UW-Madison Faculty Senate October 2, 2017 Transciption of proceedings >> I know there are a few people still coming in, but I'm told there's a quorum and the clock says 3:30 so I'm going to declare the meeting in order. And can I ask all of the faculty to rise as you are able for the reading of the memorial resolutions? >> Let me recognize Professor Luke Zoet to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus Charles Bentley. >> Charlie Bentley, AP Career Professor of Geophysics Emeritus who revolutionized our understanding of the Antarctic, passed away peacefully on August 19, 2017. The reliability of Bentley's science is legendary. Bentley worked on the first seismic profile in Antarctica. When Charlie radioed to the office that the ice was three kilometers thick, the staff was unsure whether to release the startling and unprecedented result based on the word of a 20 something year old grad student. Then Kerry weighed in, "If Charlie says the ice is three kilometers thick, the ice is three kilometers thick". The ice in fact, was three kilometers thick. >> Let me recognize Professor Steven Hutchinson to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus Birute Ciplijauskaite. >> Birute Ciplijauskaite, John Baskim Professor from 1973 to 1997 and a lifetime senior fellow UW Madison's Institute for Research and Humanities from 1974 until her retirement in 1997; died peacefully on June 19, 2017. Internationally renowned and with a vast scholarly production and breathtakingly wide range expertise, she was undeniably our departments most distinguished and prolific member. The Departments Spanish and Portuguese considers itself extremely fortunate to have had Birute Ciplijauskaite among its ranks. Her passing leaves an immense and unfillable void. Immense because of the depths and enormous array of addition unfillable because to borrow Hamlet's words "We shall not look upon her like again". >> Thank you. Let me recognize Professor Jerry Dempsey to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus Donn D'Alessio. >> Donn D'Alessio served University of Wisconsin Madison for over three decades. As a Chair of Population Health Science for 19 years, Donn's quiet leadership expanded the faculty into a search driven school of public health and created the formation of a unique graduate program and population health science. His own infectious disease research program pioneered perspective studies of type one diabetes and established the Wisconsin Diabetes registry. To quote remember Donn's many junior colleagues he was quote "100% positive, always supportive, excellent listener, a good and loyal friend with a novel dapper wry sense of humor that carried the day". Donn is missed by many of us as a mentor and leader and mostly as a friend. >> Thank you. Let me recognize Professor Emeritus Bhudatt Paliwal to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus Jack Fowler. >> Jack Fowler, Emeritus Professor of Oncology and Medical Physics died December 1, 2016 at his home in London, he was 91. Professor Fowler held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health from 1988 until 1994 and from 1999 until 2003 when he served as a profoundly impactful scientific advisor; he's considered one of the founders of modern clinical radiation and biology. He received more than 30 honors from several national and international scientific organizations. In 2003 this legacy was honored by the professorship in the Department of Human Oncology. >> Thank you and let me recognize Professor John Parrish to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus Milton Sunde. >> Milt Sunde, Professor Emeritus of the Poultry Science Department died October 2, 2015 in Madison Wisconsin at the age of 94. He was born in Brooking, South Dakota and received a BS from South Dakota State University, an MS in 1949 and PhD in 1950 from the Department of Poultry Science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He remained and was promoted to Professor in 1957. He trained 74 masters and PhD students in his career as an enduring legacy. Professor Sunde lit up the room when he taught, being known as a vibrant entertaining and passionate teacher in all things, he will be missed. >> And I would like to recognize Professor's Sunde's son, Roger Sunde who is a professor here today in the Nutritional Sciences Department, thank you for coming. [ Applause ] >> It's a great family legacy. Please be seated. >> I'm going to give a chance for everyone to come into the room and get seated here. >> Welcome everyone it is always good to see you at the first faculty senate meeting of the year. I hope you all had a good and productive summer and that the fall semester has started well. I particularly want to welcome the new senators and extend my thanks to several people here. First thank you to Anya Wanner who has stepped into the role of UC Chair and to Terri Warfield and Steve Ventura who are the new members of the UC this year, seceding Tom Broman and Amy Went who is our outgoing chair. Next, thank you to the secretary of the faculty, Steve Smith who has done a terrific job of working on a variety of complex issues over the year. And thanks to all of you for your willingness to serve on the faculty senate. It's an important role. Let me note three new hires for your attention, Dean Ann Massey joined us in August from the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University in Bloomington as our new Dean of the business school replacing Francois Aretelumanya. David Darling joins us as the Associate Vice Chancellor for facilities planning and management replacing Bill Elvey. David has been in charge of the facilities at Sandia National Labs in New Mexico. And Amy Gillman is the new director of the Chasin Art Museum, replacing Russel Penchenko. Amy comes from the Toledo Museum of Art. So, if you run across those folks over this fall be sure to say "welcome". Let me start with a reminder of some of the things that we've accomplished here at the University in the last few months. We've just welcomed an outstanding group of new faculty, we successfully recruited 105 faculty this year and I know there are a lot of people in this room who worked on those recruits. We've closed 92 retention cases over the past year, that compares to 144 in the previous year; so I'm delighted to have fewer retention cases. I hope that number continues to go down this year as well. We successfully retained about three-fourth's of those top faculty members equal to our 10 year average. We are about to launch the fourth round of the UW 2020 research funding initiative. There are now 49 funded projects under way, funded with 16.5 million dollars and involving more than 300 faculty and staff from every one of our colleges and schools and it's a wonderful way to help jump start some research that can really have some great long run promise. So thanks particularly to Wharf for their core funding in that. With our always forward campaign our current fundraising campaign with alums and friends we have raised 2.2 billion in the last four years for faculty research, education and student access. We've had a record number of alumni and friends participating and we're well on our way to 3.2 billion dollar goal. Our retention and graduation rates as I've reported to you here and in past years are at all-time highs and we are among top public universities in those statistics. We were just named number five in the nation in federal dollars spent on graduate student fellowships, trainee ships and training grants. It's an important sign of our excellence in graduate education even as we also work to bring our graduate student compensation up to market rates. And again, thank you to Wharf, that has substantially helped us increase our graduate student support in the last few years. We all know that graduate students are key for recruiting top faculty as well, this is important. Finally, after a 15 year hiatus I announced at the end of last month that we're