January 27, 2015
Executive Summary
1. Call to Order
Chair-elect Moore called the ninth meeting of the sixty-first session of the NC State Faculty Senate to order at 3 p.m.
2. Remarks and Announcements
Chair-elect Moore announced that Chair Zonderman has been appointed to serve as Interim Head of the Department of History.
3. Approval of the Minutes, Meeting No .8, January 13, 2015
A motion passed to approve the minutes
.
4. Presentations
Strategic Plan, Three Year Implementation
Dr. Margery Overton, Vice Provost for Academic Strategy presented a
PowerPoint on the three year implementation plan. She reminded the Senate of the overall process that was launched in 2010 when Chancellor Woodson came to campus. The strategic plan was developed and presented to the Board of Trustees in Spring 2011.
Dr. Overton stated that a process was developed called the implementation plan and that summer five working groups were organized around the five goals that came out of the strategic plan. Those five working groups/teams that met during the summer of 2011 reported out very quickly and that became the basis of the three year implementation plan.
Dr. Overton reflected on where the plan is now. She stated that they realized in Spring 2014 that the plan was about to run out and a process had to be put in place on going forward.
Faculty Ombuds
Roy Baroff, Faculty Ombuds, gave an overview of his background and explained what an ombuds is and what his office does.
The new Ombuds Office will be located on Cox Avenue across from the Double Tree Hotel on Hillsborough Street. There will be free parking and confidential access.
Mr. Baroff stated that there are two primary core functions of an ombuds:
1) Provide direct assistance to faculty, around issue conflicts, functions as a sounding board, seeking information and certainly there is the Human Relations and other programs provided.
2) The second role is to pay attention to trends and issues that might come to him in the aggregate and be able to report up the chain, to be able to report to the Chancellor or Provost Office his concerns about policy or procedure of the university. He stated that the ombuds compliments the existing formal structure and it is an alternative to the structure.
Mr. Baroff stated that the initial plan is for him to work 10 hours per week. He has been meeting with faculty, staff, and administrators to better understand the university, the issues and concerns that faculty already have, primarily to build an infrastructure. He is currently working on a website and brochure that will lay out the framework for the office. There will be numerous ways to contact him.
5. New Business
Chair-elect Moore reported that elections will be discussed at the next Senate meeting. In addition to electing senators, a Secretary of the Senate will be elected, and that person will be elected from the Faculty Senate body.
Senator Banks voiced his displeasure of the firing of UNC System President Ross. He feels that the faculty should somehow make the Board of Governors aware of their thoughts on this issue.
Chair Elect Moore stated that the issue will be discussed at the Executive Committee meeting on Thursday to see where the Senate will go from here.
Several Senators voiced their displeasure and offered opinions of what they think needs to happen.
6. Adjourn
A motion passed to adjourn at 4:20 p.m.
Meeting Minutes
Present:
Secretary Daley, Chair- Elect Moore, Parliamentarian Fath; Senators Ash, Auerbach, Banks, Barlett, Bernhard, Bird, Borden, Brady, Cubbage, Davidian, Devetsikiotis, Fleisher, Gunter, Holden, Krause, Levy, Lunardi, Nfah—Abbenyi, Orcutt, Smith, Williams
Excused:
Chair Zonderman; Provost Arden; Senators, Knopp, Moore
Absent:
Senators: Allaire, Baumer, Bullock, Byrnes, Edwards, Fuentes, Heitmann, Laffitte, Scearce, Sotillo, Spontak, Steer
Guests:
Duane Larick, Senior Vice Provost, Academic Strategy & Resource Mgmt; Jon Harbor, ACE Fellow; Roy Baroff, Ombuds; Marcia Gumpertz,, Assistant Vice Provost, Faculty Diversity; Margery Overton, Vice Provost for Academic Strategy, Josh Teder, Student Senate ProTempore; R. Chittiller, Editor-in-Chief of the
Technician
1. Call to Order
Chair-Elect Moore called the ninth meeting of the sixty-first session of the NC State Faculty Senate to order at 3 p.m.
2. Remarks and Announcements
Chair Elect Moore announced that Chair Zonderman has been appointed to serve as Interim Head of the History department.
3. Approval of the Minutes, Meeting No. 8, January 13, 2015
Minutes of the January 13, 2015 meeting were approved as submitted.
4. Presentations
Strategic Plan, Three Year Implementation
Dr. Margery Overton, Vice Provost for Academic Strategy, presented a PowerPoint on the three year implementation plan. She reminded the Senate of the overall process that was launched in 2010 when Chancellor Woodson came to campus. The strategic plan was developed and presented to the Board of Trustees in spring 2011.
Dr. Overton stated that a process was developed called the implementation plan and that summer there were five working groups put together around the five goals that came out of the strategic plan. Those five working groups/teams that met during the summer of 2011 reported out very quickly and that became the basis of the three year implementation plan. She noted that in the development of that implementation plan there are five goals, but as they got all the ideas that came in a lot of the actions that they wanted to do overlapped and met multiple goals. As it emerged there were three overarching actions that described the bulk of things.
