April 24, 2019 Minutes

Faculty Senate Agenda

April 24th, 2019

SUB Ballroom D

3:10- 4:30 pm

I.      Call to Order

a.   Meeting was called to order at 3:10

II.      Approval of the April 10th meeting minutes

a.   Julie Ruff moves to approve. Tomas Gedeon seconds. No discussion or changes. None opposed.
Minutes are approved.

III.      Announcements

a.   One more Faculty Senate Meeting –May 1, 2019

1.   Complete unfinished business

2.   Confer degrees/Posthumous degree

b.   Reminder: Film and Photography Policy: Audiotaping and Recording
http://www.montana.edu/legalcounsel/proposed/index.html Comments on this policy will be accepted
until April 24, 2019.

Please forward comments on any proposed policy to Kellie Peterson at [email protected]

c.   Rec-Sports Update-Eric Austin

1.   Refunds should be in your next paycheck

2.   Pop-ups are still happening- with the exception of the weight room in Romney hall which will
need to be removed by July 15th.

3.   Expectation  at this point is that the two main floors of fitness center should be ready to go
by August 15th

4.   Working on plans for what a new facility might look like. A task force has been put in place
for planning. Hope to have architect on board soon.

d.   Good news from OCHE

1.   MSU Intent to plan proposals will advance at July BOR

A.  Master of Music w/ options in Music Technology and Music Education

B.  PhD in Exercise and Nutrition Sciences

C.  PhD in Public Policy

2.   Will likely see full proposals reach Faculty Senate in early September

e.   Thank you message from Senate to Dr. Renee Reijo Pera

1.   Faculty Senate extends its deepest thanks Dr. Renee Reijo Pera for her service to Montana
State University and the State of Montana as Vice President for Research and Economic Development.
Her efforts promoted our research and scholarship within the higher education enterprise as a
necessary part of education in a constantly changing world, and as a foundation of the
knowledge-based economy of the state and the nation. Her leadership emphasized collaboration across
the disciplines, the benefit of integrating research with education, and the need to impact
stakeholders outside

the University. Dr. Reijo Pera’s prioritization of the successful communication of our scholarship
ensured that it did not exist in isolation, rather it bettered the lives of those in Montana and
beyond. Thank you, Renee, for a job well done. Montana State University’s Faculty Senate, April
2019

2.   Tomas Gedeon moves to approve this message. Ed Dratz seconds. None opposed. Approved.

IV.      Informational Items

a.   Athletics Report – George Haynes, Camie Bechtold-hired a new basketball coach. Doing program
reviews right now. National issues: class absence policy, value based revenue, based on
performance, Sports waging, Need one more person to sit on the ? committee.

1.   Stats

A.  Federal Graduation Rate (4-year average), 53%

B.  Average GPA, 3.08

C.  Student’s on President’s List, 1137

D.  STEM Majors, 1759?

E.   International Students, 512

F.   In Honors College, 1557

G.  Students with a term GPA above 3.0, 60.7%

2.   Top 5 Majors of Student-Athletes

A.  Business/Pre-Business (including Prof Accountancy)-83

B.  Health and Human Performance-32

C.  Mechanical Engineering-17

D.  Sociology/Criminology-16

E.   Elementary Education-16

3.   SP19 Student Athlete by College, 343 SA’s Represented A.  CLS, 84, 25%

B.  COE, 69, 20%

C.  EHHD, 64, 19%

D.  JJCBE, 83, 24%

E.   CAA, 4 1%

F.   COA, 18, 5%

G.  University Studies, 16, 5%

H.  Nursing, 5, 1%

4.   Academic Support

A.  TUTORING

B.  MISSED CLASS TIME LETTERS/COMMUNICATIONS

C.  ACADEMIC CENTER –Computers, Printing

D.  GRADE CHECKS

E.   STUDY TABLES

F.   ELIGIBILITY REVIEW

G.  ACADEMIC COORDINATION

H.  TEST PROCTORING POLICY

5.   NCAA Hot Topics

A.  Transfer Portal-want SAs to be able to transfer just as other students can/do

i.      Gives more control to SAs

ii.      National Issue

iii.      First Year = lots of students in portal

iv.      MSU has 10 Student-Athletes in the Portal

B.  Values Based Revenue Distribution

i.      First Distribution in Spring 2020

ii.      MSU would have earned this year if implemented

iii.      Based on Grad Rates, APR, and Federal GSR

C.  2018-2019 Accomplishments

i.      Golfer Delany Elliott tied a program best 4 under par at the Red Rocks Invitational.

