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Faculty Senate

Minutes of October 7, 2008

(unapproved)

 

The Faculty Senate met at 2:00 PM on October 7, 2008 at the Center for Tomorrow to discuss the following agenda:

1. Approval of the minutes of May 6, 2008

2. Report of the Chair

3. Report of the President John Simpson

4. Report of the Provost – Satish K. Tripathi will present an update on the current budget

5. Interaction with Dr. Jason D. Adsit, the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center

6. Old/New Business

8. Adjournment

Item 1. Approval of the minutes of May 6, 2008

 

The minutes were unanimously approved after corrections ( “amendment” mentioned on p. 3 should have been a “proposed amendment”)

 

Item 2: Report of the Chair

 

1.         The chair extended a warm welcome to all new and returning Senators.  In critical times such as these, he said, their involvement in the Senate, and in UB in general, is especially important. He stressed the need to “stay informed, communicate this to our constituents; we must make sure our concerns and opinions are heard.”

 

2.         The chair honored Senators whose service over the past year was particularly noteworthy.  “It’s only a certificate, a small token of appreciation for the great work they did,” he said, “but it is something more long lasting than a typical ‘thank you’.” 

 

• The first recipient is “someone who anchors and monitors all Senate proceedings, who serves as an invaluable resource not only as our Parliamentarian, but as our UB historian as well. His comments, suggestions, and clarifications are always substantial in our discussions. He has served several terms as UB and SUNY senator both. Most importantly, Professor William H. Baumer cares about this institution and its integrity. The chair said he served a number of years on the FS Grading Committee with Bill as Chair, and has never seen meetings run more efficiently. Baumer spends an enormous amount of time preparing, editing, and suggesting modifications to grading and grievance policies that are rigid, consistent, and eminently fair to faculty, administrators, and students alike. This past year, Baumer and the Grading Committee met often several times per month to craft and create seven policies that were eventually approved by the Senate and promulgated by the President and Provost. His tireless involvement and dedication to service to this University are exemplary and undoubtedly help make this a truly great institution.” 

 

• “The second recipient currently serves as an Associate Dean of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and as Co-Chair of the FS Athletics and Recreations Committee. At any sporting or University Welcoming event, she spreads her addictive team spirit to everyone around her. Among her duties as Associate Dean are curriculum development and faculty evaluation, and no one is better suited to these tasks.  Professor Gayle Brazeau is passionately concerned about teaching, quality of instruction, and the availability of resources to help us all continue to improve in this respect. Gayle Brazeau devoted herself through several months to helping to find a Director for the Teaching & Learning Center, a mission she has championed for several years now.”

 

3.         A new Director of the Teaching & Learning Center has been hired --- Jason Adsit

 

4.         Also tireless in their work have been Professor Robert Shibley and Bradshaw Hovey in the continuing development of the UB Physical Master Plan; they presented ideas for the future of the South Campus in July, and last week presented an update to the FSEC. November 19 will be the date of their third public presentation event.

 

5.         Dr. Josie Capuana resigned as Administrative Director of the University Honors College; Professor Don McGuire is currently serving as Interim Administrative Director.  He, Professor Herreid (the Academic Director), and VPUE Michael Ryan met with the FSEC in mid-September to discuss the current state of affairs and future of the Honors College.

 

6.         The budget: Sean Sullivan met with the FSEC in July when things seemed much better --- then the bottom fell out.  The Provost put together a Strategic Financial Management Advisory Group, the function of which is to compile ideas from all constituent groups of the University.  The chair emphasized that no one on the Advisory Group represents any particular unit; he also said that this Group does not subvert the Senate Budget Priorities Committee --- it is merely a group with wider university representation. The BPC, he added, would be invited to one of the next Senate meetings.

 

7.         President Simpson delivered a stirring 3^rd annual address to the WNY community, in which he rightly pointed out the need for reforms to SUNY to allow UB to continue its path toward realizing UB 2020. The video is available online.

 

8.         The Academic Planning Committee met this past Friday to discuss UB’s academic planning in the context of the imminent budget cuts.  As usual, many good ideas were put forth, and the Chair, Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian, was invited to share some of these with the FS.  The chair welcomed Professor Christian, who discussed how important it was for the faculty at UB to respond to the budget cuts with a unified voice. The Faculty Senate needed to take some form of action to send state leaders a message of support for the university to show that “UB is the solution, not a spending cut.” This is what the administration is trying to do with UB Believers, Christian said, but it is important for the faculty as a body to try and do the same thing: “I think that the Faculty Senate should come out and say that, as people who have given our lives to it, who really care about it, that there are many, many reasons why we really need now to protect [higher] education,” Christian said.

 

9.         Finally, the chair reported that at the next FS committee, he would like to re-mobilize and revamp is the old “Public Service and Urban Affairs” committee. Following up on a suggestion by an esteemed colleague, he proposed renaming it the FS Committee for Community Outreach. There is no better time than now to re-activate this committee, he said.  “We need to realize that we are part of WNY, that they need us and we need everyone out there as well.”  The chair announced that he would be circulating two sheets, asking faculty senators for names of colleagues who would be ideal for this committee, and what suggestions for specific charges this Committee should first address.

