THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

T H E   S E N A T E   R E C O R D

 

Volume 34-----JANUARY 30, 2001-----Number 4

 

The Senate Record is the official publication of the University Faculty Senate of The Pennsylvania State University, as provided for in Article I, Section 9 of the Standing Rules of the Senate and contained in the Constitution, Bylaws, and Standing Rules of the University Faculty Senate, The Pennsylvania State University 2000-01.

 

The publication is issued by the Senate Office, 101 Kern Graduate Building, University Park, PA  16802 (Telephone 814-863-0221).  The Record is distributed to all Libraries across the Penn State system, and is posted on the Web at http://www.psu.edu/ufs under publications.  Copies are made available to faculty and other University personnel on request.

 

Except for items specified in the applicable Standing Rules, decisions on the responsibility for inclusion of matters in the publication are those of the Chair of the University Faculty Senate.

 

When existing communication channels seem inappropriate, Senators are encouraged to submit brief letters relevant to the Senate's function as a legislative, advisory and forensic body to the Chair for possible inclusion in The Senate Record. 

 

Reports which have appeared in the Agenda of the meeting are not included in The Record unless they have been changed substantially during the meeting or are considered to be of major importance.  Remarks and discussion are abbreviated in most instances.  A complete transcript and tape of the meeting is on file.

 

                                   TABLE OF CONTENTS

   I.  Final Agenda for January 30, 2001

       A.  Summary of Agenda Actions 

       B.  Minutes and Summaries of Remarks

II.  Enumeration of Documents

A.    Documents Distributed Prior to January 30, 2001   

B.    Attached

Door Handout – Undergraduate Education 

Committee - FYS

           Corrected Copy – Faculty Affairs Committee –

           Report on the Impact on Faculty Development

           Of Hiring Faculty off the Tenure Track

           Corrected Copy – Faculty Affairs Committee -

           Recommendations for Emeritus/Retired Faculty      

           Attendance    

III.  Tentative Agenda for February 27, 2001

FINAL AGENDA FOR JANUARY 30, 2001

 

A.  MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING -

      Minutes of the December 5, 2000, Meeting in The Senate Record 34:3

 

B.  COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SENATE - Senate Curriculum Report

                                                                              (Blue Sheets) of January 16, 2001

 

C.  REPORT OF SENATE COUNCIL - Meeting of January 16, 2001

 

D.  ANNOUNCEMENTS BY THE CHAIR -

 

E.  COMMENTS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY -

 

F.  FORENSIC BUSINESS -

 

G.  UNFINISHED BUSINESS -        

 

      Committees and Rules

           

            Revision of Constitution, Article II, Section 1 (Membership)

 

H.  LEGISLATIVE REPORTS -                                                                                             

 

      Committees and Rules

 

            Revision of Bylaws, Article III, Section 4

           

I.  ADVISORY/CONSULTATIVE REPORTS –

 

    Faculty Affairs

 

            Report on the Impact on Faculty Development of Hiring Faculty off the Tenure Track

 

            Recommendations for Emeritus/Retired Faculty

 

    University Planning

 

            Recommendation for Developing an Ecologically Sustainable University

 

J.  INFORMATIONAL REPORTS –

 

     University Planning

 

            A Grand Destiny, The Penn State Campaign, Rodney Kirsch,

                        Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations

 

     Admissions, Records, Scheduling and Student Aid

 

            Reserved Spaces Program

 

     Faculty Affairs

 

            UniSCOPE 2000 Presentation

 

     Senate Council

 

            University Faculty Census Report – 2001-2002

 

     Undergraduate Education

 

            Summary of Student Petitions by College, Unit or Location       

 

            1999-2000 First-Year Seminars: The Inaugural Year in Review

 

            Non-Returning Students Report, Spring 1998 to Fall 1998

 

     University Planning

 

            Long-term Debt and Debt Service of the University

             

K.  NEW LEGISLATIVE BUSINESS -

 

L.  COMMENTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE UNIVERSITY -

 

M.  ADJOURNMENT -

 

SUMMARY OF AGENDA ACTIONS

 

The Senate passed one Legislative Report:

 

Committees and Rules - "Revision of Constitution, Article II, Section 1 Membership).”   This report redefines the electorate of the Senate to include persons who are candidates for degrees at Penn State.  (See Record, page(s) 7-8 and Agenda Appendix "B.")

 

One report must lie on the table until the February 27, 2001, meeting because it involves a bylaws change:

 

Committees and Rules – “Revision of Bylaws, Article III, Section 4.”  See Record, page(s) 8 and Agenda Appendix “C.”)

The Senate passed three Advisory/Consultative Reports:

 

Faculty Affairs – “Report on the Impact on Faculty Development of Hiring Faculty off the Tenure Track.”  This report makes a series of 6 recommendations prompted by concerns over the potential negative effects of hiring faculty off the tenure track in both full-time or part-time positions.  (See Record, page(s) 9-13, Agenda Appendix "D," and Corrected Copy Record Appendix III.)

 

Faculty Affairs – “Recommendation for Emeritus/Retired Faculty.”  This report makes 9 recommendations to help build a greater rapport between the institution and Emeritus and retired faculty members to help the former faculty remain a part of the University community and to utilize their valuable expertise.    (See Record, page(s) 13-17, Agenda Appendix "E," and Corrected Copy Record Appendix IV.)

 

University Planning – “Recommendation for Developing an Ecologically Sustainable University.”   This report makes 10 recommendations as a follow up of the 1998 “The Penn State Indicators Report” which examined the institution in regard to sustainability indicators.  (See Record, page(s) 17-18 and Agenda Appendix "F.")

 

The Senate heard eight Informational Reports:

 

Admissions, Records, Scheduling and Student Aid – “Reserved Spaces Program.”  This document reports the reserved spaces comparisons over the span of time from 1984 through 2000.   (See Record, page(s) 21 and Agenda Appendix "G.")

 

Faculty Affairs – “UniSCOPE 2000 Presentation.”  This report recognizes the three missions of the University (teaching, research, and service) as a continuum of scholarship.  After this presentation the Committee on Faculty Affairs will examine the UniSCOPE report for implications in promotion and tenure process and report to the Senate.  (See Record, page(s) 21-28 and Agenda Appendix "H.")

 

Senate Council – “University Faculty Census Report – 2001-2002.”   This report was presented to establish the representation (number of Senators, by voting unit) on the 2001-2002 Senate.  (See Record, page(s) 28-29 and Agenda Appendix "I.")

 

Undergraduate Education – “Summary of Student Petitions by College, Unit or Location.”  The report provides a summary of student petitions for exceptions to the academic policies over the last two years and their sources by colleges and campuses.  (See Record, page(s) 29 and Agenda Appendix "J.")

 

Undergraduate Education – “1999-2000 First-Year Seminars: The Inaugural Year in Review.” This report presents an initial assessment of the First-Year Seminars and the plans for continuing assessment.  (See Record, page(s) 29-34 and Agenda Appendix "K.")

 

Undergraduate Education – “Non-Returning Students Report, Spring 1998 to Fall 1998.”  Each spring semester, a portion of student body chooses not to re-enroll for the following fall.  This report indicates the statistical information on these Non-Returning students. (See Record, page(s) 34-36 and Agenda Appendix "L.")

 

University Planning – “Long-term Debt and Debt Service of the University.”  This committee reviews (at intervals) the status of Penn State’s indebtedness, it size, purpose and the expanse of the debt service. This report indicates the conclusions reached by the committee.  (See Record, page(s) 36-37 and Agenda Appendix "M.")

 

University Planning – “A Grand Destiny: The Penn State Campaign.”   This was an oral informational report by Rodney Kirsch, Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations, and included a summary of the capital campaign that is presently underway.  (See Record, page(s) 18-20 and Agenda Appendix "N.")

 

The University Faculty Senate met on Tuesday, January 30, 2001, at 1:30 p.m. in Room 112 Kern Graduate Building with Cara-Lynne Schengrund, Chair, presiding.  One hundred and eighty-five Senators signed the roster. 

 

Chair Schengrund:  It is time to begin.

 

MINUTES OF THE PRECEDING MEETING

 

Moving to the minutes of the preceding meeting, The Senate Record, providing a full transcription of the proceedings of the December 5, 2000 meeting, was sent to all University Libraries, and posted on the University Faculty Senate's web page.  Are there any corrections or additions to this document?  All those in favor of accepting the minutes, please signify by saying, "aye."

 

Senators:  Aye.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Opposed?  The minutes are accepted.  Thank you.

 

COMMUNICATIONS TO THE SENATE

 

You have received the Senate Curriculum Report for January 16, 2001.  This document is posted on the University Faculty Senate's web page.

 

REPORT OF SENATE COUNCIL

 

Also, you should have received the Report of Senate Council for the meeting of January 16, 2001.  This is an attachment in The Senate Agenda for today's meeting.

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS BY THE CHAIR

 

Chair Schengrund:  The Faculty Advisory Committee met on Tuesday, January 16, 2001, and discussed the following topics:  we had a legislative update; we had a discussion of the aims of the Black coalition; we had a response by the president to legislative and advisory/consultative reports; we discussed the number of credits for baccalaureate degrees; we discussed the university academic calendar; we discussed degree audits; we discussed tuition discounts for faculty/staff dependents; and we discussed PSU principles.

 

The next meeting of FAC is scheduled for Tuesday, February 13, 2001.  If anyone has any items for FAC to address, please contact one of the Senate Officers, or one of the three elected FAC members; Peter Deines, Peter Rebane or Gordon De Jong.

 

The Senate Officers began their spring visits to colleges and units at University Park and the first one was on January 15, 2001 when we visited the College of Engineering.  We visited the College of Education yesterday (January 29, 2001) and we will be visiting the College of Earth & Mineral Sciences tomorrow morning (January 31, 2001).

 

The Senate Office has received several memos from the president regarding implementation of reports passed by the Senate.  Please refer to my announcements in the Senate Council minutes, attached to your Agenda packet, regarding the details on the implementation of these reports.

 

I did receive another memo from Dr. Spanier since the Senate Council meeting and the printing of those minutes.  This memo referred to a report presented last spring, March 28, 2000, by the Senate Committee on Research entitled “Report of the Committee on Postdoctoral Fellows.”  The president has “asked the Office of the Vice President for Research to take responsibility for oversight of all postdoctoral appointments and implementation of these recommendations.  To date, the recommended definition for a postdoctoral appointment has been adopted.  We are asking that all appointments be made with a letter of appointment following the guidelines spelled out in the report.  We have established a minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and scholars equivalent to the zero level recommended by the National Institutes of Health.  Postdoctoral fellows will continue to be included in all the professional development programs currently offered for our graduate students.  Additional actions will evolve over time.”

 

At this time I’d also like to update the Senate on what’s happened since our last Senate meeting with regards to the visit by the Coalition of Students.  After that Senate meeting, you received an email that was sent out by the Senate Office that indicated that we did meet with the students, and that we did sign a two-page document, not as officers of the Senate, but just as members of the University Faculty Senate.  Since that time one of the requests in that document was that the students be allowed to form a committee.  They would appoint the members of the committee and that that committee would meet to discuss what changes they might like to recommend be made to the curriculum.  The Senate Officers, especially John Nichols and John Moore have met with the students, and they’ve had three meetings.  The first two meetings were primarily to organize the committee.  One meeting was held before the holidays, and two meetings have been held since that time.  They’ve appointed several faculty members to the committee.  There are between eight and ten student members, and we are meeting with them and discussing possible agenda items with them.  There was an article in the Collegian that indicated that we were nearing…the way I read it, it indicated that we were nearing consensus on a mandated three-credit course on racism.  That article was somewhat premature, as those discussions have not come anywhere near reaching consensus on that point at this time.

 

COMMENTS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY

 

Chair Schengrund:  At this point in time I’d like to call on President Spanier to make comments.  As we begin our discussion of reports, I will remind you to please stand and identify yourself, and the unit you represent before addressing the Senate.

 

Graham B. Spanier, President:  Thank you Cara, and good afternoon everyone.  Next Tuesday, Governor Ridge will release his budget proposal for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  We are hopeful there will be a line in there suggesting an amount for Penn State.  We are even more hopeful that it will be a number we like.  Unfortunately, there has been no word whatsoever from the governor’s office this year about what we might expect, and given the state’s revenue collections for the month of December, which is the most recent month that they’ve reported on, of course we’re not optimistic that it will be a number that matches the request that we made earlier.  But we hope it will endeavor to come close.  Anyway, that will become known next Tuesday, and we’ll have an opportunity at the next Senate meeting to give you an update about where we stand, and what position the university might likely find itself in for this coming budget year which begins on July 1, 2001.  Meanwhile, between now and the time of our next Senate meeting I believe our appropriations hearings are scheduled.  What is the date of the next Senate meeting?  Is it February 27?

