MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Provost Zhu said he wanted to encourage other colleges because for the rest of the colleges there are forty-eight position searches ongoing right now. Only eight have been completed. So that is forty positions as of last Friday. He noted that it may be in different stages – people are coming for interviews but he knows that everyone plays a very important role in this – meeting with candidates. He asked everyone to please work with their search committees to make progress forward because time flies. He noted that a quarter of this semester is gone already; it is week four already so we don’t have a whole lot of time. He asked everyone to please work really hard to ensure we have all those positions and they are filled with strong faculty candidates. We need them to continue our student success and to continue the accomplishments that we have achieved.

Provost Zhu noted that many faculty have asked about new faculty positions. He asked everyone to please understand that in this ongoing search cycle, we have so many positions, and that is because the last two years we have gone through this program prioritization and one year ago, we didn’t really do this tenure-track faculty search. We used many visiting faculty to cover our teaching needs while the program prioritization was ongoing. He noted that his estimation is, and it depends that we are still in the process of looking at the budget projections for the next year, to decide on whether we can actually start a new run of faculty position allocations. He added that if we are going to do that, the numbers will be very modest. If we are going to do it, he wants to make sure that we allocate those positions in adequate time before faculty leave for the summer. The goal is to have the committees in place and perhaps to post those positions before faculty leave for the summer. That way we will have the time over summer waiting for candidates to apply without getting into a really tight schedule for those who are recruiting new faculty. Provost Zhu stated that this is the update for the current search and he will keep everyone updated with the projections for the coming year.

Provost Zhu commented that the Provost’s Office is working on online test security initiative. After that, there will be security and integrity of testing for all in- classroom classes. He noted that it has been brought to his attention that our online testing policy is not complete. He stated that we do not have a very good policy in place so we are working with the Admissions and Standards Committee to develop a policy and to bring it to the next Faculty Senate meeting for approval. He noted that the reason why he wanted to give everyone a heads-up is that we could have a policy in place but the people who really enforce the policy are the faculty. So, we really need the faculty on board to ensure that we have a policy on instruction in the classroom and that we also have reasonable steps in place to assess our students’ learning outcome. So just to have a policy in place by the next Faculty Senate meeting, we will approve that and put the policy in place. Without broad faculty buy-in to implement a policy and stick with it, it means nothing.

Finally, Provost Zhu talked about the recent incident of flooding in Rhodes Tower. He first wanted to thank the faculty in CLASS and the Department of Mathematics for doing an excellent job and who came back and carried on their classes on that Monday when they didn’t have access to Rhodes Tower. On Monday last week Rhodes Tower was closed due to flooding in the elevator shaft. Based on the data he