October 19 2015 | Arts & Sciences Senate

A&S Senate
Tentative Agenda
October 19, 2015

Approval of agenda
Approval of minutes from September 21, 2015
3:30-3:35 President’s Report
3:35-3:45 Zero Credit / Audit Option - Robert Aller
3:45-4:00 CASA By-Laws Changes Nancy Hollingsworth
4:00 Present Drafts of Department Descriptions WAGS and CLCS Sacha Kopp
New Business
Old Business

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A&S Senate Meeting
Minutes
September 21, 2015

I. Approval of agenda: approved.

II. Approval of minutes from April 20, 2015: Approved. If there are any corrections, please email them to Laurie Cullen.

III. President’s Report (M. Schedel)

Dr. Schedel welcomed everyone back. Looking forward to another year as your President.

IV. Dean’s Report and Sr. Lecturer and Advanced Sr. Lecturer

Transitions in CAS Office: Ellen Broselow from Linguistics is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs. Peter Stephens is Associate Dean for Research and Facilities. This is a new position. Rebecca Bair joins the college as Assistant Dean for Advancement.
Faculty research support: We have two new staff members that we moved from the former Center for Survey Research. Carol Davies and Soraya Zabihi will be helping with grant support for the whole college. Peter Stephens and Ellen Broselow will be doing grant workshops this fall. Working on a Data base for funding opportunities.
Incentive grants: working on course release incentive for faculty.
Dr. Naomi Wolf will be joining SBU as a visiting lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences. She will be giving numerous workshops.
Adrienne Unger is the new Director of the Humanities Institute.
John Shandra is taking over as Director of the FAHSS program.
Capital Campaign: All colleges are being asked to come up with a campaign for how we will raise money and what we will raise money for. Hope is to raise $600 Mil with $200 Mil yet to go. Have been working with chairs to talk about areas where we might want to fundraise. Trying to come up with a plan that totals $50 Mil. Theory behind a campaign is a little different from what has been fundraising. We have a lot of great gifts throughout the college but there are constraints on those gifts.
A little different then fundraising.
We have over $20 Mil in endowments which have another $10 Mil in accounts we could be spending now but over 170 accounts of those accounts are in the increment of $1,000 or less. Difficult to use money like that.
Circulated to chairs a set of campaign ideas or themes for input. This is very much still up for discussion. A few areas where we think that there will be a lot of fundraising opportunities are: support of physical sciences (a large number of alumni), strengthening of the Social Sciences, Biological Imaging particularly instrumentation, Digital computation, Humanities Institute (interdisciplinary research), studios/instrumentation in the arts, and the student experience (scholarship programs).
Lecturers: Have been working with the Provost’s Office and Human Resources as well as drawing on the expertise of lecturers throughout the college in trying to pull together a proposal where we could have a promotion track for lecturers. The word “distinguished” is reserved for SUNY so we can up with two titles, Sr. Lecturer and Sr. Advanced Lecturer. These will be local titles. This promotion track would be a trigger to look at salary equity. This would be something we do annually.

V. TLT: Hosting Syllabi Online (P. Aceves)

Initiated a project 2-3 years ago which went somewhat hand in hand with the course evaluation project. In it students told us that they wanted to see the syllabi in advance of the courses to help them make decisions in selecting courses.
P. Aceves gave a demonstration of how it works on-line.
Created a site called Classic Syllabus Explorer. Can search by course.
Generally keep the most recent course syllabi online.
Not only is it helping students plan their schedules, it is helping us in our assessment efforts.
Ideally it would feed into SBU Class which has a lot of search features.
Still have classic e-mails.

VI. CAT Restructuring (S. Kopp)

In the course of last year, I have been meeting with faculty in the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory and talking about their future plans. This is an unusual department in that it is the merger (in 2011) of Comparative Literature and the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies. Faculty have expressed their dissatisfaction at the way it is working out. There are three graduate programs (Comparative Lit., Cultural Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies) and five undergraduate programs in the department. Faculty felt it was best served by being two separate departments. Don’t have the proposal today. Want to invite cross college discussion about this proposed split and then to have within a month’s time a proposal written with a lot of eyes on it such that this body can then consider it. Then depending on the outcome of the vote it then goes to the University Senate, the Provost and then SUNY.
Two documents were emailed to the college. One for a proposed Department in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies with a doctoral program and the other for a Department of Comparative Studies and Culture in Literature with two undergraduate degrees and two potential Ph.D.’s. Those seem like fine intellectual areas for us to pursue. We have a lot of faculty strength in those two areas. There is a lot of cross-pollinating with other departments within the college.
Want to avoid overlaps. Want to be cognizant of those potential connections with other departments and of the resource implications.

Q: How many faculty would be in these two new departments and how many undergraduate minors in each.

