Present: R. Osgood, J. Brand, J. Swartz, B. Grey, D. Kaiser, K. Kamp, J. Mohan, J. Mutti.

The meeting came to order at 4:23 in the Nollen House Conference Room.

The minutes and excerpts of the February 27, 2002 meeting were approved.

The President made no remarks.

Dean's Remarks

He stated that the College has been asked by the Luce Foundation to submit a full proposal for consideration of funding in the final round of competition in the Luce Asian Studies initiative. He stated that he would like to constitute a faculty committee to develop the proposal and asked for Council participation. B. Grey noted that there is a sense among the faculty that there needs to be more involvement of the faculty in the institutional grant process so that there is clear buy-in prior to the process becoming a fait accompli. Kamp suggested that it would be appropriate to circulate information about the grant to the faculty as a whole and ask if there were individuals who would be interested in becoming involved in the process. This seems particularly appropriate in this case, because adding a human geographer is not completely uncontroversial and there has been recent dissatisfaction among some faculty when grants were applied for without broad faculty awareness and involvement. B. Grey volunteered for the committee, noting that he is clearly a proponent of the human geography and East Asian studies initiatives.

Council Remarks

B. Grey distributed a draft letter to the Scarlet and Black penned by Mickey Munley and John Kalkbrenner intended to rebuke a student initiative on the ballet to be voted on today regarding the administration of dining services. He stated that he was asked by the authors to determine if members of Council or the Council as a governing body of the faculty would endorse the letter as signatories. After some discussion it was decided that since the issue is not dealing with academic policy it is not appropriate to be taken up by Council.

K. Kamp noted her concern with the way the College web page is currently being administered-in a way which minimizes the ability of departments to customize their pages. B. Grey noted that this is another of the issues that the Instructional Support Committee is dealing with at the moment. The Dean noted that this is a primary publication of the College. He further noted that there has been a problem in the past with delivering a consistent set of information at the level of the department to the public-principally interested students and their families as well as a failure to have those pages maintained regularly.

Faculty Salary Process

The Dean reviewed previous Council discussion on the faculty salary process. He noted that Council had agreed on using different processes for pre- and post tenure faculty. There was then some discussion of the use of a multi-year assessment model rather than continuing to follow an annual process. The Dean noted that there are approximately forty percent of the faculty who are untenured. If you move to a three year review cycle this means that you have effectively cut the workload for the Faculty Budget Committee to one-fifth its current load. B. Grey suggested that, since it is the intention of the Council to explicitly include teaching, along with scholarship and service as criteria for consideration in the review process, the Personnel Committee might be made responsible for salary review of untenured faculty since they are already responsible for the third and tenure review processes.

There was further discussion of mechanisms which might be used to provide information on teaching performance under a multi-year cycle. K. Kamp stated that she would be opposed to any decision which would substantially increase the workload of department chairs such as sitting in on every colleague's classes even though providing information beyond the end-of-course evaluations is desirable. D. Kaiser stated that reliance only on end-of-course evaluations in the review of teaching performance-if it occurs only once in a three-year period-would be a great mistake.

K. Kamp asked Council members to recognize the key issues in the discussion of a multi-year review model as 1) the potential for will we get increased quality , 2) the desire for a decreased time commitment, and 3) the effect on morale. She was concerned that the half of the faculty getting a lower than average assessment would be dissatisfied with the idea that they would be stuck with this for three years and morale would decline even lower than it currently is.

D. Kaiser offered the conclusion that Council does not agree on the multi-year model. He also noted that there was previous agreement on the exclusion of specific categories of faculty in the regular review process. He asked Council members if they believe that we can improve the faculty salary review process by using a set of uniform college-wide teaching assessment data. He suggested that the answer is "yes". B. Grey agreed. J. Mohan asked why we recognize end-of-course data as an input to faculty development decisions, but not to salary decisions. He suggested that these data would be very useful for this latter purpose if employed in the multi-year review since you would be able to see trends. D. Kaiser suggested that this use of end-of-course evaluations could be supplemented by other data such as information from class visitation by chairs. The Dean offered the conclusion that Council agrees on the use of uniform and college-wide teaching assessment data in the faculty salary review process. J. Mutti joined K. Kamp in her concern over additional burdening of the department chairs. D. Kaiser suggested that perhaps the time has come for reconsidering the administrative expectations of department chairs, including their terms and compensation.
Thus far in this discussion Council has agreed on 1)the use of different processes for pre- and post-tenure faculty, 2)the use of uniform and college-wide teaching assessment data, and 3)the exclusion of specific categories of faculty from this process.

The meeting was adjourned at 6:05 p.m.

Secretary
Karen Wiese