Minutes for December 2, 2019

The Faculty Senate of Eastern Kentucky University met on Monday, December 2, 2019 in the South Ballroom in the Keen Johnson Building. Chair Ciocca called the fourth meeting of the academic year to order at approximately 3:30 p.m.

The following members were absent:

^* Indicates prior notification of absence to the Faculty Senate Secretary
* ALT Jacob Domenghini attended for C. Hagan
^ ALT Rob Weise attended for T. Smit

APPROVAL OF MINUTES:

Senator Crosby moved approval of the November 4, 2019 minutes, seconded by Senator Schilling. Motion carried. (YES = 49 votes | NO = 1 vote | ABSTAIN = 0 votes) (See Also:  Individual Votes)

REPORT FROM THE PRESIDENT:  Senator Benson

Last Tuesday evening more than 700 of our faculty, staff and their guests enjoyed a pre-Thanksgiving meal at Case Dining Hall.

Last week marked the end of our fall high school tour. This was a wonderful opportunity to connect not only with thousands of prospective students but also hundreds of alumni who are representing EKU in our local schools. (See: infographic with preliminary details of these visits)

With the November elections now in the books we await the next legislative session, still unclear of funding levels for public higher education and what lies ahead for pension reform. With those uncertainties, we do know there has never been more priority placed on recruiting and retaining students to maintain and grow tuition revenue. While we have seen a significant enrollment shift in recent years, we are encouraged by some early indicators trending positively in admissions. At the end of November:

• We have received more than 33,000 inquiries through various outreach, including direct mail campaigns, digital marketing and communications, on-campus recruitment events, and nearly 500 national, regional, state and individual high school college fairs college fairs.
• We have generated nearly 800 more fall admissions applications for first-time freshmen and have admitted more out-of-state first-time freshmen compared to this point in time last year. 
• Specifically, as of November 14, we have generated an increase in fall applications from students in the targeted SMART states of IN, TN, MO, MS, AL, and SC compared to this point in time last year. 

One of the strongest recruitment messages we have is the strength of our faculty and academic programs. Some recent successes to celebrate include:

• EKU’s Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Program won the UPCEA South Region Program of Excellence Award for quality teaching and learning.
• EKU Mock Trial celebrated a first-place finish at the 32-team Illinois State University Invitational Tournament. 
• Dr. Victoria Collins, associate professor and graduate program coordinator in the School of Justice Studies at EKU, recently was named Critical Criminologist of the Year for 2019 by the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. 
• The “Military Times: Best for Vets” 2020 rankings once again placed EKU in the top 10 percent of public universities in the nation and number one in Kentucky. 

GUEST SPEAKERS:

Ombud Minute. Ombud Beck stated that during her tenure so far, her work has focused more on one-on-one interaction rather than mediation. Many people may be unfamiliar with the mediation process and therefore might be reluctant to engage in that way. Mediation uses a neutral, third-party to negotiate; and anything can be mediated by any number of people. The goal of mediation is to develop an answer that is acceptable to all. However, the hardest part of mediating a conflict is the first step—agreeing to work together to find a solution. That is the hard part because it requires the parties to put into words the reason for the difficulty. Saying it out loud makes it real, and we’re often reluctant to do that. We choose to ignore it and hope it will just go away. A mediator can often help find the voice, or identify the problem because only then can it be managed. So, when you find yourself in the midst of a controversy and you’re unable to address it, call in a mediator. They sit down in a comfortable space, engage in a civil dialogue, and help to work out a solution.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS:

Policy 4.6.8 - Visiting Faculty. Senator Crosby moved approval of Policy 4.6.8, seconded by Senator Cizmar. Motion carried. (YES = 51 votes | NO = 0 votes | ABSTAIN = 1 vote) (See Also:  Individual Votes)  

NEW BUSINESS:

Rules Committee Motion to Limit Service on Standing Committees. Senator Bishop-Ross moved to approve limiting service to no more than two standing Senate committees. As the motion comes from committee, a second is not required. Motion carried. (YES = 44 votes | NO = 7 votes | ABSTAIN = 1 vote) (See also: Individual Votes)

Elections for Committee Vacancies. The following senators were nominated and accepted by acclamation for committee vacancies.

• Academic Quality Committee (1 vacancy) - Christopher Budano
• Elections & University Nominations Committee (1 vacancy) - Amy Schilling
• Information Technology Committee (1 vacancy) - Brent Shannon
• Rules Committee (1 vacancy) - Allison Noland

Report from Council on Academic Affairs. Vice Provost Robinson presented the following materials.

Items #1-4 were moved forward for approval. Motion carried. (YES = 51 votes | NO = 1 vote | ABSTAIN = 0 votes) (See Also:  Individual Votes)

GENERAL & STANDING COMMITTEE REPORTS

REPORT FROM SENATE CHAIR: Senator Ciocca

The Senate is still in need of a parliamentarian. Please share that information with your colleagues and have any interested parties contact the Senate chair.

The Executive Committee met on November 18 at 3:30pm. Below are some highlights from the meeting.

