University Committees – Anticipated Agenda Items for 2017-2018

First Year Seminar Committee

  • Continue to solicit proposals for new FSEM courses to increase the number of approved courses.
  • Discuss the future role of the committee after the QEP ends at the end of the next academic year.

University Sabbaticals, Fellowships, and Faculty Awards Committee

  • August 2017
    • Initial meeting to introduce new members and review general duties, grant application deadlines, and to decide on an initial schedule of meetings
  • September 2017
    • Meet to discuss Jepson Fellowship applications (Likely two meetings depending on the number of applications)
  • October 2017
    • Meet to discuss Sabbatical applications
  • January 2018
    • Meet to discuss Waple Professorship applications
  • March 2018
    • Meet to discuss University Award nominations

Academic Affairs Committee

  • Consideration of teaching time schedules and academic concerns related to use of an enterprise scheduling system

Faculty Affairs Committee

  • New business (tentative):
    • Setting policy on acceptable student recordings of class materials (referred by UFC)
    • Deciding whether to revisit the student course evaluation instrument (suggested by N. Mikhalevsky)
    • Standardizing and improving faculty evaluation, especially teaching evaluation beyond the student course evaluation (suggested by N. Mikhalevsky)
    • Examining faculty workload other than teaching (suggested by N. Mikhalevsky as follow up to the Workload Committee’s focus on teaching)
    • Making recommendations on junior faculty service, including service on assessment (suggested by N. Mikhalevsky)
    • Clarifying policies on unpaid leaves of absence (suggested by A. Rao)
  • Old business:
    • Making cost-neutral improvements to adjunct welfare (currently in progress)
    • Improving rate of return for student course evaluations (referred to D. Schleef)
    • Seeking to reduce minority faculty service overload (currently with Diversity Task Force)
    • Aiding Campus Rec’s attempt to strengthen services to faculty (currently with Campus Rec)
    • Working to remediate salary compression (currently with Advisory Committee on Salary Adjustment)
    • Enabling online P&T review (currently with UFC; may come back to our agenda at some point)

General Education Committee

  1. Consideration of student requests for general education credit for transfer courses
  2. Consideration of faculty proposals for general education credit designation for courses
  3. Establishment and implementation of a procedure for removing general education courses from the list of approved courses based on their frequency of being offered. The committee has decided this year that if a course has not been offered within a four year cycle (so that a student could reasonably expect it will be offered while they are enrolled), it should be removed from the list of approved courses. This policy will be formalized and implemented next academic year.
  4. Coordination with the Office of Institutional Analysis & Effectiveness for General Education Assessment. There is a great deal of assessment data that has been gathered on the various general education courses. The committee and Debra Schleef, Associate Provost of Institutional Analysis & Effectiveness, have developed a plan this year for working groups to evaluate this data and provide feedback to the instructors and the committee. This plan will go into play this summer, so we anticipate the first reports this fall. The committee will need to respond to these reports and prepare for the next round of evaluation in summer 2018.

Committee membership for 2017-2018: Nicole Crowder (CAS, current chair), Belleh Fontem (COB), Jennifer Walker (COE). Two at-large positions will be open for 2017-2018.

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