March 1, 2016
1. Call to Order
Chair Moore called the meeting to order at 3 p.m.
2. Approval of the October 20, 2015 General Faculty Meeting Minutes
Secretary Darby Orcutt recognized a motion and second for approval of the minutes.
The motion passed to approve the minutes as submitted
3. Remarks, Jeannette Moore, Chair of the NCSU Faculty
Chair Moore presented a plaque “Resolution of Appreciation” to Chancellor and Mrs. Woodson for their $1.15 million donation to NC State to start a tuition scholarship fund for the dependents of NC State’s faculty and staff.
Chancellor Woodson stated that they were glad to be able to make the donation. He recalled that the universities that he and Mrs. Woodson attended offered this benefit.
Chancellor Woodson announced that since their gift, 40 additional gifts have been added to the program. Chancellor and Mrs. Woodson received a very enthusiastic standing ovation for their generosity.
4. Remarks, Chancellor Woodson
Chancellor Woodson stated that there has been a number of transitions in leadership. David Hinks is now officially the Dean of Textiles. Also, Scott Douglass is the new Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration and he brings amazing experience both in higher education and State Government. He started his career as the State Budget Director in Delaware and left there to be the CFO in the School of Business at Penn State and was then promoted to CFO of Penn. He went back to Delaware where he has served as their CFO for the last seven years.
Chancellor Woodson stated that Annette L. Ranft is joining us this summer as Dean of the Judy and Steve Zelnak Poole College of Management. Provost Arden and others have been interviewing candidates for the Dean of the College of Education and that search is in the final stages of concluding. Eileen Goldgeier will be interviewing candidates for the Vice Provost for Equity and Diversity.
Chancellor Woodson stated that this year he wants the campus community to be aware that a member of our faculty and an Adjunct member of our faculty was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor an academic or professional engineer can have in the country.
Ken Swartzel who is a food process engineer from Ag and Life Sciences, William Reynold Distinguished Professor Emeritus did a great job during his tenure here developing new technologies for food processing, using both chemistry of food and also the thermal chemistry to ensure that food is safe and also nutritious and high quality in its flavor.
Rudy Rodriguez, who is an Adjunct Professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and lead entrepreneurial in our region has also been named to the National Academy. NC State University now has 23 active members of the National academies.
Chancellor Woodson announced that Dr. Trudy McKay, Distinguish Professor of NC State, member of the National Academy of Sciences, recently was named as a recipient of the Wolf World Prize in Agriculture. The Wolf Prize is one of the few highly distinguished prizes in agriculture. She is a quantitative geneticist and works largely with fruit flies, but her research has led to many applications in agriculture and for that she is being honored with the Wolf Prize. Almost 50 percent of those who receive the Wolf Prize go on to receive the Nobel prize, so it is a significant honor, great for NC State and great for Dr. McKay.
Kate Meurs, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine is the first recipient of the Mark L. Morris Jr. Investigator Award from the Morris Animal Foundation. This is a tribute to all of our work with companion animals. She is a great scientist and a great leader at NC State.
Susan Nutter, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, has yet again been honored. In this case by the Academic Research Libraries across the country as the Research Librarian of the year. This award highlights vision and commitment to the academic librarian profession.
Chancellor Woodson announced that also this year for the first time in history NC State received a Churchill scholarship. After World War II, there were two scholarships created, the Rhodes and Churchill and they honored the highest achieving American undergraduates with a graduate fellowship to attend Oxford or Cambridge University. This year Mia de los Reyes who is an undergraduate in Physics received the Churchill Scholarship. Mia is a product of NC State since her father is a professor of Civil Engineering. Mia is also a product of the great system of higher education in North Carolina having received her high school degree from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. Mia will be going to Cambridge to study Astro Physics.
Chancellor Woodson stated that the meeting began with the Faculty Senate recognizing him and Mrs. Woodson for starting the scholarship fund. He said it was important for them to give back to NC State and they wanted to do it in a way that hopefully inspired others to participate. He is grateful that almost forty people have stepped up and contributed. He said this scholarship will mean a lot in the future. As important as this is to the faculty, it is hugely important to those that work every day for the university with more limited resources than he and Susan, so it was important for them to do this. He went on to say, “We didn’t do it to get recognition, we did it to inspire others.”
