Present: Mahmoud Abdalla, William Arrocha, Avner Cohen (Vice President), Andrea Hofmann-Miller (Zoom), Pushpa Iyer (Zoom), Katherine Punteney, Thor Sawin (President), Pablo Oliva. Absent: Sabino Morera. Guests: Pablo Oliva. Staff: Stacie Riley. 

Updates and Business with FEC: Thor introduced Pablo Oliva, Chair of FEC. Pablo explains that faculty who are submitting for sabbatical, contract renewal, and promotion during the 2019-2020 academic year will have the option of submitting an “electronic dossier” through a secure Google drive. The reason FEC decided to offer this option is to make the processes more transparent, more secure, and more fluid for all committee members. FEC has also found paper dossiers with missing information and they feel the Google drives will help alleviate that problem. Stacie Riley will be creating a shared drive for each faculty member. Once complete, Stacie will email each faculty member inviting them to upload their documents. Pablo states it is advisable to upload a single pdf into each folder. Please note that in order to log into the Google drive faculty must use their Middlebury email address. After each deadline, Stacie will remove access from the previous party and grant access to the upcoming party. For example, on September 17th the faculty member’s access to their sabbatical dossier will be removed and the peer review committee will be given access. Once the review committee has written and signed their letter they will send it to Stacie who will upload it into the drive and send the faculty member a copy. This process will continue through the list of evaluators until final approval/denial has been made. On the first day of the next academic year all files will be deleted so it is important that faculty members keep a copy of all material uploaded into the Google drive.

William asks how to handle publications. It was recommended that links to publications be added to a pdf for upload. Mahmoud asks about books, since some foreign publishers don’t have web pages links are not available. It was suggested that a note could be added to the dossier telling reviewers that you have the book and they could check it out, or you could upload a copy of the title page and a chapter or two.

Thor reminds the Senators that a new rubric has been voted in, which will be uploaded into Faculty 180 and used for the upcoming FAR process. The breakdown of the new rubrics is teaching 40-60%, scholarship and professional impact 20-50%, Middlebury/MIIS service 10-30%, and the new optional category of professional development 0-20%. This was shared last spring at the Assembly and faculty were asked for feedback. Thor has received no feedback so the rubrics should be considered final for this year, with potential changes once this has been used once. It was pointed out that the same rubrics will be used for both GSTILE and GSIPM. 

It has been noted that faculty hired in January have issues when it comes to the process of contract renewals and promotions. Currently, faculty hired in January go up for contract renewal in their second semester and promotion in their ninth. These faculty have reported difficulty in every step of the review processes, including having to justify that they qualify. Last year the Assembly voted in a change for January hires, application for renewal in their fourth semester and promotion in their ninth. Unfortunately, HR prevented the implementation of this revised schedule, based on the logic that January hires would get a double benefit (having more data for contract renewal, as well as being eligible for promotion earlier). Thor discussed two alternate possibilities for January hires with HR and both were deemed acceptable:

• Two parallel FEC calendars. Current calendar for fall hires (contract renewal commencing on October 15th with notification on April 30th) and a second calendar for January hires (contract renewal commencing on March 15th with notification on November 30th).
• A compressed/expedited FEC calendar. Current calendar for fall hires would remain the same as above with contract renewal for January hires starting on February 15th and decision notification on April 30th. 

Consensus seemed to be around exploring the expedited calendar, which was presented for consideration at the ILG meeting on September 18^th.

Community Building Focus Groups: Pushpa presented on a series of focus groups she plans to facility on campus in her role as the Chief Diversity Officer. She will offer separate groups for faculty, staff, and students.

Pressing Needs for The Senate this Academic Year:

Thor asks the Senators what pressing needs the Faculty Senate should address this academic year. 

• Avner states there needs to be a sense of returning to normalcy after last year. 
• Mahmoud states that people are wondering what is going to happen now that the French program has been decimated by ISP and contract non-renewal. What are the next steps on how to shape programs with so many faculty leaving and how is the language framework policy going to be instituted?
• William can’t speak for all of GSIPM due to its fragmentation, but feels it is important to find new channels to stay informed about what is happening across GSIPM. He is also troubled there were no school-wide retreats this year in either GSTILE or GSIPM. His program is in shock knowing how many people will be leaving at the end of this year. All this while the program curriculum is undergoing accelerated and radical changes. It’s going to be a rough transition so faculty are looking for strong Institute leadership.
• Katherine thinks there needs to be community-wide conversations about the curricular changes in the various programs. Her question is who is in charge of changes and who will initiate the community conversations? She thinks the Senate needs to ask Jeff Dayton-Johnson to bring the community together. The town hall he held in late August was a good start, but we need more, perhaps some cross program faculty retreats.
• Andrea shares that the mood around campus and in the T&I is not very good, there is a lot of bitterness. She states that the high tuition charged by MIIS is a huge deterrent in attracting international T&I students, and the quality of US students who apply to the T&I program is just not there.
• Thor thinks faculty morale needs to be worked on. He asks the Senators to send him ideas that they think will be helpful in terms of raising morale and he will write to the Institute Council, who have been very responsive to the Senate’s requests. One idea is to bring back the school retreats and to let the Council know that there may have been good reasons to not have the retreats this year, but they were missed by all faculty. 

Updates from the Town Hall and Faculty Assembly: 

• Celebration for faculty not returning next year. Patricia Szasz has volunteered to be person contacting faculty who are leaving to discuss their interest in participating in a lecture series in their honor. Since Patricia is new to the Council and was not involved with the ISP process, it was felt she would be the best person to approach these faculty. 
• ISP. Thor was informed that there would be no formal list of non-returning faculty provided to all faculty, although program chairs are aware of who is leaving. It will be left up to each faculty member to let others know of their decisions. 
• When the Senate meet with President Patton she gave a strong statement about increasing the amount of faculty development funding. Thor feels the Senate should check in with Laurie about the status.

Updates from the ILG Meetings:

The five goals of the Institute Council this academic year was presented at the town hall, but those in the ILG have a bit more information that Thor shared at today’s meeting. 

• Linguistically and interculturally competent graduates. Recruiting has begun with the new language requirements for DPP, IEM, IEP, and TLM. The Council has appointed a task force (led by Laura Burian and Patricia Szasz) to create a transition plan for languages in 2020/21. At the end of October, the task force will present to the Institute Council and in December MIIS will start to develop study abroad packages that combine language learning with career-focused courses at partner universities. 
• Market responsive, career-focused MAs. At the end of September the Council received a report on employer relations activities and proposed modifications to increase effectiveness, which serves as the basis for new staff positions/redeployment of existing ones. By the beginning of October there will be instructions developed for programs on what “career focus” implies, and programs will receive instructions to provide market response report by the beginning of March. By the end of October non-language gaps in curriculum will be identified (e.g. analytics, econ). 

As time was running out, the remainder of the Council’s five goals were not reviewed. Thor briefly touched on a few things the Senate will be working on this academic year. 

• Handbook modifications. Senate has initiated a process for handbook modifications so we don’t vote in a change and then have it blocked at implementation. 
• Handbook additions to protect faculty from non-renewals, or create a fairer process. The Senators should come up with suggestions about the process and other ways to ensure cost savings, i.e. as a department we all take a pay cut. Thor did caution that HR might have a problem with this because senior faculty could coerce junior faculty. What can be done when a program finds itself with market constraints? The Senate will create a committee to discuss this further.
• LPP faculty with multi-year contracts. This is very important and we need to figure it out this year, we can’t just keep kicking it down the road.