Time & Location: 8:30 – 10:30 a.m., 220 Seymour
Attendees
Voting Members
- Mike Andriatch
- Joy Bhadury
- Davida Bloom
- Steven Breslawski
- Frances Dearing
- Scott Haines
- Jim Haynes
- Tom Hernandez
- Shanelle Hodge
- Debbie Jacob
- Josh Johannes
- Kadathur Lakshmanan
- Jose Maliekal
- Dave Mihalyov
- Chantelle Nasri
- Cherise Oakley
- Summer Reiner
- Sandeep Singh
- Kathryn Wilson
Non-Voting Members
- Denise Copelton: Co-Chair
- Crystal Hallenbeck
- Karen Riotto
- Lou Spiro: Co-Chair
- Melissa Wight
Guests
N/A
Regrets
Voting Members
- Sara Kelly
- Teresa Major
- Brad Menear
Non-Voting Members
- President Macpherson
- Kathleen Peterson
The meeting was called to order at 8:30am
Approval of March 29, 2018 Minutes
Dr. Copelton asked the committee to review the minutes from the March 29, 2018 meeting. With no corrections, Dr. Breslawski motioned the minutes to be approved, Dr. Haynes seconded the motion, and all were in favor so the minutes were approved.
Announcements
Dr. Copelton stated that the minutes from the April 5, 2018 meeting are not currently available and will be distributed at our next meeting.
Division Presentation
Note: Presentation is available on Blackboard and on the JPBC website.
The following questions, answers, and discussion points occurred during the following
presentation:
Division of Academic Affairs
Presented by Dr. Jim Haynes, Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Dr. Copelton: I remember that at Senate the discussion was that we would be able to use the IAS System for the spring.
Dr. Haynes: You are.
Dr. Copelton: Will we continue to use it in the fall because your statement just now leads me to believe we can use it indefinitely.
Dr. Haynes: We can use it indefinitely until a decision is made to change.
Dr. Breslawski: So, how is assessment funded? I see a funding request – none. So, this request would be new funding. I am assuming you are not spending nothing on it now.
Dr. Haynes: Correct. I interpreted the funding request as being if I was requesting this group
to consider allocating new funds from Central Reserves back to Academic Affairs.
Dr. Breslawski: Then what is the funding model for assessment? Do you set aside a pool of
money? Does the pool of money go to Ms. Dearing? Are the Deans expected to set aside funding? I am thinking about for instrumentation.
Dr. Haynes: Closing the Loop funds are provided by Academic Affairs to support course and
program improvements (instruments in some cases).
Dr. Bhadury: Dr. Haynes, you may want to clarify that this effort is for assessment related to
Middle States rather than assessments for the professionally accredited programs.
Dr. Haynes: Right, which they are already doing. We are not talking here about assessments and learning outcomes for individual courses. This is what is required by Middle States. It is
programmatic assessment. Is that correct, Ms. Dearing?
Ms. Dearing: Right. It is programmatic assessment, general education, and administrative
office assessment. I will say Dr. Haynes did fund a full-time position for my office and I just
recently hired someone full-time to replace Lee Robinson, which has been about three years in the making. So, I am very grateful and that is a major funding initiative to have a full-time
permanent line in assessment. It is a major change and a much-needed one. We will be coming back with ten periodic program reviews next year. So, it will be a very busy year but we need to do this to get ready for the Middle States Self Study.
Dr. Copelton: That was actually going to be my question. So the funding that you set aside, the $20,000, for the three fellows is primarily to work with departments on programmatic assessment?
Ms. Dearing: Yes.
Dr. Haynes: Ms. Dearing, her team and I think Donna Wilkinson-Barker will be developing a rubric for everyone to use.
Ms. Dearing: Yes. We are meeting shortly.
Dr. Copelton: So at this point, we are committed to keeping Digital Measures?
Dr. Haynes: We are committed to keeping Digital Measures and it is because the Union will
object if we change systems.
Dr. Copelton: This system will be implemented starting next year.
Dr. Haynes: The workflow will start in the fall.
Dr. Copelton: There is a long list of faculty that have been here who are already on the tenure clock or who are looking at a promotion in the next year.
Dr. Haynes: This will not affect them. They will have to use it, but it will not affect them.
Dr. Copelton: Because up until next year, we don’t upload for example anything into digital
measures other then imputing our responses to the questions. So, instead of assembling a paper binder, everything would have to uploaded.
