[phas-faculty_staff_others] Senate minutes

[Carlos Bertulani]

Here is a small minutes of the senate meeting today.

1- If you are on tenure track you can contact on Dr. Sharonda Pruitt (https://www.tamuc.edu/people/sharonda-pruitt/) to ask for advice on your career. She is chairing the junior faculty program.

2- Most senators do not report anything from the senate to their faculty. There were some complaints about this.

3- Revised T&P Policy: 

(a) The senate will collect the most contentious points of discussion and bring them to the senate in December for final draft.

(b) After the senate sends the draft to the Provost, it is up to the upper admin + their assigned committees to decide if they accept, modify, or do whatever they want in the T&P policy.

4- There are reports of gangs fighting on campus, inside dorms, and stealing property. The reports seem to be alarming. A group of ten gang members have been caught on video using masks not to be identified, fighting, stealing, vandalizing. Be vigilant.

5- Workload Policy: 

(a) A senate committee asked 28 dept heads for their policies and 20 answered. Four depts. are said to have very good policies, including Physics&Astronomy. Congratulations.

(b) The senate will ask again all department heads for a clearly written statement on their work load policy. A warning: if the depts. don’t reply that the univ. might enforce its own policy all around campus, disregarding their internal policies. 

6- COURSERA: The business dept. seems to be using their services and the university apparently is already paying for some of their services. Students get credit if they take their courses.

My own opinion: Looking at their website one reads wonderful things such as education for free. But notice that they have a good  number of employees. Also, who pays for all the technical infrastructure? In the end it is a profitable organization (at least their founders make 6 figure salaries and up), like many of the MOOCS are. Nobody does anything for free. It could be a suicide for us to use their program as they sell the same product we do. 

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The most important item is # 3, T&P policy. Some want external reviewers, some not, some want more years for promotion, some not. Who knows what our provost, president, and their assigned committees decide about this? They rarely follow the senate recommendations.

Carlos