Academic Senate Meeting Summary

Monday, August 29, 2005

3:15 to 5:00 pm

COOR 174

Members Present:Acker, Adelman, Allison, Alpers, M. Anderson, L. Anderson, Blanchard, Bodman, Brock, Broman, Bryan, Burg, Burstein, Canary, Colbourn, Corral, Creath, Crow, Crozier, Deluse, Denhardt, Etter, Farmer, Garcia, M. Glick, Gooding, Guleserian, Gustavsson, Herrera, Humble, Ismeurt, D. Johnson, Johnston, Kihl, Kirkman-Liff, Kleemann, Koldoff, Komnenich, Kopta, Koshinsky, Kurpius, Lafford, Bush, Margolis, Mattson, McPhee, Mitchell, Moore, Ossipov, Pany, Patterson, Rez, Roedel, Roen, Sebren, Shaeffer, Smith, Trapido-Lurie, Stromwall, Sushka, Trotta, Vallejo, Vandermeer, Velez-Ibanez, Verdini, Vernon, Vrudhula, Wales, Watson, White, Witt, Zatz

Substitutes: Scott Yabiki for Jennifer Glick

Guests:Norma Hubele, Director of Strategic Initiatives, IraA.FultonSchool of Engineering,

for Myles Lynk, Faculty Athletic Representative and Marjorie Zatz, Vice Provost

A record of Senate absences will be kept in the Academic Senate Office.

1. CALL TO ORDER.

The meeting was called to order at 3:15 p.m. by Senate President Susan Mattson.

2. PREVIOUS MINUTES

*The Senate Summary of April 18, 2005wasdistributed electronically and is posted on the Senate Web page at:

The minutes were approved as distributed, by voice vote. Any corrections should be directed to and

3. ANNOUNCEMENTS AND COMMUNICATIONS

A. Senate President's Report (Susan Mattson).

President Mattson welcomed everyone back to the Senate. She deferred part of her time for announcements to Norma Hubele, a member of the task force formed last spring when President Crow asked Professor Myles Lynk to make an investigation into some of the events that may have led up to the Loren Wade incident. The formal report of that task force has been accepted by President Crow.

B. Report on the Lynk Task Force (Norma Hubele, FultonSchool of Engineering)

Myles Lynk, our Faculty Athletic Representative, asked me to represent the committee that looked into this unfortunate incident, which resulted in the death of a former student. The members of the committee are Clare Kirlin, a student in the honors program who just recently graduated in May; the Honorable Cecil Patterson who is a retired judge; Dr. Jim Rund, Vice President of University Undergraduate Initiatives;

Dr. Tom Schildgen, Chair of the Department of Technology Management from ASU Polytechnic; Mrs. Alice Snell from the Foundation Board; and Chuck Blanchard, Esq., whose firm assisted the committee. Essentially what President Crow asked us to do was to look into policies and procedures, beginning with the Student Code of Conduct to determine if something had occurred prior to the incident. Was there a pattern of behavior, a pattern of neglect on the part of any faculty or staff who could have paid attention to that pattern and have perhaps prevented what eventually occurred? Myles Lynk led the team as we investigated and studied the problem for four or five months. We interviewed over 30 individuals, and you may recall that we also posted a call for the ASU community at large to determine a sense of violations of safety that we needed to know about. In July, we issued a report to President Crow that we are proud to say was accepted in total. One of our findings was that there was no violation of the Student Code of Conduct in the sense that some important incidents that may have constituted a pattern had occurred off campus. One of our recommendations was that what violates the Student Code of Conduct off campus should also be reported. We found that incidents which occurred off campus were known by isolated groups but had not been reported to the university. Coaches had thought that they understood what was going on, but were not sufficiently trained to identify emotional stress. We felt that coaches need to become sensitized and trained to identify emotional stress and to take advantage of campus services to help students and staff deal with such cases. These, among others, constituted the nature of the recommendations that we made and as Susan indicated, President Crow graciously agreed with all our recommendations. We expect that in the near future the Senate may be called upon to assist in implementing some of these recommendations. We thank you in advance for helping with this important task.

C. University President's Report (Michael Crow).

Student Numbers

• We now have 60,000 students attending our institution, on all campuses.

• We have the largest freshman class attending an AmericanUniversity in the United States, 8,400 freshmen. In spite of their size, they are the highest quality freshman class having attended a university among Arizona residents and the most diverse. Thirty percent of the students in the freshman class from AZ are students of color and they have a large range of academic achievements.

