UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS ACADEMIC SENATE
VOLUME XXX, No.3
MINUTES
REGULAR MEETING OF THE REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY
OF THE DAVIS DIVISION OF THE ACADEMIC SENATE
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Memorial Union, MU II
1. Minutes of the October 9 and October 30, 2001 meetings
2. Announcements by the President - None
3. Announcements by the Vice Presidents - None
4. Announcements by the Chief Campus Officer - None
5. Announcements by Deans, Directors, or other Executive Officers - None
6. Special orders
A. State of the Campus Address – Chancellor Larry N. Vanderhoef
B. Remarks by the Chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate
a. Update regarding Academic Senate Office move
b. Report on outcomes of the recommendations of the Special Committee on
Academic Personnel Processes (SCAPP) and the Special Committee on
the Academic Personnel Process Reforms (SCPPR)
c. Academic Senate review of the use of standardized tests in admission
decisions
7. Reports of special committees
A. Report of the Special Committee on Transportation and Parking
B. Report of the Joint Committee on Work-Life Balance
8. Reports of standing committees
A. Report of the Faculty Research Lecture Committee - oral
B. Report of the Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction
*C. Annual Report of the College of Engineering
9. Petitions of students - None
10.Unfinished business - None
11.University and faculty welfare – None
12.New business – None
Anita Oberbauer, Secretary
Representative Assembly of the
Davis Division of the Academic Senate
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A quorum having been certified, Chair Gibeling called the meeting to order at 3:10 p.m. A roster of members present and absent is attached as Appendix I to these minutes.
1.Minutes of the October 9 and October 30, 2001 meetings. Chair Gibeling asked if
there were any corrections to the minutes of either of the meetings. None were voiced.
The minutes were approved by consent.
Chair Gibeling asked if anyone wished to remove item 8.C. Annual Report of the
College of Engineering from the Consent Calendar. No requests were received. The
Report will be noted as approved by consent.
2. Announcements by the President – None
3. Announcements by the Vice Presidents - None
4. Announcements by the Chief Campus Officer – None
5. Announcements by Deans, Directors, or other Executive Officers – None
6. Special orders
A. State of the Campus Address – Chancellor Larry N. Vanderhoef. (A copy of the address is attached as Appendix II to these minutes.) He then was asked to expand on his earlier comments about graduate student support. He said the issue of tuition and fee waivers for graduate students is one of the highest priorities for all of the campuses. He also said building the endowment fund for graduate students is a high priority.
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw was introduced and welcomed. She said she was delighted to be on the Davis campus and that she was looking forward to the challenges and opportunities and to working with the faculty.
B. Remarks by the Chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate – Momentarily deferred.
7. Reports of special committees
Chair Gibeling requested a slight re-ordering of the agenda in order to accommodate
Diane Wolf, Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Work-Life Balance. No objections
were voiced.
B. Report of the Joint Committee on Work-Life Balance – Diane Wolf stated that the Committee was constituted last Spring by Chancellor Vanderhoef and Academic Senate Chair Gibeling partly in response to a letter to the Chancellor signed by over 100 faculty members, male and female, citing the need to review the campus maternity leave policy. She then provided a summary of the Report, appearing on pages 13-16 of the Call to the Meeting. She said with the support of the Representative Assembly, she hoped the Chancellor will move to implement the recommendations contained in the Report. She said it is the Committee’s hope that UC Davis will serve as a national role model for a family friendly University. She then responded to a few questions.
John Vohs asked if any formal action needed to be taken on this report. Chair Gibeling stated that at this time it was provided as an informational item.
6. B. Remarks by the Chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate
a.Update regarding Academic Senate Office move – Chair Gibeling reported that
the Academic Senate Office is scheduled to move to the third floor of Voorhies
Hall approximately March 26 in order to accommodate the move of the
Committee on Academic Personnel to the Senate Office. It is intended that once
the budget improves and the third floor of Mrak is remodeled, the Senate Office
will return to Mrak Hall. The length of time for the Senate Office to be in
Voorhies is estimated to be 1-3 years.
c.Academic Senate review of the use of standardized tests in admissions decisions –
Chair Gibeling said the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools
(BOARS) has a developed a proposal concerning standardized tests. He said the
next step will be Town Hall meetings at each campus to discuss the issue of
undergraduate admission tests. He noted that the Town Hall meeting at Davis
would probably occur in early April.
b.Report on outcomes of the recommendations of the Special Committee on
Academic Personnel Processes (SCAPP) and the Special Committee on the
Academic Personnel Process Reform (SCPPR) – Chair Gibeling provided a status
report on the changes and modifications in the academic personnel process as a
result of the recommendations of SCAPP and SCPPR and the actions of the
Representative Assembly last spring. (A copy of the slides used in his Power
Point presentation is attached as Appendix III to these minutes.)
