Minutes of the
Fifth Regular Meeting of the Twenty-Sixth Senate
Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
January 8, 2007
12:00 P.M., Kettler G46
Agenda
1. Call to order
2. Approval of the minutes of December 11, 2006
3. Acceptance of the agenda – A. Karim
4. Reports of the Speakers of the Faculties
a. Indiana University – M. Nusbaumer
b. Purdue University – N. Younis
5. Report of the Presiding Officer – D. Turnipseed
6. Committee reports requiring action
a. University Resources Policy Committee (Senate Document SD 06-8) – P. Iadicola
b. Executive Committee (Senate Document SD 06-9) – A. Karim
7. New business
8. Committee reports “for information only”
a. University Resource Policy Committee (Senate Reference No. 06-11) – P. Iadicola
b. Executive Committee (Senate Reference No. 06-12) – A. Karim
9. The general good and welfare of the University
10. Adjournment*
*The meeting will adjourn or recess by 1:15 p.m.
Presiding Officer: D. Turnipseed
Parliamentarian: S. Davis
Sergeant-at-Arms: G. Steffen
Secretary: J. Petersen
___________________________________________________________________________
Attachments:
“Proposed Amendments to SD 03-19 (Metrics for Intercollegiate Athletics Program)” (SD 06-8)
“Metrics for Intercollegiate Athletics” (SD 03-19)
“Salary Increment Policies” (SD 06-9)
Senate Members Present:
B. Abbott, A. Argast, S. Blythe, W. Branson, J. Burg, C. Champion, S. Ding, P. Dragnev,
B. Dupen, C. Erickson, R. Friedman, J. Garrison, L. Graham, T. Grove, I. Hack, S. Hannah, J. Hersberger, C. Hill, P. Iadicola, A. Karim, L. Kuznar, D. Lindquist, M. Lipman,
K. McDonald, L. Meyer, G. Moss, G. Mourad, M. Nusbaumer, D. Oberstar, J. Papiernik,
K. Pollock, L. Roberts, H. Samavati, R. Saunders, J. Summers, R. Sutter, J. Toole,
A. Ushenko, G. Voland, M. Walsh, M. Wartell, N. Younis, J. Zhao
Senate Members Absent:
J. Grant, K. Modesitt, D. Mueller, R. Murray, A. Mustafa, E. Neal, E. Ohlander, J. Tankel, S. Troy, L. Wark
Visitors Present: J. Dahl, R. Kostrubanic, P. McLaughlin, K. Stockman (Journal Gazette)
Acta
1. Call to order: D. Turnipseed called the meeting to order at 12:02 p.m.
2. Approval of the minutes of December 11, 2006: The minutes were approved as distributed.
3. Acceptance of the agenda:
A. Karim moved to approve the agenda as distributed.
The agenda was approved as distributed.
4. Reports of the Speakers of the Faculties:
a. Indiana University:
M. Nusbaumer:
1) I would like to thank Vice Chancellor Hannah for posting the special merit pay process on the university archive web page.
2) It has come to my attention that Dave Danielson is leaving the university shortly. I want to express my appreciation for his contributions and leadership to this university.
3) At the last meeting, Vice Chancellor Hannah mentioned that, in discussing increments, there appears to be a fair amount of variability between departments in terms of what faculty know or the input they have into increment policy. I want to state, first of all, that I think we need to recognize that, ultimately, as faculty we also are workers. As workers we deserve to know the basis of the reward system in the year prior to us being evaluated. If that is not occurring in departments, I would like to see efforts made to change that. Secondly, to the extent that faculty have input into creation of that criteria for promotion and tenure, I would strongly suggest that faculty at least have input into establishing departmental criteria for increments as well, and I would request that the Faculty Affairs Committee look into that situation.
b. Purdue University:
N. Younis: Happy New Year, colleagues!
Today I am going to talk about two issues: the grievance board and promoting IPFW. I would like to remind Purdue faculty that the deadline to indicate your desire to serve on the Purdue Academic Personnel Grievance Committee is Friday, Jan 12, 2007. Please consider serving on this board as we have many vacancies to fill.
