The University Senate met in regular session at 3:00 p.m., March 8, 1999 in the auditorium of the W. T. Young Library.

Professor Roy Moore, Chairperson of the Senate Council presided.

Members absent were: Walter Abbott, Eileen Abel*, Sammy Anderson, Joseph Anthony, James Applegate, Leon Assael, Anthony Baxter*, Jeffrey Bieber, Brian Biermann, Deborah Blades, Rachel Bomberger, Maria Boosalis*, Jayson Brittain, Nathan Brown, Geza Bruckner, Joseph Burch, Leo Cai, Joan Callahan, James Campbell, Brad Canon*, Ben Carr, Edward Carter, Jordan Cohen, Wiliam Cohen*, Todd Curtis, Robert Dahlstrom*, Frederick Danner, Mary Davis*, George DeBin, Susan deCarvalho*, Henri DeHahn*, Jeffrey Dembo*, Eric Drake, Roberta Dwyer*, Anthony English*, Vincent Fields, Juanita Fleming*, William Freehling, Richard Furst, Hans Gesund*, Jonathan Golding*, Howard Grotch, Issam Harik*, Debra Harley, Patrick Herring, Kay Hoffman, James Holsinger, Craig Infanger, Mike Inman, Anthony Jones, Jamshed Kanga, Alan Kaplan, Benjamin Karp, Edward Kasarskis, Richard Kermode, James Knoblett, Thomas Lester, C. Oran Little, Donald Madden*, Mark Meier*, Douglas Michael, Jason Miller, David Mohney, Robert Molzon, Miles Osland, Thomas Pope, Shirley Raines, Dan Reedy, Thomas Robinson, Avinash Sathaye*, Claire Schmelzer, Robert Schwemm, Robert Shay, David Stockham, Louis Swift*, Kaveh Tagavi*, Thomas Troland, Thomas Waldhart, Retia Walker, Jane Wells*, Nick West, Paul Willis, Carolyn Williams, Eugene Williams, Lionell Williamson, Emery Wilson, Deborah Witham*, Linda Worley, Thomas Zentall.

* Absence Explained

Chairperson Moore called the meeting to order and asked for corrections or revisions to the February 8, 1999 minutes. There were none and the minutes were approved as circulated.

The Chair made the following announcements:

I want to thank Jim Applegate for organizing and coordinating the Senior Faculty Development and Post Tenure Review Dialogue on Thursday and Friday. I hope that most of you were able to attend at least some of those sessions. There was very good attendance at all of them and there were a lot of very good comments and suggestions. The Steering Committee and the Senate Council will be working on that issue and hope to have something for you by the fall.

The next Senate meeting will be on Monday, April 12, 1999. This will be the last meeting of the year and you will be receiving the agenda.

The Board of Trustees at its meeting last week approved the change in the Governing Regulations which will now extend voting privileges each year instead of alternate years to the Student Government President and also voting privileges to the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center.

Chairperson Moore made the following introductory remarks:

Gordon Davies is the President of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. The Council was created in 1997 by the General Assembly as part of a higher education reform effort initiated by Governor Paul Patton. Dr. Davies is the first President of the Council on Postsecondary Education. He comes to the Kentucky position with extensive experience in state higher education assistance coordination. He served for 20 years -- 1977 until 1997 -- as Director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, an agency quite similar to our Postsecondary Education Council. During the academic year 1997-1998, he was a visiting professor in the Department of Organization and Leadership at the Teacher's College of Columbia University. At Columbia, Dr. Davies taught courses in higher education with special attention to public policy, finance, and the changing relationship with colleges and universities to government. He also has continued his international work with presentations in France and South Africa. His lengthy tenure in Virginia was marked by substantial enrollment growth in the state-supported colleges and universities and by innovative programs and funding initiatives that helped place Virginia in the forefront of American higher education. He was the principal author of The Case for Change, a report issued by Virginia's commission on the University of the 21st Century in 1989. The report drew national and international attention with presentations to representatives of about a dozen foreign countries and more than half the American states and territories. Dr. Davies has served as an officer in the United States Navy. He has held marketing positions in the computing industry. He was the founding Dean of the New Public College and he taught religious studies at Yale University. He has been a strong advocate for equal educational opportunities for thirty years, having directed the Harvard-Yale-Columbia Intensive Summer Studies Program from 1968 until 1971. That program offered educational enrichment to students from the nation's historically black colleges and universities, helping them prepare for graduate and professional studies. Each of his three degrees are from Yale University. He holds a BA in English and Philosophy of Religion and both an MA and PhD in Philosophy of Religion. He has competed in more than two dozen marathons, including 5 at Boston, and has done rock climbing and mountaineering on four continents. On a more personal note, I might mention that he has met frequently with the Coalition of Senate Faculty Leaders which meets each month, and we have certainly appreciated our discussions with him.

Dr. Davies was given a round of applause.

Dr. Davies made the following remarks:

Thank you for that kind introduction.

Your last Senate meeting is next time. That means I will have been through a full academic year. That is incredible.

I want to begin by thanking you, the faculty of the University of Kentucky, for many kindnesses during this year. I have now visited UK more often than any other campus in Kentucky to speak with various members of your faculties and executive committees of the faculty Senate and a couple of meetings with the COSFL, the state faculty leaders association. I am very grateful to you. It has been unfailingly a pleasure to be here, and I have learned every time I have come. I want also to commend you for the work that has been done by you over the years as part of this faculty on behalf of Kentucky and Kentuckians. It shows you have made great contributions. We have a lot more to do and I know that you are up to that.

Let me share some work that we have done in the last two months in trying to plan for the future. By future, I am thinking twenty years, although it is incredibly arrogant that somebody at my stage in life would be thinking twenty years. Out to 2020, because that was the goal, the target date set by House Bill 1 for the reform of Kentucky Postsecondary Education. But I mean it in a shorter sense because I have turned my attention to getting ready for the year 2000 and the legislative session in the year 2000 and that budget from 2000-2002, the next biennial budget.

