1. Call to Order

Chair Zonderman called the meeting to order at 3 p.m.

2. Remarks, David Zonderman, Chair of the NCSU Faculty

Chair Zonderman updated the faculty on some of the issues discussed in the Faculty Senate.

Chair Zonderman stated that in the past few years, the Senate has done a simple balloting contest to help determine the top four issues to focus on. This year the Senate voted to address the following issues in ranked order.

1)Strategic Resources Management, especially the allocation of academic funds

2)Strategic Resource Management, focusing on growing doctoral programs in the GSSP

3)Undergraduate Student Retention and Success

4)Revision of Post tenure review policies

Chair Zonderman reported that they have already started to look at the question of the allocation of academic funds. Ginger Burks, Director of Cost Analysis, spoke to the Senate and a number of questions were raised. He said two questions in particular were the necessity to give departments as much lead time as possible for whatever new funding model we come up with, and that as much as possible the model be used to incentivize good things like offering the courses students need to graduate and hopefully disincentivize “bad perverse things” i.e., departments raiding each other for students or teaching a class just to try to raise money with it.

Chair Zonderman stated that the Senate has also discussed projections for growing doctoral programs with Duane Larick, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Strategy and Resource Management. He said colleagues from the Sciences urged Dr. Larick to remember that the funding environment in NSF and NIH is even more competitive than ever and the idea that the pot of money is going to grow is a projection that we cannot make. While we want to certainly aim at growing strong doctoral programs we want to be realistic in the projections that we make.

Chair Zonderman stated that in future meetings the Senate is going to hear from Vice Chancellor Mike Mullen and Registrar Louis Hunt about many of the possible factors that can impact student retention and success including things like high school academic records, First Year College, transfer status and a number of others.

Finally the fourth priority is the revision of post tenure review policies. That review is necessitated by new policies that have come out of the Board of Governors. The Provost and the Chancellor have worked with the Faculty Senate Executive committee to send the General Administration a letter stating that we are doing post tenure review just fine here. We were basically told by GA “well thank you very much also but we are going to change it anyway.”

Chair Zonderman said he doesn’t think the changes are going to be drastic because some things are already being done here that are not being done on other campuses, but we do have to make some revisions and that is in the hands of a task force led by Vice Provost Betsy Brown.

Chair Zonderman stated that one other issue that is generating a lot of discussion on college campuses nationwide is the need to address openly and honestly the problem of sexual assault. Recently the Faculty Senate heard from Captain Kendrick from the University Police Department, Sarah Lannom from the Office of General Counsel, and Student Body President, Rusty Mau who is part of a group of Student Body Presidents from around the country working with the White House on an initiative addressing this issue.

3. Approval of the Minutes, Dennis Daley, Secretary of the Faculty

The minutes of the March 4, 2014 General Faculty meeting were approved as submitted.

4. Progress “Report Card” on University Strategic Plan, Chancellor Woodson

Chancellor Woodson reminded the faculty that we are in the middle of the strategic plan and that the first three-year implementation plan was launched in 2011; today he will be reporting against the progress of that first phase of implementation.

Chancellor Woodson reported that goal number one for NC State was student success. He said an indication of progress to date is that the central part of our strategic plan for student success was really a meaningful enrollment plan. Some will recall that NC State was on an unsustainable chart of growth, particularly with undergraduate admission and the freshman class.

Chancellor Woodson said there were increasingly large freshman classes that resulted in challenges in early gateway courses that students weren’t being successful in. Our retention rate and our graduation rate were going down and we had some issues. We did it because we thought it was our pathway to financial heaven; we thought we were going to be paid for it. The money never came in the way that inspired us to future growth. We put an enrollment management plan in place that has us capping the freshman class. We had a peak of around 4700 freshmen and decreased it down to 4200 allowing some growth for transfer students and growing the graduate program. This is translating into a lot of success.

Chancellor Woodson stated that they also implemented an enrollment wizard, putting more tools in the hands of the students. The students could understand where they were in their progress toward degree, using technology to help them access where they were along their learning path. If they had an interest in changing majors, they could explore online what that would look like and how big of a challenge that would be. He noted that the enrollment wizard is paying off.

