COUNCIL AND COMMITTEE SUMMARIES
Meeting of the University Senate, February 9, 2015
As submitted to Yenisel Gulatee, Senate Secretary, University Senate
UNIVERSITY SENATE CHAIR’S REPORT –Joette Stefl-Mabry, Chair
I. Informational
•
1/22-1/24 Senate Chair attended the Winter Plenary in Farmingdale, Long Island,
attending and participating in sector sessions with other SUNY CGLs
II. Reports of Actions
•
Proposal to establish a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering was approved by
UAC on 12/18/2014. The proposal was approved by UPPC on 11/20/2014.
III. Recommendations for Actions
•
That Campus Governance Leaders (CGLs) at the University at Albany (Senate Chair,
Vice Chair and Immediate Past Chair) attend SUNY Plenaries:
•
April 23-25, 2015, 170th Winter Plenary, Hosted by SUNY Plattsburgh,
Plattsburgh NY.
•
October 2015, 171st Fall Plenary Meeting, Hosted by SUNY Buffalo State,
Buffalo NY.
UFS (University Faculty Senator’s Report) –Danielle Leonard, J. Philippe Abraham &
John Schmidt, SUNY Senators
Report from the UFS Winter Plenary at SUNY Farmingdale, Jan 22-24, 2014.
Submitted by John Schmidt
The plenary occurred the same week as the Chancellor’s State of the University Address and the
release of the Governor’s budget for SUNY. In fact, Chancellor Zimpher gave her address in the
morning and drove down to Long Island to talk to the UFS the same afternoon. This meant that a
lot of new developments occurred and were considered, the major ones of which are listed
below.
1, The Elsevier Contract. SUNY’s contract for their bundle of journals, including electronic
access (“Science Direct”) was renegotiatied fo $44M over the next 5 years. This covers almost
all SUNY Campuses and is the major budget breaker for SUNY Libraries. Doctoral Institutions
pay 74% of this total cost and the cost of this and other blocs is excalating due to the
monopolistic publisher practices, and will continue to be a budget problem. SUNY System in
past years contributed $1.2M, and will continue to supply $0.6M per year plus another $2.5M
over 5 years.
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The wider view concerns what SUNY and other large systems nationwide can do to alter
the dynamics of journal subscriptions. The current system is held in place largely because
publication credits for promotion and tenure revolve around high impact journals, which these
giant companies monopolize. Open access journals are being pushed by NIH and other agencies
so that results can be made available to all users without charge. However, this means that
publishing costs are pushed over to authors in this model, and these can be set very high (and
possibly predatory) by publishing corporations as well. The only real solution would be if large
systems such as SUNY could get together and establish reputable, high impact, open access
journals.
2 SUNY Budget in the Governor’s budget proposal. The outlook is quite a bit brighter than in
the previous year when the cost of UUP raises were not funded (even though the state had
previously agreed to a maintenance of effort), but the new money this year would come with
strings attached. The highlights of the Governors budget includes $50M for recruiting Master
Innovators/Researchers (Full Professors) to spark SUNY’s research efforts, especially in clusters
of excellence. In addition there is an additional $50M for a SUNY Innovation Fund, and both of
these are slated to continue at the same rate for 5 years. There is a $30M loan to support Open
SUNY’s expansion of online courses and degree programs. The rationale for the loan is that it is
expected to bring in more students (and tuition), which should eventually he able to repay the
loan. It would pay for infrastructure for Open SUNY such as a common 24 hour hot line and
servers, etc. There is only $2M extra in the main budget, but an additional $18M for SUNY
Excels Plan (more below). On the capital fund side, there is $200M (this year and continue for 5
years), almost all of which is to cover a backlog of critical maintenance for SUNY’s old
buildings.
3. SUNY Excels. As you will recall, this is a set of metrics to measure SUNY’s commitment to
excellence and to year-to-year improvements that the Chancellor envisions as a way to convince
the Governor and the Legislature that funds spent on SUNY are a good investment for New
York, and worthy of further investments. Already tuition at SUNY is substantially lower than
comparable State University campuses, and our degree our BS/BA completion rates are
substantially higher than the national average. There are a total of 17 metrics in 5 categories,
labeled “Access, Completion, Success, Inquiry and Engagement.” Since SUNY has 32 campuses
ranging from University Centers, Medical Schools, special schools (optometry, maritime,
agriculture), tech schools, 4 year colleges, etc, some of the metrics will apply moreso to some
campuses than others. For the coming year, each campus will formulate a plan including which
of the 17 metrics they will concentrate on, and what measures they will take to improve their
scores. Campus governance should be included in the formulation of this plan. There will be a
pot of money, which will include not only the $18M above but a 10% withholding of state tax
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revenues (since our support is about 35% state tax money and 65% tuition, this would be about
3.5% of our state funds budget). A variable amount of this money will then be reawarded back to
the campus according to SUNY central’s rating of our plan this year (meeting in December to
disburse funds), and in future years according to our progress in meeting the goals we set this
year.