We asked the Rand Corporation to take Kentucky's demographics and to take Kentucky's college going participation rates and retention rates once people are in colleges and universities and graduation rates. We said if we want to be at a point which is the national average in a few things in the year 2020, what must we plan to do between then and now? The three averages that we said we wanted to reach were that we wanted to have a national average college participation rate and that is high school graduates going on to college, but it is also participation of the adult population in various age cohorts in postsecondary education, coming back for training in new jobs, coming back for retraining in the jobs they already hold, and coming back for reasons of personal fulfillment and personal development as human beings. Average participation, national average, we wanted average graduation rates, nationally average graduation rates. Average participation would be about 65% of the people going on from high school to college. Kentucky is about 45%; we are about 20% short. Average graduation rates vary in Kentucky universities but on average we graduate slightly fewer than 40% of students in our universities after six years of their start date. In the nation it is somewhere around 48% five years after starting. Rand takes in the model they have developed. They take graduation rate and combine it with retention, and they have a term they use for that called "through put," that is a combination of how many get through and how fast they finish. They took those two and combined them. Rand took our data and came back and said if you want to be on this track by the year 2020, fifteen years from now you should have added sixty thousand students to Kentucky higher education. By the year 2020, you should have added almost eighty thousand more students. On a base of about twice that, about 150,000 students. It means in order to achieve these national averages we need to be about 50% larger than we are as a system of higher education by twenty years from now. That is undergraduates, that has nothing to do with the specific charge to the University of Kentucky to become a great public research university. Rand then distributed that enrollment across the three sectors--community and technical colleges, comprehensive regional universities, and research universities according to its current distribution. What that would show by the current patterns of higher education attendance is that the bulk of that enrollment would go to the comprehensive universities and the next largest section to the research universities and the smallest section would in fact go to the community colleges. That is a policy decision that can be made and affected by any number of policy levers having to do with senate funds, where you choose to place undergraduate enrollment, the preparation of the students, and the kinds of advanced education, education beyond high school that they might need. That decision Rand was saying was a highly flexible one that could be made by Kentucky as time went on. My own guess about that is that in the long run a large amount of that increase in enrollment will occur at the community and technical colleges. A smaller amount than past practice would indicate will occur at the six regional comprehensive universities. Very little or none might occur at the two research universities as they focus on this specific charge to become top twenty at UK, top twenty public research universities, or metropolitan universities research universities of distinction at University of Louisville. That supposes, of course, that we fund colleges and universities in very different ways than people have funded them in the past because in the past as you know, the enrollment has been almost entirely the driver for budget. If that is the only way to get the money, then, of course, everybody has to be growing.

Stop me at anytime if you have questions, if I say things that are not clear.

A Senator who did not identify himself - You want to increase by the year 2020 the number of students from Kentucky by 80,000. Is that strictly instate, or does that include students going out of state?

It does not include exporting many more Kentuckians than are exported now.

So that would be an estimate of how many more students are going to be enrolling in Kentucky Universities?

That is a good point and I am glad you raised it. They could go to independent colleges. In that distribution that I was talking about, Rand did not even look at what would be the unused capacities of the independent colleges and universities in Kentucky and whether there were policies levers that could be pulled to have people choose the independent colleges.

Obviously, there are two variables here. One is participation rate, and the other is retention and graduation. If you were hypothetically to increase retention and graduation to 100% you would not have to increase enrollment very much at all. In fact, you might even be able to drop enrollment because these two are balanced. You really do not want to do that; you really do want more Kentuckians to go on to college. You would not want to say let's just push through the ones that are most apt to succeed and forget the rest. But these are two variables, and they are related to one another. If you had productivity increases, efficiency increases in either, you could affect those.

We asked Rand then to take 1997 constant dollars and calculate for us in 1997 constant dollars at the current distribution of students--doctoral, comprehensive, community and technical, and what it would cost to increase enrollment. About $450 million dollars, which is not surprisingly about half what we spend now on undergraduate education. That includes the state's contribution and tuition and fees. Tuition and fees equals roughly 30% of that, 70% from the general fund. It was at this point last week in legislative hearings that the eyes started to cross in legislative committees. That is a big number, and I know it is a big number. On the other hand, if we want to be at national averages of college's participation, advanced education participation in Kentucky in two decades, we can't wait ten years and decide to start in 2010. We have to start, and we have to start in the year 2000. We, in fact, started in the middle of 1998. I wanted the legislature to see these numbers. I wanted my council to see them, and I shared them with my council earlier last month. I was privileged, and thank President Wethington for the invitation to review them with the Board of Trustees of the University, Monday a week ago. Reaction there was I think very sober, but realistic. If we are going to do this, we have to be prepared to pay for it. That is the decision that has to be made again and again about this kind of educational reform.

Bill Maloney (Engineering) asked if the pool of qualified applicants is going to be big enough to do that.

Good question. Which is another reason why I think that a lot of that enrollment will go toward the community and technical colleges. There are about 3.9 million people in Kentucky. Roughly one third of those are people under the age of 20. So that is 1.3 million. That leaves 2.6 million. Of 2.6 million, there is an estimate that as many as 900,000 adults in Kentucky have literacy problems that impede their ability to get a job. My sense is that in a population that is not going to grow much in the next 15 years, that a major task is to reach a substantial portion of that population, the portion of it that is young. I am sure there is a substantial portion of it that is older. Not only equip them with basic skills, but also even convince them that advanced education is an option, something they should even consider. A second major task, which becomes for me a matter of extreme urgency, is to establish relationships with K-12 to ensure that the next two generations, the generation of 2010 and 2020 that come out of our public schools have those basic skills and have entirely different ways of looking at themselves as lifelong learners. Neither of which they are used to or which Kentucky is used to with that population. It seems to me it is absolutely critical that we deal with that 900,000 and not forget them or the burden of social cost on the state's general fund which will be enormous, and, even if we make a lot of progress in creating new and better jobs and a higher skilled work force, we will be dragging along a burden that we failed to address.

