Behrend Faculty Council Meeting Minutes

Monday, October 24, 2022
4:30 p.m. via Zoom

  1. Call to Order – Lisa Jo Elliott, Faculty Senate Chair
  2. Approval of minutes from September Faculty Council Meeting
    1. Linda Hajec and Adam Simpson
  3. Status of CIM replacing CRCS as our curriculum system. Linda Hajec: CIM is up and running; we tested CIM and found that CIM is very user-friendly. We need to set up a meeting with the undergraduate curriculum committee. We need to understand who is going to be the student representative. The form we developed with the four schools is ready to go. The next step is to make sure that all schools feel comfortable using it.
    1. Question (Lisa Jo Elliott): Do you want all committee members to be trained on CIM? What is the next step for training?
      Answer (Linda Hajec): For training, the goal is to find one or two persons per School depending how the office staff is running. It’s up to the schools how to address training. People in the committee are not necessarily the people who would be inputting.
    2. Question (Lisa Jo Elliott): Is there anything that faculty council leadership can help you with?
      Answer (Linda Hajec): No, just enthusiasm for the new system.
  4. Other questions that have been raised by committee meetings.

    1. Is there a policy for NTT promotions and contract lengths?
      Lisa Jo Elliott: I met with a lot of committees to discuss charges and understand what is happening across the Schools and Campus. One question that came up was: Is there a policy for NTT promotion and contract length?

    2. Chancellor Ralph Ford: The policies are available accessing the "Faculty & Staff Resources" page of the Behrend website. Then, users need to click on the link “Behrend Administrative Procedures (Office 365 login required)”

    3. Lisa Jo Elliott: Shows how to find document BCF19 – Appointment and Renewal Lengths for fixed-term multiyear faculty. The policy gives faculty something to follow; it’s predictable. Faculty should be able to understand how contracts work.

  5. Update from Senators – pressing initiatives at UP

    1. Molly Monahan Lang: There were 15,000 responses to housing and food survey. Disability services will tell faculty who in our classes qualifies for accommodation instead of knowing from individual students a bit piecemeal. The changes to general education were passed.

    2. Sara Luttfring (member of faculty affairs committee). A key issue: When faculty who are on contracts are notified if their contract is being renewed, if they are up for renewal. The problems is that this date has been pushed later and later. Katie Bieschke talked with us; they are developing a procedure: Contracts will come up in April but faculty up for renewal will receive a notification of intent, that Katie Bieschke said it would be binding, in early February. This is going to be Penn State-wise, so all campus will act similarly. Feb 1st would be the latest that faculty would be notified with this message of intent. The actual contract would follow a couple of months later. This is a good start, but February is still relatively late. We urge to find ways to move this date even earlier in the academic year.

    3. Lisa Jo Elliott: According to Matt Swinarski: Senators met two weeks ago and acknowledged that there is a plan to meet more with Behrend community to let people know what is going on. Senators will post updates on what each committee is working on one week after each Senate meeting. They want to give an announcement out one week prior to the Senate meeting on any major legislative report coming up for a vote and use the Senate discussion board on Canvas to get faculty input and comments. Matt Swinarski added a module, Senate discussions, to our Canvas page for updates. If you want to send messages to senators, you can use this discussion board.

  6. Lisa Jo Elliott reminds everyone of Matt Levy's role as an ombudsman

  7. Workload guidelines being constructed by the Allegheny campus
    1. Concern over faculty service as the number of faculty decrease.
      Lisa Jo Elliott: Psychology has a disciplinary meeting every year to hear what happens at the different campuses. There is a lot of concern about workload. Faculty at the Allegheny campus is working to create guidelines on workload. Lisa Jo Elliott asked them to share these guidelines.
  8. New Business and comments for the good of the order.
  9. Adjournment
    1. Alicyn Rhoades, Charlotte De Vries