two institutions as opposed to paying for twelve hours and the fees of one.
At small institutions like this, these courses are a wonderful way of expanding the effective size, faculty, and tying in with other institutions.
Steven Stahl: That was my other question, which I put on Proftalk and haven't gotten an answer to yet. It's students who sign up for these classes... are they going to have to pay tuition at the other campus also? And are they going to have to ask for a transcript to be sent? How much hassle is this going to be for them to do this? Plus, are there any financial aid implications? Are they going to be able to apply any financial aid to the tuition at the other college?
Joe Straight: It seemed to the committee that the way to handle that is through the SUNY Learning Network. Right now it's only handling the courses over the Internet, not really handling the distance learning courses that are taught in Thompson Hall. My understanding is when students sign up for one of these SUNY Learning Network courses whether it may be from Fredonia or from another campus. College tuition is still counted as part of their Fredonia load. Is that right Nan? SUNY Learning Network courses, if the students sign up for them they don't have to pay extra tuition if they're already full-time?
Nan Bowser: That is correct, as long as they are full-time here.
Joe Straight: There are some administrative things that could be handled through the SUNY Learning Network.
Ted Steinberg: These financial questions are all very interesting, but the main question is are these courses taken over the television equivalent to courses with a human being in the classroom... and the answer is no. We have to decide whether we want to go in that direction and jeopardize Fredonia's recognition and tradition of diversified education. I think that's the first issue we must discuss.
Jan McVicker: I have a really quick question. Do we currently have a limit on how many distance learning classes a student can take toward the hundred and twenty hours? Is there any regulation?
[tape flip]: answer not recorded
The motion was returned to committee by a unanimous vote.
David Ludlam: Joe has a proposal, and I'm going to let him read and explain it to you.
Joe Straight: Ok, the second proposal from the Academic Affairs Committee is that MWF classes begin on the half-hour starting at 8:30AM and ending at 3:20PM. Options for use of the period from 8 to 9:20 would include the following: MTh 8-9:20; TF 8-9:20; MWF 8:30-9:20; MTThF 8:30-9:20. Further it's proposed that implementation of this begin with the fall 2000 semester.
For some time the committee has been concerned with the fact that we don't really use the entire academic day from eight to four. If we looked at recent use of the MWF 8-8:50 period, we find that there are about a half a dozen courses a semester during that period. The period on TTh from 8-9:20 is a bit more popular, but still not all that popular, about a dozen courses use that period. I looked to see if people were using the period from 9-9:50 and it does appear that they are using that period MWF. There are thirty-seven courses in the spring during that period.
The hope would be that by starting the day on MWF at 8:30, we could get people that are currently teaching at nine to move back and teach at 8:30. Then that would give us an additional MWF period and free up some of the pressure that comes at the peak times from ten to two. Also with proper planning of offerings and coordination among the departments we could also offer some other options for the 8-9:20 period. Someone asked about 8-9:20 TTh. As far as I'm c