Faculty Senate

April 26, 2016

SUB Lookout Room

(Draft Minutes)

President Powers called the Faculty Senate meeting to order at 3:05pm.

1) Roll Call:

Vice President Scott Lowe, Senators – David Biedenbender, Mac Test, John Francis, Laurie Cavey, Marty Orr, Peter Koetsier, Richard Klautsch, Tim Chenoweth, Ross Perkins, Jennifer Snow, Nader Rafla, Kim Martz, Susan Esp, Danielle Murdoch, Jaclyn Kettler, Bonnie Keanley, Merlin White, Megan Davis, and Jim Stockton

Guests – Provost Marty Schimpf, Vice Provost Sharon McGuire, Policy Manager Sunny Wallace, Registrar Kris Collins, Vice Provost Jim Munger, Professor Peter Mullner, Professor Sarah Toevs, Director Vicki Stieha, Adjunct Dana Hathaway, Lecturer Jane Roser, Professor Royce Hutson, Professor Arturo Rodriguez, Professor James Armstrong

Agenda Items:

2) Approval of Past Minutes – Senator Test motioned to approve both the March 8th and April 12th minutes. Senator Kenaley seconded. President Powers called for the question, hearing none motion carried.

3) Old Business:

a. Vice President Lowe moved to Re-affirm the Faculty Senate Resolution Opposing Guns on Campus. Senator Klautsch seconded. President Powers called for the question, hearing none motion carried.

b. Policy 3080 Last Week of Classes and Final Exams – The Senators were sent a draft of this policy at the beginning of this week. Senator Stockton has brought copies of the most recent revision of the policy. He also has a copy of the ASBSU letter that the students sent to Faculty Senate. This is the fifth time in the last four years that this policy has come to the senate. This is the second time that the ASBSU students have asked us to revise the policy. Two years ago there was not a consensus on what the changes should be, so we let the old policy remain in place. Senator Stockton suggested that if we can’t come to an agreement on the policy today and vote on it that we should consider one of two things: just allowing the current policy to remain and send a polite letter to the students explaining to them why that is the case so that they don’t feel left out or ignored, or we talk about getting rid of the policy altogether. The changes that were made was changing the scope to undergraduate classes and making the policy statement a lot richer. It now speaks too many of the concerns that I heard at the last meeting especially when it came to labs, artistic performance, project participation, all of these types of activities many of you expressed are done the 15th week classes. The policy now basically focuses just on exams and removes the 15% clause out. There was also the concern about adjuncts not being paid during finals week. Correct me if this is wrong, but this is more of a departmental collegiate concern on the contractual agreement with contingent faculty and while most contingent faculty contracts do cover the 16th week. Sarah Jones from HR said there are some that probably are not covered, so I would assume that the correct response would be adjuncts should go talk to their chairs, find out what their contract says. But we need to encourage them to follow what is currently the policy.

Senator Stockton motioned to pass the policy as is with the given exception of with the word “findle” which will be corrected. Senator Stockton motioned to approve Policy 3080 with minor editing. Vice President Lowe seconded. President Powers called for the question, hearing none motion carried.

New Business:

a. PAR Assessment – Vice Provost Jim Munger stated this is about the assessment of program learning outcomes which is basically what the student is expected to learn during their degree program. This is the most important thing that accrediting agencies look for is to make sure we have a good structure for ensuring that we assess the learning outcomes for all our programs. Currently we have relied on our five year program review process as the way to document that we are assessing learning outcomes. However, it has not worked well and that has led us to make some changes. There are vastly different processes and they are somewhat reactive and retrospective as opposed to ones that are forward looking. Several of our accreditation reviews it was noted that we need to do a better job of showing that we have consistency among departments and making sure that everybody is doing the assessment learning program outcomes. During the year that we engaged in program prioritization, we evaluated the strengths of department programs learning outcomes as a measure of the quality of program. During this process, departments filled out a form and then that was evaluated by a rubric and those scores were eventually turned back to the department as well as comments. This was a way for departments to look at and see how well they were doing in terms of that assessment of learning outcomes. Note that in the handout the graph shows how well we did and how well the departments did which was pretty well but there is still some room for improvement. The Provost’s Office is in the midst of a revamp of our five year program review. The program learning assessment piece will become a standalone prominent process which will be highly supported. This will be basically separated from that program review process. Director Shari Ellertsonand her team are taking on the task of facilitating the creation this whole process and started with the report we used in program prioritization. They have developed the framework that is described and made modifications through the reporting template. They received feedback from the assessment coordinating committee, from the associate deansand from the dean’s council. The key feature of this is formative in nature and that it basically involves faculty members as peer reviewers again using this rubric to give back to departments. This is very important because what it does is it means that it is not another compliance process but a formative development of the assessment process. This reporting will be on a three year cycle with as much consideration as we can of meshing with specialized accreditation visits because that is already an onerous process. The good news from my standpoint is that this matches well with what you do with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and University our accrediting agency. This new process will be rolling out next year.