S. Kopp. It is likely there would be nine in each area.

Number of undergraduate minors are in the copy you were emailed.

N. Goodman: has this been vetted with the Undergraduate Student and Student Governments? M. Schedel: Once we have a full proposal it will to the student governments.

???: Overwhelmingly those of us involved in Women’s Studies before the merger would support this as giving us back out interdisciplinary intellectual academic community that we feel has been somewhat faded.

F. Walter: Are we going to keep the single administrative structure or are we going to have another Chair and Administrative Asst.?

S. Kopp: No new resources. Probably a shared services of the staff. More concrete later. Have to go through Capra.

Q: What is the process for faculty that want to move to another department?

S. Kopp: They have to meet with the chair and faculty of the department they want to move into. They have to write the reasons why they want to change departments. A vote would then have to be taken in that department. I work with the chair of the original department chair they are moving from and try to understand the implications

VII. Summer Revenue (M. Schedel

M. Schedel: There was an Initial proposal that departments would be able to keep summer revenue for Other than Personnel Services (OTPS). Unfortunately that did not happen.
S. Kopp: Worked hard with the chairs to try to look at cost containment. $4 Mil in structural deficits. With all this effort with cost containment, we actually managed to trim about $3 Mil. of costs from our expenses for the year. Thought we were well on our way to be able to address the structural deficit which is $4 Mil. The deficit is bigger this year. Big gap between what we are budgeted and how much it costs. This year that number is $5.2 Mil.
Looking for a plan to address this. It is going to be a multiple year plan. Will not be possible to fix in one year. Going to look at diversifying where we take in money. Not just state but through philanthropy, tuition based programs, etc. to fill the deficit.
It should be noted that Dean Kopp stated a Town Hall Meeting to discuss the complex College of Arts and Sciences budget would be forthcoming so he can show how he plans to "close the gap". That they had received emails from Kane urging them to have summer classes with the plan that the revenue could be used, that faculty in her department had registered for much needed academic conferences and bought airfare based on that revenue.

M. Schedel: Departments made plans for the summer courses expecting to get that revenue back. Departments feel cheated. They put in the effort and didn’t get back what they thought they would.

Pamela Wolfskill asked about the Arts and Sciences Senate Meeting Discussion on 4/20/15 where Dean Kopp stated "This year, I committed that we would return the summer/winter revenues to the departments. I did so because I could see that the cost of instruction was already factored out." (it was on page 5 of his Q&A). Also, Pamela brought up the minutes of the 4/20/15 meeting where Dean Kopp was asked "Can you do anything about TA stipends?" and his response was "My hope by putting summer and winter tuition revenues back into department hands is that they might use the money for TA stipends."

This was followed that with a question of why he changed his mind. Pamela gave an example of how this affected her department as faculty were allotted conference money based on the assumption that summer revenue would be given to departments. She also stated that an email from Kane in April '15 included a spreadsheet with 4 tabs to help calculate tuition revenue per class.

SK:   I can’t point to one thing and say it’s all because of that. It is a lot of things. I am very aware of everyone’s frustration. Should be working on areas that will build revenue. I plan to come back with a more detailed presentation. Some departments are in the red and some are in the black. Trying to come up with a rebalancing for the department budgets that make is realistic for everyone to achieve the gap. Every department has a deficit. Moved a chunk of that deficit for the college in to the Dean’s office so now it is underfunded. In these tuition programs there is a share that goes to the Dean and a share that goes to the department. Types of revenue generated is different with each department.
J. Souza: Do you feel that this was creating a credibility issue with the Dean’s Office for the future based on this reneging?

S. Kopp: Right now we have a $5.2 Mil gap. I’m going to ask for a bigger gap to be filled than last year. We have more start-ups this year. Let’s say 100% is the total tuition brought in. 30% goes centrally, 7.5% goes to the provost, 7.5% goes to the Dean and 55% goes to the department. The 55% to the department is now funding faculty salaries or Graduate TA’s. It is funding things in the department. Tried to make gaps smaller. Cost of infra-structure are factored out first. The 100% we are talking about is revenues after the cost of instruction.
P. Bingham: I am not understanding what you are saying. I think you will find different departments handling these funds very differently Do you realize that over-taxing summer tuition revenue could prevent the growth of online programs that could ultimately help CAS grow out of its chronic deficit – thereby killing the goose that can lay some golden eggs?
S. Kopp. I am aware of these problems and would attempt to avoid them. We worked with Peter Gergen to make sure he had the funds necessary to deliver instruction for the year.
P. Bingham:   In some cases these funds represent reinvestment for continued offerings.  So if you take them away….it’s not that you get these funds.  You get them on a one-time basis and the program shuts down and there are no future funds.

VII. New Business: no new business.

VIII. Old business: no old business.

Meeting adjourned.

Submitted by:

Laurie Cullen
Secretary

Senate Minutes