September 2023

September 2023

September 2023

UCCS Faculty Representative Assembly Meeting

Friday September 8, 2023

Attendance: Lynn Gates, Monica Yoo, Jena McCollum, Jon Caudill, Matthew Jabaily, Rosely Conz, David Moon, Fernando Feliu-Moggi, Esther Lamidi, Jennifer Zohn, Karin Larkin, Elisa Thompson, Michael Kisley, Mary Martinez, Kyle Rogalla, Aaron Corcoran, Kevin Laudner, Solveig Olsen, Lei Zhang, Robin Kempf, Camilla Troudt, Martin Key, Haleh Abghari, Suzanne Cook, Suman Lakkakula, Ron Martella, Assma Sawani, Emily Mooney, Nicholas Tapia-Fuselier, Jessi Smith, Margaret Harris, Claire Rau, David Anderson, Norah Mazel, Darshika G. Perera, Joel Tonyan, Jennifer Sobanet, Nancy Marchand-Martella, Kathy Kaoudis, Kristi McCann, Evan, Karen DeVries, Leslie Tekamp, Evan Taparata, Dylan Harris, Gordon Stringer, George Rus, Larua Austin-Eurich, Ilaheva Tuaone, Susan Taylor, Marek Grabowski, Jian Ma, Eric Billmeyer

Call to Order / Approval of Minutes

Motion to approve the minutes from April 2023 and May 2023 meeting by Karin Larkin

Seconded by Joel Tonyan

 

Reports of Visitors:

Jennifer Sobanet, Interim Chancellor

First, I just wanted to say thank you, Monica and Minette and Joel and the Executive Committee for the incredibly warm welcome that you've given to me since I started on July the 1st. And I have so enjoyed working with all of you and look forward to meeting everybody on the Faculty assembly. So thank you for inviting me into this meeting. I just wanted to give you a little bit about me, I have been part of the CU family for the past seven years and was at CU Denver and now and in the interim chancellor role at UCCS.

One thing I would love for you all to know about me is that my role at CU Denver was being the historian. I had been there for so long and we had gone through so much change in such a different group of leaders that I just wanted you all to understand that as I come into this role at UCCS, I've played the hat of historian for a very long time. And so I have a lot of respect and honor for the history of UCCS and all of the decisions that have been made in the past by past leaders and past groups. So as I embark on this time as you're interim chancellor, please know that I'm looking at things from the perspective of understanding history of listening to people of understanding. So just wanted to give you that piece of information about me and that's why

I'm meeting with all of the colleges and all of the divisions.
And Nancy and I are doing, excuse me, some of those tours together across campus as a way for me to be able to meet people and learn what's important to the campus. It's a way that I'll be spending a lot of my time this semester. I've already been out with Letters of Arts and Sciences and student affairs, so making my way through of meeting everybody.

Since we're coming off of a Regent meeting, I thought I'd give you the news. Enrollment is up .3%. We were predicting it would be down .1%, so this is even the little bit better than what we were predicting. After five years of declining enrollment, we did explain to the Board of Regents that that the majority of that growth is coming from three main areas. An increase in our graduate students have 25% first time full time students of increase of 3.8% and retention. So that's just fall to 1st year to 2nd year, retention is up 1.9%. We're actually seeing declines in transfer students and declines in continuing students. So those are areas, you know, persistence of our students is going to be an incredibly important topic that we're going to be talking about I'm sure all year, but also we'll need to be talking about in the years to come. Transfer students is something that obviously is happening because of declines in Community College students to begin with. But they're turning around, so hopefully we can do some work also to turn our transfer student population around.

Another topic that's hot off the presses is the system office has just released information that we need to follow around the Supreme Court decision around affirmative action that happened back in June. They just published a non-privileged memo in CU connections this morning, so to make sure you read so you connections today as it is basically restating that the decision made by the Supreme Court is  very clear that we cannot use race as a factor in our admissions decisions. However, this doesn't impact our undergraduate admissions because we haven't been using that for a very long time across the entire CU system. Instead there might be pockets of grad programs that we might need to address, and that's something that I know that Nancy is working with the Deans on, and we were given very specific guidelines from the system office about how we will handle that in our graduate programs.

This is primarily an issue at Anschutz Medical Campus and some graduate programs that Boulder, Bender and Springs, so we'll have to do a little bit of work there.
But I also want to just let you know that what was reinforced today at the Board meeting is how much the system and all of the campuses celebrate the diversity of CU and of Colorado and honor our history and our roots and will continue to do the work of diversity, equity and inclusion that we are permitted to do and that this Supreme Court decision doesn't change any of that.