Chancellor Woodson stated that they also created an advising dash board. A lot of these things came out of the taskforce for student success. The task force identified some of the key hurdles that were impediments to students’ success and an advising dash board that allowed an adviser quickly to see graphically where a student was in their educational journey and what they could do to get there more quickly has been a valuable tool.

Chancellor Woodson reported that they also centralized the change of degree application so that students who would like to move into a different degree program would have one simple process to go through. The big change was the structure of Academic and Student Affairs. We merged DUAP with Academic Affairs to create the Division of Undergraduate Academic and Student Affairs (DASA). We spent money to hire more professional advisers both centrally and in the colleges and we have invested in living and learning villages which are critical to students’ success. There are now fourteen living and learning villages with the most recent one being the Entrepreneurship Village that is located in Wolf Ridge Apartments on Centennial Campus.

Chancellor Woodson stated that we are seeking to grow the tenured and tenured-track faculty. Obviously that has been a real challenge in a fiscal limited environment. We haven’t lost ground in spite of some of the economic challenges.

We are at an all-time high in terms of post-doctoral scholars. Again 494 is a top twenty institution number in terms of the post docs that we employ. That is a dramatic increase for and reflects the hard work of the faculty that brings in resources.

Chancellor Woodson reported that for the research expenditures, we are up 417 million this year and that is an all-time high. Federal support is at an all-time high at 177 million this year. Nonfederal support is also increasing, predominantly because of some of our partnerships with the private sector. We are also receiving increases in research expenditures for tenured and tenured track faculty from both federal and non-federal sources. Frankly those numbers from last year don’t reflect some of the very large awards that were granted to NC State last year, which will start to come through the system this year. The Provost Office has issued a call for a smaller but continued effort to keep hiring in some of these clusters.

Organizational Excellence

Chancellor Woodson reported that there has been some progress, but there is still more progress to be made. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity has been consolidated. We have also consolidated Extension, Engagement & Economic Development through some realignment that has eliminated a Vice Chancellor position and we also created the Division of Academic and Student Affairs consolidating two administrative leadership positions into one organization.

We have made some progress with Shared Services. We have created an Onboarding Center to help new employees get on board quickly by going to one organization and getting the services they need to join the NC State family.

Academic Effectiveness and Efficiency Review is something that we do every year. We have had an academic program review task force. We have had some program consolidations and we have an ongoing process for annual review.

The most dramatic thing that represents our organization and our culture is the James B. Hunt Jr. Library. Students are so inspired by the critical investments we have made in both the Hunt and Hill Libraries. It makes a huge difference in the lives of our students.

We received a report on the progress of the Office of Institutional Research and Planning yesterday. We have gone through reaccreditation and hope that we will be accredited to continue to offer 34,000 students a degree.

Chancellor Woodson said he hopes some of you have seen progress in rebranding the university, not changing it but elevating the way people think about NC State. We needed to elevate the overall university brand. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are a university, held together by wonderful colleges that have their independence, but at the end of the day it is the brand of the institution that helps carry the weight and Brad Bohlander and his colleagues have done a great job of rethinking that.

We have also gone through the promotion and reappointment review. Most ranking agencies rank us based on spending more per students than our peers, not less. The Board of Governors and General Administration holds one of the metrics by which we are funded to be more efficient in the granting of degrees and as a result to spend less per degree. We are doing that because we have had less money to spend. My hope is to reverse this trend.

Chancellor Woodson reported that annual giving is something that we are proud of the changes. Last year we raised $117 million in cash and the year before that $131 million and prior to those two years we had never raised more than $90 million. We have also in the last two years had gifts and new commitments of close to $200 million each of those two years. If the market will stop going up and down, by the end of this year our endowment will be more than one billion dollars.

Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty

Chancellor Woodson reported that women faculty are increasing, flat with non-tenure track. He said we have got to keep working on the number of underrepresented faculty. The numbers are better, but they are low. Our students need to see themselves in the classroom and they need to be inspired by people that look like them and have a culture and history that they have had.

