Meeting Minutes #261

Members Present: Francis Ryan, Francois Berthiaume, Alexander Pichugin, Sue Shapses, Thomas Figueira, Lisa Rodenburg, Ted Szatrowski, John Kolassa, Ralph Bowen, Anna Haley, David Kryscynski, Jeffrey Zahn, Jessey Choo, John Evans, Anne McPherson, Nikolaos Linardopoulos, Peter Morrone, Glenn Amatucci, Heather Pierce, Gary Rendsburg, Jennifer Shukaitis, Robert Boikess, Amy Jordan, Mariann Bischoff, Gerben Zylstra, Sanjib Bhuyan, Changlu Wang, Mei Ling Lo, Jack Bouchard, Evan Kleiman, Karen Thompson, Rafiq Huda, Crystal Akers, Thomas Davis, Marci Meixler, Alisa Belzer, Ellen Williams, Eleanor LaPointe, Linda Oshin, Julia Maxwell, Cara Cuite, Meenakshi Dutt, Ronnee Ades, Xenia Morin, Ana Pairet Vinas, Benjamin Paul, Jeremy Morgan, F. Javier Diez, Tuğrul Özel, Mary Trigg, Ronnee Ades, Peter Morrone, Kenneth McKeever

Non-Members Present: Francine Conway, New Brunswick Chancellor, Saundra Tomlinson-Clarke, New Brunswick Provost and EVPAA, Carolyn Moehling, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Jacqueline McGlynn, Director of Administration - NB Chancellor's Office, Martha Cotter, Parliamentarian

1. Call to Order

The meeting was called to order by Chair Haley on Friday, December 15, 2023, at 1:11 pm via Zoom.

2.  Approval of the Agenda

A motion to approve the agenda was made and seconded. Then Heather Pierce (HP) made a motion to suspend the rules and bypass the Executive Committee (EC) in order to bring directly to the Council floor a resolution just passed by the Faculty and Personnel Affairs Committee (FPAC) in support of Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu, an internationally renowned political economist who has been detained in Azerbaijan since July. We've learned from his family that his health is rapidly deteriorating, and he may not survive much longer. So, we would like to suspend the rules and get this resolution on the floor today and support his release.

To clarify matters, Chair Haley explained that there is an established practice of the Council that before resolutions passed out of a committee can be voted on by the full council, they are to go to the EC for review and approval. So what HP is requesting in this case is a change of the rules, which requires a two-thirds vote of those present for passage.

After a brief discussion, the vote was held and more than two-thirds of those present voted in favor of the motion. Thus the rules were suspended and the resolution in support of Dr. Ibadoghlu was added to the agenda under New Business. The amended agenda was then approved.

3.  Approval of the Minutes of the Meeting of October 27, 2023

The minutes were approved.

4. Chair's Report – Anna Haley

Chair Haley welcomed new members and noted that we are currently at 74 out of a possible 85 members and that she is still working, largely with SAS, to get the rest filled in. She then presented the following updates and announcements.

  • She is going to try to offer. sometime in January, a belated new member orientation that anyone can join , whether they're brand new, kind of newish, or even old; time to be determined. It’ll last about an hour and will be recorded so that folks can watch it if they can’t be there.
  • She implored everyone who has not yet affiliated with a committee to please do so because resolutions come from committees and are one of the absolutely key ways that this Council does its work and advises, in turn, the governance of the university. So please, please, if you have not yet done so, let the Chair and Vice Chair know which committee you would like to work with and then engage with that committee.
  • We wrapped up the faculty priority issue survey, which was designed to get a sense of what those we represent are most concerned about. There were 966 respondents, yielding somewhere between a 45% and 48% response rate, which is pretty decent these days. Of the respondents, 11% were lecturers, 28% were NTTs on the teaching practice and clinical track, 5% were NTTs on the research track, 11% were pre-tenured, and 44% were tenured faculty, who were clearly overrepresented. Major concerns identified were implementation and enforcement of negotiated AAUP contracts, faculty input into shared governance, addressing fringe benefit rates, course scheduling, and addressing contractual pay raises charged to current research grants. These prioritized concerns, together with issues on which the Chancellor seeks Council input will help to shape our work this year and probably beyond.
  • Along with Rutgers AAUP, the NBFC has invited Yeshiva University Professor Emerita Ellen Schrecker to deliver a zoom talk in late January or early February. She is a former editor of the American Association of University Professors magazine Academe and a prolific author on social movements, political repression, and higher education. She's written many, many books, the latest of which, published by U of Chicago Press, is entitled The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. She has graciously offered to come to talk to us about the historical context of academic freedom struggles within higher education. Chair Haley has asked committee co-chairs and now asks other members to weigh in if you have thoughts about best times for this in terms of days of week and times of day. We are tentatively targeting a Wednesday or a Thursday evening again in late January or early February for that, and we will get more information out about the event to you and ask you to publicize it  among the folks you represent in your departments,