going to be restarting our cluster hiring program this fall. You might have seen the call for proposals that recently went out. We're going to ask for some set of proposals this fall and then go into what's going to be, I hope, our typical call that will happen in late spring. Clusters build on one of our most important strengths, the trans disciplinary work that we do on a complex projects. And the idea is to put in proposals that propose hiring three new faculty across three different areas that add to the faculty that are already here, to really build substantial strength in an important area of scientific and intellectual interest that we want to be strong in, that we want to expand our abilities in, in the years ahead. We are hoping to launch three to five new clusters every year for the next five years. And if we do that successfully we should end up hiring about 50 new faculty. So, I'm excited about that new program and hope that you'll all make sure people in your departments know about it and I want to get a lot more proposals than we can possibly fund, all looking good. And that will be a reason to go and try to scrape some more money together to fund even more. Those in our fundraising campaign and across the university, we've been focused on four primary strategic priorities. First, enhancing the educational experience, that means modernizing class facilities for active learning, strengthening our investment student services, enhancing out of classroom learning and generally making sure that we stay at the top of educational excellence. Second, improving access for all students and I've said this to you before, my goal is that every qualified student who we admit can afford to come here. And we're not there yet but we are getting closer. That means expanding support for low and middle income students with particular emphasis on first generation and historically disadvantaged groups. Right now we lose top students because we don't offer some of the same scholarships others do. But let me talk about some of the progress that we have made in the last year or two. Through the always forward campaign, we have in the last four years raised money to fund approximately 1,000 new scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students, that's an amazing step forward in just four years. We're putting more of our own institutional dollars into need based scholarships. Ten years ago we provided 13 million dollars in need based grants and scholarships with our funds, that is outside of state and federal dollars. Last year we provided 58 million, that's more than quadrupling that number in the last 10 years. And just two weeks ago we launched a new program that I'm very excited about called Badge of Promise. It guarantees a year of free tuition for first generation students who transfer from a two year UW school or a Wisconsin technical college under our transfer agreement. I think many of you know that students who go to the two year schools, they do take a certain curriculum and have a B average or better they can automatically come to UW Madison at the end of their second year when they graduate from the two year school. A high share of first generation students for a whole variety of reasons, start at local two year schools. And those who fill the requirements for transferring, come in and our transfer students graduate at the same rate as our more typical freshman. So this program essentially says if you're a first generation transfer student who comes in from the UW schools you will get two semesters of free tuition, one year. If you are also pell eligible you will get two years of free tuition. And it's an effort to really reduce the cost of UW Madison and say to some of our lower income families around the country that you can indeed graduate from UW Madison with all of the opportunities and career advantages that that degree is going to give you. So, student excellence, student access. The third strategic priority we're working on is maintaining and growing faculty excellence. That means hiring well, retaining, paying competitive salaries and making sure we have the teaching and research environment that keep and attract faculty. The new cluster hiring program is a very important piece of this. But another important piece is our compensation program. As I'll note in a minute there are no new cross the board salary increases coming out of the state budget this year. There will be some next year, so again we're doing a critical compensation fund aimed at providing salary increases for those who deserve them on the basis of merit or equity. We've increased the funds we're putting into this by 30%, making 3.5 million dollars available for faculty salary increases and 4 million dollars available for staff increases. We're also doubling the fund available for one time bonuses. Last year we did this for the first time and put in 2 million; it was highly successful. Those bonuses went disproportionately to some of our lower wage workers, which is exactly where you know for special projects I would like to see them go. And we're going to double our bonus fund to 4 million for a total of 11.5 million in compensation dollars this year. So, I - again we've got lots of things we can work on here in terms of faculty excellence. But I hope that we're moving forward. And then fourthly, student excellence, student access, faculty excellence. Fourth priority here expanding and improving our research portfolio. That means all of the things we have to do to keep up with emerging trends, making sure our research facilities work well, supporting interdisciplinary research, providing bridge funding, etc. etc. And our cluster hire program is of course, an important piece of that. This is not a cheaper, easy agenda. And as I've said before when I talk about the need to be entrepreneurial and to increase investment funds in this university, it's not about the money. It's about those strategic priorities and what we have to do for our students, graduate students, faculty and staff in order to maintain the excellence of this university. So, let me turn to entrepreneurial strategies. I have given you this list before, but I'm going to repeat it again. Here are the six things that we are trying to work on. Expanding the summer semester, which will both educationally give students a wider variety of educational options, reduce time to degree, but also brings in additional revenues for schools and colleges. Secondly, growing our professional masters programs for non-traditional students. A number of you out there are doing some really exciting masters programs, either in person or online that expand our educational reach and also expand our revenues. Thirdly, bringing tuition for out of state and professional students up to market levels. We're working on that and I've gotten permission from the regents to again move what I think in two years now would put us at the market level for out of state tuition. And I remind all of you that whenever we do a tuition increase we take at least 20% of that money and put it back into financial aid to make sure that we can keep people whole here at the university. Fourthly exploring student mix and numbers. We've been working on that with professional schools and I'm going to come back and talk about that more in a minute. Fifthly building alumni support. That's the always forward campaign; I've already mentioned some of our successes there. And lastly, growing research funds with programs like UW2020 and cluster hires. All of these strategies are on us to execute. We have to be entrepreneurial if we're going to create the investment dollars we need to maintain and grow excellence at this university. And we're seeing the effects. I just talked about three programs that are possible because of what we've been doing on these strategies. One of them is our cluster hire program, one of them is our badge of promise program and one of them is the expansion and critical compensation