Eastern Mennonite University

Eastern Mennonite University
Faculty Assembly Minutes
Monday, September 24, 2007
Martin Chapel
#1

1. Devotional reflection
Faculty Senate President Owen Byer opened the meeting with a reflection on the book of the prophet Habbakuk. He pointed out that God gave space to Habbakuk to argue with God, ask questions, and express doubts. He highlighted 3:16ff as verses that encourage us, even in the midst of questioning, with the thought that God’s wisdom is greater than ours and God has a bigger plan that is unfolding if we have the patience to wait for it.

2. Song
Roman Miller (biology professor) led us in the singing of #69, “The Lord is King”

3. Introduction of guests
Myrrl Byler, the director of Mennonite Partners in China (formerly China Educational Exchange), introduced a group of English teachers from universities in China who are here for a cross-cultural learning experience for this semester. Seven come from Sichuan Province and one, who is here for the entire academic year, is from Beijing University of Science & Technology.

4. Provost’s Report
Provost Beryl Brubaker presented written remarks (attached here). Her remarks touched on the following main topics:

  1. Finances: the history of how other programs (seminary, graduate programs, ADCP, IEP, Preparatory Music, etc) developed and why their finances are treated differently from the undergraduate program’s; it was the intention that these extra programs would pay for themselves and not harm the undergraduate program. Overall, these extra programs are making good progress in sharing their income with the entire university.
  2. Student/Faculty Ratios: the process of calculating these ratios is very complex and somewhat controversial; the rationale for including everything that faculty do as part of the ratio was to give departments more flexibility in making cuts in faculty FTE. So far not much progress has been made in reaching our goals of a 12.5:1 undergraduate ratio or 1:10 seminary ratio.
  3. Sabbaticals are part of the mix of ‘things faculty do’ and one way to achieve lower faculty FTE targets is to limit the number of Sabbaticals per year.
  4. Enrollment: a slightly weaker than hoped for enrollment is one factor in making it difficult for us to reach our target student/faculty ratio; our inability to increase enrollment is a serious problem.

    The provost ended on this note: “We will overcome these problems and become stronger.”
  5. President Loren Swartzendruber was invited to make remarks in response to the provost’s report. Regarding finances, he noted that EMU has not overspent on financial aid and anticipates having a higher retention rate in Spring 2008 because of a decision to reduce by 10 the number of conditional students accepted compared with the 2006-07 academic year, the only year in which an extra 10 were admitted. He noted the importance and effectiveness of faculty involvement in recruitment and plans to devote 2 faculty FTE to specific recruitment activities in lieu of cutting those FTE all together. Finally, he noted that as a small institution we are coping with extra complexity because of our graduate programs, but those programs are making progress in helping to finance the university.

6. Time for clarifying questions

  1. Elroy Miller (professor of social work) thanked the provost and president for “honest reporting” on these matters and commented that it is not easy to face issues that have been generated by strategic decisions made years ago. His question was: Are the graduate programs, in fact, being subsidized by the undergraduate program? By how much and to what extent?
  2. Provost Beryl Brubaker suggested that it was a complicated matter to calculate the costs for the graduate programs since in many cases they are using shared facilities at times when the undergraduate program is not using them. Perhaps it would be more equitable to set higher targets for graduate programs to contribute to the general budget to cover overhead expenses.
  3. President Loren Swartzendruber commented that it is also difficult to calculate the value of such things as the fact that large numbers of Eastern Mennonite Seminary graduates are pastoring churches in conferences from which our undergraduate programs receive many students.
  4. David Brubaker (professor of conflict transformation) noted how the CJP was forced to plan for the use of resources more creatively in absorbing the additional $100,000 levied for the university budget.
  5. Sue Cockley (professor for the adult degree completion program) asked whether the ADCP has been subsidizing undergraduate or graduate programs with the sizeable sum that it contributes to the university budget.

7. Announcement
Terry Jantzi, chair of the Institutional Review Board, reminded faculty to become thoroughly acquainted with the university regulations on research done with human subjects, whether that research is conducted by professors, by their students, or in collaboration. The IRB must approve all research done with human subjects. The IRB web page contains all necessary information: https://www.emu.edu/irb/

8. Faculty Round-table Discussions
Faculty Senate President Owen Byer explained the formation of constituent groups to link faculty with a particular senator. The remaining time (about 30 minutes) was devoted to senators listening to their constituents’ concerns centered around three questions presented by Owen:

  1. What’s on your mind about EMU that you would like the Faculty Senate to discuss?
  2. Should the academic calendar be carefully re-examined with respect to a history of increasingly shortened semesters, unequal fall and spring semesters, and the timing of holidays?
  3. What would an ideal EMU student body look like given our mission?

