UNIVERSITY
OF KENTUCKY
SENATE
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October 13,
2003
3:00 p.m.
W. T. Young
Library
First Floor
Auditorium
Lexington, Kentucky
An/Dor
Reporting Services, Inc.
179
East Maxwell Street
Lexington,
Kentucky 40515
(859)254-0568
University
of Kentucky Senate
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3
1 CHAIR DEMBO: Welcome, everybody. We'll get
2 underway with our October meeting for
3 the University Senate. This is the
4 agenda. By now I hope you've all
5 learned how to negotiate the University
6 Senate Web page. Certainly if you have
7 any suggestions about the layout of the
8 Web page, please send them to us,
9 especially to Rebecca Scott sitting to
10 my left. We're always looking for ways
11 to streamline, to make it easier to get
12 the links that you need. First item of
13 business, if I don't hear any
14 objections, we can assume that the
15 minutes from the previous meeting stand
16 approved as is. Pregnant pause. Okay.
17 Next section, we have some
18 announcements. Finally our College
19 Senate Elections have been completed.
20 We have a bunch of senators from Arts
21 and Sciences. Not to put you on the
22 spot, but just so we can get to know
23 each other: Michael Cavagnero, welcome;
24 Janet Eldred, hello, Janet.
25 ELDRED: Hi.
4
1 CHAIR DEMBO: You're behind Grossman's large
2 head. You can't help it.
3 GROSSMAN: Thanks, Jeff.
4 CHAIR DEMBO: Daniel Gargola, welcome. Jennifer
5 Lewin. When the Senate Roster says
6 replacing another senator, what that
7 indicates is that the other senator is
8 either ineligible to serve or has
9 stepped down, and the person replacing
10 that senator serves the amount of time
11 that was left in the previous senator's
12 term. So when somebody new comes on,
13 they serve three years. If somebody is
14 replacing another senator, they serve
15 whatever period of time was left in that
16 senator's spot. Stan Brunn? Michael
17 Bardo? I'm not taking attendance. I'm
18 just trying to -- Don Gross, Tamara
19 Brown, Dick Jefferies. Hello, Dick.
20 Tom Zentall? Hello, Tom. And then from
21 the graduate school, there was an
22 election and also I think a new set of
23 rules that the graduate school is now
24 developing. Davy Jones is now an
25 elected senator with voting privileges.
5
1 Davy has been on the Senate Council in
2 his ex officio membership as a faculty
3 trustee; now he's a senate -- a voting
4 senate member. Communication
5 Information Studies, Tom Lindlof,
6 welcome. And from Fine Arts, Bob
7 Haven. Welcome to the Senate.
8 As always, if there are any
9 questions for new senators, feel free to
10 ask. We had a little orientation
11 session, but I'm happy to go over
12 anything that you'd find helpful to
13 you. Since we're talking about Senate
14 functions, I need to just make a short
15 announcement that Senate Council
16 Elections will be held and you will be
17 getting a ballot. Ms. Scott, when will
18 ballots be going out?
19 SCOTT: Ballots should be mailed Wednesday
20 morning.
21 CHAIR DEMBO: On Wednesday morning. And in a
22 second, Kaveh Tagavi, who's Chair of the
23 Rules and Elections Committee, will also
24 add something. I just wanted to outline
25 to you how this works. It's a strange
6
1 sort of system because, as a senator,
2 your Senate term begins on August 15th
3 and goes till three years later, till
4 August 14th. The Senate Council terms
5 go from January 1st to December 31st, so
6 it's an odd cycle. Then on top of that
7 there are Senate Council Officers. So
8 this time of year is when we elect
9 Senate Council members. There are nine
10 faculty who are voting members of the
11 Senate Council, the SGA president, and
12 three members from the Student
13 Government -- two members from the SGA.
14 There are nonvoting members, of course,
15 which are the faculty trustees. And the
16 rules say that three faculty members
17 shall be elected annually during the
18 fall semester and the election is
19 conducted by mail under the supervision
20 of the Secretary of the Senate. This is
21 where, Kaveh, I think it would be a good
22 place for you to step in if you want to
23 talk a little bit about the election
24 process. I have some of the rules up
25 here in case people wanted to see them.
7
1 TAGAVI: Yes. Very briefly, sometime I think
2 Wednesday or Thursday, we're going to be
3 mailing you the ballots. They are this
4 color this time and an index card. The
5 important things are that you have two
6 weeks to vote and vote for three people,
7 exactly. If you vote for less than
8 three or more than three, your vote will
9 be disqualified. It's not my doing.
10 That's the rules, and I have to follow
11 the rules.
12 Then what we would do is there are
13 three openings, twice as many, that's
14 six, plus any ties for the sixth place
15 will be on the next ballot. And you
16 will only win the election by having 50
17 percent plus, and we keep going, having
18 a second round or third round until all
19 three members are chosen.
20 Another thing for you to pay
21 attention is not more than three could
22 be from any college or eight from any
23 sector. So when you are nominating and
24 voting, realize that, for example, Arts
25 and Sciences already has two people or
8
1 three people, then nobody else -- if
2 it's three, nobody else. If it's two,
3 only one more person from College of
4 Arts and Sciences, as an example, could
5 be elected. That's all.
6 GROSSMAN: Any reason we're not doing this by
7 Web?
8 TAGAVI: Rules.
9 GROSSMAN: Huh?
10 TAGAVI: Rules says it has to be by ballot. We
11 could change that.
12 GROSSMAN: Can it be electronic ballot?
13 TAGAVI: No, it has -- it says --
14 GROSSMAN: Does it say paper ballot?
15 TAGAVI: It says paper ballot.
16 GROSSMAN: Okay.
17 TAGAVI: But something to think about.
18 CHAIR DEMBO: Other questions about the Senate
19 Council Elections? There are usually at
20 least two rounds. One is the nomination
21 round, and then after that will be the
22 actual ballot. And all members who are
23 nominated and make it to the first
24 ballot will be contacted to see if
25 they're willing to serve. And one more
9
1 thing before we leave the subject of the
2 Senate Council: Officers of the Senate
3 Council are also elected at the end of
4 the fall semester, and the term of the
5 new Senate Council Chair starts on June
6 1st. This is a list of the members of
7 the Senate Council who will be eligible
8 to chair. That's an election that
9 occurs just within the Senate Council
10 itself.
11 Before we get to Faculty Trustee
12 reports, we don't have an official
13 memorial resolution. I just wanted to
14 mark the passing of two beloved faculty
15 at the University of Kentucky. One is
16 Joe Davis from the College of
17 Agriculture, well-known to everybody in
18 that community, a real advocate for
19 students and fairness and good, sound
20 academics for a number of years, so we
21 all miss -- miss him.
22 The other is Russ Groves, a senator
23 from the College of Design, was a former
24 academic ombud for the university who
25 died in a plane crash. You may have
10
1 read about it several weeks ago,
2 weekends ago. So I would imagine that
3 official memorial resolutions will be
4 coming forward, but I just wanted to
5 mark the passing of these two faculty at
6 this meeting.