funds. We need to be doing this sort of thing and in order to do that we've got to generate the revenue that makes it possible. Let me now come back and talk for a minute about strategy number four, which is exploring student mix and numbers and I want to start at the right place. I want to start at our commitment to Wisconsin freshman who come here within this state. Our admit rate this year for Wisconsin students, Wisconsin applicants was 71%. That's as high as admit rate as you see in almost any flagship university, higher than many for their in state students. We guarantee we will have a minimum of 3600 Wisconsin students every freshman class that is above our 10 year average and as demographics in this state change so that they're smaller and smaller numbers of high school graduates, it's at increasing share of the high school classes that we are bringing into UW Madison. This year we don't have 3600, we actually have over 3700 because of the acceptance rates that came down the line. Thirdly the badge of promise program is particularly designed to bring in first generation students and transfer students who, for whatever set of reasons can't start at a four year school but have the capability and the intellectual interest to move on to a four year degree here at UW Madison. And fourthly we're also expanding, this is a slightly different thing, high touch program aimed at persuading the really top test score students out of Wisconsin high schools to consider UW Madison, some of them do, some of them don't. I'm not going to ask a show of hands as to how many of you had children that didn't come to UW Madison. It's sometimes a little hard in Madison to keep people here, I know that. But we're really trying to focus on high touch recruiting for a group that we really want to see stay in this state, get their college degree here, makes it much more likely they're going to work here and be here for their careers. We're working on a whole variety of fronts to really make a commitment to the state of Wisconsin, and I feel strongly that we have made as much of a commitment as any flagship I know and more than many. Given that we now have another opportunity, over the last five to 10 years our applications have among out of state students, and I'm not talking about international - other US domestic, have increased by more than 70% over the last decade. Furthermore, over the last several years that increase has gone along with no diminution in the quality of applicants. In other words, we've done what every school wants to do. We've increased our applicant pool and actually in no way at all decreased the quality of that pool. This year we rejected 1300 high caliber, out of state students, this does not include international students whose academic quality was comparable to that of our admitted students. All right, that is a golden opportunity for us to do some class expansions building on that very deep pool of applicants whose quality is as good as anyone already coming. So we're going to begin to explore expanding the freshman class by between 200 and 250 students a year for the next four years. We'll be talking about this more in the coming months. We've talked to the Dean's about it, we've talked to the department chairs about it, we absolutely know that we need to invest in a number of places around this university so that we can admit more students and in no way lower quality. So for instance there's already hiring that will be going on in LNS this year, that's aimed at hiring and departments that are going to see some of the effects of an increase in class size. We want to be in front of this, not behind it. The reason to do this and I might say everyone of our peer schools, not some of them, everyone of our peer schools over the last decade has increased their class size between 1000 to 5000 depending on which school you're looking at. So, we're the only ones who didn't do it, and we didn't do it because we had this deal with the board of regents that said for every one out of state student we admitted, we had to admit three instate students. And given the demographics of the state, first of all that wasn't very possible because instate students were falling and secondly we lost money every time we did it, so there's very little reason to do that. We now are in a different world. We've got a different agreement with the regents. We made very strong commitments to the state and we can now do some expansions in our freshman class, funding as necessary to make sure we maintain quality. And this is one we're going to be working very closely with departments, with the deans, with the people that are going to be affected by this. So, I'm excited about it and I will say if we want to keep going on the compensation front, on supporting graduate students, on looking at cluster hires, on providing student access and student excellence and redesigning some additional classrooms, these are the sorts of investments we have to be making. They're necessary to generate the sort of revenues that all of our peer schools have been generating to do this type of work. So let me turn from this to the state budget. I haven't talked about the state budget as a source of new revenue. The reality is that a good budget is one that has no cuts in it, right? And this is a budget with no cuts. Twenty years ago that would have been a bad thing to say; these days compared to where we've been in the last six budgets it's a really good thing to say. This is a budget with no cuts. It even has a little bit of new money in it, not a lot but some that will come to us and that's good too. But we can't count particular on new money from the state budget in future years. What we use the state budgets is to make sure we don't get cut more. All of that said there's some other things in this budget. There is no pay increase in 2017/2018. I'm sorry about that, but there are two pay increases coming down the line in 2018/2019 and you should bring this back to your department so you're sure they know this. One 2% increase will occur on July 1, 2018 and a second 2% increase will occur January 1, 2019. So next year we're going to do a cumulative effect here. We're going to have a little bit more than a 4% pay increase funded across the university, and that's going to be really good for all sorts of reasons. You can give them better than I can. Furthermore, the capital budget in this state budget restores maintenance funding. It includes funds for critical utilities repair project of Baskim Hill and it builds the lot 62 parking ramp, which is necessary for future expansions in the school of Veterinary Medicine. Now as always, there's some things in the budget that I'm not happy about. I think that's probably true in every state budget with every chancellor. A provision changing the qualifications for chancellors of UW institutions was added to the budget. That change prohibits UW system schools from adopting any policy or rules that will require the Board of Regents to consider only individuals who are eligible for tenure when filling chancellor or vice chancellor positions. The Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Monay and I wrote a letter to the governor setting out all the ways in which this would weaken UW schools and particularly research institutions and encouraging him to veto that provision, but we were unsuccessful in that. As you know, and we're going to talk about later the Board of Regents has also proposed some changes to the selection of chancellors that I find deeply problematic, that greatly reduced the voice of the campus in the selection of chancellors and I will let Anya say more about that later. There are also provisions in the budget around performance funding that are going to take a little bit to meet. And there's some provisions around work load reporting that particularly focus on reporting teaching hours and the result of this is that we're going to do work load reporting, not teaching reporting, work load