Approved 7-0-1
10/11/11
EC #06
UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
EXECUTIVE COMMTTEE
September 27, 2011
3:30 p.m., HMSU 227
Present:
Absent:
Ex officio:
S. Lamb, K. Bolinger, J. Conant, T. Hawkins, B. Kilp, J. Kuhlman, C. MacDonald,
T. Sawyer
R. Guell
President D. Bradley
I.
Administrative reports
President Bradley:
a. Yesterday Board of Trustee members, M. Alley, D. Campbell, A. Tucker, R. Baesler and I went
to the Commission’s Trustee Academy where we spent most of the day. They wanted to
bring the Trustees up to speed on what they believe are important topics. The topic this
year is on Learning Outcomes. George Kuh from Indiana University (one of the top gurus in
the country on student success and retention) had a slide presentation. I will download his
slide and send it to Executive Committee. One thing he showed was getting students into
what he calls “high impact activities.” It’s similar to a significant experiential learning
activity, or a rigorous entry level seminar course, etc. some which we are doing already and
some that we talked about doing. I believe it is worth viewing. Some of the data is pretty
dramatic.
II.
Chair report (S. Lamb)
As you know, last week, at the Executive Committee, I made a case for focusing on the
numerator in the student faculty ratio, that of Students. The institution has had enormous
success in its marketing and recruitment efforts, which has helped to raise the self-esteem of
the institution. I think that if we continue to place great efforts in achieving continued success
in this domain, the spirit of the institution well remain most positive. And I am concerned about
the negative repercussions, of shining the spot light on internal variances in the Student Faculty
Ratio. I am empathetic with the administration’s need to have accurate information when
making decisions, and I am most encouraged about their recognition that equality of Student
Faculty Ratio’s across departments would not achieve fairness. The School of Music ideal ratio is
certainly distinct from the ideal ratio for the Accounting program in the Scott College of
Business.
I asked Robert (Guell) what the University student faculty ratio would be in a couple of years, if
we get the same number of incoming students that we have had in the last two years. My own
rough estimates are that we would need a little less than a 10% growth in total enrollment to
achieve the magical 20 to one ratio, if we had the same percentage of graduate versus
undergraduate. I do not have confidence in my figures however. I wonder how close we will be
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to that growth if our present new enrollment figures remains fairly stable for the next two years.
Bob did not arrive at a figure. But, I would like to read you his response.
In the discussion on the student-faculty ratio, it is easy to lose sight of the role of the
numerator: that is, the students. We can spend an enormous amount of energy and angst
over the denominator of this ratio or we can look to increase the number of students we
serve. We can look to eliminate faculty lines in everyone’s college but our own, or we can
imagine what we can do for students to help them succeed, because by definition, their
success in persisting is our success in creating higher student faculty ratios. Let me
illustrate this point. In the Fall of 2008 we had 489 FTE faculty (including adjuncts of all
types). In Fall of 2010 we had 488.25 FTE faculty but had an 11.5% increase in
undergraduate student credit hours and a 2.3% increase in graduate credit hours. As a
result our student-faculty ratio was 17.95 in Fall 2010 rather than 16.3 in Fall 2008.
Colleagues, this is a tremendous increase. That of 1.65 or an increase of 10% in the SFR.
Though the Fall 2011 numbers have not been made available to us, we believe that when
they are, the increased number of undergraduates will, once again, increase our studentfaculty ratio.
What is necessary now is to focus our effort on recruiting and retaining students. To
emphasize that point, it is worth noting that these student-faculty ratio statistics would be
even better if we could have duplicated our retention figures from ten years ago. We learned
yesterday that the freshman retention rate dropped to 58%. Had it been 68%, as it was in
2008, it would have meant 280 more sophomores, 4200 more SCHs, and a student faculty
ratio that was nearly six tenths of a point higher. If it had been 72%, as it was in 2000, and
we could keep it there, we would have already achieved this particular goal. By focusing, and
I would say fixating on the faculty part of this 20:1 student-faculty ratio goal, we run the risk
of missing the target because we will forget about the numerator, the reason we exist:
students.
President: I do not believe that the provost and I are fixated on the numerator/ denominator
and that is why it is probably a four or five year target to get to where we are to where we want
to be. The real reason for spending some time on this is because we are going to be retiring
people in each of those years. We need to make sure we are not totally off base on where we
are putting these replacement positions, or in some cases, new positions. It is definitely my goal
to grow another 1000 FTE, which is what we are talking about. I think we can do that and maybe
a little more. We can increase enrollment by about 1000 FTE over the next few years moving
ISU closer to the 20:1 ratio, depending on what happens to retention. We can reach the goal
over several years by increasing enrollment and keeping the size of the faculty at its current
level, but everyone must keep in mind that we will need to hire faculty in the areas of need not
necessarily in the areas in which faculty leave.
S. Lamb to president: If we do achieve the same type of freshmen enrollment for two additional
years and a small class leaving for a couple of years what will our student FSR be?
President: I calculate it if we kept retention at 63, we would be up to about 13,000 with the
same number of freshmen. You can say with the CEP’s gone, that might drop it to 12,500, but it
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is still 1000 more than we have today. I challenged the recruiting folks to do better next year.
We should have more freshman next year than we have this year. Admission can get them in the
door, get them admitted, but we have a problem turning applications into matriculates.
S. Lamb to president: In your fall address this you should make this point.
I think we can add a 1000 FTE and make sure that the faculty does not shrink as we move
towards the 20:1. But, in the interim, we need to make sure that if department(s) x, y, or z
needs some additional faculty, that they are taken care of. If a department is going to be losing
positions, for whatever reason, we wouldn’t want to add an assistant professor in that
department if four years later it is going to be a position that was not supported by previous
data. Nothing is going to happen instantaneously.
