Academic Senate 2
p.m. – 5 p.m.
2007/2008 Academic Senate
MINUTES
December 10, 2007
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I. |
The meeting was called to order at 2:10 p.m. and attendance was
taken. Forty-five Senators were
present. |
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Ex Officio: Present: Van Selst, Sabalius, Gorman, Henderson, Lessow- Hurley, Kassing Administrative
Representatives: Present: Sigler, Lee, Najjar Absent: Phillips Deans: Present:
Parrish, Wei, Merdinger, Absent:
Stacks Students: Present:
Reyes, Lazarowich,
McDaniel, Prothro-Jones,
Grabowski, Zeier
Alumni Representative: Absent:
Thompson Emeritus Representative: Present:
Buzanski Honorary
Senators (Non-Voting): Present:
Norton General Unit
Representatives: Present: Romo, Sivertsen, Liu |
CASA Representatives: Present:
Fee, Kao, Schultz-Krohn, Canham, Hendrick COB
Representatives: Present:
Campsey, Roldan, Jiang ED Represent: Present:
Langdon, Maldonado-Colon Absent:
Rickford ENG Representatives: Present:
Backer, Meldal Absent: Gao H&A
Representatives: Present: Mok, Absent: Van
Hooff, Vanniarajan SCI Representatives: Present:
McClory, Kaufman Absent:
Hilliard, Bros SOS
Representatives: Present:
Peter, Hebert, Von Till, Zia |
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II. |
Approval of Academic Senate Minutes – Minutes of November 19, 2007 were approved as is. |
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III. |
Communications and
Questions – A. From the Chair of the Senate: Chair Lessow-Hurley thanked President Kassing and his wife Amy for hosting the Senate at his home on Sunday, December 9, 2007. It was a wonderful party and tradition. Chair Lessow-Hurley also thanked Valerie Gonzales in the President’s office for her assistance with the event. Chair Lessow-Hurley announced that Eva Joice, the Senate
Administrator, was now a Chair Lessow-Hurley made the following announcements: The Advisory Committee to the Board of Trustees for the selection of the president has been selected. The Senate elected Senator Ken Peter and Annette Nellen to serve as SJSU’s faculty representatives. The staff elected Nancy Day. Senator Najjar has been chosen as the administrative representative. The alumni representative is Pat Smith. The community representative is Don Lucas. The Trustees to the search are Glen Toney, William Hauck, Kenneth Fong, and Roberta Achtenberg. There will be an inaugural meeting of the committee on January 14, 2008, at 10:30 a.m. on campus. When the chair gets the details, she will email the Senate. B. From the President of the University – |
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President Kassing thanked everyone for a good fall. The President also thanked the Senators for coming to the holiday get-together at his home. President Kassing announced that the campus had raised $50 million last year and $100 million over the last three years. In the past, it has taken 13 years to raise that much money. Thanks were given to VP Fred Najjar and University Advancement. Our spring enrollment is up 8-9% over last year. Fall applications are also up about 20%. President Kassing invited Senators to attend the seasonal celebration for faculty and staff on December 13, 2007, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the Student Union. President Kassing announced that he had to leave the
Senate meeting early to catch a flight to |
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IV. |
Executive Committee Report – A. Executive Committee Minutes – November 19, 2007 – No questions. B. Consent Calendar – Approved as is. |
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C. Executive Committee Action Items: None |
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V. |
Unfinished Business - None |
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VI. |
Policy Committee and University Library
Board Action Items. In rotation. A.
Instruction and Student Affairs
Committee (I&SA) – Senator Sivertsen
presented AS 1368, Policy Recommendation, Access to Instructional
Materials: Timely Identification of
Textbooks, Course Readers and Library Reserves (Final B.