Chancellor Woodson stated that he is very pleased that the citizens of North Carolina will have the opportunity to vote on the bond, March 15th and he is also pleased that the Governor and the Legislature chose to enact a bond to give to the people of North Carolina for a vote.
Chancellor Woodson stated that the bond is big for NC State and will continue to move our campus forward. Engineering Oval, which is not a complete move of engineering to Centennial Campus, but it is largely a completely move of engineering to Centennial as a critical next step for us. Chancellor Woodson stated that the second critical project is a Plant Science Research Center that is part of our Plant Science initiative. He gave a shout out to Agriculture and Life Sciences for working tirelessly across the state to get this bond passed.
Chancellor Woodson said he is very grateful for Provost Arden, Vice Chancellor Mullen, Justine and the many people working everyday on this campus to continue to build the kind of climate that we all aspire to work within and that we all aspire to be leaders within. The students have been very responsive, so too often when you have conversations about diversity, the only people that show up are those that are diverse and committed to the topic.
Chancellor Woodson said to really have an impact across campus we need to engage the entire campus community and I am very proud to say that has happened and it is illustrated in a number of events that we have had across campus. The attendance has been great, the conversations have been strong and the inclusive environment at NC State has been strong, but it takes all of you, the faculty and all of us in administration and our students to work together on these issues. Thank you for your leadership.
Questions and Comments
A faculty member commented that for years we used the tuition increases partially for need based scholarships and partially for increases for faculty. By using those funds I think we could probably help grow our own team and really reward the fore mentions. What is your view on that and is that something we can consider in the future?
Chancellor Woodson: I believe that whatever resources we have we need to invest in our peers and you are right, historically we have either waited on the legislature to give us money or we have reallocated from the campus initiated tuition increase for faculty salaries. Please remember that tuition receipts here are considered appropriated receipts so they are still part of the legislative appropriation to the university even though we earn it, so we have had limitations on the amount of any appropriated receipt or dollars that we could use for salary increases.
We have each year that we have had the authority to, used tuition increases to pay for the promotion increments, which has been critical for us. We have had all of the promotion increments every year through this challenging time and those were increased this past year and that was paid for through CITI. The problem with financial aid is the Board of Governors put a cap on us for the amount of funds that we could use for tuition increases for financial aid. That cap was 15% and we are hardly above that cap of our appropriated seats for financial aid and as a result we have not been able to divert any new money toward financial aid and that has put a real challenge on us in terms of meeting the critical financial needs of our students. So the reality is I think we are in for a period of very constrained tuition increases.
If you have listened to Margaret Spelling in her early comments she is all about affordability and so am I, but affordability has a number of ways you can measure it and one is by providing financial aid, so I think we are going to have some real challenges coming up with the funds through new funds, so that leaves us with the authority to give raises but not the money. So, I have asked Provost Arden and Vice Chancellor Douglass to think about how we can build budget models that give us flexibility to compensate our employees and do it in a way where we are not going to departments in October after a budget just passes. Certainly campus initiated increases is one of the ways that we can provide revenue to support our faculty.
What metrics are we using to decide whether cluster hires are successful?
Chancellor: The metrics will be whether the faculty are successful. If you look at the strength of the faculty at NC State overall and then you look at the clusters that we have initiated, many of those clusters are bringing tremendous resources to the university and tremendous reputations. The way you measure the success of any university based on faculty is reputation and the strength of the faculty. There are a number of areas where the university has been bolstered through cluster hires or new strengths have been built through cluster hires. I look at whether our faculty is successful and whether we are growing research and development at the university and whether we are spinning out technology and whether we are offering new curricula to students.
Can we include teaching and undergraduate programs and student enrollment in those metrics?
Chancellor Woodson stated that enrollment is not the way to measure at the undergraduate level, because we are not growing. Many of these clusters are driven by an academic.
