Clerk’s Committee Meeting Minutes
Thursday February 9, 2016 2:30 pm
Attending: Alfonso Abad Mancheno, Dave Dobson, Sherry Giles, Gwen Gosney Erickson, Eva Lawrence, Beth Rushing Kathryn Shields (recorder for this meeting), and Don Smith. Absent: Leanna Kantt, Jeffrey Ray
Meeting began with a moment of silence
Minutes from Feb. 2 meeting – approved
Item of New Business: Tim Kircher cannot attend the Board of Trustees meeting.
We discussed whether we should try to replace him or have the Clerk be the faculty representative? Jane regularly gives a report of the faculty meeting so the situation has changed from past practice. The faculty rep attends the open portion of the meeting and any committees of interest. Dave also attends Finance and Academic Affairs committee. We agreed that it may be a chance for another faculty member to experience the board meeting, which might be welcome.
Dave will send it out to faculty to see if anyone would like to attend on Feb. 24-25 with a note that the first person to respond will represent faculty and report at the next faculty meeting.
Review of Faculty Meeting on February 8
We agreed that the minutes for the Feb. 8 faculty meeting look good.
In follow-up discussion regarding the faculty meeting, we decided that the words “at least” should be left out of the statement on catalog language on credit hours:
Guilford College utilizes the federal definition of the credit hour. Under this definition, one credit hour entails the equivalent of forty-five hours of instruction and student work in a term, regardless of the length of the term or the delivery mode for the class.
The Academic Dean and the department chairs are responsible for ensuring adherence to this policy.
The federal definition does include a reference to the credit hour defined as a “minimum” of the forty-five hours of instruction. We agreed that this statement is a step in the right direction. In order to work towards some clarity about the implications for our classes and our academic environment, we need to continue conversations as a campus community.
The Clerk will send out that statement with the agreed upon catalog language and mention that the process language is in process separately.
As a related matter, we discussed the fact that the academic calendar could include an additional week in the fall of 2018-19 now that January term no longer exists.
Dave communicated to Jane of the results of faculty-approved nominees for honorary degrees.
Curriculum discussion. We really need to know if this proposal is going to be approved by faculty sooner rather than later. Another way of describing what they are proposing is a major + 3 SACS requirements + a PPSE. Art and Science recommends that what we do needs to be required and awesome (experiential, student-led). We will need staff to support the community outreach, training, etc., but we cannot start budgeting it without a decision about support. In the Forum next week we could have a goal to build an approvable proposal (Feb. 15). We could revisit in the Forum on March 1 [after the presentations on Feb. 17 by the Arts and Science group (a repeat of earlier presentation), and on the discussion on the 22nd, which will be an opportunity to try to elicit people’s dreams (collaborative learning, ethical leadership), mine ideas, and generate plans]. We can take the results of these two forums to the March faculty meeting for approval if we are able to come to some consensus. The curriculum will not really be in its final form until we’ve worked out the implementation.
Discussion of Position requests for searches in 2017-18
We will be losing a few people to retirements and unexpected losses. We will not know about our fall enrollments so the plan is to request proposals and approve a few (around 2) this semester and add several more (around 2) in the fall if the enrollments are high enough. There is also a chance that the two we approve could have to be pulled.
We will remove the request for cover letter, job description, and course rotations. We added some clarification about the narrative (teaching area, list of courses, contributions to gen ed, interdisciplinary programs, and other majors). We should remove “supporting materials” unless we have some specific requirements.
Include in the memo that programs that submitted proposals in the fall can either update that information or let us know they want that proposal to be considered.
Online course evaluations pilot for spring semester– approved
Discussion of online course evaluations. One person wondered if we could create a requirement to encourage submission because we would not want to create a situation like the advising survey. For example, could the students not be able to access grades until their evaluations are submitted? Banner would require programming, so it probably would not be possible.
The system will send reminders to people who have not submitted them. They may also be able to be tied to Canvas. While online evaluations tend to generate fewer responses than paper, we would likely need to change the way we have thought about them in the past. We can also do some things to increase responses.
They can still be administered in class and we should offer that as a recommended practice to instructors.
After we adopt the online course evaluations we can decide what questions can be included (common set of four questions, lab-specific, studio-specific, and we could make department-specific questions, and individual questions). We could decide that we would only allow three forms at Guilford. The four questions are good global questions and the other options are relevant to certain classroom situations, which would be better information for everyone involved than the generic set of questions we currently use.
Since we have not had a faculty discussion about it, we agreed that a pilot this semester is the best way to go. Beth will send a memo that Clerk’s has approved a pilot of online evaluations during the current spring semester. We should indicate that there is strong support from Department chairs and it also has FAC support. The Dean will meet with faculty who will be under review next year. For the people who will be up for Tenure Review, they would have the option to use the ScanTron evaluations if they are nervous about a change. We plan to follow up with a presentation/discussion at the March faculty meeting.
We will continue the following issues to future meetings:
Proposal for Personnel Committee
Faculty service workload and expectations –
Proposal for Peace as a core value –
The meeting closed in silence at 3:55 pm.