Academic Senate Summary
Monday, April 21, 2008
3:15 – 5:00 p.m.
EDC 117
Present: Allen, Allison, Alpers, Anderson, Blasko, Brewis, Broman, Burg, Bush, Capaldi, Christiansen, Coffman, Comfort, Crow, Cruz-Torres, DiFelice, Doty, Drucker, Elliott, Ellis, Fabricius, Facinelli, Fromme, Gitelson (at West), Gonzalez-Santin, Grace, Guleserian, Harp, Karcher, Kingston, Kinnier, Komnenich, Kopta, Koshinsky, Kostelich, Liu, Magana, Margolis, Maris, McPhee, Moorhead, Mossman, Ossipov, Pardo, Restrepro, Rez, Roen, Romero, Rose,
Saenz, Schneller, Schultz, Shaeffer, Simonhoff, Winter, Sousa, Stump, Thompson, Tompkins, Trotta, Tsakalis, VanderMeer, Vaughan (at Poly), Verdini, Vernon, Watson, Wheeler
Substitutes: Kevin Ellsworth for deLusé
Absent: Allenby, Barclay, Blanchard (with prior notice) Bodman (?), H. Campbell, Carter, Cobas, Colbourn, Cook, Gopalan, Guerin, Hajicek, Happel, Henn, Heys, Hoffmeister, Ingalls, Jackson, Konomos, Lara-Valencia, Mathur, McNeill, Minteer, Morton, Ovando, Pinholster, Roedel, Rush, Shah, Sloane, Stewart, Strom, Sullivan, Teye, Thomas, Whitecotton, Wiezel, Williams, Wutich, Ye
- Call to ORDER (Bill Verdini).
The meeting was called to order by Senate President BillVerdini at 3:15 p.m. This meeting was televised to all campuses.
- UNIVERSITY PRESENTATIONS AND REPORTS
A. Senate President's Report (Bill Verdini)
We are conducting elections for Assembly officers and grievance bodies now. There is still time to vote. A few problems have been reported about how the ballot is accessed but most have been resolved. Please vote and encourage colleagues to vote up until April 25, 2008.
I was supposed to get a report from the Faculty Athletic Representative Myles Lynk for today’s meeting, but I have not received it yet. I have seen some reports and we are doing pretty well this year in terms of academics and athletics. As soon as Myles report comes to me, I will see that you all get a copy. This is my last Senate meeting and I hope you reserve me a few moments at the end to say a few words but now I would like to call Dr. Crow to the podium.
B. University President’s Report (Michael Crow)
I want to start by giving you a view from my perspective of items related to the performance of the institution this semester. This semester I can report that things are going anywhere from good to very good on a scale where excellent is the highest. We have some stress and stains that I will mention in a little bit but on the good side:
We have a record number of applications in the history of the institution, those applications reveal a record level of quality, diversity, and student distribution. We had over 100,000 students request information about ArizonaStateUniversity. We have spent a fair amount of energy and resources on being able to give those students a robust set of information about the university programs that we are offering and I don’t know if many faculty have seen the kinds of materials that the Office of Undergraduate University Initiatives has put together in the last couple of years, but they are positive and dynamic and they project well what the institution is all about in terms of helping us help our student prospects look very carefully at ASU.
We have had very solid academic hiring around the institution. I was in Washington a week or so ago, where I spoke as an invited lecturer before the National Academy of Sciences annual meeting. A person came up to me from Harvard wondering how we were able to recruit Billy Lee Turner to our geography department--this person said Billy Lee was the most prominent academic geographers in the United States. [He was becoming concerned about some of the academic hiring that was going on here.]
Fund raising has been progressing this semester. We have closed on three families initiating a $42 million strategic investment fund endowment for the university where resources will be made available to units throughout the institution from this endowed fund. This is something that we have not been able to do before and we think this contribution by these families allows us to be able to have an endowed steady flow of resources for annual investing.
The projection for the close of our research activity this year will be somewhere north of $240 million in research activity expenditures by our faculty--this is a continued and steady increase in performance and there are a number of schools involved. I was at the University of North Carolina last week and they are anticipating a downturn in their research funding for some reason that has to do with stability of funding from certain agencies. Among the hundreds of institutions a year that receive funding from National Science Foundation, we are ranked 35th in terms of all their investments on an annual basis. We did see some reports of progress by some external reviewers of the rankings of some of our programs. We saw top 50 rankings for our graduate programs in Business and Engineering, and in Arts, Political Science, History, Nursing, and Psychology and in other units—Chemistry and Physics are in this node, so, there are significant achievements being made for such a young institution as we are.