5. Remarks, Provost Arden
Provost Arden stated that one of our major priorities is to move faculty salaries forward at this institution over the coming years. Assuming that there will not be any state appropriations to do so we are going to have to find a way to allocate or reallocate roughly $10 million a year for a 3% program across the university.
Provost Arden stated that they have just finished the College of Education’s dean search. They had three outstanding candidates. He will be collecting input from a survey over the next couple of days and will meet with the Nomination Committee at the end of the week, so it is his intention to move that search very quickly.
Provost Arden stated that Eileen Goldgeier is leading the search for the Vice Chancellor for Institutional, Equity, and Diversity. We will be having the first round of off campus interviews later this week and the final interviews will be March 14 and March 21st. The exact dates of those interviews and forums can be found at the Provost website under administrative searches. Please do come to those open forums.
Provost Arden stated that the College of Design’s dean search is well under way as well. They are having their airport interviews in a couple of weeks, by mid-March and the finalist will be on campus the last week of March and first week of April.
Provost Arden stated that three comprehensive reviews are taking place this year. They include Louis Hunt, Senior Vice Provost for Enrollment Management, Alice Warren, Vice Provost, McKimmon Center, and Louis Martin-Vega, Dean of the College of Engineering. He said they will have the results of those reviews over the next few weeks.
Provost Arden stated that he has asked the deans to update, review, and refresh college strategic plans. The reason is we are under a nine-year strategic plan, 2011-2020, so this is going to be major work. They are going to be updating their current plans to be consistent and current through the plan, so they will go from 2016-17 fiscal year through the 2019-20 years. Please be involved with that important process.
Questions and Comments
Senator Auerbach – Question regarding concentration on cluster hires.
Provost Arden stated that he hears frequently that the numbers of faculty are down in almost every department, but the data doesn’t really match that. In fact, if you look across the university as a whole the number of tenure track faculty have grown for the first time in many years. They haven’t grown by leaps and bounds. If you look at where we are spending resources, we are spending resources in two major ways with faculty hires; one is cluster hires and the other through traditional disciplinary hires and once again the data shows that we are actually spending roughly twice as much over the last four years on traditionally departmentally based disciplinary hires as we are on faculty excellence hires. In fact, when we looked at faculty excellence hires and looked at a proportion of total recurring expenditures from allocations from the Provost Office to the colleges it accounted for 13% of recurring allocations and 17% of one time allocations over that period of time. He said part of the reason this perception is out there is that one of the issues that they are dealing with at the university is the age distribution of our faculty, the fact that many faculty are retiring and some leaving. So, we are spending a huge amount of money on replacing and retaining faculty. Although the expenditures on the disciplinary side are twice as much on the cluster hiring side those are the net gains in faculty and have been on the interdisciplinary side and for many years we were just treading water, so we are spending very significant amounts of money recruiting, retaining, and replacing faculty.
What is the fraction of classes taught by tenure track faculty?
Provost Arden said he has been told that tenure track faculty are ultimately more than two thirds of our faculty. In terms of credit hour production he assumes that it is huge, meaning that he thinks credit hour production certainly in the undergraduate level is going to be much more than a third than non-tenure track faculty occupies.
6. Big Picture Overview of DASA and the new University College
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that this is a relatively new division. He arrived here in August 2012 and the planning for this came out of the strategic plan. Goal 1 is student success and Goal 4 talks about organization excellence through effectiveness and efficiency. So really we take those two into place and you think about how we were organized. We were organized like most large research universities. The Division of Undergraduate Education and Undergraduate Academic Programs in the case of NC State and the Division of Student Affairs and in most of these universities both of those units have as part of their mission, serving students, helping to support the success of students.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that in January 2011 the Provost and Chancellor appointed a group to take a look at this structure and pulled that together and decided that it was the way to go and again it is fairly rare in a place like this, and in October 2011 an implementation team was put together to decide how this was going to move forward, which led to a search and also led to him coming the following summer.