University Library Board (ULB) –
None C. Professional Standards Committee (PS) – Senator
Canham presented AS 1375, Policy Recommendation, Administration of online Student
Opinion of Teaching Effectiveness (SOTE) evaluations for online courses
(First Questions: Senator Buzanski asked, “What is meant by “significant portions?” Is this half the class, or more than half?” Senator Jiang commented that the committee had spent quite a bit of time discussing this, but after a lot of debate thought it best to defer to the faculty teaching the class to determine this.” Senator Peter said, “Can you tell me if a CFA representative was present, and if so what they had to say about this policy?” Senator Canham said, “I know that we discussed this in the committee, and that Senator Bros was talking with a CFA representative.” Senator Merdinger said, “The intent was for the President of the CFA to come to the Senate to apprise the Senate of what the nature of the concern that the CFA had was.” Chair Lessow-Hurley said, “It is my understanding from Senator Bros that the local chapter of the CFA will not challenge our policy on online SOTES for online classes.” Senator Van Selst said, “Interestingly, we were told it is okay to have written evaluations that are formative as well as numeric, so other campuses are doing things that we have not agreed on. I don’t know.” Senator Campsey said, “Given the benefits you have presented here to online SOTES, why give the instructor the choice between online and paper SOTES.” Senator Canham said, “The majority of the committee felt we could not limit the faculty. We wanted to allow them to have that choice.” Senator Meldal said, “In the original policy both the words classes and courses are used. In the amendment, I believe it says classes and sections, so you may want to clean-up the language in both. Also, in 5.6.2 it says it is the instructor’s responsibility to interact with Institutional Research. Wouldn’t it be easier to have the department take care of this, since this is how it is done for other SOTES?” Senator Canham said, “I will take this back to the committee.” Senator Campsey said, “I would like to suggest, given the cost of SOTES, that the committee require that the SOTES be done either in the classroom setting or by email.” Senator Canham said, “I will make a note of that and take it back to the committee.” Senator Peter said, “If a relatively conventional course had a couple of online modules that the faculty member deemed significant, could the faculty member then opt to do an online SOTE?” Senator Canham said, “I think it would be up to the faculty member.” Senator Peter commented, “I don’t want to put words in CFA’s mouth, but it might be safer to go with a majority since they [CFA] did not agree not to grieve standard courses.” Senator Van Selst asked, “Did the committee consider, as a default, having the evaluation instrument in the same format as the instruction?” Senator Canham said, “I know we discussed this, but I’m not sure if we made a decision. We just wanted to begin with online classes for online SOTES.” Senator Van Selst said, “For a pure online class, it seems the default ought to be online SOTES.” Senator Canham said, “I’ll take it back to the committee, but I believe that we wanted to let the faculty choose.”
D.
Curriculum and Research Committee (C&R) – Senator Kaufman said, “We are dealing with the Instructional Materials Accessibility policy that will be coming done the line shortly. I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that there are going to be visits to each of the opening college meetings by representatives from this body and the Disability Resource Center (DRC) in the spring. We are drafting policy to make this an incremental process so that people can learn along the way, and there will also be training provided. The DRC has trained one college liaison in each division of the university to interface between developing accessible material and the DRC. If you don’t know who those people are in your division, I’ll be happy to send a list out.” E.
Organization and Government Committee (O&G) – Senator
Backer presented AS 1372, Policy Recommendation, Definition of Majority Vote Regarding
Election of Department Chairs (Final |
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Senator
Backer presented AS 1373, Voting Privileges for Faculty Assigned to More Than One
Representative Unit (Final |
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VII. Special Committee Reports –
VP Rose Lee gave the annual budget report. VP Lee introduced and thanked her staff,
Cynthia Haliasz and AVP for Finance Becka Paulson.