Going forward I think there are some stresses with our state investment partner, the State of Arizona, and the State of Arizona has a momentary financial stress that they are working their way through for us in the FYO8 Fiscal Year. We are almost through that fiscal year and we just received our reduction investment notice on Friday from the state and it is roughly a $15 million reduction in their investment. That is not good news, since those are all dollars already committed and dollars already spent for the most part. That is something that we have to work toward resolving. More challenging than that is the FY09 Fiscal Year, where the university is being slated for a much more substantial potential investment reduction, possibly as large as $50 million. We are working hard to make certain that this does not happen. We have the added stresses of enrollment demand at the same time we are having an investment reduction. Putting all this into perspective, we also secured last year a substantial change in tuition policies for the university, which helps us to advance interests of our students, resources, and to get some things done. It was a substantial positive movement toward depoliticking of tuition, where we have each freshmen class coming in at the 34th tuition position among the senior universities in each of the states--with a guaranteed five-year rate going forward for each of those classes.
The state’s investment in the institution is about just under $500 million right now, minus on an annual basis, the reductions that they decide to make. On what is called the Capital Plan in which we made a request along with our sister institutions for $1.4 million in new facilities--we moved that forward.It is met with moderate to heavy resistance but nonetheless we are making progress, we have the endorsement of the East Valley Partnership, the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, the group called SPEED, which is a group of corporate entities that support this and for those of you who are unfamiliar with this it is a three-part plan that calls for the renovation of all deferred facilities on the Tempe campus, the construction of two new facilities on this campus, a building that we are presently are calling “ISTB6” and the building of another building roughly the size of Coor Hall as a general use classroom and office building. Then there is an additional $470 million for expansion of the University of Arizona Medical School. Some of you have seen the first draft report to appear in the newspaper, which indicates there are some stresses and strains, that the medical school, and this is true but we won’t cover that until after the Regents meeting later this week at Tucson.
I think we have made good progress this semester. We have some waves we will have to navigate here in the months ahead, as we deal with the state’s investment in the institution. We are arguing vociferously for our growth to be supported regardless of the state’s financial position. We will see how we do on that. We have strong allies, strong supporters, but the state also has its own financial stresses, but there are lots of alternative pathways that the state could take at this point. They have not set on a course yet. Are there any questions?
Q (Mossman): There was a recent report in the news that the Dean of Medicine for the UofA Phoenix has resigned in part or totally, because his position was demoted from Dean to Vice Dean which suggests to me that the independence of the Medical School in Phoenix is not all that it is cracked up to be. That the power still remains and the administration still remains in Tucson. How does this impact the ASU partnership with the UofA School of Medicine?
President Crow: It would be fair to say that Ted Shortliff who is the individual you are talking about was appointed as the Dean, and he was the former chair of Bioinformatics at Columbia and I have known him for a long time. Ted did go through a two-step process. One step was to hear that the position had been changed from Dean to Vice Dean, and then a second change took place within just a few hours reversing that decision to have 2 deans and a vice president for health affairs, and he chose a vote of no confidence from the first dean to resign. The instability exists as I suggested in my earlier comments, it is there and has to be remedied. I met with Regents early this morning, I met with Regents over the weekend, and there will be a series of meetings with Regents at the Tucson meeting this week so we are working on a remedy for the structure of the partnership, the nature of the partnership, the nature of the leadership within the partnership but there also have been several rapid succession decisions, which in and of itself probably is not the best way to run an emerging medical school. There are things that we have to resolve and we have to work our way through that. The issue of the separateness of the deans has been resolved, and other personnel issues have resulted from that, but they have not been resolved.
Q (Watson): I just saw recently that Parking and Transit Services was going to increase fees for the third time, but also that the U-Pass is now going be $10 per month--and there was another decision out of Financial Services I wanted to bring up which indicates that ASU was going to have to do away with the reimbursement for home modems. My question is not to the substance of those decisions but this was the first time I heard of these things were in email announcements rather than having these items come through the Senate or any other faculty organization--as far I know. My question is about procedure more than anything else and whether or not decisions that are on the financial side of the house will make the academic side of things, such as a Senate committee or process that involves faculty input?