 

Chair Schengrund:  February 27, 2001.

 

President Spanier:  Okay, well I may not be here for that meeting because that is the day for our House appropriations hearing.  So I probably will be in Harrisburg for that.  I’d much prefer to be here.  Our Senate appropriations hearing is the day before, and for those of you who enjoy good theatre you could watch it on TV or catch the re-runs at some point after that.  But I will try to represent us as well as possible, and to make a strong case.

 

Meanwhile, unfolding on a somewhat earlier agenda than our appropriations, are discussions about how Pennsylvania will allocate its share of the tobacco settlement money.  And as you may know Penn State has a very keen interest in this multi-million dollar pot of funds because some portion of those funds are likely to be designated for health related research, and Penn State would be a key player we hope, in the receipt of some of those funds that would be targeted for health related research.  And there could be as much as several million dollars a year for the next 20 years associated with that project.  So I, and other colleagues in the Penn State administration are spending quite a bit of our time these days working on that particular issue, and we do hope and have some degree of confidence that members of the legislature will put some degree of emphasis on the research side of the picture, and that Penn State will be treated fairly in the distribution of those research funds.

 

I have on many occasions spoken to the Senate on my thoughts about the broad issue of intellectual property, ownership and protection for faculty members, and I have expressed my gratitude to I think, the three different Senate committees who have been working on that for a couple of years now.  I believe that we are getting very close to the point where that policy can come to the Faculty Senate for your approval.  I’m hopeful that that will occur at the next Senate meeting and I want to lend my strong encouragement to the passage of that document.  We feel at somewhat of a disadvantage right now, and a little bit awkward that we do not have a policy in place.  This is an area that is rapidly evolving, and almost certainly every couple of years we’re going to need to go back and take a look at that policy and make sure it’s up-to-date with the latest developments in technology and intellectual property.  But it’s important that we move that policy that’s been drafted forward as soon as possible.

 

I’ve had an opportunity recently to review with Provost Erickson and the deans and others, what I consider to be a remarkable success story, and I want to take this opportunity to particularly thank those of you who represent our campuses across the state.  I want to recognize and thank you for achieving what five years ago we hoped to achieve, but knew it would be tough to get there, and that’s namely the enrollment distribution pattern that has evolved at Penn State generally and particularly, as it affects our campuses.  We hoped through our reorganization of the then Commonwealth Educational System, that we would move towards providing greater upper-division baccalaureate degree opportunities at our campuses, give our faculty at those campuses greater opportunities to interact with upper-division students, to meet the needs of the communities and the regions in which our various campuses find themselves, to allow students who are place-bound, who work in the communities, or for other reasons simply prefer to finish their degrees on a campus other than University Park, an opportunity to do so.  And we expected our upper-division enrollments would gradually increase and that we would deploy more upper-division degrees without encroaching on the enrollments and the progress that other colleges and universities in the state wish to make, and that this would decrease the number of students competing for scarce spots on the University Park campus and allow more students whose first choice was the University Park campus to enroll here at the campus where we’ve been turning away a huge number of students.  All of these things have not only turned out to have occurred but really have exceeded our expectations.  The percentage of students who were transferring from a commonwealth campus to University Park five years ago, was 77 percent.  This past year it was 51 percent.  That is a huge shift.  So we will soon be in a mode where the majority of students starting at a campus other than University Park will probably finish their degrees there, and they are doing that by choice, of course because the option still fully exists for any student to move to another campus if he or she wishes.  This has been a shift of about 2,000 students over that period of time, and it’s a very positive development.  It has allowed our campuses to admit very high quality freshmen students to the campuses.  All of our campuses as far as I know have increased their retention rates and of course, all campuses have increased their graduation rates.  This is a very small number of provisional students compared to what we once had, and enrollments have increased at I believe all of our campuses as well, with the lion’s share of that enrollment increase being at the upper-division.  So it’s a very positive development all around.  It just didn’t happen on its own.  A lot of people did a lot of different things to bring that about, and I think it’s worth mentioning.

 

Just a few plugs that I would like to make before I take your questions.  This spring I noticed that both at University Park and at our other campuses we have an unusually rich array of performing arts events.  On this campus, productions that are being done under the sponsorship of the Center for the Performing Arts, productions of students in our theatre and musical theatre programs, concerts and recitals from our School of Music.  It is a wonderful opportunity to see what’s going on, on campus, and I must admit that I try to go to as many of these things as I can and I don’t see an awful lot of our faculty there.  And I don’t know if you are aware that all this is going on and I know everybody’s busy but take a look at these things.  They are usually published in the Intercom.  Try to get out to see some of them.  Probably most of you don’t know that I play the washboard in a Dixieland jazz band.  I was performing in Pittsburgh this past Saturday night, and in the same jazz venue where we were performing was one of the great trombonists in the United States who was playing there that evening on another floor.  He and his manager mentioned that they are doing a tour of nine of our commonwealth campuses during the month of February.  And I saw the schedule there, and it is part of a program we have, that funds performances at all of our campuses.  So I encourage those of you on the campuses to get out and see talent like that as well.

 

I’d also like to make another plug.  One thing that I try to do absolutely every weekend, either on Friday or Saturday night is stop in for at least an hour or two to attend the Late Nite Penn State events at the HUB.  We’re up to about 5,000 students a weekend participating in those events.  And I think in the two and a half years I’ve been doing that each weekend, I’ve seen a total of about three faculty members who have appeared.  I wish that you could go out and just see what is happening and what’s evolved with the social life on campus, the programming that’s available and what it means to the students.  Usually you have about six different kinds of entertainment available to them at any given time--food service and the entertainment going well into the wee hours, past the bedtime of most faculty members.  But the other thing that will be happening this spring is, we will gradually be opening up as parts of it are completed, the new expanded and renovated White Building, which will be tied into the Late Nite Penn State program where 24-hours a day on the weekend, students can have fitness activities available to them and all kinds of other fun stuff, and refreshments and food service available there as well.  So it’s a great thing to get out and see.  And the ultimate thing that I would encourage all of you to think about seeing and I know many of you have done this once along the way, (and I wish everyone would just do it once) is to stop in at sometime during the Dance Marathon, which is coming up in couple of weeks.  It starts at 7:00 p.m. on a Friday night and goes until 7:00 p.m. on a Sunday night.  Go and support the students who are out there and see what goes on.  The massive amount of effort that thousands of our students put into this and the product of what they do and the thousands of people who come to watch them, it’s really quite amazing.  And they have been raising over $3 million a year for the Four Diamonds Fund at the Hershey Medical Center.  It is the largest student run philanthropy in the world.  It is something we should be very proud of and I hope we would see some faculty support for that.  I should point out that many of our campuses are involved in Dance Marathon now, and have parallel programs and fund raising efforts going on at the same time.  And that’s been one of the areas of the most rapid increase in support of the Dance Marathon is what we’ve been seeing on our campuses.  So if you happen to be on a campus where there’s some significant associated activity, I would encourage you to lend your support as well.  Okay, with those comments then I’d like to open it up for your questions and comments.

 

Howard G. Sachs, Penn State Harrrisburg:  I’m sorry to raise it because I know this is your favorite subject, it’s a parking issue.  It was brought to my attention by one of my colleagues at Harrisburg, but it concerns many of the Senators who come from campuses other than University Park who have meetings such as the Senate, the Senate committees in particular, this one was for Graduate Council meeting.  They encountered some resistance parking in the parking garage closest to Kern.  In fact, one of them was told to go park out by the stadium and take the bus.  Well, for many of my colleagues coming up here is at least a two hour drive and a two hour drive back if you’re teaching before or after as I am today, it’s a bit of a chore.  Both of these colleagues, one from Hershey, one from Harrisburg were so incensed by the reception that they got that they offered to turn around and go home rather than attend the meeting.  There must be a simple solution, such as a one-day parking permit for the parking garage that would solve this issue.  Because it really does make the campus up here less than inviting.

 

President Spanier:  I’m sorry you’ve had that experience.  On the one hand I should confess that when I first got involved in university administration and was asking leaders in the field nationally for advice they gave me lots of advice and said, “by the way there is only one issue you should never get involved with and that’s parking.”  Once word is out that you are willing to entertain questions about parking you will be the appeal mechanism for all parking tickets.  But seriously, I’m troubled by what you have to say.  We should certainly do our best to welcome not only visitors to campus, but our own employees.  Parking is a complex matter and if something is not working with regard to your attendance at meetings on this campus then we need to get that taken care of.  What I’d like to do is to ask that any of you who have encountered parking related issues in fulfilling your university duties, send all of those complaints to George Bugyi.  And then George and the members of the Faculty Advisory Committee can kind of figure out what the issues are and bring them to the next meeting with Rodney Erickson and me and we will then at that point get the parking authorities involved and try to fix whatever is wrong.  But seriously, if you wouldn’t mind George, it would be helpful just for George to have that information because I mean one thing can go wrong with one person and it may just have been a mistake.  But if ten people had exactly the same problem, and if ten people had the same problem on three different dates then there is a dysfunction in the system and we ought to fix it.

 

James E. May, DuBois Campus:  Just to follow up on that.  It seems that today I was told there is a policy of the local parking that those attending the Senate meeting in Kern are not allowed to park there anyway.  They should come with a floating permit.  So one very specific initiative might be that Senators coming from non-University Park locations for the Senate might be allowed to park on the ramp right outside Kern Building.

 

President Spanier:  Okay, you got that, George?  Other questions, besides parking?  All the hands went down.

 

Tramble T. Turner, Penn State Abington:  President Spanier you recapped a number of successes, many of them associated with the HUB, like the Late Nite program or “THON,” which indeed a lot of locations have lent their support to.  Using the example of the newspaper readership program, which had great success at UP, and then I think, three years later it was indeed available in Abington and been quite a success I’m glad to say, at our location.  I wonder if that might be a model for similar programs--Late Nite at HUB at other locations?  Partly I’m asking whether those programs at HUB are funded out of student tuition, student affair funds but principally for programs here at UP, and if perhaps some support might be lent to similar programs at other locations?

 

President Spanier:  Well, yes certainly that could happen.  A good deal of the support for the Late Nite program actually comes from student fees that are attached to each campus.  And all of those kinds of student fees go directly to the campus and can be decided on locally.  Now at some of our campuses there are variations in programs.  It varies a lot depending upon whether we have residential...whether it’s a residential campus or not, and the demographic profile of the students.  At some of our campuses, there wouldn’t be a very strong interest in that, but at other campuses there would be.  So I would be supportive of that happening anywhere at which the students themselves, and the local student affairs people thought that that would be beneficial.  And I’m a great advocate of it.  I’ve seen what it has done on this campus for a lot of our students.  It still hasn’t reached all of our students, but for many it is a very positive development.

 

Brian B. Tormey, Penn State Altoona:  As you were plugging your jazz thing, I thought that if you could put me in touch with your agent, I might be able to get you a really closer venue than Pittsburgh.

 

President Spanier:  Okay, well if there were more time I’d play more often actually.  It is a lot of fun.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Are there any other questions?  Seeing none, thank you.

 

FORENSIC BUSINESS

 

None

 

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

 

Chair Schengrund:  We have no forensic business but we do have some unfinished business.  And the item that was left from the last time was a Revision of the Constitution, Article II, Section 1(Membership) and it’s found in Appendix “B” of the Agenda.  And this report basically is proposing a Constitutional change.  It was on our Agenda last month for discussion, and then lay on the table until this meeting.  If there are further questions, Deidre Jago will be happy to answer them.     

SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMITTEES AND RULES

Revision of Constitution, Article II, Section 1(Membership)

 

Deidre Jago, Chair, Senate Committee on Committees and Rules

 

Deidre E. Jago, Hazleton Campus:  Thank you, Cara-Lynne.  Good afternoon.  Are there any questions that I could try to answer for anybody? 

 

Chair Schengrund:  If not, all those in favor of the proposed change, please signify by saying, "aye."

 

Senators:  Aye.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any opposed, "nay"?  The aye’s have it, the motion is carried.  Thank you.  We have a legislative report, and again this is from the Senate Committee on Committees and Rules.  And it deals with a Revision to Bylaws, Article III, Section 4 and this is the deadline for reporting the names of newly elected and newly appointed Senators to the Senate Office and it’s found in Appendix “C” and Deidre Jago will present this report as well.

