FAEC Minutes Sept 23, 2020

FAEC MINUTES 9/23/2020 

Present: Ed Shannon  (HGS), Naseem Choudhury (President), Katie Cohen (Library), Donna Flynn (Councilor-at-Large under 11), Scott Frees (TAS), Kim Lorber (Secretary), Lisa Lutter, (CA), Thierry Rakotbe-Joel (ASB), Mihaela Serban (SSHS),  Ashwani Vasishth (Councilor-at-Large over 11)

Guests: Virginia Galdieri (Assistant Vice President of Human Resources; HR), Janet Faber (Assistant Director, Employee Relations & Faculty Services (AFT; HR)

Vote to begin meeting to order at 10:04am.

Minutes Approval: The 9/9/20 minutes were approved. One abstention. The 9/16/20 minutes were approved.

Councilor-at-Large Over 11: We have two candidates. The vote will go out on Monday. A quorum will require a minimum of 50 votes. The candidates are: Bonnie Blake and Alexandre Olbrecht.

As a future discussion:  The roles of the Councilors at large needs to be defined. Should these be tenured/untenured, other time breakdowns (less than 15 years and over), etc.

President’s Council: The President’s Committee On Campus Sustainability (PCCS)- Dr. Ashwani Vasishth has been the chair. Dr. Vasishth was notified by President Mercer he would no longer be chair. Faculty have a unique opportunity to push for more sustainability practices than Facilities or another campus group due to job security. Faculty on PCCS believe it is essential to have a faculty chair.  Dr. Vasishth asked that FA support having a faculty member as the chair of this and be in charge of the committee? FAEC feedback was invited. Some examples are below:

• An example was given about recycling bound journals from the library. Facilities said it was too expensive to remove the bindings for recycling. Dr. Vasishth asked for a few students to be hired and very inexpensively to prepare the volumes for recycling. This could have been a press opportunity showing student volunteers doing this to maintain our sustainability mission.
• Sustainable and beneficial trees should be planted as recommended by the committee; instead, others have been planted, which die, requiring reinvestment. Expertise about sustainability should be utilized.
• The FA President and Vice President will ask President Mercer to consider during his last year to not make these changes before a new president is installed in less than a year. What are the bylaws, how are decisions made for presidential committees?
• Can the PCCS be moved from under the President as sustainability issues have changed since it was established and perhaps another body on campus can do more? The committee can seek members with expertise from all campus bodies and address this under FA, for example.

Good News:

• Pre-requisites: The pre-requisite issue is being resolved by the Registrar regarding students being dropped from courses due to pre-requisite courses not having been completed or passed. This semester will be a trial period following the recommendations of TAS. The goal is to remove from faculty the need to find out who was missing the pre-req and should be in their class.
  
• ITS immediate issues: Contact your dean, who will contact Rob, who will dispatch immediate assistance. This means the dean would need to give their cell numbers to all faculty and adjuncts in their units.
  

SGA: Would like information on how to access help for mental health issues included in all syllabi. ARC is in discussion with SGA regarding this.

Spring Schedule:  The Provost is finalizing the spring schedule. There are 200 live classes and a variety of formats will be used for the others.

Spring Break: It is possible spring break may be cancelled this year to allow faculty to have more time to prep for the spring during a longer winter break while also minimizing the risk of students leaving campus for spring break and bringing COVID-19 back upon return.

ITS Issues: Assistant Dean Kathy Burke has been advocating with ITS for assistance in the Respondus exam process. For the moment, Jefferson Sampson will be available by phone for the indefinite future. A shortage of student assistants (due to student job budget cuts) has resulted in great delays and the needs for more immediate response opportunities. There is a proposal to divide help desk requests into urgent and non-urgent. Is there a hotline number we can call if something is happening in class and must be addressed immediately? Contact your dean for the immediate future regarding urgent ITS needs (such as in-class tech issues).

HR Report by Virginia Galdieri and Janet Faber:

Promotion Process: All of the binders have been scanned to make the process electronic. Candidates’ can give their final approval of their binders by the end of day tomorrow; at least 7 of 9 have approved.

Spring 2020 Promotion Schedule: 

• Candidates complete their electronic application by close of business tomorrow.
• Committee reviews 9 applications through 9/29 and will be asked to meet on 9/30.
• Then allow candidates to submit additional information.

Virginia will send an email to see if this schedule is viable. It is hard to fit another committee into the fall schedule: Sabbatical, Tenure, FDF are already taking up most Wednesday meeting slots. Since we are working remotely, it may be possible to have meetings on other days at other times.

Once the committee begins, candidates cannot add further information to their application packets.

10/14 or 10/15 might be the deadline for adding anything to the tenure packages.

Virginia will ask if the tenure committee can have an extension. The HR calendar is coordinated with others on campus. Perhaps working backwards from the final deadline will provide more time than the 9/29 deadline for the Promotions Committee from the last academic year. The committee will be solicited.

Faculty Handbook: Can this be revised this academic year? In our digital world, much is not addressed in the handbook. Units function differently.

• A timeline is needed. The last Faculty Assembly meeting will be in April, at which we would vote. A final draft received by February or March would be very helpful.
• The promotions section is almost ready for the committee to review.
• There should be guidelines about digital binders and remote committee meetings.
• It is planned to reconvene the faculty handbook task force by the middle of October.

Faculty Handbook Concerns: 

• Streamlining rules for how to conduct promotion and other votes; in some schools one can vote for oneself. In other units, the candidate leaves the room and cannot vote in support of their own application. If someone has a partner in a unit, should they stay in the room while their significant other is being discussed? The Faculty Handbook is silent regarding these and other matters.
• Guidelines for applications for promotions to different ranks are unclear or missing in the handbook. Some details are in the checklist but not in the handbook. If the checklist is not known to an applicant, their handbook may be missing peer observations or something else. This compromises their application due to the gaps in the handbook.

Meeting adjourned at 11:57am.

Categories: FAEC MEETING MINUTES 2020, RAMAPO FAEC, Uncategorized