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March 2002

Faculty Senate Meeting – March 26, 2003

Roll call:

Excused: Edelbach, Fradella, Klug, Knobler, Wu

-President R. Barbara Gitenstein spoke to the senate about the budget cuts:

-Gitenstein said that the numbers change every day but they are never in the right direction; the challenge for this year is a $7.3 million cut

-Gitenstein said that the two things that must be preserved are the health and safety of students and faculty as well as the academic core

-Gitenstein spoke about advocacy; she encouraged faculty to talk about higher education with individual business leaders and to write personal letters and op-eds

-The college is focusing its attention on scholarships since it will be responsible for covering the $350-400,000 discrepancy in the TAG program and $1.2 million for OSRP (TCNJ students receive close to one third of the $3.4 million OSRP).

-Gitenstein mentioned that the tuition hearing will be held in June; attempting to do it now would involve too many uncertainties.

-Bennett and McMahan asked about untenured colleagues and promotions; Gitenstein assured that there would be no faculty positions being and that promotions will not be affected

-Behre asked what Gitenstein hopes to see faculty doing; Gitenstein said that the faculty should help students feel free to speak

-The chairs of the five task forces addressed the senate:

-Debbie Compte, who represents the cross-cultural task force, said that cross-cultural exposure should be developmental, sustained, active/reflective, and self-documented

-Compte also outlined the four phases of orientation, engagement, immersion, and continuation; said that this must be embraced by the faculty for it to be effective

-Marcia O’Connell, who represents developmental advisement task force, spoke about having a model that can be implemented immediately and easily modified

-The core is to have an advisement team, where the advisement office provides central coordination of advisement; students would have electronic portfolios; the implementation details will be left up to departments

-Joe Goebel, who represents the first-year experience task force, said that the current system is similar to those of institutions that have won awards for their first-year experience

-The ratio of 1 CA per 25 students and 1 peer advisor per 50 students will be maintained

-this task force recommends that students not be allowed to declare majors upon admission; some Senators expressed concern about this for certain majors; Goebel
explained that students would be permitted to take the classes but cannot declare

-John McCarty represents the positioning of the college task force; this task force disagreed with the Lipman Hearne recommendation of the public honors college because it is too informally used

-Lipman Hearne suggested elimination of the Honors program because it does not serve a marketing purpose for the college anymore if we are a public honors college; the task force noted that Honors was both a marketing and an academic matter.

-Crofts noted that President Gitenstein had already indicated that she would establish a task force next autumn to look at the Honors program

-Kamber suggested that the language in the document is confusing and Tebbe invited McCarty to speak to the Honors Advisory Council because he perceived a lack of communication

-Lengyel represents interactive communication task force and talked about the image problems within the Ewing community

-Said that students are currently soliciting feedback from the community in terms of how we can better our relationship

-Said that information dissemination in light of the budget cuts is a real issue even though a lot of data collection has already been done

Meeting adjourned

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