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Chair: S. Camp
Recorder: J. Godkin
Members Absent: S. Abraham, B. Patterson, and M. Nelson-Richards
The meeting was called to order at 3:12 PM.
I. Approval of Agenda
The Agenda was approved unanimously.
II. Approval of Minutes
The minutes from October 25, 2004 were approved unanimously.
III. Chair Report- S. Camp
The chair began the meeting welcoming the Assembly back to the spring semester. S. Camp then announced that Provost Coultrap-McQuin will give a brief report on the status of the construction and personnel and departmental moves.
For updates, the Assembly can access the Campus Concept minutes at
http://www.oswego.edu/administration/campus_concept/index.html
and facilities reports at http://www.oswego.edu/news/content.html?id=P507.
S. Camp and L. Peterson just returned from Albany and the Winter Plenary of University Faculty Senate. They learned a great deal regarding budget, the Chancellor, assessment, a new proposal by one of our trustees, the funding of libraries and more. Senator Peterson will report in more detail later in the meeting.
Next week S. Camp will meet with the College Council and will report on faculty work since our last Council meeting in December.
As a result of the full agenda, S. Camp announced that the Assembly will only have time to engage in discussion of the policy recommended by the task for on Sexual Harassment and Consensual Relations Policies and Procedures. This will allow more thorough consultation with our colleagues prior to voting.
Lastly, the Chair reminded the Assembly that the General Faculty Meeting of February 14th has been changed to March 21, 2005 at 4 p.m.
IV. Provost's Report- S. Coultrap-McQuin
The Provost gave an update on construction projects currently underway on campus. Construction in Poucher started in January and is expected to be completed by next January. The Dean of Education office has been moved to Rich Hall. Construction for Swetman is planned to start in September of this year. Disability Services will move to Hewitt this September. Wilber and Park are scheduled to be home of School of Education. Half of C&I will move in the fall and half will move in spring. Sheldon is scheduled to be the home of the children's center and admissions. The third floor will contain five classrooms and a lounge. The classrooms will be primarily used by the School of Education. The second floor will contain a historic classroom, which will be used for tour groups. Graphic design will move into Lanigan, causing other departments to move out. WRVO will move out of Lanigan and will be moving into the Government Documents section of Penfield. The documents are currently being moved to other locations of the library, including into storage. The Provost would like to put together a committee composed of librarians, students and faculty to come up with a vision for the 21st century Library. Most campus projects are expected to be completed in 12 months. The Provost encouraged the Assembly to visit the web site for updates. She finished by answering questions from the Assembly.
V. Reports of Councils, Committees and Task Forces
Academics Policy Council met on January 28, 2005, and approved the requirement that students must maintain a minimum of 2.0 GPA in all classes counting toward their minor, thus making the policy the same as for majors. Students also must take at least 1/2 of the classes counting toward their minor at Oswego. The exact wording will be presented for vote at FA. APC also discussed the Provost's mission statement on faculty development.
Priorities and Planning Council met Friday, January 28th with the Provost and discussed goals 6 and 7 of S. Coultrap-McQuin's plan.
General Education Council recommended to the Assembly that "Computer Literacy" be redefined to "Computer and Information Literacy". The rational for this change was reported in the document distributed to the Assembly.
UCC met January 24th and approved the following courses:
BLW 455 Cyber Law
GER 250 Landeskunde 3
MUS 113 Introduction to Music Literature and History 3
MUS 397 The Business of Music 3
Academic Outreach Council met January 31st and discussed the tasks performed by Continuing Education The mission of the council was explained and possible initiative will be discussed this semester.
Campus Concept Committee met on January 26th and heard a status report from Jerry Desantis and Provost Coultrap-McQuin. Discussion was held regarding timely, improved communication regarding construction and moves necessitated by construction.
VI. Faculty Senator Report- L. Peterson
(see attachment)
VII. Unfinished Business
1. The changes to the Physics Major were approved unanimously.
2. The changes to the Meteorology Major were approved unanimously.
VIII. New Business
1. Elections for vacancies on FA Councils and Committees
Undergraduate Curriculum Council
No nominations
Academics Policies Council
John Hounker
The meeting was adjourned at 5:00 PM.
(Attachment)
Plenary of the SUNY Faculty Senate
Luther D. Peterson, SUNY Oswego Faculty Senator
The Winter Plenary of the Faculty Senate was held January 28-29, 2005, at the SUNY Central Administration complex in downtown Albany. Email on the Faculty Senate (FS) list-serve preceding a plenary suggests the hot-button topics with which we will deal at the meeting, and in the weeks and days leading up to the meeting, this traffic centered on assessment issues, particularly a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request by a reporter for data collected over the first two years of assessment, the tuition increase proposals of the chancellor and the governor, retention and graduation rates for SUNY students, and Trustee Candace de Russy’s request to the Board of Trustees (BOT) that they pass and impose an “Academic Bill of Rights,” which emanates from politically conservative circles, upon the SUNY system. One afternoon in December we even held a conference call of… senators and our Faculty Senate President, Prof. Joe Hildreth of SUNY Potsdam, in which strategies of compliance by local campuses to the FOIL request were discussed. These issues did take up much of our time in Albany, but along with them other matters as well.