President Crow: I am familiar with the first item. Betty and I can talk about this if the Senate has a committee that we can report this type of information to, such as the University Affairs Committee, on a quarterly basis, where the CFO can come in and give a report on where things are. I will be happy to do that. The bus passes are not something that we control. We purchase these from Valley Metro and that is based on the usage of the passes, so, the purchase price has increased (and we did not push that down to the students.) The other item I think involves about 300 people, I am not sure of the exact number.
Senator Watson: It is about 200—but it is really about whether or not something can be worked out for these people.
President Crow: I think having more information on the table rather than less is better for people who might say--why are you doing that, and we think the university should do this or that. I think perhaps we should facilitate that kind of interchange and over the summer I would be happy to assign whatever officers the Senate might want to nominate, to bring your input and questions to us on some regular basis.
Q (?): Until that process is sorted out, are you still open to input on the issue of internet modem service?
President Crow: I am always open to feedback--and here is some I have received so far—if a faculty member can pay for it from an account they have on their own, why do we not let them do that as opposed to a state account. That is the feedback I have received.
Q (?): What email should we use to give you Senate input?
President Crow: Email me directly with your idea at
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Q (Rez): I am very pleased that we are only going to lose $15 million. I was expecting a much more severe cut considering that the states deficit is more around $1.2 billion. But what concerns me, seeing the way that things are being done—everybody was expecting some sort of revertment yet nothing was being done in the way of planning for it, just spending like there was no tomorrow. During the coming year are we going to have to tighten our belts better and maybe not be as extravagant on some things as we have been in the past?
President Crow: Your overall point is well taken, and I understand the notion about being cautious as we move into a more stressful and uncertain fiscal time but it is not the case that people haven’t been anticipating this. We have asked all the directors within the institution and all the deans within the institution to prepare reserve funds equal to or greater than these anticipated cuts—and this has been done. A compensation mechanism is in place and already implemented for ’08. For Fiscal ’09 plans are still being finalized. I am not one to go ahead and say, let’s make these budget adjustments we anticipate,at least until the last possible second because that assures that they are going to be made again. In this particular case—we have made adjustments for ’08. Those are done. So in terms of the broader question that you have in terms of not advancing with certain things, we absolutely are not advancing certain things as we are being cautious where we need to be cautious. Cuts are just one side of the equation. The other side of the equation are revenues that we might be able to generate for the institution. We are also asking the deans and the directors to see what might be done in terms of revenue enhancements, expansion of summer school, and expansion of certain other kinds of programs that generate revenues for the institution. We have asked the deans and directors to work on that and many of them are. Betty can comment on that further.
Provost Capaldi: Each dean had a target of reserves for this year and for next year -- and they had to show if they were going to increase revenue or make cuts, and you probably notice if you are in class—that for summer school there will have a major effort going on to increase onlinecourses and there are more masters programs being added, all of which gives more revenue to the colleges. We prefer to add, since the state provides only core money. If we can generate more money we could actually end up not changing much, if people plan ahead and I think the deans are going very good on that.
Q (Shah): My question is about the calendar and it should probably be addressed to the Provost Office. I heard there is talk about having a later start date in August. You probably need to discuss this with the Registrar’s Office but I would like to suggest starting earlier in the fall, decreasing the winter break, giving students at least another couple weeks of summer, which for them (and I have been approached by students on this) would mean an extra pay period and help them out financially.
President Crow: Betty is probably the best person to answer that but we do know that we have some issues with the overall academic calendar and its timing, including the “mystery week.”
Provost Capaldi: It is very hard but I think it is a good topic for us all to discuss because Winter Session is actually a session now, and we have a fairly active academic program—if we start later that will fluctuate the holidays—remember the days when all universities started in September, and we would have two weeks after Christmas in which they could study over the break. Then everybody in the country went to starting in August. I understand we in Arizona have a unique situation, so this is well worth continuing to examine.
C. University Academic Council Report/West Senate Report (Richard Gitelson)
They are having an assembly meeting today on the constitution.
President-Elect VanderMeer: This is not on the agenda, so it will come as a complete surprise: we have been fortunate this year. As you all know, the University has been expanded. We have four campuses now, with the addition of the Downtown campus, and it has a governance unit but the downtown senators, including the president, have continued to meet with us, and we thought it was appropriate to provide some recognition for that.