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• Attendance
• Chair's report
• Discussion of the report of the CLAS review committee

Minutes of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty Assembly

Attending: Adams, Adrain, Birrell, Boggess, Bork, Cheatum, Cole, Cowles, Ehrstine, Filios, Frankel, Fulton, Gutiérrez, Harwood, Joselson, Kim, Kimmich, Larsen, Lawrence, Leicht, Malanson, Menninger, Mitchell, F. Nelson, G. Nelson, Oliveira, Onel, Parratt, Pelton, Ringen, Schnell, Schope, Singer, Snider, Storey, Thomas, Wittenberg, Yuasa

Excused absence: Franklin, Gölz, T. Jones, Oesmann, Pavlik, Piñeros, Strohmer, Stroyan, Trevor

Absent: Algan, Aprile, Blumberg, Bolton, Buss, Gatica, Gavruseva, Geng, Hurtig, D. Jones, Marra, Mills, Moore, Plumert, Porter, Pusack, Robinson, Tomblin

Guests: Raúl Curto, Executive Associate Dean

1. The minutes of the Faculty Assembly meeting of April 21, 2004 were approved as distributed.

2. Chair's report. Chair Sarah Larsen (Chemistry) introduced herself and the other officers of the Assembly, Vice Chair Jae-On Kim (Sociology) and Secretary Alvin Snider (English).

In an overview of business that will come before the Assembly this year, Larsen noted the final report of the CLAS review committee, to be discussed at today's meeting, and the questions it raised regarding the role of the Assembly in the governance structure of the College. She said the Assembly would work toward better defining the its role. She also noted that the Assembly would consider proposals from the Educational Policy Committee, and that a meeting with Provost Hogan was planned for the spring semester.

Larsen announced the members of the Diversity Committee for 2004-05: Kate Cowles (Statistics & Actuarial Science), a returning member who will serve as committee chair; Tisch Jones (Theatre Arts) and Gerhard Strohmer (Mathematics), returning members; Jodie Plumert (Psychology), Jane Singer (Journalism & Mass Communication), and María Vélez (Sociology), new members.

Larsen also reviewed the business that came before the Assembly last year, noting especially the successful proposal to reduce the size of the Assembly, the approval of the College's self-study, and three measures proposed by the EPC.

Larsen then reviewed some Assembly attendance statistics and pointed out that there was a quorum at all four meetings last year, a significant improvement over previous years. In a comparison of the membership of the College's various governance bodies, she observed that the Faculty Assembly was the largest and had the greatest breadth of opinions, so it was important to better define its role and increase its effectiveness.

3. Discussion of the Report of the Review Committee for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Chair Larsen asked for comments on the faculty governance section of the review committee's report. Vice Chair Kim responded by saying that the fact he was elected vice chair last year was an indication that there were problems with the Faculty Assembly, since the nomination committee was unable to find any better qualified candidates. He admitted that he had not attended many Assembly meetings as an at-large representative, but he felt that the Assembly was an important body because it was the only one in which all units were represented. He found the connection between the Assembly and the Dean's Office tenuous and suggested that a way to strengthen the connection would be to have the Assembly elect the College's Executive Committee (EC) and Educational Policy Committee (EPC). He maintained that it would give the Assembly more respect and make it significant enough to be the subject of politicking during elections, as the EC and EPC now were.

Member John Menninger (Biological Sciences), in response to another member's request for a comparison of the Faculty Senate and the Faculty Assembly, said that he had served on both. He said that the Faculty Senate voted on serious issues and the University administration was compelled to respond to the Senate's concerns. He said he wasn't sure what the Assembly did.

Chair Larsen noted that the Faculty Council, a body elected by the Faculty Senate from its membership, acted as an executive committee of the Senate and screened agenda items. She went on to say that the Faculty Assembly was designed to act as and give voice to the faculty as a whole. Its charge was broad but had few specifics. In her experience, most measures proposed by the EPC required Assembly approval, but not much else required its attention.

Executive Associate Dean Raúl Curto said that the Faculty Assembly did not seem to have the power that the other two elected bodies, the EC and EPC, had. He maintained that it would be difficult for the dean to make any significant decision without consulting the EC, and that the EPC had much power over the College's educational policy, and both committees were considered strong and viable by the Dean's Office. The Faculty Assembly, he said, did not have strong ties to the Dean's Office since it was no longer chaired by the dean, and it was not consulted on a regular basis throughout the year. He thought the perceived lack of power probably was a cause of low attendance.

