MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Dr. Sridhar reported that we now have an up to date website for the Faculty Senate. Dr. Sridhar stated that there were a few items he wished to talk about. The first has to do with our GenEd curriculum. Dr. Barbara Margolius has been working on getting ready for GenEd assessment. She has been collecting syllabi from across the campus. Those who have been teaching GenEd courses have been supplying items for her. He noted that as far as looking at all of that and also as part of the 2020 project on GenEd, there is now a new ad hoc committee that has been established. Two weeks ago, the Steering Committee set up a new ad hoc committee to look at our GenEd offerings, getting ready for assessment, and also sort of going back and looking at the 2008 report on GenEd seeing if there are things that we need to address. Dr. Sridhar acknowledged and thanked the members and noted that actually, the committee is still being formed. There are still a couple of spaces left. Dr. Margolius has been actively soliciting faculty to participate in this committee and we should have a full roster pretty soon. He noted that at some point in the next couple of Senate meetings we will have a more substantive report.

Dr. Sridhar commented that we have just gone through one semester of using this new system for student evaluation of instruction, the Blue system. We were able to get fifty percent of our students to respond to the SEI instrument. He added that we are still working on that process. In fact, later in this meeting, UFAC is bringing to us some language for sharing data that we received this year.

Dr. Sridhar turned to Rhodes Tower. He has spoken with both the Director of Facilities and the chair of the Senate Committee on Academic Space about Rhodes Tower. With the kinds of things happening in the building, there are several issues not the least of which are students trying to use the elevators to meet with faculty for required appointments especially for English and math classes. The Facilities Director has assured him that they are working around the clock getting things fixed. He reported that as of the latest update, there are four elevators working in the building, three in the main well and one inside the Library. But there of course several maintenance needs there. The two items that the Facilities Director pointed out to him were that first of all, we need better elevators. The second is that because of the fact that the building has not been asbestos abated, our facilities crew can’t really get in and do maintenance tasks even if they are technically capable of doing that. Dr. Sridhar said that he is just bringing this issue to everybody’s notice and that the Senate Committee on Academic Space will look at this issue in more detail and perhaps bring this issue to Senate later.

Dr. Sridhar stated that another big challenge has been MagnusMart. He reported that there were long conversations about MagnusMart at both Steering and Provost’s Council discussing the various things that have gone wrong with MagnusMart. In spite of efforts to test the system before releasing it, the testing was clearly not adequate enough and there are scenarios we have encountered that fall outside of the testing situations. The Steering Committee recommended that he speak with the Controller and he did. He reported that we now have a temporary fix. The temporary fix was communicated campus-wide – that we try to use MagnusMart for every single purchase and, if there is trouble, then we will use the old paper forms to actually get our stuff