The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of Dec. 13, 2001
Faculty House, 2nd Floor

1. Prof. Steve Silver, Faculty Council chairperson, called the meeting to order at 11:15 a.m.

2. Members attending: Profs. Bishop, Briggs, B. Carter, Chen, Dunlop, Foster, Jones, Kelley, Kuzenski, Lally, Matthews, Ouzts, Pilcher, Silver, Templeton, Thompson, G. Williams, Zuraw, Durgun for Hoyle and Del Mastro for Skow-Obenaus.

3. Members absent: Profs. Foley, Webb and Woo.

4. Prof. Thompson moved and Prof. Zuraw seconded that the minutes of the October 25 meeting be approved with one change to correct a misattribution of an opinion. This was passed unanimously.

5. Prof. Zuraw moved and Prof. Matthews seconded that the minutes of the Nov. 15 meeting be approved. Two factual corrections were made, and the Council then went off into a discussion of whether one item should be included at all since it uselessly raised and thus made more real an inert issue potentially harmful to professors. A motion was made by Prof. Kelley and seconded by Prof. Kuzenski that the item be struck altogether; Prof. Bishop objected as a historian and proposed a noncommittal wording, whereupon Prof. Kelley withdrew his motion. With these changes the minutes were approved unanimously.

6. Prof. Bishop's tabled motion from November was brought before the meeting again: that professors who wanted to pull students out of each others' classes for field trips should have to get the other professor's permission by means of the latter signing a pink slip. There was another long discussion on this. Some people were in favour of professors not being able to take away each others' students by compulsion by putting them on orders, but others raised the possibility that one professor could cancel a big important event like the Debate Club trip by refusing to release students, and opined that making the students get the pink slip signature was putting yet another burden on them. Prof. Jones gave some insight into the process of putting students on orders, noting that the system tended to just spit out approval of orders without anyone asking whether they were beneficial. A sense emerged that it would be best if professors would just talk to each other about pulling students out of their classes, but that the Council should find out more about the whole issue of our scope in putting students on orders. Prof. Thompson suggested that Prof. Bishop defer her motion until Dean Ozment could come to a meeting and discuss the issue; she agreed.

7. The Council members went and got their free lunch.

8. Prof. Durgun raised the question of exactly what standards department heads and members should use on the annual evaluation forms to assess the heads' service to the college. It was noted that a department head's position is ambiguous, part faculty and part Administration; it was concluded that the Council should ask Dean Ozment about this issue also when she came. At this point the Council lost its quorum as people concluded there would be no vote this day on a policy about this; the representatives of two departments then observed that actually there was some urgency about it because their department heads were up for post-tenure review and needed guidance on just how to prepare and what documents to submit.

9. Some of the liaison members with campus-wide committees reported on their committees' progress in rewriting their charters. Prof. Pilcher reported of the Sabbaticals Committee and Prof. Carter reported of the Research Committee that they were meeting and progressing. The issue was raised that some committees did not want student representatives because they dealt with sensitive material. Some observed that student committee members often did not contribute and/or did not attend.

10. Since the quorum was gone, the meeting mutated into a quasi-social discussion, though it included the wish that the issue of the pre-law and pre-med committees not being official campus-wide ones any more be raised at a future meeting. The transition from meeting to hanging out was probably made around 12:20 p.m.