Faculty Senate

Minutes - November 30, 2020 - 3:05pm - Online through WebEx

CCSU FACULTY SENATE MEETING

Present: Adair, S.; Atkinson, S.; Austad, C.; Benoit, D.; Bigelow, L.; Bishop, J.; Blitz, D.; Boscarino, N.; Bray, A.; Broulik, W.; Chakraborty, S.; Chen, S.; Cox, S.; Dumpson, N.; Duquette, J.; Elfant, A.; Flinn, B.; Foster, P.; French, J.; Gagnon, A.; Gamache, J.; Garceau, T.; Ghiloni-Wage, B.; Gichiru, W.; Gu, S.; Halkin, S.; Harris, D.; He, F.; Hernandez, J.; Holt, J.; Hou, X.; Hughes, H.; Jarmoszko, T.; Jenkins, A.; Jones S.; Kapper, M.; Karas, R.; Kean, K.; Knox, C.; Langevin, K.; Leonidas, E.; Lewis, M.; Mahony, M.A.; Martin, K.; Martin, V.; Matzke, B.; Mendez-Mendez, S.; Moreno-Fuentes, G.; Nicoletti, J.; Oyewumi, O.; Pancsofar, E.; Phillips, E.; Rein, T.; Roark, E.; Rode, D.; Ruhs, T.; Salama, T.; Salgado, E.; Schenck, S.; Scott, T.; Sikorski, J.; Singhal, R.; Skinner, L.; Smith, R.; Sohn, Y.M.; Spear, E.; Strickland, A.; Styrczula, S.; Sylvester, C.; Wang, W.; Whittemore, L.; Williams, L.; Zadi, S.

Ex-Officio: Dauwalder, D.; Farhat, J.; Kim, J.; Kostelis, K.; Robinson, C.; Wolff, R.; Toro, Z.

 

Parliamentarian: Dimmick, C.

President of the Senate: Latour, F.

Guests: Alicandro, J.; Bielawa, M.; Casamento, C.; Cintorino, S.; Claffey, G.; Fallon, M.; Gonzalez, K.; Goode, G.; Jackson, M.; Jasek, M.; Kirby, Y.; Lupachino, K.; Magnan, C.; McGrath, K.; Melnyk, J.; Misra, K.; Palmer, J.; Peckham, K.

1. Minutes

• Minutes of November 16, 2020

The minutes of November 16, 2020 were approved unanimously.

2. Announcements:

a. AAUP President (L. Williams)

• Contract proposals will be exchanged with management on December 1, 2020.
• The Human Resource office at the Board of Regents has informed AAUP that faculty may not use Zoom in the Spring semester. AAUP will immediately be filing a grievance about this, and may ask faculty who use Zoom to assist, either by signing onto the grievance or other ways.
• The next Chapter meeting is this coming Thursday.

b. SUOAF-AFSCME Secretary (J. Gamache)

• SUOAF held its nominations meeting for Chapter Officers for 2020-2022 on November 20, 2020.
• SUOAF is expecting the decisions on the Christopher Dukes arbitration case this week.

c. SGA

• The SGA Finance committee is drafting a student survey asking where SGA reserves should be allocated. Reserves balances are high due to travel restrictions, which has curtailed student travel to conferences. Some options include directing them to the diversity sculpture, scholarships, and reimbursing student activities fees.
• The last SGA meeting is this Wednesday, December 2 at 3:05 p.m.

d. FAC to the Board of Regents (D. Blitz)