Don Frazier (Medicine) - The allocations have to be there, too, to improve the K-12, and at the same time there has to be a commitment by the institution to get involved.

I think that is absolutely right. There was a new study that I heard about on the radio this morning about a long term research center estimating the cost of improving teacher's salaries in the public schools, which is just huge. I am sure teacher's salaries are a major issue. All we were trying to do in that study, as I remembered it, was to get them to national averages. I do not think that is enough to get them to national averages. It does not mean automatically that the schools are fine.

Loys Mather (Agriculture) - What would you see the allocations of these Rand findings to an institution like UK with our mission?

It seems to me that there are several. First of all, I, in passing, went by one. President Wethington and I have talked about this, although we have not set down and talked about this. We have talked about this in the sense to agree that we haven't talked about this. We need to define and define very precisely what it means to be a top twenty public research university in the year 2020 and what kinds of funding are necessary to this university to help it on its way to become that. Other than enrollment driven funding. We are proposing to Kentucky for the year 2000 a different way of doing budgets that is not nearly as strongly driven by enrollment as other forms have been in the past. The kind we used in Virginia and the kind you used in Kentucky. They were very similar. We abandoned them for different reasons, but substantially they were the same. I think that the one thing that we have to do is worry about the University of Kentucky and its mission and how it does not have to get trapped into a behavior that is not necessarily going to get it there. A second thing I think that we need to do which is far more important is what it has done in the past, and that is to behave like a flagship, and to behave like a flagship is to provide the leadership that is necessary in a system to help it stay tuned to its work and accomplish its work. Ron Heifitz at Harvard wrote a book called Leadership With No Easy Answers or something like that. It is a very good book. He is at the Kennedy School and the School of Medicine. One of his observations is that groups tend whenever the work gets hard to avoid it and go do something that is easier than the work that is assigned. The essence of leadership in a group is to keep helping the group do its work, keep reminding the group what its work is. It seems to me that a flagship that is not engaged in a competition for undergraduate students could help a system that is engaged in attempting to increase enrollment to keep its eye on the ball. That, I think, would be very very important. A third is this establishment of the K-12 link with higher education.

The commissioner of schools, Bill Cody, and I have met. Actually, it was one of the first meetings I had because one of the first things I found when I got here was that they did not think well of us, and I don't mean just the Council on Postsecondary Education, I mean all of us. They did not think well of us at all. I went over and visited with Cody, and we have had a very good relationship in the last six to eight months--good enough that our two boards are meeting together next month for the first time that anybody can remember. We will propose at that meeting an informal tie between our two boards, The Board of Education and the Council on Postsecondary Education, to address all the "seam issues"--the issues that are on the edges between us and them. What are they? Admissions requirements, graduation requirements, teacher preparation, research, teacher training, low enrollment, advance placement. Those kinds of issues that should knit us together, but, in fact, are like wounds that have healed badly. We are going to try to tie it together at that level. But that is a different level. That is not the level of faculties helping faculties.

Ray Forgue (Human Environmental Sciences) - I guess what I am hearing you say is that UK's undergraduate enrollment may not increase absolutely, but may, relative to other institutions. The question is then, not so much in a budgetary sense but in a political sense, the degree the public perceives UK as a certain kind of place and will want their students to come here, and relatively speaking they will not be able to.

I am suggesting that, but I am not telling you that I am wedded to that. You become a more selective institution. But so did Chapel Hill and so did Virginia, and yet they are both critically conscientious of their responsibilities to the state, and they are both very highly regarded within their states. I have been in another state, the only one I can think of, where I was doing an evaluation of the University, and I asked the board how well they thought they discharged their responsibilities to the "citizens of blank." There was silence, and a member of the board said I do not think that we have any responsibilities to the citizens of blank. We only get 15% of our budget from them, and we do not owe them much. I cannot imagine the University of Kentucky saying that to the people of Kentucky, but neither could I imagine the Universities of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or Virginia ever saying that. That struck me as an outrageous thing to say.

Ray Forgue - I guess what I was referring to was this responsible in what way? In other words, we might perceive our responsibilities being a certain way, but the public may have a different perception of what our responsibilities are.

The public probably does have a different perception. The public does not know what to expect of a top twenty research university, and we have to help them learn. We do not even know what a top twenty research university will be in the year 2020. The marvelous thing about this opportunity is not to chase forty other institutions to try to catch them in twenty years. We have an opportunity to participate in defining what the research university will look like. Now surely little old Kentucky is not going to define it for the whole United States, but we could have a tremendous effect because a lot of states are not even worrying about questioning it. They are just assuming it is going to be like it used to be, and it probably is. This is a pretty exciting game. It is a game that has rules, but they are not very constraining rules.

Lee Meyer (Agriculture) - Where do our other dimensions like the Medical Center and Agriculture Extension Service fit into this? They do not fit neatly into the definition of a research university but they do a land grant university. You held up UVA and Chapel Hill as examples.

Both of who have no land grant responsibilities. They do have medical center responsibilities. Here I got in trouble, because I said once this is really hard for the University of Kentucky because it is the flagship and it is the land grant. If you are in North Carolina you have a great private university, a great flagship, and a great land grant. If you are in Virginia you have a great flagship that actually doubles as the private and a very substantial land grant. If you are in Kentucky, you have one university that has to play all these roles, and it is very difficult. That translated in the last two weeks in somebody's mind into he is proposing to do away with the land grant mission of the University of Kentucky. I do not know how that translation was made. Wrong. Wrong. The land grant mission is an important part, and the land grant mission is a substantial mission I would suggest to you in Kentucky, in Virginia, and in North Carolina. It is a research mission into what has become one of the highest techs of all the tech industries, the agricultural one. I think that it fits hand in glove. The outreach mission, the mission of that part of land grant, which is the service part I think remains a part of any research university, not only to have great knowledge but then to tell people what it means and how they can use it. There is knowledge that is immediately transferable, and there is knowledge that is not. I sat in here only a month or two ago and heard Bill Phillips give one of the best lectures on physics I have ever heard. I doubt that when he started he saw all sorts of immediate utility for the kind of work he was doing on searching for absolute zero. But he certainly has, and the Nobel Prize Committee thought he was right. My son incidentally, my son Benjamin, was Bill Phillip's roommate the night he got the call in California telling him that he had won the Nobel Prize. Benjamin now goes around telling people he slept with a Nobel Laureate.

