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RPC Meeting Minutes
October 11, 2006
Present: Balik, Collins, Flath, Heyman, Hornbach, Hoye, Laskin, Latham, Michelfelder, Nachlis, Nedelsky, Wheaton and Contant (ACE Fellow).
- Meeting was called to order at 2:05 pm
- Minutes from the meeting of October 4, 2006 were approved.
- Student member Herschel Nachlis was introduced to the committee.
- Dan Balik presented the Benchmarks for Academic Quality data prepared from the recommendations of last year’s RPC study. There was significant discussion about the purpose of this summary document and the responses received from Board of Trustees members and other constituents. Should there be targets or goals established for each item? What should be the comparison groups (Macalester five years ago, peer institutions, national averages)? Some data were difficult to obtain easily – particularly on the faculty publications and citations. Faculty publication data was for publications printed in 2005 from the Web of Science listings, as were citations for those 2005 publications. This needs to be worked on with the Library. Collins and Balik will work on this. Other data is difficult or impossible to obtain. What should happen to those items? Members of the committee made suggestions to the Provost and Balik.
- Chair Heyman resumed the conversation on identifying the benefits of changes to support for faculty. The committee addressed the question of the goal for this discussion. Provost Michelfelder indicated that the last review of faculty workload was about 15 years ago, and it was time to reevaluate whether we are doing all we could be doing to support faculty.
Student body size was an issue that came up last meeting. In conversation with the President, the student enrollment should be assumed to be between 1800-1850 FTE – not lower.
Chair Heyman asked for assistance in preparing a survey to go to faculty regarding potential benefits to various options to improve faculty support. Included among the options discussed would be: FTR, start-up packages, teaching load, sabbatical cycles, staff support for teaching, and team taught teaching. The committee indicated that the preamble to the survey would be important to prevent high expectations from the faculty and to discuss the issue of tradeoffs between actions and outcomes (reduced teaching load yielding large class sizes, for example).
- Chair Heyman reported that he would be showing the two graphics he had prepared on U.S. News ranking and teaching loads and U.S. News ranking and sabbatical cycle length to the faculty at the Faculty Meeting this afternoon.
- Meeting adjourned at 3:30 pm.
Respectfully submitted by Cheryl Contant |
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