Our mission: In collaboration with our colleagues across campus, we prepare students to succeed academically, professionally and personally, to embrace a commitment to lifelong learning, and to become informed, engaged, and productive citizens.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that students are doing lots of things on this campus and his Division along with partners in International Affairs and OIED have put a lot of resources in, working with students outside of the classroom.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that their Division is large. We have approximately 520 permanent employees on any given day. About 200 of those are EHRA. If you look at our permanent roster about 50 people are faculty, either tenured or non-tenured faculty. We also have a number of part times in our program. We are single largest employer of students on campus. We also generate a fair number of student credit hours through the departments of Music and Health and Exercise Studies, through Environmental Sciences, through all the UFC courses that are taught, through exploratory studies and so forth. He noted that about 5.5% of all undergraduate student credit hours are generated within DASA, so about 38 and a half thousand students. Our budget is about $90 million. More than half of that is from receipts from Housing and more than 12% is appropriated in tuition and funding. The other 38 percent is student fees.
Vice Chancellor Mullen explained the organizational chart and briefly described the numerous departments in the Division of Academic and Student Affairs.
We have 78 buildings across the campus, more than 3 million square feet that we manage. There are about 10,244 beds in those buildings. We have fourteen Living and Learning Villages. About 80% of our freshmen live on campus and we would like to see that grow closer to 95 percent one day. We know that when students particularly live on campus and participate in learning communities that their retention rates and their first year GPAs are higher. About 45 percent of the freshmen are participating in villages now, and we would like to see that grow.
Student Health Services serves students all over campus. We have a pharmacy and we have opened a dental clinic over on Centennial Campus which anyone can use.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that Student Leadership and Engagement is one of their big programs. Next week seventeen different teams of students and faculty will be setting out across the US to do service work in a variety of environments.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that they have a student legal service office that helps students with a variety of legal problems and it’s oftentimes real estate rental related and often time international students who are being taken the advantage of. So if you know students who are having problems send them to legal services.
Vice Chancellor Mullen reported that in the last year we have had 5 suicides on this campus, which is a lot of loss for the family and a huge loss for the community. We thank the students for upping their own student fees to increase what we do. We have added about a third to our capacity with counselors. We have gone from wait times of two to three weeks for students to get in to see counselors. In the month of January the counseling center saw 1248 students and 150 of those students were expressing suicidal liberation and 35 of them were considering harm to others. It is a real crisis for us, about 12% of our students in a given year make use of our counseling service. So I encourage you, if you know of students who need help get them to the Counseling Center.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that twenty of those students were elevated to our Behavioral Assessment Team. Our behavior assessment team comes in when we think a student and or a staff or faculty member is a threat to the community. These students came in through that portal.
University College
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that University colleges are not uncommon. The University College serves as a home for a wide variety of academic kinds of program where ever they are located; the advising for first year undergraduate students who has not declared a major, pretty much universal. Many of them have campus advising services for incoming students, transfer students, military students, and a wide variety of students. Many of them provide a wide variety of support. Often times you might find a career center, honors programs, and or research. Federal TRIO programs supports students from seventh grade through high school in getting ready for college. Sometimes you see general studies and interdisciplinary degrees in those university colleges and occasionally you will see some of the faculty who teach first year general courses housed in the University Colleges.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that this all existed before DASA was formed, so there is nothing in University College that was here before 2012. At any time we have about 1500 students, those that use to come in through First Year College are now coming in through exploratory studies. Those are mostly freshmen, some sophomores and occasionally a junior. We have two unaffiliated academic departments, which are Health and Exercise Studies as well as Music. We have approximately 60 faculty. The Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sciences has been there since the inception. That program had been a university wide program spanning four colleges and when it was moved into the Division of Undergraduate Academic Programs about 24 students across four colleges and there was no communication in with respect to how those students were being handled. That was moved in probably a year or so prior to DASA being formed. Bill Winner came in as the Director for that and that program has now grown from that 24 students to 250 students and we are graduating more than 35 students every May, and another 10 or 15 in the fall graduation. We are going to spin the Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science into the College of Natural Resources this fall, so July 1st it’s moving out of DASA into CNR, which I think is a great idea. Mullen said they have a really good strong program now, so students deserve that college experience where they can interact with other students and have access to more faculty.
