NEW MEXICO INSTITUTE OF MINING AND
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
1. Call to order and approval of minutes
President Dave Raymond called the meeting to order at 4:07 pm with a call for approval of the November 4, 2014 minutes.
Dr. Brian Borchers moved to approve the minutes, Dr. Fred Phillips seconded. The minutes were approved by unanimous consent.
2.Approval of minutes for May 6, 2014
President Dave Raymond called for approval of the May 6, 2014 minutes. Somehow these minutes were not approved.
Dr. Bill Stone moved to approve the minutes, Dr. Fred Philips seconded.
Dr. Iver Davidson announced that beginning next semester iClickers will be sold in the bookstore. They will be sold as used for $5.00 each. Once the old ones are sold out, then the bookstore will take over the new iClickers. ACT will still support the use of iClickers in the classrooms. Melissa Jaramillo-Fleming was informed to address the students of this change. The decision was made with the student's welfare in mind. The iClickers started out as a test project using grant money and was never intended to be a long term plan. Students do have the possibility to download the app for the iClickers if the faculty would like them to use it.
Dr. Iver Davidson announced that ACT is taking requests for Canvas shells. There is a form online that allows you to put what courses you want created in Canvas for the next semester. There is also a form for Moodle that will create those courses. Spring will be the last semester for Moodle.
Dr. Iver Davidson introduced Richard Helbock as the Instructional Technology Specialist for ACT. He comes from Western New Mexico University and he will be the administrator for Canvas.
Dr. Sally Pias announced that she, Dr. Mary Dezember, Dr. Hamdy Soliman, and Lisa Majkowski attended an assessment academy results forum in November. This related to their efforts with the student research symposium. They successfully graduated from the four year process. Dr. Hamdy Soliman and Dr. Sally Pias as faculty members were able to learn about a lot about assessment and have embraced the idea and would like to share it in a positive way. It is becoming more of a priority form the Higher Learning Commission. They have set up a task force that will try to come up with tangible efforts that they can communicate about this process. Dr. Hamdy Soliman will send an email about the requirements with the HLC visit.
4. Senate committee reports
1. Computing on Campus Committee (Jun Zheng)
Dr. Jun Zheng reported that the committee has status updates of the new email system. Google Apps for Education has been chosen as the new email system.
The conversion will be tested out on the PRRC first. If the testing on the PRRC goes well, the TCC email will be converted sometime during the spring semester or during the break after the spring semester. The admin.nmt.edu conversion would be done after the TCC conversion. For end user, you should point your email software at one of the Google's servers instead of mailhost.nmt.edu. All of the emails that users have on mailhost.nmt.edu will be automatically moved over to the new server. If you have local copies of email in your PC or smart phone, you will be able to upload it to Google Apps for Education or leave it where it is.
If you use the web interface, it will look like Gmail. When the conversion happens you will gain access to the Google calendar. There will be an educational effort to email out what server you will need.
2. Space Utilization and Campus Planning (Dave Westpfahl)
Dr. Dave Westpfahl read a statement explaining the space committee questionnaire to the Faculty Senate:
The useable square footage of the campus will increase significantly with the Bureau of Geology moving into its new building in the Spring of 2015, and with the addition of the new Chemistry Building, planned for move-in during 2016. The Space Utilization Committee has been tasked with formulating a plan to distribute this space to academic and non-academic departments on campus. A principal goal of the Space Committee is to try to consolidate, or defragment, departmental space. We would like to identify faster-growing departments, with the goal of trying to provide these departments with sufficient space to meet their growing faculty and student populations. As it stands, we are also short on laboratory space for recently hired professors. To work towards this goal, we plan to meet individually with all departments to assess their existing space, and future space needs. We need your departmental input to help with these issues. A Space Usage Questionnaire (separate from the Space Survey made for Finance) was emailed to all departments on Friday, November 21, by Juliann Ulibarri from the Chemistry Department, and copies are available in the back as well. Your response to this by December 10 will be your department's primary initial input to our committee for review and recommendations to the Administration; therefore your timely response will be much appreciated as all departments need to be considered as a whole.
Dr. Tom Engler asked that he as Dean of Engineering and Dr. Bill Stone as Dean of Arts and Sciences be included in this discussion.
3. EREC standing committee – Nominating Committee (Snezna Rogelj)
O behalf of the Nominating Committee, Dr. Snezna Rogelj proposed establishment of a new standing Education and Research Efficiency Faculty Senate Committee. Dr. Snezna Rogelj read the resolution and explanation that was prepared by Dr. Richard Sonnenfeld:
Be it resolved, that the Nomination Committee of the Faculty Senate commends to the faculty senate that the Education and Research Efficiency Committee (EREC) be given the charter described and explained below, and also be promoted from its current ad hoc status to a standing committee, subject to all rules and procedures of standing committees.
Purpose: The purpose of the committee is to represent the educational and research missions of New Mexico Tech to assure that business processes are supportive of these missions and balance business needs against faculty/staff time and attention. The committee will accept requests from other committees or individual faculty regarding business procedures (or more rarely, policies) that seem more burdensome than necessary. The committee will also seek out such procedures on its own initiative. The committee will propose adjustments to procedures such that they accomplish business/legal goals while allowing maximum freedom of action and minimum time investment by those involved in advancing Tech's primary missions. Past areas tackled by the ad-hoc committee involve property, travel, and purchasing.
