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Faculty Senate Executive Committee

Minutes of January 21st, 2009

(unapproved)

The Faculty Senate Executive Committee met at 2:30 PM on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009, in the Jeannette Martin Room of Capen Hall (567) to discuss the following:

 

1. Approval of the minutes of October 15, 22, and November 12, 2008
2. Report of the Chair
3. Report of the President/Provost
4. Budget Update—Associate Vice President for Academic Planning and Budget—Sean Sullivan
5. Outsourcing student email—Elias Eldayrie, CIO and Sandra Peter, IT Policy Officer
6. Old/New business: Open Access vs. Traditional publishing and dissertation embargos
7. Executive Session (if needed)
8. Adjournment

 

Item 1: Approval of the minutes of October 15, 22 and November 12, 2008

The minutes of all 3 meetings were unanimously approved.

 

Item 2: Report of the Chair

· The chair reported that the UB Council unanimously endorsed UB’s legislative agenda of policy reforms that the President has argued are needed to realize the full potential of UB 2020. Council members passed a resolution that states their support of 4 solutions that have all been endorsed by the SUNY Board of Trustees:

o increased flexibility in spending and contract matters

o access to market capital,

o ability to lease and purchase land or facilities, and

o a rational tuition policy

· Last Friday our local elected officials, the NY State Senate Assembly gathered downtown to unanimously support the same proposals (introduced as Bill #2020)

· The chair will introduce a similar resolution at the Feb 3rd Senate meeting. It is especially important now for faculty to support these changes, he said, because an email was sent last week through UUP to the effect that we should not be supporting these reforms. This was a confusing message that was sent to faculty and it is important to counter it, chair Hoeing emphasized. He added that he would draft something for next week’s meeting to formally support President Simpson.

· The chair also convened an exploratory meeting of the newly rechristened Faculty Senate Committee On Community Outreach: 8 to 10 people showed up, a lot of excitement but no one volunteered to be chair except for a nontenured librarian, so Chair Hoeing decided to serve as chair until someone else comes forward. He will convene a meeting soon, he said.

· The Distinguished Ranks committee met on January 5, 2009 to vote on which faculty members to propose for the rank of Distinguished professor and for the Chancellor awards. This is a great committee, chair Hoeing said, because one gets to realize how great one’s colleagues are.

Item 3: Report of the President/Provost

n/a

 

Item 4. Budget Update—Associate Vice President for Academic Planning and Budget—Sean Sullivan

Associate vice president Sean Sullivan gave an overview of the budget actions proposed by the governor for the next fiscal year 2009-10. He outlined the impact of the governor’s budget proposal on research universities in general and UB in particular. Compared to last year, “the governor has added some things and taken some things away” and “partitioned the message about the budget realities.” For instance, Sullivan explained, the budget includes an addition of nearly $62 million to fully fund SUNY’s bargaining costs, $8 million to cover inflationary costs, and $10 million to cover modest energy costs increases across the system. These additions of $80 million have to be considered in the context of the $211 million he took away, which amounts to a net reduction of $131 million in tax support. What is more, Sullivan added, it is not just that the deletions significantly outweigh the increases, it is also that they disproportionately impact research universities in the SUNY system, including UB.

In addition, the governor may have approved the tuition increase proposal, but whereas UB used to retain 100 percent of the funds thus obtained in the past, now the governor’s budget proposal includes a proposal to return to the state 80 percent of tuition income from UB’s professional programs, i.e. the M.D., D.D.S., J.D., Pharm.D., M.B.A. and DPT programs. It also includes a proposal

· to reduce graduate tuition scholarships and minority graduate fellowship budgets (by 15%)

· to reduce support for some “university-wide programs” by up to 50%, including UB’s Research Institute on Addictions, MCEER and the Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence program.

· to impose a state “tithe” on sponsor reimbursements for indirect costs incurred to deliver sponsored research programs (this would affect UB by about $2 million to $3 million).

Sullivan reported that President Simpson wrote a letter the chair of the SUNY Board of Trustees to detail his concerns and objections, and distributed copies of the letter to the senators. The Western New York legislative delegation sent a similar letter to Gov. David A. Paterson, Sullivan added. He concluded by emphasizing that SUNY as a system will continue to take actions to respond to these threats.

 

Item 5. Outsourcing Student email—Elias Eldayrie, CIO and Sandra Peter, IT Policy Officer

Elias Eldayrie provided the ground for the decision to establish a partnership with Google Apps and outsource student email.