Chancellor Woodson stated that he is very proud of some work that that has been done in large grants. Vice Chancellor Terri Lomax deserves a lot of credit for this. We have started to build a number of both international hubs and research hubs. We received a $10 million grant from the Belk endowment to work with Carolina and Duke on something called the college advising core. This is where you send young idealistic recent graduates to rural high schools around the state to mentor young people to help them understand what it takes to get into a college like NC State. You would be shocked to know that the ratio of students to counselors is 800 to 1. High school counselors need help.

Chancellor Woodson stated that we have to get more of our students exposed to study abroad and to do that we have to raise money. The last two years he has used about fifty percent of the discretionary resources that he receives through the greatest needs funds for study abroad and the remaining half for undergraduate research. He said there are no two activities that define the success of a student more than those two experiences and we need students that don’t have the means to study abroad to take advantage of that.

Coop rotations are critical for NC State and those numbers are improving.

The commercialization efforts at NC State are also improving. This past year we signed 145 new commercialization agreements and licensing agreements for technology, and we had ten new startup companies.

Chancellor Woodson stated that rankings aren’t everything but people pay attention to them. Students and alumni certainly pay attention to them. It is something that we have to pay attention to. We don’t manage for rankings, but if we are successful the rankings will improve and they are improving. We are up to 95th in overall national universities, 43 among publics. It’s a good trajectory and we are on a good course.

Chancellor Woodson explained that these rankings from US News are in each of the areas that they rank the university. The overall ranking is 95th and in many of the measures we have a better ranking than our overall ranking. We are 176st out of the top 280 tier one universities in faculty resources. Faculty resources are salaries that we pay faculty. The other part of faculty resources is how many classes have fewer than twenty students. The small privates are always going to win in this game. We know we are never going to compete with Wake Forest with the ability to have small classes, but we can do better than we are doing. This is something that we have to work on.

Questions and Comments

Will you comment on the possible role of incoming students and community colleges?

Chancellor Woodson stated that community colleges are going to increase as a source of students for us. We have to be realistic about the financial situations with a lot of families and frankly our higher admissions policies. We have to be prepared through good articulation agreements and a clear understanding. They are getting better but it is still a small number for us. This year we transferred about 1300 students to NC State and approximately 900 of those were from community colleges. The data will tell you that they are as successful as our starting students, but it is going to increase for both NC State and UNC Chapel Hill.

Question regarding six year graduation rate of community colleges.

Chancellor Woodson said he certainly takes it into account. There are two ways to measure the time to get a degree versus what the time frame within which you get the degree. If you ask how many semesters was a full time student enrolled at NC State before they graduated, it is 8.4, so that is a little more than four years. A lot of our students take a year off for many reasons. Unfortunately the federal system for measuring graduation rate is defined by the Department of Education. The only way we can compare ourselves to our peers and be held accountable to those comparisons is to use something that we all do and that is the six year graduation rate.

5. Strategic Resource Management, Provost Arden

Provost Arden announced that Dr. Betsy Brown, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, will be retiring at the end of this academic year.

Provost Arden commented on the next phase of the strategic plan. He stated that in the next phase we are going to be looking at developing the next implementation plan. Although this is a nine year strategic plan, we have deliberately broken it into three-year implementation phases. We have been looking at developing this next three-year plan and have taken input from faculty, deans, and others. The plan is now up on the Provost website under strategic plan and an Email with a pdf went out today as well. Please take a look at it because that will be guiding many of our actions over the next three years.

Provost Arden reported that that we have been involved with three concurrent processes over the last several months. He said the first is an overview of what we have achieved in the last three years and it is pretty impressive as to what this institution has done and achieved over that time frame. You saw the highlights of that today. We will be delivering our report in hard copy later and a report to the Board of Trustees in November. At the same time we have been developing the second three-year implementation plan. Many of the actions from the first three years are continued on. Many are completed and we are able to check off the list such items as living and learning villages. There are many other things that are going to require actions into the second part of the plan.

Provost Arden stated that the other thing that we are doing that the Chancellor mentioned is we want to be metric driven, so we are continuing to look at our metrics, are we meeting our goals, are we moving in the right direction and are we measuring ourselves in the right ways.

You will also remember that the framework of the implementation plan is though we have five overarching goals to the plan, those overarching goals are metrics against three groups of actions.