Joachim Knuf (Communications) - It strikes me that a lot of things that you are describing here deal with sort of smoothing out of what happens at the interfaces inside the system. If I am not completely off here, and I have only been here about twelve years, there is also a second part to this piece. That is the level of public support for the education system as a whole. One of the things that I saw was not how well it was regarded, but that, yes, there is such a system. They do not in any particular sense respect. They do not have a very good feeling for what the role of the university is for the Commonwealth as a whole and sometimes not even for the role of universities in general. In terms of fine-tuning the system components, that is something that needs to be done and is well within what we can do. But then there is a huge outside mission to be accomplished as well, because without that, none of these things are going to happen very easily.

You are absolutely right. First of all, you have been here fifteen times longer than I have, and I respect your experience and I think that you are absolutely right. That is where the political will to bring this off needs to be tested. The Governor is clearly committed to it. He reinforced that commitment when he spoke the other night to the Board of Trustees. He finds this energizing. Do we have, as a collective 3.9 million people, the will to see this through and the judgment that it is, in fact, worthwhile? There are substantial numbers of people who may not see the value of advanced education at all and whose horizons need to be expanded if we are going to succeed. That takes obviously political leadership that goes beyond this university, this little organization called the Council on Postsecondary Education. It takes delegates, representatives, and senators going home and saying to their constituents that this is worthwhile and we can show you. There are things that we can do that help to show that. Let me give you two examples that have already worked and one that might not. The Metropolitan College in Louisville, which can be pointed to and said because higher education responded quickly to a need for UPS to know whether or not we could educate people and help them build a workforce that was twice again as large as the workforce they had, they stayed here. Otherwise, they would have moved. GE Capital in Northern Kentucky, because Northern Kentucky University and the Community and Technical Colleges, the Technical Colleges specifically came together quickly and put together the training program GE Capital needed, they decided to locate their information technology system training facility in Northern Kentucky. The third is the uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, which is a subject now of fierce competition among Alabama, New Mexico, Ohio, us. But "us" was not just the community college and the engineering branch of UK in Paducah. It was the whole resources of this University, the resources of the entire community college system and technical college system and Murray State and the University of Louisville. Now if we can prove that we are an agile and responsive set of organizations when it comes to economic issues, I think that we buy enormous good will. One of the very senior people in economic development after the Northern Kentucky win sent me an e-mail and said KCTCS is the best thing that has happened for economic development since the interstate highways. That needs to translate obviously into something where economic development has targeted industries they are going after. We know what they are going after, and we are helping people prepare for the jobs in the targeted industries that they are bringing people to work. So it is not random, and it is not a matter of responding in thirty days because somebody has now thrown a note over your transom saying we might come in. It is a matter of nurturing and developing, over a long-range, critical clusters of industries in sights around one another so that they support one another. One of the reasons you get a vibrant economy in a place like Austin is that you can walk across the street essentially and have the same kind of job, so people are moving there and there is a lot of vitality.

Bill Maloney - It is interesting your comments about the things with K-12. You are not talking about going as far as Boston University did and taking over the Chelsea, Massachusetts, school district to straighten it out.

No. In the first place I think that you would understand what I mean when I say that it takes a particular kind of arrogance to think that you can take over something and straighten it out. I was in universities in the 1960s, and I remember universities in cities presuming that they knew how to fix the cities. The particular university that I was in was Yale University, and it was Brewester who was smart enough to say that they had to recognize that we are academics and they run cities and we don't have all the answers about how to fix cities and I thought it was a very wise thing for him to say. I don't think that we have all the answers about how to fix schools. On the other hand, a more closely-knit relationship between the board of education and its objective and the colleges and universities and their objectives. Notice I do not say the council and its objectives, because we are not a governed system. We are a coordinated system. A closer set of relationships can only benefit the human beings who move through P-16, age 3, 4, and 5 and then they are in grade thirteen, but they are the same human beings. Yet we have this big ditch between grade twelve and thirteen and we can fill it in. That seems to me to make some very good sense. What also makes sense is that at some point in the future, there would actually be budget requests that are common between the public schools and the colleges and universities. One way, for instance, to address issues like remediation and teacher preparation and inservice teacher training might be for the systems to behave as a system as they try to address them. Remediation, which irritates so many people about higher education, is, in fact, only about one and a half percent of the total national expenditure in American higher education. It is a very small amount. Remediation is to a very large extent a kind of repetition. You are teaching over what you taught earlier. But that is what you do every September from grade five to grade twelve. You start in September, and you repeat over what you were teaching in May. We always do repetition. If we were to do this in a coordinated way, maybe we could deal with an issue like that with much more success than we have and try to take it off the table and put it into a genuinely pedagogical framework rather than political.

Jane Lindle (Education) - A lot of our systems do not start in September anymore and they do have a calendar. I am encouraged by your comments about more joint projects between the various systems because getting either system to move is very difficult, but getting two systems to move at the same time is really a miraculous idea. I am concerned that in the transition between the systems and the hope that we have more people matriculating from K-12 into higher education whether it be community colleges or whatever and also looking at remediation and teaching inservice and trying to get these systems working together, I would hope that there would be some incentives built in for having our academic calendars reflect, or at least be able to be responsive to, what is going on in the K-12.

Let me ask you a question, what do you think is going to happen to the academic calendar in the next twenty years?

Jane Lindle - I am pretty sure it is not going to look like this. But I have been around twenty years and it still looks like this. I am hoping we will get a little momentum going that will help it from stagnating.