Not a long time ago, the Indiana University Speaker had the same request to fill vacancies on the Indiana University Faculty Board of Review. I believe it is time to have one grievance board, which is the IPFW grievance board. It does not make sense to me that we have two grievance boards with individual procedures and yet we are one university. I propose that we form a committee that consists of faculty and administrators to establish a new IPFW grievance procedure to replace the existing separate grievance procedures and rules. With our collective wisdom, we can come up with one that is fair to everybody and better than the individual Indiana University and Purdue University grievance procedures. This is not unprecedented as, for example, we have one sabbatical guideline for IPFW that combines the best of each, Purdue University and Indiana University’s sabbatical guidelines.
The second issue is promoting IPFW. This campus has made significant advancement in recent years. Also our faculty are dedicated teachers who enjoy great success in the classroom. They provide the students of Northeastern Indiana with quality education despite the limited funds provided by the State of Indiana compared to other state institutions. IPFW faculty are committed to preparing students for successful careers in professional positions and productive life members in a multicultural and ever-changing world. Many of our faculty are scholars who are known nationally and internationally for their creative work. Their service to the university, community and their professions is unmatched. Thus, it is time to brag about IPFWs reputation and change the theme of “One university-two great names” to (for example) “A great undergraduate university with two big 10 conference names.” Thank you.
5. Report of the Presiding Officer – D. Turnipseed:
Welcome back to everybody, those of you who have been on sabbatical, and especially to our friend (Charles Champion) in the back corner. We are glad to see him back in any condition. He looks pretty good.
C. Champion: I would like to thank everybody for all the great phone calls you made. They came at times when I needed it. So, thanks to everybody. I really appreciate that. Thank you.
6. Committee reports requiring action:
a. University Resources Policy Committee (SD 06-8) – P. Iadicola:
P. Iadicola moved to approve SD 06-8 (Proposed Amendments to SD 03-19 [Metrics for DI Program]). Seconded.
(Jack Dahl encouraged an editorial amendment in both the title and Metric 3 to remove the “DI” and replace with “intercollegiate athletics.”)
A friendly amendment was made to remove “DI” and replace with “intercollegiate athletics.”
Motion to approve the friendly amendment passed on a voice vote.
Motion to approve, as amended, passed on a voice vote.
b. Executive Committee (SD 06-9) – A. Karim:
A. Karim moved to approve SD 06-9 (Salary Increment Policies). Seconded.
Motion to approve passed on a voice vote.
7. New business: There was no new business.
8. Committee reports “for information only”:
a. University Resources Policy Committee (Senate Reference No. 06-11) – P. Iadicola:
Senate Reference No. 06-11 (Miscellaneous information about the athletics budget) was presented for information only.
b. Executive Committee (Senate Reference No. 06-12) – A. Karim:
Senate Reference No. 06-12 (Items under Consideration by Senate Committees and Subcommittees) was presented for information only.
9. The general good and welfare of the University:
P. Iadicola: One issue that concerns me is the allocation of the Chancellor’s Scholarship money for athletics. I am concerned about the potential impact that may have. If we are providing large amounts of the Chancellor’s Scholarships for athlete scholars and not for other categories of students, is there a potential impact that we should be cognizant of in shifting that money principally for that purpose? I think for the good and welfare of the university, we should think about the potential impact of the scholarship money shift for that purpose and see if we may need to target future scholarship money or assess the use of that money. I think that is something we need to be vigilant about as senators of this university. I think athletics can play a very important role in this university for many of the same reasons that it was proposed in terms of creating achievements among our students. We need to be concerned about using a particular pool of money in such large amounts.
