Minutes of the
First Regular Meeting of the Twenty-Seventh Senate
September 10, 2007
12:00 P.M., Kettler G46
Agenda
1. Call to order
2. Approval of the minutes of April 9 and 16, 2007
3. Acceptance of the agenda – B. Abbott
4. Reports of the Speakers of the Faculties
a.
b.
5. Report of the Presiding Officer (Senate Reference No. 07-1)
6. Committee reports requiring action
7. Question Time (Senate Reference No. 07-2)
8. New business
9. Committee reports “for information only”
Educational Policy Committee (Senate Reference No. 07-3) – J. Tankel
10. The general good and welfare of the University
11. Adjournment*
*The meeting will adjourn or recess by 1:15 p.m.
Acting Presiding Officer: M. Nusbaumer
Parliamentarian: A. Downs
Sergeant-at-Arms: G. Steffen
Secretary: J. Petersen
___________________________________________________________________________
Attachment:
“First-Year Results of Baccalaureate Framework” (SR No. 07-3) (click on both links to view both presentations)
Senate Members Present:
B. Abbott, N. Adilov, A. Argast, S. Blythe, J. Burg, C. Champion, P. Dragnev, C. Erickson, R. Friedman, J. Garrison, J. Grant, I. Hack, S. Hannah, J. Hersberger, C. Hill, P. Iadicola,
J. Jackson, D. Lindquist, M. Lipman, D. Liu, G. McClellan, K. McDonald, G. Mourad,
K. Moustafa, D. Mueller, A. Mustafa, M. Nusbaumer, H. Odden, E. Ohlander, T. Parker,
M. Ridgeway, L. Roberts, H. Samavati, R. Saunders, J. Summers, R. Sutter, J. Tankel,
C. Thompson, J. Toole, A. Ushenko, G. Voland, M. Walsh, G. Wang, M. Wartell,
N. Younis, J. Zhao
Senate Members Absent:
W. Branson, B. Brewer, S. Choi, S. Ding, B. Dupen, L. Meyer, K. Pollock
Faculty
Members Present:
C. Lawton, D. Miller, K. O’Connell, S. Sarratore, L. Vartanian, D. Young
Visitors Present: J. Dahl, R. Kostrubanic, P. McLaughlin, K. Soderlund (Journal Gazette)
Acta
1. Call to order: M. Nusbaumer called the meeting to order at 12:04.
2. Approval of the minutes of April 9 and 16, 2007: The minutes were approved as distributed.
3. Acceptance of the agenda:
B. Abbott moved to approve the agenda as distributed.
The agenda was approved as distributed.
4. Reports of the Speakers of the Faculties:
M. Nusbaumer left the chair to make his report.
a.
M. Nusbaumer:
1) I encourage all departments to begin developing standards for approval of sabbatical proposals. Last spring the Senate passed a different sabbatical leave document, so now they will be judged based upon departmentally created criteria. We need to work on those.
2) Speaker Younis and I had a call for nominations for the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs search committee. Those of you who do not know, this is Vice Chancellor Hannah’s last year in that position. We received a total of 12 nominations. Eight of those were from the College of Arts & Sciences, and there was one each from the Richard T. Doermer School of Business; Helmke Library; College of Engineering, Technology and Computer Science; and the Division of Organizational Leadership and Supervision. That is the sum total of the nominations we received.
3) For those of you who have examined the US News and
World Report’s latest edition ranking colleges, IPFW is again in the fourth
tier. Those are the people ranked from 108-140 in the
4) Over the summer, some of you may have noticed the Journal Gazette published an article doing an analysis of grades on this campus and various other campuses around the state. One of the pieces of information they provided was that in IPFW’s courses, 40 percent of our grades were As, 29 percent were Bs, and I do not remember how the remainder fell out there. Numerous faculty were rather stunned by that in terms of the range and distribution of grades; and so this summer I spoke with Vice Chancellor Hannah to examine the situation of these inconsistencies in grading practices across campus and asked her to provide a report on grade distributions across departments, faculty ranks, and also dealing with issues of grade inflation.
b.
N. Younis: Good afternoon colleagues. I would like to welcome the new senators and the returning senators for another academic year. I hope the academic year is off to a great start for all IPFW faculty, staff, and administrators. This promises to be a challenging year, and I am positive that we will collaborate to achieve our goals and make positive changes in the campus community. I will briefly talk about three issues.