Dr. Haynes: Presumably, everything that would be a paper file, printed from an electronic file. It is just instead of printing, you are uploading.
Dr. Bhadury: Since this is going to go into effect in fall 2018, it is incumbent upon us to inform all faculty.
Dr. Haynes: Actually, there has been, I believe, a notice going out about that but there will be
continued communication.
Dr. Reiner: Will folks be able to upload their materials over summer?
Dr. Copelton: That is a very important question that I want to underscore because it takes
months to put the materials together. If this doesn’t open until September, say, the deadline for submission is October 1 or near around there. That isn’t going to be nearly enough time.
Dr. Haynes: Ms. Wight, will you send me an email reminding me of this question?
Ms. Wight: Yes.
Dr. Copelton: Can you just clarify for me what kinds of positions or things you are talking about for course releases?
Dr. Haynes: Associate Chairs, Graduate Coordinators, and Assessment Coordinators.
Dr. Copelton: But not Chair course releases?
Dr. Haynes: Chairs are separate. We have data that says we should change course releases for
Chairs, but the Union has objected and so I cannot do that. Much to my regret.
Dr. Maliekal: We are in the School of Arts and Sciences having discussions about general
education courses instruction as you instructed.
Dr. Haynes: Any progress to report?
Dr. Maliekal: No, because we are also trying to gather data to see how what you have
suggested can be managed.
Dr. Haynes: So perhaps coordinating with Dr. Zollweg on his database instead of duplicating
it.
Dr. Maliekal: Yes. This has to be done collaboratively rather than in a disjointed manner.
Dr. Bhadury: I just want to make clear the greater goal of this, because this will be
implemented over the next few years under the leadership of our new Provost. The greater goal, to summarize, is to build what is called a pyramid approach. Where some of the classes on the pyramid have larger class sizes because they can be done effectively that way to be matched up with those at the top of the pyramid that are smaller and have more intensive learning experiences.
Dr. Haynes: The number of large enrollment courses would be few, and by that the definition
the workgroup used last year was 250 or more.
Dr. Bhadury: The second goal of this is to ensure greater coverage of general education
courses by full-time faculty. It is not just the financial savings; we are looking to provide greater coverage.
Dr. Haynes: The President has told me from the beginning, the objective is to improve the
educational experience for our students.
Dr. Copelton: I am curious about that size, 250. How many rooms can accommodate that size? I teach what we consider large sections, which is 150 and every semester we have trouble finding a room for it.
Dr. Haynes: That is part of what has to go into the analysis.
Dr. Singh: How many small liberal arts colleges do this? Other than comparing it to SUNY
comprehensives. We tell our students we have small class sizes and have face-to-face interaction with faculty instead of teaching assistants.
Dr. Haynes: What we are talking about is, I would hope and I don’t know because we don’t
have the data yet. If we get two fine arts courses that were big, two “N” course that were big,
two “S” courses that were big and two “H” courses that were big that would go a long way
towards making every other class size 25. Given the fact that we offer hundreds of classes each year in those areas, I don’t think eight is a great departure from the liberal arts ideal of small classes.
Dr. Bhadury: Dr. Haynes, I have a request for you. A funding request for now, I would suggest the following. Over the last 10-15 years across the world but particularly in this country, there has been a lot of work done on what is the appropriate pedagogy for large courses. New technologies have developed and new methodologies have developed. I have seen how 100-150, not in Theatre but others, are taught very well integrated with clickers. Now the request, subject to what the School of Arts and Sciences and Dr. Zollweg comes up with, if there are some of these classes to invest some additional money in to target appropriate faculty. There are some faculty that do very well and have good student outcomes. Invest in them to learn some of these new pedagogy approaches.
Dr. Haynes: That process is already underway and any extra funding needed would be at least a year off so I won’t be asking for any this year. Dr. Rich teaches an over 300-student section of Anatomy and Physiology and he has been using clickers, actually new enhanced clickers. They call them “Clickers on Steroids”, where he is able to engage students in discussion. There are better technologies out there. If we were to buy those clickers for every student on campus, they would charge us $10 per student. If we only want to buy them for a certain number of students, then the price goes up but it is too early. The committee hasn’t reported on the results. This is for the future. For now, I am just trying to say we need greater instructional efficiency in general education while trying to maintain as many small classes that we can.