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that they service well over 1000 students now. Some of them come because faculty advisors instruct them to and a lot of times students come through because they want an answer to a question, so that is just an overview of the Division.
Questions and comments
With the transition of environmental studies to another college do you see the college as an incubator for interdisciplinary programs; are you going to seek to develop them and if so do you see it as a challenge, an opportunity that you have so few tenured faculty?
Vice Chancellor Mullen stated that he thinks there is an opportunity for at least a place where we can began to foster conversations that bring faculty from across colleges together to maybe incubate ideas about what that next step might be and to provide and oversight of resources and recruiting and those kinds of things. I am not looking to pull faculty into the University College, but if we could really do some interesting things and do that incubation, I think it would be good.
The figures on students seeking counseling and suicidal rates, my question is, is there any way your office is tracking this for us or nationwide?
VC Mullen stated that depending on which survey you look at we are either slightly above the national average or we are right at the national average. He said 10 to 12 percent of the student body is not unusual. The students are coming to our universities in much different circumstances. They seem to be less resilient, who may be on a variety of medications when they get here, aren’t use to the stresses of university and they don’t cope with it. There is a lot of things going on there. We have added psychiatric services, we have added good counseling, and we have added an internship program.
Relating to that, what are the trends in undergraduate versus graduate students that visit the counseling center?
VC Mullen stated that in some cases the suicidal part is actually higher at the graduate level. We tend to see the percentage of students in distress relative to the total number, higher at the graduate level.
Senator Auberbach inquired about the ethnicity of student suicides.
VC Mullen stated that within the last year there have been five suicides that included three minorities.
What kind of mental health insurance is provided?
VC Mullen stated that they provide services free at the Counseling Center although there is a charge after you have a certain number of psychiatric visits.
7. Summary of November 3, 2015 through February 23, 2016 Faculty Senate Activities, Jeannette Moore, Chair of the Faculty
The Faculty Senate has met seven times since the October 2015 General Faculty meeting. Agendas and all supporting materials, including minutes of each of the three committees, are posted on the Faculty Senate website.
Topics discussed at the seven meetings include:
- Campus Safety During an Emergency (Jack Moorman, NC State University Police Chief; Captain Ian Kendrick;
David Rainer, Associate Vice Chancellor, Environmental Health and Public Safety) - Resolution of Appreciation for Chancellor and Mrs. Woodson for their generous donation to NC State University
that will initiate the tuition scholarship for dependents of faculty and staff - Athletics and Academics (Debbie Yow, Athletics Director; Roby Sawyers, Professor and Faculty Athletics
Representative; Katie Graham, Assistant Dean and Director, Academic Support Program for Student Athletes) - Student Perspectives in Regards to Diversity (Khari Cyrus, Student Body President)
- Status of Committee Items (discussed at the December 1, 2015 meeting)
- Academic Policy Committee – Sarah Ash and Alton Banks, Co-Chairs
Faculty Governance of Curricula and Courses; Disability Services (burdens placed on faculty); Council on Undergraduate
Education (CUE) and the General Education Program - Governance and Personnel Policy Committee – Paul Williams and Lonnie Fleisher
Proposed Drug and Alcohol Free Workplace regulation for NC State University employees; Evaluate the Procedure for
Formatting, Adopting, and Publishing Policies, Regulations, and Rules; Faculty Grievance & Non-Reappointment Working
Group - Resources and Environment Committee – Marguerite Moore and Darby Orcutt
Transportation and Parking discussion; Policies and progress on sustainability - Results of the COACHE Faculty Satisfaction Survey (Nancy Whelchel, Associate Director for Survey Research,
Institutional Research & Planning; Katharine Stewart, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs) - Enhancing Graduate Student Success (Maureen Grasso, Dean of the Graduate School)
- Discussion and Vote on Re-Naming “Secretary of the Faculty” to Associate Chair (passed 22 to 1 with no
abstentions)
Topics scheduled for discussion in upcoming Faculty Senate meetings include:
Academic Analytics: Where is the university going with this? (Mary Lelik, Senior Vice Provost, Institutional Research & Planning; Duane Larick, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Strategy & Resource Management)
Also coming up soon:
The Faculty Senate website will be revamped to be in compliance with the new university security upgrades. It will match the format recently adopted by the university, and there will be a change in the web address with planned implementation for summer 2016.