reporting across campus. So when people ask us what are your faculty doing, we're not just going to say "Well they teach so many hours", that's silly. You all do far more than in classroom teaching, right? Which is what this asks for. I want to talk about how you interact with students, how you do research, what time you spend on administration and professional service and be able to give a full picture of the work load and activities of our faculty; so you will be hearing more about that as well. Let me turn from the state budget to the federal budget. As you might know the president proposed large cuts to federal agencies. We have been working both with Wisconsin delegation and through some of our national peer organizations to try to reduce the effect of those cuts and I'm very pleased that at least the initial indications particularly around things like NIH funding is that Congress is probably not willing to go along with a lot of those proposals. I won't say more about that but would be happy to talk to anyone after the meeting who wants to discuss it. Let me close by quickly touching on two other issues that I think are highly important on our campus. The first is sustainability and I know we've got a resolution on this coming up and I'm happy that we're going to be talking about this. We always have to be looking for ways to run our institution better and sustainability is one of the issues that's important there. All of you in your book on pages 11 and 12 have a two pager that we put together on what is it that we're doing at this university over the last several years around sustainability? I hope you'll look at it. You can pick this up online. Get it to your faculty and those who are interested. There are three ways in which we work on sustainability. Our first, and I think our most important is probably education. We have huge growth in the number of students who are enrolling in programs relating to environment and sustainability and training people are going to be out there in the future working on this, is really important. We have 172 courses right now cross listed with environmental studies. Secondly an addition education is research and many of you work on issues related to sustainability. We have more than 250 current projects funded with approximately 360 million dollars that in some form or another addresses sustainability and environmental issues. In fact our largest federal grant over the energy institute is all about developing sustainable agricultural crops for biofuels. And thirdly, it's not just what we do with our students and with our research; it's what we do on campus with our buildings. The campus master plan has paid a lot of attention to this and we have always have more progress to make on this. But I'm also impressed with what this campus has done. We've invested 63 million dollars in energy conservation projects over the last decade and reduced our energy footprint by 27% per square foot. A number of campus buildings have renewable energy systems now such as solar hot water; our others such as union south are designed to maximize daylight to reduce electricity use. We're retro-fitting older buildings with more efficient HVAC systems, better insulation, better lighting, occupancy sensors and those sorts of things. This work does cost money and the much reduced budget for buildings and maintenance over the last four years has slowed down these efforts. We did a lot more in the first six years of this last decade than the last four, but we have a 10 phase set of projects in hand that we need to make progress on and I know you're going to talk about some of that. We've got great leadership. The office of sustainability led by Professor Kathleen Middlecamp on the faculty side and then on the staff side, someone from our facilities group. We're in the midst of hiring a new person for that job, our person who was in it, left. Have been very important to all of these efforts. So, this is one that I take very seriously. I know that you take seriously. We'll come back to it on the agenda. Finally let me close with a few words on campus climate. You can't have been around this country for the last six months without really engaging, particularly around campus in the national conversation around racial injustice, around the way in which this country does or doesn't welcome those of other ethnicities or nationalities or about our immigration policies. Everyone here watched what happened in Charlottesville and in some other communities around this country. And we on this campus, so far have been fortunate that we have not been targeted by hate groups, but it doesn't mean it won't happen. Here at UW it has been relatively well documented that a group using the name Ku Klux Klan existed on this campus in the 1920's. There were actually two groups that used that name. I've created an ad hoc study group to advise on how we can best acknowledge and respond to that history. Professor Steven Cantrowicz a history professor and an expert in White Supremacist movements and Dr. Floyd Rose, a longtime community leader are co-charring that committee. It isn't easy to have conversations about racism or about ethnicity on a disproportionately white campus, and a disproportionately white community and state. But those are conversations we have to have if we're going to compete effectively for the best students and the best faculty in the century coming up. Last year I asked all of your units to engage in some way in training that focused on inclusivity and diversity. And I've asked department chairs and I will ask you as well to work with your department chairs to say "Okay what did you do last year? What did it open up? And what's the next step"? What do you need to do this year to continue those conversations, to continue that exploration? I'm also asking every school and college to work on a strategic plan to promote diversity inside the unit. Some have already done this and I've done a real call out to the school of education, which did an excellent job on putting together a school wide diversity plan and I want other schools to engage in that as well. We will be releasing next month the results of the campus climate survey, with recommendations of what that says. It's our first survey on those issues to come out. We have just finished our expanded, our Wisconsin program which is a program with freshman getting them to engage in conversations about "Where do I come from" and "How does the community I grew up in shape the lenses that I look at the world with"? And "How do I live and work and thrive in a community where there are a lot of people with very different past experiences, who come with very different lenses on the world"? We piloted this program last year, got very good evaluations and have rolled it out to all freshman this year. We just launched a new diversity liaison program to engage interested faculty and staff in developing and leading workshops on diversity for their peers. And I hope that some of you, and some of your colleagues will be participating in that. And we are, again funding our faculty diversity initiative to provide some support from central funds for hiring faculty that are targets of opportunity. When we ask students of color what we could do to make this a more welcoming campus the most common answer was hire more diverse faculty and staff. So, as I say there's a lot more to be done on that front. I don't know what's going to happen on campus around these issues. It will be lively, as it should be. It's lively at the national level, that will be reflected in our conversation here. But I hope that we can have a good and I might note a civil conversation around differences of opinion and differences of issues engaging with all of these questions of immigration and diversity. We have been through a period of challenges in recent years but we are now in a position to make some investments. I very much hope we can continue those investments in the years ahead. As