You have read, and people who have pointed out, that we, by and large, find ourselves teaching in the eighties or nineties very much the way people were teaching seven and eight hundred years ago. But I have a sense that will change and change quite dramatically as we move to a kind of almost modular education.

Jane Lindle - That has funding implications.

Everything does because you can not do it the same way. It has space utilization implications. It has pedagogical implications. The principle of GE Capitals training in Northern Kentucky, as I understand it, is going to be to bring people into training for a period of say six months and then they go out and work for a year and a half and then they come back and do six months more and then go back out. The challenge is how to make those six month experiences additive rather than repetitive so that you are not just coming in to learn version 2.1 having learned 2.0, and then 2.3 and 2.4 and boring. But there is something going on that is cumulative toward what we now call a degree, an associate degree and then a baccalaureate degree. Where then does the general education that we prize or the liberal education depending on how you are defining it in the university you are in. How does that get woven into modules like that and don't we have to rethink the whole notion of what a generally or liberally educated woman or man is? I think that all of this is up for grabs in the next twenty years.

Don Frazier (Medicine) - Talking about the obvious, we talk probably to twenty or thirty thousand kids a year now. There are a lot of entities that are working together now to make it successful. The one thing that we have learned though is that we don't come in and dictate curriculum. There is enough information about curriculum there, with what universities like our own and regionals have to offer our resources that actually make that exciting and actually increase the effectiveness or what is trying to take place in the classroom. This is increasing. There is more of this going on within our own institution and other regionals. Somewhere along the line, if you really want to make a real impact we are going to have to sit down with these entities and talk about how you do this in greater numbers, and one is going to be distance learning and telecommunications and getting involved with how we can actually take a person from a major university and get them into the classroom. On invitation, not taking over, going in and talking about some things. I can go out into schools now and offer my time free. That is fine. It does not cost much, but when I start talking about trying to take some of these programs and get them into lots of schools, 40,000 students at the same time, then someone has to help me a little bit in terms of how I get access to these telecommunications systems and get into the classroom. Then I think that these major universities, as well as being important with respect to our own students learning in terms of getting involved with K-12, we need to talk more distinctly about financing some of these things if we want to have a bigger impact.

A friend of mine, who is indeed involved in the Kentucky Commonwealth Virtual University, has a phrase he uses when he describes the many wonderful things that are always going on in Universities. He calls them random acts of progress. The point is that they are wonderful, but they do not together add up into some systemic initiative that is scaleable, up to scale you are talking about. You are absolutely right. The combination of the virtual university with the linkages that now do, in fact, tie into our public schools and the use of KET's facilities. I knew about KET long before I came to Kentucky. People always talked about what great work they did in adult basic education and delivery into the schools. We have to pull all that together, the virtual high school as part of the virtual university. Basic education. We have to pull it all together and get it all into the schools. The University plays a critical role in this.

Don Frazier - That would speak to trying to get enough students to have the increase you were talking about, 50%.

Yes, but think about it in the context of very different models of what advanced education participation is apt to be twenty years from now.

Mike Nietzel (Dean - Graduate School) - Could you talk more specifically about the alternative you see for funding besides an enrollment driven one?

I would be happy to describe what it is we are proposing, but I want to hasten to say it is sort of a work in progress. It will still be in progress even through the year 2000 and 2002. There are three parts. One has to do with the base and how to judge the adequacy of each university's base. Right now what we are doing is your base last year plus 2.3% in each of the next two years. That is fine if we assume that the base is adequate and inflation is less than 2.3%. It does not get you anywhere very fast, but it maintains the base. Only all over the state people tell me that their base is really bad compared to everyone else's base. Probably everybody is right in some way. A series of sets of benchmark institutions, a different set for every university in Kentucky, no Kentucky university may be on any other Kentucky university's list. How are the benchmark institutions chosen? They are chosen by using a set of variables somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 15 that are quantitative, quantifiable variables against which the entire universe of American higher education is run. The fifty or so statistically most significant universities are chosen that are like the University of Kentucky. Does it stop there? No. That is the list from which we work. We have now done two things. We have agreed with the universities about the variables and picked the list. We then we invite in or go visit "the university," our staff, the university's staff, and we invite the budget office and the legislative staff to go with us. Why? Because if they participate in this discussion, come legislative session time, they do not take cheap shots at it because they were part of it and they know that it was not just log rolling. It was actually done in a professional manner. We sit down and we look at the list. The President or his representative, whoever is leading the discussion in the University, says we think that the third institution is not a good institution because it is in the middle of the second largest city in the United States, and we are primarily not an urban institution. We are a suburban institution or an institution in a nonpopulation dense place. Then we say, okay, cross off. Next one. This one has no medical, dental, or law school. Okay, we will cross that one off. We just keep going down the list until we get a manageable list that would be statistically responsible, which I would say is anywhere from 15 to 25 institutions. Then we say that is the benchmark list. Money has never been a factor. The kinds of factors: the size of the institution, the percentage mix by discipline of the degrees it confers; fine arts, engineering, humanities, sciences, the faculty to student head count ratio, the ACT scores, and the percentage of part-time full-time students. Things that you can describe about an institution. We then say what is the per-student funding for each of these institutions? Dollars per full-time equivalent student. Calculate that and see where our institution rests within this list of benchmarks. Set an objective. We want all Kentucky institutions to be in the sixth percentile or above of their list. I don't know what the council will set it at, say fiftieth. It could say fifty fifth. I can not imagine it will say less than fiftieth. I would hope it says more than fiftieth. We target the institution's base to a set of peers around the United States. We have not in this, and this is not a UK issue, but we have not fallen into the trap that I think exists in most states of comparing the regional institutions against one another and just comparing them against one another. We have avoided or begun to break out of a difficult Kentucky trap, which is to think of itself apart from the nation, or as only related to the states that border it. We have said that this is a national list. This is a list that has institutions on it from California, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Texas. Because we are in a national game, so we have said this is a national game. We are not funding simply enrollment growth. That is the base. Then a very small set perhaps of performance characteristics for which you would add two percent on top for each one that is meant. I only have two right now. I am open to others, but I only have two. One is increasing graduation rates on a pace to put us at the national average by 2020. The other is meeting our commitments to equal education opportunities, which are easier to forget in Kentucky than they are in some other southern states--at least other southern states with which I am familiar. Then a third, which reflects the aspirations of the University and those are the incentive funds of which we now have six in the Kentucky 1998-2000 budget. I would think that we probably have fewer in the 2000-2002 budget. The one I can tell you for sure that we will recommend is a continuation of the dollar for dollar match endowment challenge. Because you have simply done superbly in matching over $50 million dollars of $66 million that is out there, I am convinced that it is a splendid way to jump-start a major private sector involvement in the financial support of a university. I say jump start, not that it could not be done more slowly without this incentive, but with it, if you think about it, if the Governor is successful in doing this in the year 2000 and the year 2002, there will be a total of $360 million dollars added to the endowment of the University of Kentucky over a period of six years. Which is really good, not to take away from all the other development that will go on. These things as you know cascade. I would see that one continuing. Probably, I would see others being created as time went on. They would reflect the aspirations of the institution. How the institution gets from here to there would be in those incentive funds. Three parts. That is how I would see the budget coming together.