7 Next on the agenda, we have Faculty
8 Trustee reports. We'll start with
9 Michael Kennedy.
10 KENNEDY: I will try not to make this too long,
11 but there's a lot to -- a fair amount to
12 cover. We do this, I think, once a year
13 now, have a report by the Faculty
14 Trustee. That's contact information.
15 I'll show that slide again at the end.
16 I would also try to get -- are we set up
17 to get the Internet? No. Okay.
18 Let me just give a little overview
19 of the Board of Trustees. It consists
20 of 20 people from across the state.
21 There are 16 appointed by the governor.
22 Three of those are nominated by the
23 Alumni Association. The other four are
24 two faculty trustees, a staff trustee,
25 and a student trustee. The board meets
11
1 about -- well, it's been back and forth,
2 somewhere between six and ten times a
3 year. There's been a move by President
4 Todd to have the board meet fewer times
5 and for longer. And previous to his
6 assuming the presidency, the board would
7 come in and basically meet for two
8 hours, eight times a year. Four times
9 are mandated by the legislature. And as
10 the person who became chair in 1998
11 said, what we would do is come in and
12 smile and nod because most of the work
13 was done by the Executive Committee and
14 the Administration. That's been changed
15 considerably. We come in the day
16 before. I say we come in. I live in
17 Lexington, obviously, so I don't have to
18 come in very far, but the trustees meet
19 the night before, have dinner at Maxwell
20 Place, and have about two to three
21 hours' worth of discussion. And lots of
22 issues get brought up at that, at those
23 meetings. It's very open. It's a good
24 group. Currently there -- it's half
25 women, half men, ten of each. It has an
12
1 African American chair. It has a woman
2 who's vice chair. The staff
3 representative is the secretary of the
4 board, so it's really different from the
5 Board of Trustees of, say, five years
6 ago.
7 Under modes of operation, I've
8 described that for the board. I'm
9 essentially one year, plus a little bit,
10 into a three-year term on the board, and
11 I spent the first year kind of getting
12 to know people and keeping my head down
13 for the most part. Let's see. If I --
14 I think that's -- we don't have an
15 Internet link, and I think that this
16 doesn't work, Ben, but we'll know in a
17 second.
18 Basically my method for
19 communicating with the board and
20 participating with the board is to get
21 to know the people. And I could count
22 maybe a third of them as what I would
23 say friends. I'm on good terms with
24 most of the rest of them. And what I do
25 is, there's a lot of sort of verbal or
13
1 oral interaction. And then
2 occasionally, when I feel something's
3 important, I'll write them an e-mail or
4 a letter. For those of who you might be
5 interested, it takes about 15 or 20
6 hours a week to do the Board of Trustees
7 stuff on the average.
8 A lot of board business gets done at
9 athletic events, football games, which
10 seem to be mandatory. I went to, I
11 think, three football games prior to
12 going on the board and I've now been to
13 every one since, because that's where
14 people talk about things, talk about
15 issues. I also find it's hard to walk
16 across -- it takes much longer to walk
17 across campus now because I get
18 buttonholed by people.
19 I'm currently on the Academic
20 Affairs Committee, which is responsible
21 for passing on the organizational
22 changes in the university and name
23 changes and so on. The Nominating
24 Committee, which nominates officers for
25 the board, and the Ad Hoc Committee on
14
1 the President's Compensation, which I'll
2 say a little more about later. Other
3 committees are the Executive Committee,
4 which is elected by the board, the
5 Investment Committee, the Audit
6 Committee, and the Finance Committee,
7 which deal with issues that I don't know
8 very much about. There's some fairly
9 substantial business people on the
10 board, and I'm trusting that they know
11 what they're doing. University
12 relations, as far as I know, hasn't
13 met. And then, again, there's an Ad Hoc
14 Committee on the president's bonus.
15 Student participation, there's a
16 student representative. That got sort
17 of bent out of shape when Jim Robinson
18 resigned as Student Body President. The
19 student -- the student representative is
20 automatically a Student Body President
21 unless the Student Body President
22 resigns, in which case they have to have
23 a special election, and it looked like
24 there was going to be a
25 disenfranchisement of the students. So
15
1 this is one of the e-mails I wrote to
2 the board. Let me say that all of this
3 will be on my Web site, so don't worry
4 about reading it. If you're that
5 interested, as I say, the whole
6 presentation will be on the Web site.
7 And because of -- partly because of
8 my letter and partly because of other
9 people's concern, they did have a
10 special election for a student Board of
11 Trustees member. It could not be the
12 person who simply assumed the
13 presidency. Now, if I could make that
14 go away... The current Student Body
15 President is Rachel Watts. Is she here?
16 Anyway, she's great. She's really doing
17 a nice job both, as I understand it,
18 with Student Government and certainly on
19 the board.
20 State budget, which is of primary
21 concern, this is not good, as I think
22 everyone in this room probably knows.
23 The governor has had a conference on
24 trusteeship for all trustees for the
25 nine -- the eight universities, six
16
1 comprehensive universities: Kentucky,
2 University of Louisville, and KCTCS,
3 K-C-T-C-S, the community college and
4 technical school.
5 Think we might be possibly hooked
6 up? Okay. Great. This has been a
7 yearly thing that Governor Patton
8 installed, and the last one was a month
9 ago in Northern Kentucky, basically.
10 Governor -- both the candidates for
11 governor spoke, and then the next day
12 Governor Patton spoke. He predicted
13 there will be these statements after the
14 election: We didn't know it was this
15 bad, and the cupboard is bare. And
16 depending on how the election goes, they
17 may also say: The bastard spent it
18 all. The deficit is somewhere between a
19 quarter of a billion and three-quarters
20 of a billion dollars. And where higher
21 education falls in this, from just --
22 from listening to people, it seems like
23 we're sort of behind -- behind primary
24 and secondary education, behind Medicare
25 and -- I'm sorry, Medicaid, and maybe
17
1 behind prisons. So it remains to be
2 seen, how thing are going to -- how
3 things are going to play out.
4 One of the things I did was to put a
5 letter in the Kernel -- Rachel Watts and
6 I cooked this up together -- basically
7 saying: You don't want your tuition to
8 go up another 15 percent, write to your
9 legislators, suggest that we raise
10 Kentucky's absurdly low tobacco tax.
11 It's three cents a pack. That's the
12 lowest in the nation except for
13 Virginia, which is two and a half cents
14 a pack. The average is something like
15 70 cents a pack. Hawaii is $1.51. We
16 could probably increase that a little
17 bit and then direct the revenue to
18 higher education. I can't say there's
19 been a great response to that letter,
20 but there's going to be another letter
21 writing campaign that Student Government
22 and the student governments from the
23 other universities are going to engage
24 in.
25 The question I would raise is: Are
18
1 we a state-supported university or a
2 state-assisted university? University
3 funding has dropped from more than half,
4 a decade or so ago, to about a third.
5 Our budget, just for your information,
6 is about 1,400 million dollars, 1.4
7 billion dollars. We did approve a
8 15-percent tuition increase. Because
9 most of the university's costs are fixed
10 in terms of salaries and then operating
11 expenses, there's very little -- very
12 little of what the legislators and
13 perhaps the people in the Commonwealth
14 believe is fat in the university
15 budget.
