December 02, 2020

Faculty Senate Meeting 

December 2, 2020 

Held via Teams due to Covid-19 

Attending: Arts and Sciences: Jennifer Fowler, Kelli White, Cynthia Pipkins, LeAnn Chisholm, Pat Heintzelman, Sujing Wang, Jing Zhang, Suying Wei, Matt Hoch, James P. Nelson, Christopher Martin, Cengiz Sen, Edgardo Pujols, Melissa Riley, Wen Liu, Jim Armacost, Garrick Harden, Cheng-Hsien Lin, Ashwini Kucknoor, Yusuko Sato Business: Ricardo Tovar-Silos, Vivek Natarajan, Education: Dorothy Sisk, Cindy Cummings, Eunjin Kwon, Donna Azodi, Cristina Ríos Engineering: Berna Tokgoz, Ruhai Wang, Chun-Wei Yao, John Gossage, Mien Jao Fine Arts and Communication: Awais Saleem, Serdar Ilban, Nicki Michalski, Paul Hemenway, Ashley Dockens, Xenia Fedorchenko, Millicent M. Musyoka  Library: Trina Nolen  

Not Attending: Arts and Sciences: Larry Osborne, Charles Popp, Jeremy Shelton, Business: Ashraf El-Houbi, John McCullough, Keely Weeks, Time McCoy Education: Kaye Shelton, Robert Nicks, Lisa Wines, Khal Hamza, Cristina Rios, Praphul Joshi Engineering: Yueqing Li Fine Arts and Communication: Travis Prokop, S Jordan Wright, Jacob Clark, Brian LeTraunik, Library: Carmen Doering, Lamar State College Port Arthur: Mavis Triebel

Call to Order: 3:35  

Approval of Minutes: A motion was made by Paul Hemenway to accept the minutes of the last meeting. It was seconded by Vivek Natarajan and carried.  

President’s Report:  

• Share governance talk with Provost Brenda Nichols was positive and periodical discussions of the campus business between the administration and the faculty senate are expected. 

• The budget and compensation committee met with Provost Nichols for discussion of lowering the campus-wide costs to cope with the potential significant budget shortages. 

• Representing for the Faculty Senate, Dr. Fowler attends CID and Dean’s meetings.  Issues discussed included COVID-19 updates/free testing at Lamar (invitation key administrators to talk in the FS February meeting, Vice President for Finance Mr. Jeremy Alltop’s Finance literacy workshop for colleges/departments/faculty, and revisit of external review for faculty promotion. 

• A part-time Faculty Senate administrative assistance, Amy L. Jones is hired this month. She will be in the new Faculty Senate office, Rudy Wilson, room 128 (formerly John Gray Building B) on Thursdays and Fridays. 

• The Faculty Senate legacy email account facultysenate@lamar.edu is available now. It will make future office transition easier to keep track of the organizational history. 

Committee reports: 

Academic Issues from Mellisa:  

We did not have a meeting on Nov. 18th, but the committee discussed through emails on the 19th. 

We reached out to Advising Center Director, Kayla Holloway regarding the changed schedules to online classes due to COVID_19.  Students were much confused by the changes and she emailed back and said the situation is much improved for the coming semester.  

Faculty Issues from Xenia  

• Template for Piper Award nomination has been located and made accessible for Competition Space. Discussion of having a link to in on the main Senate webpage. Dr. Sujing Wang is the current administrator for the Piper Award Competition Space page. 

• Grievance procedure and Ombudsman position posting. No news.  

• Course releases, what is the policy (discussion)? Should this go to the F2.08 committee?  

• Discussion of College Personnel Committee formation. Language should be similar to the University Personnel Committee formation.  

• Committee will be looking at procedures and language of the Promotion and Tenure process at the request of the Provost. We will meet with Dr. Nichols the next Monday. 

• AP courses parent courses. AP folded into the regular course (neither separate payment nor separate credit for instructors but there is challenges for accommodations made for two different types of students). Should this go to Workload Committee?  

• Topics raised in the November committee meeting: How do we represent the interests of most faculty possible? Faculty representation is done by senators. How do we represent our departments and colleges? What instruments do we have? Are we meeting with our faculty?  
• Survey for faculty’s feedbacks on teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Dr. John Gossage reminded me that an online teaching feedback survey is ongoing, and the Faculty Issues may ask for the results instead of conducting another survey of their own.  

Budget and Compensation from Garrick 

The committee was not able to meet in November due to my doctor's appointments.  We have been researching possible areas of lower costs in various campus sectors. There should be more to report in the February meeting. 