 

LEGISLATIVE REPORTS

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON COMMITTEES AND RULES

 

Revision to Bylaws, Article III, Section 4

 

Deidre Jago, Chair, Senate Committee on Committees and Rules

 

Deidre E. Jago:  Basically this is not changing any kind of procedure that the Senate has requested in the past.  All this legislation is doing is putting a time frame into the Bylaws of our Constitution so that people understand that the names of the new Senators need to be sent to the Senate Office fairly early.  In the past this has been something that has dragged on, and in order to staff committees, in order to find out who possibly can represent various constituencies, we need to have this information.  So this will have to sit on the floor of the Senate for another month because it is a change in the Bylaws.  But what we are asking is that these be reported to the Senate Office by the first Friday in February in order to be reported to the Senate at the last regular meeting of the academic year.  So as you think about this, even if you would choose not to institute a regular date into our Bylaws, it’s not too early for you to be thinking about these upcoming elections.  They need to happen right away.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Are there any questions?  If not, thank you and this will lay on the table until the February 27, 2001 meeting.  Moving on to advisory/consultative reports, the first one is from the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs.  And this is a Report on the Impact on Faculty Development of Hiring Faculty off the Tenure Track.  The report can be found in Appendix “D” and Louis Milakofsky and…is Margaret coming?  Okay, and Margaret Goldman will present the report.

 

ADVISORY/CONSULTATIVE REPORTS

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON FACULTY AFFAIRS

Report on the Impact on Faculty Development of Hiring Faculty off the Tenure Track

Louis Milakofsky, Chair, Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs

 

Louis Milakofsky, Berks-Lehigh Valley College:  Thank you.  Over the past few years the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs has been concerned with the hiring increases and use of fixed-term faculty throughout the university.  In many cases these faculty have contributed significantly in the area of teaching, service and in some cases scholarship and research.  But too often they are considered undervalued by the university--second class citizens if you will.  The Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs was charged with determining how this affects faculty development and the academic climate.  We now report our recommendation to the Senate.  I’d like to introduce Margaret Goldman who is the subcommittee chair, who has spent many hours working on this report, and who will first list some editorial changes to the report and then answer some questions.

 

Margaret B. Goldman, College of Medicine:  Just three small changes.  On the bottom of page one, the second sentence from the bottom should read, “FT-II, University policies and guidelines pertinent to the position”.  Scratch out “are”.  Then under Attachment 1 where it says in capital letters, “SURVEY OF TENURE TRACK FACULTY” that should come following the paragraph that starts, “The group felt policies,” rather than preceding it.  It should go down one paragraph.  And under Attachment 2 explaining benefits.  The third line up from the bottom of the first paragraph, “members” scratch out “on,” “not on the tenure track”.  But basically we developed three separate questionnaires that were distributed by all of the members of the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs at their respective campuses.  Then the answers to the surveys were summarized and you have the summary of those surveys in Attachment 1.  The conclusion that we came to is that we really wanted to develop a series of recommendations that would allow the part-time faculty and the full-time faculty who are not on the tenure track to become more inclusive in the university.  So the essence of the recommendations is really two…we have many policies in place and to really communicate those policies better, to try to develop a means that there will be a better understanding on the part of these faculty of what is expected of them and what they can expect from the university.  And so that was the basis of many of the recommendations to try to accomplish that, and we hope that that will work.  Are there questions?

 

Peter D. Georgopulos, Delaware Campus:  In your third recommendation, the last sentence.  It starts off by saying, “Adequate resources should be allocated to support newly hired faculty in accordance with his/her qualifications, experience, and expected contribution to the unit”.  When you say resources, are you talking specifically about salary here?

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  I think that this has to be determined by each unit.  But what we are finding is, that at some of the campuses individuals might not really have all the things that they should have to carry out their functions--whether it’s office space.  We have not specifically addressed salary, we’ve left it more general.

 

Peter D. Georgopulos:  Because I’d like to add the phrase, “and marketplace conditions,” at the end of that sentence.  That we’re not locked into a salary for a part-timer, which is fixed by a college.  I think we have market conditions which dictate that, and if you are in campus “a” and wanting to hire a historian who may cost you “x” dollars because of the competition nearby.  Whereas, if you’re in campus “b” isolated, you may not have to pay as much.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  So, you would add at the end of three…the sentence would read, “Adequate resources should be allocated to support newly hired faculty in accordance with his/her qualifications, experience, and expected contribution to the unit and marketplace conditions”.

 

Peter D. Georgopulos:  Correct.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  Is there a discussion on that point?

 

Dwight Davis, College of Medicine:  I think I would probably need a bit more clarification of what implications that would mean for the individual units in terms of cost or resource allocation.  Maybe it’s just that I don’t understand what the meaning would be, and how that would impact on this as it presently reads in terms of resource allocation for the unit.  I’m just asking where is the clarification?

 

Peter D. Georgopulos:  My concern is that we could hire somebody that fills a slot for a course for instance, and that person might not have the qualifications, but we are desperate to get somebody in there, and we ruin that entire semester because that person did not really fulfill the obligation that we were looking for.  If we’re going to be undercutting the competition we’re not going to get good faculty coming in here, and teaching courses for us on a part-time basis.  And my concern is that the number of part- timers that are teaching for us at the non-UP campuses are going up, and this probably is putting pressure on the administration to put resources in there and I think they’re really going to need it.

 

Louis Milakofsky:  I know this issue dealing with salary is quite different.  I know at Berks-Lehigh Valley we’re finding that universities and colleges surrounding Berks-Lehigh Valley campuses it’s becoming more and more difficult to hire fixed-term faculty, especially fixed-term II because we can’t match the salary issue.  So I know that’s a concern of our particular college.  I’m not sure just by recognizing it whether anything can be done about it but I would hate to see a course or several courses go by the wayside because we can’t find faculty.  I know on another…on a side…not a side issue but directly to this issue, the provost of the university has convened a special working group called fixed-term II.  And I asked him specifically to look at the salary issue in light of the demands for fixed-term faculty.  We’re not the only university and college which has an ever increasing demand to hire fixed-term faculty.  I don’t see a problem in including that statement but let’s keep it general enough that we still allow the colleges some latitude in hiring.

 

Jean Landa Pytel, College of Engineering:  I guess I’m missing something.  I don’t see the point where your comment would not be included in the present wording of the recommendation.  Adequate means adequate, to get the best person…pertains to not just salary, but office space, office support and all that kind of stuff as well.  So adequate I would imagine would be whatever it takes.

 

Peter D. Georgopulos:  My first question was what does resources mean here?  And that’s why I say to pin this down even more so, to put that phrase in there about marketplace conditions.

 

Louis Milakofsky:  I don’t see a problem in including that.  It doesn’t go to a specific dollar amount that either a department or a college would feel so inhibited that they can’t do something on a basis whereby they should fulfill the course.  Again, adequate resources is a very general term.  The particular report is meant to be general, because we don’t know the particulars of each and every college and each and every department.  And we’d like to keep it open enough, but I think people understand the market value of a faculty member.

 

Caroline D. Eckhardt, College of the Liberal Arts:  I think we should leave that statement as it stands.  Again, I don’t think we can legislate salary, and the question of how it applies to tenure track as well as non-tenure track and the staff as well as the faculty, that’s another whole issue.  As I read the statements here, it pertains to providing adequate support for faculty who have been newly hired.  That’s the way, and I think we ought to leave it that way.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  And I just wonder whether that is something that should be addressed more by the benefits committee. 

 

Robert Secor, Vice-Provost:  I want to support that comment.  In fact, my sense in the beginning of the discussions with the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs was that statement really was caused by how do we support people who are here.  More appropriate…something like travel support, not anything about salary.  Adding the phrase marketplace conditions doesn’t always work.  Marketplace conditions in industry?  I don’t know what that really refers to?

 

Jamie M. Myers, College of Education:  I’ve never heard a friendly amendment discussed this long.  I call for the question.

 

Chair Schengrund:  It wasn’t actually moved and seconded, so I think it’s just a point of discussion.

 

Patricia A. Book, Outreach and Cooperative Extension:  Under recommendation number four where you speak to the issue of promoting to achievement.  It’s come back to be specifically guidelines for promotion.  Could you elaborate on what you were thinking there?  Are you speaking about promotion from lecturer to senior lecturer… 

 

Louis Milakofsky:  That’s one avenue, right…

 

Patricia A. Book:  I’d be interested in what your thoughts were?

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  Our thoughts were to leave it very general.  There are some guidelines about promotion that are listed in the recommendation.  But to point it out in hopes that we could encourage the faculty development of these part-time faculty.  The intent was really to leave it general and encourage development.

 

Douglas K. Brown, Penn State Altoona:  I’ve just got an editorial on Attachment 12, second paragraph down the third line up…

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  Attachment 12?

 

Douglas K. Brown:  I’m sorry, Attachment 2.  Really the sentence that starts fourth line from the bottom of the second paragraph, “Fixed-Term I faculty classified as exempt with no summer duties cannot receive 9/12ths of their annual salary each month”.  Does that mean that tenure track faculty can receive 9/12ths of their annual salary?  Shouldn’t that be one thought?

 

Chair Schengrund:  This is from the…

 

Louis Milakofsky:  This is a direct quote as information from the Senate Committee on Faculty Benefits, so if they want to speak to it, they are more than welcome to have the podium.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  I think it’s 1/12th…

 

Chair Schengrund:  Len, do you want to respond to that question?

 

Leonard J. Berkowitz, York Campus:  That’s last year’s Faculty Benefits Committee.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  Shouldn’t it be 1/12th?  It should be 1/12.

 

Louis Milakofsky:  It should be 1/12, yes.

 

Roy B. Clariana, Penn State Great Valley:  I’d like to go to the first page, recommendation number two.  I have two questions.  One is, “In its strategic plan, each academic unit should describe its goals…”.  Would existing strategic plans have to be then updated?  Or would this be something that goes forward with the next strategic plan for each academic unit?  And then second, by goals I would interpret that to mean simply having employment.  However, would a better word be “purpose” of hiring full-time or part-time?

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  I think that would mean for the ongoing strategic…for the newly developed strategic plans.  And actually it does mean goals rather than purpose, because you’ve got to think of how you’re going to utilize this particular component of your faculty in terms of the whole academic mission and the culture of that unit.  So I think it should be goals and not purpose.  Any other questions?

 

Beno Weiss, College of the Liberal Arts:  I was wondering, is there a certain point where these FT faculty members actually acquire their faculty tenure after a certain number of years?  Have you considered that?

 

Louis Milakofsky:  The answer to that question is no, they are non-tenured…they are on the non-tenured track.  However, if a position is opened up they may apply for a tenure track position in accordance with the guidelines set out for hiring tenure track faculty.

 

Beno Weiss:  Isn’t there a fine line?  Let’s say someone who has been doing this for 20 years and some people have.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  That’s correct.  Some people have been doing it for a long time.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Are there any other comments or questions?  Seeing no more questions, I’d like to call for a vote.  All those in favor, please signify by saying, "aye."

 

Senators:  Aye.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any opposed, "nay"?  The aye’s have it, the motion is carried.  Thank you very much.  The next item on the Agenda is another report from the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs and that is Recommendations for Emeritus/Retired Faculty.  This is found in Appendix “E” and again, Louis Milakofsky will present the report along with Valerie Stratton and they’ll be there to answer questions.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON FACULTY AFFAIRS

Recommendations for Emeritus/Retired Faculty

Louis Milakofsky, Chair, Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs

 

Louis Milakofsky:  Just a bit of introduction.  Since 1999 the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs has been discussing the status of emeritus (retired) faculty based on part on our view that they may be a lost valuable resource in the university--in many cases forgotten about.  Also, articles which have recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education dealing with retired and emeritus faculty, and in particular, a study done by the University of Iowa dealing with emeritus faculty.  Thus, the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs decided to conduct a pilot study of emeritus/retired Penn State faculty.  Our recommendations in this report are based in part by these results of the study, and our experiences dealing with these faculty.  I’d like to introduce Valerie Stratton who has authored this report.

 

Valerie N. Stratton, Penn State Altoona:  Well, as Lou indicated this is really a national problem and it came to our attention and concern that Penn State really ought to investigate this.  Again, we saw it as having two sides:  that the university often loses out on the expertise and abilities of the retired/emeritus faculty, and then the emeritus and retired faculty feel very much neglected and rejected.  So we did conduct this study and it was really a little more than a pilot study.  We did generate a random sample of 300 names from the lists of retired faculty and received a very good percentage return--170 out of the 300.  Actually, there were about another 10 or 12 surveys that could not be used partly because the person was no longer alive and the name was still on the list.  Things of that sort which were unfortunate in some cases.

