IFO/MnSCU Statewide Meet and Confer
UNOFFICIAL MEETING NOTES
September 29, 2004
IFO Present: Patrice Arseneault, Nancy Black, Steve Bohnenblust, Debra Japp, Mary Kesler, Dave Larkin, Becky Omdahl, Cindy Phillips, Annette Schoenberger, George Seldat, Cindy Webber
MnSCU Present: Deena Allen, Linda Baer, Jerry Johnson, Jim Jorstad, Linda Kohl, Linda Lade, Gary Langer, Mike Lopez, Chancellor James McCormick, Don Mercado (new HR Director), John Shabatura, Becky Soboweski
Also Present: Roy Saigo, President St. Cloud State University
Called to order at 8:35 a.m.
Chancellor: I want to start off by saying thank you to Steve Sviggum for endorsing the IFO/MnSCU Contract. I would also like to say that I hope we can make progress on trust in our relationship with our leadership. If we can talk about that I’d welcome it. I would like our relationship to improve.
IFO: Thank you, Chancellor.
Business Practices Alignment Committee
IFO: What is the status?
(MnSCU gave a handout.)
IFO: I see that you have put the 107 recommendations into three different (A,B,C) categories. What do these categories mean?
MnSCU: C = major change of policy. B = major change of procedure. A = minor change.
IFO: Who are the Business Practices Stakeholders that you are addressing your correspondence to?
MnSCU: Anyone who is impacted.
IFO: There was no date on the letter (that we received August 26, 2004) – that would have been helpful. The culture says we need to bring some of these recommendations to a meet and confer setting.
MnSCU: Yes, we intend to do that.
----------Side Conversation on Sick Leave----------
IFO: Sick leave policy wasn’t included.
MnSCU: Let’s take that back to the BPAC group.
IFO: This is a good example of trust (MnSCU is revising the sick leave policy without bringing it to meet and confer first). You are asking us to agree to your new sick leave policy, which was never brought to a meet and confer, and you’re asking us to agree to something that you already unilaterally imposed!
MnSCU: I can try to clear this up. The two individuals you want to address this issue (sick leave) with are up at the capital. I am fairly aware of this issue. There is no directive from the Office of the Chancellor that universities need to change how they report sick leave. We’d prefer it be in day and half-day increments but that doesn’t mean we’ve asked the campuses to do it that way. I don’t know where this is coming from.
Chancellor: It appears that our personnel director doesn’t know about this.
MnSCU: There are a lot of loose details we need to tie up.
IFO: We received a memo asking us to change our sick leave policy.
------------Side Conversation Concluded--------------
IFO: We were told most of these 107 recommendations did not impact faculty. We asked that those items be identified. We are again making this request of you.
MnSCU: We are bringing two items to meet and confer.
IFO: It would be easier if you just told us which do not apply to faculty. Can this system support these changes?
MnSCU: We will work on that list for you.
Chancellor: It seems Bill Tschida needs to be giving out clear direction to the campuses.
IFO: Sometimes it may appear that some of these 107 recommendations do not fall under the purview of the contract but they do. It might be helpful for us to review these together.
MnSCU: Nancy Black and Linda Baer will sit down and go through the entire list together after Gary Langer identifies those MnSCU believes impact faculty.
Work Plan Calendar/Policy Work Plan
A handout was given by MnSCU where three types of policies were identified.
Chancellor: The results of the audit were reviewed by the Board of Trustees. We were severely criticized on our computer security. We have a problem, and as part of building trust, we need to talk about this.
IFO: This does affect us. We’ve learned about HIPPA – health privacy and personal information. There are many lawsuits on computer security.
MnSCU: We asked the IFO for seven representatives to serve on the Business Practices Alignment Committee Study Group.
IFO: Yes, we received your letter dated September 8 on September 13. Is the intention to review all policies on all campuses?
MnSCU: No.
Uniform Transcript Policy
MnSCU gave a handout.
MnSCU: There was no state university faculty on this committee that made the recommendation to the Business Practices Alignment Committee. We submitted the committee recommendations to former IFO President Jim Pehler and your Academic Affairs Coordinator Debra Japp; we received no feedback. Transcripts in the system vary widely. We wanted to develop a format that would look the same across the system (keeping in mind our transferring students). This is going to require developing a policy.