ii.      Jocelyn McCarthy won RIMSA/NCAA Regional Slalom Title.

iii.      Claire Lundburg was named Big Sky Newcomer of the Year.

iv.      High Jumper, Lucy Corbett was named Big Sky Freshman of the Year in Indoor Track and
Field.

v.      Volleyball advanced to Big Sky Championships; first time since 2012.

vi.      Ty Mogan advanced to the NCAA Cross Country Championships, first bobcat to advance since
2014.

vii.      Clinched Brawl of the Wild Series for 3rd straight year.

viii.      Football beat the Griz for the third straight year and advanced to the second round of
the NCAA playoffs.

ix.      Tyler Hall became MSU and Big Sky All-Time leading Scorer

D.  Clinched Brawl of the Wold Series for 3rd  Straight Year

i.      Volleyball: Cats 1, Griz, 1

ii.      Women’s Cross Country, Cats 1

iii.      Men’s Cross Country, Cats 1

iv.      Football, Cats 2

v.      Men’s Basketball, Griz 2

vi.      Women’s Basketball, Cats 2

vii.      Women’s Tennis, Griz 1

viii.      Men’s Tennis, Cats 1

ix.      Women’s Golf, Cats 1

x.      Women’s Indoor Track & Field, Cats 1

xi.      Men’s Indoor Track & Field, Cats 1

xii.      Women’s Outdoor Track & Field, 0

xiii.      Men’s Outdoor Track & Field, 0

xiv.      TOTAL: Cats 11, Griz 4

E.   What’s Next?

i.      Focused on a capital campaign which will proved better space for SAs

ii.      Looking forward to competing next year

F.   Questions:

i.      Seem to have a lot of Business students. Why? They are very competitive. JJCBE has been
very supportive of student athletes.

ii.      Who advises students on what courses to take? They go through academic advisors just like
everyone else. Also have coordinators that help students. Talk about advising during exit
interviews.

G.  Volunteers needed for Athletics Committee-one space open

b.   CAAT and Sophomore Surge Update – Chris Kearns/David Singel

1.   CAAT:

A.  History-how it got started: Idea to help facilitate the onboarding experience of our students.
Make sure that, as they come to campus, courses that are recommended are already loaded into their
Degree Works. Make sure we have the information we need to do that ahead of time. Conversations
with advisors. Registration is reduced to scheduling. Those in advising commons are working with
professors, etc. on this effort. Having these templates helps us use predictive analytics. What is
the sequence, does it makes sense? How often are prereqs offered, are they offered often enough to
not set someone back?

B.  Advising Syllabus: (get document from David Singel) A description of the “contract” between
advisor and student. What do they expect from each other? Best practices for advisors.

C.  Advising Plans: After Roll and Scope documents are done, and strategic plans, we’d like
departments to consider developing and Advising Plan. Should inform how we recognize advising in
any workload policy. How is that shown? How we think about assessing that, how do we do that? How
do we know we are doing a good job?

2.   HIPS- long list of practices understood to have high impact on student success. Kuh

George D. Kuh is the Founding Director, Senior Scholar and Co- principal Investigator at the
National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.

3.   HQ-longer term assignment leading to a scholarly product structured with reflection and
metacognition.

A.  This is identified in the Strategic Plan that I am hopeful you all helped to craft.

We are thinking about featuring faculty engagement in HQ- HIPS in our next faculty symposium and I
would like your feedback on that.

B.  And you should bear in mind that as we are talking activities and pilot projects associated
with the NASH grant, we are taking things that faculty are doing, working together to take them to
the HQ level, and administratively being saddled with and getting bogged down in the reporting that
NASH wants from us.

4.   First year experience/seminar

A.  featuring seminar.  We have talked to you previously about the Surge, where with the help of
peer mentors helping new students navigate the hidden curriculum and develop a proper mindset, as
well as helping instructors as the instructors. More details at NMI institute.

B.  Effective: 10 percentage point gain in retention.

C.  True:  Founded on Core seminars principle

D.  Growing: US, CLS, and now BGEN. Aligning BGEN 104 with Core under Susan Dana

E.   Create a better mind set to help with studying and also in life

F.   Kearns/Singel wrote a paper on this if you’d like them to share it with you

G.  10% point increase for those students in that first year Spring to Fall retention

H.  Goes back to Core 2.0 principles

5.   High Impact Practice: Engagement Portfolio;

A.  in terms of micro-credentialing we are discussing the idea of giving explicit attention to the
over-arching CORE learning outcomes. To have these explicitly on students; radar and to provide a
platform for threading them throughout the curricula.