III.
Fifteen Minute Open Discussions
a. J. Kuhlman: Would you provide a profile of fall 2011 of those who have not been retained?
Freshman class? I’m referring to incoming GPA’s and those kinds of things.
President: Yes. I’ve asked Patty (Mc Clintock) to post the data that she has now; as soon as
it is available.
The president discussed the role of adding minuses to the grading scheme and its impact on
the number of students on probation. He expressed dissatisfaction with the current grading
scheme. (The C- grade and the D- grade to me do have some impact because people are on
probation that would not have been on probation before.) I asked for a histogram of GPA’s.
Students who are looking for 4.0 are not happy with this system.
S. Lamb: Do you have insight into the reason for the decrease in our retention rate?
President: Other than what I said in the email…the reason for what I said was J. Shriver’s
(Associate VP Academic Affairs) staff and J. Beacon’s (VP Enrollment Mgmt, Mkrg
Communic.) staff made calls during the spring and summer trying to get students to
preregister. The thing they heard most from students (far more often than they have heard
in the pass) is “I decided to transfer so I can live at home” –it’s economics. It is probably a
complicated answer, and we need to work harder on this problem.
S. Lamb: What efforts can we make at the university level trying to get students involved in
say 3 or more…?
President: I think that one of things that J. Schriver is trying to do with University 101 is to
put more rigor into it so that it can serve students better (e.g. theme housing like Kuh
discussed in his presentation…) we are not doing things like other universities are doing
them – e.g. when they do theme housing – students in the same major are taking other
courses together so they are really developing a cohort type of relationship. We are not
seeing the same impact at ISU relating to our theme housing. There is not much being done
at ISU to build a cohort. We may be doing a few things, but we have not taken them to the
next step. One of the advantages of having housing report to the provost is that now there
are no barriers relating to Academic Affairs and Residential Life.
b. K. Bolinger: There needs to be a review of the Faculty Performance process. Will it be an
open process?
President: It definitely will be, but we don’t want to spend the next two years or so refining
it. I believe we should have a review process that is well-defined during the first couple of
years that we actually use it. We will be reviewing the process. Don't expect it to be perfect
the first time, but it will get better with each use.
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S. Lamb: I do believe a review process is built in. I do not think that some faculty are reading
the performance evaluation process established – mainly what they are doing is reading the
timeframe guidelines. They may not be aware of all the work that has gone into it.
c. B. Kilp: Expressed frustration at not being able to place all of his activity into the Qualtics
document.
T. Hawkins: We need to keep the process simple and the 3 categories help accomplish that.
C. MacDonald: This is a pilot, and we will learn from it.
d. T. Hawkins: Asked clarification on a charge for FAC relating to summer school. What does
this mean? How to create creativity and entrepreneurship allowing students to take 12
credit hours and move more quickly towards graduation.
S. Lamb: Clarified the issues by explaining the various alternative ways faculty might be
compensated for teaching summer classes. A lot of different models were considered.
President: I informed the committee of the offer made to 40 students who would be able
to finish their degree requirements by August for a 50% scholarship. Most of these students
accepted the offer and most of those qualified for August graduation. We had our highest 4
year completion rate ever.
e. The president requested better data be disseminated to dean's and chairs so better goals
can be set. He wants all to encourage people that this is a process. Deans and faculty need
to work together to establish future goals. It is not the role of the president or provost to
set goals at the department level, but rather the deans and chairs. It is important that we all
recognize staffing needs by various departments. We need to explicitly understand each
other’s needs.
f. J. Conant: Emphasized the need for accurate data in the construction of departmental
Student-Faculty ratio targets. Current need is established on base on that data. So where
we are at now if data is inaccurate, targets will be determine from that; you are going to
have an unfairly set gross for targets. Until we have plain data on what the FTE, SCH for each
department – we will not be able to set departmental goals.
g. President: So we will get the data and have well-defined reports. I will suggest that the
targets we have today will probably not be the targets we have two or three years from now
as people get a better understanding of what is needed by department…there will be
movements back and forth. I would encourage people to look at this as a process. It is not
something that will be decided at one meeting.
h. S. Lamb: It does this institution no good if we do not have strong voices speaking on the
faculty’s behalf. Maybe sometimes it is a little too strong from the administrations’ view
point. It is important to the faculty to have their voices heard. It is the EC’s role to attempt
to see things from a broad perspective, but it is also a necessary role that we must project
the faculty’s viewpoint sometimes rather strongly upon the president (administration).
i. T. Hawkins: Faculty see the chairs as their advocates and hence should not be made into
administrators. They have both faculty and administrative duties.
President: Things are not always black or white. A chair has to be an advocate for his/her
department and deans have to advocate for departments, maybe several departments. The
future dashboards (data) are a measure of the department and not the chair. The goal of
dashboards is to highlight what is important to the University and communicated to the
various publics. I believe it is faculty working with deans and making it work at the college
level. A big part of my job is to make sure are resources are balanced. Retention cannot be
solved at the department level but at the university level as a whole. We all (faculty, staff
and administrators) have an impact on retention.
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IV.
Approval of the Minutes of September 20, 2011 (T. Sawyer/J. Kuhlman (Vote: 7-0-1)
V.
Consensus to approve (endorse) Jake Eubanks (Library) as a nominee to the President for service
on the University Athletics Committee.
Meeting adjourned at 4:38 p.m.
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