1) At the last January Senate meeting, questions were raised regarding the currency and standards of departmental promotion and tenure criteria. I urge the departments that have not established the rubrics and comparability, as outlined in Senate Document SD 94-3, to do so during this academic year.
2) On
August 13, you received from the faculty speakers the call for nominations to
serve on the Search and Screen Committee for the Vice Chancellor for Academic
Affairs due to the impending retirement of Dr. Susan Hannah. The speakers
received twelve nominations (ten Purdue University faculty and two
3) To further enhance the university, shared governance must improve in the academic arena.
Finally, please join me in congratulating the volleyball players and coaches in their outstanding achievement to play in the national championship game this past spring.
Thank you.
5. Report of the Presiding Officer (SR No. 07-1) – M. Nusbaumer:
M. Nusbaumer referred to Senate Document SR No. 07-1 (Report on Senate Documents).
I would like to introduce a few folks. As all of you, I think, are aware, David Turnipseed, who was elected Presiding Officer, has left the university, so we had to hold a late call for nominations and election. Professor Richard Hess will be taking over the duties of Presiding Officer the next time we gather.
I would also like to thank Professor Andrew Downs for being willing to serve as our parliamentarian, and Professor Gary Steffen for being our sergeant-at-arms. I would also like to introduce Jacqui Petersen, who is the Senate secretary.
It is also customary at the beginning of the first Senate meeting to have all the senators introduce themselves and tell us who they represent. (The senators introduced themselves.)
6. Committee reports requiring action: There were no committee reports requiring action.
7. Question Time (Senate Reference No. 07-2)
Question: For the past few years the university has employed two full-time doctorally-trained psychologists and one part-time master’s level therapist on campus to deliver mental health services (both counseling and prevention education) to our students. For personal and professional reasons, both doctoral-level psychologists recently left the university. It has come to our attention that the administration is not planning to replace them, and is seeking to “outsource” mental health services to Parkview Behavioral Health, and to no longer engage doctoral-level psychologists to serve the mental health needs of our students.
It has been widely reported that mental health needs of students have been sharply increasing in recent years. Students increasingly come to campus with serious mental health-related conditions such as depression, anxiety, and substance abuse problems. Last year’s tragedy at Virginia Tech was clearly caused by a student with a serious mental illness. There is no reason to believe that IPFW students have fewer mental health concerns than other students across the country. The more we move to having residential programs, mental health needs become even more important to serve effectively.
Mental health professionals can also offer educational and prevention programs. One of the doctoral psychologists, Shauna Summers, obtained grant support to offer a substance abuse education program to students who faced alcohol-related abuses in the student housing. This kind of program is only able to be effectively run by employees of the university, and such grant funding is usually contingent on the university having on-site staff and facilities to effectively manage it.
We do not understand how decreasing the on-campus presence of psychologists and other mental health professionals will effectively serve our students’ mental health needs. Across the country, universities are seeking to increase the presence of clinicians on their staffs, not to reduce them. We are very concerned that the university would seek this solution to student needs by outsourcing this critical service to a community mental health center, rather than by providing it with employees who are an integral part of the campus community. We think this will lead to fewer educational services, less of a presence of mental health professionals on campus, a poorer relationship between campus constituencies and mental health professionals, and reduced quality of services to our students. We ask our fellow senators to join us in speaking against this plan, and we ask the administration to tell the campus community how a plan to outsource this vital service to our students will effectively meet their needs.
The Psychology Department Faculty:
Bruce Abbott, Michael Bendele, Elaine Blakemore, Ken Bordens, Jeannie DiClementi, Michelle Drouin, Craig Hill, Jay Jackson, Daren Kaiser, Carol Lawton, Brenda Lundy, Dan Miller, Lesa Vartanian, & David Young
G. McClellan: Thank you for the spirit of concern for students that underlies the question, and also thank you for the chance to address it here today.
Prior to my arrival, the need to try to identify additional resources for personal counseling was on the table. There had been some initial conversations about how we might look at doing that. Prior to my arrival one of the two full-time counselors left for another position. Shortly after my arrival, the other of the two full-time counselors announced that she was leaving in fairly short order. It also came out that the part-time counselor is going to be interested in the next year or so in really curtailing his time. So a conversation that had started out about how we might partner with folks in the area to extend resources became an opportunity to look at having the Parkview folks step in and provide the resources.