Notes taken by senators will be analyzed and then processed by the faculty senate to guide their discussion of issues. Discussions in small groups continued until adjournment.

9. Adjournment: 11:30 a.m.

R. Michael Medley
Recorder

 

Full Text of the remarks made by Provost Beryl Brubaker  

Some Perspectives Shared with Faculty Assembly
September 24, 2007  

I must say that at least some of us in leadership for faculty senate and academic cabinet have struggled in deciding on an agenda for this faculty assembly. At least I will own that myself. It is early in the year and academic cabinet has met only once. President’s Cabinet also has had limited time to know where we are with budget. I am aware that dean’s committee and undergraduate council are busy working on undergraduate FTE. The seminary is busy gearing up for a major curriculum revision. CJP is hopping with new leadership, steering a direction for the future. And so on. But what did we need to address as a total faculty in today’s assembly? When I presented financial results in relation to prioritization recommendations for the graduate programs to the graduate council last week, they requested that this be shared with faculty assembly. From other places came the suggestion that we also report on student/faculty ratios and enrollment in relation to those recommendations. Still others wanted to talk about sabbaticals and the suggestion that you may have heard that we limit them to six next year, as well as last May’s recommendation to the undergraduate chairs that we limit the number to four for undergraduate faculty. As I went tracking for ratio data, issues emerged about how we calculate ratios and set targets, questions about whether we could do it differently. Old issues arose such as why do we look at finances of the graduate programs and a variety of other programs differently than we do the undergraduate program where we do not ask for a particular contribution. Old questions about graduate and seminary versus undergraduate privilege. Late last week we discovered that all of Allon Lefever’s faculty hours last year were allocated to the MBA program instead of his undergraduate teaching hours being assigned to the undergraduate unit so the financial report for the year should show a positive bottom line instead of a negative one. Since the books have already been closed for the year, this can’t be changed. Thus, the printed report I have is incorrect. I am well aware that many people are offended by the suggestion that we limit sabbaticals, seeing this as taking away faculty privileges, feeling like we are always taking away. It doesn’t look like we have a consensus on limiting sabbaticals and funding only so many in each academic unit or just funding the best proposals, without allocating so many to undergraduate, graduate or seminary. So all this stuff seemed pretty messy and raised questions about how to have meaningful, informed discussion. It is because of the messiness that I needed to write some things down and so that is why I am reading this.

Let me just say a few things about finances, ratios, sabbaticals, and enrollment, maybe none of them new. Loren can add any comments he cares to. Then you can ask questions if you like or you can save them for discussion in your “Meet the Senator” groups. First, about finances. We used to be a school of undergraduates only. An undergraduate school needed a registrar’s office, a library, a president’s office, and so on. It had some other things too, like a radio station. Eventually, this school would have needed an information systems department. Yes, we did add a seminary sometime in the middle of the century. Pellman’s history doesn’t tell us anything about the seminary as far as I could see on a quick look, and I don’t remember much about the seminary from my early days here in the 1970s. I am guessing from what I knew later that the seminary operated somewhat independently, that is, they had their own dean, their own policies and ways of being, although they had the same president. I wonder if there might have been an underlying tension with the college that may not have come to the surface so often in earlier days. In the 1990’s along came many ideas about additional programs so we added graduate programs, adult degree completion program, intensive English, Bach Festival, prep music, and Shenandoah Valley Children’s Choirs. You know you all are very creative. We were also regularly taking students off campus to Washington and cross-culturals overseas. Now about the financials and doing budgets differently for these new programs. I believe the thinking was that EMU did not want these programs to take resources away from the core—the undergraduate programs on campus. Some argued that these new things added only marginal costs such as when they met in empty classrooms in the evening. Nevertheless, from the beginning, they were treated differently financially. They were set up with separate budgets to tract both income and loss for a particular program. These budgets did not look like the earlier EMU budgets. We had never tracked tuition along with expenses for a particular undergraduate department or asked a department or program to achieve a certain positive amount on the bottom line as a contribution to overhead. So historically we treated these new programs differently in regard to budget to avoid hurting our undergraduate program and to help pay for the extra costs these added programs would bring to the offices such as the registrar. We started treating the seminary this way as well in order to respond to the criticism that it was privileged and too costly. And in some cases we intended to make money that would support the undergraduate program, case in point being ADCP, whose staff often say they feel like the cash cow, rather than being appreciated for the educational gift they grant to the graduates they send into our community. This history reminds us why the focus for graduate and seminary programs in the prioritization process was on finances and on setting targets for the amount on the bottom line. I have here a report on all these special programs and what their bottom line looked like over the past three years, including those for whom we set targets in the prioritization process two years ago and those for whom we did not. The MBA line for 2006-07 is incorrect and the preliminary budget lines for 2007-08 are not yet updated so I did not make copies for you. But I can report that they show good progress on the recommendations in almost all cases. (Read percentages.) Did we set the right targets-that we can debate—and will these results help us reach the goals of the prioritization process? Time will tell.

