Present Via Zoom: Mahmoud Abdalla, William Arrocha, Avner Cohen (Vice President), Andrea Hofmann-Miller, Pushpa Iyer, Katherine Punteney, Thor Sawin (President)

Absent: Sabino Morera

Staff: Stacie Riley

Faculty & Staff Town Hall: Vice President for Human Resources and Chief Risk Officer, Karen Miller hosted a town hall on Monday, March 25th about Workforce Planning and the ISP process. Andrea Hofmann-Miller pointed out a comment made by Karen, “If you did not get an ISP there is a place for you at MIIS/Middlebury”. Andrea would like to get the opinion of the other Senators on this comment because she was taken aback. William think Karen’s comment was not well-thought out. Katherine thinks she was talking about staff in that moment, and points out there were several times Karen was addressing staff without mentioning that specifically. Avner thought it was very bureaucratic. All senators that were in attendance agree.

Language Policy Update: Mahmoud states that there was a meeting on March 15th with the Council of Program Chairs, and there is Language Policy Framework retreat this Friday, March 29th, which will include the Institute Council.

Thor asks Mahmoud if the LS faculty understand that MIIS is not cutting six people from LS, but instead that number is the catastrophic collapse threshold. Mahmoud says, yes, but people have that number in their head. Mahmoud also stated that he and his LS Senator colleagues have made sure to let everyone know that anything coming from Thor as the Faculty Senate President has been thoroughly discussed at the Senate meetings prior to the information going out.

Institute Council Response Regarding Metrics and Faculty Workforce Planning: Thor addressed the response from the Institute Council dated March 21st, about differences in methodology for calculating the FTE figures for the metrics used in Faculty Workforce Planning. Details on this were sent to the program chairs and to all Language Studies faculty, which were the main affected program.

Ballot Measures: Standing Committees: Thor would like to start soliciting nominations for new committee members. He would like for each nominee to introduce themselves at the April Assembly meeting.

Professor Emeritus: This year there are two nominations, Nukhet Kardam and Jan Black.

Faculty Handbook: Is the Scholarship and Professional Impact rating section was going to be fleshed out, i.e. what constitutes a  4, 3, 2, etc., or was it intentionally left blank? Andrea states they left if blank because it was self-explanatory based on the 5 category. Thor is very happy with everyone’s work on this. William agrees that the handbook revisions look good, but feels it could use a little more polishing before sending it out. William ask that Katherine and Andrea to review the comments that the Senators made and respond to them.

Faculty Annual Review: Avner asks the GSIPM Senators if they noticed that Dean DePaolis did not put qualitative detail into the FAR. In the past, both Kent and Yuwei explained their ratings using qualitative comments. William, Katherine, and Pushpa agree with Avner. Thor suggests that the four GSIPM Senators draft a note to Dean DePaolis about this and request qualitative feedback, especially since these evaluations could be used in the plan C of faculty separations. After a small discussion, it was decided that the memo would wait until after the GSTILE faculty received their evaluations to see if this request needs to go to both deans.