MSU-BOZEMAN FACULTY COUNCIL MEETING MINUTES December 5, 2001 PRESENT: Young, Sherwood, White, Kommers, Leech, Benham, Howard, Stewart, Jones, Ross, Nehrir, McMahon for Weaver, Lansverk, Levy/Bandyopadhyay, Bogar, Jelinski, Idzerda, McKinsey for Pratt, Fisher, Lynes-Hayes, Butterfield, ABSENT: Hatfield, Morrill, Engel, Anderson, Peed, Linker, Larsen, Mooney, Lefcort, McClure, Locke, Henson, Lynch, Kempcke, Griffith, Carlstrom. The meeting was called to order at 4:10 PM by Chair John Sherwood. A quorum was present. The minutes of the November 28, 2001, Faculty Council meeting were approved as distributed. Chair's report - John Sherwood. - Gary Bogar, Mathematics, and Shawna Lockhart, Mechanical Engineering, have been appointed by the Provost to the Computer Fee Allocation Committee from nominees submitted by Faculty Council. - Membership of the Space Management Committee (SMC) was discussed at a Wednesday meeting between Faculty Council leadership and the administration and again at UGC Steering Committee. - Concern was raised for the potential perception of conflict of interest in cases where the faculty member's department is involved in a space management consideration. - A way to resolve the issue agreeable to both administration and Steering Committee is to add a second faculty member to the committee. Then, in cases where one of the faculty member's departments is involved, that individual would not vote in order to alleviate any concern for potential conflict of interest. - Because Cynthia McClure, Chemistry and Biochemistry, is willing to serve on the committee and she was one of the nominees for the original faculty position on the SMC, UGC Steering Committee forwarded her name to Acting Vice President Roloff, who has appointed her as the second faculty member of the committee. - Two ad hoc committees have been suggested: a faculty demographics committee and a faculty professional development committee. There is agreement that the faculty professional development committee should move ahead. The faculty demographics committee will continue on hold until a director of institutional planning and analysis is hired, because this second committee will require a significant amount of data collection and analysis. - At today's meeting of Faculty Council leadership and central administration, possibilities of giving a standard raise at the time of promotion was discussed. Possibilities for doing so will be considered. Faculty Affairs Committee report - Marvin Lansverk. - A proposal for an ombudsman has been drafted. The committee is now gathering information from about 20 other institutions regarding release time and budget needed to make the initial proposal successful. Montana Learning Community (MLC) Overview and Discussion - Martin Teintze, Walter Fleming, Lisa Graumlich, David Cherry. - The Montana Learning Community (the new core) is a pilot project which addresses some concerns with the present core curriculum. A goal of the Montana Learning Community is to prepare students to be better learners in the remainder of their course work. - After getting input from faculty and students, five foundational courses (Seminar, Quantitative Reasoning, College Writing, Ideas and Perspectives, and Diversity) plus a Research and Creative Experience were proposed, and they are now being tested. - Four core electives will also be part of the MLC. They will be in the areas of Natural Science with lab, Social Science, Humanities, and Fine Arts. - This fall, CLS 101 - College Seminar, enrolled 304 students with 20 faculty. This course will be renamed "University Seminar". There are also freshman seminars in other colleges. Spring Semester there will be three Ideas and Perspectives courses enrolling 327 students. - Next year, second-year courses (Diversity, Research and Creativity) will be offered. - "Diversity" includes race, class, gender, ability, and other considerations and is broader than "multicultural", a current core requirement. - As a result of the call for proposals in May to enhance existing multicultural core courses, using the five new diversity criteria, two courses were redesigned to meet the criteria. Two additional courses will be taught Spring Semester, one revised and one new. - The purpose of the Research and Creative Experience is to supplement what is currently done in undergraduate research and to do it early in the core experience. - The pilot courses will be existing courses or new courses which have been redesigned to include at least 1/3 research. - It was pointed out that there needs to be a way to move from this primary research experience to a more self-directed experience. - The question of cost was raised. According to Professor Teintze, MLC is still in the experimental phase, and it will need to be determined if the experience is worth any added cost. Because freshmen seminars are small classes, it is the most expensive part of the new core. It is anticipated that classes with large numbers of students will be included in the new core. - The new core committee is still trying to determine how to evaluate the pilot program to assess its impact. - Although some coordination with General Studies and Business freshman seminars may be possible, there are differences in goals that will not make total coordination with the new freshman seminars possible. - There will be a faculty forum on cross-disciplinary teaching and learning on December 13 from 4:00 - 5:30 PM at the Foundation Building. As there was no further business, the meeting adjourned at 5:00 PM. Joann Amend, Secretary John Sherwood, Chair