September 20th, 2024

ARKANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY

FACULTY SENATE MEETING

September 20, 2024

Reynolds 222

Attendees: Amanda Mohler, Dwayne Powell, Audrey Folsom, Khem Aryal, Trinity Pullam,

John Hershberger, Donna Caldwell, Ed Salo, Rashele Wade, Kristen Sumler, Julie King,

Pradeep Mishra, Sarah Scott, Alexandr Sokolov, Shanon Brantley, Scott Mangan, Kim Vickrey

Toccara Carter, Savannah Cormier, Suzanne Melescue, Paul Finnicum, Stephanie Hoeckley

Katie Camden, Richard Segall, Mark Lewis, Guolei Zhou, Eric Dry, Hao Yang Teng, Hung-Chi Su, Gary Edwards, Veena Kulkarni      

Proxy Attendees: Sarah Scott for Karen Graham, Margaret “Maggie” Hance for Jessica Curtis

Absentees: LTC J. Morgan Weatherly, Ibrahim Dyar, Bert Greenwalt, DayDay Robinson, Rollin Tusalem, Rob Williams

The meeting was called to order at 3:01 pm.

Order of the Day: Motion to amend the order to add introductions so we can get to know each other, by Eric Dry, Second by Alexandr Sokolov

Approval of Minutes: Motion to approve the September 6, 2024 meeting minutes by Sarah Scott, second by John Hershberger, all in favor, motion carried.

Introductions – round of introductions by name and department/college

Provost Q&A

• "Pack Support has been deleted. What is the University’s plan for the future regarding future support?" – All the Pack Support services are still there but they are located in a different software system. The services were dispersed (migrated) into Canvas and Slate because those are more effective platforms. However, very few faculty members are using Canvas for Early Alerts. The Chat Box is more effective and more comfortable for the students. Deans were aware of this transition. It will be communicated again. Only 20% of faculty were using Starfish (Pack Support) in the first place. The Pack support triage center is still working. The Starfish software system is what is gone. The “early alert” function is in Canvas for flags (within your course, in the left-side menu) and professional advising appointment scheduling will be in SLATE (SLATE Student Success is being used as a retention tool for professional advisors). Microsoft Outlook Booking can be used by faculty to book appointments for students and set office hours (Microsoft suite of products). Chris Boothman will be invited to talk to us about this.

• "What is the method for providing student progress surveys and feedback, now that our contract with Starfish has ended and Pack Support is no longer a thing?" Progress surveys are the Early Alerts in Canvas (within your course, in the left-side menu). Chris Boothman will come to talk to us about it. Note: For questions about student success and student outreach platforms, please reach out to Dean Nikesha Nesbitt (nnesbitt@astate.edu ). 

