Clerk’s Committee Minutes
Thursday January 25, 2018 8:30 am (January 18 canceled for snow)
In attendance: Frank Boyd (attended for first 25 minutes), Eva Lawrence, Dave Dobson (clerk), Alfonso Mancheño, Darryl Samsell, Jill Peterfeso, Don Smith (recording)
Regrets: Kathryn Shields
- The committee gathered in silence at 8:34 am to conduct its business.
- Don Smith was approved to take minutes.
- The minutes from January 9th were approved.
- The faculty meeting minutes from January 10 were found to accurately reflect our memories of the meeting.
- We reviewed a proposal from the CTIS program to revise their major and bring it more in line with other programs, and to add a minor in Cyber Network Security. We approved bringing the proposal before the corporate faculty at a future meeting.
- Nominating Committee is proposing to replace Craig Eilbacher as NCAA faculty representative with a non-tenure-track professor. Nothing in the faculty handbook prohibits such an appointment, and the parties involved are comfortable with this. We perceived no reason why this appointment should not be made.Nominating committee has requested there be a means for remote voting for Clerk. Although Quaker process normally requires that decisions be made solely by the members present in the meeting, voting for Clerk is already a deviation from Quaker process, so we perceived no reason why absent members should be disenfranchised, as long as there was some way to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the process. There could be a complication in trying to use Google forms (for example) to prevent multiple votes without revealing the identity of the voter.
- We discussed next steps for the process of developing the Edge plan for Learning Collaboratively. The proportion of profanity in the conversation was higher than normal. We are troubled by the ambiguity, the poor process, and the lack of feedback and leadership from Jane on what we’re trying to do. We are very disturbed at how much of the authority granted to the faculty by the handbook is being ignored and overridden. None of our questions have been answered, and we are constantly pushed into a reactionary role rather than a leadership role. At some point, control has to be returned to Faculty, so we can do our jobs. Our charge was to come up with a plan that was centered on “learning collaboratively”. We fulfilled our charge, but we were told that it’s not exciting enough. We find that this is an inherently bland topic, and there is no way to make it bold and exciting. We reject responsibility for the 12-3 plan, because we have rejected that plan. If the administration wants to unilaterally switch to a 12-3 calendar, then the responsibility for designing it is theirs. We want to shift the conversation from reactive to proactive. What can we say yes to? We discussed the possibility of simply passing the faculty plan and forcing the issue onto the administration to do whatever they want to do for the calendar. We could not come to clarity on how to move forward.
- We discussed the agenda for next week’s faculty meeting. We will request Nominating committee to rephrase their response to our revision of the faculty service requirement into the form of a proposal to be considered later. There is still time for revisions of faculty service to affect next year’s nominating slate. We decided that the Edge process was the most important issue before us, and that most of the other business can be addressed just as well in February. Dave will share important information with the trustees who will be attending the next meeting so they know the context in which the meeting’s discussion will occur. We discussed the approach we should follow for the Clerk election, specifically as to whether we should give candidates a chance to articulate their vision for the role of the Clerk, but we decided to leave that up to the candidates, as that is what has been done in the past.
- The meeting closed in silence at 10:01 am.