we move into a new academic year, I want you not only to think about the challenges, which I know you see every day. But I also want you to see the good things happening on campus. Things that you don't read about in the media because it's no fun to cover the good things. Students who walk into a class and discover a lifetime passion. Faculty who's research projects transforms what we know about a critical topic and work that we do across the state that helps this state thrive. We're privileged to be in a position that impacts the world, the state, this region in so many positive ways. So I want to thank all of you for the commitment you've made to this place. I'm always honored to work here and with that, I will close. Anya Wanner wants to make a few comments as head of UC and then we will open up to questions. So, Anya you're next. Thank you all. [ Applause ] >> Welcome everyone to the beginning of a new academic year. In particular, welcome to our new senators and to those of you who are returning, we greatly appreciate all of your efforts and involvement and we couldn't do it, we specifically couldn't do it without you. My name is Anya Wanner I'm the chair of the University Committee. I'm in my third year on the committee and otherwise a professor in the English Department. A brief word for those of you who are new to the senate and could I just see how many of you are new? Thank you. The senate meets on the first Monday of the month from October to December and February to May. The university committee, which serves as the executive committee of the senate meets every Monday throughout the academic year and also most of the summer I should say that. Both Senate and UC meetings are open to the public, except when dealing with personnel matters. The UC works with the office of the secretary of the faculty, Steve Smith and the chancellor to establish the agendas for the senate meetings. If you have any questions about the workings of the senate, the UC or any of the shared governance committees or if you have an issue you would like to discuss with the UC or the senate, please do not hesitate to contact Steve Smith and he will get you on the agenda. The senate is the representative body of the faculty and the UC is the voice of the faculty to the administration and the conduit for the administration to convey information back to the faculty. I want to be clear that we represent you and thus we are always striving to make sure that communication between the university committee and the board of faculty is open and transparent starting with this senate meeting, the office of the secretary of the faculty will be sending a message summarizing the senate meeting to all senators and alternates in order to facilitate communication between senators and the faculty you represent. Stay tuned for that in a couple of days and please feel free to suggest any other ways to increase communication. Each year the university committee chair gets up here at the first senate meeting to provide an overview of what we expect and hope or dread to be working on over the course of the coming months. Every year especially the last couple of years this overview has been accompanied by the caveat that we do not know what surprises the state legislature, the federal government or any other bodies may bring our way. That caveat made university committees, university committee priorities in the coming year include many of the same strategies for investment and engagement outlined by Chancellor Blank a few moments ago as well as adapting and adjusting our campus policy on hostile and intimidating behavior as we learn from its early implementation, as well as strengthening and deepening our shared governance processes including the creation of I'm afraid, new advisory committees for compliance and modifying other committees to better match the offices they work with. As well as amending FMP to reflect changes in summer session and other processes. Now two current items, last Friday you all received an email from the Secretary of the Faculty about two items from UW system and the Board of Regents. First a draft of a Freedom of Expression policy and second a report by the UW system Board of Regents administrative hiring work group. I will address these issues separately. So first, the Freedom of Expression policy. This is really a response to a law that hasn't been passed yet. So, we were surprised to see this actually and to be given a very short deadline for responding. So the university committee in its response will voice its concerns about the mismatch of descriptions of what constitutes material disruption of free speech expression, and specific and very harsh punishments that match these disruptions. And we ask for more review and consultation, especially in the light of this law not having been passed yet. The second one is we had a little bit more time to respond and that is the work group that the Regents appointed to review administrative hiring and to make our processes match what is now state law. The email from Steve Smith invited you to send individual feedback directly to UW system and I know that many of you have done that. In addition, the university committee because we knew this was coming, appointed a group of senior faculty, the Madison Advisory committee on administrative hiring, that sent its feedback directly to UW system as well. This committee is chaired by Terri Warfield from the School of Business. Terri is a member of the university committee. The other two members of this group are Joe Handlsman the Director of Wisconing Institute for Discovery and David McDonald from the Department of History. The Chancellor has engaged with Regents on a one on one basis and we also know that community leaders and alumni have provided comments for system as well. The university committee has also drafted a response, which it approved in its meeting earlier today. And we fully support the report from the Madison Advisory Community on administrative hiring which makes two points. So we cannot have a policy any longer on our campus and put in PVL's any longer on our campus that we want our chancellor to be somebody who is tenurable. State law forbids it. The same thing holds for vice chancellors, including vice chancellors in charge of academic affairs like our provost or vice chancellor for research. That is state law now, we cannot have that policy any longer. It makes it even more important that we have a search committee that recognizes that it is important to have leadership on this campus that is absolutely in line with the mission of this campus. Now you may have seen that the commission of the search committee is something that the advisory group makes very clear recommendations on. And the university committee is fully behind this, so the search committee we recommend be increased from 10 to 15 members and include five faculty instead of just two. We think that if you have just two faculty it is really not possible that they carry the load of representing all the input that you would need from faculty in a chancellor search. That document I think is available on the university committee website, so two documents actually. So first you have the report from the advisory committee that is chaired by Terri Warfield, which we fully support and then secondly there's our own short statement from the university committee. Do we need to say what -if you search on - if you Google on you will find the secretary of the faculty's website. Finally, I'd like to conclude with a few words about profs, which is the body that applicants on behalf of UW Madison's faculty before state government, the Board of Regents, members of congress and the public. You should have gotten a profs legislative update as it came in today. You picked it up at the door probably. These are distributed each senate meeting and they supplement information you can find on the profs Facebook page and their website profs.wis.edu. I strongly, strongly encourage you to become a member of profs to support the vital lobbying and informational work that they do. In addition to employing the lobbyist Jack O'Meara and an administrator Michelle Falbure, Michelle in the back profs relies on the dedicated work of its steering committee and other volunteers including the faculty president. For now I'd like to end by recognizing and congratulating outgoing profs president Judith Berstein, she's over here and incoming profs president Dorothy Ferra-Edwards who I think cannot be here today. