January 28^th, 2008

Present: Nick Cullather, Deborah Cohn, Sandra Dolby, Hal Evans, Jeff Hart (recorder), Brian Steensland, and Maxine Watson.

The meeting began at 4:00pm. The Dean did not attend this meeting.

Members of the committee attended three departmental or program budget meetings since the last CPC meeting. Two policy-related issues that arose were the need to cover the teaching of courses by hiring visiting professors or lecturers and the question of whether it was preferable to use AIs or non-tenure track faculty (NTTs) to meet teaching needs.

In the previous week, members of the committee also attended meetings convened by the Dean for chairs and directors. There were three of these meetings because the chairs were divided into three groups: the natural sciences, the social sciences and history, and the arts and humanities. One common theme was the lack of space for offices, classrooms, research facilities, etc., and the Dean mentioned various initiatives underway to deal with that. Another was the Dean’s intention to increase staff salaries in the face of even more than usual austerity. Faculty salary increases will be reduced somewhat to pay for staff increases. The high cost of using AIs for teaching, because of fee remissions and the inclusion of fee remissions in the University’s calculation of assessments, was also discussed. The Dean expressed concern about variance in the quality of letters written by chairs for the files of candidates for tenure and promotion. At one of the meetings, one of the chairs raised the question of whether it might be possible to guarantee confidentiality to writers of letters of reference for tenure candidates. The Dean agreed that this was a problem and said that the College Policy Committee was looking into it.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:45pm.

Jeff Hart, Recorder

Questions or comments regarding the minutes and actions of the College Policy Committee may be addressed to its Chair, Dale McFadden (mcfadden@indiana.edu – 855-3845). Past minutes and College Policy Statements can be found at the CPC web page.