He then responded to several questions. A member then commented on the
administration’s alternate proposal concerning membership of Ad Hocs (rather
than 5 member committees, the alternate proposal calls for three member
committees with two departmental representatives, non- voting.) He said serving
as a non-voting member was certainly not appealing to him. Howard Day, Chair
of SCAPP, reported that SCAPP also considered this alternative but rejected it.
7. A. Report of the Special Committee on Transportation and Parking – Carroll Cross, Chair of the Special Committee on Transportation and Parking presented an update on their report to the Representative Assembly, dated October 11, 2000. He said the Committee believes in and stands by their original report. He said the Committee is grateful to Brodie Hamilton, Transportation and Parking Services Director and to Janet Hamilton, Vice Chancellor-Administration for their candid presentations to the Committee. He said the Committee met with Vice Chancellor Hamilton to discuss the report but that there has not yet been any formal response from the administration. He noted that this lack of response has been disappointing and vexing to the Committee, but he said he recently received a letter from the Chancellor indicating a response was forthcoming.
He said the Committee was recently asked to comment on the new long range development plan and that they did so but focused on major issues such as the debt service.
He said the Special Committee believes a standing committee of the Academic Senate to oversee the budget for parking should be established. He said the term of the Special Committee on Transportation and Parking expires at the end of today’s meeting and he recommended that the Assembly consider extending this term.
Francisco Samaniego, member of the Special Committee, spoke in support of the recommendation and said that he believed it would be in the best interests of faculty, staff and students if the Representative Assembly were to extend the tenure of the Special Committee until the Spring meeting. He noted that the members of the Special Committee have expressed willingness to continue until that time so that when a response from the Administration is received a committee will be in place to scrutinize it.
John Oakley, Chair of the Faculty Welfare Committee, thanked the Special Committee for taking on these responsibilities reporting that the Faculty Welfare Committee thought these responsibilities would exceed their resources. He spoke in favor of extending the term of the committee until October, 2002. Discussion continued. John Vohs subsequently made such a motion. The motion was seconded and carried unanimously.
8.Reports of standing committees
A. Report of the Faculty Research Lecture Committee – George Bruening on behalf of Chair Bruce Hammock presented the report of the Faculty Research Lecture Committee. Professor Tilahun Yilma, Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, School of Veterinary Medicine was nominated at the 60th Faculty Research Lecturer. The report of the Faculty Research Lecture Committee was approved by acclamation. The full text of the committee’s statement is attached as Appendix IV to these minutes. Professor Yilma thanked the Committee and said he was greatly honored. He also said he hoped this would help encourage more to be done for developing countries.
B. Report of the Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction – Chair Kevin Hoover presented the proposed amendment to Davis Division Bylaw 137 noting that this is a carry-over item from a previous meeting. He reported that Academic Senate Bylaw 50 was recently amended to codify a ruling of the University Committee on Rules and Jurisdiction interpreting existing Senate bylaws and Regents’ Standing Orders concluding that Faculties must have an elected executive committee and that a dean may not serve as chair of the faculty by virtue of his or her office. He said Davis Division Bylaw 137 has long been inconsistent with Academic Senate Bylaw 50 and that this amendment is essentially a house-keeping amendment. He did note, however, that the amendment to Davis Division Bylaw 137 goes further than Academic Senate Bylaw 50(C) and forbids not just the dean but any high level administrator from serving as chair of a faculty. He moved acceptance of the amendment. The motion was seconded.
Discussion ensued with Professors Overton, Kurtz, Oakley, Dobris and other
faculty members from the Law School speaking strongly against the motion.
Kevin Hoover clarified some of the points mentioned, noting the distinction
between the role of the Academic Senate and the role of the administration. More
importantly, he said, Bylaw 137 is out of compliance with Academic Senate Bylaw
50.
In light of the hour, there was a call for the question. By a show of hands, the
motion to vote was defeated. A motion was made to table the motion to accept the
amendment. The motion was seconded and carried.
A motion to adjourn was seconded and carried.
The meeting adjourned at 5:10 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Anita Oberbauer, Secretary
Representative Assembly of the Davis
Division of the Academic Senate
Attachments
Appendix II
Academic
Senate Representative Assembly
February 26, 2002
Memorial Union, MU II
State of the
Campus Address by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef
"State of
the campus" addresses have pretty much gone out of vogue across this land
for reasons that at once seem obvious and obscure - obscure because more than
ever it is one of only a few opportunities for any individual to get even a
sense of the entire increasingly complex campus.
Quite obvious,
though, because as individuals in a university community, we seem not to have
time. We are working longer hours and harder than we ever have before. Lunch is
an apple at our desk. The days of faculty starting work at 9:00 am over
leisurely morning coffee, then ending it with a 4:00 pm gathering for afternoon
tea, with a relaxed ninety-minute lunch in between were a reality in 1930
according to Berkeley records, but they are long gone in 2002.
