Roll Call and Quorum Check (Keith Woodbury)

Approval/Corrections to the Minutes for March 13 (Keith Woodbury)

Action Items

President’s Report (Norm Baldwin)

Questions about how we operate as officers, Steering Committee, and Senate

Task Force on the Evaluation of Deans and Chairs (see attached)

Feedback for the Distance Education Task Force

Current visibility of the Greek Integration issue

Vice President’s Report (Steve Miller)

Secretary’s Report (Keith Woodbury)

Reports from Senate Committees

Academic Affairs (Desmet and Macauley)

Faculty Life (

Financial Affairs (Agrawal and Royed)

Planning and Operations (Keel and Mason)

Research and Service (Blewitt)

Student Affairs (Gordon and Winters)

Senate Operations (Holt and Miller)

Reports from University Standing and Other Committees

Legislative Affairs (Margaret Garner)

New Business

Old Business

Announcements

The Provost will meet with us to discuss the 2001-2002 budget on Thursday, May 10 at 3:30 in 254 Rose.

Ron Rogers will meet with us to discuss ACHE policies at our June 12^th Steering Committee meeting.

 

A Proposed System of Faculty Feedback For Deans and Chairs

(from the Ad Hoc Task Force on the Evaluation of Deans and Department Chairs)

Note: This proposal was drafted in response to concerns that the rejected system of evaluating deans and chairs was too threatening and too much of an administrative burden.

The consensus of our committee is to propose a system of faculty feedback for the purpose of professional development, or to help deans and chairs improve their performance. This system will not be used as a system of performance evaluation for the purpose of determining retention or salary raises. As such, deans or chairs will have exclusive rights to their faculty feedback. However, a dean or chair may elect to share their feedback with their superior, and a superior may ask to see faculty feedback with the understanding that their subordinate may refuse to share the feedback.

The consensus of our committee is that the system of faculty feedback should be administered annually to all faculty. However, to reduce the administrative burden of processing enormous volumes of written comments from the 380 fulltime faculty in Arts and Sciences, a sample of A&S faculty should be surveyed or all A&S faculty should be surveyed and a sample of their written comments word processed.

We propose that a base, or core, feedback instruments be developed by the experts serving on the Ad Hoc Committee on the Evaluation of Deans and Department Chairs. This includes experts in public sector performance evaluation, private sector performance evaluation, continuous quality improvement, and psychometrics in education administration. These experts will develop instruments with the input and insights of the Provost, deans, chairs, and faculty. To tailor the instruments to the unique nature of different dean and chair positions, deans and chairs will be invited and encouraged to make additions and modifications to the base instruments.

We further propose that feedback instruments be administered in one of two ways: (1) on-line or (2) according to the administrative mechanisms currently used to administer over 150,000 annual student evaluation instruments. We feel that a pilot study should determine which mechanism yields the highest response rate and the most valid and reliable data. A pilot study should also be administered in order to determine the questions that will ultimately be used in the base instruments (i.e., questions that provide deans and chairs the most meaningful information).

Finally, our committee feels that faculty feedback surveys should be administered in the spring or, to reduce administrative burden and overloading faculty with surveys, should be administered in the fall and spring (e.g., deans in fall, chairs in spring). However, we also feel that the issue of when to administer a faculty feedback survey should not stand in the way of acceptance of the feedback system. Hence, we propose that the deans and chairs can decide when they want to have faculty feedback surveys administered.

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