2000-2001
Meeting #4, Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Present:
McKeever (chair), Smelser (vice-chair), Chun,
Coonts, Finnie, Fritz, Goodwin, Guilfoyle, Haggart (w/o vote), Hong, Kraut,
McCaffrey, McClure, Meier, Nelson, Nielsen, Olson, Thomas (w/o vote),
Trivedi, Vaughn
Absent:
Brunsfeld, Foltz, Goble, Thompson Observers: 2
Call
to Order. A quorum being present, Faculty Council
Chair, Professor Kerry McKeever, called the meeting to order at 3:35 p.m. in
the Idaho Commons.
Minutes.
The council, by voice vote, accepted the minutes of the September 12, 2000,
meeting as distributed.
Chair’s
Report. Chair McKeever announced that the
governor has agreed to meet with the group of higher education faculty
council/senate chairs/presidents to discuss salaries. She believes that
the projected state budget surplus has prompted this meeting. The meeting is
scheduled for October 3rd and therefore, Professor Smelser will
chair the Faculty Council meeting on that date. McKeever told the council
that if they have any suggestions about what she should say to the governor
at that meeting, to get in touch with her via email (mckeever@uidaho.edu).
Her current strategy will be to indicate to the governor that the U of Idaho
is unable to keep excellent faculty members and recruit new ones because of
our non-competitive salary scale, emphasizing how this really affects not
only the U of Idaho, but the state of Idaho.
Provost’s
Report. Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Dene
Thomas, presented the report from the provost’s office in the absence of
Provost Pitcher. Thomas expanded on the preliminary enrollment report given
by the provost last week. The U of Idaho’s ability to retain students
continues to show a steady increase of about 1% each year. The total
university (all classes of students) retention rate in 1996 of 76.3% has
increased to 81.3% in 2000. In response to questions from the council,
Thomas said that these figures have not been broken down into departmental
or college figures. She noted that department and college figures also
include those students who may have changed areas of study, but have not
left the university. Everyone seemed to agree that it is important to find
out how best to keep students at the U of Idaho and that it would be good to
have departmental and college figures that indicate which programs were
showing success at retaining students. Thomas told the council that the Retention
Task Force has been sharing information on retention with department
heads on a regular basis. A councilor asked about the success of a calling
program that was initiated a few years ago, to call freshmen admitted to the
U of Idaho who had not registered for classes. Thomas said that there is no
way to select that program out as a success or failure – it is simply a
part of the total retention program effort. Another important part of the
program is the freshman calling program. This year the calling can be done
by individual departments or colleges. Professor Thomas thanked the
university community for helping the university in its effort to retain
students. She said that it was certainly easier to retain students than to
go out and find new ones.
Report
from Human Resources. Director of Human Resource
Services, Sylva Staab, provided the council with information concerning the new
voluntary long-term care insurance program being offered by the U of
Idaho through TIAA-CREF Life. Full-time actively-at-work employees under the
age of 75 will be able to apply, without a medical screening, during a
31-day open enrollment period from October 16th through November
15th. Retirees, part-time employees, spouses, and other family
members can also be covered by the new benefit, but must pass a medical
screening. Staab said that there will be TIAA-CREF representatives on the
campus to discuss the program and its many options on October 11th
and 12th at 9:00 am and 1:00 pm in the Horizon room of the Idaho
Commons. Employees can also contact TIAA-CREF Life directly with their
questions at 1-800-223-1200.
FC-01-001.
The council then took up for action a seconded motion from the University
Curriculum Committee. FC-01-001 proposes to change the name of the major
in Interior Architecture (B.F.A.) to a major in Interior Design (B.F.A.).
Councilor McClure gave the council background information on the change,
indicating that the change was a good clarification for those in the
profession and for the degree program. FC-01-001
was adopted by the council with a unanimous voice vote.
Campus
Planning Committee. Chair McKeever asked the
council for nominations from the class of 2001 to fill a council vacancy on
the Campus Planning Committee. When no nominations were forthcoming (many of
the eligible candidates were absent from the meeting) the chair opened the
nomination process to the whole council membership. Councilors and Vice
Provost Thomas spoke of the importance of this committee. Thomas emphasized
the influence that faculty members can have, not only in the planning of new
buildings, but in seeing to the repair of older facilities.
It
was even suggested that perhaps the only proper faculty representative to
serve on this committee was one who had an office in Brink or Phinney Hall.
After some discussion (which included the necessary service of council
members on committees other than the Faculty Council) and as the chair was
about to postpone the matter until the next meeting, Councilor Mark
Nielsen volunteered to serve a one year appointment to the committee.
The council (while making note of Nielsen’s Brink Hall office location)
praised his unselfish act by giving it unanimous approval. After the
conclusion of the regular meeting, Councilor Steve Meier agreed to serve
as the chair of the Campus Planning Committee.
Preliminary
Report from the Faculty Council Task Force on the Course Evaluation Process.
Councilor Mark Nielsen provided the council with a preliminary report on the
work of his task force that is looking into the course evaluation process. Professor
Nielsen told the council that the task force was given the assignment of 1)
recommending revisions to the current form used in course evaluations, and
2) evaluating the feasibility of using an on-line system for course
evaluations.
