Undergraduate Academic Council Minutes
Meeting: UAC Meeting Thursday, November 12th, 2009 -1:30-2:30pm
Room: Terrace Lounge, Campus Center
Present: Gregory Denbeaux, Steven Doellefeld (staff), Martin Hildebrand, Robert
Keesee, Winifred Kutchukian, Sue Phillips, Hany Shawky, Joan Savitt (Chair), Kabel
Stanwicks, Greg Stevens (guest),Katherine Trent, Laura Wilder.
Regrets: Maria Brown, Yu-Hui Chen, JoAnne Malatesta, Alex Rias, (Graduate student)
and Christy Smith.
Chair’s Report: There will be some draft bills and other action items coming toward
the UAC in the coming weeks. More information to follow next week. An issue
regarding wording about incompletes was taken care of by the Registrar’s office,
therefore, the Council will not be looking at it. The Registrar’s office is compiling the
number of S/U elected grades now locked in for students since the drop date was
changed; preliminary results indicate the numbers are down, so there is hope that the
number of grade change petitions will also go down.
The new date and time for UAC meetings in the spring 2010 semester has been set for
Wednesdays from 9:30-10:30am.
Review of the minutes: Minutes from 11/5 meeting were approved.
Old Business: The Chair talked briefly regarding minors. More data will be needed
before coming to any decision whether or not the minors should be made optional or
not. The Council asked Maria Brown and Steven Doellefeld to work to secure the
necessary data for use in a future meeting.
New Business: The UAC reviewed a few items from the Middle State self draft report:

The University should explore whether each academic major should be required to
develop coursework and offer sufficient seats in upper-level Writing Intensive sections
to meet the needs of its own majors.
Each department should make sure they will have enough upper level courses; it might
be that some department will not have the staffing or the financial resources to make
this possible.


The Undergraduate Academic Council and the General Education Committee should
examine different models for delivery of the information literacy and oral discourse
requirement, including a closer alignment of these requirements with a student’s
planned academic path.
The Undergraduate Academic Council should reconsider the University’s current
Foreign Language Requirement.
The General Education Committee is looking into this issue and the Chair of
the General Education Committee has been reporting to Council on their
progress regarding this matter. It was mentioned that the foreign language
requirement has been brought to the Council on other occasions and the
Council’s suggestions have been opposed by the language departments. The
University at Albany has a less stringent requirement than many other SUNY
institutions but a more stringent requirement than SUNY mandated.

In advance of every semester, the General Education Committee should send a
reminder to all instructors teaching General Education Courses to include that
information in their course syllabi.
The consensus of the Council was that this should be something done by each department or by
the Dean’s Office instead of the GE committee.

The General Education Committee should publicize information from the petition
and exception process.

The data available from the General Education Committee’s petition and exception
process should be analyzed more systematically and added to other informational
resources used to evaluate student demand and the General Education program
requirements.
The Council agreed that this data would be useful.

Curriculum planning information that departments develop should be available to
students so they can engage in better long-term planning.

The General Education Committee should review the academic progress of students
in highly-sequenced degrees or combined programs to evaluate whether their total
requirements pose a hardship that should be modified to facilitate timely graduation.
There are at least three issues here:
1) Can students in highly sequenced majors get all the courses they need
to be able to graduate on time?
2) Can transfer students meet these requirements in a timely manner? If
not, what steps should we take to accommodate their needs?
3) Should the GE courses requirements be changed? If so, does the
university have the authority to make some of these changes without
SUNY Central approval? If so, where is the demarcation point between
campus decisions and decisions that need SUNY Central approval?

The University Libraries should explore options to improve access to information for
all university library users.
-Another matter discussed was brought by Steven Doellefeld: whether the GE
committee grants blanket approval for a course whose topic varies from semester to
semester. Some suggested that the topic would need to be more specific before
approving the course. It could be also that the topic matched the description of the
course and also fulfilled the GE requirement. More time was needed to discuss this
matter. The Council will continue the discussion in their next meeting.
Meeting adjourned at 2:30pm
Next meeting will be Thursday, November 19th from 1:30 to 2:30PM –
Room: Terrace Lounge, Campus Center.