The Arts and Sciences Council and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Meeting, March 21, 2017, 3:30-5:00, UMC 247

Meeting Minutes

Representatives present:聽Sabahat Adil, ALC; Daniel Barth, PSYC; Christine Brennan, SLHS; Andrew Cain, CLAS; James Cowell, LING; Charles de Bartolom茅, ECON; David Grant, MATH; Ruth Heisler, IPHY; Kwame Holmes, ETHN; 聽Leslie Irvine, SOCY; Janet Jacobs, WGST; Berit Jany, GSLL; Daniel Jones, HNRS; William Kleiber, APPM; Carl Koval, CHEM; Joanna Lambert, ANTH; Julie Lundquist, ATOC; Ramesh Mallipeddi, ENGL; Stephen Mojzsis,GEOL; David Paradis, HIST; Lonni Pearce, PWR; Fernando Riosmena, GEOG; Rob Rupert, PHIL; David Stock, EBIO; Ding Xue, MCDB; Masano Yamashita, FRIT

Representatives not present:聽Scott Adler, PSCI; Julio Baena, SPAN; Paul Beale, PHYS; Cathy Comstock, RAPS; Kim Dickey, AAH; Erica Ellingson, APS; David Ferris, HUMN; Holly Gayley, RLST; GEOL; Kelly Sears, FILM; Ted Stark, THDN

Also in attendance: Rhonda Hoenigman, Steven Leigh

The meeting was called to order at 3:33

Dean鈥檚 remarks, Steven Leigh

The Ad Hoc Strategic Planning Committee is coming together.聽David Brown (chair), Rob Rupert and Dean Leigh are working on a charge letter; topical areas are emerging: research and faculty excellence; student success; initiatives that support our academic mission and infrastructure.聽The committee will begin meeting soon and probably go through spring 2018.聽The committee will consult with groups throughout the university and report to the ASC regularly.

The chancellor鈥檚 office has been working to update Flagship 2030 and is looking at 3 campus strategic imperatives; shaping tomorrow鈥檚 leaders; being the top university in innovation; positively impacting humanity.聽A&S will be looking at how those strategic imperatives fit with our goals.聽More information on the strategic plan can be found on the .

The search for the Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities has been announced.聽There will be a search committee it there are four or more candidates; the search committee will be asked to narrow the search to three candidates.聽The dean鈥檚 office will be working with the ASC, faculty & staff and Chairs & Directors in this search.

Dean Leigh has looked at tenure and tenure track faculty hiring in the last three years.聽The campus has been hiring aggressively supported by the revised budged system that has been in place for two years that moves money to the college based on our teaching activity.聽Additional funds came from, in part, increased student retention.聽Dean Leigh credits the ASC and the Planning Committee for the Academic Quality Initiative which focused on strategies to increase student retention.聽Some specifics on hiring:

  • There has been a net increase in faculty size taking A&S to 725 tenured and tenure track faculty; close to a new high.
  • Instructor numbers have been within historic averages.
  • There has been an increase in lecturers hired.
  • The number of faculty leaving for other positions has gone down; the campus is doing a good job with retaining faculty. After a spike in retirements 2 years ago, they are now down.聽The campus has also had largely successful comprehensive and tenure reviews which adds to faculty retention.
  • The campus has increased the diversity of its faculty adding 13 members from underrepresented groups last year and expect more this year.
  • Hiring has been in proportion to divisional size: 30 percent in Arts & Humanities, 50 percent in the Natural Sciences and 20 percent in the Social Sciences.
  • The college has been proactive in dual career hires.
  • The college has been hiring primarily at the assistant professor level with an eye to the numbers of retirements expected in the next few years.
  • Among the more senior professors that have been recently hired are a MacArthur Fellow, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, two AAAS Fellows, faculty from Duke, Washington, Toronto, Michigan, Texas, Perdue, Rutgers, UT San Antonio, TSU, Virginia Tech and Harvard.
  • At junior levels, the campus has been able to attract advanced assistant professors from McGill, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, CUNY, UT San Antonio and Texas State.
  • Hiring junior faculty has increased our vibrancy and brought new ideas and fresh practices to the college.
  • Now that the faculty is so large, the dean wants to focus on more strategic hiring and supporting the current faculty as well as a remodeling project that should be soon underway.
  • Dean Leigh would like to work on mid-career hiring with the support of donors and endowment funds.

Chair鈥檚 remarks, Robert Rupert

The final ASC meeting of the academic year will be April 18; it will be a combined meeting with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and will have reports from the committees.聽Mary Kraus and a member of the Dean鈥檚 Advisory Committee will speak on the First Year Experience.聽William Kuskin and Sara Thompson will speak on online degrees.聽Professor Rupert asked the representatives to invite their departments.

The chair鈥檚 election will take place at the April meeting.聽Please let Professor Rupert or a member of the Executive Committee if you would like to run or nominate someone.聽Also, if you would like to be involved in the divisional dean search, contact a member of the Executive Committee.

Professor Rupert thanked the ASC representatives for their feedback on reducing dependence on verification of visit forms from Wardenburg.聽Several people expressed problems with the process and Professor Rupert wanted to assure the intent is not to set policy, only to let Wardenburg know faculty has looked at different ways to manage classrooms that can lessen the need for excuse notes.