 

Report of the President John Simpson

The President reported that the Provost and he were busy devising plans that would take into account the consequences of various budget-reduction scenarios for UB. He mentioned the Financial Management Advisory Group that was charged with looking carefully at what kind of principles should guide the university and, in a long-term fashion, at what UB’s future would be. According to the President, the budget cuts will have to lead to “a conversation about what we do with our enrollments… given that the resources amounts we get from Albany are in jeopardy.” The President bemoaned the continued absence of a chancellor for SUNY, a fact that compounds, he added, the need for dialogue about the future of SUNY and higher education in the state. Simpson also remarked that while the financial crisis is obviously a negative development, the kind of conversations about change it has instigated and the amount of energy it has unleashed is “an entirely healthy thing” and something that “couldn’t have taken place in previous years.”

The President also reported on his third community address and the importance of engaging the community in dialogue. “In as much as we can mobilize the community to support our aspirations,” he stated, “we will succeed.” He emphasized the importance of letting the community know that the success of the university is crucial to the region’s future. He asked senators to make the university an issue in upcoming elections just as he had been doing.

Item 3. Report of the Provost

Satish K. Tripathi presented an update on the current budget. He said that such update was necessarily going to be incomplete since the budget situation was changing every day. He reminded the senators that what had begun as a 2.9% cut last June became 3.3% and in August followed by another 7% cut later this summer. The first round of budget cuts, the Provost explained, was dealt with by taking money away from the margins. The next round, however, constituted too big an amount to be able to take it from the margins. As a result, the first order of business was to institute a moratorium on new hiring and purchases of more than $5000. The next step was the forming of a university-wide Financial Management Advisory Group comprised of 7 faculty, 3 staff and 2 students who were asked to develop cost reduction principles and revenue generating strategies. The provost attended some of the meetings of this committee but not all of them so as to give its members the space to discuss things on their own. The group was also put in charge of defining the university core principles (including cultural and organizational ones) that would guide university thinking and actions in a crisis environment. In addition, the Advisory group was also, the Provost said, to offer advice regarding how best to achieve financial targets while preserving the university’s mission and the vision of academic excellence outlined by UB2020. “Our dedication to providing the best education must not be compromised,” Tripathi emphasized. He also mentioned the website through which members of the UB community at large had been invited to share their suggestions about reducing costs and increasing revenues. Two hundred people wrote in with very good ideas, the Provost said. Protecting the core mission of the university, Tripathi added, would require differential cuts and selective investments (“are we subsidizing things we should not be?”). In reference to unit-level cuts, he explained that “as much as possible would come from UB’s central budget before moving down the pipeline.” Issues that are going to be looked at, the Provost added, were also the question of the number of departments and programs: “I am not talking about eliminating programs, but about the organizational structure. Can we do a more efficient job?”

 

Item 4: Item 5: Interaction with Dr. Jason Adsit, Director of the Teaching & Learning Center

 

Jason Adsit, the new Director of the Teaching and Learning Center and a UB graduate from the Department of Philosophy, explained that the T&L Center was the result of the merging of two centers, namely the Educational Technology Center (ETC) and the Teaching & Learning Resources (CTLR). Its goal, Adsit summarized, was to help faculty members perform better as educators, to support instructional technology and faculty professional development. He listed the broad range of workshops available to faculty and staff: how to use ublearns, the new clickers, how to develop multimedia presentations, investigate emerging technologies, website development, etc. One-on-one sessions or group sessions were both available, Adsit said. Other special services offered to faculty include: digital scanning, webcasting, digital videorecording, web streaming. In addition, faculty can have access to a large range of equipment hardware and software through T&L Center: desktop computers (Mac and PC), laptops (Mac and PC) digital cameras, LCD projectors, etc.

 

The T&L has also been organizing a Teaching effectiveness and Pedagogy series that is faculty-designed and taught and that has been extremely successful, Adsit reported. The goal, he said, is to maximize the diversity of voices in the classroom and take advantage of the social networking tools that students are already using: “how to maximize interaction with student while maximizing student learning.” His program is also coordinating the new faculty orientation and looking for a more sustained model of orientation through an effective mentoring system. Faculty orientation as it stands is like “drinking water from a water hydrant,” Adsit said.  The goal was then to replace that orientation with a model based on a 1 to 2 or 3 year long process instead. Adsit further mentioned the revamping of the T&L website in its effort to provide better web-based pedagogy resources and to identify discipline specific resources and principles. The center will also be developing more discipline specific workshops and seminars (eg. Health Sciences Lecture series).

 

Adsit concluded by emphasizing the importance of sharing the best practices across the disciplines (exploring how studio work can inform clinical work for instance). He stated that the goals of the T&L included: highlighting the scholarship of teaching and facilitating faculty research on pedagogy by identifying internal and external resources and developing a sustained model of faculty professional development and new faculty orientation. The Center, he stated, works “to serve the faculty, respond to the faculty and to act as a conduit for the information they need.”

 

The chair encouraged senators to direct younger faculty to T&L Center so they can get the assistance they need in their progression toward tenure.

 

Item 6: Old / New Business

 

Chair Hoeing reported that the FS would soon have a new website with a direct link from Myub page to it. “There will be an open discussion board and a free for all for the exchange of ideas but also a more confidential input section where faculty will not have to identify themselves,” the chair said.

 

Item 7: Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 3:09 PM.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

Carine Mardorossian, Secretary of the Faculty Senate

Attendance

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