UH Hilo Faculty Congress
Minutes of Meeting
May 2, 2003
The meeting was called to order by chair, Nina Buchanan at 2:05 PM.
Present : Nina Buchanan, Helen Rogers, Bill Mautz, Lincoln Gotshalk, April Komenaka, David
Miller, Barbara Heintz, Doug Mikkelson, Pila Wilson,
Student Members: Melvin Jadulang
Ex Officio: Chris Lu, Margaret Haig, Steve Hora, Linda Golian-Lui
Guests:
1. The minutes of the meeting of April 4 were approved.
2.
Assessment Committee Recommendations.
The program review of the College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Natural Resource Management was presented along with the list of Assessment Committee recommendations. In response to recommendations for increased UHH resource support for CAFNRM, Steve Hora stated that it is difficult to make these kinds of responses, because CAFNRM has so few students. Chris Lu stated that one difficulty is that the CAFNRM mission is teaching, but the programs do not attract many students. David Miller stated that historically the problem has been viewed in extremes, which are not practical: for example closing the college and moving its programs into other UHH departments or moving all of CTAHR from UHM to UHH. It is recognized that it will be difficult to solve the problems in CAFNRM.
Nina Buchanan noted that the process at hand is for the Congress to review the committee’s recommendations and pass on its own recommendations to the Vice Chancellor of
Academic Affairs.
Motion to accept the recommendations from the Assessment Committee
Vote: unanimous
Nina Buchanan will inform the Dean of CAFNR and forward the report to the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs.
3.
General Education Committee recommendations. Pila Wilson presented and reviewed the committee report. Sections 1 and 2 have received the most work by the committee.
Highlights include: 1) there should be specific criteria for GE standards. 2) there are specific recommendations for English. 3) the Hawaii-Asia-Pacific requirement should be a UHH graduation requirement.
A motion was made to approve sectons 1, 2, and 7 and approve in spirit sections 3-6.
There was then discussion about details of the report with offers of several amendments to the motion.
Doug Mikkelson commented on the experience with the previous GE revision. Most of the criticism of GE was that the requirements were too complex, and the revision to the present
GE requirements have made them simple and tractable. Many of the new changes being proposed look like a trend back to the old system and will meet resistance.
David Miller stated that the report should be sent to the college senates for review and comment before the Congress acts on it.

Discussion then addressed how to present the committee report for review by the faculty and college governing bodies.
The motion was recast: to accept the report in spirit and hold a faculty convocation in the fall to air and resolve differences in opinions. Specifically April Komenaka and David Miller will bring the report in advance to the English Dept and April and Pila Wilson will bring it to the
Mathematics Dept as sections 2 (English) and 3(Mathematics/quantitative skills) have potentially significant impacts on these departments. David Miller made an amendment to the motion to change the language in section 6 to state clearly “the H/A/P requirement is a UH Hilo graduation requirement.
Vote: unanimous to accept.
4.
School of Business request to be an independent college. Congress has been requested to review and endorse this request.
Discussion. David Miller stated that as CAS is planned to be re-organized, re-organization should be done all at once and not piecemeal. April Komenaka stated that as the Business faculty have unanimously approved the proposal to be independent, then the School should be allowed to try this step. David Miller stated that there would be no problem with separation as long as the new administrative structure of a College of Business did not consume additional financial resources in advance of the whole re-organization of CAS. In a climate of declining budgets, it is hard to picture an independent administration of the Business School that would not take resources away from other units. In discussion, it was difficult to craft a specific formula for constraining allocation of budgetary resources to a new college. Pila Wilson noted that the
College of Hawaiian Language functions as an independent college without large salary for a dean and administrative support staff. Bill Mautz proposed that if one of the major rationales for forming an independent College of Business is the opportunity to increase extramural funding, then return of new overhead could be used to fund the college administration as increased funding is won.
A motion was made to endorse the request for Business to form a separate college under the conditions that there will be a fair allocation of resources among all units.
Vote: in favor 4, opposed 2, abstain 2. Motion passed.
Announcements
1. Recommendations for essential components of a course syllabus were distributed.
2. The Congress has been made aware that there is a Space Allocation Working Group. This is a committee whose formation was unknown to the Congress, and until such time as the Congress is notified of the process of formation of this committee, it is considered a rogue committee.
3. The UH System is creating a set of new high paid positions in a climate of UH budget cuts.
The All Campus Council of Senate Chairs is pressing to create a committee to review systemwide administrative structure and salaries in the light of a recent study of UH faculty salaries that concluded professor salary scales should be increased by $9,000.
Meeting adjourned. at 4:00 p.m.