 

Senators:  Laughter.

 

Louis Milakofsky:  On our part.

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  It was also unfortunate the person receiving the survey had to answer me telling me that the person was not around.  But there were a lot of strong feelings expressed in these surveys.  People went beyond simply responding.  They wrote thank you, thank you for finally doing something.  There were a lot of people that were very happy and very satisfied with their situation, but many that were very dissatisfied.  Thus, our recommendations came from that kind of concern we saw.  The summary of the responses to the surveys are provided as appendices to our report along with the actual survey we sent out.  And our recommendations we think will try to accommodate these issues and these concerns by benefiting both the university, and by benefiting the faculty.  We saw very few situations where we needed to distinguish between emeritus and other retired faculty.  The emeritus rank is pretty much a courtesy label.  It does not have too many benefits associated with it as it stands at the present time.  And when it comes to making use of the abilities and so forth of retirees, we did not see emeritus rank as being any kind of essential criterion.  So any questions about our recommendation or our report?

 

Adrian J. Wanner, College of the Liberal Arts:  I have been told that departments are not allowed to hire their own retired faculty as fixed-term II.  Is that true?  And if so, what’s the rationale for that?

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  That’s a matter of not being able to pay a salary to a retiree in Pennsylvania.  That’s a state…

 

Adrian J. Wanner:  But is it a state law…?

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  …state law with retirement benefits.  So that’s why we had to be very careful with the wording, that we did not talk about providing salary per se.  Trying to provide some compensation but we can’t have it be called a salary.

 

Alan W. Scaroni, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences:  Let me ask a question from a department head perspective.  The implication in the report is that there are a lot of department heads who for some unknown reason are not taking advantage of these highly qualified emeritus faculty.  My question is, because there are two sides to every story, what attempt was made to survey the department heads to find out if there was any disagreement between who they considered to be well qualified emeritus faculty to continue teaching?  Those of the emeritus faculty thought that they were well qualified to be teaching?  This is in no way a criticism of emeritus faculty, I’m just wondering what your feedback has been from department heads?

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  No we did not gather information from department heads and we’re not suggesting that departments need to make use of every retiree, obviously.  We specify that it should be people that are perceived as qualified.  We would like to see though, that all retirees be kept in the loop to some extent.  Not utilized, necessarily as teachers if a department head doesn’t see fit to do that, obviously that’s not to be done.  But at least to make them feel welcome within department activities.  But, no we did not survey department heads.

 

Leonard J. Berkowitz:  In this case I speak as Chair of the Senate Committee on Faculty Benefits.  Obviously, some of the recommendations are specifically concerned with benefit issues and I did want the Senate as a whole to note that the Senate Committee on Faculty Benefits did provide its advice to the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs.  But let me talk a bit about number five.  Billie Willits has not returned has she?  Okay, now I’m speaking for the Office of Human Resources and that is just to provide some information.  At this point there is no money to provide an additional person to have somebody in charge of retired faculty and staff issues.  So if we’re going to do what is recommended here it means changing what is now being done and Billie asked me to convey the following.  At this point there are four people who are specifically designated to deal with these issues.  If we designate one, she thinks it will lessen the efficiency of the office because that means people calling in at the same time will have to wait until that one person gets free, that’s one issue.  The second is, if the person is out of the office, of course you have to wait for that person to get back.  Now, with four that never is the case.  The third is many retired faculty know one or another of these better than another and some prefer dealing with one person, some prefer dealing with another person.  So, those are her reasons for being hesitant about endorsing number five.  She is absolutely in favor, as is our committee of the ideas and goals involved in all these recommendations, including number five.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Did she give you an amendment to propose?

 

Leonard J. Berkowitz:  No, this was our…what we sent back to the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs who chose to go forward with it anyway.  If anything they would suggest is not being a good recommendation, number five is not.  Because we can’t depend on that.

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  Okay, our reasoning behind this one is not that there be only one person doing this but that there be one person who coordinates it and is kind of in charge.  Because it turned out that people at different locations are getting different kinds of information.  There did not seem to be some coordination among the people apparently that are providing this kind of information.  We wanted to ensure that there is some oversight of this kind of information provided by having a person…one person responsible that we think would ensure that.  So we don’t want to take away one from four but simply designate one of those four as kind of the supervisor.

 

Barton W. Browning, College of the Liberal Arts:  It seems to me that it might be simplest for us to change the singular to a plural and talk about officers.  That would get away from the problem of having to designate one particular person.  I’d like to make a friendly amendment to modify that to change officer to a plural and make the appropriate wording to that.

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  But there already are four officers designated for this, I think you said?  To coordinate?  So it would read, “designate an Employee Benefits officers…?”

 

Tramble T. Turner:  Valerie, considering what you said about the goal of oversight.  Perhaps rather than referring to four as officers simply having Employee Benefits ombudsperson might carry the theme that you are pursuing.  They wouldn’t have to take all the calls but then they would be the designated person to resolve what’s mentioned in the last sentence of that section.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  Since the problem has been coordination of dissemination of information what if you said that, “The Office of Human Resources should designate an Employee Benefits officer to coordinate dissemination of information,” then keep the rest the same.  “This person should ensure that faculty at all university locations have equal access to information and problem resolution concerning all retirement benefits.”

 

Chair Schengrund:  Are you making that a motion?

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  If Valerie thinks that would work, I’ll make it as a motion.

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  How would that suit the Senate Committee on Faculty Benefits do you think?

 

Leonard J. Berkowitz:  Now I think I speak for the Office of Human Resources.

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  That would suit us very well.

 

Leonard J. Berkowitz:  I want to hear it again.

 

Margaret B. Goldman:  Okay, then I’ll make it as a motion that we change the wording to say, “The Office of Human Resources should designate an Employee Benefits officer to coordinate dissemination of information to retirees,” and will leave the rest the same.

 

Valerie N. Stratton:  To accomplish the goals of what we wanted to accomplish, we could make that as a friendly amendment unless anyone has any serious objections to that.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Are there any other comments or questions?  If not, all those in favor of the emeritus/retired faculty report from the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs, please signify by saying, "aye."

 

Senators:  Aye.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any opposed, "nay"?  The aye’s have it, the motion is carried.  The next advisory/consultative report comes from the Senate Committee on University Planning and that is the report on Recommendation for Developing an Ecologically Sustainable University.  It’s found in Appendix “F,” and Peter Deines will present the report.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNIVERSITY PLANNING

 

Recommendation for Developing an Ecologically Sustainable University

 

Peter Deines, Chair, Senate Committee on University Planning

 

Peter Deines, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences:  Thank you very much, Cara-Lynne.  The report before you is an advisory and consultative report, which recommends the incorporation of long-term goals in the strategic planning efforts of the institution.  The report resulted from the discussions the planning committee had with Professor Uhl in the spring semester and Professor Uhl is here this afternoon with us.  As the university is embarking on a new round of strategic planning, it was a unanimous opinion of the Senate Committee on University Planning that it was important that the long-term planning for the institution include goals for the attainment of an ecologically sustainable university.  It’s the adoption of these general long-term goals that is the purpose of this particular report.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Are there any questions for Peter or comments on this report?  I’ll ask for a vote, all those in favor of this report, please signify by saying, "aye."

 

Senators:  Aye.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any opposed, "nay"?  The aye’s have it, the motion is carried.  Thank you, all.  We do have a number of informational reports and before we start on them I’d like to remind the Senate that Senate Council had voted to change the order of the Agenda, so that the Grand Destiny report which is being presented by the Senate Committee on University Planning will be the first report given under the listing of informational reports.  So, the report on A Grand Destiny, The Penn State Campaign is listed in Appendix “N” and Peter Deines will introduce Rodney Kirsch.

 

INFORMATIONAL REPORTS

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNIVERSITY PLANNING

 

A Grand Destiny, The Penn State Campaign

 

Peter Deines, Chair, Senate Committee on University Planning

 

Peter Deines:  Thank you Cara-Lynne.  At the October meeting of the Senate Committee on University Planning, Rodney Kirsch, the Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations presented a very impressive update on the status of the Penn State Grand Destiny Campaign.  The committee asked Rod whether he would be willing to share his information with the Faculty Senate, and he graciously agreed.  I’m very pleased to introduce to you Rodney Kirsch, Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations.

 

Rodney P. Kirsch, Development & Alumni Relations:  Thank you, Peter.  Good afternoon.  I’m pleased to be with you today, and very much welcome an opportunity to inform the Senate on the progress of the Capital Campaign.  Private giving to the university has doubled in just the last four years here at Penn State.  Since the Grand Destiny campaign began on July 1, 1996, we've realized an outstanding increase of 106 percent.  This is a direct result of several converging dynamics, in my opinion.  First the energy and involvement of faculty, staff and volunteers; secondly, a laser-like focus and emphasis on major gifts; and thirdly, a very robust economy that has benefited not just Penn State, but all of us.  Private support of $171 million in fiscal year 2000, represents only actual gifts received.  The total of gifts and new documented pledge commitments this past fiscal year, which will be paid over time, amount to $200 million.  The campaign is seven years in length, and is scheduled to end June 30, 2003.  With 64 percent of the time elapsed, we have reached 89 percent of our goal, or raised $886 million in gifts and commitments towards our $1 billion campaign goal.  Currently, there are only 17 American universities with efforts of this magnitude.  To recap for a moment, when we look in detail at the campaign's featured objectives, we see good progress.  A combination of generous gifts, and very unique program of ideas by the deans and their faculty, have led the program support category to surpass its goal at this time with $154 million raised, against a goal of $122 million.  There has been more than $265 million raised for undergraduate and graduate students.  We have also generated $128 million to support faculty primarily in chairs, professorships and fellowships.  A major goal of the Grand Destiny campaign is to increase the university's endowment.  We are making good progress.  Our initial goal was to add $474 million to Penn State's endowment, which was roughly accounting for half of the entire campaign goal.  As of December 31, 2000, we are over 80 percent of our way there, having achieved $388 million.  More than $60 million or about 35 percent of all the voluntary support last year went directly into our endowment.  This is money we can use now, it’s not pledged funds we’re waiting for sometime in the future.  This $60 million is nearly a four-fold increase in endowment fund-raising from what we would compare it to four years ago.  About four out of every five dollars committed to the campaign is current outright support.  The funds are already at work or will be in the next five years or so.  We are fortunate to have so many gifts coming to us so immediately.  This is relatively atypical for a campaign that’s weighted so heavily toward endowment where many times most gifts are of a deferred basis because we don’t need them for intensive capital purposes.  Over 1,000 new endowments for student scholarships, graduate fellowships, faculty chairs and professorships, and other academic programs have been created since the campaign began.  Thus, in the history of Penn State, roughly one-third of all endowments have been created in just the last four years.  The Faculty and Staff Campaign has generated a terrific response.  Campaign commitments from Penn State employees to date have reached $25.3 million, already exceeding our what we thought was a very ambitious goal of $20 million, we have participation of 46 percent across the entire university, which is approaching our goal of 50 percent.  This level of internal support resonates very strongly with alumni and friends who are asked to support Penn State, and it is an accomplishment that few of our peer institutions would come close to matching.  I just want to give you a few examples of the kind of participation that we’ve had.  Penn State Great Valley, and Penn State Worthington Scranton have over 80 percent participation.  Penn State Wilkes-Barre has 98 percent participation.  And I want to take just two seconds to brag about my own area, since we live with this effort it seems to us day and night, the Office of University Development and Alumni Relations leads the way with 99 percent participation.  I don’t know who that one person is and I guess I’ll just keep guessing.  I want to publicly thank Gerry and Liz Susman, faculty campaign co-chairs, for their tremendous leadership.  They have led a team of volunteers with committees in every major academic and administrative unit.  We look ahead, even beyond the campaign, to continue and even improve the generous support Penn State now receives.  In doing so, we have identified several areas of concentration and have already started to develop new programs to tap into these potential resources.  I want to mention just three of them briefly.  The purpose of the Women in Philanthropy Initiative is to elevate the awareness of staff, faculty and volunteers in leadership roles in the campaign to the emerging role of women in philanthropy at Penn State and across the nation.  Focus groups, telephone surveys, and special on-campus programs like Penn State Today have been a part of these efforts.  Young alumni--those who have graduated from Penn State within the last ten years--represent fully 30 percent of our alumni body, and we need to engage this group early.  They will be a continued focus of our Annual Fund efforts.  We need to get this group in the habit of giving during their early years after college, when their experiences are fresh and vivid and their connections to Penn State are still strong.  In the coming year, the Annual Fund will be reaching out to this audience in increasingly targeted and innovative ways through a combination of telephone, mail, and electronic communication, as well as the recruitment of a Discover Group comprised of graduates from this era.  The Wall Street Initiative is a joint activity of the New York Regional Campaign Committee and The Smeal College of Business Administration Campaign Committee.  Lead volunteers have been recruited in 13 Wall Street firms to assist in contacting and engaging their colleagues.  In addition to fund-raising among a currently very affluent group, this activity will provide a network useful to students and graduates in finding internships and careers within the financial services industry.  Given the steady progress being made in the campaign and the fact that there have been new, emerging opportunities since our original goals were established in 1996, the college deans were asked this past summer by President Spanier and Provost Erickson to consider a revision of their individual college goals.  During this process, no minimum or maximum targets or percentage increases were mandated to the colleges.  We want any new objectives to be driven by real academic priorities and specific program ambitions, rather than some arbitrary dollar target.  Individual sessions involving the dean, volunteer campaign chair, the director of development in the unit and, in numerous cases, the provost were held to discuss goals in each college.  Having personally attended many of these sessions, several points came clear to me.  First, our volunteer leadership demonstrated strong ownership in the future direction of the university and this campaign.  Second, we have a very strong group of deans who are truly interested in and committed to fund-raising.  Third, the deans and their faculty collectively see private support as a vital element to enhancing the quality in their colleges.  Over the course of the winter and spring, an external assessment seeking the opinions of major donors and volunteers will be conducted to ascertain the viability of adding new objectives to our current efforts as we enter the final two years of our campaign.  This analysis will be completed this coming May 2001.  In closing, I wish to thank the members of the Faculty Senate for your time and your support and encouragement and for your leadership in advancing the academic reputation of Penn State.  Clearly, Penn State's reputation amongst its alumni and friends makes a tremendous difference in the story we tell prospective donors and in their motivation and willingness to support us.  So, I’d like to thank you, and if there were time for questions, I would be happy to answer them.

