NOTE: At times, issues of confidentiality may require that some items discussed in meetings be excluded from these minutes.

ALC MEMBERS: Charles Bachman, Tom Ball, Bill Barnes, Richard Bennett, David Caudill, Lance Crimm, Tom Currin, Venu Dasigi, Ameen Farooq, Alan Gabrielli, Steven Hamrick, Ruston Hunt, Andrew McMorran, Joyce Mills, Julie Newell, Mark Nunes, Jeff Orr, Nikki Palamiotis, Phil Patterson, Dawn Ramsey, Jeffrey Ray, Nancy Reichert, Han Reichgelt, Ronny Richardson, Becky Rutherfoord, Khalid Siddiqi, Sandra Stone, Denise Stover, John Sweigart, Zvi Szafran, Margaret Venable, Andy Wang, and Tim Zeigler

MEMBERS ABSENT: Lance Crimm, Ameen Farooq, Dawn Ramsey, Sandra Stone, and Denise Stover

GUESTS: Austin Asgill for Charlie Bachman

Item 1. Updates

Dr. Szafran updated the Council on the following:

Degree Programs:

§ Education – Dr. Rossbacher, Alan Gabrielli, and Dr. Szafran went downtown recently for a meeting regarding an Education program and received strong support from the System Office – more direction forthcoming

§ Engineering – Dr. Szafran is going to follow up on this

§ Game Design – under review at the System Office

§ IID – no news

Construction Management – Khalid had good news on their recent accreditation visit. They received the highest possible commendation on their review and received accreditation for 6 years.
Budget – Due to additional reductions in projected revenue, state agency budgets are being cut an additional 1% - SPSU’s share will probably be $200,000. Szafran stated that we probably won’t know this year’s final budget until April and next year’s budget until June or July. There will most likely be an additional 2% cut in next year’s budget. Due to the delays in finalizing the budget, faculty hiring decisions for next fall may take longer.
Patrick McCord and John Mills are addressing several issues with the owners of Austin Creek Apartments. Austin Creek have indicated that they may block access to the campus through their property.
QEP – Becky reminded everyone to become familiar with our QEP by reading Bob Brown’s executive summary, a copy of which went out in a recent email from Bob. The SACS team will be on campus the end of March. Becky will send out an agenda and interview schedule. She encouraged everyone to have water available for the team members in the event they come to your office. Patrick McCord and Dr. Szafran are still supplying data to the visiting team.
Nancy Reichert asked to be involved in the scheduling of the SPSU 1001 Honors’ section for the students in the learning communities and will work with Julie Newell, Venu Dasigi, and Mark Nunes on this. Kasey Helton and Ron Lunk have also expressed interest in being involved in the development of learning communities.
Phil Patterson announced a PSLSAMP talk tomorrow entitled “Journey to Success”. It will be at 3:00 PM in H 200. All faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to attend.
Russ Hunt announced the second of three workshops for faculty research on Friday from 10:00-12:00 in the Ballroom.

Item 2. Emergency Procedures

In response to last week’s tornado warning, Dr. Szafran asked the Council to inform their faculty, students, and staff to be sure to comply when the warnings sound and move to a safe place. The tornado horns did not go off but the emergency speakers in the buildings did announce the warning. Most faculty complied and moved their students to a safe place, but some did not follow this procedure. Julie Newell commented that there is no signage telling people where to go and this needs to be addressed. Dr. Szafran responded that he has asked about this and was told that putting a sign up in a specific area would cause everyone to try to crowd into that one space. He agreed that safe places all over campus need to be identified and that materials are being prepared for distribution in the fall. Julie also asked for stickers to be placed in all classrooms with the telephone number to University Police in case of an emergency.

Item 3. Ending “Temporary Graduate Status” for Part-time Faculty

Dr. Szafran talked about our current P&P on temporary graduate faculty status for part-time faculty and the recent discussion on this topic in the Deans Council. He shared a new draft policy with the ALC which will remove the designation of “temporary graduate status” for part-time faculty and in its place require departments to justify their part-time faculty teaching graduate courses on the course justification form already being used for SACS. There were no objections to this change so Dr. Szafran will forward this on to the Graduate Programs Committee for consideration.

Item 4. Summer Teaching Loads

Dr. Szafran talked about previous summer teaching loads (for full-time faculty) based on data from Steve Hamrick. The goal is to come to a common understanding about what a maximum load is for the summer for full-time faculty and what limits to set. Szafran stated that he understands the faculty’s need to maximize their pay but there had also been some concerns about faculty with extremely high summer teaching loads. He would also like to be able to guarantee summer pay versus pro-rating pay but cannot do that until class sizes are larger. This means offering fewer sections of courses with higher enrollments. Szafran also suggested that going to a permanent schedule will make this easier. After much discussion, Szafran suggested that departments only offer sections that they reasonably think will fill and limit faculty teaching loads to 8 or 9 credit hours for the 8-week session and 9 or 10 hours for the 10 week session. Labs (3 hour) will count as 1.5 credits. All were in favor of Zvi’s proposal.

Item 5. Increasing Grants and Contracts at SPSU

The System Office released a list of grants awarded by campus and SPSU was near the bottom of the list. The list included awards related to research, instruction, and public service. In discussing it, the ALC had the following comments/questions:

ELS and Georgia Highlands may not have been included in our totals and should have been.
We need to increase the amount of outside revenue we bring in to supplement our state budget.
We need to look at what we’re already doing to show all of the funding that we’re bringing in.
What is a reasonable expectation per department to bring in external funding in these categories?
How do we calculate what we’re doing?
Encourage faculty to seek grants by giving them a greater share of the indirect costs.
What should chairs’ and deans’ expectations be in fund raising?
Offer course release for writing grants.
All Engineering faculty are expected to participate in grant writing.
Need mentors in each department to help.
We should be getting email daily about funding possibilities.
EU used to send out weekly email with no response so they stopped. A recent speaker they brought to campus suggested that faculty volunteer to be an NSF proposal reviewer to become acquainted with the type of proposals being submitted and those being funded and those that are no.
Sign up for Community of Science and receive weekly email with opportunities.
New faculty especially need to know about Community of Science and any other places to learn about grants
Need workshops for faculty.
Faculty expect resources (release time, etc.) to write grants.
Faculty need to know where to look for opportunities.
Should we have a secure website to post proposals currently being worked on by our faculty so that other faculty can view and learn from?
Should chairs be expected to come up with a plan for addressing this?
What should be the expectation for faculty?
Writing grant proposals is a heavy workload.
SPARC is available to offer support.

It was agreed that Chairs would each develop a document stating what they thought some reasonable outcomes might be for their departments in the grants/contracts area. Emphasis would be given to trying to obtain funding for initiatives currently being planned by departments or already taking place in the departments.