Nielsen
then summarized the activity of the task force since last spring:
Expanded
its membership (five faculty members, Dene Thomas, and Wayland Winstead)
to include Jane Baillargeon (Institutional Planning and Budget) and
Cindy Leonhart (Registrar’s Office)
Conducted
a very small-scale experiment with on-line evaluations during the summer
Composed
a working draft of an alternative evaluation form to use during the
experimental phase
Councilor
Nielsen then reviewed the plans for the fall semester:
1.
Conduct an on-line experiment using the following guidelines:
Voluntary
participation
Participation
approved through departmental administrators
Use
of parallel sections testing on-line form vs. identical written form
Possible
use of incentives for student participation
2.
Try to answer questions raised earlier in
the drafting process:
Will
student participation be diminished?
Will
students fear a possible loss of confidentiality using an on-line
evaluation?
Will
the students be able to skew the results in some way – negative or
positive?
Will
the results be useful in ways that a written evaluation is not now?
3.
Gather Comments on the working draft of the
evaluation form.
Nielsen noted that the working draft of the evaluation form was designed
to:
Professor
Nielsen concluded his presentation by asking the council to encourage
faculty members to participate in the on-line experiments this year and to
help in gathering the necessary feedback on the experiment and the
evaluation form. He said that information about the activities and plans of
the task force – including a copy of the draft version of the evaluation
form – is available for viewing on the web at http://www.uidaho.edu/~markn/eval
Questions
and Comments on the work of the task force:
The
numbers that you get from the present evaluation process is a number with
no variants – the evaluation results assume that all of the classes
are the same, yet the numbers are used to separate teachers into
classifications of good or bad teaching. The individual questions mean
nothing by themselves. What we get is a composite snapshot of how the
student felt about a course at a particular time. We can’t dictate to
administrators how the numbers are going to be used. I think faculty
should dictate how evaluations are used. I don’t think that it was
within the charge of the task force to do that. As a faculty council we
should dictate how those numbers are used. We can
discuss this further next week.
The
draft form uses two questions that apply to instruction and two questions
that apply to the classroom environment. How are those supposed to be
used by the department? We wanted to keep the form
brief, the questions applicable to a broad range of teaching styles and
class formats, and we wanted to add a question on student self-evaluation of
effort in the class. We also wanted a grading scale that was better
understood and unambiguous. Another important area was questions of context
and having the students add context to their rankings. Finally, the last two
questions are to evaluate the teaching environment – what is the condition
of the classroom and the quality of the technology.
The
current form is not a valid evaluation instrument. In the new form,
how do you tie the questions and the letter grades together? How are they
correlated? Those new questions are an improvement.
They give the person reading the evaluation some contextual information
about the student. It also gives the student some context before they answer
the main questions.
Are
administrators going to really look at the responses
or just the numbers coming from a class that has hundreds of responses? That
is a departmental administrator’s decision beyond the task force’
control, but experience says that chairs do read the evaluations.
Some
are troubled by using a new form and a new on-line system that hasn’t
been approved yet. Shouldn’t we use the same form we are using now
on-line? We are losing too much valuable information by having such a short
evaluation form with only two questions dealing directly with the course and
the instructor. The task force has chosen to keep
the form short and simple to make it easier to evaluate the results.
What
is the reason for wanting to do the evaluation on-line? Cost is
not the driving force. The task force does not
really know if this is a good idea or not – perhaps we can learn enough
from the experiment to tell us what we need to know. It could make the
evaluation process more objective by removing any instructor influences from
the process.
A
councilor noted that another problem that the council needs to address is
making students aware of the importance of the teaching/course evaluations.
Students do not seem to understand how important these evaluations are and
how the university applies them. Chair McKeever concluded the discussion by
saying that further discussion of the task force report will be on the
agenda next week. She urged council members to study the report, talk to
other faculty members, and be prepared to offer informed comments at the
next meeting.
On
another matter that will come back before the council at a later date – Responsibility
Center Management (RCM) – Chair McKeever reminded council members to
contact colleagues at other colleges and universities to obtain their
experiences with this type of financial management program. Her
conversations with faculty members at other English departments has proven
to be very informative and rewarding.
Diversity
Issues. Special Assistant to the President for
Diversity and Human Rights, Raúl Sánchez, challenged the council to
think about diversity issues in a different light. He said that part of
his job is to make people feel a little bit uncomfortable, but only for the
purposes of creating a better institution. Challenging assumptions about how
we do things and how we have comfortably come to do things and its
consequences is also part of his job – challenging how we know what we
know. He said that in many respects, we don’t understand how we obtain
information. On a more superficial level, his job has to do with blatant
forms of discrimination. He sees his job as being an advocate for
underrepresented populations and helping the institution to be more diverse.
Sánchez asked the council to think about the following scenario: If we are
successful in attracting a more diverse faculty, staff, and student body,
what type of environment are we inviting them into and will they feel
comfortable at the university and in Moscow?