• There are 13,000 total new students transfer students.

Other freshmen statistics:

• The number of students in the upper 10% of the graduating class increased by 15% this year.

• The total number of National Merit Scholars at the university now is just under 550. There are 155 or so new ones coming in with the freshman class.

• The average SAT score of the incoming freshman class was just slightly above 1100.

• 1,400 freshmen graduated in the upper 5% of their HS graduating class. More than one thousand members of the freshman class are of Hispanic origin.

• Enrollment growth at the university for all students, graduate and undergraduate, is 5% this year.

The facts are that we increased our out of state tuition by more than $2,000 per year,and then we saw an increase of 12% in applications, and an increase in 8% in attendance. Our revenues from out of state tuition now exceed instate tuition revenues. OST=$120 million per year,which helps us with all aspects of ouruniversity financial operations.

We have large numbers of students from San Diego county, large numbers of students from Orange county, as we have never seen before, due to the fact that in the state of California, two years agoaccepted 40,000students, admitted them to the University of California and Cal State, and even after having been admitted they were later told that there were no spaces for them. We are working on how to take advantage of this situation by offering those students a sound educational opportunity in Arizona. We also received a large number of students from metro Denver, metro NewYorkCity, metro Minneapolis, and metro Seattle.

We have other intense issues ourselves to deal with this year, related to parking, which is in most part due to the way the institution is designed, the car culture, this location, and we have many people coming and going in compressed blocks of time. I am asking our University Executive Committee to appoint a task force to take immediate actionto make special lots available that are not really lots now, and by mid-term a solution including clearing some property that we have and turning it into parking spaces. We may even lower the cost of the Foundation building parking structure, in order to make the some 300-400 unused spaces more accessible to students.

Last year, we completed the most complex and successful faculty recruitment year, within our history. The Provost and his staff, the deans, the chairs, and others did a fantastic job. They found outstanding faculty members. They are also the most diverse faculty class that we have ever had and they have great credentials.

A little bit about where we are headed at the legislature. The Arizona legislature uses the terminology that I would like people to keep in mind. As our "largest investor"--they are providing about 30% of the university's budget overall. We are asking the state for enrollment growth and support funding. We are asking the state for resources to help us to take care of some issues at the ASU Polytechnic campus. That campus needsnew facilities, and they just broke 5,000 students this semester (1,100 more students than they had at the end of the spring semester--a 29% increase in a single semester) and those are full-time equivalent students. That is a remarkable fete including the launch of their general engineering program, and the launch of several other programs. We are working hard to try to seek your support for what we call "building renewal and building maintenance" on this campus too--that is something that has been underfunded for two decades or longer by the legislature. It continues to be an issue and we will be working on that as well as a number of other items.

We have not made a decision regarding faculty and staff merit-based raisesbeyond the compensation adjustments that faculty and staff have already received, 1.7%, which is part of our investment package with the state of Arizona. That decision will not be made until we have final enrollment numbers. We are making the case now that with the state's economy doing so well,it is time to make investments in our faculty and in our staff to make up for lost ground that has occurred over the last 10 or 15 years. We are advancing that argument and making our case.

Right now we are in the midst of designing the largest capital campaign in the history of the university, and it will be sometime before we are prepared to begin talking about launching this initiative. Schools and colleges havealready submitted their priority needs to the Provost'sOffice. We are looking toward expanding our endowment funding for student financial aid. We have a new president of the ASU Foundation, Ira Jackson, and a new executive vice president of the ASU Foundation, Jackie Norton.

Students and faculty may still find disturbing that the university is continuing to develop its tuition base as a revenue source to the institution. When the per student funding from the state has not increased in 25 years, per student, and as we have seen the kinds of dramatic reductions in funding per student that we have experienced in the last few years in particular, we know that to address this, we must do two things 1) advance investments from the families and students that attend the university and 2) greatly expand financial aid. That has been and continues to be our strategy. We have specifically increased by 50% in one year the number of students coming to the university from below the poverty level through the Access ASU program. We have continued to live up to our pledge of not signing any tuition increases for students eligible for Pell Grants over the last three years. We continue to expand a number of financial aid mechanisms, both merit- based and need-based. It is my consistent and on-going argument that the price of the university is not a barrier to entering the university;it is financial aid or the lack thereof. If we try to run the university on a low admission price basis, we will have no other resources to make up for that. We will not have the resources that we need for the faculty, support for the library, for facilities, for programs, and for all the other things that we need to operate. In our budget request next year, we will be requesting more than $400 million from the state of Arizona.