The Chancellor also committed, in her State of the University presentation, to increase
the total number of SUNY degrees granted per year from the current 92,000 to 150,000 by 2020!
This would mean more than 60% increase in only 5 years, presumably through ramping up
online degrees in Open SUNY.
4. Experiential Learning. The budget contains language that commits SUNY to move toward
the requirement that all undergrads complete a credit bearing experiential learning, or applied
learning experience. This is a huge change and an enormous undertaking. There are two issues
associated with this language being inserted into the budget.
The first is that it is essentially the governor and legislature setting curriculum, the
responsibility for which is set in the policies of the SUNY Board of Trustees as the responsibility
of the faculty. It would set a significant precedent, one that we do not think is at all good. The
Chancellor had no answer for us about this violation of the SUNY BOT policies, but said she
would continue the discussion about a way to eliminate the problem.
Second, she also admitted that this could not be done in the near future. By her estimation
under 50% of students now undertake experiential or applied learning now, so it would take an
enormous effort and substantial resources to find such experiences for more than 50% of our
students. She encouraged faculty to define this very broadly, including not only coops, and
internships(paid and unpaid), but also undergrad research in professors’ laboratories and
scholarly research efforts and various types of volunteer work in the community in areas that
might be considered appropriate to their majors. Many of our departments have long offered such
experiences to our eager, superior students. A side question is the issue of whether sending many
of our below average, not so eager students to our outside partners might turn them off to the
idea of hosting our students as interns.
5. The TAP Audits and Satisfactory Academic Progress. Recently, the Comptroller’s office
audited Stony Brook University with respect to their disbursing of TAP funds to undergrads, and
found that they were not restricting funds to those with “Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP),”
resulting in more than $4M in fines/recovery of funds. SAP is a technical standard that applies to
both TAP (state) and Pell (Federal) funds that differs substantially from “normal academic
progress” that each university applies to all of its students. In particular, it means that TAP funds
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cannot cover tuition for remedial courses, or in the case of the GenEd language requirement, for
the first semester course, since only the second semester course is required. It even goes as far as
how many electives can be taken if the requirements in the major are still unmet. Thus, this
would open up problems for financial aid officers as well as all of our academic advisors. The
Chancellor indicated that she is trying to work on this issue and interpretation of the standards
with the Comptroller’s office, but no solution is in the immediate future and other campuses will
undoubtedly be similarly audited and fined.
6. The cost of remedial courses for unprepared students. The chancellor has indicated that
remedial courses (not giving credit toward graduation) costs the SUNY system as a whole
approximately $95M per year, a very significant amount. She has people exploring ways to
reduce this problem. One way, mentioned in her State of the University presentation is to put
SUNY advisors in every high school in NY State. Another plan is to accelerate remediation in
mathematics (one of the worst areas), using programs/courses developed in California with the
Carnegie Foundation. A third is to work with Teacher Ed curriculum and with clinical teacher
prep. UAbany was mentioned as about to start a partnership with the Amsterdam School District
on this.
In addition, the UFS passed three resolutions on various issues listed below.
The first resolution applauds the SUNY Board of Trustees for requesting additional, much
needed resources in this budget cycle, urges the legislature to pass the budget, and urges faculty
to lobby in support of its passage.
The second resolution encourages the Research Foundation, which currently has a pot of money
for STEM, to use it to incentivize graduate student applications to NSF and other granting
agencies to support their research. Currently SUNY units are not doing so well in applying and
winning these graduate support stipends. It also includes language that they should look into
finding money to do the same for social sciences and humanities. It currently covers STEM only
because that money is already earmarked for this area.
The third resolution encourages campuses to adopt measures to support the 35,000 veterans in
NY State returning to college. The measures were part of President Obama’s “8 points for
veteran’s success” put forward in a speech last summer. The resolution was recently passed by
the SUNY-wide Student Assembly.