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> There are always lengthy reports at this time and I know there are lots of questions and comments out there. I am going to try, because we do have an agenda to open this up. If it goes for more than 20 minutes, I might exercise my prerogative and say other comments should come at us one on one, individually because we do have to get on to the agenda. But why don't we open for any comments and questions and go from there. >> Hi, Mark Edsel District 11. So I really admire what you've done with the badge of promise program. And I fully support that; I'd like to see it be even more funding for students and so thank you very much for establishing that. I went online to try and contribute money to the badge of promise program and I could not find a way to do that. >> I will ask about that and officially get back to you on that. >> I typed in badge of promise. I went to the badge - I just could not find a way. >> So the right way to contribute would be to call the foundation and to make a contribution to the foundation that's specified for the badge of promise because they're the ones who will take the - >> So if I go the foundation and I'm looking for something you can type in a search and they'll come up with a fund number, you just click on it and you put your credit card in and - >> I'll look into the badge of promise. >> You put that on the UW foundation website please. >> Will do. Anyone else who wants to contribute, we'll make it happen. >> Philip Hollander, District 59, German, Nordic, Slavic and Jewish Studies. My question pertains to the changes in the senate or the state funding bill dealing with domestic partnerships and funding for healthcare. This is something that if we're interested in campus climate, this together with the issues pertaining to transgender people that we dealt with last semester, there are important aspects of campus climate. And I'm interested in knowing how the university is responding to this loss of healthcare for partners that is going to impact many members of the faculty? And significantly damage our ability to attract people and retain people? >> Yeah we're quite active when this was proposed in indicating our concerns about this change, that it really was not a good idea and it would really be chilling to a good number of hires, We were not successful in that discussion. As all of you know, I mean the reason for this was that the idea that now that gay couples can marry we don't need this. As many of you know the majority of people who take advantage of this actually are not gay couples, though they too take advantage of it. Its domestic partnerships that exist in other ways. But we unfortunately are very tied as to what we can do on our healthcare funding. We can't put extra healthcare programs in place. You know there are real limitations on us as a state agency. We've looked at whether we can do some things you know, in addition to the normal healthcare provisions and it does not look very likely. Is Wayne here? Our head of HR? I know we looked at this at some length earlier and I don't have a good answer to you. If you have some suggestions you should bring them to us and if we haven't looked at them we will look at them as alternatives. Thank you. I share your concern. [ Inaudible ] >> So it's very exciting to listen to your presentation when you look - when you outline all this expansion of education opportunities across the wide spectrum. And I would assume that everyone in the audience would concur with you that this is essential also to preserve the quota for instate students; otherwise we may lose our identity within the state. But there is a challenge in your presentation of probably we may wish to hear more because the numbers may not add up. You see you talk about the quota of 3500 maybe 3600 if I hear correctly of instate students from our Wisconsin high schools. And you pointed the demographics that those numbers are declining and of course this raises immediately the issue of quality. How we preserve quality and you were adamant about saying that we need to preserve the qualities with this particular segment of our incoming students with the specific ideas on how to preserve the quality there. >> As the pool of Wisconsin residents graduating from high school has shrunk, that does create a challenge and you know there's two answers to that, right? I think we're pursuing three of them actually. We're pursuing all of them. One is that we do have to provide the scholarship assistance that will bring students here, that we want to come. So that when we make an offer, they come here and that's number one. Number two, we are working as I mentioned to really do some special high touch work for those students who's ACT's are 30 or above. Many of whom end up going out of state, trying to keep more of them here at Wisconsin and what a great university they have in their back yard. Which we've actually done surveys of the students at high test scores and why they didn't come. And it's really given us some insight as to what we need to message to them, so that's number two. And number three is we're really working to up our game in general on the admissions office. Here in state more so than even out of state because we've been doing pretty well on that front and I think we have not done as good of job of reaching, some of you will tell me stories of your own children of reaching out to really good instate students around the state and making them feel wanted at UW Madison as they feel at Minnesota or Indiana or Michigan or at another school. So, we're basically put some more money into admissions, really working on making sure with our in state students we can maintain the quality at the same level as the quality of the out of state applicants that we have. And so far we've been successful at that. >> Thank you. >> [Inaudible] Feinstein, Community Environmental Sociology. I was delighted and grateful to see the summary of efforts around the campus on environmental sustainability. It's wonderful to see that gathered in one place and presented so pithily. My concern about this is just that we have an abundance of data that shows that you can't divorce sustainability from equity. And the presentation of that data right next to data on our campus climate, to me left a question hanging in the air. We know very well from host of studies and a range of fields, that environmental harms originate from those who have many resources and fall disproportionately on those who have few. And I would just encourage you and your office and other offices around campus to consider issues of equity as an integral piece of our efforts on sustainability from which they really cannot be divorced, thank you. >> Thank you. Any other comments? In that case I'm going to move on to the next item of the agenda, which is the minutes. You all should have minutes of May 1 on page 13 on the agenda. Are there any additions or corrections to the minutes of May 1? If not, I'm going to state the minutes are approved. Note that you have in your materials page 14, the faculty document 2697, which highlights the body of work that this assembly has done over the last year. We're required to present that to the new senate every year and I hope you all take a chance to look through that. Turning to agenda item six, Professor Chad Goldberg will present an update on a resolution from last year. >> Thank you Chancellor. I'll try to