The proposed addition to article III, paragraph D, of Appendix P of the Faculty Handbook reads as follows:
III.
The University Faculty Council has the responsibility of nominating at least two individuals as chair of the Undergraduate Studies Committee for the upcoming academic year. The selection of the chair will be made by the Provost from the list that the Council submits to him. Appendix B, Article V.F.1., specifies the procedure as follows:
Therefore it is appropriate for the University Faculty Council to be prepared to discuss nominees at its 4 April 2008 meeting. The Council officers encourage you to come to the 4 April meeting prepared to offer nominations of faculty members who fulfill the conditions given above. If possible, we will submit our list of two or more names to the Provost after Friday's meeting.
President John Anderson has scheduled a University Faculty Meeting for Wednesday 23 April from noon to 2pm. The meeting will be held in the MTCC Ballroom and in Room 580 of the Downtown Campus, and lunch will be provided at both locations. There will be an opportunity for conduct of University Faculty Council-derived business at the meeting, although the President and other senior administrators will also be offering reports. The items that the Faculty Council will bring before the University Faculty, assuming that we are successful in achieving a quorum at this meeting, will include the proposed Bachelor's Degree program in Aerospace Engineering and the proposed changes in Appendix P of the Faculty Handbook.
The Undergraduate Studies Committee met on 4 December, 12 February, and
11 March, and has considered some significant issues at those meetings.
Prof. Jack Snapper, Secretary of the UGSC, will distribute minutes from
these recent meetings to the UniFC membership at the 4 April meeting,
and the Council can decide whether any of these issues require Council
action.
Links to the minutes are available in an unpassworded form at
http://www.iit.edu/~ugsc
The specific minutes are available as:
Several faculty members, including some in the Computer Science Department, have expressed concern about the potential for conflict between an advisor's ability to provide helpful guidance to students and the University's responsibility to guarantee student privacy in the context of the students' academic records. The Federal rules on this topic are encapsulated in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). IIT follows FERPA rules both by its own stated policy and because we are recipients of Department of Education funds, for which compliance with FERPA is obligatory. The University Counsel, Mary Anne Smith, considers this to be an important issue, and she plans to host a lunchtime discussion on the subject either later this spring or in the fall. UniFC members and other interested faculty will be encouraged to attend this upcoming discussion and make their concerns known.
The current student advising system operates via Student Information System (SIS), an old software system that, if anything, provides too much access by faculty to student records. The interface to SIS via Web for Faculty is considerably more restrictive in its provision of possibly sensitive information. Both SIS and Web for Faculty will be replaced within the next few months by Banner Academic and associated software modules. The faculty interface to Banner academic is being defined now, so this is an appropriate time to look for a useful balance between the students' right to privacy and the faculty advisor's right to information that will help him or her provide useful guidance.
President John Anderson and University Counsel Mary Anne Smith met with the officers of the Faculty Council (Phil Troyk, chair; Chris White, vice-chair; Andy Howard, secretary) on 27 March 2008. This was the third such scheduled meeting during this academic year.
The group began by discussing IPros. President Anderson recommended that the each academic unit be given a minimum IPro requirement each year, such that the unit would be responsible for offering at least that number of IPros. The minimum for one AU might be different from the minimum for another AU. He expressed some concern that without imposing such a minimum, it may become difficult for the IPro administration to offer enough high-quality IPros to meet the needs of the students.
President Anderson explained the plans for the May Commencement, for which the general ceremony will not include the distribution of degrees; instead, the degrees will be conferred at college- or department-level gatherings immediately following the general ceremony.
The Council officers explained the outcome of the 26 March Faculty meeting, and asked that the 23 April University faculty meeting include time for consideration of UniFC-generated business matters, including the Aerospace BS degree and possible Faculty Handbook changes.
The group discussed the plans for an IIT-wide Strategic Planning Committee. The committee has been appointed: it has 24 members, of whom 14 are faculty, and of those 14, 7 are from the UniFC-supplied list of nominees. Some of the other people on the UniFC list will be asked to participate in the strategic planning process via special-purpose task forces, some of which may begin to meet over the summer. He agreed to receive a modified version of the UniFC candidate list, taking into account the nominations that the UniFC secretary received after the cutoff date. The special-purpose task force members could be drawn from the updated list. President Anderson said he does not intend to use consultants during this strategic planning effort.
The group briefly discussed the President's decision to focus much of the University's budgeting process to the College level.
The President expressed reservations about the current Promotions and Tenure process, noting that the IIT system, in which the administration and the faculty Promotion & Tenure Committees operate in parallel in considering nominations, is unusual. He also feels that IIT's three-layer system is organized in an odd way. He acknowledged that he will not attempt to change these aspects of the system in the short run: but he is seriously concerned with improving process definitions, especially at the UCoPT level. He would particularly like to see definitions supplied by the Academic Units of their standards for promotion and tenure. The Counsel pointed out that those standards ought to be approved by the Chief Academic Officer, i.e. the Provost; President Anderson agreed, but suggested that UCoPT itself could play a role in examining and approving these standards. He also suggested that the quality of letters now being sought for candidates is not as high as it could be: the letters need to include some from faculty at high-quality universities, particularly those who are not actively collaborating with the candidate. The President also said he would like to see a greater degree of uniformity in the participation of Academic Unit heads in the process: in the current system some AU chairs are actively involved in the units' CoPT process, and in others the chairs are disengaged.
President Anderson told the UniFC officers that he is looking into a multi-level teaching faculty system, such that the Senior Lecturer position that currently exists would be replaced by two or three positions of differing seniority.
Note that the following academic units will be replacing
or reappointing representatives as of fall 2008:
BCPS (Chris White), BME (Phil Troyk), CAEE (Jeff Budiman),
CS (Wai Gen Yee), ECE (Geoff Williamson), ID (Vijay Kumar),
Kent (David Rudstein), MMAE( Ganesh Raman), MSED (William Newman),
PSYC (Joyce Hopkins), SGSB (Joel Goldhar)
Council officers will be elected at the May 2008 meeting.