5. Panel Discussion on Teaching - Saundra Tomlinson-Clarke, Provost and EVPAA, Carolyn Moehling, Vice Provost for     Undergraduate Education  

Chair Haley introduced Saundra Tomlinson-Clarke and Carolyn Moehling and thanked them for coming to share some quick thoughts about teaching, and then to engage with us in a conversation about teaching.

Brief Presentation

Provost Tomlinson-Clarke began the presentation by saying she was very delighted to be here with a focus on teaching and noted the importance of teaching in the academic master plan, in which teaching is in each of the four pillars, but particularly scholarly leadership. She further said that we're thinking about teaching as a way of really affecting student success by connecting teaching what our students learn, what opportunities they have, and pathways to their success. It's not only what's being taught but how it's being taught. So we're really wanting to provide an infrastructure for inclusive teaching. And we're really excited about some of what is rolling out in terms of the implementation of the Academic Master Plan.

VP Moehling then presented a brief overview of the teaching support programs and services currently provided or planned by the Provost’s Office.

  • The big news is that we are starting an Institute for Teaching, Learning, and Inclusive Pedagogy (tentative title), and this came directly from what we learned from a survey conducted by the New Brunswick Faculty Council.  The aspiration for the institute is to become a leader internally through inclusive and innovative teaching research and practices, with the ultimate goal to become a national leader among institutions with teaching centers.
  • Planned programs and services of the Institute include:
    • Support for instructors at all career stages
    • Provide a physical space or spaces designed for collaboration, experimentation, and community-building
    • Provide a centralized website with a shared calendar detailing all services and programs
    • Support the implementation of new and emerging practices and tools through programs, consultations, and workshops
    • Provide orientation for new instructors and offer continued support
    • Conduct and support research on the innovation in teaching and learning. 
  • Some of the ways in which the Provost’s Office currently supports teaching and learning include:
    • Provost’s Teaching Fellows
    • Educational Developers’ Network
    • Active Learning Community
    • Student Success Steering Committee
  • Finally, the Provost’s Office also provides support to a number of other programs supporting student learning including the learning centers, disability services, and academic support for student athletes.

Discussion Period

A number of members had questions or comments concerning the presentation or teaching more generally.

