Clerk’s Committee Meeting Minutes, February 15, 2018

Clerk’s Meeting

2/15/2018

In attendance: Frank Boyd, Dave Dobson, Kathryn Shields, Don Smith, Alfonso Mancheno, Darrell Samsell, Jill Peterfeso (recording)

  1. Gathering and Moment of Silence 2 minutes
  2. Figuring out who’s doing the minutes (Jill?) 1 minute
  3. Approval of Minutes from February 8 2 minutes
  4. Intro and comments from Clerk-Elect 5 minutes
  5. Feedback on candidates for QEP director 10 minutes
  6. Review of Faculty Meeting Feb 14 20 minutes
  7. For discussion: “Still Here” report on contingent faculty 10 minutes
  8. For discussion: Implementation of Edge plan 20 minutes

We opened with a moment of silence. We approved minutes from February 8. We spent considerable time fretting over trying to schedule Clerk’s meeting so that newly elect “shadow clerk” Jim Hood can attend our meetings.

Feedback on candidates for QEP director

We had one candidate for QEP director, and we discussed ways to support the new QEP director. We agreed that funding for QEP-related workshops and trainings is essential; Guilford told SACS we’d be funding this, and the ADO reported working on a grant that includes QEP alongside the Edge.

Review of Faculty Meeting, February 14, 2018

We noted the following from meeting:

  • Vice President for Enrollment Arlene Cash reported she is cautiously optimistic about application numbers. (Yay! Yay?)
  • The new nominating slate of changes was approved
  • An anonymous concern was raised via a written note that the FAR (Faculty Athletic Rep) has been a white male for a long time.  We will pass this concern on to nominating committee.
  • We discussed the feedback Nominating received re: the proposed changes to the faculty handbook around service. This issue continues to be a challenge, largely because many faculty seem to view this as connected to larger questions of workload extending beyond simply committee service. This led to brainstorming and discussions about teaching load, addressing bigger faculty concerns about workload, etc. Some suggestions came up: asking Nominating and current committee chairs to ascertain whether some committees could be half-credit committees, such that people can serve on two and not be doing an onerous amount of work; seeing if some committees can exist with far fewer members, or even just be led by one committee chair. Bottom line: all of this is super challenging — at Guilford and everywhere — and the meeting became impassioned as we tried to come up with practical and creative solutions to our many struggles.

For discussion: “Still Here” report on contingent faculty

We had an open discussion about the contingent faculty report provided by Richie Zweigenhaft. Can the salaries for contingent faculty increase? Yes, but it would come out of the same pool of the Academic budget, so an increase in one place would necessitate a decrease in another place.

We discussed how the report helped us to see how we can work with our contingent faculty.

Might we be able to create titles for our continent faculty that will help them advance professionally, even if we cannot help them monetarily? Yes. And that’s something that would have to be discussed with and among the faculty.

 

We closed with a minute of silence.