· In December 2007, the CIO Office held a forum with undergraduate and graduate & professional student leaders to explore their views on a UB partnership with Google to replace our central student email service with Gmail and the Google Apps for Education suite.

· Google Apps for Education is a free solution that provides a set of online communication and collaboration tools, including gmail (Webmail service), Google calendar (shared calendaring, time management tool), Google Talk (chat/IL, including audio and video chat), Google Docs (online document, spreadsheet, presentation creating and sharing).

o Google Apps for Education was introduced 2 years ago as a free Software as a Service Solution

o Google Apps has grown to more than 2.5 M users as 1000s of universities in more than 100 countries

o The 2008 Campus Computing Survey (N=531 Colleges and Universities) found that 42.4% of participants have migrated or about to migrate to an outsourced email service. This percentage is approximately 50% for public research university participants.

o Large universities currently using Google Apps: Arizona State, Clemson, Colorado State, Cornell, Delaware, George Washington, Indiana, Northwestern, Notre Dame, UC Davis, USC, Virginia, Utah State. In addition, U of Texas-Austin, Florida, Penn State are currently negotiating with Google.

· Students would keep their buffalo.edu email addresses and the service would be advertising-free while they remain students at UB. When they leave and/or graduate, they can continue to keep the same gmail account, but advertising would kick in.

· The student leaders were all enthusiastic about the partnership, and they polled their constituencies in January to February 2008.

· Student responses to the polling were overwhelmingly in favor of the partnership with Google: more than 95% of student respondents were in favor.

· Some students raised serious questions about email privacy

· An update on partnering with Google for student email was presented to the Faculty Senate Computing Services Committee in Spring 2008.

Elias Eldayrie then explained why colleges and universities have been switching to Google Apps and Gmail:

· Students get more services and much more storage space than colleges and universities can provide

o Increased email storage -- 7GB and growing

o Improved service quality w/ calendaring, instant messaging and shared document, spreadsheet, presentation applications

o Support for a broad range of mobile devices, providing Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube and other Google products on a broad range of mobile devices

o Collaboration/Communication Tools, including audio and video chat (personal videoconferencing) via Gmail

o Opportunity for colleges and Universities to reduce costs and redeploy staff to provide new and strategic IT services: There is no competitive advantage to an institution in providing email to students.

o UB cannot afford to provide an email service that is equivalent to Google’s service

Eldayrie also addressed what there is in it for Google:

· Hopes to create loyal customers

o Students will continue to use their services/keep their accounts after graduation

o Advertisements will be shown after students graduate

§ While a student is enrolled at UB, Google provides these services without displaying advertisements

The CIO concluded his presentation by offering some comparative data on UB EMAIL VS GMAIL. For instance,

· Storage Size 150 MB for UB vs 7GB for Gmail

· Message Size 150MB vs 20MB

· Spam filtering both but Gmail would be able to offer Integrated Calendaring that UB does not offer

· Online Collaboration Limited at UB but available for GMAIL

 

When it comes to issues of Privacy, Eldayrie explained, US does not “troll” email messages and the university is FERPA Compliant; UB will require FERPA compliance from Google, but Google does “troll” (data mine) email messages. In addition, when it comes to e-discovery and subpoenas, UB is responsible for responding to the very time-consuming process of e-discovery, FOIL requests, and subpoenas; if we outsourced student email to Google, Google would be responsible for responding to e-discovery FOIL requests and Subpoenas.

The CIO also mentioned the costs risks: Google would provide Gmail and Apps at no cost to UB, but will Google continue to provide this free service? Last but not least, while Email at UB only a utility IT service and hence UB is unable to provide the features and storage capacity gmail provides, providing email is a core competency for Google; they continually increase storage capacity and innovative features.

Eldayrie also reassured the senators what as far as the data in emails is concerned, the student, not GOOGLE owns it. This includes customer content of any third party content and/or info used as part of the service.

Janiece asked about about faculty and staff. Why could they not benefit from a similar switch?

Eldayrie responded that a # of different issues of intellectual property would have to be taken into account before such a thing could happen. UB needs to have access to data in relation to faculty and staff without having to beg Google for it. He also explained that UBlearns would not be affected by this switch.

Item 6: Old New Business

Item 7: Executive Session (if necessary)

 

Item 8: Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 3:54 PM.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Carine Mardorossian, Secretary of the Faculty Senate

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