  • Anne McPherson (she/her) noted that a lot of the trainings that the new institute is planning to offer feel like trainings that she has already availed herself of through otear. She would like to know what the differences are and is concerned that redundancies will be created. Carolyn Moehling responded that the plan is to leverage what's already being offered on campus by bringing the various offerings together, making them more widely available, coordinating them, and filling in gaps without creating redundancies.
  • Heather Pierce complained that all the goals about student learning and students meeting learning goals seem to be at direct odds with what's actually happening on the ground for the spring semester; namely, that a sizeable number of long-time, dedicated lecturers have lost their appointments while the workloads of NTTs have been increased without any increase in remuneration. Provost Tomlinson-Clarke responded that she would definitely look into this matter to make sure that what Heather suggested is not what's happening. 
  • Xenia Morin said that she didn't see micro badging integrated into our professional development for teachers or for lecturers and others and asked Carolyn Moehling if she would you like to comment on how micro badging and teacher training and support may come together. VP Moehling responded that we have just started our New Brunswick process for programs to establish digital badges this semester and most of the applications so far have been for student badges. She does anticipate that badges might be part of what the new institute might offer for faculty who complete different kinds of programs. Explanatory note: Digital badges are just digital manifestations that the recipient has completed a particular set of activities or tasks or developed certain skills. Unlike the old paper certificates that you could hang on your wall, a digital badge is a digital icon that you could put in your Linkedin account or on your email signature line. It has the advantage that when someone clicks on it they actually go to a site that explains exactly what earning the badge means.
  • Ellen Williams described her proposal, included in the NBFC feedback on Discovery Advantage, to increase experiential learning opportunities for students by means of a clearer integration of on campus teaching and extension teaching.  This would require someone in administration compiling a directory of on campus faculty who are interested in learning about community-based active learning opportunities and sending those faculty a list of extension faculty providing such opportunities in all 21 NJ counties. Rutgers Extension division has a long history of of providing active learning opportunities. We have the mechanism for doing much more of this; all we need is the infrastructure. Carolyn Moehling thanked Ellen and responded that it’s a great suggestion.
  • Tugrul Ozel complained that we have now been using the centralized Course Atlas scheduling system for a number of years and don’t see any significant benefits from using it. Instead, we see more and more scheduling problems that have created a chaotic situation, in his opinion. He therefore asked the Chancellor or the Provost or the Vice Provost to tell us what solid benefits we have achieved using this system and what can be done to make it work better. Carolyn Moehling responded that we know there are continued concerns about the impact of Course Atlas and are working on thinking through how best to evaluate the impact. She added that there is at least one benefit to using Course Atlas; namely, that we are using our classrooms in a way that is more reflective of a matching of size and need than we had been doing before. Because of that, there is more opportunity for departments to launch new classes or get larger classrooms for classes that have increased enrollments. So in that respect, if you look at before and after Course Atlas, you will see that we have a better matching of class size to classroom capacity.
  • Ted Szatrowski suggested that there needs to be more conversations about teaching and sharing of information among colleagues at a very local level as well as on the campus level and that the Provost’s Office should encourage such local conversations and sharing. At the opposite extreme, he also suggested that we might want to have conversations about teaching with folks at Camden and Newark to see if we could learn something from them. Carolyn Moehling responded that she agrees with Ted and noted that one of the goals of the institute is to build community among instructors to share information and to have a place where we can talk about teaching. 

6.  Administrative Report – Chancellor Francine Conway

Chancellor Conway began by thanking Saundra and Carolyn for their presentation, thanking NBFC members for their comments, and noting that she is encouraged by the fact that we are talking and collaborating and sharing information and will continue to do so, as she meets regularly with Anna to listen and learn about matters that are of importance to the faculty. She then made a number of points concerning the current state of the campus community (edited for brevity).

  • There is a lot going on the campus. On the one hand, there's a sort of excitement around the academic master plan and the processes and projects and things that are coming out of it. But then, on the other hand, we're all struggling with or grappling with post COVID realities.
  • Her primary concern is about our community and how to hold it together. There are a lot of folks hurting whether they're impacted directly or indirectly by what's been happening. Both COVID and the current crisis in the Middle East seem to have left some faculty, staff, and students on both sides of the issues feeling betrayed by their institution.
  • We have very real challenges to meet. We need to find a way to make and maintain a space where academic freedom continues to be a value we embrace but, at the same time, to not be hateful or do unnecessary damage to others. We have a responsibility to provide an environment in which students can learn free of discrimination of any sort. But how to do balance that with academic freedom? With freedom of speech? 
  • The Chancellor has issued an action plan developed by experts on such matters, but it is by no means a foolproof plan and she welcomes comments, suggestions, and advice on the plan and on how to hold the community together.

