The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of April 15, 2004
Board of Visitors Room, Jenkins Hall[Not yet approved by Faculty Council.]
1. Prof. Lisa Zuraw, chairperson of Faculty Council, called the meeting to order at 11:05 a.m.
2. Members attending: Profs. Andrade, Bishop, Bloss, Briggs, B. Carter, Chen, Darden, Davakos, Davis, Hewett, Hoyle, Knapp, Lally, Matthews, McKinney, Moody, Murray, Niksch, Snively, Woolsey, Zuraw and Heuston for Allen. Prof. Williams, chair of the subcommittee that wrote the faculty Ethics Code, was there as a guest.
3. Member absent: Prof. Miller.
4. Prof. Zuraw reported on the verdict from the SACS accreditation team. The Citadel needs to document just how our assessment procedures improve the school in order to be reaccredited. The Quality Enhancement Plan is therefore being changed, and a list of nine needed improvements has been identified by the QEP Committee. Prof. Zuraw had been asked by the committee what the faculty liked best about the QEP and guessed that it was the inclusion of first-semester sophomores, which has now been taken out in aid of better focus; but we can still pay attention to sophomores too. Prof. Zuraw called the Council’s attention to the new GPA standards to be eligible to continue at the school, which would adversely impact a little fewer than ten current students, and there was a little discussion about how this was still not quite up to the minimum GPA standards of the NCAA.
Prof. Zuraw listed the members of the Council who could no longer be on it because of the two-term limit, and urged their departments to elect new representatives for the May meeting. She pointed out that in May the Council had to elect a new vice-chair and secretary. She gave Prof. Bishop a beautiful blank book as thanks for having been the Council’s "historian" for five years, and led a round of applause for her.
Prof. Zuraw noted that General Mace had complained about the current policy of letting graduating seniors walk the stage when they still had up to 17 credits to earn to complete their degree; Winthrop College, for instance, lets graduates walk the stage only if they are completely done. She announced that the additional phase of the Provost search was now over and the two extra candidates had been interviewed; the search committee now will be able to forward three names to Gen. Grinalds for choosing. She mentioned that the presentation on employee pay which we had all been asked to attend was probably not yet relevant to faculty because they had not yet run faculty data when the meetings occurred. In connection with the Employee Climate Survey, it had been asked how more faculty could be induced to come to campus-wide social events like the welcome-back party in August. Council members intimated that they did not see this as a legitimate issue.
5. The minutes for the meeting of March 18th were approved with the correction of one mistake in a date.
6. The Council took up the motion made and postponed at the March meeting to replace the Faculty Ethics Code formulated specifically for The Citadel with the general AAUP code. Prof. Williams, as the chair of the subcommittee which had with much hard work written that code, told the history of the subcommittee’s efforts and advocated keeping the resulting code, which his and the others’ expertise and all that work had made valid. He had added a new sentence to the Preamble saying that the code could not be used for any faculty evaluation or disciplinary action, and that and the footnote at the end about continuing to work on it meant that the code could not be misused by being made official. He noted that the AAUP code was written in 1989 and ours was better and newer. Prof. Moody asked for clarification about the footnote: had the Council approved the Code or not? There was discussion about the fact that the finished code was presented late in the year with pressure to adopt it fast and the statement that we would continue to work on it was to make us able to scrutinize it minutely as a full Council at our leisure. However, Prof. Zuraw noted, Provost Carter had said that this conditional state of approval was invalid; either it was approved or it was not.
Discussion ensued on the merits of the Citadel code. Prof. McKinney noted that it looked like a job description and he could see it being used in court. Profs. Hoyle and Knapp indicated that their departments were against it; Prof. Knapp went on to say that the date of a document does not invalidate it, that The Citadel was not a special exception of a college just because its faculty "dress in funny clothes" and that we should adopt the industry standard. Prof. Woolsey asked whether we should discuss adding the probihition on outside teaching and the support of the Honour Code to the AAUP code. Prof. Briggs asked whether the AAUP and the Citadel codes conflicted anywhere. It was agreed that they did not, and also that the Citadel code did not conflict with any ethics of specific disciplines. Prof. Lally declared herself uncomfortable with the Citadel code’s requirement to be "positive" when teaching sensitive subjects; Prof. Hoyle noted that if there was a strict interpretation of the Citadel code’s clause that professors could teach only their field of official competence, he and several other math professors who had expanded their range to Computer Science could not teach. Prof. Bishop said that, though she had worked on the Citadel code and it was good in itself, since there was this creeping tendency on the part of the Administration to edge it more and more into the realm of the official, it would send them an excellent message if our reaction to that was to drop it altogether and go with the code of our "union". Prof. Moody objected that to her the message would be that subcommittee work was futile as the whole Council would just negate it all.
Prof. Davakos called the question, seconded by Profs. Chen and Knapp; there was a vote of 14 to 1, with four abstentions, in favour of stopping the discussion. The Council then voted 13 to 7 to drop the Council’s own ethics code and adopt the AAUP one.
7. Prof. Briggs called the Council’s attention to the Campus Affairs Committee’s new parking survey, and urged members to get their departments to fill it out by the end of the month.
8. Jeff Weart, the head of the Krause Initiative on Ethics and Leadership, came in and gave a special presentation about his work on it. He described his qualifications, including his degree in leadership development, and the process of his getting to know The Citadel, which had shown him how much students love the school (as well as hating it) and want to do better in terms of ethics. The proposed Leadership minor is an academic thing, outside his scope, but he solicited discussion on what the faculty could do; for instance, we could have had students who came to the Fine Arts Series play "Breaker Morant" write an essay about the ethical issues in it. His job is to connect the dots so as to get a focus on ethics and leadership on a campus-wide scale; he named his five goals, including getting a model for proceeding and ultimately serving as a community resource. Prof. Zuraw asked what we could do as faculty; Mr. Weart asked us to be aware of what he was doing, perhaps get on the writing team to develop the conceptual model, and keep him involved in our activities. There were some suggestions from members, such as Prof. Lally’s suggestion of a film series about leadership issues.
9. The Council gave a round of applause to Prof. Zuraw as outgoing Faculty Council chair, and the meeting was adjourned at 12:28 p.m.