• "Last year, faculty were given a 2% merit raise. Deans received raises of 4.6% to 27%.  Please explain." Dr. White says: “Stop listening to what you heard!” No equity adjustments were given out of the raise pool. They came out of the equity pool, which is totally different.  A 27% raise is not factually true, no dean got over a 2% merit raise or COLA (cost-of-living adjustment). (Note: a faculty or dean that moves into a new position can negotiate that contract; also a mistake was made in the budget book, it is being corrected) After salary equity adjustments were made to all faculty who applied, 4 dean salaries were adjusted from a different pool of money. The Provost did give one $6500 faculty salary adjustment, the average given out to faculty who applied was a $3500 salary adjustment. The Provost gave 8 equity adjustments to faculty in total and 5 equity adjustments to deans. Our Deans’ salaries are not keeping up with other institutions. The Provost spent the money in the account (excess money at the end of the fiscal year) to adjust as many salaries are he could. He had to spend it or that money would not be replenished the next year. Our policies prevent the Provost from giving raises unless they apply for it or are “in cycle”. Equity adjustments for faculty are every 3 years but must be requested by the faculty. The equity process is in the Faculty Handbook. What he can do is limited by the policies that are in place, but we can amend those through the shared governance process. It will take 2.7 million dollars of hard-funded money to address salaries. If we change the Equity policy in the Faculty Handbook, things can be done differently. We have a pay equity committee that can address this and look at the wording. He can’t give equity adjustments outside of the 3-year cycle (according to the current policy). The policy may need to be re-worded. Why 3 years? Title IX says “once every 3 years” for pay equity. The pay equity issue should be handled at the college level. Everybody who made a request got an adjustment, but you have to make the request and be in-cycle. We don’t have the hard-funded money to do it for everyone across the board. (Note: hard-funded money comes from recruitment/retention/graduation which affects the state funding formula) Salary adjustments won’t happen overnight, it will take years to get to everyone. We can only get the money if we get more students on campus consistently. We do have many salary compression issues on campus. There were years in the past, with a different administration, when we got raises that sent this institution into debt. It was a bad idea but it was done. The pot of money for raises is only $50,000 currently (it is not enough) because we haven't been producing excess revenue. It is irresponsible to spend money we don’t have and we have to answer to the state legislature. Dr. White has only been here 14 months, this is a decades-long problem we are trying to solve. It was also asinine to split up research and development funds between all the faculty and only give people $250 for faculty development or research. Now it is given to the deans as a lump sum to allocate to what is needed within their college. The Dean of Nursing, who got differential tuition money, gave it up to help others, the College of Engineering did too, as did the Business college. Some of that money got pooled to help those who needed it.

• "When will faculty positions lost to OVRIP and departures in the last 6 months be replaced? Please don't respond with a generic "case by case" basis response." OVRIP is the early retirement incentive. If you lost a person due to OVRIP, if the dean asked for the position to be backfilled, they got it. We have to hold them for 2 years, need has to be shown to get the position back. This is how it happens in academia across the US. You have to justify and defend why that position is needed to get it filled again. Part of some of those salaries from positions not filled can be used to alleviate salary compression in that department. Vacated positions are always de-identified so they are not linked to a specific person or department.

• "Many of my students are complaining about late afternoon classes and do not want them as they work in the evening and on weekends, and do not want classes on Friday for the same reason; what was the basis in fact that led to this decision?" The basis is that it is considered best practice and every other institution in America does it too. All of our classes can’t be at the same time, it creates time conflicts for students and difficulties in creating their schedules. It helps many students who are really thankful for it. Doing the schedules as we had been doing makes us a suitcase campus. If we condense schedules we limit options for students. Departments and Colleges do get to decide what their course offerings and schedules look like. The Provost does not dictate your schedule or what you teach. We want the 10/80/10 rule (10% of classes at 7-9 am/ 80% between 10 am – 3 pm/ 10% after 4 pm), which is the only guideline provided by the Provost. Academic Affairs only requested extra classes for the big load of international students that arrived on campus this year and all those requests were met so those students could be in classes. Schedule issues should be discussed at the department level.

• "Why are faculty being asked to teach multiple online companion sections that don't count toward their load, and aren't compensated as overloads?" He does not know. Will said it is a department decision. We aren’t doing underloaded classes or multiple sections of low enrollment to meet the 3/3 or 4/4 requirements (3/3 = teaching 9 credit hours in the fall and in the spring; 4/4 is teaching 12 credit hours in the fall and spring). The deans and department chairs make the decisions about what counts as an overload. For example, teaching only 25 kids in total spread over a 4/4 teaching load, an average of 6 to 7 students per class, this can’t be defended as a common practice. It was happening on campus. We were so lean that we let under-enrolled classes run because there was no other option and students needed them to graduate.