Membership: EREC consists of four faculty senate members on staggered four-year rotations. (For a committee like this, improved institutional memory is important.)
Language for Bylaws: Education and Research Efficiency Committee (EREC) – The committee will represent the educational and research missions of New Mexico Tech to assure that business processes are supportive of these missions and balance business needs against faculty/staff time and attention. EREC consists of four members (4-year terms, with a 1/1/1/1 rotation).
Proposed Membership for 2014-2015: Gary Axen, Richard Sonnenfeld, Rebecca Reiss, Tom Kieft.
Dr. Reiss drops off in 2015-16, Dr. Axen drops off in 2016-17, Dr. Sonnenfeld drops off in 2017-18. Dr. Kieft drops off in 2018-19.
The committee addressed issues that they have helped out with including an issue involving student travel. There was a policy that blindsided them and were able to get it changed. There were various problems that evolved from the audit. The business office did not consult with the faculty in terms of how new procedures would affect faculty. The committee worked with the business office to assist faculty. If approved, it will be a “super committee” like many other committees that are working with faculty and administrators.
Dr. Snezna Rogelj made a motion to establish this committee. Motion passed unanimously.
5. Report of Council of Chairs
Dr. Warren Ostergren encouraged the senate to look at the minutes from the Council of Chairs meeting.
Engineering Science/Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Engler presented the curriculum changes approved by the engineering chairs. Remove ES 111 as a pre-requisite for ES 302, 303 and 347. All of these engineering courses meet all of the engineering student's requirements but not all engineering students require ES 111 or MATLAB for that purpose. Mechanical Engineering does use MATLAB and they have proposed to add ES 111 as a co-requisite to the MENG 302L and a pre-requisite to their MENG 305. The reason for this is so that they can be sure that their students have the necessary skills to accomplish these and later courses.
Dr. Tom Engler made a motion that these changes be adopted. Motion passed unanimously.
This will be effective immediately. Sara Grijalva will email students one by one if this affects them.
Dr. Tom Engler presented the Petroleum Engineering changes. For PETR 245, PETR 111 was changed from a pre-requisite to a co-requisite. For PETR 345, changed the pre-requisite of PETR 245 to a co-requisite. Both of the changes are to help students who transfer and need to take these courses at the same time. They are also trying to offer courses every semester now.
Dr. Tom Engler made a motion to accept the changes. Motion passed unanimously.
Dr. Kevin Wedeward presented the Electrical Engineering changes. The first change is to the electrical engineering courses. They used to allow students to use six credits of Electrical Engineering courses and they would like to change it to be pure engineering elective courses for the six credit hours. The replacement is engineering electives will be six hours of engineering courses numbered 200 and above. Courses from Electrical Engineering may not be used to satisfy this requirement. The second change is to add an extra credit to the Electrical Engineering electives. It used to be a seven credit hours and it will now be eight credit hours. With that change, there are no credits left for free electives so the statement will be removed from the catalog.
Dr. Kevin Wedeward made a motion to accept these changes. Motion passed unanimously.
Dr. Tom Engler presented the Mineral Engineering changes. ERTH 200 was approved from a three credit to a four credit course. Therefore there is an additional credit hour that is being asked for the Mineral Engineering program.
Dr. Tom Engler made a motion to accept these changes. Motion passed unanimously.
6. Report of Graduate Council
This was postponed until the February meeting.
Updating standing rules (Steve Simpson)
Dr. Steve Simpson reported that the standing rules have not been keeping up with the changes that have been approved. He and Dr. Brian Borchers have tracked down all the changes over the years and put them in the current form. Dr. Steve Simpson noted that the Senate will not be voting on this today, but that he would like everyone to have some time to review and make sure everything is accurate.
Dr. Steve Simpson went over the types of things that they have been attending to. Roughly 95% are not changes but are things that have been approved but were not updated. There were three standing committees that were listed but not actually in the standing rules. These three were the Benefits Committee, Faculty Development Committee, and the Regents-Faculty Conference Committee. They need a description for the Benefits Committee. There were several different descriptions of committees but they were able to locate the correct version of what was approved by the Faculty Senate and updated the information. They will now add the Education and Research Efficiency Faculty Senate Committee. There were some discrepancies with Ex-Officio members that they corrected. The standing rules did not account for the split between the Assessment Committee, Retention Committee, and the Student Learning Committee. There were some changes that had to be made due to changes in offices. TCC and ISD formed ITC and some responsibilities were distributed to ACT.
Two new things were added that should be reviewed. The Associate Dean for Student Success and the Community Education Director were added to the list of members. Also, under meetings, a quorum for a regular or special meeting of the Faculty Senate was modified to be 25% of the membership excluding Emeritus, adjuncts, and faculty on leave. (Adjuncts were added to this list.)
Let us know if we need to make any others changes if there is anything that still seems inconsistent. There will also be a copy with marked changes available.
1. Accreditation and retention (Mary Dezember)
2. Accreditation, assessment, and the Integrated Planning Workspace (Mary Dezember)
This was postponed until the February meeting.
The meeting was adjourned at 4:52.