In the course of those conversations, the goals were to increase the number of hours available for direct client service delivery and also to, if possible, extend those hours. We currently have 2 ¾ time equivalency Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. We would like, perhaps, to extend those resources, recognizing that we have around 800 students in campus housing and 12,000 students enrolled. We are trying to figure out how we might disperse some of that service.
We have entertained a series of conversations and proposals from Parkview with those goals in mind. As that process has played itself out, there have been ongoing discussions with a variety of folks about how we might continue to tweak the proposals.
Our goal in doing this is to retain a presence on campus of campus counselors. It is critically important that we have service available Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and that students, either by appointment or by walk-in, can access that support. But it is also critically important that all of you and your colleagues and staff are able to make referrals and also to access staff for consultations. We remain committed to that notion.
We want to make sure that whoever we bring in, and it will be new folks no matter how we draw the lines on bureaucratic charts, that in some part this discussion will be about how well the predecessors have done in building relationships on campus. We are all anxious about who is going to fill those spots and how we are going to maintain those relationships.
We have asked that the number of people who fill those spots on campus be limited to no more than two, so that we do not run into a situation where we have a counselor for half a Monday and a counselor for half of Tuesday and then another counselor for half of Thursday, etc.
We have also made it clear throughout that it is really important to us as a community that these folks, being both the on campus people and also others from Parkview who will help us, be really involved in campus life. While you may not have to report to us, you do have to be with us, you have to be of us in order to understand the IPFW culture and community. So we continue to stress the importance of education for prophylaxis value as well as participation in a full range of community life activities.
One of the concerns I know that has been raised is the question of doctoral-level versus master’s-level. The positions, when advertised the last time, were master’s-level positions. We have replicated that in the asking in this iteration. Because of where we are right now and the need to serve students, we have been between the part-time IPFW counselor and somebody that we brought in to help out short-term. I think they have been fairly able to cover the need since the start of school. But as we go through the year, the need for services can increase, and we need to make a move here pretty quickly. One way or another we are going to wind up with new faces on campus, and most likely needing to get involved in some sort of temporary support agreement. The current proposal that we have from Parkview calls for service through June, so it is not two years or five years or eight years. It provides us, I think, with some opportunities to increase service delivery, to increase venues, to increase day parts of service, and to maintain, assuming we are all open to doing that, the kinds of relationships that are really going to make a difference in supporting faculty and staff in helping students to succeed. We have emphasized to Parkview the importance of bringing people in who have experience in college counseling. We recognize that it is a unique kind of counseling, and we have emphasized that repeatedly.
In closing, from my perspective, this should be less about where the boxes are drawn on the chart. We have examples of successful contract services on this campus: the housing operation and the student health operation. This is really about how we interact with those folks. It is whom we hire and the growth of relationships more than where the organizational lines are on the chart. I am, again, really appreciative of the fact that underlying all of this is a genuine concern for the success of our students, and I am committed to an ongoing discussion about the quality of that service. Assuming that we proceed with the agreement with Parkview, we will evaluate whether or not, over the course of the coming months, we have improved our service, maintained our service, or, worse-case scenario, have gone backwards. It would be wrong to do otherwise. We have to constantly ask ourselves: “Are we achieving our goals?”
D. Young: My concern in raising this issue and continuing this conversation is a real concern that, if we are moving away from a centralized core for counseling to an outsource situation, are these folks really going to firmly be IPFW people with as much involvement as the other individuals had? Will they, Parkview on the one hand and IPFW on the other, be able to have that identity and commitment to the campus; for instance on Eating Disorders Week, depression screening, countless wellness committees, and substance abuse committees? I am very concerned about that. Just a point of clarification: Dr. Gilmer, when he first came here, was not Dr. Gilmer. When Dr. Summers arrived, she had received her Ph.D., and so she was a fully licensed psychologist. Eventually, both of them became licensed psychologists. So that is my concern: the identity of these individuals. There is also a concern about the level of care to which we have become accustomed. I think we were very fortunate to have two very skilled people who could provide services at the high level of psychological care, and now we are sort of looking at the next tier.