Motion from the Online Education Committee: That "Online" be added at the beginning of course titles for all courses 25 percent or more of the instructional hours of which are delivered online, Dan Barth

Professor Barth discussed the history of online education discussions in the last four years within the college.聽Labeling online courses as such has been weighed; many different methods were discussed but many were deemed too complicated or hidden to be useful to consumers of the transcripts.聽Professor Barth spoke with Mary Kraus and the registrar, Kristi McCormick concerning course labeling and, taking into account their feedback, the Online Education Committee developed a motion.聽If a quarter of the lectures are being replaced by online content, it will be labeled Online. If the college feels strongly about this we can also work with the BFA to make it a university-wide effort.聽There is a strong push from administration聽not聽to label courses as online with the feeling that might give a negative connotation to something that could produce significant revenue.聽Without the online designation, the Online Education Committee argues that no data can be collected concerning the relative effectiveness of the classes.

A discussion ensued concerning the percentage of online that should trigger the online designation.

Professor Rupert, who is also the chair of the Online Education Committee, spoke with Patrick Tally of the Curriculum Office as well as the registrar about existing courses that have different meeting times for instance, language classes that meet two or of three days in person.聽Also, the logistical complexities of labeling were discussed.聽An alternative to labeling the class 鈥渙nline鈥� in the course title is to use the 鈥淪pecial Topics鈥� field to give the online designation.聽This would also show on the transcripts.聽A new field could also be generated.

A friendly amendment was made to track the percentage of the class that is online and label it in the special topics field.

A friendly amendment was made to start the labeling at 10 percent.

The student impact was noted,聽it might devalue a course by being labeled online; also the usefulness of data when not all colleges are using the same system and the difficulty of adding this percentage to each class by the schedulers in the departments.

The amended motion: Courses in Arts and Sciences that have an online contact component of 10 percent or more will be labeled as such with the specific percentage, in a field that appears on the transcript.

The motion passed by acclamation.

Professor Rupert thanked Professor Barth and the Online Committee for their work.

Independent studies, internships, practica聽and thesis hours聽and the new General Education Requirements.

Currently the new core curriculum has a section that reads:聽All courses that satisfy a major minor or certificate requirement in the college will automatically satisfy a distribution requirement.

It was never addressed that we were speaking only of regular courses, not independent study, practica, internships senior thesis hours.聽It is in the purview of the ASC to clarify the document.聽A mixture of responses have been received; the floor was opened for discussion.

Several representatives expressed their department鈥檚 opposition to using those courses for requirements.聽One department supported considering them towards the core as if non-traditional courses are being counted towards the major, careful vetting has occurred.

In response to a friendly amendment, the motion was made positive.

惭辞迟颈辞苍:听Include independent study, practica, internships and senior thesis hours in the core curriculum as long as they satisfy a major minor certificate requirement in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The motion failed.

Current events in Athletics, Rob Rupert

There was discussion at the last ASC meeting and with the Executive Committee about the administration鈥檚 handling of former Assistant Football Coach Joe Tumpkin.

The administration hired independent councel to look into this situation.聽The attorneys hired specialize in institutional response to sexual violence and gender based harassment. They will have a report by April.

A motion was proposed and seconded to approve the decision to bring in an external body of attorneys to investigate the administration鈥檚 handling of the Tumpkin matter.

The motion was passed by acclamation.

Motion from the Curriculum Committee:聽That the revised proposal for a B.A. in Statistics and Data Science be approved.

This proposal came to the ASC in the fall and there was a non-unanimous positive vote. The proposal went to Mary Kraus鈥� office and after discussion it appeared not everyone who needed or wanted to be involved was involved with discussions of this new B.A. program. The departments involved were asked to get together and come to a consensus. The proposal went back to the Curriculum Committee who voted 9-0-1 to support the B.A. so the motion returns to the ASC. Documentation was previously sent to the ASC representatives.

The floor was opened to discussion.聽It was noted that the Geography Department has classes in GIS and spatial statistics and will send a note to APPM and MATH advising them of the classes offered.

The motion was passed by acclamation.

Professor Rupert thanked MATH and APPM for their work.

Faculty governance, challenges and future direction, Rob Rupert

Professor Rupert has received feedback from faculty who want to deal with faculty governance more broadly rather than on a case by case basis. The floor was opened for discussion. A few points raised:

  • Invite chairs to occasionally visit the ASC to talk about the issues the departments see.
  • More attention needs to be given to the changes made to instructor workloads without much faculty input.
  • The chancellor-appointed Ethics Advisory group is looking at faculty governance as an ethics issue and would like feedback.
  • The impression exists that faculty governance is weak at CU compared to other universities.
  • An outside consultant could help with communication between faculty and administration.

Professor Rupert suggested sending Andy Cowell and the Ethics Advisory Committee thoughts and suggestions on faculty governance.

New business

David Grant spoke of the concern some people in the university have for the health of our students who play football. Some figures show that up it 85 percent聽of college football players suffer from CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). As faculty, there is a responsibility to look out for the health of our students. The College of Arts and Sciences has the expertise to look at the physical and ethical issues involved.聽Professor Grant would like to set up a committee to look at these issues.

A supportive discussion ensued; suggestions of on campus specialists and interested parties were discussed.

The motion was made and seconded: To create an ad hoc committee of the ASC to review the existing evidence of traumatic brain damage to college football players and in the light of that evidence to report to the ASC on the ethical and moral implications of the University of Colorado聽Boulder, having a football program that involves students at the college.

The motion passed by acclamation.

Please contact the Executive Committee if you want to be involved.

There is currently a grant from the PAC 12 to investigate the issue of sports injuries; it is a broader study, covering more than football as well as non-athletes. Theresa Hern谩ndez is handling with the college.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:55.

Minutes submitted by Janice Jeffryes