I would like to ask if anyone has any questions.

Q: Are the other Arizona universities comparable overall?

Ans:No. With all of the net enrollment growth within the university system, eight out of 10 students-- enrollment growth--come to ASU. There is a range of complex reasons for that. Last year for the first time, the historic 5 to 2 funding formula did not hold true ($5 to ASU, $5 to UA, and $2 out of pocket). Enrollment growth was funded first. The programmatic issues were funded second, and since enrollment growth was funded last year, we are hoping it will be funded again this year. That caused some tension within the dynamics between the universities and within the legislature because most of the enrollment is coming to ASU on all of its campuses, not just Tempe.

Q: Is Bio Design really part of the university?

Ans:If you want the simple answer, how could it be anything else?

Discussion:A few months ago, I heard from a colleague that he had to be "escorted" around the building. There is a retina scan that is required of some that enter.

Discussion:There are other buildings where no one is allowed at all and this particular building has those kinds of facilities, and it is part of the university, and yet some of the materials that are held in the labs should not be generally accessible. There is a professor who just won a major grant from the Gates Foundation, and he is working with infantile influenza and it has to be contained, managed, and worked on in certain types of laboratories. There is a big safety issue involved.

Q: Yes I agree, but if you shut off labs I think that is reasonable, but to shut off offices within the building generally is not because what happens if a professor tries to have office hours, as required in the ACD Manual? What also happens when a student shows up and wants to visit a professor in the office in that building?

Ans:It is unusual for this campus to experience secure access to a whole building, but it may not be an unusual situation at other campuses. I do take your point.

Q: It seems to some of us as if faculty in those buildings have disappeared into a black hole. What if they lose touch with their other colleagues eventually? ASU being a place where we pride ourselves in being inclusive, the other research faculty may feel excluded.

Ans:Your point is well taken that as we advance the institution if we encounter barriers that create a psychological concern, in that sense we ought to look at that and why a decision was made to have secure access to a building. We are still learning relative to BioDesign. It is an enterprise in which the leaders of the BioDesign are all faculty members of this institution. There are no other elements involved. Even I have to check in the building to attend a meeting. That is the way that the facility was designed by the people engaged in designing it. Maybe it is not the best design. I can tell you that exclusion was not the driver; it was safety that was the driver. It was concern over animal facilities and research facilities that are in that lab.

Discussion:I am sympathetic to limiting the access to certain hazardous or medical materials, and controlled access to work with them by university employees. What we are trying to do is balance access with safety issues and maybe the balance needs to be reviewed.

Discussion:It is a legitimate point and we need to look at it. I do not know the number of labs on campus that have the biohazard safety level #3 or biohazard safety level #4. There are certain conditions that the people that design those labs, and not just the faculty involved, that said we need to be able to say who came into the building and who came out of the building. We need to be able to know who they are, where they went, and what they did. It is a function of safety of these materials.

Discussion:At the University of Pennsylvania, when I was there, there were numerous labs that were locked.

Discussion: There were entire buildings to which you had to gain entry through a secure access, and there were other facilities that required background checks. We have not had those kinds of things typically at this university, and we do not desire to. This is a learning experience for the institution and if that creates displeasure or concern, we are going to continue to look at this issue.

Discussion: We are also trying to alleviate parking woes with the free bus pass program, and the bus passes are not just for students, they are for everyone. One of the things that we are trying to do is to provide no barriers to the use of public transportation, and when the light rail comes on,with the Valley Metro bus service--when you show your ASU ID card--you will have unlimited free access on all of those facilities and that is what we are working on. We have some students claiming that they are dropping out of the university because it is too challenging to find a place to park.

Discussion:I really like the idea of the bus pass as I have been a bus rider now for 18 years. Thank you for this program.

Discussion:Now, imagine you are a student and you have less money than a family and you are trying to figure out a way to get around. That is what we are trying to facilitate. We are also trying to take some of the load off the parking structures and some of the load off the traffic. We are happy to do that, we are going to extend the bus pass program into spring. But I have to tell you that as we expand our parking we are walking on eggshells, because our parking has always been far below the actual market price. Eventually, if the services cannot be afforded, the system will break down, and then you will wonder how we got into the box that we were trying to get out of.

D. University Provost's Report (Milton Glick).