President Hildreth’s opening report dealt with a number of issues facing the university. Highlights: (1) As perhaps we all are aware by now, Gov. Pataki’s budget request relative to SUNY involves a $500 per year tuition increase, a return to his previously expressed idea that one half of TAP funds be held until a student’s graduation, and a new proposal–labeled Partnership to Accelerate Completion Time (PACT)–to reward four year campuses with $500 for each student who completes his/her baccalaureate within the specified time, for almost all undergraduate programs meaning completion within four years.
(2) Regarding assessment Pres. Hildreth recalled the agreement, the MOU, between FS and Central Administration and the BOT that assessment was to be used for internal improvement, not invidious public comparisons between campuses, and that this FOIL situation now threatens if not destroys that key provision of the agreement.
(3) The Mission Review (MR II) process is now at the stage where Central Administration is planning its visits to each campus, which will be completed by December. Hildreth urged campus governance, lead by CGLs and senators, to be very much a part of this next stage of the process.
(4) The Honors Task Force, seeking to bring a measure of unity to honors programs throughout SUNY, has collected materials from all of the programs and has promised a “best practices” document; this, however, appears to be somewhat off into the future.
(5) The Levin Institute in Manhattan has hired a provost, is already teaching a few graduate-level courses, and is about to purchase a building in the central downtown part of the city.
(6) After much delay, the web-site for FS is up and running, and therefore now the source for information on the senate, its committees, its plenaries, and its archives of past resolutions, etc. (Go to the SUNY system site, click faculty/staff, then faculty senate.)
The next major item on the agenda was a report and Q and A with Provost Peter Salins. Again I give highlights without replications from Pres. Hildreth’s report, in order of his presentation:
(1) Regarding Mission Review, Salins reiterated the necessity of faculty involvement.
(2) The issue of graduation rates is important. Salins acknowledged the many problems in accumulating the data for this, and the problems of our current generation of students to complete college in the typically stipulated four years. He also stated that SUNY is “well-positioned” on this issue in comparison with other public universities around the nation (he spoke of a place on our web-site with comparative data for SUNY, CUNY, and the California state college system, and noted that Univ. at Binghamton is “fifth or sixth” in the whole country among public research universities on four year graduation rates). He promised that this issue will be a major topic during the MR campus visits. In response to a question he said we are now in about a 40% completion range, and that he thinks we can move this to 50% (see Appendix A).
(3) Libraries. SUNYConnect is “almost complete,” bringing a seamless connection between SUNY-wide catalogs, some 2700 journals, and Interlibrary Loan. He praised the SUNY system’s involvement in ARTstor–more on this below (report of presentation by Assist. Provost C. Hatch).
(4) Salins encouraged use of CourseSpace, the web based tool for teaching courses. He also pointed to a transfer template available on the university web-site, by which community college students can search a “seamless transfer” to our four year campuses for teacher education. He hopes that we will soon have programmatic agreements in business and engineering, allowing similar templates for these.
(5) Provost Salins devoted the rest of his talk to the problems caused by the FOIL necessity to release assessment data. He began by praising the SUNY campuses for their efforts over the past two years in doing assessment. He gave a lengthy narrative of the efforts occasioned by the FOIL request, in particular a January 10 presentation to the BOT Academic Standards Committee, with reporters present, where Commissioner Richard Mills of state education, Prof. Trudy Banta of Purdue University, and four campus presidents all spoke of the excellent work we are doing regarding assessment. In general, Provost Salins reports, press coverage of that meeting has been positive.
Friday afternoon Chancellor Robert King responded to concerns brought forward by representatives of the “sectors” into which the university is divided (university centers, comprehensive colleges, etc.). The highlights: (1) He is opposed to the Academic Bill of Rights, expressing the opinion that what is good in the document–particularly protection of diversity of opinion on our campuses–is already a reality. He expressed the opinion that the BOT will not impose the document without consultation.
(2) In response to our sector’s question about the $50 million taken from us for the univ. centers in the last fiscal year, he said that 15 to 16 million has already been restored and that recently the governor has agreed to release another 9 million. In the end perhaps 35 or 40 million will be restored. He stated that this restoration is important not only because of the money, but also for establishing the base lines of operations for comprehensive colleges relative to BAP.
(3) King expressed agreement with all sectors’ concern that we should work to raise the numbers of full-time faculty and lower that of adjuncts, and that faculty development needs to be a priority. King too expressed the need for faculty involvement in Mission Review.
Jumping ahead to his presentation to us after dinner, Chancellor King placed himself alongside Pres. Hildreth and Provost Salins in his description of the fracas over assessment and FOIL. With such positive outcomes presented in the campus assessment reports, he said that we can we can be positive and proud about our accomplishments, and not worry about someone drawing wrong conclusions.
Turning to TAP and PACT, he described briefly the advantages of the proposed schemes for governor and legislators, but opined that these plans will not pass in the legislature.