B.  How can students take these experiences and reuse them for multiple purposes.

C.  Worked with Sophomore Surge mentors (70-120)

D.  Student government and sophomores there

E.   Sub-set of sororities and fraternities

F.   How can we integrate working inside the classroom with working outside of the classroom

G.  Focus on equity

H.  We want students to walk away from MSU with overarching core outcomes

6.   NASH Grant: Taking high impact practices to scale. We received one of the awards on this.

A.  They are asking us to measure what we are doing

B.  High quality practices that involve student reflection and metacognition

C.  Reporting part is good: What practices do and do not engage students? Who are we missing and
how can we make students more successful.

D.  High quality practices are built into our strategic plan

E.   NASH group:

i.      Abbie Richards

ii.      Tony Hartshorn

iii.      Trish Seifert

iv.      Carina Beck

v.      Chris Kearns

vi.      David Singel

vii.      System Wide

•    Joe Theil

•    Brock Thessman

•    Heidi Pasek

•    Stacey Sherwin

•    Melinda Arnold

•    Carrie Vath

•    Anneliese Ripley

7.   Independent experiential -This embraces some of the CORE R experiences, as they are done as
490’s, but also 492 independent studies, 498 internships etc.

There has been work – with some longer history – at JAGS and at

Faculty Senate on setting standards for the academic essentials of these experiences.  We are also
looking for some technology platforms that will help ensure consistent application of these
standards.

8.   Capstone – 499

Our understanding of the Capstone experience at MSU is that it is lumpy.

In the context of the NASH grant we are taking the opportunity to better understand what we are
doing, what works for our students and how we can bring faculty together to share and propagate
best practices.

9.   CAAT- We are talking about on-boarding advising students - how we bring them in to the campus.

A.  The key emphasis is for pre-planning with Templates for all majors/options at all math starting
points, so that the basic itinerary for the first semester is pre-loaded into each student’s
DegreeWorks account before they even get Orientation.  Advising is filling some details;
Registration is scheduling.

B.  I mention this now, as some of you probably are aware of the fact that our professional
advisors are working together with the departs and the registrar’s office to create these templates

C.  We are also using these Maps, in conjunction with an APLU program on Transformation Clusters to
have a comparative look at “curricular complexity” using a Curricular Analytics. We will be talking
about that more next fall – but, in a nutshell, we are looking for bottlenecks in student progress
that might be able to alleviate with some restructuring of the sequence of courses taken/

D.  As part of the transition to Advising Commons. Development of the Advising Syllabus

E.   Made for students and professional advisors.

F.   Through CFE and a faculty fellow within CFE, working toward a greater degree of cooperation
and exchange of ideas and best practices with faculty.

G.  There is discussion of developing and incorporating Advising Plans after completion of Role and
Scope documents, and College strategic plans.

H.  Asking departments to reflect, from a student perspectives, and the sequence of advising touch
points and establishing a plan of who will be there for the student at each of the touchpoint – be
it Advising Commons professional advisors, faculty advisor, mentor, etc., an how that work will be
appropriately integrated into the workload plan, how it will be assessed, and how that assessment
will be used in cycle of continuous improvement.

10. CORE Synthesis opportunities

A.  Seminar

B.  Explicit attention to overarching themes

C.  Independent Experiential Learning / Capstone

D.  Members of CAAT:

i.      Beck, Carina <[email protected]>;

ii.      Campeau, Tony <[email protected]>;

iii.      Donnelly, Diane <[email protected]>;

iv.      Edwards, Emily <[email protected]>;

v.      Fastnow, Christina <[email protected]>;

vi.      Haskins, Judi <[email protected]>;

vii.      Holmgren, Steven <[email protected]>;

viii.      Kearns, Chris <[email protected]>;

ix.      Lipfert, Theodore <[email protected]>;

x.      Maher, Rob <[email protected]>;

xi.      Maki, Sarah <[email protected]>;

xii.      Seifert, Tricia <[email protected]>;

xiii.      Singel, David <[email protected]>;

xiv.      Sterling, Tracy <[email protected]>;

xv.      Swinford, Steven [email protected]

11. Questions:

A.  What does NASH stand for? National Association of Assistant Heads

V.      New Business

a.   New Courses/Program Changes

1.   Undergraduate:

A.  HONR 275: Extreme Microbiology in Yellowstone-Was taught as a special topics a few times.
Co-taught by a member of the engineering faculty. Support for its sustainability.