VP Lee said, “I am going to start with the Executive Summary on page v. The new term for what was known as the general fund is the CSU Operating Fund. We are now allowed to invest and earn interest on our fees. That is new. The piece of the operating budget that comes from the state treasury is $169,960,150. The piece that is now fee revenue is $97,734,750. The fee revenue includes the state university fee, the non-resident fee, the application fee, and some other minor line items. This gives us a total budget of $267,734,750. This is what we used to call the general fund. We allocate this entire budget out. However, the university must collect $97,774,600 in revenue. The only piece of this that is guaranteed is $169,960,150. If we do not collect $97 million, we need to reduce the budget or have reserves to cover it. I make this point, because if we are under-enrolled as we were in 06/07, there is a shortfall in our budget. Typically, we carry reserves to carry cover a potential shortfall. The change from 06/07 to 07/08 is that we had an 8% increase in our CSU Operating Fund. $10 million of the increase is in state appropriations and $9.7 million is revenue. The revenue reflects the increase in student fees. The 8% increase amounts to $19.8 million. We only received a 1% increase in our budgeted FTE. Most of the new funding went to cover mandatory costs. This includes the compensation pool, which was 3% or $9 million. Also, our health premium increases every calendar year. Every January 1st there has been a 3% to 10% increase in the health premium. In a family, the state pays over $1,000 for health insurance if the coverage is for a family. We have great benefits, but it does cost. Retirement costs increases if the PERS rate changes. When the stock market is doing well, our retirement costs go down. This fiscal year the rate is in the 16% range. When university fees go up, grants for students getting financial aid also go up. This is the one line item in the CSU Operating budget that we are not allowed to transfer and reallocate to other areas. For facilities we got $300,000 from the state and that is not much. There is close to a $40 million backlog for deferred maintenance. When you add up all of these items up, the budget available to allocate drops to $3.9 million. A 1% increase in our budgeted FTE translates to 228 new FTES. We also had to allocate $2.5 million to the compensation pool.
Now
let’s go to page 5 of the budget book.
This page has the calculated percentages of the budget for each of the
areas. This is not just the CSU
Operating Budget. These are the
percentages of a total budget of $520,638,077.
Moving to page 7, this is what is available to distribute at the beginning of the fiscal year. We had unexpended benefits of $3,171,660. This is higher than what we usually have which is around $1.5 million. We are trying to determine why this is. We rolled-forward $6,692,708 from Central Accounts. We also had some excess revenue from applications available at $99,762, $3,920,707 from our new FTES, and $121,073 from facilities use fees. We had a total of $4,141,542 available in base funds to distribute and $11,125,284 in one-time funds. This gave us a total of $15,266,826.
We funded staff benefits at $171,540. We allocated $2,500,000 for compensation. In addition we had to fund health premium increases of $1,100,000. We had utility costs of $500,000, and funded $239,965 for SSI/FMIs salary increases. We set aside $600,000 for the Accessible Technology Initiative. We defaulted to that amount because we needed to fund enrollment growth. We had to fund base for the 1% increase in FTE, so that was $1,170.000, and $3,200,000 in one-time funds. These are mandatory costs.
There is a list of continuing projects that we decided we needed to fund. First we allocated $2,300,000 in reserves. Then we have facilities leases, moves, and UCAT costs of $150,000. We also had $400,000 in South Campus maintenance costs. Hopefully, this will drop off. This includes the stadium maintenance and all the fields. The Accommodation Review Board ADA Evacuation Chairs cost $98,670. This money will complete putting evacuation chairs in all the locations identified by the committee. Comprehensive Campaign Funding was part of a 3-year plan and cost $648,978. Homecoming for the 150th Anniversary: $265,500. We funded My-Safe-Campus at $25,232 for the software so students can call an 800 number and remain anonymous.
Under allocations to division VPs, we allocated $60,000 in base and $141,750 in one-time funds to the Academic Affairs Division. We allocated $500,000 in one-time funds to the Student Affairs Division and $315,000 to University Advancement Division.
We allocated all but $37 in base funds. We had about $880,154 left in one-time funds. The UPC then made allocations of $338,154.
On page 17, this chart represents the percentage share of each division of the CSU Operating Fund Budget. The Provost/Academic Affairs received $164,180,110 or 61.3%. The VP of Administration and Finance received $36,741,437 or 13.7%. The VP Student Affairs received $20,228,575 or 7.6%. Athletics received $6,318,061 or 2.4%. The VP of University Advancement received $5,861,280 or 2.2%. Finally, University-Wide Resources were $32,753,537 or 12.2%. The footnotes on page 13 list everything included under University-Wide resources.