So what we want to make sure is that Colorado and all of the potential students that would want to come to one of the University of Colorado campuses knows that we are continuing to do our DEI work and want to have everybody feel included at every campus at the University of Colorado, they actually called out our Council on inclusive belonging and the work that we do in our in our pre collegiate programs as an example that UCCS is giving of how we are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The other thing that was announced that I thought you all would be really interested in hearing about is there's been a lot of discussion at the Board level, specifically in the University Affairs Committee around AI and how are we adapting to this new world of chat, GPT and other changes that are happening, and how we're embracing that.

So there was a big discussion of that at the Board meeting today and has been in the University affairs meeting that I know Nancy, I'm attends and and will be updating you all on, but I thought it was they were asking us about what discussions are happening on campus around AI.

 

Nancy Marchand-Martella, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

We now have two brand new departments, which are both in LAS. TCID the Technical Communication and Information Design program that is now moved to a department and the Women in Ethnic Studies program has now been elevated to a department.
And so I just wanted to thank all those folks who did a lot of last minute work to get this on the agenda.

A quick update I did mention at the town hall about a faculty relations manager.
We just hired Mary Cousins Reed who will be working part time in the Provost Office.
She will be looking at implementing efforts in the area of mediation. Mary Cousins Reed will work with the Faculty Assembly grievance committee to get this grievance policy over the wire and for us to be able to have this on our campus.

We are continuing conversations about compensation. A little exploration on what the other campuses are doing and so more to come on that one, but we are of course having conversations related to that.
We are looking at working titles. That's APS 5060. We will be doing a survey so that we can get the opinions if individuals related to the “I” part of IRC, should have titled differences related to those with a terminal degree? For example, having a doctorate or a terminal degree moving into the teaching, assistant, associate and full realm, and with the instructors having the current configuration. It's a question we want to gather data about and so I am happy that IRC faculty will be a part of fine tuning this survey.

Jenny Russell and I are will get the survey out and we'll share the results with all of you.
So I'm of course happy that we've got good collaboration there and we are continuing our conversations around differentiated workload. AT22 teaching load for all of our new faculty related to up through the comprehensive review year for our tenure track faculty, and so this is 1 where I've actually put it on as a personal goal where I'm evaluated.
I like to put my feet to the fire and so I'm evaluated on getting this one over the wire.

 

Kathy Kaoudis, Vice Chancellor for Administration and Finance

I'm excited to announce that our energy performance contract was approved and the consent agenda that came through from the Regents Finance Committee. So what does this mean for all of you? There are over 40 projects. The total of all of these energy improvement projects is about 17 and a half million is what the energy consultant estimated. The other thing that was approved in the consent agenda was an increase in our available line of credit from system treasury to $15 million.
And so rather than going and getting financing for $17.5 Million what we figured out is if we are smart about how we use that line of credit, we can time the investment in these projects and it will save us about $3.5Million dollars by using treasury financing rather than going out and doing bonds or a bank loan or something else for $17.5 Million which is super good news.

What that means for all of you is a lot of the projects that are in that plan are related to deferred maintenance, on heating, ventilation, and cooling projects.
So where our chillers and our boilers are dying because they're old, we will be able to time those projects and use that money to replace them and hopefully have fewer outages.

The other thing that I wanted to update you all on is our budget model. The budget redesign team, led by our amazing Provost Nancy Marshawn Martella, over the summer worked on the budget model and really identified that we have some data cleanup that we need to do.

So, when interim Chancellor Sobanet talked about our enrollment forecast, one of the things we learned was that enrollment management had one number, Institutional Research had another number, budget was pulling a report that had a different number, and the bursar's office had a different number.
Through the process of reconciliation, we were able to figure out why the numbers were different and come forward with a number that we really feel good about of 10,735.

But it identified this problem with the quality of our data.

The budget redesign team is recommending that we spend the next year really focusing on our data and making sure that our data going into our budget model is good data. It's transparent and it's clean so that one, we do run that data through the model, we'll get good results and we'll be confident in what those results are because we will know we started out with the with the right numbers.
We want to hear your feedback on a proposed budget model cost.