Menninger pointed out a section of the review report that quoted the CLAS strategic plan Goal V. B.: "Work with the Faculty Assembly to enhance its function as a governance mechanism that represents departmental faculty and priorities." He asked Curto whether the College had plans to enhance the Assembly's function. Curto replied that strategic planning was not done in isolation and that the College needed to hear from the faculty that the Faculty Assembly was a priority. He said the College was not putting much effort into it at the moment because there were so many other things that needed attention, and they consulted the Assembly only when they were required to by the College's Manual of Procedure.

Curto said that he would like to see a stronger link between the EC and the Assembly, but that EC members were not always able to make it to Assembly meetings to make presentations or answer questions. He noted a suggestion that the EC might serve the Faculty Assembly in the same way the Faculty Council served the Faculty Senate. Vice Chair Kim asked Curto what he thought of having the Faculty Assembly elect the EC members. Curto said he personally would be in favor of that, though he observed that having EC members be members of Faculty Assembly as well would make their job bigger and might make it more difficult to find faculty who were willing to serve.

Members suggested that, if part of the function of the Faculty Assembly was to express the views of the faculty, the Assembly membership should be surveyed for the top issues and priorities. Member Joseph Frankel (Biological Sciences) said that the Faculty Assembly might represent a point of view that was different from that of the University as a whole, and he gave the example of the athletic reform proposal that the Assembly sent directly to President Skorton last year after it had died in the Faculty Senate. Member Kevin Leicht (Sociology) said that the vision for the College articulated by faculty and administrators outside the College was often at odds with how the College faculty viewed their mission. He was encouraged that the external reviewers of the College saw scholarship as the focus of the College's mission.

Chair Larsen said she was willing to solicit the opinions of the Assembly members on priority issues and open a dialogue regarding the restructuring of the Faculty Assembly. Vice Chair Kim moved that the chair appoint a committee of three to five members to study the issue of structural change and report back with alternatives or proposals at the first meeting of the spring semester. Member Christopher Cheatum (Chemistry) seconded the motion. Chair Larsen called for a vote and the motion passed on a voice vote with no opposition.

Menninger asked Dean Curto about the issue of start-up funds and facilities in the sciences, referred to in the review report. Curto replied that hiring faculty in the sciences was a top priority for the Dean's Office, but that the money had to be there. He stated that the biggest problem was not money for faculty lines, but for renovation and other facilities-related start-up costs that could be very significant for science faculty. Inadequate funding for start-up costs, he said, led to an increase in the number of lecturers rather than tenure-track faculty.

Curto called attention to a proposal that had been widely reported in the news, which involved a three-pronged approach to enhancing funding to the Regents institutions: tuition increase, internal reallocations, and an increase in state funding. He said there would be no commitment of funding increases from the state until the internal reallocations were proposed. He emphasized that the state's definition of reallocation would have to be understood and adhered to.

Curto also noted that the final report of the internal review committee had a number of factual errors, which would be corrected in the College's response to the review, but would not be emphasized. Personally, he said, he put more weight on the shorter report of the external reviewers, who had a better grasp of what a comprehensive liberal arts and sciences college was about.

Menninger then asked about the recommendation of the review report that the College have a greater voice in graduate admissions and allocations. He noted that the College having more strategic control over the block allocation implied that there would be winners and losers in the process. Curto replied that graduate programs were what made the College different from four-year colleges, and were an essential component at the core of the College's identity. Currently, he said, the relationship between the CLAS and the Graduate College was characterized by after-the-fact communication and coordination by luck or coincidence, and that the College would work toward improving communication and increasing its administrative control of the block allocation. He said that Dean Maxson had appointed two task forces to examine graduate and undergraduate programs with an eye toward formulating criteria to evaluate excellence. The greatest effort would be made to support programs that were on the brink of excellence, in the hopes that the support would catapult them over whatever limitations they were facing.

Curto added that he did not know whether the recommendations of the task forces would be presented to the Faculty Assembly for approval.

4. Adjournment. As the time for adjournment was close at hand, Chair Larsen adjourned the meeting.

Respectfully submitted,
Alvin Snider
Secretary, 2004-05