Clerk’s Committee Meeting Minutes Tuesday April 5, 2016 1:00 p.m.
In attendance: Dave Dobson (Clerk), Gwen Erickson (Recording Clerk), Sarah Estow (Social Sciences and recorder for this meeting), Sherry Giles (Business, Policy, and Sports Studies), Sadie Hunter (Community Senate), Beth Rushing (Vice President for Academic Affairs & Academic Dean), Steve Shapiro (Natural Sciences & Mathematics), Kathryn Shields (Arts).
Not attending: SGA representative (position currently vacant).
- The meeting opened in silence at 1:07.
- Approval of Minutes from March 29, 2016
The minutes were approved with one minor edit. Lisa reported that Amber Echerd will be the SGA representative for the rest of the year. Dave will contact the incoming Clerk’s Committee members to invite them to attend our remaining meetings this year.
- For approval: Faculty representatives for website group
The committee approved the following volunteers to join the website redesign committee:
- Bryan Brendley
- Cynthia Nearman
Dave will recommend to Roger Degerman that he also include a librarian (Gwen or someone else) on the committee. The committee will also be encouraged to hold open meetings to get input from other community members.
- Review of Faculty Meeting March 30, 2016
A great deal was accomplished at the meeting. The queries faced some criticism and some of that may be due to perceptions that because they came from Wess Daniels, they were being imposed on us by an outside entity, like the Friends Center. There wasn’t much time during the meeting to frame that this was just a first step in a longer process and these queries weren’t originally written for this particular purpose. Moving forward, people will be encouraged to share their responses to the queries. In general, there was support for this query process, despite the fact that some faculty felt that this set of queries reflected a White perspective, may be too general, and should be tailored to fit the faculty role.
Perhaps redrafting the queries can serve as a vehicle to reflect on the issues they address. A concern was raised that redrafting may take us further from our goal of responding to student demands. It was proposed that a small group work on redrafting the queries but there may not be enough time left in the semester to get that work done in a satisfying way and make it back to faculty before the end of the school year. The issue will be discussed again in one of our remaining faculty meetings but won’t likely take the form of a direct redrafting of the queries. Clerk’s will make it clear to faculty that this work will be ongoing.
The Clerk will post a query on the screen at the start of our remaining faculty meeting(s) to give faculty an opportunity to reflect.
The DAC will craft a faculty response to the student demands.
Next week we will sort out how to allocate time in the next faculty meeting. We will likely have a called faculty meeting on 4/27 as well.
In the early Fall, the Clerk and Gwen will help orient the new Awards Committee to their work including criteria for the awards, etc. with the hope of having them develop a centralized list so students and faculty have a better sense of who is eligible for what and what the application processes are.
- For discussion: January Term and JTAC report
The report has gone to students and some are unhappy at the prospect that January Term may be going away. The faculty should have a chance to discuss the report so that discussion should appear on the agenda of one of our remaining faculty meetings.
Can we achieve some of the same goals in other ways since January Term, as is, hasn’t been successful? Perhaps May projects or other summer activities. It may be that the Communities of Practice component of the developing curriculum will meet those goals and serve to harness the positive energy and experiences many got out of the January Term.
- For discussion: Status and procedures for endowed award funds
It’s not clear what process is being followed to determine which awards are given and which ones aren’t based on financial solvency. Some people have never seen their award balances and some of these funds have been unwittingly overspent. With this information, the managers can fundraise from alumni if needed to keep these awards running. BannerWeb may be a good repository for this information, assuming the correct information about the corpus and the income can be found. We likely have to wait for the new VP of Advancement to be hired to get this information because Beth has been unable to get the information from Advancement or the Finance office. It’s also not clear who should get all that information once it’s available.
- For discussion: FAC process and standards changes
Dave produced a new summary document of the proposed changes. Is the format helpful? Yes, and the FAC is happy with it. The plan is to take it to faculty for discussion and/or approval on the 20th, but there are changes and some work on details that may be needed (e.g. appeal process also needs revision, new role and process for faculty development in reviews needs clarification). Clerk’s discussed the possibility of including untenured or recently tenured faculty on FAC. Continue discussion next week.
- For brief update: Service compensation model
Continued to next week.
The meeting closed in silence at 2:30.