Now let me say a few words about the student/faculty ratios. For many years dean Lee Snyder, as mandated by the administration, maybe the Board, held the faculty to a 16:1 ratio. Did the seminary have a target? If so, I was not aware of it. Following Lee, another philosophy emerged, that is that student/faculty ratio is not a useful parameter, rather we needed to increase use of adjuncts. Further, it was believed that adding programs, ones we all wanted, would increase enrollment. In the year 2000 Dean Marie Morris and her faculty inherited the resulting increase in faculty FTE and lowered student/faculty ratio. Did we also increase the percentage of adjuncts? I can’t tell from the current Factbook. At any rate, the ratios came under review by the prioritization committee two years ago and we set targets, believing that this is a useful parameter for all programs and the most meaningful way to monitor undergraduate productivity. What we learned as we tried to set targets in relation to our peers is that there is no standard way to calculate or report them and so comparisons turns out to be comparing apples and oranges. So we came up with our own ways and targets. In determining how to calculate ratios we decided to include everything faculty do in order to provide flexibility for those needing to lower the ratios to the target levels. For instance, we set the undergraduate target at 12.5: 1 and in figuring the faculty FTE that feeds into that formula, we included not only teaching hours, but also load hours devoted to sabbaticals, release time, new faculty orientation, etc.—everything faculty do that is calculated in terms of load hours. I want to emphasize that this was done so that groups needing to make a change would have choices about what to cut. And when we suggested in May that undergraduate sabbaticals be reduced to four next year, it wasn’t because we wanted to take away another privilege, but it was to decrease the number of faculty we would need to cut to get to the target ratio. If we have to cut FTE, where shall we cut? We do have choices. It is being suggested that we should change the way we are calculating faculty FTE and include only the hours for teaching, chairing and doing selected administrative tasks within undergraduate departments. We can do that but that will change the undergraduate target to closer to16:1, instead of 12.5:1. The target reflects what all is being included. Or we can move certain things we do, eg. chair hours, to the administrative side of the house as has also been suggested and again we then will need to change the ratio target because we are no longer including all the things that make having a lower target appropriate. I did not bring copies of the current draft work on student/faculty ratios because we have new staff who are working on clearing up questions they have about the details of methodology. I can say that I think on ratios we have not made a lot of progress so far toward our goals (UG in 10-11 range and seminary in 7-8 range). Ratios are affected by both faculty FTE and student enrollment. Hence a few comments on enrollments, which at the moment are not helping our ratios.

2005-06 was our base year for the prioritization recommendations. We had 876 undergraduate students that year and 203 new first year students. The prioritization recommendations called for an increase of 27 undergraduate FTE by the fall of 2009 or a target of 903. While we increased to 889 last fall, we dropped back to 872 this year and this fall we have the same number of new first year students as we had in our base year. The other place where we have ratio problems is in the seminary. Seminary FTE likewise dropped from 85 in the base year to 71 last year and this year. Overall enrollment in terms of FTE has gone from 1273 up to 1284 and then down to 1264. These are not huge fluctuations but they do affect ratio and this year did not go in the desired direction.

Now about the budget in this enrollment driven institution--as many of you know, revised budgets were due to Ron on Friday and Cabinet will look at the results this coming Wednesday. At that point we will be able to make decisions about such things as the planned cost of living raise for next year.

I know this is a difficult time in our history as we try to do some adjustments in ratios and finances. The decision of the prioritization committee was to bring about change in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, fashion. Each methodology has its strengths and weaknesses. Evolutionary changes spread the anxiety over considerable time and that is what we are dealing with. I am encouraged as I hear reports that programs are taking ownership of the recommendations and being creative in addressing them. We also must acknowledge that our inability to increase enrollment is a serious concern and we need to address that. I understand there is a proposal in the works to allocate some faculty time to recruitment in the near future. As has been said many times, recruitment is everyone’s business—each of us makes a difference in whether or not we invite prospective students to join the EMU family. We will get through this and we will come out stronger. We always have—read our history. It is the mission that compels us and the commitment of faculty, staff, and constituents that makes it possible.

I hope these comments and updates are helpful.