The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of Nov. 18, 1999
Board of Visitors Room, Jenkins Hall

1. Professor Julie Lipovsky, Faculty Council chairperson, reluctantly called the meeting to order in the absence of a quorum at 11:11 a.m. This meeting never achieved a quorum.

2. Members attending: Professors Bishop, Foster, Kelley (permanent replacement for Wallace), Lipovsky, Maynard, McDowell, Pages, Pilcher, B. White, G. Williams, Zuraw, Trautman for Chen, Peeples for Dunlop and Leon for Thompson.

3. Members absent: Professors Brown, Emanuel, H. Ezell, Feurtado, Hurren, Silver, Toubiana, Wolf and Woo.

4. Prof. Lipovsky alerted the Faculty Council to some issues that would arise in future. (a) The Faculty Tenure and Promotion Committee wishes to challenge and examine some things in General Order 12, the new tenure and promotion rules, and Gen. Carter, Vice President of Academic Affairs, has agreed to consider the issues, after which Faculty Council will get the documents.

(b) The Board of Visitors has changed some policies relevant to the Faculty Manual, and Faculty Council should now decide whether to include them in it; Prof. Lipovsky persuaded Spike Metts to send us an easy-to-read document with the proposed changes in bold so that we can look at them in place and vote on each one.

(c) The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, in its continuing mission to accredit us and others, has intimated that we do not have enough of a strategic plan. Col. Metts is forming a new committee, the Strategic Planning Implementation Committee (which needs a new title so it doesn't have that acronym), to look at the areas SACS thinks The Citadel is weak in like student retention and GPA. Prof. Lipovsky pointed out to Col. Metts things we are strong in; one of Faculty Council's immediate tasks will be to choose a faculty member to be on this committee.

(d) At some point, Faculty Council may have to decide whether to approve a change in the charters of two committees, Research and Development, if they decide to change their policies to allow non-tenured or tenure-track people to receive funds to do or present research. Full-time temporary people are now at a disadvantage in this area.

5. There was a discussion of violence in the barracks. Prof. Pilcher, as head of the campus AAUP, presented the Council with a letter that chapter had approved deploring the attacks. Prof. Lipovsky reported that she had sent a version of some of our suggestions to the Commandant of Cadets and received no reply as yet. Issues were discussed like the present leadership training in Military Science classes and possible strengthening of its ethics component in future, a call for faculty to be more active in helping students who seem to be in trouble, and, on a somewhat related topic, why drug searches can't be at a less disruptive time than ESP.

6. There was a discussion of the new 24-hour schedule and whether the optional dinner and 7:50 formation before a later ESP is better or worse than the old formation at 6, dinner and 7:30 ESP. The Board of Visitors is much attached to the old way, the vast majority of the students appear to want it back, and members of the Council tended to agree that the new system interferes with academic values as well as others: there cannot now be meetings or review sessions at 7, and ESP is effectively from 8 to 10 instead of 7:30 to 10:30 so that an hour is lost. The sense of the meeting, which could not be put into a formal resolution without a quorum, was that the school should go back to the 6:00 formation and the 7:30 to 10:30 ESP but keep the new freedom about going to dinner after the 6:00 formation.

7. Gen. Carter has suggested that a task force be formed to examine the whole question of whether to divide The Citadel into schools (the pro-tem compromise of searching for a "Dean" of Education as head of the Education Department is now underway, the ad is before the public) with representatives from all departments and with half the members being from the Academic Board. Council members suggested that this task force be a subcommittee of Strategic Planning and that the Administration draw up its proposal in a document which could then be a target for debate. There was a little additional talk on why this new organization was thought desirable, how much decentralization of power it could bring (could one school eliminate the faculty uniform?) and whether it would do any good in boosting the graduate programs given other factors.

8. Prof. Lipovsky reported on the faculty survey she took about parking in the Capers Hall lot; there are probably more than 15 professors who need to park there for evening classes, and the response to the issue of paying an additional parking fee for more slots is generally negative.

9. The meeting was adjourned at 12:10 P.M.