The remainder of King’s speech focused on tuition, particularly upon his plan–worked out in conjunction with the leadership of SUNY student governance–of tiered tuition increases: each entering class is assessed a tuition based on the rise in the academic cost of living since the previous year, and then frozen for the next three years. Also, tuition at the university campuses, he proposes, will be increased by an additional 1.5% each year, reflecting their higher costs. This additional increase is to be capped at one and a half times the tuition at other campuses, which will be reached in twenty-two years. The chancellor, finally, claimed that our NY tuition costs are the lowest in the region including New England , New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
There were two more presentations in the afternoon, on energy consumption in SUNY and on libraries. The latter was dealt with in another presentation on Saturday morning as well, and I will combine the information presented at both.
Energy. A senator, Dr. Maureen Dolan of Old Westbury, brought to our attention the mandates of Governor Pataki’s Executive Order #111 of June 2001, about which the university system appears to be in arrears. For example, by the end of this year, at least 10% of the university’s procurement of energy must be from renewable sources, not including hydro power, and in another five years another 10% must come from renewable sources. At present we are at about 2%. Also, old buildings are to be retrofitted alongside n
ew construction to be certified according to “Green Building” guidelines. Dr. Dolan urged the senators to bring these issues back to our fellow faculties and also the fact that there are financial sources available to assist all state agencies to comply with these mandates.
Library. Carey Hatch, Assist. Provost for libraries, spoke in glowing terms about ARTstor, a collection of soon a half million graphic images available through the web for campuses. The central university has paid the initial costs of tying into this tool, and the annual fees–which are sizable, coming to some $8,000–are to be paid by the local campuses. All four university campuses and twelve of the thirteen comprehensive campuses have bought in. Oswego has not, and in speaking privately with Mr. Hatch, I learned that our library based its decision upon the fact that the Art Department is digitalizing its slide collection, and felt ARTstor was not necessary for them. I am not sure what our decision should be, but it seems to me, based particularly on the stunning demonstration that Mr. Hatch presented us, that other departments, such as anthropology and history, should have been/be consulted.
The presentation on libraries on Saturday morning, offered by the director of U. at Albany’s library, Meredith Butler, and the assoc. director at Brockport, Christopher Brennan, brought to our attention the dismal state of spending for journals and books in the SUNY system, relative in particular to inflation (to remain even for the 1990-2002 period vis a vis inflation, expenditure would need to increase 20-24%). Even worse, I learned in the supporting statistics that of the comprehensive colleges only Brockport at 1%, Old Westbury at 30.2%, and Oswego at 20.1% dropped in total expenditures over that period, the last period of available data (see Appendix B). That means that in real dollars for books and journals, Oswego’s library has lost some 40 to 44% in purchasing power over this period. That is a bad mark for Oswego, in my opinion.
Saturday morning at plenaries are given over largely to resolutions and reports of FS committees. Two resolutions came forward from the FS Executive Committee. The first was a forceful statement of support for Chancellor King in general, but prompted by his current disagreements with BOT Chair Egan and Trustee de Russy. The second resolution states that the campus CGLs and senators be made members of the local mission review groups, wherever they have not been. These were passed without dissent.
Committee reports and resolutions: From the Operations Committee came a resolution stating that campuses “be encouraged to develop target ratios of Full Time Tenure Track faculty to non-TT adjunct faculty,” and that this discussion be a part of the MR process. This passed without dissent. Governance Committee distributed a draft resolution on practices for evaluation of administrators, and presented a resolution on academic misconduct, which was tabled. University Programs and Awards Committee announced the twelve university wide faculty who will serve on the GEAR assessment standards committees for English composition, mathematics, and critical thinking–and two of these are Oswego faculty, Robert Moore and Jack Narayan! Congratulations to them, and what a feather in our cap! This committee also presented three resolutions, two regarding Chancellor’s awards: that a faculty member cannot receive a second award within ten years, and one already holding a Distinguished faculty rank is ineligible for these awards. The third resolution states that someone holding a Distinguished faculty rank in whatever category (teaching, research, service) is ineligible for Distinguished appointment in another category. These resolutions passed.
Appendix A
2004-05 SUNY data. The graduation
rates are:
6 Year SUNY 58%
National Public Universities 45%
National Private Universities 57%
5 Year SUNY 55%
National Public Universities 37%
National Private Universities 51%
4 Year SUNY 40%
National Public Universities 20%
National Private Universities 41%
Appendix B
University Library Expenditures on Books and Journals, 1998-2002. Comparison of Oswego with some of the other twelve comprehensive colleges:
Buffalo State 1998 $885,073 (2000 977,867) 2002 $933,760 % change 98-02 5.50
Geneseo 626,761 (698,470) 653,753 4.30
New Paltz 552,457 (647,235) 687,223 24.40
Oneonta 562,777 (700,337) 611,695 8.70
Oswego 634,794 (581,171) 507,133 (20.10)
Plattsburgh 732,688 (711,704) 756,896 3.30
Potsdam 387,483 (404,369) 422,217 9.00
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