October 22, 2013
Executive Summary
1. Call to Order
Chair Zonderman called the fourth meeting of the sixtieth session of the NC State Faculty Senate to order at 3 p.m.
2. Announcements
Senator Richard Bernhard has volunteered to serve on the Search Committee for the new Director of Transportation.
The Library awarded two faculty awards to Suzanne Kennedy-Stoskopf from the College of Veterinary Medicine and Joseph Hightower from CALS.
The Center for Student Leadership, Ethics, and Public Service (
CSLEP) is launching a series of compelling conversations on various issues. They have chosen the Affordable Care Act and the recent North Carolina Legislation on voting for the fall. The event will take place on Monday, November 4
th from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in Witherspoon 126, which is the Sankofa Room.
3. Approval of the Minutes, Meeting No. 3, September 24, 2013
The minutes were approved as amended.
4. Faculty Teaching Workload/ Additional Compensation
Vice Provost Betsy Brown reported that in January 2013 the Board of Governors revised its policy on “Monitoring Faculty Teaching Workload.” She stated that for Research Universities it is two courses per semester and not four. Brown stated that the important thing to remember is that this is the starting point and not the end point for what your teaching load is, so we are operating within the assumption that if you have other responsibilities, that may affect whether or not you keep all of those courses. It may be affected by the kind of students that you are teaching and the kind of course you are teaching.
Additional Compensation Paid Through the University
Vice Provost Brown reported that the limit on additional compensation during regular pay periods is going to increase from 20 to 25 percent. The 33 and one third percent in the summer is not changing. What has been proposed, and what the Provost, Chancellor, and Vice Chancellor are thinking about now, is whether the 25% additional compensation can also be earned on the 33 and one third percent in the summer, which is apparently a practice at some universities, but has not been a practice here.
5. Laboratory for Analytic Science and Partnership w/NSA
Associate Vice Chancellor Randy Avent stated that there were two things that attracted Michael Wertheimer, Director of Research, NSA, to consider a partnership with NC State and the other Universities that he was looking at. The first was the fact that Research Triangle Park in general has a growing cluster economy centered on information technology and analytics and the other was when Jim Goodnight bought him to Centennial Campus.
Avent reported that the first administrative funds were received around June to run the NC State portion of the lab and the first research funding was received in September.
6. Provost Remarks and Q/A
Provost Arden gave the faculty an opportunity to ask questions on issues that they would like him to address.
7. Old/New Business
Resolution on Reaffirming the University’s Commitment to Achieving a Diverse Student Body
Chair Zonderman presented the Resolution for a second reading.
A motion passed with unanimous consent to adopt the resolution.
The Governance Committee proposed the following change to the Faculty Senate bylaws.
Recommended revision to Article VI, Section 4, of the Faculty Senate Bylaws:
"Any Senator who resigns or is on leave for more than one semester shall be replaced in the following manner: the Chair of the Faculty, in consultation with the remaining Senators from the College, shall appoint a replacement from within that College for the remainder of the Senator's term, oruntil the return of the Senator on leave."
The motion passed with unanimous consent to accept the change to Article VI, Section 4, of the Faculty Senate Bylaws.
8. Adjourn
A motion passed to adjourn the meeting at 4:21 p.m.
Meeting Minutes
Present: Chair Zonderman, Immediate Past Chair Kellner, Secretary Daley, Provost Arden; Senators Ade, Aspnes, Bernhard, Bird, Borden, Bourham, Bradley, Edwards, Fleisher, Funkhouser, Heitmann, Knopp, Krause, Lunardi, J. Moore, Penrose, Rucker, Spontak, Sztajn, Tyler, Williams
Excused: Parliamentarian Weiner; Senators Ade, Allaire, Barlette, Morgado
Absent: Senators Devetsikiotis, Fuentes, Holden, Knowles, Laffitte, Lucia, Marks, M. Moore, Nfah-Abbenyi
Guests: Betsy Brown, Provost’s Office; Barbara Carroll, Associate Vice Chancellor for Human Resources; Eileen Goldgeier, Vice Chancellor & General Counsel; Marc Hoit, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology; Randy Avent, Interim Assoc. Vice Chancellor for Research Development;
Julie Schwindt, Director, Office of Contracts and Grants
1. Call to Order
Chair Zonderman called the fourth meeting of the sixtieth session of the NC State Faculty Senate to order at 3 p.m.
