Present: Mahmoud Abdalla, William Arrocha, Andrea Hofmann-Miller (via Zoom), Pushpa Iyer, Sabino Morera, Katherine Punteney, Thor Sawin (President)

Absent: Avner Cohen (Vice President)

Staff: Stacie Riley

Faculty Handbook: In order to continue the momentum on handbook revisions, Thor has assigned two Senators to each of the eight sections for review and comment.

Correspondence to Program Chairs: Thor sent out an email to the Council of Program Chairs to address three issues.

• Feedback on the proposed survey for the evaluation of deans and program chairs. He sent the draft questionnaire and asked that any feedback be received by Friday, April 17th.
• The new evaluation categories for the Faculty Activity Report (FAR) and the proposed rubric. Thor asked that each chair remind their faculty that they will be reviewed on the new categories for calendar year 2019. He also solicited feedback on the rubric with a deadline of Monday, April 15th.
• Update on the Institute Council’s response to an issue of FTE calculation during the Workforce Planning Process.

Evaluation of Deans and Program Chairs: According to the Faculty Handbook, faculty have the responsibility to evaluate the deans and program chairs. The deadline for these evaluations is April 30th. The evaluations are to be initiated by the Vice President for Academic Affairs, who will establish a process to solicit input from faculty. Thor spoke with Laura Burian, Fernando DePaolis, and Jeff Dayton-Johnson about this evaluation being distributed anonymously through Qualtrics to the appropriate faculty. There is a question about who gets the questionnaire since the handbook does not specify. After a short discussion, it was decided that the evaluation of the deans and program chairs would go to regular and visiting faculty. It was also decided that there needs to be clarity in the handbook; wherever “faculty” is mentioned it needs to specify which faculty (i.e. regular faculty, adjunct faculty, visiting faculty, or a combination of faculty).

Should the April 30th due date for evaluating administrators and chairs be moved to early March or sometime in the fall? If it happens in the spring, the purpose of the evaluation would be more formative/developmental, and if it happens in the fall it would feed into the annual evaluation. Mahmoud thinks that chairs should have the opportunity to work on things that are pointed out in their evaluation so spring would be his vote. This tool should be constructive and not punitive. After some discussion, the deadline for both the dean and the program chair evaluations by faculty should have a deadline of March 15th.

Term Length for Committee Members: Last May, the Assembly voted in the adoption of three year terms for the FEC, APSIC, and Faculty Senate. The idea behind this was to have a one-third turnover of each committee yearly. Thor states that if everyone who was elected to a two year term converted to a three year term there would be no new people on any of the committees this year. Since this is the only year it will be an issue, Thor would contact the committee members who started in 2017 to see who is interested in extending for an additional year. If more faculty are interested in the extension, then the Senate will hold a special election to determine which member will remain on the committee.

Language Policy Framework: Sabino updated the Senate. He stated that March 6th through April 5th was the timeframe for faculty to develop proposals about how their program would change their language and ICC requirements, or submit a statement that they did not plan to change. Sabino stated that degree programs had to submit curricular change proposals last Friday, which are now under review by the Institute Council. In the near future, there will be an open forum for students to hear and comment on these proposals. Sabino wants to know what role the Senate can play to ensure that this process happens openly, transparently, and consistently across campus. It was decided that Sabino would draft a letter on behalf of the Senate asking the Institute Council to clarify the open forum plan.

Thor presented the 2016 Modern Language Association (MLA) report; looking at the raw data gives a very different picture from the Chronicle of Higher Education article about declining language enrollments. (The language policy framework cited that Chronicle article as justification for the proposed changes). The MLA report shows that undergraduate students taking language classes is the same now as it was in 1980-1985, which was the high-point for language enrollment here at MIIS. The report also noted there is a larger decline in classical languages and Italian, and that the biggest drop occurred in two-year colleges. This information suggests that the problem of language enrollment is not as dire as it has been portrayed.

100% Plant-Based Commencement Reception: Pushpa brought up the decision by the administration (Jeff Dayton-Johnson and the Sustainability Council) to have a 100% plant-based commencement reception this May. Then, before the MIIS Community had been informed, Jason Scorse gave an interview to VegNews stating that MIIS is hosting the first 100% plant-based commencement reception in the country and that this decision was made in conjunction with the Student Council. Pushpa states that many students are upset that this decision was made without any consultation. Pushpa wants to know how decisions are made on this campus? She states we talk about consultation, inclusion, transparency, but it always seems that we are being informed of a decision that has already been made.