8
ACADEMIC SENATE
COLLEGE OF SAN MATEO
Governing Council Meeting May 13, 2008 minutes
Members Present
Jeremy Ball President Teresa Morris Library
Diana Bennett Vice President Brandon Smith Language Arts
Lloyd Davis Secretary Kathleen Steele Language Arts
Rosemary Nurre Treasurer
Others Attending
Mike Brandy Maas Co. Jeff Kellogg Maas Co.
Joe Chapot San Matean Teeka James Language Arts/AFT
Dan Kaplan AFT Anne Stafford Language Arts
CALL TO ORDER The meeting was called to order at 2:24 pm. MSU to approve the agenda. Approval of the minutes of April 8 and April 22 was postponed to a future meeting.
PRESIDENT’S REPORT Jeremy reported we must do summer work on accreditation recommendations to meet the October deadline. At Mike Claire’s request, the Board of Trustees has assured funding is available for faculty participants. Committee members include Jeremy, Andreas Wolf, Ernie Rodriguez, Mike Claire, and Stacey Grasso.
Teeka expressed concern that faculty are disengaged. Faculty need to hear an authoritative (but not authoritarian) message from union, senate, and administration leadership to participate more. Jeremy said the technology plan needs action steps and deliverables, and must be tied to the educational master plan. Today we will discuss program review, to get some direction for work over the summer. We also need to work in summer on assessment and on Fall ’08 flex activities. The accreditation oversight committee has identified other things we’ll need help on. Rosemary asserted this is serious business, and we need more people involved. Brandon called for stronger leadership, perhaps a call to arms at an all-college meeting. Jeremy said we may not be taken off warning status in October. We will have made tremendous progress by then, but the accreditation team will want to come back and check our follow-through. For example, program review changes will not be implemented until April. Teeka said we were told at the last meeting don’t worry, we’re taking it seriously, we have a consultant, and we are moving ahead. The likelihood that we will stay on warning needs to come out. Kathleen warned tranquility will set the faculty up for major freak-out if we are not taken off warning. Jeremy added the warning is for two years. If we don’t get off warning in that time, we lose accreditation. The letter we got indicates that’s a possibility. They are playing hardball and have changed standards dramatically, which makes it hard to make predictions.
Dan remarked what is so odd is at the same time we get the threatening WASC letter, there is a huge debate in Washington DC which could take SLOs out of the hands of accrediting agencies. An article by Paul Basken in the 5/9/2008 Chronicle of Higher Education indicates a conference committee is meeting to reconcile the Higher Education Reauthorization Act. Both the House and Senate versions say SLOs can no longer be in the domain of accrediting agencies. Colleges have the responsibility to assess effectiveness. When the conference committee comes up with a new act, it will not continue to allow accrediting agencies to use SLOs. Jeremy said the safe option is to proceed. Most people think we’ll get off warning, but he, Sandra, and Susan do not. Anne said it will be a rude shock we don’t get off.
Dan recalled Cathleen Kennedy and Bill Rundberg put together a very sophisticated technology plan for the district. Diana added she and Tim Karas produced a CSM technology plan, but when Tim left and Diana moved on to other things, it was not pursued. Jeremy said we now have people working very hard preparing documents which just sit, as opposed to documents which are accessed during planning and prompt people to show how what they do at one level ties in what others do at other levels. Jeremy said our two year old technology plan is way out date, especially since it is not linked to the facilities master plan. We were dinged for our plans not being linked, and for not assessing their success. The new process is a shift from meeting-based planning to document-based planning. We have a lot of meetings but rarely write things down or have long term follow-up. Jeremy said he expects something dramatic at the end of this. We hear a lot about shared governance, but how is the faculty voice actually articulated and carried forward? That will be built into the planning process, with a clear dynamic.
Kathleen said these things are great, but how will faculty have enough time to write up documents and talk to each other? We’re at a crisis point in all departments. Every year our count of full-time faculty to participate in these things goes down. We may need to negotiate a solution, possibly a schedule change so we have a week out of instruction to do such things as SLOs and program review. The cost is it takes us away from the classroom and our students. We can’t continue to do more and more. Anne asserted getting off warning shouldn’t be on the backs of faculty. Dan said SLO workshops can accomplish a lot in one day, and part-timers can participate.
Jeremy reported on District and CSM Academic Senate elections. Jeremy opted not to run for DAS president this year. Current DAS president Patty Dilko is willing to run again. Diana is testing the online ballot for CSM Senate officers and by-laws. It will be up by the end of this week. We have two candidates for vice president: Lilya Vorobey and Eileen O’Brien.
The retirement party for CSM’s eight retirees will be Tuesday, May 20, in 18-206.
FACULTY APPOINTMENTS One faculty member is needed for the Policy Trust Committee. Carolyn Fiori has agreed to serve.
When Tim Karas took a job at Mission College, we decided to hire a replacement for his full-time librarian position rather than add a position to the pool of open positions. The library serves the whole campus, and only one full-time librarian was seen as too few. Soon librarian David Gibbs will be leaving us for a job at Georgetown, and we are faced with a similar decision. Rosemary and Jeremy spoke in favor of filling the librarian position. Dan pointed out there is another full-time librarian, but with John Kirk retiring, there will be no full-timer in economics, and the number of full-timers in political science is way down. We just eliminated the only full-time German position. Lots of departments have no full-timers. We have so many unmet needs. Jeremy reported the instructional deans have set the hiring priority list for this year. We need to decide as soon as possible on the library position.