• The Advisory Committee to select the next President of CSCU will be meeting on Friday to elect the chair and co-chair. David indicated he was nominated for both roles, but he has declined to chair the committee, citing his chairing of the FAC and other professional demands on his time.
• The FAC at its last meeting approved in principle a statement of principles that is being called “Back to Basics” in opposition to the “Everything on the Table” slogan that the BOR has adopted. It will be presented at the next Faculty Senate Meeting. We believe it better expresses the mission and the direction that the CSCU and its three units should be taking. He will try to send the statement out to everyone in advance of the next meeting.
• For sake of information, you probably received a notice from CSCU signed by the interim president of CSCC (the so-far non-existent community college, which already has in interim president, provost, and three regional presidents). It expresses how the System Office plans to establish a shared governance structure. They are proposing a College Senate which consists of 27 people who will be representing 50,000 students. For comparison, we have a Senate of twice that number for 10,000 students. They will have one-tenth of the representation we have.
• The interesting fact is that faculty will be a distinct minority in this College Senate structure. There will be 12 faculty, on from each of the campuses, 12 classified/professional staff, and three students, one per region. Faculty will be one-third of the representatives of this College Senate governance body. They also have complicated formula for a “curriculum congress”. Basically, according to how they plan to organize curriculum there will be six college-level deans, from each of the six so-called area of study. Then 15 associate deans for the sub-areas of study, which are then in a way, not defined, further divided into disciplines. The disciplines would meet across all 12 campuses one per term. Basically, curriculum would be run by the associate deans because there will be no department chairs, only faculty leads for a discipline, or a program coordinator for an inter-disciplinary program. Those are the latest developments. You can imagine teaching faculty are not pleased. Will this pass? Probably, but over strenuous faculty opposition. Will this be coming in our direction? This is unknown. We will see what the Board proposes in our next contract. They are very concerned to eliminate faculty control over curriculum, which they consider to be an impediment to the one community college.
• He gave as an example another policy item that has just been sent to the FAC: the Board of Regents Policy for Alignment and Timely Completion of Mathematics and English at Connecticut State College in Fall 2023, which basically calls for elimination of developmental English and Math courses. All students would go into regular courses and faculty would be expected to provide additional support services to students (e.g., students for whom English is a second language and need additional support.) Moreover, the level of support would be determined, in part, by the high school GPA, which can be self-reported by students. All students would be directly enrolled in college-level English and Math courses with supports to maximize success, as needed. That would be an additional burden on the faculty who may not be developmental specialists and would eliminate developmental sequences. That has implications for the University since there are guided pathway and transfer articulations, which presupposes students coming to the universities do have adequate preparation. Sen. Blitz then read from the policy, that includes four pages of 30 bibliographic references, typical of how the System Office is presenting policy - no facts, figures, references, etc., but rather, a cited research paper.
• Questions:
  • Sen. Jones asked where the report could be found. Sen. Blitz noted it is in an email from the CSCU dated November 18, 2020 at 11:04 a.m. President Latour noted that this will be put on the agenda for discussion at the next Senate meeting. R. Wolff noted that English faculty were included. Sen. Leonidas agreed, but said English faculty pulled out when it became clear they would have no real input.
  • Sen Mahony noted that this sounded reminiscent of something in the legislature several years back, when it was being championed by Sen. Beth Bye, who said too much money was being spend on courses students did not need.
  • President Latour noted PA 1240 about remediation and said the proposal from the BOR also includes many elements not in PA 1240 and many that go beyond PA 1240.
  • Senator Bishop asked about the report from the Yale student. D. Blitz noted it was on the CSS 101 course and he would share it with her.
  • Finally, Sen. Blitz indicated that one of the quotes in the report was attributed to someone whom the FAC contacted. The FAC was told by the person quoted that she had asked for her name to be removed from the report, because her comment was misattributed.

  e. President of the Senate (F. Latour)

  • The first Presidential Open Forum (virtual) is tomorrow at 3 p.m.
  • If you gave any students a grade of Incomplete last semester, you should have received an email from the Registrar, asking you to either submit a grade, or give an extension.
  • The deadline for submitting grades is 12/22.
  • This week and next week is an unusual situation where we have consecutive Senate meetings. Our next and last meeting for this semester is 12/7. There will be a significant number of items on the agenda, including a longer Curriculum Committee report and Graduate Studies report, as well as discussion of our response to BOR proposals. And, of course, as usual, the approval of the candidates for graduation.

