Present: Chair Moore, Immediate Past Chair Zonderman, Secretary Orcutt, Provost Arden; Senators Ange-van Heugten, Ash, Auerbach, Banks, Bernhard, Bird, Bullock, Bykova, Byrnes,

Cubbage, Davidian, Fath, Fleisher, Huffman, Moore, Pearce, Perros, Porter, Sannes, Smith, Smith McKoy, Sotillo, Steer, Williams

Excused: Parliamentarian Lubischer; Senators Hergeth, Kathariou

Absent: Senators Argyropoulos, Bartlett, Devetsikiotis, Gunter, Scearce, Silverberg, Spontak

Guests: Peter Harries, Sr. Associate Dean, Graduate School; Maureen Grasso, Dean, Graduate School; Marcia Gumpertz, OIED; Marc Hoit, Vice Chancellor, Information Technology; Doug James, Office of Faculty Development; Katharine Stewart, Vice Provost, Faculty Affairs; Roy Baroff, Faculty Ombuds Office

1. Call to Order

Chair Moore, called the tenth meeting of the sixty-second session of the NC State Faculty Senate to order at 3 p.m.

2. Introductory Remarks

Chair Moore asked visitors to introduce themselves.

3. Announcements

Chair Moore announced that in celebration of data privacy month, the Office of Information Technology encourages everyone to learn how to safeguard sensitive data.

All faculty involved in PTR this semester must complete the online training modular, sign the attestation and give that to their department head.

There has been an update to the campus adverse weather statuses. They are now known as conditions, to align with the UNC administration policy change. It is retroactive to January 1st.

4. Approval of the Minutes

Secretary Orcutt called for approval of the minutes for the 9th meeting of the NC State Faculty Senate.

The minutes were approved as submitted.

5. Remarks from Provost Arden

Provost Arden thanked everyone who participated in the five year comprehensive reviews of Vice Provost Alice Warren and Louis Hunt. There is one more comprehensive review for this year and that is Dean Martin-Vega from the College of Engineering, who will have his review in mid-March.

Provost Arden noted that there will be eight comprehensive reviews next year that will include 4 Deans and 4 Vice Provosts.

Provost Arden announced that the Interdisciplinary Environmental Science Program that is currently housed in DASA will be moving back to the College of Natural Resources. He said in discussions with Vice Chancellor Mike Mullen and Dean Watson they felt that most of the degree granting programs belong in colleges where students can participate with a full range of other college activities and have other individuals in those colleges affiliated with supporting those programs.

Budget

Provost Arden stated that he is concerned with .the possible challenges to our budget and the possible new resources. He said it is incredibly difficult to predict how much is going to line up because there are so many moving bits and pieces. He recalled that in the second year of the biennial budget we are due for a more than $40 million cut to the system from the Legislature, which will equate to about $10 million to NC State. There is also slated to be a $6 million cut from Advancement funding and then on top of that we have to self-mount another merit program internally, which is another $10 million to come up with.

Provost Arden stated that on the plus side we are looking at new resources coming in and because we didn’t hit our enrollment targets this year we have had to downward adjust predicted enrollment targets for next year meaning that what we thought were going to be moderate growth in enrollment funding will still be positive as in a couple of million versus 10 or 15 million.

Provost Arden stated that we are in the second year of our tuition budget, so there will be tuition resources that come in next year, but it is uncertain how the Board of Governors and incoming President Spellings and the Legislature are going to view tuition increases going forward. Although we are under a five year tuition plan which allows us to raise tuition up to 5% per year for in state tuition, the Board of Governors have made it very clear that they don’t want to be getting 5 percent proposals from any of the constituent institutions.

Provost Arden stated that he will soon be asking the deans to update their strategic plans for the last four years of the current university’s strategic plan which runs through 2020. We are all going to have to be thinking about potential reallocation of current resources. Hopefully we will have some new resources to allocate. The way we really need to be thinking is what are our very high priorities and what are those things that we would be willing to reallocate resources from to achieve our highest priorities.

Provost Arden stated that we are going to have to focus in the next few years and be willing to make some difficult decisions potentially, but that being the case he thinks we can take some relief from the fact that overall the university is still well funded as far as state higher institutions go compared with most states and compared with most institutions. He thinks we need time to adjust and we need time to develop other revenue streams and resources and we need to be able to align those with our strategic priorities going forward.

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

You said that there may be new resources that you can allocate, could you hint at what some of those might be?

Provost Arden stated the only new resources that we get are increases and appropriations through budget expansion and there has not been a significant budget expansion for many years. Enrollment growth funds and tuition increases are the only major resources. He said looking ahead of those, at the moment he sees that each of those is going to be quite limited.