B.  EELE 448: Optical Communications Systems-Take a look at the prerequisites.

C.  HDFS 315: Communication and Marketing in Community Education-Community education programs. As
of now, business courses on marketing are not required.

2.   Program Changes

A.  SFLR-BS: Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Food and Bioenergy Systems-Changes are primarily
housekeeping. Minor changes to the courses in the program details. Addition of courses and
rearranging of sequence to make more sense.

b.   CSTC-Cert: Graduate Certificate in Climate Science for Educators

1.   12-credit program

2.   Supports NTEN –National Teacher Enhancement Network and MSSE –Master of Science in Science
Education

3.   Bundles teaching in life science, chemistry, earth science, physics and elementary school
science teaching

4.   Based on existing coursework

5.   Intermediate step between individual courses and MSSE.

6.   Certifies completion of mid-level credits and assists with subject endorsement, licensure
renewals

7.   These do no go further than Faculty Senate, so this does not require a vote.

8.   Would like to move them forward next week.

c.   Proposed Faculty Handbook Update

1.   Identified an inconsistency in the faculty handbook

2.   Current language allows candidates the option to adopt most current Role & Scope at Tenure
only

3.   Allow those at Promotion and Retention to have the option of selecting the most current Role &
Scope Doc?

4.   Section 6. University standards for Tenure –current language

A.      Candidates for tenure are
reviewed under the Role and

Scope Documents in effect on the first day of employment in a tenurable position. Candidates may
select a more recent, approved Role and Scope  Document by notifying the primary review committee.

B.      Candidates for tenure are reviewed under the Role and Scope Documents in effect on the
first day of employment in a tenurable position. Candidates may select a more recent, approved Role
and Scope Document by notifying the primary review committee.

5.   Section 8. Promotion to Professor–current language

A.  The faculty member will be reviewed using standards and indicators in effect two (2) years
prior to the deadline for notification of intent to apply for promotion. Candidates  may select a
more recent, approved Role and Scope  Document by notifying the primary review committee

6.   Section 5. Retention – proposed change

A.  Candidates for retention are reviewed under the Role and Scope Documents in effect on the first
day of employment in a tenurable position. Candidates may select a more  recent, approved Role and
Scope Document by notifying  the primary review committee.

7.   Discussion:

A.  Under old handbook, you used the role and scope that was in effect the day of hire at each
step. This gives candidates more choice.

B.  Do not see a lot of opportunity

C.  Complications: department review committee-if one chooses one document and another chooses a
different document, that could be confusing for committees.

D.  Constituents want the choice.

E.   Like the idea of choice. Worry about retention candidates (the more vulnerable of our faculty)
and the pressures they could feel while choosing a document. Will it look negative to the committee
if you chose the more “difficulty document”? Will there be a pressure to choose one over the other?
Will they be discriminated against?

i.      You can make that argument, but a good P&T committee should be able to work with whichever
document you choose.

ii.      Do not see that this would be an issue.

iii.      It could be, but the answer wouldn’t be to limit choices. Best idea to give them the
options up front.

8.   Options….

A. Vote Today

i.      Vote on Promotion to Full Changes

•    David Parker moves to suspend the rules and consider the package at full. Ed Dratz seconds.
None opposed. No abstentions.

•    Do we need to add language in about dates? Provost Mokwa thinks that they could be confusing
to add in in jus these spots. Provost’s office sends out a schedule and that should continue to
work.

•    Jim Meyer moves to approve. David Parker seconds. No further discussion. None opposed. No
abstentions. Approved.

ii.      Vote on retention Changes

•    See above comments.

B.  Vote next week?

VI.      Public Comment

a.   Renee Reijo-Pera, VP Research-Thank you for the tank you.

1.   Want to formally thank the Faculty Senate

2.   Restructured VPR office, made many streamlining changes to the office.

3.   Thank you for what you’ve done for me. Made me stronger, , wiser and more patience. Last five
years have been the favorite of my career. Most of the knowledge of the world is not in books. It
is in human hearts and minds. I know your work and what I love is that behind it is a dream to make
the world a little bit better than it was before.

VII.      Adjournment

a.   Meeting was adjourned at 4:22

Final Meeting May 1, 2019

3:10-4:30

SUB 233

A printable PDF of this information can be found here.