16 One other thing that was done was to
17 not have the same tuition for all
18 units. I think there was a 25-percent
19 tuition increase for a program in the
20 business school, and that's another
21 approach to dealing with this budget
22 crisis. I don't think -- if you go to
23 this on the Web, you can go to the
24 University of Kentucky operating
25 budget. You can get there lots of ways,
19
1 obviously, but this would be one way.
2 And if you're interested in the budget,
3 you can examine the 21 pages or whatever
4 to your heart's content.
5 Faculty salaries: That may get your
6 attention a little bit. An e-mail from
7 Steve Reed, which was short but worth
8 bringing to your attention, he wants to
9 know what -- he wrote to Dave Jones and
10 myself asking what the board could do to
11 increase faculty salaries in the
12 long-term. This has stirred up some
13 activity in the Senate Council, as you
14 might imagine, and Ernie Yanarella is
15 heading a committee to examine what an
16 answer to this question might be. So I
17 think -- what date are you talking about
18 having something back to?
19 YANARELLA: November 15th.
20 KENNEDY: November 15th.
21 CHAIR DEMBO: Lexington Community College is on
22 probation, and it's on probation not
23 because of any lack in quality of doing
24 its mission but because the Southern
25 Association of Colleges and Schools
20
1 questions whether or not it is
2 sufficiently autonomous from University
3 of Kentucky, I guess partly because this
4 Senate is composed both of Main Campus
5 Medical Center and LCC members. And for
6 a number of reasons, they feel it's not
7 sufficiently separate from UK. So
8 there's the desire on the one hand to
9 keep the connection between LCC and UK
10 and, on the other hand, to not get
11 unaccredited because that association is
12 too close. There seem to be -- I'm just
13 telling you some of the issues the board
14 is going to have to confront, and this
15 is a major one.
16 A committee has been appointed to
17 look at three options. One is keep LCC
18 autonomous but connected to UK; that is,
19 comply with some of the requirements of
20 SACS for doing that. Another one is
21 that LCC joins KCTCS with the other
22 community colleges, and finally that LCC
23 rolls into UK, perhaps as a college or
24 some other method.
25 I've written to the LCC faculty and
21
1 gotten back a score of responses and
2 talked to other people, and apparently
3 number one is their first choice and
4 number two is their second choice and
5 number three is not considered viable.
6 The faculty don't want to do number
7 three. The feeling is that they would
8 pretty much get lost in UK, and so this
9 is something that's coming up.
10 Human Environmental Sciences
11 Relocation, my -- that's sort of my
12 philosophy about when you reshuffle
13 academic units. And we had to -- the
14 board finally, after getting -- I would
15 say I got 40 letters on both sides of
16 this. The question was, would all of
17 the units -- well, let me first say what
18 happened. Interior Design went into the
19 College of Design, and that was
20 something that almost everybody wanted.
21 There was a lot of discussion about
22 whether Family Studies ought to go into
23 the Education College or into the
24 Agriculture College. The things that
25 pulled this back and forth were mission,
22
1 on the one hand, and the fact that
2 there's a large extension component
3 which the agriculture people are
4 responsible for, on the other hand. And
5 a great many Alumni and a great many
6 other people wrote letters on both sides
7 of this issue. The decision was made to
8 move all but the Interior Design
9 Department into the College of Ag, where
10 I gather they have been pretty warmly
11 welcomed. But to examine where Family
12 Studies ought to ultimately wind up and
13 particularly where Early Childhood
14 Education, which is a part of Family
15 Studies, ought to be. So you can see
16 this was a kind of thorny problem.
17 Shared Governance: The Governing
18 Regulations are being revised, and this
19 was a necessary step because we moved
20 from a chancellor's model to a provost
21 model, but it's beginning to look like
22 maybe more is going to happen in this
23 Governing Regulations revision, and it's
24 something that the faculty needs to
25 watch closely. Dave may have more to
23
1 say about this, but it's something to
2 keep on the radar.
3 The Council of Senate and Faculty
4 Leadership, COSFL, is composed of
5 trustees, the Senate Council Chair, and
6 the AAUP president from each of the
7 colleges, each of the universities
8 across the state, and they meet monthly.
9 They have a Web site. Maybe he plugged
10 another cable in here. Hah! Well,
11 great. So that's the COSFL Web site,
12 and that's, I think, an important
13 organization for us.
14 There's a conference coming up this
15 Saturday, and it's on the -- it's going
16 to have two major speakers: Tom
17 Layzell, who's the new president of the
18 Council on Postsecondary Education,
19 talking about the next stage of
20 Kentucky's postsecondary reform; and
21 Jane Buck, who's the president of the
22 National Organization of AUUP, is going
23 to talk about the use and abuse of
24 contingent faculty, which is something
25 COSFL's very concerned about and I think
24
1 we should be very concerned about.
2 It's -- the institution sees two
3 positive things out of that. One is
4 contingent faculty that is
5 nontenure-track and part-time faculty
6 are cheap. You don't have to pay
7 benefits, low salaries, you can call
8 them up the night before Wednesday --
9 classes start on Wednesday and say,
10 well, it looks like we don't need you
11 or, hey, can you come in and teach three
12 sections?
13 The problem with it, of course, is
14 that it kind of tears the core out of
15 the faculty. They don't have particular
16 allegiance to the university. They're
17 not involved in making policy and so on
18 and so forth. So the short-term, it's
19 like -- it's one of those very difficult
20 problems where there -- where there's a
21 lot of short-term gain and a lot of
22 long-term loss, so I encourage you to go
23 to this conference. Lunch is five
24 dollars, if you do. And that is this
25 Saturday, so send me an e-mail if you're
25
1 interested in going and I'll get you
2 hooked up with the right people.
3 President's compensation, it's an
4 issue that the board has been sort of
5 battling with nicely, but it's hard to
6 know what to do. The president -- a
7 president of a university is different
8 from the rest of us. We spend a million
9 dollars to search for one. They get a
10 lot of perq's. They get paid big bucks,
11 not as large as some other people in the
12 athletic and medical fields, but they
13 get paid fairly big bucks. And the
14 question of how to handle that is being
15 looked at by the trustees. Should there
16 be retention bonuses for the president
17 who agrees to stay on? Should there be
18 a performance bonus, which currently we
19 are paying and frankly aren't all that
20 good at assessing. It's hard to assess
21 when your sample size is one. So I'll
22 know more about this in the next month
23 or two.
24 Athletics: It's interesting, I've
25 heard several comments by -- or read of
26
1 comments by presidents who came in to
2 do, you know, something in the
3 educational realm and wound up spending
4 half their time on athletics and some of
5 them not surviving that. Dr. Rossell,
6 as you may remember, didn't survive an
7 athletics issue, basically. There was
8 at Vanderbilt University -- now, this
9 isn't the recent move by Vanderbilt to
10 kind of do away with their athletics
11 director, but they had a conference last
12 spring that I attended and Myles Brand,
13 the president of the NCAA was there, and
14 Mike Slive, the Southeastern Conference
15 Commissioner, also spoke. And so this
16 was also something as a trustee that I
17 didn't plan to do anything with,
18 including go to the games, and then I
19 found out you've got to do that. And
20 then it begins to look like the tail
21 wags the dog after a while.
