The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of Jan. 22, 2004
Board of Visitors Room, Jenkins Hall1. Prof. Lisa Zuraw, chairperson of Faculty Council, called the meeting to order at 11:04 a.m.
2. Members attending: Profs. Bishop, Bloss, Briggs, B. Carter, Chen, Darden, Davakos, Davis, Hewett, Knapp, Matthews, McKinney, Miller, Moody, Murray, Niksch, Woolsey and Zuraw.
3. Members absent: Profs. Allen, Andrade, Lally, Lipscomb and Snively.
4. The minutes for the meeting of Dec. 11, 2003 were presented for approval. There ensued a correction about the Quality Enhancement Plan, an elucidation about staff parking problems and two deletions of off-the-record remarks; they were then approved.
5. Provost Carter visited the meeting to talk about progress on the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). Consultation with the whole campus has resulted in the identification of eight areas of improvement for the freshman and first-term sophomore educational experience. These are (1) leadership, which is being helped by the hiring of Jeff Weart for the Krause Initiative and could be helped by things like an Honour Code test on the Web; (2) wellness, including combating the worsening problem of lack of sleep at an age when adolescents need a lot; (3) the yearly schedule, which could be improved, for instance, by putting Recognition Day for the freshmen before rather than after final exams as all other service academies do; (4) academic policies, which might include changes like requiring more than a 1.1 GPA to be allowed to return to the school, a drive by company academic officers to stop time-wasting games and messaging on room computers, and professors’ feedback to freshmen earlier in a course about how they are doing; (5) academic support, keeping up things like the library, Learning Center and Citadel Success Institute; (6) expanding the First Year Experience program to more courses than Citadel 101; (7) current technology in the classroom, which The Citadel is doing well with and will continue to use education lottery money to enhance; and (8) more interaction by faculty and others with students outside the classroom, perhaps encouraging every faculty member to eat in the mess hall and visit a cadet room at least once. Provost Carter went on to note that a team of volunteers from other schools will be sent by SACS at the end of March to assess progress on the QEP; therefore, a version of it needs to be finalized six weeks before that, Friday Feb. 13th, though it can then be changed. The Citadel has nominated two outside people to be on this team, but it is not known whether SACS will accept them.
6. Prof. Zuraw asked Provost Carter what the situation was with the Faculty Ethics Code; Prof. Bishop added the question whether it was still being treated as unofficial and advisory only. Provost Carter said that he had submitted it to the Board of Visitors and would present it to Academic Board but not for any official vote of approval; it is just for information and to suggest goals to aspire to, and thus belongs on the Citadel website, but that does not make it part of our official obligations.
Prof. Zuraw asked what qualities the faculty should look for when assessing the candidates to succeed Prof. Carter as Provost. He said it should be someone with a lot of both academic and classroom experience and experience as an administrator; it need not be someone with an actual military background, but it should be someone who is not anti-military and can understand the military side, since the person will have to prove him- or herself to several groups including Jenkins Hall. Provost Carter then left.
7. The minutes for Dec. 11 were approved with the changes mandated in Item 4 above.
8. Prof. Zuraw made some announcements. She first indicated the progress of the new Provost search; there will be four open meetings for faculty with the four finalists, chaired by herself.
She then announced that the 2004-2005 academic calendar has been set and that, beginning in August, evening and graduate classes will now start in the same week as day classes. She presented this as a potential problem, since it would mean that a Thursday graduate class would hold its final exam just 12 hours before the final grades were due; but the two comments on the change were positive, it will put us in sync with the College and extend the Christmas break for graduate faculty.
Prof. Zuraw announced that the Employee Climate Survey was still being tabulated; the people in charge of it got a 50% response and a hundred and thirty pages of comments which they need to digest. She then called the Council’s attention to the Dec. 19 e-mail response Col. Tomasik had made to the Council’s December resolution to oppose his idea of putting a gate on Capers Lot. He invited us to suggest an alternative. Council members agreed that we should take up the issue seriously, since the QEP meetings and other discussions have recently shown that much is blamed on the faculty—including not being available enough to students, which could be a parking-related problem—and we should reframe parking as an issue of general interest and not just a locus of faculty griping.
Finally, Prof. Zuraw noted that she had attended the Council of Chairs meeting, and that they will be meeting with the Commission on Higher Education to discuss such issues as faculty recruitment, retention and retirement, a possible tuition cap, restructuring, and how to correct information about higher education that gets into the public record.
9. The Council began its task of considering whether to deactivate some standing college committees on the grounds that they do not seem to meet often or have a purpose. The first of these was the Internal College Relations Committee. Prof. Hewitt wondered whether its deactivation would be wrongly taken as a sign that all is well with internal college relations, but Prof. Zuraw pointed out that the minutes could reflect simply the conviction that it was ineffective. Prof. Briggs told of some things this committee had done long ago, but more recent members noted that it was now a ghost committee which its members deemed not even worth meeting to abolish. The Council voted unanimously to deactivate this committee.
10. The next candidate for deactivation was the Campus Affairs Committee. Prof. Bishop pointed out that this could become a very active committee again if it were tasked with examining the campus parking issue. Others suggested that parking could be dealt with by the Employment Committee, but Prof. Bloss pointed out that this latter was also a ghost committee which had never taken up any issue after its bid to scrutinize faculty salaries was refused. The idea was raised that overseeing issues of faculty housing was a waste of faculty time since fewer and fewer faculty lived on campus. Prof. Briggs strongly advocated keeping Campus Affairs; it had been inactive for several years but it was supposed to participate in campus-wide physical planning, and while it slept Faculty Council itself had to do several things the committee should have done, like deploring a hurtful tree-cutting and making rules for Physical Plant inspection of campus quarters. He noted that the Campus Residents Association’s periodic meetings with Physical Plant are utterly powerless briefings where residents receive orders from the landlord; a real committee is needed to take positions.
Prof. Zuraw called for a meeting of the Campus Affairs Committee with its old chair, Prof. Matthews, convening it, to elect a new chair legally and rewrite the charter. Prof. Bishop moved and Prof. Knapp seconded that the Campus Affairs Committee be tasked with examining campus parking issues. This was passed unanimously.
11. The meeting was adjourned at 12:25 p.m.