keep this brief because I know we have a very long agenda today. As some of you will recall in April 2017 the faculty senate passed a resolution calling for fair and equitable pay for faculty assistance, that's faculty document 2677, I believe that's reproduced in the packet that everybody received today? The senate passed that resolution and I remember because I was the one who moved that resolution. The senate passed that resolution overwhelmingly after it had already been endorsed by the associated students in Madison, the TAA and the academic staff assembly. The resolution acknowledged that faculty assistance, a category of instructional academic stuff who in vice chancellor play an important role in delivering a first rate education to our students in various disciplines, most notably ESO and chemistry. Those faculty assistance perform the same duties as teaching assistants and often do more, but are paid a lower minimum compensation rate. That's the kind of equity issue that my colleague was talking about a moment ago. The faculty senate resolution advised the chancellor to raise the minimum nine month 100% appointment compensation for faculty assistance to equal that of teaching assistants by Fall 2017. The semester and to maintain this parody in the future. That resolution sent an important message, a unified message from both academic staff and faculty about the kind of university where we want to work, a university that recognizes the value of everyones contributions here including those of faculty assistants. On the morning of the day that the faculty senate voted to support fair pay for faculty assistants, Dean Carl Schultz issued a memorandum announcing important improvements for faculty assistants in the college of science. And in the memo LNS committed to pay increases for some faculty assistants for this academic year. The memo also announced that in Fall 2017 the semester existing renewable faculty assistants and ESL, English as a second language will be transitioned to renewable positions, which is a more appropriate job title with higher salaries. These are valuable steps and the right direction. They reflect the spirit of this faculty senates advice and we should commend Dean Schultz for them. They are however, only first steps. The improvements only affect faculty assistance and the college of letters and sciences, so one fifth the faculty assistants do not benefit from these changes. Even within LNS the pay raises for faculty assistants still falls short of the minimum compensation rate for TA's, so this is not quite parody. Not all faculty assistants in LNS received pay raises, there was no raise in the LNS standard rate for faculty assistants with a PhD in the discipline that they teach in. And lastly two experienced faculty assistants in English as a second language who were leaders at the forefront of last year's campaign for fair pay, leaders who spoke to this body last April were pointedly excluded from the transition to renewable positions in ESL. One of those faculty assistants, Alyssa Franza is with us today and I would like to ask you to listen to a few words directly from her. >> Hi, when I reflect on the past year of my life as a faculty assistant there are two principles that stand out in my mind. And those are equity and having a voice in my work place and on this campus. I love teaching, it's what I trained for in grad school, and I spend a lot of time and energy on it. Until last year the message I was getting from the university was that despite my education, despite my dedication, my qualifications and my experience the work that I did was less important and less valuable then that of my graduate student colleagues. Then we, our faculty and academic staff union brought this issue before the TAA, before ASM, before the academic staff assembly and before this body. All of those bodies and all of you who were there then supported our resolution calling for equal pay for equal work. This said to my FA colleagues and to me that the work we do is valued and it is equal. In early August, however my colleague John Bulakasia who also spoke before you in April and I were informed that we would not be hired to our program after a combined 13 years of service. This has left me to believe that if I exercise my voice in my work place and if I join it with the voices of labor unions and shared governance I will be punished. Thank you. >> Thank you Alyssa. Colleagues I submit that what happened to Alyssa Franza and John Bulakasia was not in the spirit of faculty document 2677. It is not consistent with the vision that resolution articulated the vision of a university where concerns about fairness, justice and solidarity still play a role in the work that we do together. Colleagues I report these developments to you today to underscore that the advice of this body has not been fully heeded yet and there is still work to do. In closing I do an add that three is a petition circulating around campus that protests the treatment of Alyssa Franza and John Bulakasia. I urge you to sign it if you would like to do so, please contact me after today's senate meeting. Thank you. >> Moving on to agenda item seven, Professor Anya Wanner will move to confirm appointments to elected committees. >> I move to confirm he appointment of Joellen Fair, Department of African Cultural Studies to serve on the committee on committees for the spring semester 2018 replacing Ivy Caufus who will be on sabbatical. >> Are there any questions or a need for further discussion? If not I'm going to call for a voice vote, all those in favor of the appointment of Joellen Fair on the committee of committees indicate by saying aye? >> Aye. >> Any opposed? Motion carries. >> I move to confirm the appointment of Lisa Bratske, school of nursing to serve on the university library committee for three years replacing Lima Burland who resigned from the committee. >> Are there any questions or need for further discussion? If not I will again call for a vote for the appointment of Lisa Bratski on the university library committee, all in favor say aye? >> Aye. >> Any opposed? That motion carries. Let me recognize provost Sara Manglesdorf to present the annual report of the university academic planning council. >> You should have received the report UABC in your packet and I will not go through it all detail but you can feel free to ask me any questions you might have. Two things I did want to highlight. One is sometimes people say that we never take anything off the books around here and we just add new programs, it's absolutely not the case. We authorize two new degree programs last year, we renamed and restructures seven. We suspended admissions on eight and discontinued 21. So, we're always changing. And I also wanted to mention that we ask the general education committee to do a special review of all the ethnic studies courses and the ethnic studies subcommittee reviewed 225 syllabi for all the courses that were on the books as meeting the ethnic studies requirement, sort of very thorough review and reported back to us and they're continuing their work in the coming year and then we are also spent a lot of time talking about higher learning commission, crepitation will be going through and just coming up with the definition of what a credit hour is and all kinds of other important things. But I'm open to take any questions either here or you can find me off line. >> Talk to the provost if you want to talk about it. Let me recognize professor Kurt Pulson who is going to present a resolution for first reading, you can find this on page 30 and 31 in your packet and let me emphasize there's not a vote in this. It is a first reading, we'll come back to it next month. >> Is this good enough? >> Yes. >> So the resolution you have before you is again, as chancellor said a first reading. I urge you to take this back to your department, get feedback and we'll vote on it next week, next month. Sorry, and I want to begin by thanking