 

Peter Deines:  Thank you, Rod.  Are there any questions for Rod?

 

Chair Schengrund:  Seeing none, thank you very much.

 

Senators:  Applause.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Our next informational report is that which was presented on the Reserved Spaces Program, which is found in Appendix “G” presented by the Senate Committee on Admissions, Records, Scheduling and Student Aid.  JoAnn Chirico is here, and she’ll stand for any questions that people might have concerning the Reserved Spaces Program.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON ADMISSIONS, RECORDS, SCHEDULING AND STUDENT AID

 

Reserved Spaces Program

 

JoAnn Chirico, Chair, Senate Committee on Admissions, Records, Scheduling and Student Aid

 

JoAnn Chirico, Beaver Campus:  Good afternoon.  Are there any questions?

 

Rebecca L. Corwin, College of Health and Human Development:  I was just wondering how…did your committee deal with how the students perform academically once they get here?

 

JoAnn Chirico:  Let’s see, I should have refreshed myself on the report.

 

Senator:  Could you repeat the question?

 

Chair Schengrund:  The question was do we know how the students perform once they get here.  Is that correct?  That’s what you said.

 

JoAnn Chirico:  I don’t know the answer to that offhand.  I believe we did have follow-up data and that they did perform comparably.  I know in the individual categories we’ve looked at two other students.  These are all students that did meet university criteria but not admission to University Park specifically.

 

Chair Schengrund:  The distribution of their grades…of their averages are shown on…I don’t know what the page number is, but there is a table that has that information in it.

 

JoAnn Chirico:  I don’t believe that that’s their achieved average.  I think that’s their predicted average.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Oh, okay…

 

JoAnn Chirico:  Not their actual achieved average.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Other questions?  Seeing none, thank you JoAnn.  Moving right along.  The Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs has an informational report on UniSCOPE 2000.  It is found in Appendix “H” and Louis Milakofsky will introduce Drew Hyman who will present that report.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON FACULTY AFFAIRS

UniSCOPE 2000 Presentation

Louis Milakofsky, Chair, Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs

 

Louis Milakofsky:  Thank you.  In September, which is a long time from where we stand today, last September, a booklet was distributed to each and every Senator and guest titled UniSCOPE 2000: A Multidimensional Model of Scholarship for the 21^st Century, which integrates the three criteria for promotion and tenure--research, teaching and service. You will also find this booklet on the web site.  There is a web site noted in your Agenda, also if you want to tap on the Senate web site under Faculty Affairs you can link to that web site.  At the end of this presentation, the Senate Committee on Faculty Affairs, at the next Faculty Affairs meeting, will examine and review the UniSCOPE report and report to the Senate at a later date.  So I’d like to introduce now, the chair of this very important committee who developed this report.  His name is Drew Hyman, Professor of Public Policy and Community Systems in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology.

           

Drew Hyman, Chair, UniSCOPE Learning Community:  Thank you, Lou.  Chair of the Senate, officers, Senators and guests.  For two years…actually a little more than two years…a group of your colleagues has been meeting as a learning community to discuss the issue of scholarship.  We were convened in response to a Keystone 21 initiative of the College of Agricultural Sciences.  We began with the goal of addressing the evaluation of outreach scholarship.  We also recognized that scholarship, and in particular reward and recognition in the promotion and tenure system, is a university-wide issue.  Thus we broadened our membership to include colleagues from throughout the university--several colleges and commonwealth colleges and extension.  We all agreed to meet monthly for six months to deliberate this issue and here we are two and a half years later.  When we began our deliberations, we quickly recognized that outreach scholarship is manifest in teaching, research and service, and thus broadened the scope of our discussion beyond outreach to scholarship in general.  Last year we reached a plateau in our deliberations and decided that it is time to bring our thoughts to a broader audience.  Hence, I’m here to give you an overview of the UniSCOPE model (as we call it) and to offer it to you, our colleagues, for your consideration.  We chose the term UniSCOPE to represent our agreed mission.  UniSCOPE is an acronym for UNIVERSITY SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITERIA FOR OUTREACH PERFORMANCE EVALUATION.  As noted, you will see that we ranged beyond outreach and have addressed all forms of scholarship.  We believe the UniSCOPE model allows us to capture Penn State’s Broad Definition of Scholarship.  It interrelates our definition of scholarship with Boyer’s four functions of scholarship to create what we call in the report “the types of scholarship”.  The result is a model that allows us to identify and document the full range of faculty scholarly activities, and to provide for the evaluation and reward of scholarship--Teaching Scholarship, Research Scholarship, and Service Scholarship. This effort is part of a wide ranging inquiry within the academic community.  In part, we are responding to the Carnegie Foundation report (generally known as the Boyer report) that found that almost all colleges pay lip service to the trilogy of teaching, research, and service, but when it comes to making judgments about professional performance, the three rarely are assigned equal merit. More recently the Kellogg Commission issued a major report that cites the need for “institutional leaders to develop incentives to encourage faculty involvement in the engagement effort. Such engagement is an integral part of Penn State scholarship.  As many as 66 percent of our faculty report being involved in outreach activities. There is also widespread sentiment among faculty that our recognition and reward system is problematic.  Over half of the respondents reported that there are no department, college, or university level rewards for participating in outreach at Penn State and half perceived the primary barrier to be no reward for outreach activities relative to promotion and tenure. Which brings us to the UniSCOPE challenge for the Penn State academic community.  How can we create a system for equitable recognition and reward of the full range of university scholarship? The UniSCOPE model begins with the principle that university scholarship is scholarship that fulfills the mission of the university, in particular, the unit with which the faculty member is affiliated, and which utilizes the faculty member’s academic or professional expertise.  Scholarship involves the thoughtful discovery, integration, transmission, and application of knowledge.  The UniSCOPE model begins with the three missions of the university--Teaching, Research and Service.  We use these missions to express what we call the forms of scholarship.  And we use Boyer’s four functions as functions of scholarship and Boyer called them--discovery, integration, application, and education.  We illustrate the interrelation of these forms and functions in this “dynamic view” of the UniSCOPE model.  In this model, knowledge and creativity begin with observations in the field or observations in the laboratory, which are in turn reinvigorated in the process of application, education, and integration.  This is a continuing, iterative process.  The results benefit both theory and application, the academy and the world of action, the university and society.  The report also presents a linear view of the UniSCOPE model, wherein the intersections of form and function create the types of scholarship.  This table illustrates how the intersections of the forms and functions of scholarship create what the UniSCOPE model calls the types of scholarship.  Each type of scholarship is a foundation for defining, documenting, and assessing scholarship, and in turn, for recognizing and rewarding scholarship events or scholarship activities. The UniSCOPE report provides examples of each of the 12 types of scholarship in this model.  Examples of Teaching Scholarship--Discovery Function are shown in this slide.  Note the box highlighted in yellow on the small chart is the one that we’ve expanded to the left.  Teaching scholarships involving integration also have examples in the UniSCOPE report.  This is similar for teaching scholarships where applications are involved and teaching scholarships where the education function is involved. The report also repeats this sequence for the Research Scholarship Discovery, and then integration, application and education examples. The report repeats the same sequence, we have parallel structure here, for Service Scholarship Discovery and then for integration, application and education examples of service. The full UniSCOPE model which we then explore is based on five major elements:  the forms and functions of scholarship that we’ve already looked at, which in turn create the types of scholarship, and then we add the media and the audiences for scholarship.  To sum up our findings, the UniSCOPE report provides a definition of each type of scholarship, and we build on Penn State definitions.  The teaching scholarship for example, was on the previous slide.  The types of scholarship, the media for delivery, and the audiences for scholarship can each be seen as a continuum in the UniSCOPE model. The intersection of the three continua, or dimensions of scholarship can be seen as a scholarship event or academic activity.  And we joked a little bit about this looking much like a slide rule and probably appropriate for the age of those of us that were on the committee, although we did have a few younger people on the committee.  We did try a much more dynamic model, which was a circle with things going around, but we couldn’t present it in a flat way in the book, so we do have more dynamic and up-to-date ways of presenting this and this works.  Scholarship events can be documented, assessed, recognized, and rewarded.  The mix and match features of the UniSCOPE model are apparent.  For example, teaching of theoretical concepts can be delivered as part of a resident education curriculum to undergraduate students.  That same theoretical material may also be delivered through extension education or technical workshops to professionals in the field, or to certificate students.  Many other combinations are possible and we think all should be recognized.  The report gives examples of scholarship events, and suggests how they could be documented--modern political and social theory was one example.  The model makes it clear that neither geographic location for delivery, nor the resident/nonresident, criterion for teaching, nor the basic applied distinctions for research should be defining criteria for assessing scholarship.  The UniSCOPE challenge, therefore, is to create comparable means for documenting and equitable criteria for assessing any, and all of the permutations and combinations of the dimensions of university scholarship. The report builds on the categories for documenting scholarship, provided in our Rainbow Dividers.  It suggests a few changes to fine tune and complete the lists.  In general, we believe UniSCOPE is compatible with the current Senate policies, as articulated in HR-23. And these are some examples of the categories for teaching.  The UniSCOPE model has similar sections for the types of Research Scholarship and for Service Scholarship. In conclusion, we believe we are responding to the call to action of the Kellogg Commission that stated, “Of all the challenges facing the engagement effort, none is more difficult than ensuring accountability for the effort”. The Kellogg Commission also notes that, “The effort to encourage accountability must see to it that student needs are served, the quality of community life is embraced, and that engagement flows from the university’s basic missions”. This level of involvement creates a pressing need to identify and evaluate faculty activities so that they can be properly acknowledged and rewarded.  What’s really being called into question is our reward system and the key issue is what activities of the professor are most highly prized?  At Penn State more than 1,500 faculty and instructors provide outreach programs.  This level of involvement creates a pressing need to identify and evaluate faculty outreach activities so that they can be properly acknowledged and rewarded.  A decade ago, the Carnegie Foundation report stated, “It’s time to recognize the full range of faculty talent and the great diversity of functions higher education must perform”.  Ten years later, it’s still time. Hence the UniSCOPE learning community’s Challenge to Penn State:  How can we create a system and collegial culture, that equitably recognizes and rewards the full range of university scholarship?  While our deliberations revealed no single list of characteristics can adequately encapsulate the disciplinary and professional diversity of scholarship that exists at Penn State, we offer the UniSCOPE model as a framework on which the disciplines and professions, departments, colleges, and campuses can find common ground and develop appropriate criteria. The UniSCOPE model has become in demand beyond Penn State.  We will be presenting the model at the American Association of Higher Education meetings next week and at several subsequent national and state-wide conferences.  For these purposes we will be revising the title while retaining the acronym.  Thus you may see UniSCOPE referred to as the UNIFIED SCHOLARSHIP CONCEPT FOR OVERALL PROFESSIONAL EVALUATION.  The phrase is changed.  The concept is the same.  In conclusion, the UniSCOPE learning community is a small, ad- hoc group of your colleagues.  We offer the UniSCOPE model for your consideration and hope you will take the initiative to deliberate, revise, enhance, and operationalize it--and thus bring it to the entire academic community.  Thank you.