Faculty Comments and Questions

  • Tugrul Ozel said that we had lots of community-related problems last spring, which we’re still trying to recover from. What happened in the world in October put extra problems on top of what we already had. So he suggested that maybe we can focus on making our community better and resolve our differences before we tackle trying to solve the conflicts around the world. Chancellor Conway responded that it’s too late for that. The world’s conflicts are here in our backyard and there’s nothing we can do to avoid them.
  • Tom Figueira made two important points with which the Chancellor fully agreed. (1) There needs to be a clear, well-noted, and well-publicized boundary between free speech on one hand, and harassment, disruptive activities, etc. on the other hand. (2) It appears that students unable to cope with their responsibilities due to serious personal, intellectual, psychological, and even perhaps psychiatric problems, are particularly prone to engage in serious disruptive behavior.
  • Alisa Belzer suggested that one way to help defuse the situation would be to teach students how to talk constructively across differences, a skill that most of our students probably lack. In the past at least, many universities taught students this skill via teach ins, workshops, etc. Chancellor Conway responded that while she agrees that talking across differences can be very effective under the right circumstances, she believes that emotions are too raw now to try this approach. One of the things that we did look into earlier when this crisis started was the opportunity to have conversations across groups, but the experts here at Rutgers who have worked in these areas felt that it would be very destructive to bring people together when emotions were so raw and fraught, and that there needs to be a cooling down period, a period of trust building before having those productive conversations.
  • Ted Szatrowski is concerned that he is a white male who was economically privileged as he grew up, but teaches a diverse group of students, about whom he knows very little outside of their performance in his course and has little perspective on their lives.  He wories that this lack of perspective will lead him to give students inappropriate advice if they come to him for help, Can the university help him educate himself?

 7. Committee Reports

Student Affairs – Crystal Akers and Ana Pairet vinas, Co-Chairs 

Crystal Akers noted that many more members were present than we've historically had before, and so she wanted to thank everyone who was able to attend today for being there and for being part of the great discussion that we had. The committee did the following:

  • Reviewed the Committee response to the Discovery Advantage.
  • Discussed Ellen Williams’ proposal for integration of on campus and Extension teaching. 
  • Considered possible charges for the year, including
    • Issues related to free speech
    • Course Atlas and accountability
    • Cost of materials to students

The committee is going to put together a Google Doc to kind of flesh out some of these ideas and figure out where they want to invest their time and effort moving forward.

Faculty and Personnel Affairs – Francois Berthiaume and Heather Pierce, Co-Chairs

There were nine members present and the committee discussed the following: 

  • The resolution on the scholar jailed in Azerbaijan which will be voted on under New Business.
  • Two continuing charges related to departmental and school procedures, as they are found in bylaws and other ways of doing things.
  • How lecturers are incorporated into departmental structure and decision making.
  • Term Limits for department chairs.
  • Trends in the scheduling of classes which are leading to increased class sizes and enrollments and fewer classes being offered.
  • How to better equip faculties to support students with disabilities, especially when classes are getting larger and larger.
  • Possibly putting more weight on community service.

The committee is going to divide up the work among its members, particularly the work of finding and analyzing bylaws, but it may eventually need to enlist the help of other NBFC members.

Comments from Ted Szatrowski   I was interested in the issue of term limits for chairs, so I spent a couple of hours and pretty much reviewed online almost all of the Rutgers School bylaws and found that only Newark Arts and Sciences had a limitation, and it could be overridden with a two-thirds vote. I also have some information about weights for community service contributions that I will send you if you’re interested.

Comment from Ellen Williams:  I want to let you all know that we have a new disability studies minor here at Rutgers and we have an interdisciplinary faculty & staff working group. I'm excited to be part of the arts and disabilities component.

Academic Affairs – Ted Szatrowski, Chair

The committee discussed the following:

  • Course Atlas
  • Test Optional Admissions

Bob Boikess is going to write a resolution on the use of SAT and GRE.

Athletic Affairs – Kenneth McKeever, Chair

  • The Committee continued its investigation of the benefits Rutgers faculty actually receive from our membership in the Big10 Academic Alliance. 
  • Chair McKeever discovered one very substantial benefit; namely that the Alliance has signed a contract with Elzevir that eliminates both open access charges and page charges.

Comment from Tom Figueira: I happened to participate in, and was involved with the planning though Corey Brennan, who was the leader of the first and last pan, a Big10 conference in classical literature. While we did receive some financial support within Rutgers and we did receive some support from two institutions that we have close relations with, I have to say that the whole thing was a kind of a resounding dud.