Senator Perkins,what type of involvement from the departments with the new process will be required.

Dr. Munger stated the actual filling out of the report is a relative short process; however it would depend on the department on the number of hours required for analyzing the learning assessment of the student. We will try to use specialized accreditation in colleges when possible as we review learning outcomes in departments.

Senator Lowe stated that an interdisciplinary program like Environmental Studies that has learning outcomes that are offered by other departments and I’m worried about putting pressure on those other faculty that are outside the department to provide the assessment.

Dr. Munger stated that they will need to figure out how is it that you know a student in Environmental Studies is actually achieving what they are supposed to be achieving without leaning too heavily on other departments.

Senator Toevs stated that this is really a formative process and is about faculty having conversations about what we want our graduates to know when they leave this university. It is really more of an internal process and not measuring us against some standardized exam. In factit is a real important piece to avoid outside entities coming in to say you will use a standardized exam and more about the student learning, engaging faculty in those conversations, about the goals of our program, and how we as individuals and faculty come together to track whether were seeing changes over time.

Senator Weaverquestioned if this would be a three year cycle and is this replacing the five year cycle.

Dr. Munger, no this is separate processes with a difference cycle. Director Ellertsonwill come to the Senate in the fall with an update on the process.

President Powers stated that would be great and very helpful for the new Senators.

b. Faculty Senate Standing Committee Reports: Vice President Lowe

  • Student Affairs had no business this year and had nothing to report.
  • Faculty Professional Standards Committee met and reviewed the emeritus faculty applications and submitted those to the Provost’s Office and all were approved.
  • Sabbatical Committee met and voted on changes to the sabbatical policy in February. They also met and went over sabbatical applications for FY17. The same committee stands and will move forward with the new policy for sabbatical leaves next year.
  • University Curriculum Committeehad weekly meetings during the fall semester and six meetings during the spring. They reviewed 141 individual proposals. They reviewed two changes to the general education, the foundations program, and they discussed policies on cross listed courses and changes, they requested changes for curriculum action form. All of the proposals that were submitted, approved or rejected and pretty much everything the committee dealt with are available on the Registrar’s webpage.
  • Graduate Council – Dr. Jamie Armstrong. The activity of the graduate council for this past year. In the area of curricular activity, there were 46 curricular proposals as opposed to 61 in the previous academic year. Of those, most of the proposals deal with changes to existing courses creation courses, but along the way there were 5 new degree programs, two discontinue degree programs, and 3 renamed programs. In the noncurricular area one thing that the graduate council does is to approve adjunct and affiliate faculty who are not full time employees of Boise State. We had not approved 18 nominees to adjunct faculty status and 8 to affiliate. One policy matter that we dealt with that was related to previously applied courses, if someone is a graduate student transferring in and they have a certificate, the graduate council decided that a certificate was not in the same category as a degree. It is possible to apply credits earned to a graduate certificate to a program here. If it is to a certificate from Boise State, it would follow the transfer credit policy where no more than 1/3 of the graduate credits transferred in from another certificate could apply to one here at Boise State. One of the things Dean Pelton was really concerned about was the welfare of graduate assistants, graduate students, and he announced that a health insurance plan was in place to replace the one that expired last summer. The graduate council is working with representatives of the undergraduate curriculum committee and others on campus to refine the format for submitting curriculum change requests so we will be able to use the same one for both undergraduate and graduate courses. I am retiring and it has been my pleasure to serve on the graduate council.
  • Diversity – Senator Frances stated the committee was joined this spring by Madeline Jewel, a student representative. The committee discussed a number of concerns and established relationships with several parties on campus including Alicia Estes, Executive Director for the Office of Institutional Compliance and Ethics, Annie Kerrick, Director of Title IX/ADA/504 Compliance, and Donna Llewellyn Executive Director of Institute for STEM and Diversity. Issues discussed included harassment of faculty by students. There are some clear guidelines about if a faculty member or student harasses another student, but when the opposite happens this is not so clear and the support is not there. The committee has deep concerns over this issue because normally the people targeted are women and minorities. One of the committee’s suggestions is to clarify and disseminate reporting procedures for harassment. They mentioned the faculty handbook has not been updated or printed for years, so they are working with the Office of Institutional Compliance and Ethics to try to get a support resource directory with updated information and procedures of how to file complaints. Another issue was security escort service. The committee considers it unfortunate that the service is not reliably available for faculty and graduate students. Another concern is the hiring of EEO/AA Director and the fact this has been an ongoing vacancy. They feel it is an important position to get filled and they look forward to working with the individual hired in the position. The committee is also sad to see the faculty associate for inclusive excellence position basically terminate and they hope the university will consider recreating that position. They are looking forward to working with the new General Education Committee on policies related to UL 06 and reviews of assessment outcomes that will happen in the fall.
  • Faculty Financial Affairs – Senator Chenoweth: There was no new business, but we had several updates regarding the Budget 2.0 project.
  • Undergraduate Academic Policy and Standards – Senator Stockton: This committee met several times this year. Sara Conithafrom Education was elected chair. The committee dealt with two policies which we have just recently passed that would be Policy 2240 and today’s passage of Policy 3080.
  • Faculty Grievance – Vice President Lowe: This committee had no new policy and did not meet.