the chancellor for her blog post on Thursday on sustainability efforts and for that document in our packet. I think that really serves a need for us to communicate with all the stakeholders that we have about the actions that we are already undertaking in this regard. Often times when I'm talking to students or I work out in the community a lot, people say "You're not doing enough", this is a helpful communication piece. So the spirit of this resolution I'll just describe a little bit of the process. It actually started at the funeral of one of our faculty, Phil Lewis after whom the county parks is named. And I was talking to people from the Dane County Climate Action Council and the question is what can the university do to kind of signal and renew its commitment towards actions on sustainability and climate? And so the spirit of the resolution is to build on the strengths and what we've already done and to establish for ourselves as a university of a stretch goal that you see there in the resolution. More on process. I started circulating this resolution; I got a lot of feedback and wonderful insight and assistance from the university committee from Paul Robbins at Nelson, from Dan Vymount with Wisconsin Climate Research Institute and Carol Barford at Sage. And it's an illustration of what collaborative shared governance can do. And so the resolution does three main things. It suggests that the senate endorses and adopts the goal that UW Madison become climate neutral by 2050, we recognize this in aspiration and stretch goal, but a lot of our fellow universities are making that goal. We are already circulating versions of this amongst the other shared governance groups and the ASM sustainability committee is also bringing forth a similar resolution. It also establishes the goal or the recommendation that we prepare a campus wide climate action plan. It doesn't specify what that plan would look like or who would do it, we don't want to get bogged down in yet another committee. But the idea that a lot of other universities have engaged in this climate action planning and Paul Robbins has certainly indicated that he would be willing to bring any of them in for giving seminars and helping to understand how to do it. And then the last thing that the resolution does is it encourages the chancellor to sign the university and college presidents' climate action agreement. >> You wanted to move this for conversation? >> I'll move it next month. >> Conversation? Comments? >> Bruce Barret, from family medicine and community health, number 103. Just a reminder about four years ago we did do something on this level, for those of you who were here, so I brought a motion to urge the university and the foundation to divest from fossil fuels and we voted to create an ad hoc committee to study the issue. And that committee studied it with seven or eight meetings including town hall meetings, wrote up a 36 page report, which you all adopted I think almost unanimously February 2014 perhaps. And the main four recommendations that you all agreed with for those of you who were here then, were to prioritize education, which I think we are doing. There's many, many courses. Promoting interdisciplinary and interconnected research on climate change, we're one of the top universities on this beleaguered planet doing that. Commit our campus to significant emission reduction targets, as chancellor Blank told you we've reduced energy use per square foot by more than 25% by 27% or so. But the last thing that we asked, I don't think has been acted on so I'm actually going to read it to you rather than the whole 36 pages because we do have an agenda. Promote non-fossil fuel investment opportunities. We considered divestment and we were split. We wrote appendices for and against from that committee. But there was complete consensus on the need to offer opportunities for donors to invest in non-fossil fuels companies. The committee strongly recommends that the faculty senate urged the UW foundation to create this option for donors. The committee further recommends having a climate change, challenges and opportunities as a central theme of the next capital campaign. And then I should have added and the next several cluster hires. So anyway thank you, I just wanted to share that information. >> Thank you. Other discussion and comments on this? It will come for a vote at the next meeting, so if there are questions or issues you can raise them with Kurt or with others, all right. In that case I will recognize Professor Wanner who is going to present a change to FPNP also a first reading to be voted on at the next meeting. >> You have in your materials on the last page I believe, faculty document 2700 which is a proposed modification to a portion of FPNP 305. This part of FPNP describes the graduate school and its faculty. This particular section H deals with the role of academic staff vis e vie graduate students. As written this section could be interpreted to give the dean of the graduate school the power to allow academic staff to service major advisors, and Dean Cappers came to us and asked is this really what you want. We weren't entirely sure if this is what the faculty wanted so we're bringing one potential clarification to you. So the university committee believed that the modifier on a basis similar to that of faculty members was not originally intended to apply to both advising and training programs, the language proposed is intended to make this clearer. But it might not be what you want so this is just a suggestion, just a first reading because this change to FPNP is about getting an original intent. We are bringing it to the senate for discussion prior to it's being put up for a vote so we look forward to your input. >> Comments? >> Hi my name [Inaudible] I wanted to come up here to voice my strong opposition to this proposal. In our department [Inaudible] host the collaborative research sent unit and that unit is staff with two federal scientists. Those are excellent scientists and they're considered associate scientists and these people actually bring money to the department, to the university and they train students and between the two people they've trained over 70 graduate students on this campus and changing the - or limiting their ability to be major advisors on graduate committees would have a lot of unintended consequences that would reduce the amount of dollars that would be brought into this university, it would reduce the excellent teaching and training opportunities and it would reduce the amount of federal connection that we have through those scientists, so I urge the university committee to not continue with this proposal and I would urge my colleagues to propose this proposal. >> Thank you. >> [Inaudible] Goldberg, district 71. I agree with what was just said. I don't quite understand the need to restrict the existing language that we have. It's not clear to me that this was the intent and it seems that we just heard good reasons why maybe we should keep it more open as opposed to the restricted version in the market. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I would then propose or is that we're getting here that we clarify by saying something like including major advisor, because if that's the intent and the way its written right now is not entirely clear then perhaps we should make it clear. >> So this is one where those of you who have academic advising for graduate students and have an opinion about this your department does it one way or another, should definitely be in touch with Anya and with the UC so that if they come back next month with revised language, it is language that reflects what's true out there on campus, this as I hear it a very open conversation. Any other comments on this? I am at the end of the agenda. I think it's hot enough, we've been driven out. I'm going to adjourn the meeting and I will look forward to seeing you all in another month. Thank you very much for coming.