  3. Committee Reports (reports marked with an asterisk are informational reports intended for consent agenda only; if you would like a report to be discussed, please inform the President and Secretary by Monday, noon)  

  a. Excellence in Teaching Committee (C. Brewer & L. Casas)*

  • This report was submitted later than usual because of the date of the virtual ceremony. If there are no questions, this can be approved as part of the consent agenda. If there are questions, we can invite individuals to the next meeting to present the report. Jan Bishop congratulated Fred Latour and Jan Mason for being selected as this year’s award recipients. The Committee report was accepted as part of the consent agenda.

  b. University Planning and Budget Committee (J. Melnyk)

  • President Latour introduced the report. As you may have heard, the BOR requested that consultants review programs offered by the four universities to make recommendations. Of course, we can do a better job than consultants who do not know higher education or our institution. As a matter of fact, we already do this on a regular basis through the Assessment Committee and Program Review process, which is not part of the feedback loop. However, because the BOR is specifically requesting that consultants look at those programs, a request has been made to the UPBC for it to do a review of our programs. He introduced UPBC Chair Jay Melnyk to speak further on this topic.
  • J. Melnyk said that a few weeks ago President Toro requested that the UPBC consider some sort of program review or program effectiveness process because the BOR was asking for outside consultants to conduct this predominantly financial review. In conversations with the UPBC and Faculty Senate steering committee Fred asked the UPBC to move forward with this request from President Toro and develop our own process.
  • The UPBC is in discussions about what that would look like, and even though we do not know exactly what the BOR will be looking for, we can infer a little bit and would rather be proactive prior to a report coming from the BOR, rather than be reactive. The UPBC is tentatively proposing (and tentative because it was only discussed in Email, the committee is meeting tomorrow for further discussions) a two-fold goal: (1) to empower departments to examine their publicly available data (for example, what is on the OIRA website) and to provide input and perspective into how their programs serve the needs of their students and the State of Connecticut and (2) provide relevant documentation of CCSU programs to the University community, the UPBC, and President Toro so that we may be better equipped to respond to any reports coming from the BOR. He then presented for feedback and consideration the potential process that the UPBC is now discussing:
  • First, UPBC is considering asking department chairs to look at their programs and identify strengths and weaknesses and would want to leave that comment or question open-ended as to what the strengths and weaknesses might be, but also provide some guidelines about what that might be. So, the UPBC would also compile a list of helpful documents and relevant publicly available data, as well as some prompts or suggestions. We would also want to encourage departments to review their academic program reviews as well as their annual reports, as information that can be drawn upon to help the UPBC in this process may already be existing. And the UPBC also wants to be mindful and sensitive to the increasing demand we would be placing on departments, especially during our current situation with the pandemic. It is the hope that the UPBC can empower departments and their programs, point them in the direction of data they may or may not be aware of, use the feedback provided to UPBC gathered from the programs to inform us of our collective strengths and areas and where we can do better so that the UPBC might be better equipped to help handle any challenges that arrive from the BOR.
  • Questions:
    • Sen. Blitz asked who exactly is asking for this: Academic Affairs at the SO or the Academic and Student Affairs Committee of the BOR, Merle Harris chair? He indicated we often talk about the “board” generically. He looked at the minutes of the last meeting and there was no mention of an outside entity conducting this review. He plans to inquire and report back to the Senate. He asked if it is the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which has been hired by the State. He noted we are different than other state agencies and not likely covered by the same process that may be applied to, for example, the Department of Motor Vehicles.
    • CFO Casamento noted that she asked a clarifying question of the System Office CFO and learned that the Boston Consulting Group has indeed been hired by the State of Connecticut to mostly look at the Executive Branch and see what kinds of efficiencies can be obtained. There could be indirect impacts on us and CSCU has indicated they are going to be participate if called upon, but the primary focus of the work of BCG is the traditional line agencies across the state. As for the community colleges, Grant Thornton, our independent auditor, has been hired to review and develop some program evaluation processes geared toward the community colleges. This is an interesting way of saying that the BOR is not going to require we use their process, but they are going to be looking to understand what our process is on our campus. At the end of the day, if we do not have a process, or one that in their eyes passes the test, then we certainly would be encouraged to adopt a process that has been developed and obviously would need to be modified for use at the universities. Certainly the work Jay is describing would put us on the path of developing our own process, but there are two different things going on by two different organizations.
    • Sen. Mahony indicated that the size of the BCG contract would suggest that it could be requested under FOIA. Dr. Blitz indicated he would make an inquiry at the upcoming BOR Finance Committee meeting.
    • Sen. Mendez-Mendez suggested that the Senate file a FOIA request to obtain the BCG to learn of its contents and made a motion that such action be taken. The motion passed.

  4. Unfinished Business

  a. Presentation by Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Center (M. Mahony)

  5. Adjournment

  • The meeting adjourned at 4:48 p.m.