Vice President Lowe stated that no committee recommended to be disbanded. It is anticipated the nominating committee will work to provide additional tasks for all committees prior to the start of next year.

Faculty Senate Constitution – Vice President Lowe stated the Constitutional vote has concluded. There were 5 proposed amendments and a total of 362 votes of the 550 academic and administrative faculty on campus. Amendments #1 and #5 were passed. Amendments 2, 3, and 4 did not pass; #2 received 354 in favor, #3 received 333 in favor, and #4 received 293 votes in favor. Amendment #2 created a ratio for research/teaching faculty but did not pass, Amendment #3 created an At large Senate seat but did not pass, and Amendment #4 created a seat for Adjunct, Affiliate and visiting faculty which did not pass.

Faculty Senate Bylaws – Vice President Lowe stated the majority of the changes had to do with grammar and bringing the bylaws in line with the Constitution. The substantial change was in #3 which dealt with the committee structure. Vice President Lowe motioned to approve the revisions to the Senate Bylaws. Senator Stockton seconded. President Powers called for the question. Senator Perkins reached out to the College of Education to get input and they questioned the use of a majority vote,where all of the amendments would have been approved, as opposed to the historical precedence of a 2/3 majority. Are we going to continue in this mode and has there been any discussion of a 51% majority for voting for amendments to the constitution. President Powers stated she had not heard any discussion of moving to 51% majority vote. Senator Stockton stated it has been this way for a couple decades andbelievesthe Senate can bring the question to the floor for discussion and if we want to change the 2/3 majority vote we can change that. Constitutional changes are not committed to every five years, within that span we can work on constitutional change if the senate is motivated. Vice President Lowe, noted that change #5 redefines what the faculty is to include clinical, research, and teaching faculty, this vote did not include them and I hope that we put that up for a vote again next year. Senator Stockton I was under the impression that lectures would be able to vote this time but we were held to the language of five years ago and the only people who can vote from the language five years ago is tenure, tenure track and administrative faculty and I am very glad that the amendment did pass and we can move forward. Senator Perkins stated we still have one group who cannot vote and are not represented on Faculty Senate, is there a means of gathering input from them and disseminate it out to faculty. Vice President Lowe stated they talked about it before the meeting and we could invite those groups to attend in an Ex Officiocapacity and sit at the table and be part of the discussion of all our meetings. President Powers restated the motion on the floor is to approve the proposed changes to the Bylaws, any further discussion, hearing none. Motion carries.

Foundational Studies Program Subcommittee Update- President Powers stated she hopes you all had an opportunity to read the letter that I forwarded. After our last Faculty Senate meeting I had five emails with similar feedback and the subcommittee that has been working to address concerns and incorporate the feedback and change formatting. One of the things we talked about at the last meeting is there might not be clear rationale for these recommendations and it might be too big of a leap from the results report and the review process to come actual recommendations that we drafted. We have been working on that and right nowthe current draft is a 5 to 6 pages and the subcommittee really feels like there is more work to be done and can do a better job of potentially answering some of the questions and concerns. So we have a member of the subcommittee who is interested in carrying on this work over the summer and bringing this back to the senate early on in the next academic year. One of the things we really wanted to do was solicit feedback from the senate in terms of what you are hearing from your constituents in terms of feedback about the letter, what are the next steps, and this really needs to be representative of the senate. I would love to first open up the conversation to senators and then we will extend that to the audience as well.