Richard Rice called the meeting to order at 3:15,
The minutes of April 20, 2004 were corrected as follows: Under the
discussion of the freshman seminar, Jocelyn Sanders corrected her comment
to read: "The freshman seminar committee is determining the means of
assessment."With that correction, the minutes were approved.
Motion: To allow Marcia Noe to serve her third year on the Faculty
Administrative Relations Committee (Honerkamp/Churnet). Motion failed.
Nominations were made to replace Marcia Noe on the Faculty Administrative
Relations Committee. June Hanks and Sheila Van Ness were nominated. June
Hanks was elected.
The deans introduced the new faculty members for the 2004-2005 academic year:
Dean Burhenn introduced the following new faculty members from the College
of Arts and Sciences:
Bret Clough, Deborah Kreiss, and Bradley Reynolds, Biological and
Environmental Sciences;
Daron Janzen and Howard McLean, Chemistry;
Kimberley Carr, and Angel Geoghagan, Criminal Justice;
Jacqueline Boals, April Cooper, Paul Guest, Matthew Guy, Bryan Hampton,
James Inman, John Jones, and Paige Joynter, English;
John (Matt) Matthews, III, Tracy Poole, and Martha Pratt, Mathematics;
Ahn Jooyong and Jan Cochrane, Music;
Mark Fisher, Dennis Plaisted, and Brian Ribeiro, Philosophy and Religion;
Peter Groves, Physics;
Julie Buck and Melissa Gratias, Psychology;
Stephanie Stokes-Eley and Jillian Zwilling, Theatre and Speech.
Dean Casavant introduced the new faculty members from the College of
Business: Debbie Archambeault and Kristy McManus, Accounting.
Dean Bailey introduced the new faculty members from the College of
Engineering and Computer Science: Deng Hongmei will join the Department of
Computer Science in January.
Dean Tanner introduced the new faculty members from the College of Health,
Education, and Professional Studies:
Kristi Gibbs, Graduate Studies Division;
Mark Gillen, Graduate Studies Division, Counseling;
Melody (Gaye) Stone and Donna Emerson, Human Ecology;
Steve Arnold, Assistant Coordinator, Nurse Anesthesia;
Cheryl Newton, Social Work;
Cowan Kaye, Bonnie Warren-King and Dolly Gerregano, Teacher Preparation
Academy;
Kelli Hand, Nursing.
Theresa Liedtka is the new Dean of the Library.
Richard Rice mad e the following report from the faculty senate:
The new EDO process is being clarified by the Handbook Committee.
Cumulative Performance Review will continue. Richard referred to Betsey
Darken's e-mail on this subject. The enrollment cap situation and peer
group situation are in abeyance. The Lupton faculty travel fund will
continue. Marvin Ernst is coordinating this program. The Football
Committee is chaired by Tom Rybolt and two student members will be chosen.
The committee will do a cost-benefit study of UTC's football program. A
final report will be given only at the end of this football season.
Perhaps the faculty or the faculty senate may wish to make recommendations.
No classes will be held on Wednesday, November 24, but the University will
be open for business on Wednesday, November 24. The University will be
closed on Thursday, November 25 and Friday, November 26.
Chancellor Frederick Obear expressed his pleasure at returning to
the Chancellor's office and said that the Chancellor's Search Committee had
met with System President John Peterson that morning. We have a record
head count and FTE for the institution. Head count is 8689 students, a 2%
increase over last year. We have a record freshman enrollment--1502
students, an increase of 91 freshmen. Our African American student
enrollment is also at a record high: 19.9 of our students is African
Americans, and 27% of the freshman class is African Americans. Centennial
High School in Nashville joins our list of top ten feeder schools. We also
had a very successful recruiting and alumni event in Memphis in connection
with last weekend's football game. Many of our incoming students are
products of the joint enrollment program. Our students who are 25 years
and older is a group that continues to decline, probably a function of our
increase in student housing. We have 2500 students in residence on campus.
The SIMS Center has achieved its 5-year enrollment goal and has exceeded
its enrollment projections.
Since July 1 we have brought in $3,000,000 in gifts, including a
$300,000 scholarship gift to Mathematics from Dorothy Shelton in memory of
Marge Watson, and a $750,0000 gift from Brenda McKenzie has been received
by the College of Business.
We are still having problems getting dorms open; students are still
living in hotels and in temporary space on campus. The Federal Government
has approved the transfer of 200 acres of land in East Hamilton County to
UTC for environmental and wildlife teaching and research space and for
recreational use. Our construction boom continues on campus. Ground will
be broken on Collins Street for special interest facilities (largely
fraternities and sororities) during this fiscal year. The Wellness Center
will break ground by the end of the calendar year. The Strength and
Conditioning Center now has an architect and we anticipate a spring
groundbreaking. We have an additional 8 and a half million dollars in
capital maintenance projects going on this year. The Chancellor asked
everyone to join with him in creating a campus environment that will
attract good candidates to the Chancellor search.