IFO: We are upset that little or no consideration is given to faculty schedules. You are asking us for so many faculty to serve on committees with little notice and some are every other Friday. You must understand that as faculty we develop our schedules several months in advance. When you ask us to serve on these committees with little notice or regard for our teaching schedules it comes across that you don’t really want our representation.
MnSCU: PolyCom is an option.
Chancellor: If you ask faculty to serve on a committee that meets every other Friday, that is 1/3 of a semester! Is there a better way? How can we consult with you? Faculty schedules are already developed.
IFO: Spring schedules are created by the second week in September. We’re being asked to give input in a way that is not effective to us. Is ITV really operational on all of our campuses?
Chancellor: What about involving your staff to do some of this work?
MnSCU: This has been productive; we’ll make some changes.
Chancellor: Maybe we need to hit the road and visit each campus.
IFO: Transfer has a good working model. Chancellor, your idea to travel to each campus is a great idea.
Financial Aid
MnSCU gave a handout.
MnSCU: This was developed last spring. The Board of Trustees felt there needed to be more financial aid requirements. There were three major changes that came out of the review.
IFO: It’s very likely that we are going to need three months before we will have feedback for you. Is this information or action item? Often times you give us information at a meet and confer and assume we’ve been “consulted” when the terms of the contract have not been met for a meet and confer. This draft is disturbing. This came from the Business Practices Alignment Committee and I don’t think we’ve ever agreed to these goals. We’ve never agreed that those things are problems. We need to go on record as saying we’ve never agreed to these as system problems. It’s a problem when you are assuming these are high priority. It would be helpful for faculty to know what the motivating factor is for these changes.
MnSCU: I think we need to be more careful that we don’t construe or portray the FA/IFO as having agreed to something just because we brought it to a statewide meet and confer. Sometimes we won’t agree. If we definitely can’t agree, then it needs to happen at the bargaining table.
IFO: Thank you. if we agree to something, we sign off on it. Sometimes we will need to take it back to review.
Transfer Oversight Committee
IFO: We want to talk about the transfer of “D” grades.
MnSCU: We know there is variation in practice. Our basic perspective is that a “D” grade on the campus should be treated the same as with a transfer “D” grade.
IFO: We need to discuss this more; we want to be student centered.
MnSCU: The bottom line is that there is considerable variation. We aren’t looking at the majors. It sounds like a transcript problem.
IFO: Even within our own programs, faculty who teach the same course, you will find variation.
MnSCU: We need to bring the “D” issue back to the Transfer Oversight Committee. There were a lot of opinions expressed in the Committee. We want to do what faculty want us to do in this matter.
Joint IFO/MnSCU Taskforces
IFO: I’m pleased we jointly agreed to the formation of these two task forces. We will name our folks at the October 21 Board of Directors meeting. Where are you in the process?
MnSCU: We’ve got names from most of the universities. Chris Dale will give them to Nancy Black.
IFO: We suggest the meetings take place on the first Friday of every month beginning November 5, for both task forces.
Marketing/Communications Plan
IFO: We reviewed the communications plan as presented to the Board of Trustees by Chris Roberts. We had concerns with unique individual local institutions. We think it is essential that public relations focuses on individual institutions not MnSCU as a brand. We want to see your communications plan focusing on the uniqueness of our state universities. We’re wondering if two plans wouldn’t be better (i.e. one for the 2-year and another for the 4-year).
Chancellor: I’ve always thought a good plan could do both (for example General Motors and General Mills). I regret you don’t feel the same. I hear that you don’t see yourself in this plan.
IFO: The plan groups the 2-year with the 4-year institutions. We feel it is essential to point out our differences.
Chancellor: I think this is serious that we still have this concern after this plan has already gone to the Board. We have a support problem.
IFO: One problem I see is that it was written as though the same people who would go to a CC/TC would go to a SU. We told Chris Roberts how we feel at our last Board meeting.