Nate Brown (Student Government President) - This weekend I met with some of the other student government presidents around the state, and we talked some about the new tuition setting policy you just described. Something that affects all of Kentucky and especially UK when you are looking at the first part of the base is that you have twelve to fifteen different variables that you are looking at, but the main thing that you are looking at here is that Kentucky is different so much in per capita income than other states. We do not want to make huge jumps in tuition, and we don't want to have all that fall on the backs of students. Are there any more things like the research challenge fund type of matching grant program to kind of off set that and help out?

Good question. The issue is a serious one. It is easier to talk about being a high tuition state when your per capita income is eleventh among the states than when it is 80% of the national average. Ours is 81% of the national average. That is a consideration. You are absolutely right. Kentucky higher education is not priced at anything like the levels of a Virginia, and it can't be and it shouldn't be. Going to your specific question, we tried once, and this is only one other state, a matching grant challenge program on endowment designated specifically for financial aid. The way we did it was not dollar for dollar on the principle. It was dollar for dollar on the earnings, which actually to a donor works just as well. It was not nearly as successful as the programs to attract and retain scholars. I can't tell you why because I am not a professional in development. Could it work? Yes. But I think that we would really need to get a group of professionals together to talk about whether they thought it would work.

Nate Brown - Our base would be so much different if we took out all the programs such as agriculture extension. It seems that student tuition should not be paying for those things.

It does not. Am I willing to take them out? The answer is probably not across the board because probably they are in the budgets of the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, and the University of Illinois too. Because they all have these kinds of missions and every state puts some kinds of mandates. A tobacco state will have one kind of mandate, a wheat state will have another, but there will be mandates of various sorts. When you say that students should pay a percentage of the funds, should you include these in those funds? No, not at all.

Nate Brown - Is there any way to look into a program that would allow the students to have the same tuition when you come in as a freshman for four years instead of surprise tuition increases to make sure that the students know what they are getting into when they are being recruited. I know that there are some problems that go along with that. The university would be liable for making sure that they have classes available during the four or five years. I know some universities have this. Are there other problems with that? It seems like it would be a good incentive for retention rates and graduating in a timely fashion.

The answer is a very firm I don't know. That is the sort of thing that is very easy to say yes to when inflation is less than one percent. It is also the thing that we don't read about very much any more because inflation is one percent and tuitions are not going up ten and fifteen percent. They are going up much more modestly. If something were to happen, if the economy went in the tank and we went into a recession, the last time I went through a recession we lost $400 million from $1.2 billion from state money. After a while that adds up. That would throw a clincher in that sort of promise. The other would be the kind of inflation we suffered through in the 1970s, which was double digit inflation. I don't know how universities could make that pledge to their students and honor their faculties. To put it most bluntly, 80% of the money spent in institutions is usually personnel service money, money for salaries and benefits and such. It could reap great hardship on the faculty. I would want to really think about that.

Chancellor Zinser - I would like to have you reflect more on the question of the relationship between becoming more selective as an institution at UK. We are progressively becoming more selective, looking at that in relationship to forecasts and assumptions we are making about enrollments. One of the things that we try to be very sensitive to and I think that we will need to in the future is to not become so inaccessible on any level, including the ACT scores or anything else, that we become an institution that is no longer an inspiration to the people of Kentucky in terms of ability to move forward in the institution. That is one dimension. Another one is as you are talking about adding another fifty percent, in terms of numbers of students, I would suspect a number of that proportion will be coming to the University of Kentucky even in a selective environment, and that a definition of what we mean by state activity in the year 2020 may come to be much more complex than it is today, particularly if we are at the diversity of students and when they come back to school. I just wondered if you might extend those thoughts and expand a little more on that in terms of your own vision of the year 2020 and UK becoming more selective and yet being an institution that is not in any way being inaccessible to very bright people coming here.

So the aspirations of young people in Kentucky can still legitimately include coming to the University of Kentucky?

Chancellor Zinser - I think that influences enrollment not only at UK but also at other institutions.

I do think that what happens when the flagship sets standards and makes those standards a stretch is that the whole system goes up. I do not think, for instance, that a James Madison University in Virginia would have become the quite selective institution it is had there not been a College of William and Mary and a university there. The whole water level grows with the highly selective institutions. I do think that the standards will change. We are seeing some evidence of that already in this country, in Oregon, for instance, where universities are exploring competency-based admission. A competency-based admission is entirely different. Frankly, I do not know how to even begin doing that. It is not something I would even suggest doing here. But I think that we need to be thinking about it because if it is being done somewhere it will probably be done elsewhere. How to handle that in this University without finding yourselves distracted by significant numbers of new undergraduates strikes me as very difficult. I don't quite know how to reflect on that in any way that would not be embarrassing to me and probably to you.