The second point I wanted to raise is that I had the pleasure over this past break to be a member of the campus-wide tenure and promotion committee. I must say it is a very good way to come back into the university, to see the accomplishments of my junior and senior colleagues, and to see the true production of this university in terms of research publications, the presentations, and the teaching work that is being done at this university, as well as the service work. However, the committee had concerns about a couple of issues. I wanted to bring them before the Senate because I think these are essentially faculty issues and issues in which we as senators need to play a role. One of the issues relates to departmental documents that provide the principal basis for promotion and tenure. These documents are a very important guide for faculty at this university in development of their careers at IPFW. The one thing that concerned the members of the committee is the significant variance in expectations for tenure and promotion at this university. Recognizing the uniqueness of our scholarship and the uniqueness of our work, there seemed to be a significant variance in the expectations across these departmental documents. Many of the members of the committee were concerned that the documents that had been developed by departments may need to be updated or recertified or compared to other departments at other institutions that have the same mission. I think that is something that we should encourage as faculty in our respective departments: that the departments take their own initiative in reviewing the documents, and develop a mechanism to compare their standards to comparable universities and comparable departments within those universities. I also think the Senate should play a role in encouraging legislation or encouragement of departments to make sure their documents have the integrity that I am sure they originally had. This is so very important in reviewing cases for tenure and promotion, to make sure that these faculty, who are putting their credentials before a committee of their peers, have the guidance that is in these documents to present a case which is suitable for this university.
The second point I want to raise regarding tenure and promotion is that I must say I was very pleased to be working with various colleagues from various departments and schools. The other issue came about because so many of our cases, an unusually large proportion of our cases for promotion at this university at this time, were in the area of teaching excellence as being the principal area. I believe teaching is very important, and very important to the mission of this university. I think that we have done some very important work. The vice chancellor and the Faculty Affairs Committee have done some very important work in showing the various ways that people can make a case for teaching excellence. In our committee deliberations, we began to make distinctions in cases for teaching. Using these distinctions we saw cases where the faculty member had made a clear case for effectiveness. Clear cases show that their teaching work actually had an impact on the students. Unfortunately, the list of ways to show teaching excellence, in some respects, underrepresents items to illustrate teaching effectiveness, and I think it is because it is more difficult to do. In evaluating any organization it is much easier to have process measures. It is more difficult to show what has been the true impact. But I think that departments, in revisiting their documents, need to think very clearly about promoting these teaching excellence cases by giving their candidates the tools to show effectiveness of their teaching. I think this is going to be a trend for universities. I think we see this in terms of the “no child left behind” and how it is having both good and bad impact in the public school arena. We would be, as we have been in the past, ahead of the curve if we took steps now to examine our documents and to basically promote, in the teaching area, strategies and mechanisms for faculty to show teaching effectiveness. Thank you.
A. Ushenko: I have always understood that the university was essentially a haven for people who are contributing to the culture, the arts and intellectual activities, and who forgo, for the sake of purity of research, the pressures of the marketplace in order to be supportive and be able to pursue, unmolested, their research. Teaching is an important service in many ways, not only for the promulgation of their fields and their activities and the creation of new colleagues passing through, but also to make what they were doing accessible to the human community. It is kind of like the orthodox monasteries where they breed and train big dogs. It is an absolute to breed and train those dogs well. But it is not totally what being a monk is about. I am bothered by teaching versus research because to me it seems to set up an implied double standard. Do we need those categories? What about professional activities? Good teaching requires research. It may be secondary, not primary, but it requires research. What happens is sort of like the attitude towards women in the 50s. You set up a dichotomy. There is this sweet lovable woman who is a good mother, good cook, and faithful wife, but she is dull and boring. There is the exciting, glamorous woman who is a rotten mother, rotten cook, but she is exciting. Both lose out. In the same way there is a sort of feel that there is the selfish research person who pushes students aside as he is immersed in his research. Then there is the guy who does not quite make it as a researcher, but he is a lovable campus professor. Isn’t there a little bit of something like that that is going on in the back of the mind? Is it a good idea to even have these distinctions? Teaching on a university level is not teaching, it is professing. It is a professional activity.
M. Nusbaumer: I look forward to the continuing practice from the vice chancellor’s office of sending us recommendations from the Campus Promotion &Tenure Committee after every round of promotion and tenure considerations to address some of the issues raised here.
