Official EPC Meeting Minutes Spring 2010

These are the official EPC meeting minutes from Spring 2010.

Attendance
Faculty: Jane Couperus (CS), Cindy Gill (NS), Nell Arnold (IA), Jill Lewis (IA), Lise

Sanders (HACU), Elly Donkin (IA), Dean of Advising Eva Rueschman

Director of Central Records, Bobbie Stuart

Students: Ananda Valenzuela (SS), Peter Graham (HACU), Melanie Magolan (IA), Sasha Fuller (NS)

Absent: Dean of Faculty Alan Goodman, Claire Oberholtzer (at-large), Carol Lee Bengelsdorf (SS)

Agenda
I. Approve Jan. 26  Minutes II. Set agenda and procedures for Feb. 16th meeting III. Review and tweak motions IV. Reports from schools regarding Div I V. New Business

I.
Plan for today is to organize in order to get all the ideas together and figure out what to include in the amended motions for the February 16th faculty meeting and also send them out with a covering memo and proposal to the faculty before the meeting.

Ideas were made on how we could get feedback from faculty, among them listing motions on paper then having people write in and report, asking do you have any specific constructive feedback from a specific motion. Also, is there anything you love about the proposal.

Valuable information from faculty for us would be:


 * 1) I can live with it.
 * 2) I am crazy about it.
 * 3) Not a good idea.

Strategized on how to structure the meeting with a clear format. The Deans questioned who would be running the meeting. After much discussion, agreed that:


 * the meeting would begin with students staying for several minutes only, so the EPC would be represented as a whole
 * each student would speak for one minute and then they would leave
 * there would not be any formal minute-taking
 * nothing would be voted on
 * each EPC member for their school would present a slide, giving a basic summary of their school’s position, limited to four minutes each
 * each school will report on their conversations from their school meetings via their EPC member
 * using a grid board, putting the major concerns on it before the meeting
 * there would be a time limit on each motion presented
 * last half-hour would be opened to the faculty to speak for two-minutes only, implementing a timer and a one-minute warning card, speaking only once until everyone has had the opportunity to speak.

Preliminary contracts, proposals, and the application current practices were discussed, along with suggestions of improvement. This included a page to fill out on The Hub by the student stating what they are thinking of doing in Div II. That would help solidify their ideas, hopefully eliminating postponement to the last filing deadline.

Would like to make sure most of the faculty are on board with the Advisor's Page. If we don’t have Advisor’s Page we cannot track cumulative skills. Worrisome as we don’t know how we can do without it. If don’t have it things built on top of it would collapse. Put back in writing requirement?

IV.
NS report: Cindy (NS) reported on her school’s motion voting. Having preapproved list would be helpful. Revised scheme for splits distribution into arts, sciences, humanities and social analysis. Idea is if you start from concept for each faculty member and they are responsible for one distribution a year, that you can develop them and be equal. Shot down by deans who wanted a more school-based distribution listing. Will come forward as amendment (discussed on 16th) in March. Bigger issue for governance. Huge pressure on NS in proposed distribution and HACU would have less pressure than right now.

NS proposal balances responsibilities among individual faculty. Institutionally lot of confusion in HACU, CS, and NS discussion about distribution requirements. Pedagogically the idea of separating out arts and humanities, (Larry’s) makes a lot of sense. Anxiety remains about where electives will fall. Splitting motions may be problematic, if you do a separate motion about distribution in relation to the number of courses it might be an issue. Make two and three go together. Suggests having a choice between two sets of categories.

CS mixed report. Major concern about 7 plus 1 not just messy, but how are we going to look to outside world, 8-1 and decided against.

V.
Co-Director of the Writing Program, Deb Gorlin addressed the first-year writing skills from the Writing Program’s view by saying they are happy to have the benchmarking assessments in the first year and encourage them again at the end of Div. II. The process of writing goes on all four years and we can’t constrain people to one year, assuming that at the end of that year all students will be in top shape. The Writing Program is working on what interventions work best right now.

Eva would favor something in a Div II eval that has a separate rubric for writing and another marker and another way that students can institutionally go to improve because they know they will be assessed at end of Div II.

Still need a student CS member.

Attendance
Faculty: Jane Couperus (CS), Cindy Gill (NS), Nell Arnold (IA), Jill Lewis (IA), Lise

Sanders (HACU), Elly Donkin (IA), Carol Lee Bengelsdorf (SS), Dean of Advising Eva Rueschman, Dean of Faculty Alan Goodman

Director of Central Records, Bobbie Stuart

Students: Claire Oberholtzer (at large), Ananda Valenzuela (SS), Peter Graham (HACU)

Absent: Adam Krellenstein (NS), Melanie Magolan (IA)

Agenda
I. Approve Dec. 8 Minutes II. Review written EPC proposal III. Prepare PowerPoint presentation IV. New Business

II.
The two aims of this meeting are to go through the full proposal and Elly’s cover letter to send to the Deans after today’s meeting and edit the PowerPoint presentation.

III.
Jane went over each of the six Motion slides, with Ananda’s pictures, in the PowerPoint presentation and tweaked placement of paragraphs so that the final PowerPoint version would be ready by Thursday for school meetings.

Explained the concept of the Advisor’s Page, which is not a motion, but page that would show the progress of each student over four years making a better overview, but not appearing on the transcript. It would be seen and edited by the current advisor or anyone else the student designates. Slide showed mock-up of five overlapping categories, with columns on the right side having automatic put-ins.

All silently reviewed the Cover sheet for the Proposal that will be sent out with the full proposal to all deans after this meeting. Only changes were positioning of paragraphs and fine-tuning wording.

Soft requirements, quantitative skills, competency shift, and the passing of Div I were clarified.

The New Div I would take effect in fall 2011. If voted in, we will have the opportunity to see where the workload falls and address issues this coming year. Want to vote on the full package of all motions in March, after amending and changing motions if we needed to.

The EPC members attending the five school meetings were verified.