The Provost made the following report: He is pleased to have Fred
Obear as interim chancellor. The Ed.D degree in Educational Leadership has
been approved by the UT Board of Trustees and by THEC. The program will
begin next May with the first cohort and two new faculty members for the
program are being aggressively recruited to begin in January; next year a
third faculty member will be added to the program. Last spring the faculty
senate approved an articulation agreement for students transferring to UTC
from Tennessee Board of Regents two-year and four-year schools. The senate
stipulated that the agreement must be reciprocal. The TBR Board approved
the articulation agreement with the reciprocity clause. The transition
from 128 to 120 hours for graduation has been approved. The increase in
ACT score from 16 to 17 and the increase in TOFOL score to 550 for
admissions standards have been approved by the UT Board.
We have three new major initatives this fall: a mission review,
chaired by Marvin Ernst; a budget review committee, chaired by Richard
Cassavant; and a quality enhancement plan, required by SACS. We lost 32
faculty, including 8 on their last year of phased retirement and added 43
new faculty this year, 17 on tenure track and 26 on term appointments.
Freshman Seminar is being reviewed and we are looking at what other school
are doing; a task force to redesign and test a freshman seminar program is
being implemented this year.
The compensation package for faculty for the current fiscal year
(2005) includes a 3% across-the-board raise that accrues to the base
salary, and also a $250.000 pool to be divided among faculty and staff,
with $100,000 of that pool going to faculty. Also in the current year's
budget are $250,000 for compression and equity adjustments; $210,000 of
this will go directly to salaries. Deans have submitted recommendations
for individual allocations of that $210,000 which have been sent to
Knoxville for approval from the vice-president for finance of the UT
system. He anticipates that those faculty recommended for compression and
equity adjustments will see this raise in their September paycheck.
Finally, a one-time longevity bonus will be paid to faculty and staff at
the rate of 70 dollars for each year of serv ice for faculty and staff who
have been here three years or longer to a maximum of $1750.00. Last spring
$1,901,000 was requested from the budget committee for academic affairs;
$1,100,000 was approved. The first four priorities were funded: chronic
deficits, faculty salaries, salary compression, and library. Some
discretionary funds have been made available to the Colleges for the deans
to disperse according to their priorities.
The budget for next year and the year after that are of primary
concern: Academic Affairs has some serious unfunded needs: a number of
faculty teaching at UTC are paid with gift funds. We have three different
groups of faculty that need to be rolled onto the budget: 1).computational
engineering( Sims Center); five have been granted tenure . This will cost
$1, 040,286. 2. Also, $280,000 must be rolled into the budget to cover 17
faculty who are teaching general education courses on soft money. 3). the
Ed.D. program will hire three faculty at the cost of $100,000 each; these
people are now being paid out of a grant from the UC Foundation and
eventually all of this money will have to be covered by the state budget.
UTC Foundation professorships also roll into the budget eventually from the
Foundation's budget; the total cost of this plus promotions is $120,000 per
year. Two full-time academic advisors now being paid out of the Lupton
Fund need to be rolled into the budget. Last spring the faculty senate
passed a resolution asking for $952,000 over two years to bring salaries up
to minimum levels. and we need to do this for academic affairs staff as
well. Finally graduate assistantships, currently being funded from a
number of sources, including the UC Foundation, need to be rolled into the
budget at a cost of $537,463 over a two-year period. In addition, some
non-salary issues needed to be added to the budget: equipment ($1,640,000).
This includes the cost of both replacement of equipment and the staff
needed to maintain equipment, and faculty travel ($500,000), and library
acquisitions (15% increase in the acquisitions budget + $250,000 over two
year), academic department operating budgets, which have not had an
increase in over a decade (10% increase), and Center for Excellence in
Computer Applications ($505,000). THEC will not fund CECA beyond this year
because it has been funding essential technological infrastructure costs
and not things that a Center of Excellence should be funding. The total
comes to $7,000,000 over two years.
The Provost identified several possible sources of funding for
these priorities: enrollment increases, surpluses in scholarship funds
($1.1 million dollars), $500,000 in unfilled faculty lines, a tuition
increase, a higher state allocation to higher education, and internal
reallocations (cutting existing programs).
Questions and Comments from the Floor:
Mike Russell asked if the Provost's program as outlined above meant
that there will be no new faculty positions added for next year. The
Provost said that it is unlikely that we are going to be adding positions
when we have vacant positions that still need to be filled. Mike then said
that some departments, including his, have a real problem staffing general
education courses. Will there be a program to convert adjuncts to
full-time instructors? The Provost replied that this is a less costly way
of meeting student demand but not a good long-term solution. He would
rather see new assistant professors with a nine-hour teaching load and some
research expectations on the tenure track than a assistant professors with
twelve-hour loads and no research expectations. However, converting
adjuncts to full-time instructors is probably the way we will go for the
next couple of years.
Leila Pratt said that we will not get $7,000,000 no matter what we
do. How would the Provost prioritize his list? The Provost said we might
get half of the $7,000,000, and that we could get by with $3.2 million for
FY 2006 and $3.4 for FY 2007. He will not prioritize his list because if
he does, the bottom items will disappear. Leila asked if that because of
the contractual obligation to the faculty, the salary costs must be met.
The Provost said that the answer was yes.
Verbie Prevost announced that she had agreed to chair the
Chancellor's Search Committee because this is the first time in the history
of UTC that a person had not been assigned from Knoxville to chair it and
that President Peterson has assured her that he will not micromanage the
search from Knoxville.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:00 p.m.
Recorded by Marcia Noe, Faculty Secretary
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