2. Announcements
Senator Richard Bernhard has volunteered to serve on the Search Committee for the new Director of Transportation.
The library awarded two faculty awards and they went to Suzanne Kennedy-Stoskopf from the College of Veterinary Medicine and Joseph Hightower from CALS.
The Center for Student Leadership, Ethics, and Public Service (
CSLEP) is launching a series of compelling conversations on various issues. They have chosen the Affordable Care Act and the recent North Carolina Legislation on voting for the fall. Faculty members are invited to attend. The event will take place on Monday, November 4
th from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in Witherspoon 126, which is the Sankofa Room.
Chair Zonderman thanked everyone for attending the General Faculty meeting.
3. Approval of the Minutes, Meeting No. 3, September 24, 2013
The minutes were approved as amended.
4. Additional Compensation/ Faculty Teaching Workload
Vice Provost Betsy Brown reported that in January 2013 the Board of Governors revised its policy on “Monitoring Faculty Teaching Workload.” They have had that policy for a long time and it has distinguished expected teaching loads per semester by the Carnegie classification of institutions. So, for research universities it is two courses per semester and not four which is what it is at some of the other institutions. The important thing to remember is that this is the starting point and not the end point for what your load is, so, we are operating within the assumption that if you have other responsibilities that may affect whether or not you keep all of those courses it may affect the kind of students that you are teaching and the kind of course you are teaching might affect that.
Vice Provost Brown stated that we now have a requirement to create a policy on faculty teaching workload, but the other important thing to remember is what we tried to do in this proposed regulation is capture current practice and not impose a whole new set of approvals and definitions of workloads. So, the Board of Governors states in its policy that department loads are determined at department level and that is how we have always operated and that is how we will continue to operate under this regulation.
Vice Provost Brown stated that the information from the Board of Governors has been provided, their policy on workload, their regulation on how they collect data on workload, which is also not changing. They don’t collect your individual load, they collect student credit hours generated by departments and it is at that level when the rollout begins.
The Board of Governors also asked that institutions determine a limit on the number of independent studies that faculty members can teach in a semester, so that has been included into this regulation. Brown stated that the key points are at the bottom of page 3 of the regulation under workload assignments where it states “The Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, in consultation with the Council of Deans, has established workload criteria for the university based on the Board of Governors policy.” That policy does not prescribe teaching workloads for individual faculty.
Vice Provost Brown pointed out, most importantly information at the top of page 4 of the regulation which states “The instructional load for individual faculty members will vary from this average load depending on the nature of the faculty member’s appointment: responsibilities in teaching, research, extension/engagement, service and other responsibilities as set out in the Statement of Mutual Expectations. Teaching workload may also reflect the faculty member’s appointment type as well as level of performance in teaching and other responsibilities.” If you are a non-tenure track teaching faculty member you are probably going to teach more than that average. If you are a heavy research faculty member then you are going to teach less than that average number and that will continue to be the case. We delegate to the deans to have some definition of what work faculty do in the college and how that might affect their load.
A faculty member commented that one thing that bothers him is the fact that there are just the four courses and somehow all the courses are the same size. Some colleges will have a lot of large classes and some will have a lot of small classes. The other thing is that there is a push by faculty to get credit for having more than one student working in their laboratories, which wasn’t part of the definitions that could easily be found in terms of teaching activities.
Vice Provost Brown stated that she thinks that is a department determination.
The faculty member asked, Is it not true that the university will get credit for things defined by this document?
Vice Provost Brown agreed and stated that this is the way they asked for information to be sent to them, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be followed.
He added that there is a lot of faculty contributions that are not going to be captured by that policy even though they are being paid to do the teaching aspect of things.
Vice Provost Brown stated that this is why they want the departments to make those definitions, not the university or the Board of Governors.
Brown stated that they are not going to ask for separate reporting from what they are already doing for Delaware, so it has nothing to do with the particular teaching load it is an accumulation of what the department teaches.
Brown stated that they don’t have a choice about doing this; she thinks the important thing is that nothing is going to change in how they calculate what is determined as a load. It is still going to be a department and college decision. The Board of Governors has said that this is the starting point and what you need to do in your department is account for how that plays itself out.
Questions and Comments
What proportion of a course do you need to teach?