Final Comment: All faculty are welcome to attend Faculty Senate meetings. The dates of meetings can be found on the Faculty Senate website.
8. New Business (Statements by Chair Elect of the Faculty Candidates)
Dr. Carolyn Bird,
I was recently watching the Oscars and it occurred to me that writing a paragraph about service to the university is sort of like winning the Oscars where you forget who you are supposed to thank and in my case I forgot some of my service I wanted to mention. I would like to add that I served for three years as the President-Elect, President, and Past President for the North Carolina Association of Cooperative Extension Specialists and during my time of leadership with them we renewed our focus on excellence and extension and the current leadership is continuing that focus today. I have remained connected to that organization and it has been a pleasure to be able to communicate to them the information from the Faculty Senate using the Association’s network. It has been fairly easy because they have an established listserv and going forward I would like to see the Faculty Senate make our work more visible to the faculty by establishing some sort of systematic communication out to the faculty across campus so that they are aware of what they are doing in the Senate.
NC State is a great place for students to earn their education and our ratings in US News and World Report are continuing to rise. In 2016 we were rated 37, which is up from 44 in 2014. I think that can be contributed to a great faculty and a great administration working together and the message that came out from President Spellings this morning recognized that faculty are responsible for creating opportunities for students to learn and have that great educational experience at NC State, so I believe working together we can continue to offer a great opportunity for students to earn their education. Equally important is the extension engagement work that faculty do at NC State to support the life of North Carolina families and farmers and other businesses across the state. As a person that has an extension appointment I see the great work that people do every day and the positive impact it has on the state.
The Faculty Senate is very important in supporting all the realms of faculty scholarship and so I’m excited to be here at NC State and I believe it will be a great honor to serve as Chair of the Faculty and I seek your support to become the Chair-Elect.
Dr. Sheila Smith McKoy
I would like to say whichever way this election goes I am extremely pleased to be a part of the moment when we are poised to make history. Whichever one of us you elect, you will elect the very first woman of color to be Chair of the Faculty (applause) and whatever direction you decide to go, I think it is really important for us to think about ways in which the Faculty Senate can remain visible. The Faculty Senate is an important part of shared governance at this university and in fact, in conversations about shared governance around the university system, these are difficult times in which we are serving as faculty on this campus. There are opportunities and challenges from issues related to legislative support of issues that are important to us as faculty; issues related to the intent to carry weapons on campuses across this campus, issues related to being able to teach those things that are important to our research and to our vital goals in educating our students, so I have seen the Faculty Senate being vital to that process and I hope that you will join us to try to continue to make real change on this campus.
I am a faculty member who is probably in a small minority of faculty members who are also alums. I came to North Carolina State University as a newly separated single mom and walking these bricks I learned a lot about the educational process, the important roles that mentors or playing, the important role that faculty play in making a person’s individual success actually possible. So, whatever I do in this role I have attributed to my role here at North Carolina State University, but that has been an important part of my process in the work that I do as a person who has served on numerous roles on this campus in terms of diversity, diversity initiatives and also as a faculty member whose been involved in both local and international engagement. I think in part, of my at the Faculty Senate, in fact, in shared governance as members of the faculty on this campus we really have to remain vital in the conversations that are important to our next steps, particularly under the new university system and the new university and the changes that are flooding the university system across this country. So, I would invite you to join me in making sure that we continue to have a voice. The people who proceeded Carolyn and I in terms of being the Chair of the Faculty have made sure that the Chair of the Faculty has a place at the table and since this is an election year I’ll have to run on a platform. We have a place at the table and I want to be your voice at that table. Thank you very much.
9. Adjourn
A motion passed to adjourn the meeting at 4:45 p.m.