Chancellor Zinser - One of the things that we are looking very hard at right now is the development of our future professorate and preparing those who are in graduate school who are going into colleges and universities of all varieties. Our teaching assistants program and various levels of preparation of the graduate students for becoming members of the professorate is becoming a much more interesting and sophisticated process. As our enrollment at the undergraduate level not only is shaped by increasing selectivity but also probably some growth in numbers, that is the environment of the laboratory in a sense in which we are preparing our future professorates in terms of their teaching. I would make the suggestion that we need to look at these carefully as two dimensions of the University that work very closely together and, to me, argue for being a little cautious about assuming a flat enrollment when that really is a laboratory for preparing people for the future professorate.

That is a good correction for me, I should not have sounded so flat. If you had seen the numbers, you would I think agree with that. It probably is not realistic economically or educationally. It is probably not realistic given the characteristics of Kentucky's population to assume that there are that many more students who could be legitimately absorbed in the University of Kentucky, which would be almost half again as many as you have now. It seems to me the number has to be considerably smaller than that.

Nolan Embry (Lexington Community College) - I wondered if you're excluding the Community College, and we have, I have heard, one of the highest tuitions in the nation, and yet we have an increasing enrollment and pull students from all over the state. A lot of them come here to become educated at LCC so they can move over to the University. As our enrollment continues to increase, it seems like that would have a greater impact on the enrollment of the University.

Yes, it could. It could have an effect on the kind of enrollment at the University. There are universities, and very good ones, who actually accept more students as transfers than they admit as first year students. It could very well be that could be a pattern that emerges because of the particular relationship between LCC and the University of Kentucky. If that relationship indeed remains a close one, then it is almost like a member of the family just sort of moving from one place to the other. No, I don't exclude the community college at all.

Bill Maloney - I wondered about the performance indicators for community colleges.

The performance indicators for community colleges are more complex because, in part, it is community and technical colleges now and, in part, job placement is as important if not more in community and technical colleges than graduation rates and transfer is another factor that needs to be accounted for. I don't know whether students can transfer from LCC to UK without finishing a degree. I assume they can. What you get is transfer at any point, graduation, or job placement and what happens in job placement, as you well know, is that students leave because the jobs were available before they finish the full formal requirement of the degree program. Is that to be judged a failure? I doubt it. Not at the community and technical college level. The thing that I care about is if the student leaves for a job and knows that she or he can benefit and can do the work and will come back at some future time to continue it when they are ready.

Bill Maloney - All of us understand the goal of becoming a top twenty research university. We understand the research challenge trust fund. Many of us have a concern that you can not become a top twenty public research university without having top undergraduate programs. The incentive funds are all being set up to generate money for graduate and research programs. Is it possible to get some break like three bucks for research and one buck for instructional improvement to begin to build up the undergraduate programs at the same time?

No. I understand what you are saying. I think that this research challenge is a difficult or a tricky issue. There are people who think that if the University of Kentucky gets $180 million from the state and raises a $180 million, they will have $360 million and that is 180 endowed chairs and that makes them a great university. That is not necessarily true. People who have not been around universities are probably more apt to think that it is. There are other things that you have to do. The infrastructure that makes great faculty come and want to be at this University is not just other great faculty. It is the resources that are there. It is the quality of the students that you teach. It is the quality of your colleagues. I don't think that the program in itself is the be all and done all. I do agree that undergraduate education is critically important. What worried me when I first came to the this state and didn't know any of the universities was that it is possible to become a major research power and rape your undergraduate program. You just bleed your sources off the undergraduate program constantly. I have a pretty good sense after only eight months that we will not succumb to that temptation. I feel good about that. I also feel good about the fact that while the people who started this program tended to have a highly utilitarian view of research, which was commercially valuable intellectual property, there have been signals sent within the universities and elsewhere that that is not all that counts. I think that this University's decision to endow a number of chairs that are in the arts and humanities sends a very clear message back that this is a matter of the aesthetic fullness of an institution, not simply commercially valuable intellectual property. At the same time, I don't think that the same level of support would be there for endowment that was dedicated to improving undergraduate education. It seems to me the way that you have to handle this is to insure that the people you get to fill the chairs that can be created are employed with the understanding that they have a commitment, and you employ the kinds of people who do have commitments to undergraduates as well as graduates, to advance research as well as to teaching young people--not the results of your research but how to think the way you think and do the kinds of research you do. I go back to Bill Phillips here. This guy is an incredibly sophisticated thinker. When he was here speaking, there was a eight year old boy here having a heck of a fine time listening to this physicist with a Nobel Prize describe what he was doing because Bill Phillip knew how to talk to kids. There are people like that, and he is one of them. They are all over the place, and you just have to be sure that you get the right kind.

Randolph Hollingsworth (Lexington Community College) - To bring it back to Lexington Community College, one of the advantages that UK has is the ability to incorporate the research mission within the community college environment. For example, you were talking about endowed chairs in the humanities who would be researchers first and having a commitment to undergraduates. Actually we might want to be thinking for the future the community college environment is actually when we are talking about the adult students and I think there are valid reasons for thinking about what Malcolm Knowles described as andragogy as an endowed chairs vision. When we are talking about research we might also think in terms of Cross and Angelo's classroom assessment research and how indeed Kentuckians who are forty years of age and just getting their GED, how then can the University of Kentucky be accessible? I think that the community college is the place where scholarship can be in various and exciting dimensions so that I could have the wonderful endowed chair who is a terrific historian sitting across the street that also talks with a research chair at Lexington Community College about how to get history to be important and accessible to the forty year old not just the eighteen year old. I think that those are two very different models that we could incorporate together. Lexington Community College is one of the largest growing community colleges and it is scary to me that we are not always in the picture. We certainly can be. If you look at the CVU Going the Distance Project, the idea of going out to a whole other market of students saying to them if you put up a portfolio that says that you get "x number" of college credit hours from this competency based idea of a portfolio and get enough hours to transfer to the University of Kentucky without even getting a degree. It paints a different picture.