Provost Arden stated that we have been able to get some resources in localized areas with either premium tuition for select graduate programs and this last year we were successful in getting a program enhancement fee for the College of Engineering. This year that generates about $4.4 million for the College of Engineering and next year that will increase to $8.8 million for the college. We need to be thinking cautiously about this because so far the Board of Governors has been very open and receptive to specifically directed program enhancement fees and tuition. “However if all of a sudden we approach this too broadly I think it will be seen as potentially an attempt to get around the board tuition increases. It is something that we are going to have to be very strategic about in the coming years.”

Will you comment on the word going around about a decrease in tuition at some of the lower enrolled institutions in the system?

Provost Arden stated that there is some discussion among some members of the Board of Governors and some legislators. At the moment my understanding of the proposal is that it dramatically lowersin-state tuition and out-of-state tuition at several of the historically black colleges and universities. When you do that, those funds have got to come from somewhere, because we are on a tuition trade off system, and that means State Government will have to give additional appropriation to help continue to operate those universities. That is supposed to be more than $60 million worth of additional appropriation and the question becomes where does that come from? The other part of the penny would come from raising out of state tuition on the other schools because when you raise out of state tuition, if you are doing that as a legislative increase and not CITI it decreases the appropriation that we would get. So, it is something to keep an eye on. The Chancellor is aware of it. It is very hard to say where it’s going to go from here.

Chair Moore - You encouraged us to stay involved with discussions, how would we do that?

Provost Arden stated hopefully through department level meetings, program and college level meetings there will be opportunities for your voices to be heard.

Do you have any updates on the health benefits?

Provost Arden stated that he hasn’t seen any further updates on the health benefits. He hopes there are no further challenges to the benefits. We are recruiting for the best talent in the country and when we are competing against other universities that have very strong benefits it is very challenging. There are challenges to keep the benefits pool liquid, but I hope wise heads prevail here and don’t do anything that make our job harder to recruit strong talent to the institution.

Past Chair Zonderman commented that this really is going to make a challenging situation even more challenging. We are competing nationwide and even globally for that kind of faculty and in some cases staff talents and our benefits are awful and if they get worst it will really be huge.

6. Enhancing Graduate Student Success

Dr. Maureen Grasso, Dean of the Graduate School stated that the Graduate School team is very diverse and all of them are committed to serving our students and faculty.

Dr. Grasso reported that the Master’s enrollment is about 61% of our total graduate population which is pretty typical across the United States. We are doing very well with conferred degrees.

Certificates play a small portion of the enrollment at about 2 percent Certificates are vital because they are our way to be responsive and nimble to a body of knowledge that not only do our students need, but it can also be valuable to people outside.

Dr. Grasso stated that there has been growth in the doctoral area. Again, there are a lot of factors that influence our enrollment in the doctoral level. The Provost has been generous with providing support in that area with the Provost’s scholarships. They have made the difference.

Demographics

Dr. Grasso stated that women nationally probably outnumber men in many of the different institutions, but it has to do with the mix of programs that different institutions offer.

If we look at domestic versus international, that has been pretty steady. Eighty percent of the students that come here end up being North Carolina natives and that may change in the future.

Dean Grasso stated that what has been interesting is the switch, because for many years the People’s

Republic of China was the number one country coming into the US sending students. That has now fallen behind India and a lot of that has to do with the ability of China to now educate their own, keeping some of the best and brightest at home. India at some point may do that, but right now 31 percent of our student population at the graduate level is international.

Success through Innovation

Dean Grasso stated that enhancing student success begins at orientation. One of the key things about orientation is it is a critical part of mentoring. It is a critical part of what you do in your programs at the department level. One of the key items she did at orientation was to put together a planner that contains links where they can go and find. The planner also has tips throughout the year on successes and ideas from her staff, so it’s the nuts and bolts that they share with them. They also share the guidelines for best practices that were developed in general by the Administrative Board.

The other thing that is important during orientation is to begin to talk about mentoring. The students have to remember to take an initiative and be proactive. The three minute thesis is so important for students to communicate what they do.

Dean Grasso stated that they have put together the Dissertation Mentoring Fellows Program, which she calls a pilot program where they invited faculty to participate in the intellectual sandbox. The whole purpose of the program is that students of underrepresented groups want to see themselves in the faculty and the only way that we are going to get that is to be able to make sure that the underrepresented students have the opportunity to perceive through, are mentored well, and come out on the other side and get positions in universities as junior faculty and move up in promotion and tenure. Our purpose is to increase the diversity of doctoral students, successful mentoring of them so that we have successful faculty. Each of the faculty in the program have to do a project and they have each come up with a project that they are doing.

