9-26-14 Minutes

Minutes approved as the first order of business.

Provost Wickert lead a discussion regarding the successes ISU had with respect to the high impact hires. He indicated that there were 29 high impact hires across all colleges that were approved by Provost Office.

In addition, it was mentioned that there will be approximately 130 hires across campus, and that these included shared-hires (CALS – Business), and that Ames Lab will help with cost-sharing for a faculty salary. Overall, there was good cooperation across the Colleges, Departments, and with ISU Administration. For the 2014-2015 AY, there will again be lots of interviews across campus, while there may be some interview fatigue, this needs to be viewedas an excellent opportunity for ISU.

There was a discussion regarding the ISU’s AAU initiative to hire NAS members.

There was a discussion of the AAU membership criteria and the Tier 1 indicators include NAS members, numbers of competitive federally sponsored funding, and PhDs awarded.

Tier 2 – citations, postdocs on campus

While the metrics related to ranking within the AAU are not clearly defined, the Academy will share their data with ISU.

It was mentioned that ISU compares poorly with respect to NAS members.

ISU’s funding record is good; it was mentioned that competitive USDA awards are viewed as highly as funding from NIH and NSF. As ISU does well with funding from USDA, it was recognized that the Academy should/needs to reevaluate this measure of success as NIFA awards are as competitive as NIH and NSF awards.

ISU is low on with respect national honors and awards made to faculty. For this reason, these is an emphasis on recognizing faculty achievements and nominations for appropriate awards and honors (e.g., AAAS Fellows)

All the Deans have been challenged to interview faculty candidates that hold an AAU class honor awards and the administrators and faculty awards committees should work to nominate current faculty to key awards/Academy positions

CALS, LAS, CVM has very good prospects. The Provost mentioned that ISU will be digging deep with respect to funding these positions, even using the University airplane to transport these individuals to campus.

With respect to AAU membership, the question was asked whether or not members universities are given any notice before being dropped from the AAU. It was also asked why are there only 62 Universities in the AAU

Another question was asked regarding how would ISU make a big difference in our ranking. Basically, NAS members affiliated with ISU would be a big boost.

How does ISU identify the space needed to relocate NAS members?It was mentioned that there is a retired member of IOM who worked at USDA. Living in Iowa. There was a brief discussion as to the best approach to ask this individual to become affiliated with ISU in some manner.

There was a brief discussion of ISU’s Appropriation request to the Board of Regents. With respect to tuition increases, based on the mid-range of the inflation index a request for a 1.75 % increase in tuition for IA residents and twice that dollar amount for non-residents. A 2.75 % increase in the veterinary student tuition was requested.

It was mentioned that it is unlikely that tuition would be held flat for a 3rd year.

Model for redistributing state revenue based on in-state students attend the Regents Institutions – the total may reach $47M

Legislature still needs to approve the plan and may recommend a phase-in approach over three years to redistribute the funds. This approach would reduce impact on UI. ISU could see an increase of $6 in Phase 1 redistribution.

Main arguments against the redistribution of funds – UI indicates that it is more expensive to train professional students.

Capital projects – biosciences was approved but funds will not be available until FY2016.

Student innovation center – ISU’s next initiative after the Bioscience Bldg. Regents approved the ISU project but not the UNI or UI projects. This has not occurred before – ISU will have two projects moving forward simultaneously as opposed to sequentially.

There has been an assessment of the 214 ISU classroom facilities with respect to seating, lighting, IT, and occupancy. With higher enrollments, efficient use of classrooms is critical. For example, it was noted that two classrooms were only used 19 hrs per week, many/most classrooms are occupied for 75 to 100 hrs per week. The implication is that there is more classroom capacity to meet the needs but it is an issue of location, location, location.

Based on the audit, it was estimated that efficient use of classroom space could add to accommodate 2000 (more) students. There are plans to budget between$2-3M per year for 2 to 3 yrs to upgrade the classroom space.

Next assessment study will focus on department controlled classrooms.

Dr. Gloria Jones-Johnson was introduced to the group.

Sarah Nusser led a discussion of the Grants Hub initiative. This is new concept rolled out in early September. The impetus for this is based on insufficient resources for grants support across campus. There was a discussion ofthe working goals for the program (a ppt presentation was distributed). It was highlighted that facultyare the ‘research engine’ on campus and that time is a key commodity and that issues related to research compliance, interactions with stakeholders, etc. are critical but can be time sinks.

Grants Hub Goals – services and training, pre- and post-award support, proposal development, enhance/improve the “pipeline” of success for younger faculty/researchers

  • Training grants take a lot of time to pull the data together, develop institutional databases for this kind of data
  • Develop a help desk,
  • Mentoring new faculty,

A question from the group address thepercent effort on PRS documents as it relates to research effort. The point was that amount of time allocated to research relates to success. When looking to support a given faculty member, how do we, as administrators,balance the departmental needs (teaching, service) withthe individual need for time and resources to be successful in research.

There was some concern that the Grants Hub might be funded by reducing the 15 % incentive investigators receive from IDC. It was stated that the distribution of IDC to researchers will not be changed.

There was concern as to whether there will be sufficient staff (i.e., redundancy) with respect to who knows how the system will/does work

The VPR mentioned that there needs to be concerted efforts to increase the research portfolio with under utilized agencies such as DoD and NIH. ISU does well with USDA and NSF.

Other topics discussed included:New initiatives that will be announced as RFPs from various agencies,areas ISU can strengthen with respect to big data.

  • Need to consider funding opportunities from Industry and foundation
  • Develop a seed grant program out of the VPRs Office –

There was a discussion regarding the Responsible Conduct of Research with respect to awareness, training needs to be structured properly, and it is critical to keep researchers at all levels engaged