I don't disagree with you at all. If there is anything that I find somewhat scary in Kentucky it is that the average age of community college students is so young. The other thing that I find a little scary is that I think the number of adults over 25 went down slightly in 1996-1997. That is completely counter to all the indicators of the importance of knowledge in our society. I urge you to do everything that you can at LCC. We all have to do everything that we can to get a broader participation in our technical and community colleges and our universities. If there is a kind of research that is there to be done, and I am sure that there is both pedagogically and strategically as you talk about the population of Kentucky, then the community colleges could be very fertile ground in which to do it.

A Senator who did not identified himself - You said that the costs of meeting of goals in 2020 would be an additional $300 million from state government. How do national trends and Kentucky trends contribute to an increased cost over the next 20 years if we weren't paying any attention to the Rand information? What cost would go up?

Costs always go up in a way. On the other hand, what the Rand stuff has shown me is an entirely new understanding of what efficiency is in higher education. The popular legislative or prox scam attack on efficiency is that you don't teach enough courses or there are too many support personnel or too many administrators. I think that is trivial compared to what I call now leakage in education in Kentucky. From grade nine to grade twelve, 15,000 youngsters disappear. At grade twelve, half of them don't continue their advanced education. If we said efficiency is throughput divided by costs and I took the degrees confirmed and divided it by the appropriation, I think that I would come up with one of the highest numbers in the United States. That is inefficiency. It is not workload or the number of administrators. It is like we are a beer bottling company, and we are pouring 60% of it on the floor. We are pouring 60% of it on the floor. It is more serious because it is not beer. It is human beings. The costs of that is what strikes me as enormous. Do costs have to go up? Not necessarily. We could go on a radical efficiency kick. That is not what I propose to do, but we could. We could try to drive costs down. Would that yield much? It would not yield much reform; I have been around long enough to know that. It might yield some change but it would not yield much improvement. If we kept doing what we do, in fact, twenty years from now enrollment will be slightly lower than it is today. It might be drastically lower than it is today because other providers will move in and offer the services we do not offer. They will offer the services to the older adult, they will offer the services to the functionally illiterate student, they will offer the adult-based education, and they will offer the training that we are now offering to mission technology people. I sent my sister a note at Sun MicroSystems about the virtual university. She sent me one back and said we are in competition with you, because Sun has now decided its training programs for its employees are so good they are marketing them. They are selling them. Distance learning. Think what happens when Microsoft, Disney, and the University of California form a not for profit or a for profit to go into the virtual university business. This world is changing phenomenally. That is a six hundred billion dollar a year business, and a third of it is in higher education. All the signals on Wall Street are to buy, buy the provider of advanced education because we are not changing fast enough. The guy who is the head of the Apollo group at Phoenix University sat in New York in a meeting with me and said that you guys are sitting ducks. Well, I don't want to be a sitting duck. We don't have twenty years. We have a few years and I think that Kentucky is very well positioned and can do very well. But we have to be very creative and very flexible with what we have. If we do, we will do all right. It won't be easy but we will do alright.

Dr. Davies was given a round of applause.

Chairperson Moore thanked Dr. Davies for his excellent presentation and for taking time to do it.

The Chair recognized Professor Lee Meyer, vice-chair of the Senate Council for introduction of the action item.

ACTION ITEM 1 - Proposal to amend University Senate Rules, Section Vl 6.4.2.4 Academic Offenses in Independent Study Courses.

Background and Rationale:

The Rules and Elections Committee met on January 26, 1999, to consider a problem raised by the Dean of University Extension regarding jurisdiction over academic offenses. Students enrolled in Independent Study Program (ISP) courses are, in many cases, not admitted to or otherwise enrolled in the University. When academic offenses (Rules 6.3.1 through 6.3.3) occur, Rule 6.4.2 specifies certain duties of "the Dean of the College where the Offense Occurred or of the Dean of the Graduate School, as appropriate."

In the case of students admitted to the University and enrolled in an ISP course, the committee agreed (and the Dean of University Extension concurred, that jurisdiction over the offense should first be offered to "the Dean of the College where the Offense Occurred" as provided by the existing rule. In the case of students not admitted to the University, the course instructor and the ISP staff are the student's only contact with the University. It is the current practice of the ISP staff to act as academic officer, registrar, and so forth for these students. The Committee agreed that this was a sensible practice. However, since all ISP courses are offered under the auspices of a College of the University, that is, with standard course numbers and designations, we agreed (and the Dean of University Extension concurred) that the College offering the course should be notified of the offense and the proceeding.

The following new rule was proposed by the Rules Committee and amended and approved by the University Senate Council.

Proposal:

Section VI 6.4.2.4 Offenses Occurring in Independent Study courses

If the offense occurs in a course offered through the Independent Study Program, the responsible Dean for purposes of Rules 6.4.2.1 through 6.4.2.3 shall be determined according to this rule.

A. In the case of students not enrolled in the University, the responsible Dean shall be the Dean of University Extension. The Dean of University Extension shall, however, notify the dean of the College where the offense occurred of the proceeding and the nature of the offense.

B. In the case of students enrolled in the University, the responsible Dean shall be the Dean of University Extension if the Dean of the College where the offense occurred or the Dean of the Graduate School, upon notification, declines responsibility for the case.

C. Students in Independent Study courses not regularly enrolled in the University shall be entitled to the same rights involving academic offenses as those of students who are enrolled in the University.

Implementation Date: Upon passage

Professor Meyer reviewed the background of the item and recommended approval on behalf of the Senate Council.

The Chair said that this came up as a result of someone cheating who was not enrolled at the University.

There was no discussion, and the item passed in a unanimous voice vote.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:45 p.m.

Don Witt
Secretary, University Senate

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