The Student Senate of the Associated Students of the University of Washington Established 1994 Session XV

The Student Senate of the Associated Students of the University of Washington established 1994 Session XV Student Senate March 10, 2009 HUB 310 Chaired by Jon Solomon. Minutes by and respectfully submitted by Samantha Kraft. I. Call to Order Jon calls the meeting to order at 5:03pm. He thanks everyone for coming. It’s week 10. He asks everyone to look at the agenda. There are copies up front. He reads through the agenda and asks if there are any additions, deletions, or modifications. II. Approval of the Agenda Tunny moves to approve the agenda. There is a second. III. Public Forum- Ana Mari Cauce- Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Jon says this is our agenda. He welcomes up Dean Ana Mari Cauce. We will have 20 minutes with questions. He says he will take a speakers list for questions. Dean Cauce says she doesn’t really have a presentation. It will pretty much be q and a. She says some of you may remember that she started officially on March 31 of last year. It’s almost been a year on the job. At the time, she says she had no idea that April Fools was an appropriate time to start. She came into the job with the hope that she would be doing a lot of hiring and building new programs, and the economy had come off a cliff. She will be spending a fair amount of time taking things apart and seeing where we can make budget cuts. It will be difficult for the university. The uncertainty is that we don’t know what the budget is going to be. We need to be getting ready. She says she will give us a little bit of a sense of where we are at. The Provost has asked the Deans to present scenarios for 8, 10 and 12 percent cuts. The Senate is talking about 20+ percent for Washington State. It’s pretty scary. She says she is not sure what it will mean. The problem with the College of Arts and Sciences is that most students have 70% of credit hours in the college. She asks how we make sure the students get the courses they need and not have new hires. She says we have fewer TAs. The first priority is to continue to serve students, and that will be difficult to do so. Melvin says hello to Dean Cauce. He says there’s been a lot of talking in developing these plans of maintaining the quality of education at the university. He asks what the main tools that the university had to gauge education. He asks what is going to be checked. Dean Cauce says there is no way that there is not going to be a quality decrease whenever you take a cut. You’ve got quality and quantity. Those things are not exactly in opposition. There is a tension between them. She asks what the right balance is between quality and quantity. We can take a 10 or 15 or 20 percent cut and not be affected. There are a number of tools. One of the things that happens is conducted by the graduate school. The departments are reviewed every 10 years or every 5 years. Every department goes through a review, and we bring in three faculty Husky Union Building 104C – 206.543.1780 http://senate.asuw.org – [email protected] Box 352238 – Seattle, WA 98195 The Student Senate of the Associated Students of the University of Washington established 1994 Session XV within the university. She says she went through a review while she was the Psychology chair. It was people from biology, English, and art. There are 3 faculty in psychology from other universities. They had faculty from Oregon, USSD, and Yale. These six come together and prepare a report from the department, and the department gives the document to the university. Inside candidates interview the faculty and undergraduate and graduate students. She just did one these meetings at the University of Miami. She was reviewing their psychology department. They come up with a report, recommendations, and make suggestions. They review the quality. She says they look at faculty course evaluations. Those are looked at by chairs on a regular basis. They look at how the courses are going. This varies from department to department. They do exit interviews. She says they do exit interviews when students graduate and then look at them 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years after. Sometimes the students will say this course is difficult, and we didn’t like the instructor. They look at it after the students have left. They also look at peer evaluations. Faculty is reviewed every three years. She says to look at US News and World Review and see how the department is rated. Even better than US News and World Review is National Research Council. They’re about to come out with new ratings, but they’ve been saying that for the last two years. She says they track that pretty carefully. Chris G. asks how new programs such as the College of the Environment will be affected. Dean Cauce says she’s not in that college. She says you would have to ask the Dean or Provost. The college is formed of units in areas that are primarily already here. They are taking two departments that are part of the College of Arts and Sciences. They are taking Earth Space Science and Atmospheric Sciences. They are moving. She says she thinks that there is one unit from the College of Ocean and Fish that is going on. She says they are transferring the two department’s budgets from the College of Arts and Sciences. She gives the example of ESS and says their budget includes between 20 and 30 faculty and 3 million dollars. They are transferring that over to the College of the Environment. One of them has an open position. They told them in the fall that they could hire a faculty member then said no because of the budget cuts. She says she had been planning to hire more people in the fall but will have to cut down. When ESS moves, they are moving without that position. The other thing is they are moving without TAs. They haven’t officially cut TA lines. Graduate students are being offered acceptance now, and they need to know if they have funding or not. She says they usually tell a department their TA budget. They took the TA budget that they planned on giving them and took out 18 percent. She says they can guarantee is 80 percent. The other is getting put aside for the cuts. The reason why they did that is because of the cuts. Maybe someone who got accept would get later. She says she wanted to make sure that we’ve been hearing about layoffs and cutbacks. As much as possible, they would rather cut an empty position than one with someone in it. When they transferred the budget, they did it without 18 percent. She says there will be budget cuts about the same size to the best of her knowledge. She says she can’t tell us what the Provost is putting in in terms of new money. She heard from the President and Provost that they hoped and planned to put new money in, but now they are saying it might take a longer time because of the cuts. She says she doesn’t know exactly. Every college is not going to get the same size cut. That’s part of the reason every college had to put together plans. She says they had their’s last week trying to explain how they would handle this and the negative impacts. Their goal is to have the smallest cut possible. If you look at state budgets, Arts and Sciences have 1/3 of the budget. They have 70 percent of student credit hours which is part of their argument to keep cuts low. In terms of courses, they are the academic work horse. Arts and Husky Union Building 104C – 206.543.1780 http://senate.asuw.org – [email protected] Box 352238 – Seattle, WA 98195 The Student Senate of the Associated Students of the University of Washington established 1994 Session XV Sciences has 50 percent of degrees. She says she can’t tell us where cuts will be for each. She should be shocked if they didn’t have cuts in the same range. Everett says thank you. He says he’s curious about if the school has thought about devolving the requirements to the divisional deans. He says his home departments are economics and math. Most of the required courses are in other departments. They end up being battered by different sources. The math department is the divisional dean of math and science. He asks if she has ever thought about that to try and save budget dollars. Dean Cauce says the divisional deans report to her. She says you can pat them on the back if they doing well, but if you don’t, it’s her fault. They are one college. It may be divided into divisions, but they are one college. She says they want to make sure math majors know about art, can write well, and know about the natural and social world. We do have college wide requirements. She says they just made a change in the language requirement college wide. They are not going to make separate requirements for each division.

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