• 2020 Census for College Students (flyer)
  Lynnette Noblitt, on behalf of the EKU Complete Count Committee, was in attendance to promote college-level participation in the April 2020 Census and shared ways faculty can help encourage students to participate. If 100,000 or more individuals in Madison County participate, EKU would be eligible to apply for additional federal grants.
• Policy Updates
  A drafting team is currently working on the pre-final examination week policy. After some discussion, the team has decided to repeal the policy rather than to revise it. Instead of having a policy, language could be added to the faculty handbook to encourage faculty to think about pre-final examination week but not mandating that they do anything with regard to that. It is anticipated that something will be brought forward to Faculty Senate in February.
• Ad Hoc Committee on Textbook Resources:
  The Bookstore is looking at two different OER options—traditional OER and managed OER. In traditional OER, Barnes & Noble will make sure the materials for a course is available for any online orders as well as on the shelves in the bookstore. In a managed OER, Barnes & Noble has staff that will basically work to pull all the pieces together for the curriculum so that it’s more like a traditional textbook which interfaces with Blackboard. Materials could be printed in-house in EKU’s Printing Services which would help decrease the overall cost.
  
  First-Day Solution:
  Another option which has proved to be a significant savings for students is the First-Day Solution. Barnes & Noble negotiates preferred pricing with publishers and the materials are provided digitally through Blackboard to the students. It is prepaid with tuition. Advantage of this option is that the materials are available on or before the first day of class.
  Kelly Smith stated that the ad hoc committee applied for an innovation grant with the Board of Regents and has been selected to present to the Board. This would be an incentive grant for faculty who either adopt existing open education resources for their courses or create new ones.

REPORT FROM FACULTY REGENT: Senator Marion

The November Board meeting was rescheduled to Thursday, December 12 at 12:30pm in Martin Hall.

Open Educational Resources (OER) Ad-Hoc Committee
Upon a referral from Chair Ciocca and an invitation from Ad-Hoc Chair Kelly Smith, the OER committee has welcomed me to join their group. There is a lot of positive work being done by this dedicated group of faculty leaders in the area of textbook affordability and quality assurance. The group had a robust discussion at their last meeting with the B&N Bookstore Manager (Tammie Gilbert) and Steve Caudill, EKU’s Chief Auxiliary Services Officer.

Here are links for some of the great existing library resources we currently have access to as members of the university community: the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the library edition of Ancestry.com. 

REPORT FROM PROVOST: Senator Pogatshnik

The job description for the Associate Provost position has been posted. Please encourage interested colleagues to apply.

The CPE Program Initiative Review is on again. We have tentatively scheduled our data submission date for December 18 with a campus visit by Gray Associates anticipated in early March. The faculty and Senate leadership will be asked to attend a two-day workshop to go over the data and the discussions once the schedule is finalized.

On January 9th, there will be an all-day session to focus on our general education revision. The expanded review group now consists of about 40 faculty and a few staff. The goal of the workshop is to identify one or two models that will be the final candidates in our gen ed redesign. As part of that initiative, a working group of faculty has been established to look specifically at the quantitative reasoning component of a revised general education program. Dr. Garett Yoder is chairing the group. They have been asked to examine current areas of concern as well as make recommendations for change. As previously stated, my preference is that the quantitative reasoning component of general education be conducted primarily through the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. However, it’s clear that the math remains one of the greatest barriers to retain and graduate, and we need to carefully examine how we teach all of our students, in particularly those who come less prepared. Department Chair Dan Mundfrom and Dean Otieno have been asked to form an internal working group in the Math department focused on improvements on gen ed math. At some point these two groups will ultimately collaborate to come to a set of recommendations on staffing, tutoring, other resources, and hopefully enable us to do a better job of assuring student success in our gen ed math courses.

Finally, I want to take a moment to thank all of you for your support during this past year. I firmly believe that we are working together for the betterment of our students.

STANDING COMMITTEES:

Budget Committee. Senator Woodruff is now chairing the committee.

Information Technology Committee. Senator Nachtwey reported that the committee met with Jeff Whitaker of Information Technology who reported on the classroom revitalization project. He said that they are prioritizing for classroom revitalization, getting new projectors and monitors, replacing old screens, and installing centralized audio AV controllers, and installing new media carts. This has been rolled out intermittently to rooms as funds become available. In addition, there are major renovations planned at some point for Ferrell Auditorium, Combs 216, Wallace 346 and Burrier 100.

We also talked with him about the faculty IT survey for 2020 which is coming up. We want to hear more about what was done with the data from the survey last year since it was long and onerous and created through a third-party survey company. So, if we can avoid doing that and make a survey that is more directed, we think that may be more effective for 2020.

Ad Hoc Committee on Open Textbook Resources. Senator Szabo reported that the committee has increased in size. There are representatives from all colleges now, except for Justice and Safety.

Kelly Smith applied for the Regents Innovation Grant, and apparently we’ve made it to the next level. The grant is a way to help incentivize people to adopt open resources for their classes.

The committee plans to bring forward some recommendations to Senate next year.

Ad Hoc Committee on EKU Forward. Chair Ciocca reported that the committee met last week. Dr. Callahan suggested the possibility of using virtual (as in via video) meetings as a recruiting tool for on-line instructors. It is difficult right now to attract outstanding candidates and this could help. This would necessitate a longer discussion on how to frame tenure track faculty with faculty not being on campus physically. The tenure policy requires working with students here at EKU. Conversation needs to be brought forward to see if this is feasible. One possible issue for those teaching on-line exclusively: how to ensure exclusive commitment to EKU.

Further, in order to move virtual meetings forward, the issue of hardware needs, and how to comply with open meeting laws need to be resolved. Inventory of capabilities would be needed. Also, the Semester length was discussed. There is a sense that the current subdivision of Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer terms needs revisiting, as is the duration of each individual term, to accommodate the students and their requirements with outside agencies. This, of course, will include a discussion of the Dead Week policy.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Chair Ciocca stated that anyone who will be unable to continue to serve on Senate in the spring semester should notify him and the secretary immediately.

ADJOURNMENT:

Senator Pogatshnik moved to adjourn at approximately 4:30pm.

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