 

Reports of Officers:

  1. Report of the President – Monica Yoo
    1. Report sent out prior to the meeting

  • The new chair’s hope is that we'll be looking more closely at what is taking place for IRC faculty across the campuses.
  • System is looking to design some kind of survey to get their pulse on that.
  • Another thing that faculty council has been working on is the revision of the bylaws and the Constitution. I know there's still some cleanup going on, so I don't think that's quite ready to be out there yet, but that will be forthcoming this year.
  • I've been working closely with the Staff Association President already. We as faculty assembly are looking to Co-sponsor some more faculty and staff collaboration, so I think that'll be pretty neat.
    One hope is that we will have a social mixer that will take place with faculty and staff. So when you see those announcements come out, please join.
  • The other project that we have in mind is having some kind of campus related service opportunity and that staff, faculty and students will come together on this and we'll do something jointly.
  • If you have any ideas especially for this service opportunity, let us know, because I think we're just starting to think about what we might want to do for that this spring.
  • In my report I included a number of policy related updates and David Weiss definitely provided even more detail which was wonderful.
  • I also wanted to note that the policy 100-022, the information security for research compliance, that that garnered a lot of feedback and input.
  • I think that the concerns regarding the class side research section, in particular I have been and will be addressed members of the cabinet, including Jessi and Nancy, have taken a closer look and are making recommendations and the policy will be back out for review, so that will be forthcoming when that comes up again, please do take a close look on your feedback would be greatly appreciated when it comes out.
  • I also noted that I want to note that Nancy had talked about APS 5060 a little bit and then when we get to the reports, I think Laura is going to present about that policy a little bit in relation to IRC and how it might impact IRC.
  • We still need people to join committees so.
    Definitely think about if you know someone who might be interested or if you yourself are interested in any of these committees. Please let us know we still need a teaching and learning representative on faculty assembly to replace someone who is no longer here.
  • The grievance committee is newly forming and is looking for members too.
  • We do need a personnel and benefits chair. We also still need from someone from LAS particularly a social science person.
  • We need someone on the Communications committee and we also need someone on the LGBTQIA, so still some vacancies still.
  • The El Tamar Institute for Innovation and Commercialization an EPIC facilitates the early development of new ideas and products.
    “We believe that connecting academia with the business community and with the local, state and federal government will provide short and long term benefits to Colorado Springs and surrounding area. Epic operates as a mediation point. Establish a relationship among high tech companies, entrepreneurs, community leaders and the University of Colorado, as well as the El Pomar Foundation.”
    So if you think you'd like to serve on that seven year review committee, that would be great. We need some faculty assembly representation.
  • The Women's Committee needs representation from the College of Business and KFL.
  • If you are a committee chair, please attach a word, doc or PDF when you send in your report.

  1. Report of the President-Elect – Joel Tonyan
    1. No report.
  2. Report of the Past-President – Minette Church
    1. No report.

 

Committee Reports

    1. Instructional, Research, & Clinical Faculty Committee
      • Report on APS 5060
      • This is more than working titles, these are our official titles and HR titles.
      • This is speaking specifically to the instructional portion of our IRC.
      •  We have now the third tier promotion which was exciting to get done last year and have it's great to see a lot of titles as principal instructor now.
      • Currently we just have the instructor, senior instructor, and principal instructor on campus.
      • We were talking about developing working titles for instructors and we were talking about using teaching Professor as working titles. Well, it turns out that teaching professor track is a track. That was created an included with APS 5060, so you can see it comes.
      • Policy is that for teaching professors, they should have a terminal degree appropriate to their field or equivalent experience.
      • We need to rework this survey that we were provided with and we want to do that from the IRC Committee 1st and then we will survey and I believe that the same time that tenure track would have an interest in this with the idea that in the teaching professor ranks, there's the opportunity to vary workload to include research.
      •    I believe some variance in salary between instructor and then teaching professor rank.
      •    What's the advantage of having that title other than it sounds better?
        1. It is still in flux depending on what can be afforded.
    2. Committee for Misconduct in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities Report
    3. No Unfinished Business

 

Visitors Reports

  1. Mark Ferguson – AVC for Campus Planning and Facilities Management
  2. Chris Valentine – Marketing
    1. Provided an update on the new marketing campaign that is being released.
  3. TAAP Q&A – Larry Lee, Paul Deniston, & Jesse Gilbert
    1. TAAP Questions
    2. TAAP Communications

 

 

Motion to Adjourn

Laura Austin-Eurich motioned to adjourn.

Claire Rau and Karen Larkin both seconded.

Meeting adjourned at 1:55 pm.