Proposed Federal Evaluation of Schools of Education Teacher Prepartion programs. This
just came in from Peter Kneupfer, Pres of UFS. As you may or may not be aware, the Federal
Dept of Education is proposing a rule that would evaluate schools of education and restrict
scholarship funds based on the evaluations (which would depend on success rates in graduates
getting certification and the "success" of those graduates in the job market and as teachers for
three years out). UUP has set up a web page that provides more information and how to submit
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comments on the proposed regulations; comments are due by Feb 2. I ask you to help get this
information to your colleagues in schools of education (for those of you who have them) and
other interested faculty.
GSA (Graduate Student Association) – Caitlin Janiszewski, GSA President
The GSA is getting its semester underway. We will be having our first meeting soon and groups
are preparing to submit their budgets. Over the break the President and Lead Senator started
some local lobbying work, opening up conversations with Assemblyman McDonald and
Assemblywoman Fahy about graduate student issues.
We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Jim Stellar as our new Provost and are excited that he will
be attending our first Executive Board meeting. We are also close to setting the date of the
President's Forum. We believe it combined with one of our Assembly meetings in a style similar
to the faculty wide meeting last fall.
We did have a Senator resign this semester due to academic responsibilities. Peatros Haile, left us
a few weeks ago and Keith Sherman has stepped up to replace him.
In terms of programming we will be having our GSA orientation program for all students but
especially transfer students on February 5th from noon to 3pm. We also continue our work with
the Education from the Inside Out Coalition on the Ban the Box Campaign. Unfortunately,
because of the "blizzard" one of the programs we were co-sponsoring was canceled but there are
more to come. We also had to post-pone an exciting program we are bringing to UAlbany which
is a leadership workshop facilitated by Lee Riddell from the SUNY Leadership Institute called
"Contemplative Leadership". We are working on re-scheduling that program for some time in
February.
SA (Student Association) – Marc Cohen, Student Association Representative
We're looking at the possibility of combining our club sport with campus rec.
Speaker series - February, March, April (Tentative).
UAlbany will participate in SUNY Speaks Up advocacy day March 24.
We are again working with career services to assist with the career fair.
Community engagement and outreach has been reaching out to service organizations on campus
to see how we can more effectively target service efforts. President Agyemang and Vice
President Cohen will continue to meet with student groups throughout the semester.
CAA (Council on Academic Assessment) – Deborah Bernnard, Chair
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The Council on Academic Assessment met on December 17 and approved a report on assessment
of Natural Sciences in the University in the High School program. The committee also
discussed options for action to take when a program does not adequately engage in assessment.
CAFFECoR (Committee on Academic Freedom, Freedom of Expression, and Community
Responsibility) – Carol Jewell, Chair
CAFFECoR will meet on Tuesday, February 10, 2015.
CERS (Committee on Ethics in Research and Scholarship) – Susanna Fessler, Chair
Nothing to report
COR (Council on Research) – Kajal Lahiri, Chair
The Council on Research had a busy fall semester, with well-attended monthly meetings
including presentations on the research year in review by Vice President Dias and an invited
presentation on the new Scholars’ Archive by Lorre Smith, of the University Libraries, giving the
Council information on the new open-access publishing platform to be hosted by the University
at Albany that would give researchers an opportunity to publish their works on a channel that
directly associates them with the university.
The Centers, Institutes and Specialized Laboratories subcommittee of the Council is currently
reviewing a proposal for a new research center. The fall round of funding for the Benevolent
Association awards for graduate student research was successfully completed with seven of nine
applicants successfully obtaining funding for a total of $3,490 provided for graduate student
research projects. The Conference support awards review committee also completed their fall
round of funding, with all six applicants receiving funding for conferences to be held during the
spring semester at a total of $13,000.
The Faculty Research Award Program garnered 44 applications this year, a substantial increase
on last year’s 26 applications, and the awards review committee is currently undertaking the
review and selection process for those awards, which will be confirmed at the Council on
Research meeting at the end of January.
The subcommittee on Excellence in Research and Creative Activities is having its first meeting
this week. We received a number of nominations.
CPCA (Council on Promotions and Continuing Appointments) – Sanjay Putrevu, Chair
The next CPCA meeting is on Jan. 28.
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GAC (Graduate Academic Council) –Abebe Rorissa, Chair
I.