• Remarks from Provost: Can we agree that we are losing in the state funding formula? Salary compression and equity were run amok. Student-to-faculty ratio was out of line for our campus (13:1 ratio; currently 15:1 for fall 2024; it needs to be 28:1). Our campus enrollment was miserably down. Our online offerings had surpassed our on-campus offerings. On-campus housing hadn’t been full in 5 years. Parking lots were empty. Friday afternoon campus was a ghost town. That was the baseline and this is why we can’t keep doing things the same. $60,000 was put out there from the Provost for research, it had never been done before (this is due to increased research funding through ABI). We are up 12% and leading the pack in the entire state. We celebrated the 20th year of ABI – they have raised $61 million of outside funding (from NSF, Institute of Humanities, AR dept of Health, NIH), this is record-breaking. We broke ground on the Windgate Hall of Art and Innovation– it was at a standstill before this, but now we can move forward with it. The board passed a $33 million bond to build the Vet school with the first class entering in 2026. We have every intention of giving the bonus this fall. The Provost asks for your patience in righting all the wrongs from a decade before he arrived. We have had many successes already. We may make some mistakes but we are improving and transparent. He cares about your salaries. The Chancellor will be there next time. Remember: recruitment and retention is everyone’s job. We have to ask: “Who do we want to be?” And… The Chancellor is NOT leaving A-State.
  
  

• Questions to the Provost from the Senators:

• Where will the vet school go? Close to the UPD building so it can be integrated into the campus.

• How will we handle keys to classrooms during centralized scheduling? The key situation will be handled so everyone will have access to the classroom they are teaching in.

New Business

Presentation by Madeline Ragland from Academic Integrity

• If you suspect an academic integrity policy violation, you have 10 business days to submit a report. You have to submit it through the mycampus portal (look for “Academic Misconduct Reporting”)
• Madeline contacts the students and meets with them to lay out all the evidence submitted by the faculty in the report. They can accept or deny the report. If they deny it, a hearing committee will meet, and the faculty can participate. The committee decides. Students can appeal to the Provost. The process is important. The goal is: “Did the student get a fair hearing?”
• The process can help show patterns of dishonesty from the students to pick up on serial offenders across different courses in different colleges. The process is cumulative. Other faculty are not alerted about each instance or know the student’s record (other than athletics – but athletics should not ask you to not report the offense because the student is a “good kid”, they can only have a witness in the hearing).
• Why should we report integrity issues? If not reported and only dealt with in-house you can’t dismiss the student from your program because there is no evidence, you need a record of it if you want to dismiss the student from your program.
• Make sure your sanction is in proportion to the offense. If you want the sanction to stand and be on record, you must report it.
• Madeline handles about 500 cases a year, a few get to the Provost, and some get to committees.
• AI (artificial intelligence) has been an issue since 2022 and has increased the number of cases she gets.
• AI has evolved, and it is not going away. Every area of expertise is different. We only sent out guidelines. You need to be familiar with how it impacts your discipline/profession
• Don’t just trust the “Turn it in” software only without double-checking it. It is only smart enough to know it came from another source, not that it was properly cited. Properly cited documents can have high “Turn it in” scores
• Copy leaks and Zero-GPT – are free tools and can be used to check for plagiarism related to AI; K-16 can be added to Canvas and Grammarly is coming out with authorship.
  1. https://copyleaks.com/
  2. https://www.zerogpt.com/
  3. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/ai-detector-authorship/
• Grammarly flagging Turn-it-in detectors might cause an issue because Grammarly can be used like chat GPT with all the suggestions it makes. Use grace when assessing students
• Don’t ignore AI, we need our students to have AI literacy. It is not going away. Be clear about your expectations about AI use in your course.
• Do follow up and investigate some before you turn in an AI case for academic integrity
• How comfortable is AA with AI? We are comfortable but each case is different and will be considered in full context.
• AI is a tool that is here to stay, similar to the invention of a calculator.
• Teach students to use critical thinking to assess AI
• Using chat GPT to write an essay is still plagiarism
• Reach out to Madeline with any questions
  
  

Old business

Committee reports:

The equity committee is still looking for members.

Motion to adjourn by Paul Finnicum seconded by John Hershberger, the meeting adjourned at 4:49 pm.

Minutes prepared by Dr. Audrey Folsom and approved on 10/04/2024 (uploaded to KB 10/14/2025)