Senators:  Applause.

 

Drew Hyman:  If anyone would like additional copies of the report or if you’d like copies of the Power Point presentation, this is the one we call the Senate short version.  We have a long AAAG version which will take about an hour.  They are available if you want to use them in your committees and your department, in your colleges they are available with notes for you.  And to request copies contact Elise Gurgevich with the Keystone 21 program and you can email her at eliseg@psu.edu.  Thank you.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Before you leave, are there any questions for Drew?

 

 

Jacob De Rooy, Penn State Harrisburg:  Drew, it’s my pleasure to have spoken with you and the UniSCOPE committee at various times, and your view on this.  I commend the entire document, as do my Senate colleagues and I also urge you, if you have not done so already, to distribute this document to all of the members of the Council of Academic Deans.  I’m concerned, however, with the future implementation of these recommendations…I’m concerned about the following issue.  For example, in Table 1 where you have research scholarship occupying row number two.  And you have discovery and integration…

 

Drew Hyman:  And this is the table that’s in…

 

Jacob De Rooy:  Table 1…

 

Drew Hyman:  It’s in Appendix “H”…

 

Chair Schengrund:  in the Agenda, yes…

 

Jacob De Rooy:  This would be cells 1-1, 1-2, 1-3 in the matrix, no I’m sorry…2-1, 2-2 and 2-3.  They seem to correspond very closely with what we have done well in evaluating our peers.  We have a very finely tuned methodology that our evaluations do indeed follow for assessing the quality of research scholarship.  It seems to me, therefore, that if you were to color code matrix cells 2-1, 2-2 and 2-3 might be color- coded red.  The color intensities fade however, as we go into the other cells.  And the reason they fade is because not that we want to ignore them, not that we’re doing outreach for example the way we should do so, but simply because we don’t have the well defined mechanisms for evaluating performance in those cells.  And until we have developed such a mechanism, I think the color-coding of those other cells will indeed fade.  So I urge you to continue leadership and perhaps kind of monitor and encourage progress in developing these evaluation procedures.

 

Drew Hyman:  Thank you and we very quickly recognize the complexity of trying to come up with some measures that are comparable to the measures for research and resident education.  For many of the other forms of scholarship, we identified and also recognized that there are differences between disciplines, and differences between units, and differences between colleges.  And we recognized that we should not take on trying to create university-wide criteria, but rather recommend it to our colleagues in each department and each discipline, to use their creativity in developing measures.  At the same time, I think the UniSCOPE group will be willing to continue to work with the Senate and other university groups to try to address this issue.  And it’s a key issue that’s on the agenda of the AAAG meetings next week, as well as others.  Lots of universities are addressing this issue.

 

Gordon F. De Jong, College of the Liberal Arts:  Drew, I started on my way out and I stopped to listen to you.  I have a proposal due in Washington tomorrow, but wanted to know first, something which a lot of other people do want to know, I suppose.  We have three dividers now at the university in terms of tenure and promotion.  Are you advocating 12 dividers?  That’s my first question.  Secondly, it seems to me that the gist of the tone of what you’re indicating is that service scholarship area ought to be called outreach.  And there ought to be a substitution of names here.  Indeed the unit that you represent would…certainly has a fairly heavy representation for outreach.  Speak to that upfront then.  Do you think we should at Penn State have teaching, research and outreach as the categories on which everybody presumably is evaluated?  Or if you’re not recommending that, what’s wrong with service?  What’s better about outreach?

 

Drew Hyman:  That’s a good point…and I don’t know if you can get to the end, Elise.  There’s a part I cut out because I had ten minutes of presentation.  But first of all the number of dividers is really up to the Faculty Senate and the university.  On the other hand, no I think, and I think the UniSCOPE group would say teaching, research and service are the three main categories, and these other subs would be categories under them--subcategories.  So I wouldn’t have 12 sections.  I would have three categories each with subsections.  We are suggesting that we talk about outreach rather than service, the report makes that clear I hope, that we’re not recommending that, but because what we found was that outreach involves teaching, outreach involves research, and outreach involves service, so that outreach involves extending all forms of scholarship to address societal issues.  So service in the UniSCOPE model is a main category, and we would think it should remain the same, and actually if you look as you read through the UniSCOPE report, you’ll find except for the section that says where is outreach in the UniSCOPE model, we don’t use the word outreach much anymore.  Because as we got into considering scholarship and thinking of the forms of teaching, research and service scholarship as a continuum (or each as continua) then where does outreach begin, and what is not outreach, was something we couldn’t decide.  The first draft of the report we had a section on outreach research, outreach teaching and outreach service and then we had another one that we couldn’t find a title for.  We don’t have a name for non-outreach.  And then we realized that’s because that outreach really means extending things we do, and so we came up with the idea of the three continua.  So outreach to me is just another name for extending our research, our teaching and our service to society, to corporations, to communities, to groups.

 

Alison Carr-Chellman, College of Education:  This may be outside the scope of your report.  I’ve always been very uncomfortable with the concept of service as somehow an insignificant use of our expertise.  This includes the university faculty in a more privileged space in a community that we are supposed to be a part of.  “Put out that light, Bernice you know, we’re here to bring you the light to answer your problems,” instead of really putting us in a service capacity.  When I first came here people laughed at the concept that you might put something under community service as low level as you know, helping with Girl Scouts or something.  But that kind of service brings a certain service to the community, and a Penn State member there representing our university in a positive way.  I was kind of hoping that this group might actually approach some of those service issues.  Perhaps service wasn’t really the main area, and maybe it is outside the bounds of your particular question.  Also, I think it’s always a little worrisome to look at changing the dividers.  Every time you do that, you send an awful lot of pre-tenure people into a tizzy.  Unless, it’s really essential and necessary, you might get some resistance on changing those dividers.

 

Drew Hyman:   When the committee looks at the dividers and our recommendations, I think they’ll find there are very few changes.  The main changes we would suggest, are primarily additions to make some of the things that we tend not to recognize more explicit, and we suggest moving very few things around to be logically consistent with the model.  Other than that, we found that HR-23 and the categories in the Rainbow Dividers we were very much in agreement with.  As far as service, we talked a lot about service and where does helping the Girl Scouts or working with other community organizations…when can it be considered university service compared to just our community service as a citizen.  And we recognized that there is a very fine line that may separate that.  If you look…you probably don’t have the UniSCOPE report here but on pages 30 and 31, we talk about the fuzzy boundaries that overlap teaching and research and service. And we talk about how we operationalize the idea of service as scholarship and service as a university faculty activity compared to community service.  That’s an issue that we hope we’ve addressed and we hope that you’ll be able to take and expand and operationalize it.  So that what is truly university service scholarship can be recognized, and then the things that are not service scholarship but just our working in the community make a difference.  For example, I’m chairman of the State College Planning Commission and my field is community and economic development.  But I consider the Planning Commission to be my community service.  If I were to do research or consultation using my expertise with the borough then I might be providing service.  But my volunteer work for the Planning Commission is my community service, it’s not my faculty scholarly activity as service.  Does that help?

 

Robert Secor:  I just want to support what Drew said.  There’s a lot of good material here.  It does not involve our re-making our HR-23 process.  What it does is it gives us some specific ways of addressing the intentions of the processes and of the color cards.  About six years ago the discussion began on how to deal with outreach in the various dividers.  And a decision was made there, the same decision that was made here is to mainstream outreach into each of the dividers.  So there are statements that outreach research belongs in the research section and outreach teaching in the teaching section.  What we don’t have until this report is what we mean by outreach research, and outreach teaching.  And how can we take those current bullets and extend them.  And those bullets in the dividers are only examples, because a bullet of non-referee articles doesn’t mean you can’t get tenure without non-referee articles.  It just gives you places to put things, and indicate that when your dossier is reviewed this is where those things will be.  So we can take those reports as Drew said, and supply bullets which will extend those categories.  Then the main effort has to be for committees and administrators to take those entries seriously.  That’s the next step.

 

Drew Hyman:  And that’s the next step, and as the committee discussed it, the bottom line is really our culture.  It’s when we are on a promotion and tenure committee and we sit down and look at a dossier, do we look to the articles and count them and say all the rest doesn’t matter.  Or do we look at the full dossier and the full production of the faculty member.  I remember my time on the University Promotion and Tenure Review Committee, I really learned about the university, I think when I served on that committee.  Because I saw the diversity of activities that we have in different colleges and in different departments, in different disciplines.  And learned that yes, you must be a sole author of a sole author article in some places and I think the record we had that year was over 50 authors on one.  And the person we were evaluating was in the middle of the list.  So we had to ask the dean what does this mean in terms of this person.  And similar with clinical scholarship in nursing and at Hershey.  These were issues that we needed to deal with and HR-23 allows us to deal with them.  It’s how do we do it mainly at that first level in the department, and being willing to recognize the full range of scholarship.

 

Chair Schengrund:  I’d like to say thank you, and I think we need to move on.  Our next report is from Senate Council.  It’s the University Faculty Census Report--2001-2002.  It’s found in Appendix “I” and John Moore will present that report, John.

 

SENATE COUNCIL

University Faculty Census Report –2001-2002

John W. Moore, College of the Liberal Arts:  The Elections Commission is pleased to present the 2001-2002 Census of the faculty for the University Faculty Senate.  Page one of the report indicates the method that is used, and pages two and three indicate the results of that method.  Looking on page two of the report on the left-hand column of numbers we have the year 2000-2001, and if your eyes travel down to the bottom of that column you see that in that year we had 217 faculty in the University Faculty Senate and if you let your eyes just travel across to the right you’ll see that the Census for 2001-2002 yielded the number of 222 or an increase of five Senators.  Perhaps the most interesting figure here is under the College of Medicine where we have a decline of two numbers, and that results from the loss of 41 faculty members from the year 2000-2001 to the academic year 2001-2002.  And those 45 result from the loss of 26 faculty at Geisinger, and 15 faculty through attrition, and that’s how we arrived at these numbers.  Any questions?

 

Chair Schengrund:  Seeing none, thank you John.  Moving on to the next informational report, which is from the Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education.  It’s a Summary of Student Petitions by College, Unit or Location and it’s found in Appendix “J” and Jamie Myers is here to take any questions.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

 

Summary of Student Petitions by College, Unit or Location

 

Jamie M. Myers, Chair, Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education

 

Jamie M. Myers:  Unfortunately, Bob Ricketts who chairs the subcommittee had to leave early.  He is the one that knows all the answers.  If there are any questions I might attempt to make an answer. 

 

Alan W. Scaroni:  I guess I’d just ask that 28 percent is a significant increase, and if there is some explanation for it?

 

Jamie M. Myers:  I believe that’s the answer I was given ahead of time.  That the addition of the category late registration, is what accounts for that increase.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any other questions?  Seeing none we will move on to the next report from the Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education.  And this is 1999-2000 First-Year Seminars:  The Inaugural Year in Review.  The information is found in Appendix “K” and Jamie will introduce Ingrid Blood.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

 

1999-2000 First-Year Seminars:  The Inaugural Year in Review

 

Jamie M. Myers, Chair, Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education

 

Jamie M. Myers:  It’s my pleasure to introduce Ingrid Blood, who will introduce this report.  This is our first report.  The Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education believes that we need to take an additional look at the freshman seminar probably in the fall after more data is in.  The committee would appreciate emails from any Senators about issues they believe are important to the freshman seminar that we can consider again.

 

Ingrid M. Blood, Office of Undergraduate Education:  I’d like you to just look at the handout that was distributed at the door.  There is a modification in one area which doesn’t really change the report.  Under the Course Credit Distribution pie chart, eight percent were two credit courses, the number underneath that should be 62 and the other one should be 85.  Again, that’s just an editorial change and it doesn’t really alter the report.  Also, we wanted to give a little bit more information regarding some of the one-credit courses.  The Commonwealth College offers a significant number of credits.  In fact, they service 2,500 students in this report, and many of them are being offered under a 1+3 model.  Freshmen take both a one-credit freshman seminar and another course, and it’s the same body of students.  I’m open to any questions or comments.

