The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of Dec. 16, 1999
Board of Visitors Room, Jenkins Hall

1. Prof. Julie Lipovsky, Faculty Council chairperson, called the meeting to order despite the lack of a quorum (again) at 11:07 a.m. A quorum was achieved at 11:25 and lost again at noon when a member had to leave.

2. Members attending: Professors Bishop, Brown, Dunlop, H. Ezell, Feurtado, Foster, Hurren, Lipovsky, Maynard, Pilcher, Silver, Thompson, Toubiana, B. White, Woo and Zuraw.

3. Members absent: Professors Chen, Emanuel, Kelley, McDowell, Pages, G. Williams and Wolf.

4. Prof. Lipovsky, with help from Prof. Pilcher who had attended in his capacity as campus head of the AAUP, reported on their meeting with General Mace to discuss Faculty Council's suggestions about violence in the barracks. Gen. Mace's basic position was that this campus is less violent than most, incidents of violence are blips which are adequately dealt with by the current procedures, some of our suggestions are against Board of Visitors policies, and the faculty is ignorant of what goes on in the barracks and more of us should take OC duty and find out. Profs. Lipovsky and Pilcher made the case for informing faculty about incidents of violence; Gen. Mace said we could find what we needed to know in the section on Cadet Information on the website.

5. Random matters were discussed while members went out to try to lure enough for a quorum to the meeting, like Prof. Lipovsky's kindness in providing bottled water at the last meeting and chocolate Christmas balls at this one, the desirability of having a faculty member involved in planning any future faculty orientation to cadet life so it is not offensive like a past session, and the fact, which also came out at the meeting in #4, that Gen. Mace likes the new 24-hour schedule because it provides accountability at all times.

6. Prof. Lipovsky reported on Col. Tomasik's position about parking. He offers 50 day spots and 20 day-and-night spots in the Capers lot to be marked faculty-only, but this concept includes department heads, so she asked for 55 day ones. This is still unresolved. He will have an architect develop a plan to make Kovats Field a parking lot. Council members observed that there might be bitterness from staff people if faculty spots sat empty while they had to slog to Capers through the mud; if it turns out 50 or 55 is too many, some can be painted over. Someone came in late and a quorum was achieved in the middle of this.

7. It was moved by Prof. Foster and seconded by Prof. Zuraw that the minutes of the meeting of Oct. 21 be approved; it was moved by Prof. Foster and seconded by Prof. Pilcher that the minutes of the meeting of Nov. 18 be approved. Both motions passed without amendment.

8. Prof. Lipovsky reported the results of her talk with Vice-President Carter about how the $440,000 earmarked for merit pay would be allocated. Gen. Carter noted that other factors had crept into the decision process for this allocation: The Citadel had to see that there was no gender or race inequality in pay, then how our salaries compared to those at area schools, and only then could merit pay be considered. Compression and inversion of salaries thus had to be taken into account too. He promised that all $440,000 would go into faculty pockets, in pay increases starting in February, but he had to do a department-by-department study to see what needed to be rectified. Council members noted that it would take consider-ably more than $440,000 to just equalize salaries in one department alone, and that the small amount the average professor will probably get as a raise is far too little reward for the amount of extra work we have to do this year to supply the information needed for merit ratings.

A little later, Prof. Ezell asked that the minutes reflect that the committee he headed to develop a mechanism for determining merit pay had only merit pay as its task and therefore that was all they did; the Administration's disappointment that they had not addressed compression and inversion was unjust, as this had not been their charge. The committee will continue to address merit pay alone because this is its mandate.

9. Since a member had to leave for a meeting, Prof. Hurren hastened to move and Prof. Ezell to second that Faculty Council support the resolution just voted, on the motion of Prof. Bo Moore, by the Academic Board to back the Board of Visitors in its resolution that the Confederate battle flag should be taken off the State Capitol building. This was passed by acclam-ation, after which the member left and the Council lost its quorum again.

10. Prof. Lipovsky reported on the last Academic Board meeting. There was a proposal in it to reorganize the tenure and promotion mechanism by cluster, which could produce some clusters too small to do the work properly once the candidate's department's representatives had excused themselves. Besides this, the Academic Board's repeated suggestions that we do things by cluster may be a subtle attempt to put the proposed schools structure in place de facto. More uneasiness was expressed on this issue: the Administration assures us it will not mean any additional deans after the converted Education Department Head, but if the President wants schools is our opposition futile? Prof. White noted that if the faculty opposed the schools structure it was our duty to speak up against it even so.

There are some changes being made in the MBA and PE programs with a view toward accrediation.

The policies of the various committees should be publicized on the web page and elsewhere; members thought that the Research and Development Committee in particular should publish a calendar giving deadlines for fund applications.

From now on undergraduate evening classes will start on the same day as day classes instead of being sometimes a week early.

11. Prof. Thompson reported on the Vice-Presidents' meeting. Individu-al PTs seem to be working with 95% passing; they may revive the veterans' day program; applications are way up; when the Second Battalion is torn down the trees near it will die, so they are going to cut them down but (Col. Tomasik says) faculty should not howl and chain themselves to them as more will be planted.

12. Prof. Lipovsky noted that the document on tenure and promotion distributed to us by Prof. Dorothy Moore is too important to handle at the end of a long and partly quorumless meeting; we should study it and go through it carefully at the meeting in January, at which she hopes Prof. Moore will come to answer questions. The big issue is whether student evaluations of professors should be used for tenure and promotion decisi-ons. Council members agreed that student evaluations were good for the professors' own use in improving their teaching but invalid for any other purpose; Prof. Ezell noted that CHE had not mandated that we use them for summative purposes, but only that we use them. It depends on who in the Administration wants them used for tenure and promotion.

13. The meeting was adjourned at 12:35 p.m.