22 Being not particularly shy, I sent
23 an op-ed piece when I figured out what I
24 thought ought to happen with athletics
25 nationally. As I said, I wasn't shy,
27
1 and I did talk to Myles Brand about this
2 and he didn't throw me out. Basically
3 the idea -- and this appeared in the
4 Herald-Leader. Basically the idea is
5 that we take any -- that any, not just
6 Kentucky, any university takes any high
7 school graduate to play -- this is just
8 in the revenue sports of men's
9 basketball and football, which
10 incidentally is where all the money for
11 the whole athletics program and some
12 academic programs come from -- comes
13 from. So we take anybody. They have to
14 attend one class. It can be anything,
15 doesn't matter what grade they make in
16 it. So the cheating of, you know,
17 trying to get these students who are on
18 the road and playing in front of 40,000
19 people and trying -- trying to be
20 students too, that goes away. They play
21 four years, and then we hand them a
22 certificate of scholarship, good over
23 the next ten-year period for either a
24 four-year college education or a
25 community college education or a
28
1 plumbing school or whatever works for
2 them, but we separate the athletic
3 experience from the academic experience
4 and we quit pretending that they can --
5 they can be students, not to say that
6 some of them don't do very well at
7 this. But the correlation between
8 academic ability and athletic ability
9 is, I think, zero and there are students
10 who can do very well athletically and
11 don't really -- would have trouble
12 academically even if that was their
13 full-time job. But their full-time job
14 is really playing athletics for --
15 during the season. So that -- that's my
16 proposal. Myles Brand called me up and
17 said: We'll try to get that in by next
18 fall. I make joke.
19 But that's where I think -- that is
20 opposite the direction they are actually
21 headed. NCAA is fundamentally -- well,
22 they're lowering the bar a little bit on
23 admissions, but they're raising the bar
24 on retention. Now, at the end of the
25 sophomore year, a student has to be 40
29
1 percent of the way toward a degree,
2 whereas before I think it was 30
3 percent. So this is going to make it
4 more difficult for those students and
5 it's going to make it harder on us,
6 those of us who have athletes in our
7 classes who are doing marginally. So as
8 I say, it's a complex and difficult
9 issue.
10 Another issue about Athletics is,
11 for those of you who've had season
12 tickets, you know that the university
13 has raised the price for football and
14 basketball, men's basketball tickets.
15 And I got a letter from Glen Collins
16 detailing what he felt about this;
17 again, it's on the Web page. I wrote to
18 Mitch Barnhart and said: Do we have a
19 way of determining how many UK employees
20 are affected by this new policy and what
21 the financial implications are for the
22 university if we went back to what we
23 sort of promised them to begin with,
24 because now they have to come up with
25 sort of a surcharge on the ticket. I
30
1 haven't heard anything back, and that
2 was the 27th of August.
3 Early on, I became concerned and
4 we'd sit in board meetings and accept
5 contributions of $100,000 for the
6 Athletic Department, $100,000 for the
7 Athletic Department, $50,000 and -- for
8 the Athletic Department, plus four more
9 $50,000 pledges to come in over the next
10 several years. You know, I mean page
11 after page of these things. And so one
12 of the things I did was to write to the
13 trustees just asking them to consider
14 linking people who make contributions to
15 the Athletic Department, either asking
16 them to contribute also to the academic
17 program or siphoning off 25 percent of
18 whatever they said they wanted to send
19 the athletic program and send it to the
20 academic program.
21 It turns out that this is a fairly
22 tricky situation. What is coming about
23 is that everybody who contributes to the
24 athletic program is going to be asked to
25 contribute to the academic program. 30
31
1 percent of them already do. It seems to
2 me the other 70 percent ought to as
3 well. We'll see how that goes.
4 One thing, which I was sort of going
5 in loaded for bear based on the idea
6 that the university was supporting the
7 athletic program, and it turns out that
8 Kentucky's one of maybe a dozen to two
9 dozen at the most -- and this came from
10 Myles Brand -- schools in the country
11 where the athletic program actually
12 makes money. And they are now
13 contributing a million dollars a year
14 directly to the -- to the academic
15 program in the form of scholarships,
16 plus of course all the tuition that gets
17 paid, both in-state and out of state for
18 the athletes. But not counting that,
19 this is a million dollars a year. Plus
20 President Todd discovered that we were
21 paying to clean up the stadium after
22 games and the basketball arena, and it
23 turns out that's a million-dollar-a-year
24 operation which is now being taken over
25 by Athletics.
32
1 So the money flow actually is from
2 the athletics program into the academic
3 program, so that sort of deflated the
4 idea of going in and yelling about
5 that. What else to say about that? A
6 million dollars is not much in a 1,400
7 million-dollar budget, but certainly the
8 money flow's going in the right
9 direction. Although I don't -- it's not
10 much fun, I'll continue to look at
11 that.
12 Robinson Forest, as you may know,
13 there was -- Grady Stumbo said that some
14 legislators had asked him to look at the
15 issue of mining again in Robinson Forest
16 and the board commissioned a report,
17 which took several months, almost a year
18 to complete. The decision was no mining
19 in the forest for the foreseeable
20 future. The university went in and
21 argued a dozen years ago to the
22 legislature that they should declare
23 that as lands unsuitable for mining and
24 gave all kinds of reasons, like academic
25 and research use and a number of
33
1 others. And what we'd have to do is go
2 back to the legislature and say, gee, we
3 were really just kidding about that,
4 we'd really like to mine it, so that's
5 not going to happen. The reason for the
6 Robinson Forest issue is that there are
7 Robinson Scholars, now down to one from
8 each of the Eastern Kentucky counties.
9 At one point it was, I think, four. We
10 got a lot of money originally to do --
11 to fund the Robinson Scholars program,
12 but it got spent on other things. And
13 so they spent -- basically they spent
14 the endowment and bought Lees College,
15 was one of the big things that happened
16 with that, which then went with, you
17 know, community colleges elsewhere.
18 So the question is what to do about
19 the Robinson Scholars program, and the
20 answer is to make a concerted
21 fundraising campaign in Eastern
22 Kentucky. My belief is that they could
23 find people who would sponsor a Robinson
24 scholar. It starts in eighth grade.
25 They identify these people in eighth
34
1 grade, and it's sort of like the, you
2 know, adopt-a-child in Malaysia or
3 whatever, you know, where you get a
4 picture of the child and you write
5 letters and so on. It seems to me that
6 we could find sponsors, but there's a
7 major fundraising program underway for
8 that.
9 Campus issues, building design:
10 People from the Med Center, is it true
11 that the final design on the new
12 building across Limestone is still open
13 labs, or did that get changed?
14 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I don't know.
15 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: To my knowledge it's the
16 open labs.
17 KENNEDY: Still open labs? I plan to make a full
18 court press -- see how I can swing into
19 this athletic stuff -- that from now on
20 people will be surveyed, that the users
21 of the building will be interviewed,
22 surveyed, and they told, well, they did
23 that; they just didn't listen. So then
24 they get to come back to the users of
25 the building and say: Here's what we
35
1 have as a preliminary design; how does
2 this look? And I don't know whether
3 that would be board action or whether
4 the president would, you know, make that
5 an administrative reg or what, but that
6 definitely needs to happen.
7 There's an issue of changing faculty
8 contracts. In one college apparently
9 people on a 12-month contract were
10 told -- some people were told, well,
11 we're moving you back to ten months.