Teresa said the library can function with adjuncts, but without a second full-timer would have to cut back on its committee representation. Teresa, whose responsibilities include orientation for 400 students, will confine her committee work to program viability. Anne said she is nervous about this decision being made by a small number of people. Jeremy said we just make a recommendation. In the past, we have concluded the library is core to our academic mission and serves many departments, and it says something about our commitment to academics if we have only one librarian. It is also shameful to have no economist. Dan noted Canada has no librarian. The lack of full-time faculty will negatively impact shared governance. Kathleen said there are such problems everywhere. Jeremy wants to recommend to Susan we rehire the position. He said the alternative would be a devastating loss. Teeka reported DSGC is considering communicating to bodies whose representatives are frequently absent that they aren’t being represented. Jeremy reminded Governing Council members to get information to faculty in their divisions. MSU (Nurre, O’Brien) to recommend filling David Gibbs’ library position.
NEW BUSINESS – EDUCATIONAL MASTER PLAN UPDATE FROM MAAS COMPANIES Jeremy reported he and Andreas Wolf were made co-chairs last fall of the CSM Steering Committee, a group whose work includes putting together an educational master plan. As they identified the documents we need to prepare, and as the seriousness of the warning because more clear, they decided to call in professionals from the Maas Companies. Maas has done more than 90 educational master plans. Clients include Foothill, Skyline, Evergreen Valley, City College of San Jose, and Peralta Jeremy invited Maas team members Mike Brandy and Jeff Kellogg to today’s meeting to let us know what they do and the direction they are headed, and take our questions.
Mike and Jeff outlined their backgrounds. Mike Brandy recently retired after years of community college administrative experience at Long Beach and Riverside and most recently as Vice Chancellor of Business Services in the Foothill/DeAnza district. He has served on eight accreditation teams, consulted on educational planning, and earned an MBA. Jeff Kellogg’s background is in real estate investment and financial advising, he has 20 years of public policy experience, and has been working specifically on educational planning for the last few years.
Mike said the goal is to get us off warning by this September. They will focus on the educational master plan and integration of our planning processes, and will produce documentation for the accreditation commission, as Maas is doing for Canada. The report must get to the commission by Oct. 10. The final review will happen in mid-August. Maas is working with the CSM planning committee gathering data, describing planning processes, and identifying links and holes. The team is asking how, for example, the District Technology Plan, the District Strategic Plan, and the District Facilities Master Plan are linked, not how they should be linked, at both the college and district levels. After being here only a month, the team has some ideas about what can be done to strengthen connections among our plans and our abundant data. Jeremy is working with Maas on details. Our planning documents identify who does what. Maas will have a rough draft before summer and will refine it over the summer. We will have four weeks to look it over before it is submitted Sept. 30. It seems doable.
The external scan of our area includes high schools, the general population, employment, and state funding. Those influences are similar to what Maas has seen at Skyline. The internal scan gathers data on our students, including age, gender, and ethnicity demographics, and our instructional programs in both career tech and general education, including enrollment by program.
The instructional planning process takes the most time, since it pulls together all the other planning processes. A lot is going on in both program review and SLOs, which are at the base of planning. Much of program review is now retrospective but not prospective. We should build in FTES projections and be sure the process carries information up to the college and district levels so institutional researchers can get a sense of where things are going. After the college gets its share of funding from the district, what is the internal process for allocation among and within divisions to hit FTES targets? Could some areas be strengthened? Be sure we articulate this clearly. Also, what progress are support services making in program review and SLOs, and are those also among the building blocks of college-wide plans?
We need to link our plans to district plans. For example, the district has a facilities master plan. How is it linked to the college facilities plan? Does the college have an executive steering committee for facilities, to put focus on the campus for monitoring and managing bond money, taking program review data into account? Maas wants to be sure the district’s new resource allocation model is working, that the college budget committee is in synch with its district counterpart, that the local plan pulls from program reviews, and that budget requests move in an orderly way through the system. The District Strategic Plan will go to the Board of Trustees in June, with final review in November. Is the college linked into the district planning process, and is that reflected in the college educational master plan? The District has directions for instructional technology and provides infrastructure support. We want to be sure CSM is linked into that policy-making. What is CSM’s technological focus? How is technology used in the classroom, and how is its use evaluated? Where it is not working, what is in place to fix that?
The planning process should be transparent. We need a planning cycle chart, including, e.g., the educational master plan, SLOs, program review, and staffing. Maas is examining our committee structure, including the composition and goals of each committee at both the college and district level, in the light of what we know from internal and external scans. How do they relate timewise? How frequently do they interact? Examination of the effectiveness of our planning process will take at least another year. We will demonstrate to the commission we know we’re not perfect and are addressing that. Whether enrollment forecasting belongs in program review will not be resolved before September.
Jeff said Maas will make broad recommendations but the Board of Trustees will make the decisions. Sample plans from Irvine Valley and Long Beach may inform discussions here. The strategic plan is what you would like to be. The educational plan is what you are, based on your instructional and support services. It has to pass review by the State Chancellor’s Office. Maas uses numbers the state is comfortable with and will acknowledge. The goals of the plan are to incorporate everything and allow the college to become stronger. It is a working document which will help secure funding in the future when the demand is there. The strategic plan is the highest level plan, and has goals which could be applied to any California community college. Lots of strategic objectives rely on the educational plan, but there may be some, e.g. in facilities or technology, which are district driven. Right underneath the umbrella of the strategic plan is the educational master plan, which drives and synchs everything else, from the departmental program review level up, not from the top down.