Moving to page 24, this is the IES budget. Revenue when we closed the books in 06/07 was very good at $17,437,842. Projected 07/08 revenue is $14,762,653. Expenditures in 06/07 were $21,845,538. We were told to bring down the prior year fund balance of $8,964,649, so you’ll notice we had expenses of $4,407,696 not covered by the revenue for 06/07. This left us $4,556,953 in roll forward for 07/08. IES projects that they will use all but $503,476 of that amount this year. We will be receiving mid-year budget reports in the budget office soon and we will see if these projections are still the same.
The next budget I want to talk about is the lottery on page 26. There was a balance in the lottery fund that had been rolling-forward from year-to-year of about $2-$3 million. The Provost Office worked with the colleges to work the balances down. You will see that in 06/07 the total expenses were $2,946,901. That left us with expenses of $372,319 that were covered by the rollover from the prior year of $772,777. We ended 06/07 with a balance of $400,458. We expect $2.4 million in lottery this year, and we plan on spending $2,553,008. This would spend down the rollover and leave us with an expected balance of $249,450.
Senator
Sabalius asked, “On page 26, line 15 is professional development. Last year that was $438,000, and this year
there is a blank or zero, why?” VP Lee
said, “It was a decision or a recommendation from a number of groups. In fiscal year 06/07, $1.9 million of lottery
was allocated out permanently for a number of uses. The library got $1.3 million. The UPC got $223,000 for the Curriculum
Reinvigoration and Learning Assessment.
An additional $380,000 went to the UPC initiative for Faculty
Development. Then under infrastructure
there was $64,000 allocated to Academic Technology.” Chair Lessow-Hurley said, “The Resource
Review Board (RRB) when it looked at the lottery funds discovered that they
went all over the place. People were
spending the money for things that had nothing to do with the projects they
requested the money for and the balances were unaccounted for. We suggested there needed to be some
accountability built into the small lottery grants for faculty. Subsequently, the UPC decided that it would be
more effective to use that money for release time grants for faculty projects
for student success. This was, in fact,
an effort to move us toward a 3/3 load.
There was an effort to essentially pay for people’s time to do things
that they were already doing to assist students. We did that on a competitive basis similar to
the lottery grants. Now, it is coming to
our attention that this may not have been the most judicious decision, but that
was the basis for the decision. The
money that was used for the release time was folded into the base, and we had
assurances, that barring a complete collapse of the
Senator Kaufman said, “The numbers that concern me the most are the 1% growth in money from the state, and the 10% growth in the number of students that we have here. Obviously, student fees don’t cover everything. How is that a sustainable situation and what are we doing about it next year?” VP Lee said, “We only got 1% enrollment growth in 07/08 because we did not meet our budgeted enrollment for 06/07. We had been given the systemwide average of 2.5% for FY 06-07. For FY 07-08, our increase was reduced to 1%. The 1.5% was given to campuses that were over their targeted enrollment in 06/07. We just received our 08/09 enrollment growth target and we are back on track with 2.4%. However, we are seriously over-enrolled this year by approximately 7.4%. The CSU system doesn’t have any more FTE to give us. There is a request for an additional 1% for the entire system, bringing the growth request to 3.5% but the state budget isn’t expected to be very good next year. At a meeting of the VPs for Finance, we were told the 1% is not likely to be funded. The projection for 07/08 is that the CSU will be over-enrolled by even more than last year, more than 8,000 FTES. That represents $77 million in marginal costs the CSU is not getting. Today, the senior team started discussions on how to bring our enrollment down from the 7% over budget to a target that is between 4% and 5% over budget which would be more manageable. We are going to have to add to the $3.2 million we put aside for over-enrollment for the spring. We will be augmenting the Academic Division an additional $4-5 million dollars for spring. The additional $2.4% of FTE will mean another 550 FTE in our budget. This will bring another $5 million to our base funding. However, if we are still over-enrolled by 3-5% we will have to set aside one time funding to meet that and we do not generate enough in student fees for to cover the entire cost.
