Minutes for Restructuring Conversation Team

26 February 2001

1:00 Serna Conference Roomn

Present:  Terry Heiner,  Greg Rolfe, Mike Metcalf, Linda Baldwin, Michael Mann, Helen Sandoval, Katherine Woodard, Faye VoWell

Absent:  Bertha Benavidez, Jack Ellis

The team looked again at the draft restructuring plan proposed by Faye and discussed what was missing or unclear.  The discussion of lab times needs to be clarified to make it obvious that labs would continue with their current structure.

The plan needs to account for the number of adjuncts a department has as Well as the number of GAs and work study students.

There was a wide ranging discussion of the role of adjuncts.  With the large number of adjuncts, We need some structure that would ensure quality in the delivery of instruction and give adjuncts the support that they need.  We discussed the possibility of and Adjunct Coordinator who would do administrative functions of hiring.  Faculty  or chairs still need to be involved in the selection of adjuncts (vetting of credentials), in looking at student evaluations and in observation of classes.  We need a formal system of dealing with adjuncts to include descriptions of who decides they are qualified to teach, who assigns them to certain classes, who decides which classes need to be offered when (a course schedule), who trains them, supervises them, evaluates them, who looks at the grade distribution and discusses whether it is out of line with instruction by full time faculty.  We could have each semester an adjunct inservice day.  We could actively recruit and set up an adjunct faculty credential bank.

We also spent quite a bit of time discussing the current committee structure at WNMU and ways to streamline it.  We began with the formulation that faculty say they are on too many committees.  No one wants to volunteer to chair committees.  No one likes to attend meetings.  Yet many of the committees are created by faculty .  Why do we have so many of  them?  Terry Heiner described a kind of ebb and flow process of committees that he has seen in his time at Western.  He said that committees have tended to grow in number until they seem overwhelming and then the President of the Faculty Senate will prune them back.  Later they begin to increase again. 

Suggestions included looking at the current committees to ascertain whether any could be combined or done away with.  We might look at the number of times committees meet  and see if they could meet less often.  We could look at the membership and reduce the number of people on committees.  If fewer people Were on a committee, the meetings would be easier to schedule.  If people served on fewer committees, they could give more quality service.  We could also look at how we conduct committee meetings.  If 90% of a meeting is informational and 10% is action oriented, why not disseminate the information beforehand via email or hard copy and reserve the meeting time for action.  We could do a workshop for committee chairs early in the fall semester on how to conduct effective meetings.

We discussed how to surface this issue at Faculty Senate and decided that the faculty on the team would draft a note to send to Gwen Cassel.

Linda Baldwin reported that the faculty of Math/Computer Science would like to meet with the members of the Restructuring Conversation Team.  We discussed an open meeting for all faculty and staff.    The Education Faculty are coming forward with a restructuring proposal also.  This could be shared and discussed at the open meeting.

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