 

Leonard J. Berkowitz:  As one of the two people that both appointed and charged the assessment group, I must admit that my reaction to the report is decidedly mixed.  I think you’ve done an excellent job of documenting the compliance with the first year seminar.  But I’m a little concerned about a couple of issues.  One is the one you just mentioned and I’m glad to see they’ve begun to recognize a possible distinction between a one-credit and a 3+1 model.  Even the way you just said it, is misleading.  The 3+1 model is not a one-credit course and a three-credit course with the same core of students.  It’s four credits.  The one is simply a registrar’s trick of allowing us to identify it.  That’s a single course, so may I suggest that as we go the further ways of assessing this you separate that group out as a special way of looking at it, instead of including it among the one-credits.  More to the point, I’m much more concerned about the assessment.  I think what you’ve got here from student focus groups and other studies probably, is a pretty good way of assessing that.  I’m concerned about what seems to be very limited information from faculty there.  Particularly, I’m concerned about the fact that all of them seem very happy.  It does not lie in accord with my experience or the experience of some of my colleagues who’ve traveled to a number of the campuses.  At the risk of speaking for some of my colleagues who’ve traveled from the campuses and who are sitting out there and who probably will not speak directly to the issue, I have been told, and I know this is hearsay, it’s not a quote, that one of the major issues that has come forward from all the campuses is, some concern and even dissatisfaction with the first year seminar.  And so I think that’s a sign that we’re not doing a very good job in the assessment group of getting at what those people, either faculty or students are concerned about.  I’d be much happier if I’d seen a split here.  I would suggest that you do much more in the next go around at getting to questions of satisfaction and a wider survey of faculty, so that we can make sure it’s working right, where it’s not, and where the problems are.  The purpose of the assessment group isn’t to say this is wonderful.  It isn’t to say it’s terrible.  The purpose is to find out how well it’s working, where we can fix it and how we can continually improve it.  If we’re concerned mostly with finding good things, that’s useless.

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  You have to look at scale and also who is making this report.  I’m here representing a group that hopes to assess the first year seminar but it really is the tip of the iceberg.  Every college has done some work with their faculty.  In fact, one of the richest resources at this university is a group called the First Year Coordinators.  And each college has someone who comes together, and we meet and we talk about the real issues.  How can you really evaluate it or not.  What you’re seeing here is a first attempt.  You have information from a focus group of faculty over a wide span but it isn’t the only one.  You went from offering only 12 percent of our students taking a course…a first year seminar course to over 90 and if we have a large number of data from each college and I totally agree with you, we will have to continue to evaluate this.  But to be able to have a complete report in its first year and answer all the questions is unrealistic.

 

Tramble T. Turner:  A question both for the chair, actually and the former chair.  In the visits to campuses where some of the concerns were brought up by faculty who were teaching first year seminars, did any of you receive information as to whether those faculty members had been assigned the duty of teaching first year seminars?  Or whether they had volunteered to teach them?  I’m asking the question because I suspect a group that was assigned to teach it might not have self-selected to be in a focus group.

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  That’s a question we’d like to ask.  Who is teaching the first year seminar?  That’s our next stage.  Are they all fixed-term faculty, are they assigned, are they volunteering.  Some colleges are creating a more sophisticated body of material in terms of who will be assigned.  For example in my own college, Health and Human Development, they now will have a core of faculty who teach first year seminars.  Other colleges, other departments have a rotating system, some are only having full professors.  It varies, but we need to find out are you being forced, or highly coerced or are you volunteering and really enjoy this.  The focus group faculty that you see here was just a first attempt of people who were teaching a first year seminar.  I don’t know whether they volunteered and were enthusiastic, or not.

 

Chair Schengrund:  In response to your question, that is not a question we thought to ask on our visits but John made a note for next year.

 

P. Peter Rebane, Penn State Abington:  One of the major debates that we had on the Senate floor was your topic of discussion.  It’s a question of whether these were to be skills courses, time management, introduction to college life, and whether they were supposed to have some significant academic content.  And I believe that the Senate stressed in its final vote that they should have considerable academic content.  Over the year that this has passed and talking informally to many people in the colleges, I have learned that in some colleges, some departments, some locations, the courses have become more of skills courses.  While in other places they have maintained more of an academic content.  When I look at your outcomes and assessments, and I look at what students and faculty claim to have been satisfied with, I find mostly career knowledge, enhancement of library internet skills, time management skills, email skills, ability to see your faculty members, I presume that applies only to Centre County, and so on.  So what bothers me a little bit, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I have not so called, “gotten involved in this,” is it seems that the first year seminars are moving at least in the students’ perception toward a skills orientation.  And I’ll have to have this committee look at, have they been academically satisfied?  Have the faculty managed to get some academics across?  This is what I’ve heard my colleagues say that they have tended to veer into the skills content.  And of course if I look at this it’s interesting to note that out of the outcome, academic content is in quotation marks which seems to be kind of an inference that that’s really so.  So I would like to have some idea both from the Senate and from the committee, do we now have skills courses?  Do we now have academic content courses?  Should we measure academic outcome?  Perhaps some will teach those who take them and look at where we are going with this freshman seminar and if we can keep it on the record for the next 5, 10 or 15 years.  Now I think that is an unanswered question that this does not address.  Thank you.

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  We have two objectives, and we may need to define those objectives more completely to try to answer that question.

 

Frank J. Provenzano, Fayette Campus:  In line with Len’s comment about the evaluation of teaching.  Is there an over…does your committee oversee all of the evaluations?  I wasn’t quite sure whether these things were all happening discordantly, or whether there was some kind of combined effort.  It is without you know, appropriate information that obviously decisions can’t be made and I think this is a wonderful effort, but obviously we need good information to refine.  I just wondered who serves with the oversight, and is there a plan of action for evaluating?

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  Most of the work is performed at the college level.  And there are a few avenues where this information is brought forward.  One is through this interest group, and note, it’s not a committee.  It’s the General Education Interest Group.  We don’t do all the work.  We’re there to help to coordinate some of this.  It is a daunting task to have eight people do this, and we’re not.  But that’s one avenue.  Another place is through ACUE.  Colleges are reporting some of their successes or should be.  It’s a multi-faceted type of a process.  We also have an undergraduate education web site and what we’re trying to do is keep that up-to-date and ask each of the colleges to really look to see what you have.  We’re hoping to have syllabi, assignments more complex, but your answer is, it’s primarily a college assignment.

 

Frank J. Provenzano:  So we should try to organize in our own college then get back to this focus group?

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  Yes.  Through that and through the core…these first year seminar representatives from each college.  We met for example for four hours in a session last fall.  We meet at least once or twice a semester, multiple groups.

 

Wayne R. Curtis, College of Engineering:  I wanted to bring up a point that was brought up in Engineering Caucus last night, and this is at a deeper level of assessment.  And I was going to bring it up with possibly a question with Graham Spanier, I didn’t suspect he’d stay this long.  And it gets at the premise under which we argued about generating this.  And one of those is directly related to the issue of retention.  One of the next things that’s coming up here is a Senate informational that seems to suggest that there isn’t a problem with retention.  If one of the premises on which we established and generated this was that there was a retention problem, does that factor into this overall assessment of do we need the freshman seminars?

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  Retention is one component of success in academic life.  If you come back, you may not be happy, you may not have learned a lot, you may not have learned to meet a professor.  The intent was to have a richer experience.  To really understand how to be a student.  To have more ownership.  So retention is one measure and we did state that we would like to follow these students.  Do they return?  But also, it’s not really the key one.  It’s are they coming back and being able to navigate the system?  How are they doing in classes?  Are they doing research?  A host of questions.  The General Education Special Committee that suggested this labored whether even to recommend a first year seminar and it took a few years and we want a richer experience, not just are you coming back and sitting in a seat of 900 in Schwab Auditorium.

 

Julia C. Hewitt, College of the Liberal Arts:  I have a concern.  I’ve taught freshman seminars three times.  The first two times, the maximum limit was 12 students.  I have had very positive feedback, and I love the freshman seminars.  The last time, the maximum amount of people was 18 or 22, it was much larger and it was a different group of students.  It was a very different enrollment, and I see it as a moment to really guide the students and sort of navigate through the system to ask them how the bigger courses are going?  What to do?  What do you think of the professors?  At the same time bring discussions that might not be possible in larger classes, etc., and in my class it’s very academic.  But I was told that because…and by the way, all three times I haven’t lost students, however, because of the low enrollment supposedly of the class, that class can no longer be taught.  This is what I was told.  This is in the Spanish Department where enrollments normally are 20 to 22, and the freshman seminar or the first year seminar will no longer be any different than any other class.  Except that they are first year students.  That really bothered me.  We don’t have 300 student classes.  Most of our classes are around 20 to 22 students.  So it kind of shifted the entire move of the type of class.  I’m not asking a question, I’m just voicing a concern.

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  I’ll ask you to look at figure two just to take a look at what the first year seminar class enrollment looks like.  Almost all the classes are 18 to 20.  But you did mention something.  Unless you’re entering your major in your first year and you have small classes, you don’t often experience that until you are a junior, and you start to have a sense of community.  Good point.

 

Julia C. Hewitt:  The classes are great, it’s like a family, and then I see the students later on in their third and fourth year again and the classes have worked great.  I’m 100 percent for it but I was very concerned about…

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  Dropping it…

 

Jacqueline R. Esposito, University Libraries:  Actually, I had a question and a recommendation.  I think it will be important to do longitudinal studies of the impact.  University Libraries has and this is part of my question, has been majorly impacted by first year seminars.  One of the things that I don’t think was anticipated when first year seminars were recommended, was the number of students that would be coming into the library requiring instruction.  So that there have been a lot of resources that has been allocated in the libraries to handle the influx of all these students.  So I think it will be important to look at longitudinally the impact of this particular initiative educationally and does the committee have a plan to do that?  And how will they assess, “I’ve been in a first year seminar in 1999, and early 2000, and how am I doing in 2002 or 2003?”

 

Ingrid M. Blood:  You can join our group.  But seriously, we will need to look at many elements of its success.  The library has been exceptional.  When we meet with these first year coordinators, the library staff is always there.  In fact, that really addresses what Peter brought up about why are we just teaching them a skills course. Most of the faculty are asking their students to think deeply, to investigate an area and then they have to learn how to use the library and that’s why they are coming to you.

 

Chair Schengrund:  I think this will be our last question, John.

 

John J. Cahir, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education:  I just wanted to offer tremendous praise to the faculty on this.  I don’t think there’s any other university of anything like this size that has been able to accomplish what Penn State has done having the first year seminar.  And to have a 93 percent compliance in the very first year is just a terrific job by everybody.  A couple of the other comments I think were very, very appropriate.  Some of the differences in approach reflect the fact that we actually had about 12 percent of the students taking first year seminars before this program was in place.  So we tried to seize on those, and we just used the ones that were in place and they had different models and we didn’t want to get into a situation of dictating to hurry people to change their models.  But the one thing that was common was to get our students exposed to a scholar very early in their career.  And to have that really affect their outlook on their education and I think that has been achieved to a remarkable degree.  We need, clearly I think…Len and I appointed this group to do that.  To get that very carefully appointed.  The other thing that I think Wayne touches on is a very important point.  In the long run it should really have an effect on retention and retention is exactly why we brag a lot about some of our graduation rates--they are not as good as they could be.  I think we need to do a lot better.  And so I think there is a lot…we also got a wonderful assessment indirectly here, a lot more first year students are going in the libraries, it can’t be all bad.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Okay, moving on to the next Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education report.  This one is on Non-Returning Students Report, Spring 1998 to Fall 1998.  It can be found in Appendix “L” and Jamie Myers will answer any questions that people have.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

 

Non-Returning Students Report, Spring 1998 to Fall 1998

 

Jamie M. Myers, Chair, Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education

 

Jamie M. Myers:  Actually, it’s my pleasure to introduce James Wager, the Assistant Vice Provost and Registrar to answer any questions about the report.