12 Well, that's fine, you know. Well, but
13 you're also going to lose 18 percent of
14 your salary. That's not so fine. So I
15 don't know what's going to happen with
16 that. It's not at the moment a board
17 issue, but I just wanted to give you a
18 heads-up.
19 Task Force on Retiree Benefits,
20 that's about to report and you will not
21 like it. Basically because of federal
22 regulations, the university has to
23 figure out -- and again, we're in the
24 financial area, which I don't know much
25 about, but the university has to talk
36
1 about how it's going to fund retiree
2 benefits in the future. You can't
3 just -- what we've said before is, hey,
4 we'll pay your -- what the university
5 has said to faculty is we'll pay your
6 premiums for your health insurance from
7 now on. Well, that apparently is not
8 anymore legal without some sort of plan
9 for doing that. And then when they
10 began to look at the numbers, they
11 said: Well, we're going to have to do
12 something; we'll have to cap this. And
13 as I understand it, and this is -- when
14 I do my classes, I have a truth in
15 lecturing percentage and so that -- and
16 that's not the probability that I'm
17 right, but it's the probability that I
18 think I'm right and it's about 75
19 percent on this issue. If you -- for
20 current retirees and people who retire
21 in the next two years, better be
22 careful, stand near the door here. If
23 you retire in the next two years, you
24 get 7,500 a year for the -- for your --
25 TAGAVI: Up to.
37
1 KENNEDY: Sorry?
2 TAGAVI: Up to.
3 KENNEDY: Up to, right, up to 7,500 a year for
4 your premiums on your health insurance.
5 After that you get a total of $50,000,
6 lifetime. So it would be a good idea
7 not to -- either to retire in the next
8 two years or not to plan to live too
9 long. I don't know what's going to
10 happen with this, and it hasn't gotten
11 to the board but it's -- I feel I need
12 to bring it to your attention.
13 Something I just heard this weekend
14 was that someone got a bill or notice
15 from the university saying that the
16 University Clinic was no longer going to
17 accept Medicaid. This may be totally
18 specious. I may be totally out of line
19 with this, but it's certainly a
20 worrisome thing.
21 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No.
22 KENNEDY: No? Don't know anything about it,
23 right? I said I want to see that piece
24 of paper, and I never got the piece of
25 paper, so I don't know, so I won't spend
38
1 much time.
2 How many people are -- here are in
3 Patterson Office Tower. Okay. Enough
4 so that I'll say this. There's always
5 been an issue of the 18th floor express
6 elevator. And back when we were down to
7 three elevators, when they were
8 revamping them, one of them was the 18th
9 floor express and, you know, 70 people
10 stood out in the lobby. So I've
11 received e-mails and heated remarks from
12 various faculty members and have made
13 some myself, especially when we were
14 down to three elevators, that why do we
15 need -- you know, we're whisking these
16 board members up and down to the 18th
17 floor while everyone else has to wait.
18 Well, I looked into it. The first
19 thing is, you have to have an 18th floor
20 express. As many as 170 people go to
21 the 18th floor in a 15, 20, 25-minute
22 period and then come down. And camera
23 equipment, television camera equipment
24 goes up and down and so on, so you've
25 got to have that. That's the first
39
1 thing I found out. So what I did was I
2 wrote to the trustees. And now, at this
3 point, I know these people pretty well,
4 and so I was able to write kind of an
5 explanatory letter about the issue and
6 then I said that there was something
7 they could do if they were inclined to
8 do it and that is not ride the 18th
9 floor express; that is, all the people
10 who -- you know, the administrators and
11 the cameramen and all the guests and so
12 on can go up and down the 18th floor
13 express, but I asked the trustees not
14 to. I said: If you've got a few extra
15 minutes, take one of the other
16 elevators, rub elbows with the faculty,
17 because there's this perception that you
18 come in and just go "whoosh" to the top
19 and back down and never have to either
20 deal with the elevators or listen to the
21 conversation in the elevators or
22 whatever. And I got like five e-mails
23 back from trustees saying: Sure, be
24 glad to do that, happy to do that.
25 President Todd wrote and said: That's a
40
1 great idea. And a couple of other
2 trustees came up to me and said: Yeah,
3 I'll be doing that. So I told them that
4 I would take the 18th floor express,
5 however, since I got to ride the other
6 elevator --
7 GROSSMAN: You need to take the stairs, Mike.
8 KENNEDY: I would never get there. Charge for
9 dropping courses was broached, is in
10 abeyance at the moment. I don't know
11 how many of you are annoyed by bicycles
12 and nonbicycle areas on campus. I walk
13 between Maxwell Place and the physics
14 building and just about get run over one
15 time out of three. Is that an issue
16 that other people are concerned about?
17 A lot of nodding heads. Noise
18 pollution, leaf blowers just outside
19 your classroom window, and other. I'll
20 do feedback at the end.
21 Provost search issue: This is here
22 only because I promised you that it
23 would be a year ago, the question of
24 appointing Dr. Nietzel as the permanent
25 provost and the way that was done. Let
41
1 me preface this -- I'm going to go
2 through very fast -- preface it by
3 saying there are two issues: One is
4 product and one is process. I think
5 most people are in agreement that the
6 product is fine, that Dr. Nietzel is
7 doing a really good job, at least that's
8 my impression. That's my feeling about
9 it, that he's doing a good job and most
10 of my impression from talking to people
11 is they think he is too. Process was
12 just sort of one damn misstep after
13 another, and so I'm just -- sort of a
14 bulleted list of mistakes and we'll go
15 on unless somebody wants to talk about
16 it.
17 The original intention of the acting
18 provost, considering an internal
19 candidate and avoiding an acting
20 provost, I don't know whether those are
21 mistakes are not. I mean, we have good
22 people here. Should they be shut out?
23 That's debatable.
24 What wasn't a mistake was the search
25 committee recommendation, which I, in
42
1 the interest of time, won't bring up,
2 but it's on the Web site. And basically
3 it said to Dr. Todd that, you know, that
4 if you decide based on the paper that
5 we've given you, even though we've got
6 these other six or seven candidates,
7 that Dr. Nietzel is the person that you
8 feel is best, then go ahead and appoint
9 him rather than bringing these other
10 people to campus. That was not a good
11 idea. What they could have said was:
12 We suggest you bring Dr. Nietzel to
13 campus first and let him go around and
14 candidate and interact and get feedback
15 from the faculty and students and staff
16 and then decide what to do. Another
17 mistake was the president's sudden
18 announcement. Claire, the other
19 trustee, and I found out about this
20 along with the rest of the board about
21 20 minutes before we went into the board
22 meeting to approve it.
23 I and some other -- the other
24 trustees and a couple of other faculty
25 released a letter trying to explain why
43
1 we had voted in favor of Dr. Nietzel's
2 appointment, because some people thought
3 we shouldn't have, which was all well
4 and good, except that we -- in so doing
5 we released the Senate Council's
6 proposed resolution on the matter before
7 the Senate Council did. Not cool, sorry
8 about that. The Senate Council's
9 recommended resolution was amended by
10 the Senate. There was a question about
11 whether or not it passed. That also was
12 partly my fault. I'm supposed to know
13 something about parliamentary
14 procedure. I could have asked for a
15 show of hands; I didn't. I think the
16 Senate resolution itself, the amendment,
17 was a mistake. I don't think it's had
18 serious repercussions. There's a letter
19 from Loys Mather on that subject, which
20 I won't go through, and finally we will
21 consider today that -- the results of
22 that resolution, which required a
23 meeting of a committee of the Senate
24 Council and administrators, but we could
25 have used that several months ago. So
44
1 just, as I say, one thing after
2 another.
