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Faculty Senate Meeting Minutes

03-04-2022

Meeting began, with a quorum, at 9:02 a.m.

Proposed agenda was approved unanimously.

Minutes were amended to reflect the fact that Nkechi Amadife is a Senator not a Guest. Also Joy Cole and Randy Nichols need to be added as Guests. With those amendments, the minutes were approved unanimously.

President Clay reminded faculty of the contact points for COVID-19 information: (855-598-2246) and COVID19@kysu.edu. Also, all faculty who haven't are urged to upload proof of vaccination status at the ADP website.

In his meeting with the provost, President Clay reported that they discussed the report of the ad hoc committee on budget cuts and the upcoming budget meeting.

There was no Faculty Senate Executive Committee meeting this week. President Clay is meeting Acting President Stamps next week and with SGA President Jason Robinson in the near future.

Next, President Clay announced that we needed two Faculty Senate representatives for the Honorary Degree Committee. Changzheng Wang and Shawn Lucas volunteered for this service.

All standing committees are being constituted and will meet at least once this semester. A guest asked if there is a single place to look for a list of those committees and their composition. Dr. Clay replied that he would send out the committee handbook to deans to distribute to faculty.

The regular quarterly meeting of the Board of Regents, scheduled for Thursday March 3, was cancelled by a phone call from the chair Tuesday. There was a full agenda for the meeting and all the preparatory documents for the meeting had been distributed. On Wednesday, there were news reports of the introduction of Senate Bill 265 regarding the composition of the Board.

There will be no student activities during midterm week. Student Engagement is hosting study spaces around campus that week.

Kentucky's COVID 19 positivity rate is 6.4 percent. The Green and Gold Commission is considering the future of the masking policy. We will continue to follow CDC guidance. Nurse Todd noted that EKU has gone mask-optional for non-class settings. A Suicide Awareness Training is being held today. All of us should be reaching out to each other to ask how we're doing. An Employee Assistance Program for mental health issues is available for full-time employees. Check with Human Resources about that.

On student excuses: In considering an attendance policy, faculty should remember that medical excuses may include confidential information. At this point, policy says that excuses should come from Student Engagement, but that office lost the administrative assistant who handled this. As of now, medical excuses are coming from the Health Service and non-medical excuses come from Destini Baker. Employees with medical excuses should go to Human Resources, but cc Health Service on anything regarding COVID 19.

Digital badges for faculty training are on the way. There will be more training opportunities after spring break.

Dr. Grimes is now overseeing Dual Credit for Academic Affairs. He wants to keep faculty updated on this program and see it integrated into our programs in ways that are compliant with SACSCOC and CPE requirements and also get more of the Dual Credit students to KSU.

A guest asked how much the high school students pay for dual credit classes. The answer was that ENG 101 and MAT 115 cost a flat fee of $60. All other courses cost $72 per credit hour.

Grimes said that in his experience, high school teachers, counsellors and administrators want KSU to succeed. Current attention to the school’s problems hinder that. KSU has an advantage in that most dual credit classes from the other universities are offered online whereas we are putting some professors in the high school classrooms. Dual Credit has not done much to get students to enroll at KSU so far, but Dr. Grimes believes that it could and wants to implement a strategy toward that goal.

Provost Hamilton interjected that Dual Credit is very important to the university. He pointed out that this semester total undergraduate enrollment at KSU is 2276: Of these, 1342 are regular students and 817 are dual credit.

Acting on behalf of committee chair, Senator Gary Stratton, Peter Smith presented the committee's report on ways to make necessary cuts to the KSU budget and generate revenue. He then asked for faculty comments and questions. In the course of that discussion, friendly

amendments were offered and accepted by the author of the report. A reference to possibly using students to oversee labs was removed. The section dealing with indirect costs was amended to avoid stating specific percentages, and a statement was added to the beginning of the report noting that these were initial ideas subject to change.

The report, with these amendments, was approved by the Senate with 14 voting in favor, none opposed and one abstention.

Below is the amended text of the Ad Hoc Committee Report approved by the Senate.

Report of the Senate ad hoc Budget Crisis Committee

Note: These are initial ideas and subject to change when more budgetary data are made available to faculty.