Senator Peter said, “If we had had half the enrollment growth this year that we had, and the other half last year, how much better off would we be?” VP Lee said, “Well, we would have more than 1% growth so we’d have an additional $3-4 million in base funds.” Senator Peter said, “So basically we just grew in the wrong year?” VP Lee said, “Well, you always want to be anywhere from 1.5 to 2.0% ahead, because that shows the system that this campus needs more. It is not just us, 22 of the 23 campuses are over their budgeted enrollment.”
Senator Sabalius said, “When you compared campuses on page 16, you show that 47.1% of SJSU’s budget went to instruction. Then on page 17, the pie chart shows that the CSU Operating Budget was only 51% of the total budget, and only 61% of that goes to the Academic Affairs Division. Is it then not the case that only 31% of our entire budget is going to instruction?” VP Lee said, “The definition of instruction is classroom expense, so in Academic Affairs there is a lot more such as Deans offices, the library, and those are not counted as instruction. On page 16, that means just instruction.” Senator Sabalius said, “I assume the money for instruction only comes from the CSU Operating Fund right?” VP Lee said, “I would say some of the lottery and continuing education funds do go to instruction.” Senator Sabalius said, “If instruction is only 55% of the CSU Operating Fund, and only 61% is going to Academic Affairs, then it looks like only 30% of our funds are going to instruction.” VP Lee said, “Those first two percentages are correct, but not the 30%. Some of the revenue funding cannot go to instruction. In addition, the auxiliary funds are restricted, such as Student Union funds which must go to support the operation of the Student Union. There are restrictions on the use of those funds and we cannot transfer them.”
Senator Norton asked, “I wanted to ask if the strategic planning budget process outlined on page 2 is working very well?” Chair Lessow-Hurley said, “I would be happy to address that. Rona Halualani, the Special Assistant to the President, just completed a fifty-four page report where she gathered assessment data from all the strategic planning body. There is a lot of work that needs to happen around strategic planning. As you can see, for example, the University Planning Council (UPC) really only works on the margins of the available resources. The RRB has been restructured and we are thinking about how we might think more broadly about resources, and the UPC is thinking about how we move past the culture of initiative-based funding on this campus and think more about aligning our resources with our priorities. We also need to re-prioritize our priorities. For example, Senator Sabalius’ question about the faculty development grants, that was an effort not to remove money from the faculty, but to create a mechanism for distributing the money so that it aligned with what we considered to be a serious priority--the need to support student success. Rona Halualani is holding a strategic planning assessment retreat, and hopefully we will get some good recommendations from that retreat on how to refine the strategic planning process. We are halfway through the first cycle and we have learned a lot.”
VIII. New Business – None
IX. State
of the University Announcements. Questions. In rotation.
A. Vice President for Student Affairs – No Report
B. Associated
Students President –
AS President Henderson said, “Good afternoon everyone. We have no additional board meetings for the year. We’d like to thank everyone for their support this year, and we are looking forward to making next year even better. Happy Holidays!”
C. Vice President for University Advancement
– No report.
D. Statewide Academic Senators –
Senator
Van Selst said, “We just had our interim meeting last week. The message we received is that the board is
likely to support MBA fees at their March meeting. The question at the CSU Senate level is in
what context and under what conditions.
It is unlikely the DWIR policy will go forward because there are a
number of issues there. The current version
of the Access to Excellence document is weak and will be tightened-up during
the coming month. There is a lot of
discussion about how to discontinue programs on campuses with budget
crises. Finally, on next Tuesday, I will
be back in
E. Provost
–
Provost Sigler said, “I will be very brief. I want to thank each and every one of you for your hard work, and wish you a happy “Dead” day. I also want to tell you how much I appreciate your passing the policy on accessible technology today. I’d like to share some good news. Senator Elba Maldonado-Colon has just received the National Award for Hispanics in Education. Happy Holidays!”
F. Vice President for Administration and Finance – No report.
X. Adjournment – The meeting adjourned at 4:30 p.m.