Informational
The Graduate Academic Council held its rescheduled meeting on December 15th, 2014. We had
to cancel the original scheduled meeting for December 9th, 2014. A few members were not able
to attend the December 9th meeting because of, among other reasons, a schedule conflict with the
public forum for one of the candidates for Provost. The two main items on the Agenda were: (1)
review of a report from the Committee on Admissions & Academic Standing, and (2) review and
approval of a proposal to establish a Graduate Certificate Program in Homeland Security, Cyber
Security and Emergency Management (HCE) by the Department of Public Administration and
Policy, Rockefeller College.
Our next scheduled meeting is on March 3rd.
II.
Reports of Actions
The Council first considered the proposal to establish a Graduate Certificate Program in
Homeland Security, Cyber Security and Emergency Management (HCE) with three tracks and a
100% online option. Professor R. Karl Rethemeyer, Chair, Department of Public Administration
and Policy and Associate Dean of the Rockefeller College, attended the December 15th meeting
and provided a presentation. Following an extensive question and answer session, GAC members
voted unanimously to approve the proposal. Members felt that the Graduate Certificate Program
in Homeland Security, Cyber Security and Emergency Management (HCE) is timely as well as
attractive to students and employers.
The second major item that the GAC reviewed was a report by the Committee on Admissions &
Academic Standing regarding a student’s grade grievance. GAC members voted to endorse the
recommendation by the Committee to send the case back to the unit for further review.
III.
Recommendations for Actions
The GAC endorses joint introduction of the proposal by the Department of Public Administration
and Policy, Rockefeller College, to establish a Graduate Certificate Program in Homeland
Security, Cyber Security and Emergency Management (HCE) to the University Senate to
approve the proposal, pending additional approval by UPPC. The proposal was approved by the
Graduate Academic Council on 12/15/14.
GOV (Governance Council) – Cynthia Fox, Chair
I.
Informational
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GOV met on December 15; the next meeting is scheduled for February 2.
II.
Reports of Actions
1. The GOV discussed and unanimously approved the language of a proposed By-
Law Amendment that addresses the Administration’s request that we consider
removing voting privileges from ex-officio members of the Senate who serve by
virtue of their administrative position.
2. GOV voted unanimously to approve the roster of the Blue Ribbon Panel on
Contingent Faculty.
3. GOV requested further information about the rationale for the proposed
composition of the Graduate Stipend Committee. It then voted electronically to
approve the roster with one additional member.
4. The December meeting of UPPC, at which a new Chair was to be voted on, was
cancelled for lack of quorum. Election was conducted by electronic vote in
January.
5. In response to a follow-up request for information about the composition of the
Start-Up New York Campus Advisory Committee and of the Ad Hoc Academic
Review Committee that are described in the University START-UP NY Plan,
Chair Fox was told that Interim Provost would be making a report to the SEC at
its January 26 meeting.
III.
Recommendations for Actions
1. GOV will begin working on the language of a Charter amendment to address the
Administration’s request that we consider removing voting privileges from ex-
officio members of the Senate who serve by virtue of their administrative
position.
LISC (Council on Libraries, Information Systems, and Computing) –Boris Goldfarb, Chair
Nothing to report.
UAC (Undergraduate Academic Council) – Robert Yagelski, Chair
The scheduled meeting of the Undergraduate Academic Council for December 4th was canceled
so that Council members could attend the public forum for on of the candidates for provost,
which conflicted with the UAC meeting time. The UAC met instead on December 11th. The
main item on the agenda was the proposal for a new undergraduate program in computer
engineering. Associate Provost for Program Development Ann Marie Murray attended the
meeting and provided an overview of the proposal and the process that led to its development.
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She also answered questions from Council members. After Associate Provost Murray’s
presentation, the Council voted unanimously to approve the proposal.
The rest of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of the university policy regarding pre-
requisites and restrictions on admission to majors and minors, an issue that arose in the context
of the Council’s review of several course proposals. Given the complexities of the issue, the
Council decided to table this discussion until it resumes its meeting schedule in spring semester.
ULC (University Life Council) –Michael Jaromin, Chair
ULC will meet on 2/3/15 at 1:00 pm. Brad Bunzey will be providing a facility report on current
construction projects with a specific focus on the Campus Center project.
UPPC (University Planning and Policy Council) –David McCaffrey, Chair
UPPC does not have items to report carrying over from the fall. At its first meeting, in February,
it will be considering the Graduate Certificate in Homeland Security, Cybersecurity, and
Emergency Management from Rockefeller College, Public Administration and Policy.
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