Dr. Grasso stated that another way to enhance student success is through diversity and inclusion. Native American students on campus are so few that they are basically invisible. One of the things that we did in the graduate school was to bring this group together and faculty to make them feel welcome and to help them connect.

Dr. Grasso stated that the Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity is an exciting program. This is a program where we have funded students and we work with undergraduates and graduate students. It is a research program funded by the National Institutes of Health whose primary goal is to mentor and train students from underrepresented groups to become scientists at the doctoral level in the areas of Environmental and Behavioral Sciences. These students are underrepresented in the STEM areas and they are not underrepresented because they are at risk. We learned the other day that one of our undergraduate students was accepted to 9 out of 12 PhD Programs. So these students are going on to do great things. They are publishing and we are doing a lot of mentoring with them.

Another thing this group has done is they have been reaching out to elementary schools across the state to get them to come here, doing some small experiments with them so that they can see what scientists look like.

Dean Grasso explained the 3 Minute Thesis where PhD candidates present their dissertation research in 3 minutes. The goal is to help graduate students improve their science communication skills.

Provost Arden stated that he hasn’t received the final report from the GSSP committee. The task force is looking at that. The reason the changes may be necessary is to shore up the program and not to eliminate it and that is because it constantly runs in deficits at the moment. Nobody questions the importance of the GSSP, in fact I would like to see the stipends higher and I would like to see it stronger, so we are trying to figure out how to make that so. Several years ago we did make some modifications to it. That is where we started having a share of the out of state tuition remission, some things that we had to do and those things helped a little bit financially, but there were also some negative consequences as well, so that is why we are going back and looking at trying to more comprehensively ask can we shore this thing up because it is absolutely vital. We are never going to hit our long term enrollment targets unless we have a robust graduate student support plan.

Senator Bullock inquired about online DELTA funding and whether the Dean is anticipating any change in the structure in terms of the way DELTA classes are funded online.

Dr. Grasso stated that is outside the purview of the graduate school.

Provost Arden stated that the short answer is yes. The long answer is we don’t know what it’s going to look like yet. What we have now is fundamentally a two tier system where there is some level of direct funding from distance education generated credits but not from on campus credits, so there is incentive to produce distance education credits but not necessarily on campus credits. We are trying to provide a uniform and equitable funding model that says for your department if you grow your credit hour production by “X” percent it doesn’t matter whether it’s distance or on campus, your department should be rewarded for that. If on the other hand your department grows your distance education by 10% but can’t grow your on campus by 10% then you shouldn’t be rewarded.

Provost Arden said it is really complicated to actually dive down into it and figure out how to produce a model that doesn’t disincentivize the production of new distance education programs. The other big swing that we have had is in 15 years since the current model was put into place, the vast majority of distance education credit hours and by far the fastest growing are actually provided to our ownon-campus students and not provided to new distance students. The whole model was based on the fact that we would be attracting new students and that is not the case, so it has taken a lot of work to work through this.

Would it be safe to say that at some point in the future the incentive to generate distance credit hours will be reduced?

Provost Arden stated that the incentive for the production of on campus will be equally incentivized.

Are we attracting students who come to us with external funding?

Dr. Grasso responded yes. She stated that they have put together a workshop to assist the students in running those proposals.

7. Old and New Business

a. Chair Moore provided a summary of grievances from the past 10 years (Appendix A).

Chair Moore explained that there were 10 petitions where one was withdrawn by the grievant, two were resolved through mediation. Of the seven remaining, four were determined to be grievable; one of the grievances is ongoing and three were upheld by the Chancellor.

Senator Cubbage stated that the RPT process essentially has had no successful challenges to the grievance in the last ten years. My point here is that we move from a faculty driven process to a final decision by the Provost. It appears there is no hope of ever winning an adverse decision and that is not a comforting thought and this won’t just be new persons coming in, we will all go through this every five years and it will be a much more daunting process.

Senator Bullock stated that she thinks this would be a difficult process. We don’t have enough data or information to really know what any of that means and I imagine it would be quite challenging to get information that is probably confidential on many levels before it gets to a place where it is public and in terms of it being shared. We don’t know what’s behind the numbers and I don’t know that we should be able to get the information.

b.Results of an informal poll of women Senators about possibly changing the title of Secretary of the Faculty.

Chair Moore stated that she polled the women senators and asked if they would support changing the name of Secretary to Associate Chair. In terms of the responses received, there were no objections to changing the title, 40% said yes but change it to Associate Chair and 50 percent said either keep the title Secretary or change it to Associate Chair.

The Senate voted on changing the title of Secretary to something else.

There were 3 abstentions and 2 nays.

c. Elections

Chair Moore and Past Chair Zonderman encouraged the senators to provide candidates for the Faculty Senate elections.

8. Adjourn

The meeting adjourned at 4:31p.m.