Faculty Senate President's Message
To:
From:
Re:
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Faculty Senators
Bruce Sorte
Faculty Senate Summary
February 10th - February 15th, 2003
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We continue to work on the revised undergraduate admissions criteria. Bob Bontrager is revising the
proposal based on your input at the February 6th Faculty Senate meeting and Sabah Randhawa will wait
until we deliberate the revised proposal on March 6th to go to the Board of Higher Education with the
changes.
A couple of people volunteered to serve on the Screening Committee for the new president, after the last
Senate Meeting. The EC added to the list of people who we nominated and were not chosen for the Search
Committee and submitted a list of 16 faculty to OUS for the Screening Committee on Friday. The Screening
Committee will represent us and provide additional perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of the
final candidates.
There has been some separation of professional faculty input from academic faculty input in the
Presidential Search forums and committee recommendations. I believe it weakens faculty input to splinter
the groups, while some would argue that it actually broadens the input by obtaining it from different
groups. This is not a huge issue, and we have been very fortunate to be as involved as we have been,
yet, I will follow up with the Board and the respective groups.
The Faculty Mediation and Grievance Committees are working on a white paper to discuss collegiality and
possibly make recommendations for its main points to be added to the P&T guidelines.
With all the budget reductions, there are a number of personnel adjustments among the fixed-term
faculty. We are addressing these issues in two ways. I am meeting with people individually to recommend
options like mediation or grievance. In addition, we are trying to get a recommendation to Sabah from
the Professional Faculty Task Force. He has been positive about considering those recommendations.
We can anticipate another budget reduction due to further declines in revenue forecasts. I hope we can
carefully review all our resources and not just do another across-the-board cut. It seems like using
cash reserves, which we have been trying to strengthen, is appropriate.
The Library Director was recently removed from the Provost's Council, as that group was streamlined. We
worked very hard last Spring to get Karyle Butcher included on that Council and we really only had about
eight months to test the effectiveness of her participation. We are now returning to the original
proposal to get the Library budget up to 4% of the Education & General budget, appoint the Director as a
Dean and move the Library out from under Information Services. Sabah has given us a number of questions
to consider and we hope this time we can agree to a longer-term plan.
Coach searches are typically handled at the highest administrative levels and they tend to be very
expedited so faculty input tends to be somewhat indirect. I have discussed faculty ideas about what
attributes should be considered in recruiting a new football coach in separate and very productive
conversations with both Tim White and Bob De Carolis. The areas we discussed included demonstrated
commitment to scholarship and diversity, salary levels and incentive plans and working with the academic
units to extend athletic enthusiasm to support for academic programs.
