The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of March 22, 2001
Computer Lab, Daniel Library

1. Prof. Tom Thompson, Faculty Council chairperson, called the meeting to order when a quorum was achieved at 11:07 a.m.

2. Members attending: Profs. Bishop, Brown, Chen, Dunlop, Gordon, Lally, Matthews, Moody, Pages, Silver, Skow-Obenaus, Templeton, Thompson, G. Williams, Hilleke for Briggs, Mays for Britz, Noble for Lineberger and Rushing for Zuraw.

3. Members absent: Profs. Jones, Kelley, McDowell, Nath and Woo.

4. Prof. Williams moved and Prof. Silver seconded that the minutes of the Feb. 22 meeting be approved. This was passed unanimously.

5. Spike Metts, Dean of Planning and Assessment, was present to talk to the Council about its concerns on professors no longer being shown the actual Student Evaluation of Instruction forms but only a summary of the statistics and transcript of any comments. There was a lively discussion on this. Professors brought up their desire to put really bad comments, like sexist remarks or "Die" (which has happened), in context by seeing if all bad remarks came from the same person and what that person's statistical answers and specifics were rather than, as now, having the comments grouped by question. Col. Metts noted that student anonymity is really needful and we should not worry about one or two off-the-wall comments; no proper department head would be influenced by such. Prof. Lally was bothered that increased security of student anonymity was more important than the professor's right to be confronted with the raw data of his or her evaluation; Prof. Templeton noted that you could put bad comments in context not by guessing whose they were but just by seeing if the student was not a major but forced to be there by core requirements or if a few conspired in a group to write bad things, and it was bothersome that this context would be lost to administrators looking at our results. Prof. Williams noted that professors turn in the grades before they see the evaluation results so even if we guessed who wrote things it wouldn't be able to lead to revenge; Prof. Pages, however, pointed out that the students might take another course from the same professor in future. Col. Metts said it was not acceptable to require the transcribers of the student evaluation results to do more work so that professors could see their version of the whole page of a negative commenter; it already takes four people a whole month to transcribe the comments and filter out the profanity. Prof. Moody raised the question of how much censorship of comments there is-- Col. Metts said just the four-letter words-- and noted that the transcription and delivery is sometimes inaccurate as when she got another professor's comments. The problem of delay in getting the evaluation data back was raised; some suggested getting instant feedback by having the students do their evaluations on the Web, but Col. Metts pointed out that having them done in the classroom insures participation in a way that would not happen if the students were in their rooms with a computer. He noted that the purpose of student evaluation is to identify extremes, really low or high ratings or the same comments year after year, and if we were in the middle ground with no obvious things to fix we shouldn't worry about the weird comments. Several people pointed out that it would be possible, and indeed less work for the transcribers, to transcribe the comments on a page-by-page rather than a question-by-question basis so that we could see whether weird or bad comments were in a group by one person; Col. Metts said they had thought to give us an overview of a question, but it would be perfectly possible to change the policy so we got an overview of each commenter. Prof. Thompson asked if a policy could be formulated to allow a professor to check into a particular evaluation grievance; Col. Metts said yes. Prof. Lally asked whether Faculty Council could form a committee to look into injustices in the current evaluation procedure, such as whether the requirement for the professor to leave the room and have a student monitor do it leads to bad things; Prof. Thompson called for volunteers for such a committee. Profs. Lally, Moody, Skow-Obenaus, Templeton and Williams volunteered, and stayed around after the meeting for some time discussing the issues.

6. Col. Metts stayed to hear Prof. Thompson's report from Academic Board. At that meeting, Gen. Carter assured the Board that there are no plans to save money by furloughing anybody; Prof. Thompson reported to them on our vote at the last meeting to keep the two councils separate and have as little additional administration as possible; it was announced that it was not guaranteed that people who were asked their preferences for teaching summer school would actually get to do so; the Tenure and Promotion Committee passed along their recommendations for people this year; the state budget reduction was announced to be 10 1/2%; and Gen. Carter proposed a policy that students be required to stay on campus until the time when their last class would be over on the Friday just before a holiday whether or not the class meets that day, which would end the pressure on professors to cancel them.

7. Prof. Bishop reported on the work of the Coeducation Council since she became the faculty representative on it. It had raised four issues: pre-knobs sleeping in classes, which might be solved by putting them with subjects they were interested in or sending them for a walk instead; how widely the leadership statement we worked on last year was being disseminated, which was not enough but at least diversity is being encouraged by the Communication Across the Curriculum meetings this year; the quality of OCs in the barracks, which is pretty much okay now since they're being encouraged to walk around at night more and the students are policing themselves better, whereas the obstacles to getting the professionals to take the night shifts are insuperable; and the school policy on cheerleaders, which the Coed Council took action on. It voted to go from the current situation of having male Citadel students and female College of Charleston students with advanced gymnastics routines to having an all-cadet squad with female Citadel students immediately replacing the College women (though the question is whether enough of them can be found to do it with all the pressure on our few women now to play a sport) and going to more of a pep-squad style; this had been accepted by Gen. Grinalds and will be done next year. It was asked whether the Coed Council had taken up NCAA standards for female athletics and whether it had addressed the rates of female application and attrition, neither of which had been done in Prof. Bishop's time on it.

8. Prof. Thompson called the Council's attention to a place on the Web where we could look at a Grade Grievance Policy from another school to see whether, as has also been proposed to Academic Board, we want to adopt it. Prof. Templeton noted that this issue arose because a student read the catalogue and asserted that there was no time limit on protesting a grade even after the Incomplete-into-F date. Prof. Silver asked whether a whole formal policy based on this one case wasn't an overreaction on the Administration's part; Prof. Thompson suggested that we read the policy, take the question to our departments and talk about it next time.

9. Prof. Thompson announced that elections for the new vice-chair and secretary would be held at next month's meeting.

10. In New Business, Prof. Bishop told of her experience as one of the judges at this year's Talent Show: one of her students had predicted another disaster, but in fact the potentially volatile acts were received without overt rudeness and all went well. Thus we can be pleased that after last year's scandal the students really did clean up their act. Prof. Williams proposed that the policy on the times of evening classes be changed so that some could start at 5 or 5:30 rather than the rigid 4 and 6:45 only, as has just been re-mandated. Prof. Thompson noted that we haven't discussed this because it's a Graduate Council thing, but said he would check with Gen. Carter about how written in stone it is. Prof. Williams asked the status of the inquiry about a tuition waiver for the children of faculty, and Prof. Thompson said he had asked and got no reply yet.

11. The meeting was adjourned at 12:01 p.m.