Budget, Planing, & Infrastructure – Thomas Figueira, Chair

The following presents an update on recent activities of the Committee:

  • Our latest resolution, which deals with faculty dining, is in the Chat: it will go to the EC next. And I will note that the petition of Busch faculty, which we echoed and supported in the Council, does seem to have had the result of the reopening of that dining facility, and we hope to build on that. Take a look at the resolution and if you have any comments and questions and emendations please email me and we'll try to accommodate them.
  • Through Chancellor Conway's intervention, we had previously achieved the success of getting Rutgers marketplace material once more permissibly sent to the homes of faculty members.
  • Another piece of business we discussed was the financial structure of the travel program about which we were able, again through the help of Chancellor Conway, to address some queries to VP Gower. We got some answers which seem to be rather confusing and opaque in several areas. We're in the process of getting those matters clarified. 
  • Under new committee business, we looked at the preliminary results of the priority issues survey, and realized that many, many faculty members are concerned about the administration’s failure to carry out contractual agreements, especially in the area of remuneration for graduate students and postdocs supported on external grants. We had a discussion, you remember, in the last Council meeting, in which we heard a rather different view of the nature of the contract than many who had negotiated it, in fact hold. And so we're wondering whether we need to have a resolution, perhaps jointly with other committees, of this council, that would go to the full Council to support the generally accepted faculty understanding of the contract with respect to support of graduate students and postdocs supported on faculty research grants.

Question : Tugrul Ozel recalled that when he was Chair, FPAC requested information about RCM from Brian Valentine. How much progress have you been able to make learning about RCM?

FPAC Chair Figueira responded that you may remember that I summed up the interaction with Brian as being both a fruitful one, and one in which we received various guarantees Then came an utterly frustrating outcome, which was that the most important and most of the other accommodations were never carried through. The most important one, I thought, was a committee that would deal with appeals of the cancelation of funding for interdisciplinary work for RCM reasons.

Chair Figueira added that these matters are very much before the Budget and Finance Committee in the Senate, where there is general and genuine disturbance about the failure of the Administration to make significant changes to RCM.  Along with the merger of the medical schools in the area, he thinks this is a kind of denial of shared governance.

8. Old Business

Two items of old business, Course Atlas and Rutgers test-optional status, can be dispensed with quickly for the moment because both matters are already on the radar for consideration by committees. The Test-optional admissions is being considered by Academic Affairs while several committees are looking at Course Atlas. 

Course Atlas is on our radar because the faculty priority issues survey showed a great deal of faculty unhappiness with its use. Test-optional admissions is being considered because the Chancellor has requested our advice on the matter and neither the NBFC nor any of its committees have ever passed a resolution on test-optionality and we thus have no official position on the matter.

The third item of old business is an update on the status of a resolution passed by the Council a couple years ago, which asked the Administration to establish the post of Rutgers Poet Laureate.  At the Chair's request, Vice Chair Francois Berthiaume  presented the following update. 

The effort to establish a poet laureate was spearheaded by Martin Gliserman, who is no longer a member of the Faculty Council but still a Rutgers faculty member (in the English department). The resolution supporting the establishment of the award was passed on September 17, 2021 and sent to the Chancellor, who welcomed the idea and eventually turned the matter over to the Provost and EVPAA Saundra Tomlinson-Clarke.  It took a little bit of time for things to get rolling in terms of an action plan, but we now have a task force, convened by Jason Geary, Dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts and also Senior Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives. The goals of the task force are:

  • Discus potential models and scope of the award
  • Devise implementation strategy

The proposed timeline is as follows:

  • Identify task force members by end of 2023.
  • Publicize process during spring 2024.
  • Select inaugural lecturer by beginning of 2024-2025 academic year.

VP Geary would like to have a task force of 6 to 8 members and reached out to Vice Chair Berthiaume to request volunteers from the Faculty Council.  If you are interested. please email the Faculty Council at nbfc@rutgers.edu to that effect or if you want, just put it in the Chat.

Several of those present expressed their displeasure at the choice of Dean and Vice Provost Geary to lead the task force and others were in line to speak when Chair Haley had to cut off debate in order to leave time for consideration of the resolution in support of Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu. She took the names of the 20 people who still wanted to speak and said they would have the opportunity to express their views in another venue.

9.  New Business

The Council then considered the resolution in support of Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu.  FPAC Chair Berthiaume moved the resolution, which did not require a second. After a brief discussion, the vote, which required only a simple majority for passage, was held.  The resolution passed with a vote of 33 in favor, none opposed, and 4 abstentions.

10. Adjournment

 Chair Haley adjourned the meeting at 3:00 pm

Respectfully submitted,

Martha Cotter, Parliamentarian and Francois Berthiaume, Vice Chair