Framework of Implementation Plan

• Five SP goals

–Success of our students

–Scholarship and research

–Interdisciplinary scholarship

–Organizational excellence

–Local and global engagement

• Three overarching actions

–Cultivate excellence and continue investing in areas of emphasis

–Enhance student, faculty and staff success

–Improve institutional effectiveness while growing and realigning resources

Provost Arden explained when we started putting the first implementation plan together we realized that any given action often impacted 2, 3, 4 possibly 5 of our principle goals. Developing a metric of actions against goals was the best way to express this.

Provost Arden stated that one thing we are going to focus on today is improving institutional effectiveness while growing and realigning resources. Specifically, the part at the bottom of the page where it says develops resource generation, cost-cutting and reallocation strategies to support the strategic plan.

We are focusing on this today to give you an update in what has become known as strategic resource management process. Also going back it was very evident when we put our plan together that we are in the middle of some significant budget cuts. The big budget cuts really started 2008-2009 and then we begin to develop this plan in 2010 and released it 2011. By the time we got into the development of the plan, it was pretty clear that we were going to be facing ongoing budget cuts. If you will look over the last ten years we have had to administer $163 million in recurring cuts as we have tried to develop this plan and move it forward. At the same time it is not an inexpensive plan. If we were to do everything that we said we were going to do, it would require continuing expansion of our budget of about $114 million, cumulative one-timecosts of $208 million and cumulative space costs of $198 million. It was very clear that a significant amount of what we were going to have to achieve is going to be on the backs not only of new revenue growth or cost cutting, but our willingness to redirect resources from our lowest to our highest priorities. We have appointed Duane Larick from the Provosts Office and Ginger

Burks from Vice Chancellor Leffler’s office to lead this project.

Remarks from Ginger Burks

Ginger discussed where the group has been in working on strategic resource management. She said the group was appointed last fall. We worked under the direction of the Chancellor and Provost. We first opened a website to collect ideas across campus. While working with that process, we also met with different groups across campus and have taken those ideas and cataloged each of them as they came in. We are approaching 200 ideas now, the process hasn’t ended. If you have ideas please reach out to Duane or myself. Our goal as a group was to vet them quickly.

Evaluate the Provost’s Fall 2014 doctoral stipend program pilot to potentially expand with modifications from lessons learned

Establish an expectation of managing budget reductions without cutting graduate student stipend slots or funding

Revise GSSP to be financially sustainable and maximize the number of doctoral students funded

Incentivize inclusion of stipends in grant proposals

Complete a market analysis of opportunities to grow doctoral enrollment in areas that may not require financial support

Work to get NC State (& UNC-CH) graduate students included in the UNC System insurance plan

Include graduate student support (fellowships) as an emphasis in the upcoming campaign

D. Internal Transfer

Recommendations:

Manage all transfer admissions (internal and external) admissions through Undergraduate Admissions

Analyze capacity drivers and resource constraints

Consider a University College model

These four groupings of ideas have turned into eight teams.

Ginger stated that the next step is their work group continuing to work. There is a working group member on each of the eight teams and each of them has been charged with reporting back to our group so we can keep up with the progress. Each team in general is expected to complete their work over the fall semester with that information coming back for further work.

The working group is continuing to look at all of those ideas that were not in phase one. There is a phase two grouping under development and review right now and really emphasizing getting more information out and posing it on the website. She encouraged everyone to review the website.

Questions and Comments

Will you comment on the University College idea?

Provost Arden stated that when we formed DASA we always had the idea that the way we structured, that day one wasn’t going to be the end point, so the concept is that we might bring together some programs within DASA; e.g., the First Year College, some of the current academic programs, the credit bearing programs into more of a unit within DASA as opposed to being broken up into sub-units as they are now.

Mullen stated that in any given time the advising staff has about 1500 students they are working with and about 800 of them are incoming freshmen. He said some don’t make it into their preferred degree at the end of one year, which makes them second year students in a First Year College and a small hand full are still juniors in the First Year College. Then we have a relatively large number at any given time of internal transfer students who are flowing through the system and are utilizing services and aren’t sure where they are going to go. So the idea that came out of strategic planning is why not take that label and try to group together more of those same programs that are already in DASA.

6. Adjourn

A motion passed to adjourn the meeting at 4:11 p.m.