Dr. Copelton: One other suggestion related to Dr. Bhadury’s, we do have a number of faculty, you mentioned Dr. Rich, who are teaching large section and who are doing that really well. I would hope that part of this initiative would include assembling a group of faculty who are doing this in the 150 and up to talk about best practices and to learn from those faculty what is necessary for an initiative like this to be successful.
Dr. Haynes: I agree. You are a member of the School of Arts and Sciences. Your Dean is here. I suggest you discuss what is going on and what needs to be developed.
Dr. Maliekal: That is exactly what we are going to do.
Dr. Singh: What is the source of this target of 8600 students enrolled by 2020 and what happens if the College does not hit this target? Will they close campuses that are so far under the targets? I just want to understand what the consequences are.
Dr. Haynes: SUNY set the goal several years ago. We don’t know what is going to happen to
any campus that doesn’t meet their goal. Fortunately, Brockport is not close to the bottom of the list. It may be that we could expect less funding if we fall short.
Dr. Copelton: I know these numbers were set by SUNY under the former Chancellor. Does the new Chancellor support this?
Dr. Haynes: I don’t think the new Chancellor has made that decision yet.
Dr. Copelton: Having been on the Academic Master Planning Committee multiple years ago, I am wondering if you can speak to what the status of that is. I know that this year you were
running some sort of pilots with some departments that were going to go through that process. I think this is an extremely important goal and we need to really focus our energies on this as an institution. So that’s why I am wondering where we are at in terms of a process because that Academic Master Plan would have fed into this.
Dr. Haynes: That was the intention of Provost Zuckerman and that is why I believe she started it. It turns out despite all of our work by the committee that they couldn’t get data that the Deans’ Council felt was reliable enough, so we have let that initiative lapse, and we have
reported that to the Goal 1 Committee.
Dr. Copelton: I just have a question about the CELT. You said you are going to be starting a
search for an Interim Director. Is that going to be an internal search?
Dr. Haynes: It will be an internal search and a one-year internal appointment. The new
Provost will probably start a full-time search.
Dr. Bhadury: Dr. Haynes, I have a question for you, Mr. Spiro and all of my colleagues in
Finance & Administration. Many states, whether they have this bi-annual budget model or not, around March if there is financial stress they will announce budget recessions. Has New York or SUNY ever done budget recessions in the middle of the year?
Ms. Riotto: Yes, it has been a good six to seven years since that has happened.
Dr. Haynes: That occurred during the financial crisis.
Dr. Singh: I see that on the page of financial responsibility there is a $1,000,000 reserve in
Academic Affairs; I do think there is a need for more faculty lines given the re-emphasis on
graduate programs, unless we plan to teach 150 graduate student classes. As a good scholar,
you know that a graduate profile requires higher scholarly accomplishments and by design,
graduate classes are smaller.
Dr. Haynes: I agree with you but let me ask the Deans, do any of the Deans think we are not
properly resourcing the academic departments according to student contact hours and other needs that they have?
Dr. Maliekal: It is true that we have managed to meet the student demand that we currently
have. Sometimes that is done with full-time faculty, often with part-time faculty.
Dr. Haynes: With lecturers.
Dr. Maliekal: We are moving in that direction. There is still some ground to be made up in that regard in some departments especially in departments that teach entry-level students courses with composition and quantitative skills. Those are discussions the Deans are having with the Provost. Going forward we will keep a close eye on the principle that the Interim Provost has laid down, which is reduce the lines that we have of part-time faculty and increase the number of full-time faculty.
Dr. Singh: Last year, the College had 125 new staff, 37 of them taught or did research, 88 did
otherwise. The Academic Affairs budget less than five years ago was about 67% State funding. Right now, it is around 64%. There is a 16.5% decline in the adjuncts that we hire. As you can see, some of my concern about sacrificing faculty in the short run and to the detriment to the College in the long run, because I think to become a selective college so that we can reach this enrollment targets without compromising quality, we have to be more selective. To be more selective we need good faculty and more faculty and better faculty. That is the point I want to emphasize and bring to your attention.