3 I couldn't give this report without
4 talking about Dr. Wethington's
5 contract. Oops. It's thinking. Maybe
6 it isn't thinking. Okay. Well, on my
7 laptop, this all comes up as one
8 picture. Well, what you see here is
9 somebody in a shaving basin, a knight
10 with a shaving basin, educating some
11 other knights around him. This has to
12 do with the fact that the Senate plus
13 AAUP basically refers to the decision of
14 the Board of Trustees to extend
15 Dr. Wethington's contract by two years.
16 He would have -- if that hadn't
17 happened, he would have been president
18 until this last July. And down below
19 here it says: So you see, it's mainly a
20 matter of timing and footwork. That's a
21 windmill. That's a tilting lance.
22 Funny, huh? Okay. Well, at any rate,
23 so we did good.
24 I mean, Dick Wilson of the
25 University of Louisville -- of the
45
1 Louisville Courier-Journal told me
2 afterwards -- by way of history, the way
3 things finally got reversed was the
4 Kentucky Press Association and the
5 Courier Journal and the Herald-Leader
6 filed suit against the university for an
7 illegal, closed meeting. And at that
8 point depositions would be taken,
9 questions would be asked, who knew what,
10 when, how was this all put together?
11 And the board reversed itself. Wilson
12 told me that if the faculty hadn't
13 gotten behind this thing, they never
14 would have filed that suit. So -- and
15 along with that, I will just say AAUP,
16 which actually led that, needs and
17 deserves your support. AUP used to --
18 back in the 40's, 80 percent of the
19 faculty was part of AUP. Now we're down
20 to 125 members or something, so...crass
21 commercial advertisement.
22 Dr. Wethington spent two years
23 fundraising for the university, and I
24 don't know what the amount was, but I
25 think it was about -- it was at his
46
1 enhanced salary and now he has gone to
2 LCC, where he makes 80 percent of his
3 previous salary, he's tenured. He could
4 do this forever at a quarter of a
5 million dollars a year. I wrote to the
6 board and to Dr. Kerley and Dr. Todd and
7 Dr. Nietzel basically complaining about
8 that, and Davy will probably have
9 something to say. He's followed up more
10 to find out what Dr. Wethington's
11 assignment is. It isn't five courses,
12 as is the standard.
13 Advisors to me, Senate Council, the
14 Senate, you as individuals, and I'm
15 going to try to put together some
16 faculty forums. I've also asked
17 Professors Chard, Goldman, Hackbart,
18 Kern, Mather, Regan and Sineath to sit
19 down with me about every six weeks and
20 talk to me about what they hear around
21 campus and what the issues are and so on
22 and may combine this with the faculty
23 forum.
24 Again, the contact information and
25 there's -- you can get to my Web page at
47
1 the University Web page: /trustees/
2 member/kennedy. All you have to do is
3 go to the University Trustees Web page
4 and follow the links.
5 I would encourage you to come to
6 board meetings at least once to see what
7 it's all about. The next one's the 29th
8 of October, and then there's one in
9 December and then the schedule is
10 printed there. At this point Jeff is
11 looking very antsy. Feedback, comments,
12 questions? If not --
13 CHAIR DEMBO: Thank you. Thank you, Michael,
14 Davy, I think we probably will have to
15 put off your --
16 JONES: I've got nothing to say.
17 CHAIR DEMBO: October 13th, 2003. You heard it.
18 Okay. We have our first action item.
19 This is an item that was brought up at
20 the last Senate meeting of spring 2003.
21 There was not a quorum of senators
22 present, so this was not voted on.
23 Because you as senators may encounter a
24 number of organizational structure
25 items, I just wanted to take one moment
48
1 to give you some background as to how
2 this works so you understand when you
3 vote on future items as well as this
4 one.
5 The Governing Regulations are the
6 extension of state government through
7 the Board of Trustees to the
8 university. The GR's have a line in it
9 saying what the role of the Senate is:
10 For matters having to do with
11 organization of the university, the
12 board relies upon the advice of the
13 University Senate, along with that of
14 the President. So if you take a look at
15 the flow chart, if somebody's wanting to
16 change a name, change a structure,
17 change a college, it goes through a
18 departmental vote or a vote of the
19 affected faculty, and one would hope
20 students and staff of the unit, goes for
21 a full college vote. It gets routed
22 through the Senate Council Office, where
23 it's forwarded to the Senate's Committee
24 on Academic Organization and Structure.
25 That is chaired, again, by Kate Chard,
49
1 who will talk in just a second. After
2 the Senate committee makes its
3 recommendation, it's forwarded to the
4 Senate Council, who then considers it
5 and then will either ask further
6 questions to develop the proposal or
7 will send it to the Senate, either with
8 a positive recommendation, a negative
9 recommendation, or no recommendation at
10 all, but it's put on the Senate agenda.
11 Once the Senate votes on it,
12 assuming it's a vote to go -- well, in
13 either event, the Senate will come up
14 with an opinion and that -- that gets
15 forwarded to the Board of Trustees. So
16 it's possible that the Senate and the
17 President might be both in favor of
18 creation of a college or changing a unit
19 and the board votes with that
20 information. It's possible the Senate
21 and the President might disagree, as
22 happened with HES, and the board will
23 vote based on that information.
24 There's one more document to be
25 aware of, and you can get this through
50
1 the Senate Council -- the Senate Web
2 site. There are guidelines for
3 proposals to create, alter, or change an
4 educational unit or alter its status.
5 And last year there was some important
6 modifications made to these guidelines
7 that Kate was involved in. Kate, if you
8 want to talk very quickly in general
9 about this process and then maybe
10 specifically about this ophthalmology
11 name change.
12 CHARD: Sure. I'll make this very fast. What we
13 did is we added -- I think the most
14 important piece is we added a routing
15 sheet because we kept getting phone
16 calls from people when they were going
17 through a name change, whether it be
18 just a programmatic name change or a
19 department name change or if it was the
20 creation of a new unit or a new center.
21 There was uncertainty about who needed
22 to be contacted, so we created a
23 wonderful routing sheet and Ernie -- I'm
24 going to give you credit -- Bailey
25 created a sample of how you would move
51
1 one of these people through. So please
2 don't think everything has to go through
3 Veterinary Science. That is a sample,
4 not necessarily a necessity. All right?
5 But it's a really good example, and when
6 I get to ophthalmology, I think it will
7 make sense, why this is important.
8 What we expect -- and the guidelines
9 I think make this more clear -- is that
10 the students and the faculty and the
11 staff that are affected by any name
12 change are consulted and that we can see
13 some demonstration that there was an
14 attempt to allow these people to have
15 input into any change. In addition, if
16 there are other programs, units,
17 faculty, students in other departments
18 or units on the campus that could be
19 affected by that particular change, they
20 should also be consulted. And we did
21 not create a strong standard of who that
22 needs to be that creates this kind of
23 system of consultation, but we did
24 recommend that using the faculty
25 senators could be one of the best ways
52
1 because then you can have anonymous
2 e-mails sent in or you can have
3 conversations in the hallway or you can
4 have a full-fledge election if you want
5 to.
