Foothill College Academic Senate Minutes
January 12, 2004; 2:30 – 4:30 pm, Room 6712
Meeting was called to order at 2:35 p.m.

A staff development course to replace Mike McHargue will be run by Lauren Velasco.
Minutes for the December 8th  meeting was unanimously approved.

Consent calendar was approved with the following changes: Keith Lee will serve as Julio Rivera’s at large TRC member.

Announcement was made regarding the need to notify faculty and students of the requirement to pay fees by January 19th or be dropped in the quarter.

Action Items:
Creation of an FSA in language arts. Senate will vote on it, then bring it to the district. Need to table the FSA request for creative writing.

Paul Starer will forward the FSA list to senators electronically, Robert Cormia will post it to the Senate website. Paul Starer noted that most divisions did not respond with changes to the FSA list that Paul circulated in December. The deadline for changes is January 19th. Business, social sciences, and adaptive learning have responded.

Information Items:
Roundtable update – A list of rankings was made for the hiring of 15 new full-time positions. An electronic version of that document will be sent out this week. There will be four March 15th letters to full-time faculty. HR and admin are working with these faculty right now. There is some duplication to the hiring list to protect Foothill positions against ‘bumping’. This list will be posted to the website.

A concern that follows from this is that we will have 15 tenure review committees if all the positions are filled. All job announcements will be done through participatory governance.

Some new hires will need to focus on working with students on basic skill needs.

An instructional purchase list presented, which will also be posted to the website. Costly purchases have been put on the list as ‘banked’ items that divisions will save for.

A reminder in this process is that instructional funds come from the state of California, not from general funds.

Plus / minus grading update. Paul Starer met with the president of the De Anza senate. The plus / minus issue may be put back until the February meeting, rather than discussed on January 20th. This may be discussion only, or could be a first and second reading because the topic has been discussed earlier.

If this is a voting issue, Paul Starer will notify the faculty of the importance of attending and speaking on the issue of plus / minus grading if this is important to them. Plus / minus grading will become policy in Fall 2005 if voted in the affirmative.

Faculty handbook. Bill Tinsley will join the faculty handbook committee, and Warren Hurd will be notified. Faculty feedback on the handbook is needed by January 16th. Divisions need to be reminded again about sending in comments. It is the administration’s position that the handbook is not a faculty or academic senate document.

Election committee. An election committee must be formed by the Senate for the election of officers in Spring. This year elections will be held for President and Vice President. Faculty will be nominated after they indicate they would be willing to serve. Any faculty member may serve. The election committee can be comprised of full-time and or part-time faculty.

It was suggested that the Vice President would serve as curriculum co-chair. It was also suggested that officers might serve for two years, with a four-year (lifetime) limit, but this would require a change to the constitution, which requires a vote by the entire faculty.

Committee on committees. Some committees are joint, meaning that senators serve on the committee, and some aren’t. There are 35 joint committees. A goal is to create a database of all senate governed committees; Charlotte Tunin created the last database of committees. Robert Cormia will work with Lee Collings to create a web interface to administer this database, so that the database itself is searchable through the web.

Paul Starer asserted that all committees must have a charter, and a responsibility to report on senate sponsored activities. The senate should also have tighter control on senate sponsored committee activities.

Election committee. The faculty speaker must be announced soon. ASFC / faculty need to be notified and speaker nominations needed by Spring. Due to measure E construction, the track and field area will be closed, and the quad area has been suggested as a possible location for commencement. The Flint Center was also suggested, as well as the soccer area.

Roundtable presentation. Bill Peterson appeared and gave his budget presentation from roundtable. At the start of the budget crisis, the college looked at the possibility of reducing the budget without faculty layoffs. Bill’s presentation focused on the possibility of reducing costs using 1320 funds without significantly reducing WSCH.

Further, is it possible to reduce real expenditures per class by 2.5% without a reduction in WSCH, creating higher productivity. Bill’s presentation also touched on finding student contact hours that could be billed as WSCH. As an example, could counselors work in a learning environment, so that those hours could be counted as WSCH? If we can increase FTES (Full Time Equivalent Students) at constant cost we can save 1.6 million dollars.

Curriculum committee. The curriculum committee got 800 course change submissions, which is a record.