E. Blakemore: One hundred percent of the Psychology Department’s full-time faculty signed on to this letter. Amongst our concerns is the regular involvement of these people in the life of the university in the way that Shauna and Garrett, in particular, have been involved over the years serving on appropriate committees and doing educational programming. Shauna wrote a grant on a substance abuse program that partially (my understanding, and I could be wrong here) was funded because she was a regular member of the university community and a staff member of the university and not an outsource individual. That kind of programming, in which she obtained grant funding to provide substance abuse, both treatment and education, is the sort of thing that we really think is important in an educational environment. These people need to be an integral part of the campus community. We did also feel, as Vice Chancellor McClellan brought up, that it would be very important to have people trained in student mental health issues. When we first heard about it, it was sort of the idea that there would be a string of master’s-level therapists coming on and off campus, so the idea that they be an integral part of the community is one of our major concerns. We also would like to see doctorally trained psychologists among those individuals who are hired, specifically trained in student mental health. I will say, also, that the department requested a copy of the contract that is currently being negotiated on the 29th of August, and we have yet to receive it.
A. Ushenko: I know absolutely nothing about the nuts and bolts of this, but I would urge everybody to take the Psychology Department’s attitude very seriously. I just want to share with you that since I came to campus a faculty member has been stalked by a student, there was a student making bomb threats, I have had a student who was trying to intimidate members of the class into having sex with him, and I have had a student who made violent threats. I also have had a student who claimed that he didn’t dare be in the room when someone else was there as she had attacked him with power tools. I think that was his delusion, but paranoia can be dangerous. That is a lot of instances. In 99 out of 100 percent of cases, probably this is just nothing, but it only takes 1 percent of 1 percent opening fire on a classroom to cause very serious problems.
G. McClellan: Professor Blakemore, I put in campus mail to you the third iteration of the draft, and I called your office to make sure you got it. I am sorry that I did not hear back that you had not received it. I apologize.
E. Blakemore: My secretary called your secretary last Thursday to tell her that I had not received it.
G. McClellan: I am sorry – I will hand walk one to make sure it gets there this time.
C. Thompson: I missed the reason for the change. Is it less expensive to have Parkview do it, and what is the rationale behind it?
G. McClellan: There is a need for us to be able to provide the service and Parkview has the resources to be able to do that in ways that have the potential to extend the direct contact per client into day parts and days that we have not been able to so far. We also hope to be able to access other areas of concern, such as eating disorders and substance abuse, and we can access a wider array of specialties than we could in the 2 ¾ time positions. So we are hopeful that we will access those factors.
C. Thompson: So it is an improvement – we are expanding our services, that is the reason for it?
G. McClellan: When I think about the measurement for success here, that is the measurement of success. We will end up having more students being able to take advantage and actually taking advantage of the service. At a minimum, we want to continue to provide the kind of quality consultation that faculty and staff are used to. As difficult as it may be to measure, we want those students who do partake of the service to feel that they have been adequately served by the service; and I think the fourth dimension of success here will be the extent to which these education programs and campus interactions maintain the kind of quality that we all think we want to see. I think those are the four dimensions of measuring whatever steps we take, whether we get there or not.
H. Samavati: Was there any issue of cost to the institution versus benefits? Obviously the Psychology Department, in their professional judgment, thinks that the first model is better with potential benefits to the campus community. Was cost an issue?
G. McClellan: No. In no conversations that I have been a part of has cost been the reason to do this. It has really been about a belief that we could provide more direct client hours and we could expand hours of service into the evenings and on Saturdays. That has really been the driving force. Throughout the conversations, folks have raised very helpful questions about quality of campus interaction, making sure we have college health specialists.
J. Summers: It sounds like some of the services will be on campus, but will any of the services be put into the campus housing, or will our students have to go elsewhere to get access to these extended hours and extended days?
G. McClellan: That is an interesting question. We have not had a conversation about providing counseling hours in housing, per se. That might be an interesting approach. I am not sure whether students would access that where they live, but it is a worthwhile subject to explore. I was really more imagining it in neighborhoods, so that it was off campus more where students might access it. That is an interesting notion, and we can certainly raise it. I am not sure how much space we have over there to do that.
J. Grant: Just a point of order, and it is actually directed to our new parliamentarian. Professor Downs, just to get us off on the right foot, my understanding is that all questions should be directed to the Presiding Officer as well as all responses. Everything should be going through the Presiding Officer at this point, and not internal conversations.