Vice Provost Brown responded that she is not doing the counting; she thinks that is something the colleges and departments need to come to terms with because they have a certain amount to cover.
Additional Compensation Paid Through the University
Vice Provost Brown stated that this regulation is essentially taking the nine-month summer salary and the additional compensation regulations that we have had for a couple of years and including them into this one. However, we have been much more explicit about most other kinds of additional compensation.
Vice Chancellor Barbara Carroll reported that there were a couple of different PRR’s that covered bits and pieces of this and it was confusing, so we have decided to put everyone and everything except external activity for pay directly from another organization into this one PRR because we thought it would be easier for people to find the answers to the questions they were looking for, so it covers faculty, EPA non faculty, and it covers some aspects of SPA staff.
Vice Provost Brown stated that for faculty purposes, the important issues are the 20% limit now on additional compensation during your nine-month or 12-month term and if you are nine-month the 33 and one third percent summer salary. If you are a named professor this addresses how that gets calculated or not in your base salary. If you are a temporary administrator and you have a supplement for that, it talks about how that gets calculated in. You can get a sense of what is counted in those percentages and what is not, so that is important to look at.
Vice Provost Brown stated that the limit on additional compensation during a regular pay period is going from 20 to 25 percent. The 33 and one third percent in the summer is not changing. What has been proposed, and what the Provost, Chancellor, and Vice Chancellor are thinking about now, is whether the 25% additional compensation can also be earned on the 33 and one third percent in the summer, which is apparently a practice at some universities, but has not been a practice here.
Vice Provost Brown stated that the other issue that has been a point of contention is the summer limit for nine-month faculty not being able to exceed a rate of pay in a single month; i.e., not to exceed 11.11 percent. We do have some activities that faculty do in the summer that are completed in one month. There are places where a lot of the summer schools are taught in May, which would be an example, so the Provost has decided that his position on this is that we don’t need to limit to 11.11 percent if the work is all done in one month.
Chair Zonderman stated that he is hearing from some department heads that folks that teach one session of summer school can actually go from five to six weeks and they are usually paid a lump sum at the end.
Vice Chancellor Carroll stated that even if in practice there have been some of that paying of a lump sum, it is going to be pulled into the payroll structure. So, if you are teaching six weeks, you can get a pay check in June and a paycheck in July.
Vice Provost Brown stated that the bottom line is that this is better for faculty. There may be some things that you don’t feel so good about, but we are trying to be as inclusive as possible. This is not the final draft.
5. Laboratory for Analytic Science and Partnership w/NSA
Associate Vice Chancellor Randy Avent stated that there were two things that attracted Michael Wertheimer, Director of Research, NSA, to consider NC State and the other universities that he was looking at. The first one was the fact that Research Triangle Park in general has a growing cluster economy centered on information technology and analytics.
Avent stated that the other thing that he thinks sealed the deal was when Jim Goodnight bought him on to Centennial Campus. When Centennial Campus started twenty five or thirty years ago this was a huge thing, which is how do we bring industry, academia, and government together. People in the medical community talk about that all the time now in translational research, but we have been doing it for twenty- five years. You can drive around Centennial Campus and this is what Wertheimer saw. There was the College of Engineering, Red Hat, there were various companies, there were government organizations and he was particularly excited to bring the three institutions together to work on this hard problem, so that was what made him first start to look at NC State. Over the next three years he sent a steady stream of people from the agency down here to talk to faculty and many of you may have been involved in some of those discussions. They talked to faculty in almost every department and every college and they found two things.
They found that there is a long enriched culture and history of analytics research here at the university. We have had a lot of work in that area in terms of statistics in the math department, computer science department, and other departments as well.
The other thing was the land grant culture of NC State. They found faculty members in every college that were willing to talk to them and engage, which was something that they didn’t always find in other universities.
They finally issued an RFP the week before Christmas that was due the week after New Year’s, so we put that in and were awarded the contract for agreement at the end of May. There are two pieces to this. There was a lease agreement because they are bringing down fifty people from the NSA to be here on Centennial Campus and then there is a research contract associated with that. They are in the process now of beginning to bring down some people one at a time. Twenty-five of those people are researchers and twenty- five are analysts that work on the problems.