6 So I urge you, if you know that
7 something's happening in your unit where
8 a name change or a change in structure
9 is happening, please check out our Web
10 page because it does have the routing
11 sheet. And if you have any questions at
12 all, please feel free to e-mail me to
13 ask me questions. And I'm going to give
14 the report right now on the Department
15 of Ophthalmology, which wanted to create
16 a name change from Ophthalmology to the
17 Department of Ophthalmology and Visual
18 Sciences. And we did go ahead and
19 approve this, but one of the things we
20 noticed is that the committee did
21 note -- and I think you're going to see
22 some of this in here, is that the
23 Medical College faculty never had a
24 chance to vote on this matter. So this
25 is a department in the Medical College,
53
1 yet there was never a vote put to the
2 Medical College faculty. And in
3 addition, the two Medical College
4 representatives that sit on the Medical
5 Center Academic Council, which is the
6 governing voting body, did not attend
7 the meeting when they did the vote on
8 this name change.
9 So in other words, what we
10 discovered is there was absolutely no
11 faculty input or governance into the
12 name change that affected directly the
13 faculty. So it was left to my committee
14 to decide whether adding "visual
15 sciences" was going to affect anyone
16 else in the entire Med Center or anyone
17 else in any other unit on campus. And
18 fortunately for us, we decided this was
19 a pretty easy one and we were going to
20 go ahead and pass it, but that's not
21 always the case. So I really urge you
22 to keep that in mind, that we do need to
23 see that, at least at some basic level,
24 the faculty that are involved in the
25 program or unit are consulted and do get
54
1 to vote. Okay? Any questions?
2 CHAIR DEMBO: So you probably have read through
3 this. This is the rationale on the
4 department. Is there any -- it's on the
5 floor.
6 LESNAW: I just have a question about the second
7 point, bringing under one umbrella basic
8 scientists, is that implying a real
9 motion of scientists in other colleges
10 who are conducting vision research into
11 this unit?
12 CHAIR DEMBO: Is anybody from the College of
13 Medicine willing to answer that?
14 SCOTT: I'm sorry; your name, please?
15 LESNAW: Oh, I'm sorry; Judith Lesnaw, Arts and
16 Sciences, Biology.
17 SCOTT: Thank you.
18 CHAIR DEMBO: Well, I don't have an answer
19 myself, Professor Lesnaw. I think
20 that -- an editorial comment -- from
21 what I've seen, sometimes these name
22 changes occur in principle because it
23 should spur interdisciplinary research.
24 How often that happens is less
25 frequently than one might think is
55
1 ideal. Professor Grossman.
2 GROSSMAN: Grossman, Arts and Sciences. How much
3 is this going to cost?
4 CHAIR DEMBO: I don't recall that there was any
5 cost analysis.
6 GROSSMAN: You have to reprint stationery, etc.,
7 etc. I'm just wondering how much it's
8 going to cost. This is not a time when
9 we want to be adding unnecessary
10 expenses to the university. Is it going
11 to cost much?
12 CHAIR DEMBO: That was not supplied on the
13 documents that we received.
14 GROSSMAN: This is already on the floor for
15 discussion since it was recommended by
16 the committee, right?
17 CHAIR DEMBO: Correct.
18 GROSSMAN: I mean, I guess I would like to
19 recommend that we table it until we get
20 an idea from Ophthalmology and Vision
21 Sciences, or whatever they want to call
22 themselves, on how much it's going to
23 cost because we really need to start
24 thinking about such things before we
25 start approving things like this.
56
1 CHAIR DEMBO: So is that a motion to table?
2 GROSSMAN: That is a motion to table until --
3 until we get some input on that issue.
4 CHAIR DEMBO: Professor Blyton?
5 BLYTON: Is that a motion to postpone temporarily
6 or definitely or indefinitely?
7 GROSSMAN: Until we get some information,
8 postpone indefinitely until we get
9 information, I guess is what I'm
10 saying. I don't know. Is that -- you
11 tell me.
12 NOONAN: I'm not aware that the university pays
13 for any printing for the clinical
14 departments anyhow. I never saw any --
15 GROSSMAN: I would like a cost estimate.
16 CHAIR DEMBO: So that's -- I guess I hear a
17 motion to table definitely, pending the
18 receipt of that information; would that
19 be correct?
20 GROSSMAN: Yes.
21 CHAIR DEMBO: Okay. Is there a second to that
22 motion? There's a second. I'm sorry?
23 LEWIN: Yeah, I second that.
24 CHAIR DEMBO: Identify yourself.
25 LEWIN: Oh, Jennifer Lewin.
57
1 CHAIR DEMBO: Jennifer Lewin. Professor Blyton,
2 how much of a vote do we need to pass
3 tabling?
4 BLYTON: It's just -- it's just to postpone, so
5 it's a majority vote.
6 CHAIR DEMBO: Okay.
7 TAGAVI: Can we have brief discussion on this?
8 CHAIR DEMBO: Discussion on tabling or
9 postponing?
10 BLYTON: What you've got is three motions to
11 postpone, and that's what you're talking
12 about is postponement. Forget the lay
13 on the table stuff. That's obsolete.
14 So you're postponing definitely or
15 indefinitely or temporarily.
16 KENNEDY: Is it a discussable motion?
17 BLYTON: You discuss only whether to postpone,
18 not the motion.
19 CHAIR DEMBO: Proffesor Tagavi.
20 TAGAVI: Well, stop me the moment you realize
21 it's out of order, but do we know if
22 this expense is anything other than
23 stationery? Because I cannot think of
24 anything other than stationery.
25 CHARD: No.
58
1 CHAIR DEMBO: We don't even have enough
2 information to answer your question, as
3 far as I know.
4 TAGAVI: Does anybody know whether a name change
5 requires any expenses other than
6 stationery?
7 UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, the T-shirts, of
8 course.
9 BLYTON: That's out of order because you're
10 talking about postponement; you're not
11 talking about the motion.
12 CHAIR DEMBO: Okay. So the question at hand is
13 to postpone definitely until we receive
14 information related to the cost involved
15 with changing the name; is that correct,
16 Bob? Okay.
17 BLYTON: I call for the vote.
18 CHAIR DEMBO: All in favor of postponing
19 definitely, please raise your hands.
20 All against it, raise your hands.
21 Okay. The motion fails. It's still on
22 the floor for discussion now, the name
23 change. Professor Lesnaw.
24 LESNAW: Judith Lesnaw, Biology. Also the point
25 regarding facilitation of graduate study
59
1 at the master's and doctor level for
2 students in other departments, I'm not
3 sure I understand what that means
4 formally.
5 CHAIR DEMBO: I foreshortened some of their
6 explanation. There was a listing of
7 some of those departments that they gave
8 as examples. I don't have it in front
9 of me.
10 LESNAW: But how would a name change facilitate
11 someone in another department getting a
12 master's or a doctoral degree?
13 CIBULL: Well, you can't get a master's or a
14 doctoral in ophthalmology, but you
15 probably can in visual science.