L. Kuznar: At the annual Sigma Xi meeting this year in November – it is a really big meeting of student researchers and scientists, one of the premier science fraternities in the nation – an IPFW student won the most outstanding science presentation prize. It was Joe Frederick Evans, and on behalf of Sigma Xi we are very proud of his work and his great accomplishment. He was in competition with students from across the nation, and as a member of the anthropology program, I am very proud.
A. Argast: I want to remove a misconception that may have been put out on the floor. I want to talk about those chancellor’s scholarships. One of the things that came out pretty clearly is that chancellor’s scholarships are not going to athletes. They are going to scholar athletes. The Department of Athletics is doing an excellent job of targeting scholars who will be in their athletic program. This is not a question of taking scholarship money away from scholars, it is a question of the athletic department doing its job better than the rest of us in identifying people to target for these monies. These monies are available to all of us, in every department. One of the things on my “to-do” list is to talk with Dr. Hannah to see if it would be possible to send letters to schools saying that, if you have a certain strength in an area you can come here and do geology on a scholarship from the chancellor. My impression is that you can do that. We should be entrepreneurial in seeking out people to receive these scholarships. So, for the general good and welfare, I want to remove that misconception. Beyond that, I would like to also advocate to the academic departments that we need to do better. Athletics is showing us up.
S. Hannah: I would like to go back to the point that Senator Iadicola raised. That was a good summary of some of the things we talked about in the Campus Promotion &Tenure Subcommittee. I will be asking, through the deans and on to the department chairs, for departments to review their criteria this semester and confirm that they are in line. It says right in our Senate documents that these criteria should be in line with those from comparable universities. Some departments, such as chemistry, made a great effort a year or so ago to go out and do this kind of research. I believe physics is in the middle of doing it as well. They are looking at comparable universities to see what the standard is. Perhaps there are some other departments who can profit from that. I would like to build this into the program review process so that at least every seven years, it will be reviewed. In the short term, maybe faculty should have committees in their departments and undertake this process. You might talk with the people in chemistry and physics to see how they have done it. I commend that. Some statement from the Senate endorsing that effort would be extremely helpful to me so folks do not think it is just something coming out of Kettler Hall. This is serious business.
A. Ushenko: Most colleagues at other places are more than happy to share P&T criteria. Is there, like copyrights, any discretion?
P. Iadicola: In regard to the scholarship issue, I am sure that the University Resources Policy Committee, in its deliberations, looked over time as to how the Chancellor’s Scholarship monies had been allocated in the past prior to Division I, for example. Yes, it is true that the entrepreneurial effort of the athletic program should be commended in terms of acquiring a large portion of that money, but it is also probably true that departments maybe were not equally encouraged or provided with the particular process in which they could be promoting their own students. I do not know. I am sure, also, that that money has changed in how it has been allocated since the creation of the Division I program. That is not to say that it should not have happened. As faculty members, we should be vigilant, we should be watchful to see how that money is allocated. Yes, there are scholars, and they are athletes, but there are also scholars who are not athletes. I just want to make sure that that money is not regularly going to be used for that category of students to the exclusion of others, and if it requires a more vigorous entrepreneurial spirit among departments, I think that is probably good.
G. Moss: I did not completely make the connection between Senator Iadicola’s original comment, and the Promotion &Tenure process. I do not know what that has to do with this particular document. I wanted to make a comment based on some things that he said about promotion and tenure. But it is not really connected to this. The thought that struck me is that we voted and passed an undergraduate framework last year, and we are in the process of assessing what we are doing in our different departments to ensure that what we put out there is our mission and our vision for our students is actually taking place. It seems to me that, as a university, whether it was intended or not, we are in a process of trying to document good and effective teaching for all of us. We want students to have the knowledge and skills and abilities to go out and live in practice the scholarship that they are learning, and we are in a process of trying to evaluate that. It seems to me that without setting out intentional research or practice, that that is what we kind of set up for the university. It also seems like that would help those who want to go up on teaching, that we almost cannot do it separate from taking a scholarly approach.