Perhaps in line
with that phenomenon, this talk will be relatively free of subjects about which
you likely are already informed, such matters as the campus response to 9-11,
the landmark Mondavi gift, events leading to the campus decisions on growth,
and so forth.
Rather, I will
discuss the future as best I can see it for our university. In fact, the state
of the campus should be always described in terms of how well we are poised for
the future.
That future
begins with the faculty, and I am not intending here to be ingratiating. It is
in fact the faculty who bear the burden of the mission of the university,
teaching, research and service, on its collective shoulders.
Regarding
teaching, there has been much said this year about the quality of undergraduate
education. An entire op-ed piece was written recently that described our
undergraduate teaching on this campus as going in the tank. In fact that
rhetoric comes out of a circumstance unique to one small corner of this campus
and spins out of a situation that involves union bargaining. For that reason I
won't say any more about it. But in fact, there are many good things to say
about the way our students and our faculty are interacting, and the new and
entirely different experiences that our undergraduates can have during their
four or five years here on campus.
The number of
freshman seminars is increasing as we speak and there will be new incentives
announced shortly that will make that number even larger than it is. The
out-of-classroom experiences that we all know are so valuable to the education
of an undergraduate, at least for the traditional undergraduate student, have
increased to the point where many of us have got to be saying to ourselves,
"I wish they had that when I was a student." For example:
- Life changing experiences in our UC/DC program, a
similar program soon to be established in Sacramento.
- The opportunity to do internships in work places
toward which a particular academic major is intended to take the student.
- Courses taught with greater opportunities for
communication with the professor, solely because of e-mail.
- Computer-assisted learning experiences that we
never had.
- Research experience that only a research
university can give.
These
are just a few of the reasons why we should be proud about the quality of
undergraduate education that is offered on this campus.
But that is not
to say that we do not have problems, problems with class size and availability,
especially problems with the academic preparation that our students have coming
into the university. While I have no doubt that these students
communicate with each other as well as students ever have, sometimes in
language that flies over my head I must add, our classical aspirations about
appropriate means of communication and composition seem not to be met. It is
easy for us to blame K-12 education for this phenomenon, but even there we must
remember the complexity of the circumstance, that at the fourth grade level in
the State of California, for example, fifty percent of the students come from
homes where English is not the first language. These facts of our changing
world have to be taken into account as we consider the successes of K-12 education.
We must think differently about how we do K-12 education, and, most important,
UC Davis must be, and is very much a part of that process. Our K-12 outreach
programs have more than doubled in just five years, and our new School of
Education is aborning. Our pursuit of truly equal opportunity for a successful
college experience requires our efforts.
The campus
growth that we are facing in the coming eight to ten years is in some ways
ominous and in other ways very exciting. Once again I return to the needs of
the faculty. If we are to recruit the very best that can be recruited, than we
must have the circumstance here that will lure and keep them. We need the money
for start-up packages. We must do better with our partnership opportunity
program. We must address work-life issues. We must increase our facilities by
near $1.4 billion worth of buildings. And we must do more than we have been
doing to retain the best staff on this campus, because retaining great faculty
requires our retention of great staff.
So here is what
is going on.
With regard to
facilities, our ten-year plan is working toward addressing that problem. The
difficulty comes in that it is a $1.4 billion problem and our current estimate
is that we can come up with only about two-thirds of that, with only two-thirds
of that amount coming from the state. That is not enough, and I will
come back to that problem in a moment.
With regard to
start-up packages for faculty whom we are able to recruit when we do have the
facilities necessary for their work here on campus, that is a budget challenge
that we are working on now. Once again, there are many colors of money that can
be put to that task, not just money from the state which really only supplies
one-fourth of what we need, but money from other sources as well:
- Gifts to the university.
- Funds from philanthropic foundations.
- Creative financing where we are able to take
advantage of the projected increase in campus non-state funds.
We are, of
course, very concerned about the deteriorating 2002-2003 budget-it's been
called a house of cards-and the important thing is that we must have a plan and
we must know where the shortfalls are possibly to come.
To help deal
with the long-term problem, the time has come for this campus to begin its
plans for a comprehensive campaign. That effort by universities has more
commonly been called a capital campaign - you may know it by that term - but in
fact "comprehensive campaign" is better language because it tells the
greater story, namely that buildings and facilities are important when we do
such campaigns, but there are so many other things that we must have if we are
to continue to improve.
We need endowed
chairs for faculty, we need better support for graduate students and, to a
lesser degree, undergraduate students. We need the best staff. Those are all
campus issues that can be addressed by a comprehensive campaign. It is not just
about buildings. We will be hearing more about this comprehensive campaign as
time passes.