 

J. James Wager, Enrollment Management & Administration & University Registrar:  Thank you, Jamie.  Just to put this into context.  At the end of each semester we know that students sometimes are not going to come back for the next semester.  One of the reasons we hope for mostly is that they are graduating.  Some students tell us that they cannot come back.  They may be going on a co-op, an internship, they may be filing an official leave of absence, they may be withdrawing from the university.  They are informing us in some fashion that they will not be returning.  The report before you is talking about a different group of students than any of those.  This is talking about a group of students who surprise us by simply not returning the following semester.  We’ve actually been conducting this survey and collecting some data since 1994.  In 1994, 1995 and 1996 we did both, collected the data and did a survey.  The results were so uniform across those three years that we then went to a bi-annual survey.  So we collected data in 1997, did not do a survey.  Collected data in 1998, the report you have in front of you is that cohort.  We collected data in 1999, did not do a survey and we are in the midst right now of finalizing the results from the 2000 survey.  So what I’m trying to say is that there has been a longitudinal effort over the last number of years to try to see what this data represents.  So the report you have in front of you is the result of the 1998 group and I’d be happy to respond to any questions you may have.

 

Dwight Davis:  Last Senate meeting we had a group of students raise some issues about lots of things, but one thing which relates to the climate on this campus.  And looking at the reasons for leaving I wanted to know if that issue was raised or attempted to be looked at in any way?  One of the things that I noticed is that if you look at places where students found comparable education elsewhere, two of those places are in large urban locations.  Any information at all about the demographics of this group, and issues that relate to things that may have to do with our location, and how students are made to feel on this campus versus some place else?

 

J. James Wager:  The simple answer is no we have not studied that.  But we do have all of the data on all of these students over these past number of years, so our ability to study that question is still in front of us.  So we may want to do that.

 

Dwight Davis:  I would recommend that we look at it.

 

Marcus A. Fedeli, Penn State Altoona:  I have a question that may take further research on the second reason under factors, which would be “unable to finance further enrollment”.  As a student I find it hard to believe that these students can’t find financing and I don’t know…do you know if they’ve researched with financial aid or have they given you any specifics of why these students couldn’t find aid?

 

J. James Wager:  Our Financial Aid Office has looked at this report very carefully.  It is true that Penn State is an expensive school.  There are other schools where the tuition rates are lower and cheaper.  It’s also true that many of our students are generally on some form of loan rather than scholarship, and I don’t recall the exact numbers but the indebtedness of students graduating from Penn State has been on the rise and the absolute indebted amount is ten’s of thousands of dollars.  So to some families, to some students this issue is very real.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any other questions.  Seeing none, thank you we appreciate it.  The next informational report comes from the Senate Committee on University Planning.  It’s on Long-term Debt and Debt Service of the University and it’s found in Appendix “M” and Peter Deines is here and he’ll stand for any questions if you have some.

 

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNIVERSITY PLANNING

 

Long-term Debt and Debt Service of the University

 

Peter Deines, Chair, Senate Committee on University Planning

 

Peter Deines:  The institution is in the middle of an extensive renovation and construction program.  The funds for this program come from a variety of sources.  The most important ones are the allocations from the state of Pennsylvania.  We have donations from corporations, alumni and friends of Penn State and the third source is bonds issued by the university.  The incurred long-term debt of Penn State and the service of this debt is the topic of this report.  The Senate Committee on University Planning reviews at intervals the indebtedness of the institution and the report before you is the latest update on this topic.  I think I shall leave it there.  If there are any questions I probably can’t answer them but Kenneth Babe is here that might help me out on this.

 

Keith K. Burkhart, College of Medicine:  Since the de-merger there is a huge debt hanging over the head of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, which includes the College of Medicine.  Any long-term planning or how are we going to deal with that debt looking out over the years?

 

Peter Deines:  Ken do you have anything to recommend?

 

Kenneth S. Babe, Corporate Controller:  That’s indeed in the College of Medicine and the Dean of the College of Medicine is working on that.  I don’t have any specific data on that.

 

Peter Deines:  There’s one comforting note.  Every so often we have a review of the credit worthiness of the institution, and we had the review of the institution some while back and just last summer after the de-merger and the issues that you speak to became apparent, there was another review.  And the credit worthiness of the institution was not changed.  So the outside world looks at Penn State as a reasonably well-managed institution financially.

 

Tramble T. Turner:  In Table 1 in Appendix “M”.  In 1997, $380 million to 1998, $478 million looking at that my question would be if that at all reflects the university taking over the Penn Stater the former Scanticon center and whether the projections are in that?

 

Kenneth S. Babe:  There’s a general complication at that time in 1997…

 

Chair Schengrund:  Did everyone hear his answer?

 

Senators:  No.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Peter could you repeat it please?

 

Peter Deines:  I did not completely get it either so…

 

Chair Schengrund:  Why don’t you come down and actually give your answer into the microphone so people can hear you.

 

Kenneth S. Babe:  If I understand your question correctly is that in 1997 or 1998, the total long-term debt increased and you wondered if that had anything to do with the merger and then subsequent de-merger.  No, it did not.  That particular increase in long-term debt dealt with general obligation bonds for the entire university, and did not specifically have anything to do with the merger.

 

Tramble T. Turner:  Just to clarify, he had the question about the merger with Geisinger.  I was asking about the Penn State Conference Center which had been the Scanticon.  The university taking over that operation.

 

Kenneth S. Babe:  No, it did not.  I’m sorry I missed that.

 

Tramble T. Turner:  I’ll ask that again, has that had any impact on the university indebtedness by running the Penn Stater Conference Center?

 

Kenneth S. Babe:  No, it has not.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Any other questions?  If not, thank you very much.

 

NEW LEGISLATIVE BUSINESS

 

None

 

COMMENTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE UNIVERSITY

 

Chair Schengrund:  We do have a comment and recommendation for the good of the university in that we’ve had a request from Justin Leto to speak at this point, so Justin if you’d like to come down and make your comments.

 

Justin Leto:  For those of you that are left I’ll try and make this brief.  My comments are regarding a certain committee that was established to address our ethical and moral responsibility in regards to our outside corporate relationships.  Nike, Pepsi the large revenue streams where we get sponsorship for athletics and where we make contracts for licensing of our name and logo.  It was very troubling for me to find out the way the administration works at this university and the way decisions are made at this university.  And for those of you that have been here for a while, you probably know what I’m talking about, for those of you that are new you probably don’t know about it quite yet.  I’d just like to focus on a few things that generally left me jaded with the entire concept of committee making process with the administration.  Back in April, as many of you may or may not know a group that I co-founded named Students for Accountability and Reform took up the issue of economic globalization.  It is a concept that is in the forefront of our society today.  The shift in manufacturing and production from the United States to abroad, the exploitation of labor, the exploitation of the environment all of these are at the forefront of our international debate.  We asked the university to establish a shared governance committee, that means they do not have all the control in the committee, that we have at least some control in the committee.  And what we got was something very, very different.  We had agreed that students would be selected by the Undergraduate Student Government President.  Of his four nominations for two positions, none were selected by Daniel Sieminski, who eventually chaired that committee and it has been no secret that Mr. Sieminski was pro-fair labor association from the beginning.  He has been pro-Nike from the beginning, he ended up chairing that committee, selecting the committee members and writing the report.  Now the reasoning behind this was generally that we were too involved in the issue, but I mean, we were the ones that actually brought the issue to the forefront to begin with.  Another reason why was, because he said that he didn’t want a committee that was not well balanced.  That he didn’t want to end up with a committee that was all White and all men.  Then I got a telephone call…I got a very disturbing telephone call that informed me that a professor of labor studies and industrial relations his name is James Stewart, expressed interest in the committee, expressed interest to the administration that he wanted to serve on the committee back in spring and he wasn’t even contacted, he wasn’t even considered and he was the only Black candidate for that committee.  Now I talked to some faculty members about what the situation is with the administration, and the most common reply I get is that they do not want to get involved.  Partly because they’re scared, partly because they’re not tenured and I would just like to know what the hell is going on here at a university that’s supposed to be at least in some aspects, have some sort of ethical or moral responsibility.  But there is a broader issue that I think many of you already know having to do with the over-corporatization of this university.  You’ve probably sat in meetings with President Spanier and other administrators where they refer to students as customers, as faculty members as employees and alumni as streams of revenue.  I don’t know what would make anybody here more nauseous, but certainly that concept and that philosophy of the way things have been run here is certainly making…well it has made me nauseous for some time and a year later and it has been about a year, since I’ve been involved, myself and many others have been lied to.  We’ve had committees that have been rigged, people have been arrested, and we are at the exact same point that we were last year.  And I see two universities at Penn State.  I see two that are quickly diverging.  We see the one that is the administration that sets policy, that makes the decisions, then we see the shadow university.  We see the students, we see the faculty that get involved to work against that.  And you have to be the eyes and the ears of what we are experiencing now and many have been the eyes and ears of what has been going on.  For example, the telephone call that I received about Mr. James Stewart.  So you know, typically people come to the Faculty Senate asking for something.  I’m not asking for anything.  I really don’t think this is anything Faculty Senate really can solve on their own but it is something that I hope has been recognized and will continue to become part of the at least, policy making procedures at least in the input.  At least if you’re in a meeting where they talk to us as students and they refer to us as customers that you’ll get up and walk out.  That you’ll make it known that the people, the corporate heads that run this university like a corporation are wrong.  And so, we are at a point in time that is the many activists that are on this campus and we are not like the 60’s by-the-way.  We debate international policy regarding world trade organizations.  We debate free trade agreements, we debate labor, we are nothing like the 60’s.  Nobody sat around smoking pot and talking about international policy, but I don’t know, it’s very troubling that this is where we are right now.  I am not a customer, okay.  It’s like you know, President Spanier I am not a customer, and to consider yourselves as employees is an abomination because there’s only one thing lower than customers in the business model and that are the employees.  I’m sure if you’d like to get in contact with me, if this is something that you’d want to do, you know, feel free.  If there is something that you can do to help, then we have a few suggestions of what that might be then please get in contact with me.  We are not radical crazy people.  We are very thoughtful individuals, who are exactly what I thought a university should be, but it has become clear to me that scholarship the things that you talk about for four hours today, is something to meet this corporate model you know, it’s something that meets this expectation.  This UniSCOPE program is how to make you do more for whatever less or for maybe little bits and pieces of reward.  You know, you shouldn’t have to be rewarded.  I mean if there was a real collective conscience at this university you would be doing it already.  And if there was an identity at this university you’d be doing it already, but there’s no identity, there’s no collective conscience except what exists in Faculty Senate, and that’s exactly the reason why I came today.  Because the students don’t have it anymore, the administration lost it God knows how long ago, and the only thing left is the Faculty Senate or at least some of you.  With those words, I certainly appreciate your time and for those that are absent if you could convey what has been said, please do so and again, if anybody would like to contact me, everything is done by email today so easily enough to remember it’s jleto@psu.edu and I would just like to thank you.

Senators:  Applause.

 

Chair Schengrund:  Just so that you know, Justin before you leave everything that is said here is recorded and is published in the Senate Record and is available on the web so that people that aren’t here can read what you said.  Thank you.

 

ADJOURNMENT

 

May I have a motion to adjourn?  The January 30, 2001 meeting of the University Faculty Senate adjourned at 4:02 PM.

 

DOCUMENTS DISTRIBUTED PRIOR TO JANUARY 30, 2001

Admissions, Records, Scheduling and Student Aid – Reserved Spaces Program (Informational)

 

Committees and Rules – Revision of Constitution, Article II, Section 1 (Membership) (Legislative)

 

Committees and Rules – Revision of Standing Rules, Article II, Section 4  (Legislative)

 

Curricular Affairs - Curriculum Report of January 16, 2001

 

Faculty Affairs – Recommendations for Emeritus/Retired Faculty (Advisory/Consultative)

 

Faculty Affairs – Report on the Impact on Faculty Development of Hiring Faculty off the Tenure Track (Advisory/Consultative)

 

Faculty Affairs – UniSCOPE 2000 Presentation (Informational)

 

Senate Council – University Faculty Census Report – 2001-2002 (Informational)

 

Undergraduate Education – 1999-2000 First-Year Seminars: The Inaugural Year in Review (Informational)

 

Undergraduate Education – Non-Returning Students Report, Spring 1998 to Fall 1998 (Informational)

 

Undergraduate Education – Summary of Student Petitions by College, Unit or Location (Informational)

 

University Planning – A Grand Destiny, The Penn State Campaign (Informational)

 

University Planning – Long-term Debt and Debt Service of the University (Informational)

 

University Planning – Recommendation for Developing an Ecologically Sustainable University (Advisory/Consultative)

 

D O O R   H A N D O U T

SENATE COMMITTEE ON UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

1999-2000 First-Year Seminars: The Inaugural Year in Review

 

Revised Figure 3