Summary: KSU is literally near the bottom of the entire nation, not just Kentucky, HBCUs or Land Grant Institutions, when it comes to funding instruction, with less than 13% of our budget devoted to instruction, down from 28% just a few years ago. Furthermore, there have been a number of faculty who have voluntarily separated from the University within the past year or two and have not been replaced, virtually all academic units are understaffed, and some academic units are now in danger of losing their program accreditation due to inadequate staffing. Therefore, while KSU might still be overstaffed when it comes to administrators and support staff, that is clearly not the case with faculty, and cutting teaching positions should be the absolute last thing we should consider in addressing the budget crisis. To be blunt: nothing could possibly have a more adverse impact on our students than indiscriminate elimination of faculty positions, and any such move will have devastating consequences on student success and enrollment for years to come. This is a university, not a business; nothing could possibly be more important to a university than faculty teaching students—every other function of this and every other university is secondary to that. The administration and staff positions in some units have continued to expand even when enrollments have not, and “right-sizing” the administration has been put off long enough; it’s time we got serious about making cuts in these areas.

Faculty Senate would like to suggest that before discussions on budget cuts even begin, we should take full inventory of all KSU resources and budget items to accurately account for real costs, including savings from vacant positions—administrative, staff and faculty—that still have active budget lines. For example, University College, Student Engagement and Campus Life and Student Success have already lost a total of 24 positions. Make sure that before we talk of “eliminating positions” further, we first take into account all of the positions that have already been “eliminated” by voluntary separation from the University in the past year.

Elimination of Non-Teaching Positions:

Grants:

Fundraising:

Attendance policy was the main business of the last meeting. An action item on this will be coming at the next Senate meeting. Committee is also working on an internship policy and clarifying the state of the incomplete grade policy.

Multiple action items were presented from the English program. These are course change, new course or course deletion proposals needed to pave the way for an overall program revision that will be presented at the next meeting.

ENG 322 Survey of British Literature I changed to British Literary Roots, with a corresponding catalogue description change.

ENG 324 Survey of American Literature I changed to American Multiethnic Literature, with catalogue description change.

ENG 409 Literature of African Americans changed to African American Literature

ENG 413 Literary Criticism changed to Literary Theory and Criticism.

Course Deletions: ENG 323 Survey of British Literature II and ENG 325 Survey of American Literature II. These are no longer needed because ENG 322 and ENG 324 are becoming single-semester surveys.

New Courses: ENG 220 Introduction to Cultural Studies

ENG 417 Comparative Mythology

ENG 419 Literature of Crime and Punishment

ENG 425 Digital Writing and Rhetoric

ENG 440 Literature of Gender, Identity and Sexuality

ENG 443 Special Topics in Film Studies

The Senate approved each of these items by unanimous vote.

Professional Concerns Committee Peter Smith

PCC presented an action item making changes to Faculty Handbook rules for faculty elections. These changes were to reflect our shift from in-person to online elections and to prohibit all campaigning, digitally or in-person, during the time that online voting is open.

This item passed by a vote of 11 in favor, none opposed and one abstention. Final language for amendments to the Faculty Handbook is below:

“Nominations for a college position shall be made at a regular or called meeting of all full-time faculty members of the college”; this meeting can be either in-person, virtual or involve an e-mail call for nominations if the Elections Committee approves.

Rationale: This reflects best practice; it has been increasingly difficult to get sufficient faculty attendance at a face-to-face meeting.

“The election will be scheduled so that a minimum of five working days’ notice can be provided prior to balloting,” [see below]

1.7.1.4. d.

“All University-wide and College-wide elections shall be conducted no sooner than five working days after the meeting at which nominations were made.”

Rationale: delete “working,” since universal e-mail access and electronic voting now enable faculty to get notified sooner, and there is no need to prepare paper ballots and sign-in sheets.

“The Standing Elections Committee shall then generate the survey that shall be used by all eligible faculty members. Faculty are discouraged from using mass e-mail messaging to engage in commentary involving an election. Once voting has begun, faculty are prohibited from mass e-mailing or doing in-person electioneering of colleagues regarding the election.

Rationale: this is to remind faculty that these elections are not the appropriate venue for politicking; the second sentence is equivalent to prohibiting electioneering at polling places,

“In the event of a special election (fall or spring),” a faculty-wide or Senate-wide election must be called and held in time for representation to be continuous rather than lapse for one or more meetings. “For a vacant seat that is within a particular college . .

Rationale: there is no policy for a faculty-wide or Senate-wide special election, only one within a college or academic unit.

Budget and Academic Support Committee Jennifer Ballard-Kang

BASC will present a grants training workshop in April. Three members of the committee are working with the Ad Hoc Committee on Budget. A meeting will happen soon with a representative of Frankfort city government about opportunities for cooperation between the university and the city.

There was none.

The meeting adjourned at 12:38 p.m.