With regard to
the staff, we have had many discouraging months and years during the 1990's.
During the early part of the decade we had to decrease our numbers of staff.
During the comeback years in the later nineties we never did quite come fully
back with regard to staff, but we were definitely on the rise.
But now in the
early part of the twenty-first century, we are having difficulty in increasing
the salaries because of the state's economy.
Fortunately, we
are competitive with regard to staff compensation in this geographic
area. But our staff is terrific; we should aim to be more than competitive in
salaries.
What has the
University done? First, our healthcare comes at minimal cost. As well, we have
not had to contribute to our retirement fund for many years. We have also made
a three percent contribution to individual CAP accounts. These addends make our
total benefits package more than competitive, and that is comforting. However,
we know the lure of higher wages, and we must be cognizant of its importance.
It is the California legislature, though, and not the "UC reserves"
as some have suggested, that has to solve that problem.
Another matter
that all of us will be hearing more about has to do with housing. Perhaps
everyone in this room is well situated with regard to housing, but it is also
true that each and every one of us is saying, "I am glad I bought my house
back then." I have no confidence that our future will ever be as good as
our past in this regard, and so as we work through the many, many concepts that
are on the table regarding our Long Range Development Plan, one important
aspect is what we are calling a new "Neighborhood" on campus. This
Neighborhood will have many features, but the most important one among them is
affordable housing for our faculty, staff and students. As we have learned from
our Aggie Village experiment, not only will this housing be affordable, it
will, under our particular restrictions, become more affordable as time passes.
I have seen nothing so far that tells me that we can avoid doing this Neighborhood,
and as we think about it, we are all realizing that it can add so much to the
City of Davis. We have been in important discussions, for example, with the
Davis Joint Unified School District for more than a year now. We can add to its
quality in our Neighborhood. We are also envisioning, together with our local
community colleges, an education center. As well, this Neighborhood would
employ, from the very beginning, all of the latest and best concepts regarding
transportation, the environment and sustainability. In that regard, it would be
an important experiment, worthy of a research campus.
This campus has
also become increasingly engaged in another problem that faces not only us, but
the entire University of California. Especially for those of you who have been
here your entire career and do not have comparisons to make, the University of
California does very poorly in our support of graduate students. I will not go
into the detail of this, but suffice it to say that when it comes to our ability
to recruit out-of-state, especially international, students, we do less well
than any of our peer institutions. We simply are not able to include all
populations of potential graduate students, and exclusion of any sector any
time always means that the average quality of the final product will not be as
great as it otherwise could be. The university Regents recently appointed a
graduate commission and that commission has reported out. What I have just told
you about our shortfalls in graduate support were confirmed, and the commission
has made several recommendations to The Regents to improve our circumstance. I
am quite confident that those recommendations will be implemented over the next
several years, and it is none to early to get started. We have special actions
that we can and must take on this campus, and Provost Hinshaw and Dean Gonzalez
are taking the necessary steps in that direction.
Regarding
students and student admissions, much has happened over the last two or three
years. This is exclusively the faculty's business, and so I assume that most
everybody in this room knows, for example, about the four percent rule.
We have also
seen the comprehensive evaluation come on line. In fact, this evaluation for
admissions is not immensely different at all from what we have done for many
years now. I must continually tell those that believe that this means we will
no longer be using "the numbers" that they need not fret. In fact,
how applicants do with regard to their grade point average and their standardized
test scores are still primary in our UC Davis admissions process.
We are also
seeing a reconsideration of the SAT I and its ostensible measure of aptitude.
That is a debate about which all of you have heard and will continue to
discuss. It is entirely conceivable that we will be going to a different test,
based on the recommendation of the systemwide senate.
Three final
quick items: First, there are certain general rules among university presidents
and chancellors across this land. One of them is, "Don't do parking."
And I don't. But I do happen to know that you will be receiving a report from a
special parking and transportation task force, and I also know that a response
will be soon forthcoming from the administration.
As well, we
continue to work on what can and cannot be done in response to the senate
committee report on our P&T process. One especially interesting issue
around the suggested appeal process has arisen, but I am confident that will be
worked out. And finally, Provost Hinshaw and Vice Provost Horwitz with some
faculty help are working on a faculty report on work-life issues that was
prepared last year in response to a charge from the Senate Chair and me. There
are definitely changes that will be made in response to that report, and you
will be hearing more about it in the future.
And so there is
lots for us to be proud about; and there is lots for us to be apprehensive
about. There are occasionally matters for us to be angry about. So what else is
new? Fortunately, we are a dedicated group of engaged constituencies. The
faculty especially cares as much as ever about how we do the business of the
university. I believe that the administration has been working well together
with you and I see no reason why that will not continue. For that I thank you
very much and, as well, I am grateful for your time today. Thank you.
Chancellor
Larry Vanderhoef
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