Dr. Overton stated that they are trying to meet the five goals and have a group of actions. She pointed out the individual actions and stated that in many cases there is more than one Executive Officer listed and if you look through the document every Executive Officer is associated with a group. The goal review that existed was developed in Fall 2011 and taken to the Board of Trustees, September 2011, not for approval but taken as a point of information and communication.
Dr. Overton reflected on where the plan is right now. She said they realized in the spring of 2014 that the plan was about to run out and a process had to be put in place on going forward.
Dr. Overton reported that they have just gotten through the 2014 benchmark for reporting out on the first three years, the development of the next three years, and there is an ongoing effort to update metrics annually judging how the university is doing on its five goals. In terms of conversations with campus and understanding how things are going, she said they will be working on the next three year implementation Spring 2017.
Dr. Overton stated that the discussion of the metrics started about the same time in 2011, pulling together university data, accessing whether they were appropriate. They are still in a state of improvement and they had 3 to 8 high level university metrics per goal to use to judge.
Slide 7: Dr. Overton explained where they were prior to the launching of the strategic plan. She stated that the background trend in red is where they were prior to starting the strategic plan and updating it onward to 2020 and in yellow there is a numerical on the chart to show where they are trying to get. She said there was an interesting process that was going on about the same time where UNCGA was talking about performance metrics and that was one of those fits and starts of trying to align their conversation with what the university was doing. Where possible, she incorporated their targets on the graph.
Slide 8: Dr. Overton stated that three things took place last summer. She said they needed to report out; they needed to develop a new one and they needed to get the metrics cleaned up. In May 2014 they tried to create a timeline that would get them to the BOT in November and that was the plan that was used in presentations between then and now.
Slide 9: Dr. Overton stated that in conversations with the Provost they are going to keep the five strategic goals because that is the plan. She said he also likes the three overarching actions. They did not know what the actions would be going forward but the hope was for them to keep that construct in the way that they are thinking about it.
Slide 10: Dr. Overton stated that they had the concept of working with the university leadership as contact points for information. There were things going on that could be used. She said you know of and you are aware of the ongoing discussions that are around the strategic resource management, that those were some things that were in process. That was one area of ideas for what was important for the next three years.
Dr. Overton stated that SACS had just visited and they developed a QEP where all the colleges and all the Vice Provost units and Executive Offices had submitted strategic plans for the next three years. They had all of that information to mine, to use in conversations to pour ideas out. She noted that she met with Executive Officers, Deans, and also had conversations with the Chair of the Faculty.
Slide 11: Dr. Overton explained that some of the guidelines were to think at the university level across unit ideas, highest impact, always and cognoscente of cost with our inductions, knowing that identifying resources would be critical.
Slide 12: Strategic Planning Process Fall 2014: Overton explained some of the key points that happened. In terms of reporting out the Chancellor decided to use the material in the fall, at the Administrative Leadership meeting and used some of the metrics in his report to the Board of Trustees. It was mentioned in the fall General Faculty meeting and it was presented as a point of information to the BOT.
Slide 13: Dr. Overton stated that the information in this slide is an overview of all the pieces of the implementation plan where she has just included the bolded groups of actions. On one page there are the three overarching pieces, the cultivated excellence and continuing investing in areas of emphasis, enhance student faculty and staff success, improve institutional effectiveness while growing and realigning resources.
Lastly, Dr. Overton provided links to information on the Strategic Planning website.
Questions and Comments
Is there any effort to crosswalk the university level strategic plan down to departments and then to individual faculty? Who actually do the work?
Overton stated that the directive to the college strategic plans is when the Provost sends directive to the dean. She said in developing their strategic plans they are told to map it to the university plan. In the sense of why did everyone have to do a strategic plan after the university plan was developed was for them to reflect on what the university had said and to see how their colleges fit in and would mount to it. In this process of mining for actions, deans independently sent in their own ideas of what they thought were matching.
Is that metric link where we would find how you are measuring those five areas like the global?
Overton pointed to the website and stated that study abroad is the only one that we have right now. It’s a conversation of can we identify the metric that identifies success in this area. She said they may be in a situation of developing some to measure; “we will just have to acknowledge that we don’t have any trend data and we don’t have any baseline data and we will start measuring that.”
What about measuring, we have relationships with Chinese universities, two different groups that are sending 3+S students.
Overton stated that she had some of that data and they were trying to count participants and then graduates. She noted that it’s not gone, “let’s see whose counting.”
Dr. Larick stated that there are other places in the implementation plan, metrics for the plan, where they are counting student numbers. He said we are separating international students from domestic students from North Carolina residence there. We didn’t replicate it in two places in the metrics version. There are places where we are looking at the globalization from the perspective of graduate or undergraduate students. That fits more into the student numbers and diversity of student metric than it did necessarily for globalization.
Dr. Overton added that there is an additional column in the next three year implementation plan and that column indicates whether this was something we were working on in the first three years and needed to continue. You won’t see some things, but you will see some things repeated.
