Institutional Affairs Team

Meeting Minutes

October 3, 2007

DRAFT

Attendance:

Joan Manley, Team Leader; Steven Moore, Dee Burgess, Paul Snyder, Charles McKinney, Paul Asfour, Larry Byrnes, Lenore Benefield, Kay Oistad, Thomas Bevins, J. Michael Rollo, Jameson Yingling

Guest: Halcyon St. Hill

Call to Order:

The meeting was called to order at 10:00 a.m. by Joan Manley.

It was moved and seconded (Asfour/McKinney) to approve the September 19, 2007 IAT minutes as presented. All in favor, the meeting minutes were approved.

Paul Snyder, Academic Affairs, addressed the group regarding the pending request to place the SAI (Student Assessment of Instruction) results online.

  • Leadership evaluations and SAI are looked at differently.
  • SAI was State mandated to provide students with information regarding specific courses.
  • The request by Student Government is to provide a better way of informing students.
  • The Provost’s Office met with Student Affairs and thought the results could be published by
  • eliminating the mean scores that are used for evaluative purposes and by providing absolute frequencies
  • restricting the results to the university domain
  • SAI was never intended as an evaluative tool
  • The administration of SAIs is mandated by university regulations as adopted by the Board of Trustees; there are 8 items that are in the public domain
  • It is hoped that faculty would take the feedback seriously and use it in their PDP
  • The colleges (therefore faculty) developed the promotional criteria that include SAI results
  • The information from leadership evaluations was originally intended to help administrators improve performance. Concerns were raised about the process and a committee was created to look at relevancy. A new instrument was devised and piloted last year. This was not done with the thought the results would be made public.

Dr. Snyder stated that Provost Yegidis would like to think more about the issue of publishing leadership results, talk to leaders who would be affected,and talk to our new president.

Halcyon St. Hill, Faculty Senate President, addressed the team. She stated that dealing with SAI originally came to IAT because it was a broad issue; not just faculty, not just students. She stated that any issues related to the leadership evaluations, and any issues related to SAI other than placing the results online, would be a Faculty Affairs matter as opposed to an Institutional Affairs matter. She requested that this committee review our bylaws and move SAI to the Faculty Affairs committee.

Old Business:

Discussion ensued that the student assessment document falls within the bylaws of the IAT related to assessment. A motion was made and seconded (McKinney/Byrnes) to make the 8 public domain questions/results available for online distribution. Discussion centered on taking the motion, in the form of a question, back to our constituents before making a recommendation to Faculty Senate. The motion was withdrawn.

Lenore will contact the 5 state institutions for which she was not readily able to find SAI results on their website to determine if they’re available online and perhaps password protected. Some team members stated that they had viewed the SAI results on the websites that were provided by Lenore and that it is worth viewing.

As members of this team are no longer housing the leadership evaluations in their office, Joan will request the Provost to inform faculty of the new location for the results.

Announcements:

Thomas Bevins stated that he is on a subcommittee to review the locations where smoking will be permitted on campus.

The next IAT meeting will be held at 10:00 a.m. on October 17.

Adjournment:

The meeting was adjourned by Joan Manley at 11:15 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Kay Oistad