As
an example of the need to change our way of thinking, he noted that
the U of Idaho is running an "image" campaign with radio and
television advertisements. Those ads are clearly aimed at attracting new
students, yet we are not translating them into Spanish, even though there is
an audience for that message using the Spanish language. If we are serious
about recruiting Mexican-American and Mexican students, then it is crucial
that we speak to them and their parents in their native language – both in
our ads and face-to-face.
Sánchez
said that the question of faculty evaluations becomes an even bigger
issue when you are a minority or woman faculty member. The literature
suggests dominant culture students view non-dominant culture professors in a
different way that affects their performance evaluation. Why is that? Is it
because of a difficulty with language or is it just because they are
"different" from the dominant culture? How much thought has the
university given to these questions?
The
university community needs to think about and discuss openly these kinds of
questions. We need to educate ourselves as we move toward developing a
comprehensive diversity plan for the university. There is a lot of
literature out there about diversity and Sánchez provided the council with
a primary web address that would assist them in their study of the issues: Diversity
Web and Digest, at http://www.inform.umd.edu.diversityweb.
He also provided the council with a reprint of excerpts from an article
entitled "To Form A More Perfect Union – Campus Diversity
Initiatives."
Sánchez
said the U of Idaho president hopes to have a diversity plan in place by the
end of the academic year. Sánchez’s hope is that we can all eventually
share in the responsibility and challenges of implementing the diversity
plan. Strategies are best developed at the departmental level.
A
councilor raised the issue of the prerequisite that foreign students meet
written English language requirements by achieving a certain TOEFL
score. He asked Sánchez if he saw that as a problem? Sánchez replied that
it is up to each one of us to share our own experience about what we have
felt that has meant in our own departments. In some departments it matters
less than in others. Is that an artificial cut-off? Vice Provost Thomas
responded that it has been a topic of discussion on
the campus. Last year a proposal was brought to raise the minimum TOEFL
score and the proposal was voted down.
Thomas
went on to say that the International Programs Office has an American
Language and Culture Program (ALCP) that allows deferred enrollment for
students who did not meet the TOEFL requirements, but met all other
requirements. The ALCP allows students to attend the university while
improving their language skills. Undergraduate students’ main complaint
has been with foreign teachers’ ability to speak English, and the TOEFL
only tests written language – not spoken. Another councilor indicated that
the ALCP program is excellent, but since it is very expensive and
self-supporting, students often do not take advantage of the program. The
university needs to underwrite some of those costs. In response to the
question of "spoken English," the vice provost responded that the
ALCP has instituted a course in diction, but resources are still needed in
this area. International teaching assistants feel much more comfortable in
the classroom after they have had this type of instruction in the English
language. The diversity plan will need to talk about financing these types
of programs and courses. Sánchez said that he needs to know about
problems that have an "immediate" solution – like the
diction course – so that he can resolve them quickly.
A
councilor noted the lack of scholarship money to help students coming
from poorer countries. It would add to our diversity if we could help these
students. Vice Provost Thomas responded that there is limited help in the
form of tuition waivers and scholarships, but we do need to do more in this
area. Sánchez noted that this is an interesting question because it brings
up the notion of diversity being just another player at the table needing
money, which would come from someone else. The diversity plan should
illustrate that diversity is central to our educational mission and
funding should flow to it naturally. Another councilor commented that the
diversity plan should include the community of Moscow and the state of
Idaho. Sánchez agreed and is working on the idea of collaboration with
community and state groups. McKeever noted that at the recent "Camp
Vandal," students were asked to put together commercials that would
sell the U of Idaho, and of the ten groups working on the project only one
came up with a campaign that included ads in both English and Spanish. They
clearly were sending the camp a message. Students sometimes teach us what we
should be doing.
Sánchez
noted a tension at the U of Idaho surrounding the idea that people
want the university to be diverse, but express discomfort in singling out
members of minority groups, because they perceive that to be some sort of
segregation rather than seeing them as part of the tapestry. For recruitment
practices, that is not what we want to be doing. People want to feel that
they are going to be comfortable here, so they want to know what we are
doing for people like them on the campus. It is something we need to talk
more about. Another councilor noted that we need to spend as much effort on creating
the right welcoming environment on the campus as we do in recruiting
minority students.
Sánchez
commented that what we mean by "fitting in" and
"environment" is an important issue. Is it about having them
fit in to our environment or is it about changing the very nature of the way
we think about our environment – a pluralistic place or a place where we
simply don’t discriminate against people who are not like us? It is a
critical distinction. Another councilor noted that even in a diverse culture
you will still have stereotyping and association groups. The focus needs to
be on the person rather than their ethnicity. Another councilor noted that
we need to find ways to encourage students to take a foreign language.
Chair
McKeever thanked Sánchez for his informative report and concluded by noting
that perhaps it is time to have a diversity conference. Sánchez said that
such a conference was in the works and that he looked forward to working
with the faculty on a diversity plan. McKeever said that a further
discussion of these issues will be added to the agenda for the next council
meeting.
Adjournment.
There being no other business to come before the council, Chair Kerry
McKeever adjourned the meeting at 5:05 pm.
Respectfully
submitted,
Peter
A. Haggart
Secretary
of the Faculty Council