Dr. Haynes: Let me explain how we choose when to hire or replace faculty that have left and
where we decide to replace them. From Institutional Research, we gather data on student
contact hours taught by each teaching department. We also have data on the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty in that unit. On the number of full-time faculty, i.e. lecturers and the number of FTE for the adjunct faculty for that department. We have that data going back six years. For this year’s go around, what I have done is I have averaged the number of faculty and student contact hours for the past three years, 2017-18, 2016-17 and 2015-16. I have done the same thing for the previous three years to give us a growth trend. Growth can be positive or negative and it is across the units on the campus. Using that data, you can calculate the average number of student credit hours per full-time equivalent person in the department. That includes tenured, tenure-track, lecturers and the FTE for the adjuncts because those are the people you are using to teach. The Deans’ Council looked at the data last year. We made the decision that if a unit was below 480 student credit hours per FTE faculty member, we would not automatically replace a line or give them a new line. Furthermore, if a unit was above 600, we would almost certainly give them a new or replacement line to resolve that problem. Why did we pick those numbers? Well, it stands to reason that a typical faculty member at a teaching college like Brockport should be encountering or facing 80-100 students each semester. Here we typically teach three courses. So, there are 80-100 students across the three courses and they are usually three-credit courses. That translates into 240-300 students per semester for 480-600 students per academic year. That is where those numbers come from. Data does not rule the decision-making in this division, it informs it. On first glance, if a department is asking for a new or replacement position and they are already in that range, they are unlikely to get it. If they are below 480, the initial presumption is they are already overstaffed, but we know there are exceptions to that assumption. Some departments have accreditation restrictions on class sizes. Some departments are bringing in a ton of external money. So, if you reduce their faculty, less external money comes into the College. So, using the data to inform our decisions, we decide
whether or not we are going to replace or provide new faculty and where we are going to do it. If we are in a situation where a department is declining in their student contact hours, which is also related to their number of majors, we are very unlikely to put resources there. If we have a department that is bursting at the seams above 600, we are very likely to put resources there.
Dr. Bhadury: Dr. Singh, you make a very valid point about the decrease in funding for
Academic Affairs. This is the basic fact that we face and this is a fact faced by all public
universities. Enrollment patterns change. The professional disciplines at this university are the
ones that have generally made a bulk of the growth but resources are not immediately
transferred because faculty are tenured and in the SUNY systems staff have tenure and all of
that. So the only way forward to allocate resources according to growth, and I am talking in
Academic Affairs itself, is to have a systematized process like what Dr. Haynes talked about
which he built with our assistance. Looking at the instruction productivity and doing this slowly and methodically over time as retirements and departures take place and add to that constant cutting back when there actual costs associated with it and unfunded mandates. The systematic process does not proceed as fast, smoothly as we would like but having that systematic process in place is about the only way a public university like ours can go. It cannot be fast, it cannot be instantaneous because there are contracts at the other end.
Dr. Maliekal: I understand the anxiety that faculty have. One way to address that anxiety might be to put the percentage of money allocated at this College and how it compares to similar institutions in the system. So that there are comparisons that can be made that will probably be helpful.
Dr. Haynes: Benchmarking.
Dr. Maliekal: Yes, benchmarking.
Dr. Haynes: Ms. Wight, will you send me a reminder on this as well?
Ms. Wight: Yes.
Dr. Haynes: I will see what I can do in the short time remaining.
Mr. Haines: I would say benchmarking is a good tool to use, but I would also want to consider what institutions we are benchmarking. We don’t want to benchmark against an institution that is in financial hardship.
Dr. Copelton: When we think about our competitors, we tend to focus on other SUNY schools, but we don’t just compete against SUNY schools. Rochester region, in particular, western New York where we tend to draw very heavily from. You have a lot of very good students who are increasingly going to places like Nazareth and St. John Fisher. I understand that their financial model is very different from ours and their funding is very different from ours, but I do think we need to increasingly look at those because they are competitors particularly for students in the region.
Dr. Haynes: The easiest way to do this, since you all will be here longer than me; this would be for you to consider undertaking this research project as a group or subcommittee?
Dr. Copelton: As a subcommittee of this body?
Dr. Haynes: Yes and I have been trying to get benchmarking data from the private schools but no one will respond.
Dr. Copelton: I know that last year, one of your initiatives was to move up the position request cycle so that departments would know by July 1, I think that was your goal, whether they were getting positions. What is the timeframe?
Dr. Haynes: Yes, I would expect with the next two to three weeks the Deans’ Council would
have made decisions on which faculty that are leaving or retiring to replace and which new positions to fill.
Dr. Copelton: So, these decisions will be made prior to the new Provost coming on board?
Dr. Haynes: Yes. That way we will really know what the base reserve will be.
Other Items from the Committee
None at this time.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:22 am.
Next Meeting: April 19, 2018, 8:30-10:30 am;
Division Presentations by Advancement and Administration & Finance
DC/LS/mw