The research contract started and we received the first cut of money around June, which is an administrative piece just to run the NC State portion of the lab and we got the first research funding in September. The research funding is around three areas, which are the sites of analysis, the sites of analytics, and user experiences. The sites of analysis are looking at how analysts solve problems. The sites of analytics are once you know how people go about solving problems, what types of tools and what types of techniques they need to help them do that better. The user experience is how you bring those two together to make it much more effective.
The first highest college to get funded out of this is the College of Engineering and the second highest college is CHASS. CHASS has a huge participation in this and that leads somewhat to the opportunity side.
Avent stated that we have a strong presence in big data and analytics. The Provost awarded us a cluster hire last year because we already have a strong presence and we are interested in growing that even more.
Currently we are bringing people in from CHASS at the very beginning to let them shape what the research agenda is. We have two Industrial/Organizational Psychologists and we have told them that they should be the ones to define what we should do and all the computer scientists should be going off and trying to quantify some of those things.
Avent stated that Intellectual property doesn’t change a whole lot. Any time the government funds anything from a faculty member they have government purpose rights to it, but anything that a faculty member does in this, the IP is owned by NC State.
Students (both undergraduate and graduate) can be involved with this project.
Avent stated that they have to be careful because there are a lot of industry partners, so they have to walk a fine line on how they work with industry on some of these problems. Research itself is not classified. The data that you operate on is classified. By far, most of the research that is going to be done in this lab by the faculty is going to be unclassified research.
A faculty member asked are the firewalls set up by NSA or are they set up jointly between us and NSA?
Avent stated that the facility itself is an NSA facility, so they are the ones that are building it and putting in the infrastructure and everything else. We will be heavily involved, but we won’t set the policies.
The faculty member stated that again, it has to do with freedom of publishing and things like that.
Avent stated that on one end of the stage you have faculty that don’t have clearances, so they are doing unclassified data. There are no restrictions with publications. There is no official review. The only thing the contract says is that the faculty should give a courtesy copy of their publication to the NSA at the time of submission. People are going to be encouraged to give them a copy a few days before to be on the safe side, but there is no publication review for that. Faculty that sign up to go into the facility and work on classified data will have to get their publications reviewed beforehand to make sure there is no exposure of classified data.
Questions
Do you have any idea how many people they plan to hire?
Avent responded that the facility will hold one hundred people and fifty of those will be their own people. He stated that there will be fifty that we can put in there and that will be a combination of industry players and maybe some research faculty members and there will be a small number of faculty.
6. Provost Remarks and Q/A
Provost Arden gave the faculty an opportunity to ask questions on issues that they would like him to address.
Questions and Comments
In regard to Transmittal Memo #83 (Regulations related to fostering student success) which involves academic policy, what is the process going to be and are we going to make the deadline?
Provost Arden stated that the memo is transmitting what has already been discussed and implemented. His understanding is that these are things that have all emerged from that whole student success initiative over the past academic year. It is being discussed by various task forces, which included members from every campus. This is just a letter confirming the changes to the UNC course manual and they were discussed at GA and on campus between 6 and 12 months ago.
Where do we stand with SACS?
Provost Arden stated that SACS is going well overall. Our report has been sent to SACS and we will find out in November if there are any substantial issues on what has been submitted. There will be an opportunity at that time to do focus reports and revisions.
Provost Arden reported that the QEP is shaping up really well and it is due to be sent to SACS any day now. The plan is to administer the QEP through DASA, so Mike Mullen will take the lead role in the administration of the QEP. Provost Arden stated that overall he thinks the QEP has come together very well and it has reflected a huge amount of work.
7. Old/New Business
Resolution on Reaffirming the University’s Commitment to Achieving a Diverse Student Body
Chair Zonderman presented the Resolution for a second reading.
A motion passed with unanimous consent to adopt the resolution.
The Governance Committee proposed the following change to the Faculty Senate bylaws.
Recommended revision to Article VI, Section 4 of the Faculty Senate Bylaws:
"Any Senator who resigns or is on leave for more than one semester shall be replaced in the following manner: the Chair of the Faculty, in consultation with the remaining Senators from the College, shall appoint a replacement from within that College for the remainder of the Senator's term, oruntil the return of the Senator on leave."
The motion passed with unanimous consent to accept the change to Article VI, Section 4, of the Faculty Senate Bylaws.
8. Adjourn
A motion passed to adjourn the meeting at 4:21 p.m.