Overton stated that global in the first implementation plan was actually in the student success section and as we talked about things that had been going on and whether it needed to stay there or needed to be highlighted more in the first section where we are focusing on it, it got moved up and now time is clicking, but the intent is to bring a little more focus to that global this next three years.
Under the goal enhancing interdisciplinary scholarship what are the various implementation detail actions? There is not much in there about undergraduate.
Dr. Overton referred to the website and stated that when you are looking for items, remember that they are not organized by goal. The implementation plan is organized by the overarching and it matches different goals.
This is not something that is fairly unique to NC State, but it is interesting that the areas that you noted as being kind of weak in measures are areas where it is really hard to find broad institutional support and reward for activities in these areas.
Overton thought that was an interesting comment. She stated that her learning curve with metrics for universities would be that if IPED says it is to be collected, we probably have it.
Is there an opportunity to change or modify any objectives and goals of the metrics or are we basically for the tenure of the strategic plan creating the same objectives and goals and maybe modify where you perceive.
Overton responded that there is room in the metric suggestions improving research and all of that, but back to the basic question. “When you say goals I’m thinking the strategic plan and I’m not hearing any conversation about rewriting the strategic plan. It was formed as a nine year plan, but if you read it there is a lot of flexibility within it to go in different directions.”
Faculty Ombuds
Roy Baroff gave an overview of his background and explained what an ombuds is and what his office does.
The new Ombuds Office will be located on Cox Avenue across from the Double Tree Hotel on Hillsborough Street. There will be free parking and confidential access.
The role of the ombuds is bringing together this diverse background and skills and bringing it to the organizational institutional level.
Mr. Baroff stated that there are two primary core functions of an ombuds:
1) Provide direct assistance to faculty. That comes around issue conflicts, as a sounding board, seeking information and certainly there is the Human Relations and other programs provided. You can also come to him for guidance if you are not sure where to turn.
Baroff stated that one of the hallmarks of an Ombuds Office is that it is confidential communication and his role is to help decide how you want to proceed.
Baroff stated that his goal is not to tell you what to do it is to advise you. He noted that he is not on the faculty side versus someone else in the institution. His interests are fair process and also in helping faculty think through what their choices are and hopefully making ones that are wise for them. The office is confidential, impartial, neutral, and also informal. No records will be kept that identify people who come to the office. Maintaining confidentiality is very important. He said it is not a notice to the university if you contact the Ombuds Office. There are no reports other than aggregate data of the kinds of people, the kinds of faculty members, and the kinds of issues that might come up.
Lastly the office is independent. The Ombuds Office is not part of the traditional and formal organizational structure of the university. The ombuds reports to the Chancellor and Provost with administrative and data reporting. That is the extent of reporting that occurs with the ombuds.
Baroff stated that the other thing that is a hall mark of this role is he is not an employee of NC State, which makes him independent of the university
2) The second role is to pay attention to trends and issues that might come to him in the aggregate and be able to report up the chain, to be able to report to the Chancellor or Provost Office his concerns about policy or procedure of the university. The ombuds compliments the existing formal structure and it is an alternative to the structure.
Mr. Baroff stated that the initial plan is for him to work 10 hours per week. He has been meeting with faculty, staff, and administrators to better understand the lay of land at NC State, the issues and concerns that faculty already have, primarily to build an infrastructure. He is currently working on a website and brochure that will lay out the framework for the office. There will be numerous ways to contact him.
Baroff stated that he is truly honored to be the first ombuds for North Carolina State University. He solicited the help of the faculty to help him meet the university and requested that they invite him to meetings to say hello and to get to know their colleagues.
Lastly he thinks the Ombuds Office is both separate and independent from the university, but it needs to be connected to it.
Questions and Comments
This position has been decades in the making and it was always a monetary issue. Are these reports you mentioned going to be available to faculty?
The response was absolutely. He stated that he would like to report on a quarterly basis.
How exactly is this going to be helpful; e.g., if I have an issue with my department head
Baroff’s response was that there is already an existing Mediation Program at the university. He said the thought is that his role is going to be different than a mediator, but it doesn’t mean that he won’t be able to facilitate or support conversation. The ombuds can be someone to talk something over with, such as a coaching role.
Mr. Baroff encouraged the faculty to contact the Ombuds Office sooner rather than later.
5. New Business
Chair-elect Moore reported that elections will be discussed at the next Senate meeting. In addition to electing senators, a Secretary of the Faculty will be elected and that person is to be elected from the Faculty Senate body.
Senator Banks stated that the UNC System Board decided to fire the President of the UNC System. The Faculty Assembly works with him to provide advice to the President. It strikes him that the faculty should somehow make the Board of Governors aware of their displeasure of the firing President Ross.
Chair Elect Moore stated that this issue will be discussed at the Executive Committee meeting on Thursday to see where the Senate will go from here.
Several Senators voiced their displeasure and offered opinions of what they think needs to happen.
6. Adjourn
A motion passed to adjourn at 4:20 p.m.