Distinguished Faculty Lecture from Dorothy 

The committee met in November for the DFL presentation, maybe after Thanksgiving. I contacted private sectors, including high schools to present the DFL video in their places. I got emails that the DFL event is postponed to Spring 2021 so students could be more likely to participate in the event.  We have a concern about the event be postponed and not been discussed by the committee first. 

We have raised the fund for the DFL event and would like to have the DFL event date discussed with the committee first and not been just informed. Dr. Fowler will bring this concern into the share governance talk in her next meeting with Dr. Nichols. 

F2.08 Committee by Jim: 

We did not have a regular meeting in November.  The administration is very interested in automating and digital measure software to be used in both F2.08 and the tenure/promotion process. We have not been able to discuss this matter after the software demo is shown to the committee.  

Jim will email the links to the faculty evaluation software Demo will be sent to the FS executive committee and keep the records in minutes.  

Faculty Handbook Committee from Matt: 

We did not see the announcement for the second review of the Faculty handbook draft.  The MAPPs review and committee are currently stalled.   Further actions from related parties are awaited for the committee to go forward. 

Vivek: We are currently still collecting data from the administration and questions from the faculty.  During the winter break, we should get more information for the committee discussion.  We would like to have short- and long- term data on workloads to see the workload trends among Lamar faculty. If the faculty have any questions or suggestions, please share them with our committee. 

Research and Creative Activity from John:  

We scheduled to meet on Nov. 18th but rescheduled to 25th.  The instructions of the application were fixed and reattached to the Competition Space and the deadline for submission was extended from 13th to 24th.  There were 7 applications and three of them were resubmission from last year pool that was affected by the budget cut.  The committee ranked the applications and presented them to the Provost office for the final decision of the awardees. 

The investigation from Pat:  

No committee meeting the last month. I met with several AAUP (former) officers for advice and we have an appointment with an attorney to get audits data through public information. 

The committee is still waiting for the data we had paid for from the administration. 

I got about one-third of everyone’s F3.2 data and the review for F3.2 data will be time-consuming. Dr. Nichols said she will help us to get the data.  

Dr. Fowler: Dorothy suggested me to reach out to Public information officers for getting the data. I will be glad to do so if you would like me to reach out.  

Student success from Nikki: 

Survey was converted into Qualtrics.  

Old Business: None.

New Business: 

Vivek: How is the upcoming spring semester looks like in terms of the pandemic impacts? 

Fowler: You and the executive committee will meet with the administration the next week, we can ask and report back to the faculty. 

Vivek: It has been a stressful year for all. Both faculty and students had a tough and challenging year. Under the situation, the faculty annual evaluation may need to take pandemic impacts into considerations when the F2.08 is reviewed.  Key discussion points are listed below: 

• Students’ course evaluation needs to be carefully reconsidered for their weights in F2.08 under the pandemic situation.  The students’ course evaluation may hurt the faculty teaching evaluation due to the unexpected online teaching environments.  Some faculty have received very few students’ feedbacks on their online courses.  

• There should be a written suggestion list that we can provide for the administration to consider for adoptions. 

• UT-Dallas and many other campuses have adopted temporary policies for faculty annual evaluations, we may review their policies and formulate ours to make our upcoming faculty evaluation more valid (policies adopted by other universities were sent by Amy Jones on December 10, 2020, please check your emails for the details).  

• Suggestions from senators: 

• Motion to discard all student evaluations for Spring and Fall 2020 as well as those for Spring 2021. 

• Reference previous years' student evaluations as evidence of performance in lieu of the current year's condition. 

• Opportunity for faculty to include commentary on student evaluations and a process to formally respond with evidence of measures they'll institute moving forward with an emphasis on education and improvement. 

• Institute some type of peer review process whereby faculty would evaluate the plans and processes of other faculty members and provide a review and feedback. 

• Prior student evaluations may be (partially) adopted for 2020 student evaluations. 

• Junior Faculty on tenure process should be able to extend their tenure clock due to the pandemic situation. Jennifer had mentioned this in the prior meeting with the administration and was agreed by the administration. However, it was not written anywhere so we will follow up with the Provost office to make sure the agreement is on paper. However, the administration had said no to the idea not to have student evaluations. They insist on the adoption of some kind of evaluation for 2020 F2.08.  Jennifer also assured that discussion from the related issues will be presented to the administration in the next week.  

• Paul Hemenway moved to adopt a resolution that “Lamar university and the administration consider methods of student success other than their course evals and SET ASIDE student evaluations for Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 given the number of students who are unexpectedly taught in hybrid or online courses.”  Pat seconded the motion.  The motion passed with 19 ayes, 5 nays, and 15 abstentions (including those who had to leave the meeting early). 
  

Adjournment: 

• The motion to adjourn was made by Paul Hemenway. Seconded by James Nelson. Passed. Meeting adjourned at 5:24 PM.