16 CHAIR DEMBO: That's Professor Cibull.
17 CIBULL: So we're tricking the graduate
18 (inaudible).
19 LESNAW: Ah-ha, which is my point. Do we have an
20 existing graduate program in either --
21 in any official science? So I mean, I
22 don't think that this is an appropriate
23 thing to fold into a motion -- not a
24 motion, but a call for changing a name.
25 Changing the name won't create a
60
1 graduate program.
2 CHAIR DEMBO: Dean Blackwell, do you want to
3 respond to that?
4 BLACKWELL: Yes, if I could. Jeannine Blackwell,
5 Dean of the Graduate School. This
6 language would not create anything
7 approaching a master's or a doctoral
8 program in ophthalmology, but they may
9 have an idea, by the name change to
10 visual sciences, to attract graduate
11 students from programs that might be in
12 related disciplines. But they would
13 have to do it at the 600 or 700 level
14 and not at the 800 level because those
15 courses would not count toward a
16 master's or doctorate. So this might be
17 a nice gesture, but I don't think that
18 it would really affect specific programs
19 in the graduate school.
20 CIBULL: To expand on that, I think --
21 CHAIR DEMBO: Please introduce yourself.
22 CIBULL: -- it's a name change. It's not a
23 change in program or anything else.
24 When they wake up tomorrow morning,
25 they'll still be ophthalmologists. I
61
1 mean, they want to change their name.
2 That's all they want to do. We can
3 debate this forever. Their mistake was
4 giving reason.
5 ZENTALL: Tom Zentall, Psychology. I suspect
6 that this is merely a matter of
7 advertising, so... Ophthalmology has the
8 idea of surgery in it, and I think
9 students from psychology, from biology
10 might be more interested in looking at
11 courses that might be offered in visual
12 sciences with a name change, so existing
13 courses might be just made more apparent
14 to them.
15 CHAIR DEMBO: There was another hand up. Yes.
16 GARRITY: Tom Garrity, College of Medicine. I am
17 in a department that is maybe somewhat
18 in this situation. We have no graduate
19 degree program, and our only degree
20 program really is toward the M.D.
21 degree. However, we have many graduate
22 students who come to our department to
23 conduct research, to take advantage of
24 faculty who are members of the graduate
25 faculty. We support them financially
62
1 with research assistanceships, and we
2 have a very active graduate activity in
3 our department. I suspect that what is
4 intended here is, you know, as Tom
5 Zentall said, an advertising of the kind
6 of basic science that can go on within
7 this particular department, which under
8 the name ophthalmology just sort of
9 implies that it's strictly a clinical
10 department. So you know, if the Senate
11 feels okay about this kind of
12 advertising, which I think is fine and
13 appropriate and helps graduate students
14 find a place where they can perhaps do
15 some of the basic science research that
16 they wish to do, then I think this is
17 not inappropriate.
18 CHAIR DEMBO: Any other comments against this?
19 Any other comments at all? Okay. We'll
20 go for a vote. The vote is based on the
21 proposal to change the name to
22 Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. All
23 in favor, please signify by saying
24 "aye."
25 SENATORS: Aye.
63
1 CHAIR DEMBO: I fooled you. All those opposed
2 say "nay."
3 (NO AUDIBLE RESPONSE)
4 CHAIR DEMBO: Okay. The next action item is what
5 Professor Kennedy was referring to in
6 response to the University Senate
7 Resolution from the November Senate
8 Meeting. This was again up for a
9 discussion item at the last meeting.
10 There was some limited discussion that
11 occurred, and now it's to be presented
12 for a vote. Let me skip ahead one
13 here. The recommendation of the
14 committee and of the Senate Council is
15 that this goes forward as an
16 administrative regulation. Again, just
17 to understand how AR's fit into it, in
18 the governing regulations, the Board has
19 delegated responsibilities to the
20 President and to the Senate. So the
21 Senate has its Senate rules to carry out
22 what the GR's state. The President has
23 his or her administrative regulations.
24 So because of the nature of this, that's
25 why we're recommending that it come
64
1 forward as an administrative
2 regulation. So I would trust that you
3 all read it and it's open for
4 discussion. I'll scroll down. So
5 hearing no discussion, I believe we can
6 move to a vote. All in favor of sending
7 this forward to the President for
8 recommendation as administrative
9 regulation, signify by saying "aye."
10 SENATORS: Aye.
11 CHAIR DEMBO: All opposed say "nay."
12 (NO AUDIBLE RESPONSE.)
13 CHAIR DEMBO: It carries unanimously. Finally
14 I'd like to bring up one more point.
15 There's been some discussion lately
16 about whether the university should or
17 should not offer domestic partner
18 benefits. The Senate Council received
19 an announcement from one of our trustees
20 that the board was beginning to talk
21 about this, and at that time the Senate
22 Council did not achieve a consensus
23 about whether or not this should be
24 discussed either at the Senate Council
25 or the Senate level, but the Staff
65
1 Senate has had a very active
2 conversation about this. They've had
3 one committee who sent forward a
4 recommendation supporting domestic
5 partner benefits and another staff
6 senator has sent around a
7 counterproposal that's very -- very
8 passionate. So as you can imagine,
9 there's probably a lot of discussion.
10 For more information, you can contact
11 the Staff Senate Chair of the Benefits
12 Committee. There's also going to be a
13 discussion here in the Room B --
14 Rebecca?
15 SCOTT: It will be in Room B-10 unless they have
16 too many people, in which case it'll be
17 held here.
18 CHAIR DEMBO: B-10 at 2:00 tomorrow. This is the
19 Staff Senate, is discussing this, in
20 case any Faculty or Student Senators are
21 interested in participating. Is there
22 any other business or announcements to
23 bring forward?
24 I have one more thing. This year
25 the Staff Senate and the University
66
1 Senate are both going to co-host a
2 holiday reception with the Board of
3 Trustees. It's going to be in
4 December. We'll announce the time and
5 place for it, but this is something new
6 that will occur. Typically it's been
7 just the University Senate before.
8 I think we're all done. Thank you
9 for your time, and we'll see you next
10 month.
11 (MEETING CONCLUDED AT 4:10 P.M.)
67
1 STATE OF KENTUCKY)
2 COUNTY OF FAYETTE)
3
4 I, ROBYN BARRETT, CSR, the undersigned Notary
5 Public in and for the State of Kentucky at Large,
6 certify that the foregoing transcript of the
7 captioned meeting of the University of Kentucky
8 Senate is a true, complete, and accurate transcript
9 of said proceedings as taken down in stenotype by
10 me and later reduced to computer-aided
11 transcription under my direction, and the foregoing
12 is a true record of these proceedings.
13 I further certify that I am not employed by nor
14 related to any member of the University of Kentucky
15 Senate and I have no personal interest in any
16 matter before this Council.
17 My Commission Expires: November 24, 2003.
18 IN TESTIMONY WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my
19 hand and seal of office on this the 26th day of
20 September, 2003.
21
22
23 _______________________________
24 ROBYN BARRETT, CERTIFIED SHORTHAND
REPORTER, NOTARY PUBLIC, STATE AT
25 LARGE, KENTUCKY
Posted by Rebecca Scott for the University Senate