A. Downs: That is accurate.
M. Nusbaumer yielded the chair to N. Younis.
M. Nusbaumer: Whatever we end up doing, I would be very concerned that there are qualified faculty on the evaluation and assessment group of whatever program we end up going with. I think it is very crucial that this faculty has significant expertise in this area.
N. Younis returned the chair to M. Nusbaumer.
R. Hess: I had a phone call this morning from the vice president of the Student Government Association, and he informed me that the student government and the student senate had twice been briefed on this whole issue and had also received a letter from a student expressing concern. The Student Government Association will be formulating its own position on the whole issue. Just for your information.
H. Samavati: Is this model finalized or are we, as a faculty, still having a say? My understanding was that the Psychology Department has brought this for discussion in the senate. Does the faculty have any say in which model should be pursued, or is it finalized?
G. McClellan: There has been discussion with various faculty members throughout the process. There is not a signed agreement at this point.
8. New business: There was no new business.
9. Committee reports “for information only”:
Educational Policy Committee (Senate Reference No. 07-3) – J. Tankel:
J. Tankel and S. Sarratore gave a combined PowerPoint presentation.
S. Sarratore: We were asked how this aligns with the baccalaureate framework. Beomjin Kim and his students developed text-analysis software. We have taken key words from the Baccalaureate Framework and applied them to the current mission and goals statements as stated by the departments. Each of the circles represents one of the academic schools or colleges, and within that the circle represents all of your mission and goals statements. You can see where there are departments with sections representing parts of the pie strictly related to how verbose you are in your mission and goals statements. Within that, you will see the red portion which indicates a hit on the words. The more intense the color, the more the word appears in a paragraph, and the size of the pie gives you a pretty good idea. You can see, as we look across campus, when we looked for words related to the acquisition of knowledge, that it shows up fairly broadly. Some units use it more than others.
(Please refer to the PowerPoint presentation on the web site for a clearer picture of the presentation [linked in the minutes].)
10. The general good and welfare of the University:
C. Erickson: I was wondering about the status of the
Child Care C enter. The child care committee has been working on this for a
number of years, and I am curious to know whether there have been any moves
made on the part of the administration to build a new
M. Wartell: I will answer that during my comments.
P. Iadicola: I heard that there have been some concerns about the summer school program in terms of enrollments and budgeting. I think that the summer school program has been a very important part of the curriculum as well as a very important part of faculty salaries. I think that it would be in the good and welfare of the university that the analysis of the summer school be as transparent as possible and also to involve the University Resources Policy Committee and the Budgetary Affairs Subcommittee in terms of the nature of the problem and the role of the summer school program here at IPFW.
The history of this university in regard to new programs is that usually the program is vetted to the Educational Policy Committee and then there is a recommendation to the Senate, and the Senate basically goes from there. Then usually, there are requests for positions. There is a little bit of an unusual situation in terms of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program as there have been staff hired for the program; and I know that in our last meeting of the Senate last academic year, Vice Chancellor Hannah mentioned in particular that the application for the Military Science degree was going to be coming to the Senate through the Educational Policy Committee. I encourage that an application be made and the Senate have an opportunity to respond to that application.
G. Mourad: With regard to the issue that we talked about today with regard to hiring professionals to take care of the mental health of our students, I believe that the Department of Psychology should be the primary source for making such a decision.
M. Wartell: Welcome back, everyone!
1) When the memo was sent out about enrollments, it was reported that there were 1180 new freshmen directly from high school. That should have been 1810. The point is that it is a very large number, and is ten percent higher than in previous year. That is very important to the good and welfare of the university.
2) Today, in the afternoon, we will be cutting the ribbon
on
3) On October 2, there will be a groundbreaking ceremony
for the new
4) You should have all seen invitations to the October 4
opening of the
5) With respect to the
Those are the kinds of things we are working on right
now. We also have a couple of small construction projects going on over on the
former
There is another project that Vice Chancellor Hannah has been pushing really hard for, which is the remodeling of the large classroom in Neff Hall, where the recital hall is. We will be starting on that in the not-too-distant future.
All of the funding for the bridge is in place, but it has been a very slow process.
The planning for the
With regard to the mental health counseling discussion, the opportunity to get more services for the same investment is the opportunity that we were trying to take advantage of, not that it was cheaper. That was a good question.
Thank you.
11. The meeting adjourned at 1:13 p.m.
Jacqueline J. Petersen
Secretary of the Faculty