H. Samavati: Just to echo my colleague’s sentiment here, and how we cannot possibly separate our work as researcher and as teacher. When I attended one of the faculty retreats, I learned and stored something, and I want to read that to you. It was from a professor who also won the faculty award, and in his writing he had written, “Research to teaching is like a sin to confession. Without the one, you have nothing to say in another.”
M. Wartell: If you have not seen it, spring enrollments are up about 2.4 percent in credit hour production, and 1.2 percent in headcount. That is great. That is about where we want to be.
I believe that all of the building projects are on schedule. The music building should open next fall. We will be running tours of the incomplete music building. If you get a chance to see it, it really is stunning. I do not know when the tours will start.
W. Branson: Nothing is scheduled, but if someone wants a tour, let me know.
M. Wartell: Something interesting about the auditorium is that there is a vent under every single seat in the 1600-seat auditorium so that the air movement ought to be great.
Housing is also on schedule with 188 new beds. We are expecting to break ground on the bridge this spring, and the same for the hotel. The developers for the hotel are delighted to develop an IPFW theme for the hotel. The bar will probably be called the “Faculty Club.”
Finally, with regard to Senator Iadicola’s questions about the Chancellor’s Scholarships, there are three levels of chancellor scholarships. They are 1) Chancellor’s Distinguished, 2) Chancellor’s Scholarships, and 3) Chancellor’s Merit Scholarships. All of them have specific academic criteria, which means SAT scores and rank in class. These are adhered to in all cases. They have nothing to do with athletics. Were we to change any of that, based on whether we are giving some to athletes or not to athletes, we would be discriminating against athletes. If they qualify for them, they have just as much right to those scholarships as anybody else. We have never, at this institution, denied a person any level of Chancellor Scholarships because all the rest of them were taken. We have always endeavored to expand them in order to ensure that everybody who is talented enough gets a scholarship.
The second part of the question is what percent of our overall financial aid is going to athletes versus anybody else. The report that I gave to you in December indicates that two years ago, it was 25.6 percent of our financial aid. This year it is 23 percent. So, in fact, the percentage of aid going to athletes is decreasing. That means that we are getting more and more aid for our general students.
R. Friedman: I know this is very preliminary, but can you tell us a little bit about the discussions about the baseball stadium?
M. Wartell: The mayor believes that life downtown will be vastly improved if a stadium, along with retail and living space, is built. He has found a developer who is willing to invest significantly in that. There is always going to be the question of, if you build a new baseball stadium and you have a perfectly serviceable one, what are you going to do with the former one? Knocking the current one down really is not an option. The city has approached us and asked that if a new stadium is built, can IPFW use the current stadium? We are looking into the numbers, and it would probably require subsidy from the city in order to get us over the hump. It is a concrete baseball stadium and it is not maintenance free, but it is not maintenance intensive, either. It would be a wonderful addition to IPFW’s facilities. We could open it up as a regional facility, bring in more high school and other college athletes, and use it as a venue for other sorts of things. If any of you went to the Bob Dylan concert, even in the rain, that was not a bad concert. But the point is, it could be a nice asset for us. We need to get it on a cost-free basis because we simply cannot afford to invest other monies in that.
D. Oberstar: On that note, is there any indication from the powers that be in the city government as to how open they would be to that suggestion, being able to have subsidy?
M. Wartell: They know that they are going to have to provide a subsidy in order for that to happen. It has been reported in the paper that the coliseum says that the maintenance for that facility is about a million dollars. There are a lot of accounting trade-offs that go into that million dollars. We believe that the maintenance is anywhere from $200,000-$400,000. Part of that could be taken care of in fees for usage and part of it could be taken care of in subsidy.
M. Wartell: The start to this semester is really very good. Thank you.
10. The meeting adjourned at 12:52 p.m.
Jacqueline J. Petersen
Secretary of the Faculty