Members Present: Donna Cole; Aaron Crandall; Beth Giles; Mallory Musolf, vice chair; Deb Shapiro; Lindsey Stoddard Cameron

Guests: Russell Dimond; Norman Drinkwater, Denny Hackel, Jake Smith

The meeting was called to order at 2:06 p.m.

The minutes of November 1, 2018, were approved.

Mallory reported that she will be attending the UW System Reps meeting on the November 9. She will be providing them with a TTC update.

 

Heather Daniels, Secretary of the Academic Staff, reported that the Faculty Senate tabled the resolution regarding graduate assistant fees.  They also heard a first reading of the resolutions regarding professor titles for both teaching and research.  There were minimal comments regarding these.

Jenny Dahlberg reported on the Standard Job Description training session. The evaluation uses an online survey tool and takes approximately 20-30 minutes per title. Feedback has to be provided by December 31, 2018.

Engineering CASI-Donna Cole reported on the Engineering CASI.  They are considering what they should do as a CASI.  

Norman Drinkwater reported on progress in reducing administrative burden on the research side.  They have developed a new streamlined process for reporting outside activities. In regards to research contracts/agreements, they are matching the amount of negotiation and management to the level of risk.  This has already been implemented for Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs).  UW-Madison executes about 1,000 of these a year and 75% of them follow standard language.  There is no need to do any negotiation on these.  They are starting to look at other agreements, like confidentiality agreements.  These also often follow standard language.  For industry sponsored research, they have been taking a more straight forward approach in negotiation.  Some of the principles being followed include that the terms cannot impede graduate students and intellectual property cannot be tangled.  If there is research in a related area in the laboratory, UW-Madison is going to assume that funds have been co-mingled so intellectual property has to go to WARF.  There is also work being done on three master research agreements.  

Norman reported on progress in regards to the Institutional Review Boards.  The survey that was deployed had about a 50% response rate.  The improvements made so far in response to the survey include improving ARROW, creating a survey for ongoing feedback, establishing an IRB working group to generate additional recommendations based on problems identified in the survey.  Both IRB groups are moving under the VCRGE umbrella.  These moves to do not include a change in location or staff.  IRB fees except for industry and non-UW sponsored studies will no longer be requires as of January 1.  

Vice Chancellor Drinkwater reiterated his support for both series of “Professor” titles.  He expressed concern about the lack of the Assistant Professor title on the research side.  

The VCRGE office is working to establish a multi-disciplinary center with focus on data science.  Brian Yandell is chairing the committee that will establish a framework for the center.  The committee will also put together a proposal that would be presented for approval to the University Research Council and the University Academic Planning Council.  There are a lot of researchers using data as an approach to problems in many disciplines.  The center creates the place for faculty and staff from across campus to come together.  

Research has not been a major focus for DoIT, but this is changing under the leadership of the new CIO, Lois Brooks.  Up until now offerings have either been too late or too expensive.  

Russell presented the new data analysis on WISELI survey. This data analysis compared faculty and academic staff results. There were statistically significant differences between faculty and academic staff in perception of overall department/unit climate and the number of people experiencing hostile and intimidating behavior. In the area of satisfaction, academic staff were more interested in leaving UW-Madison than faculty. For the question on reasons to leave UW-Madison, the areas of increase in salary; career progression; and reduce stress were areas were the academic staff selected this as a problem more than faculty and were statistically significant. ASEC will discuss this data further at a future meeting with an eye towards presenting the information to the Provost.

•Review December Agenda

Lois Brooks, new CIO, has been asked to speak at the Assembly.  Dorothea Salo has agreed to attend and share information about the Personnel Policies and Procedures Committee.  Heather or Jake will do a brief demo of the committee tracker database.  There will be a resolution about including UW-Extension academic staff on election slates and committee appointments that would begin on July 1.

•Feedback on BOR Policy Revisions 

ASEC will provide feedback on wording in the Core Mission Statements policy that still includes UW-Extension. ASEC discussed the Program Productivity Monitoring policy revisions.  They have a number of different areas of feedback.  The major concern is that the policy takes much of the decision making from the hands of the faculty and places it within the hands of UW System.  There seems to be a copy and paste error, definition error, and other smaller issues. They will continue to refine their feedback and also discuss it with the Provost.

•Topics for Provost and Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration

Program Productivity Monitoring

Dean Reviews this Year

ERP Project Slides

Meeting adjourned at 4:13 p.m.