Chancellor: Chris Roberts needs to talk to Becky Omdahl and Nancy Black. This is urgent. Linda Kohl also needs to be included in this meeting. There needs to be a blunt discussion quickly.
IFO: We view faculty as an investment and they need to be prioritized. Faculty want to know how much is being spent on this new Plan. If a campus is receiving contributions from a donor, you need to respect that and not solicit them.
Chancellor: If you can indicate where the problems are coming from, let us know. We have an enormous problem at the legislature. We really aren’t on Minnesota’s agenda for spending. Yesterday at the Chamber of Business it was stated that the members perceive the University of Minnesota to be more in tune with business. The wind in our face is worse than we think.
IFO: We’d like to see change.
Saigo: We won’t know if this works until we get ourselves out in the public. I think we need to inform our legislators.
Chancellor: I heard Chris Roberts say there are individual islands who care but the businesses don’t want to hear about supporting an institution but how will this impact the future of Minnesota? Maybe we need to correct those problems.
Saigo: The unknown and anticipation of the unknown is worse than the reality. You’ll start to see that dissipate.
New Teaching Center
MnSCU: We have had conversations since we met last and campuses are designating liaisons. Each campus is doing something different and very powerful. We hoped to have a teacher center Director but we are just now advertising. We’ve invited the State University Presidents and the Deans of Education to attend the Teaching at Risk conference on October 13.
IFO: I didn’t realize MnSCU invited people. We strongly feel faculty need to be involved in this conference.
Associate Vice Chancellor EOD Search
MnSCU: Dolores Fridge has left MnSCU and we have completed an indepth study on what other states are doing with this position. Everyone is all over the board.
IFO: Do you have a timetable?
Chancellor: We’ve got Renee Hogoboom filling-in this position for the interim. We need to know what we’re looking for and have a focus. We need IFO on the search committee.
IFO: That’s our expectation. Thank you.
CTL Faculty Teaching Awards
IFO: We want to tell you that we are in support of this idea and want to know where we are in the process.
Hand out was given by MnSCU.
MnSCU: We are creating a taskforce for this.
Desire2Learn
IFO: We thank John O’Brien for coming to our recent Board meeting.
MnSCU: I set up a meeting with the vendor. We brought in a high-powered consultant to work on the scalability issues. Today things are going better and we hope you’re seeing improvements.
IFO: On the Mankato campus we found the local help desk doing a good job.
IFO: Back to an earlier discussion we had on the Business Practices Alignment Committee – one of the recommendations is a uniform start date for all the campuses. We had a system crash with ISRS and sometimes the people who come up with these ideas aren’t looking at what is happening right now.
IFO: We want to know if attention has been given to students who have suffered from the disruption of the D2L failures. We also have an issue with the student & faculty logins.
Nursing
MnSCU distributed two handouts.
Chancellor: I hope we can address the problem with Kristin Juliar.
IFO: She has no known connections to faculty. At the last Board Meeting we were told the Nursing Task Forces would be meeting over the summer.
MnSCU: Some background on Kristin Juliar and the Healthcare Industry Partnership was given. Some of the research for these two taskforces has already taken place.
IFO: It is going to take us a couple of weeks to get representatives for these two taskforces.
224 Duty Days
IFO: The importance of this item needs to be emphasized. Our position is this is not contractual. At our last meet and confer a comment was made, “we’ll continue to talk to the state university presidents;” what were their thoughts?
MnSCU: I know who spoke with the state university presidents but I have not been advised on what to do. They want a mechanism for increasing faculty compensation where 224 duty days are not enough. They didn’t feel 224 needed to be exceeded but they see they do need to do something. We discussed MOAs. Since then I’ve had another idea – could we do a blanket LOU to authorize the universities to either made adjustments to faculty members on a daily rate or authorize payment for faculty involved in activities like grants that warrant additional compensation without creating fictitious duty days or a base rate adjustment. We’ll need to sit and negotiate this in a MOA/LOU.
IFO: This is a very real issue.
MnSCU: We’ll continue to talk and I’ll designate Chris Dale to handle the discussion.
IFO: There is no need to do a MOA/LOU because this isn’t contractual.
JSER/LSER Update
Announcement: Chris Dale returned from the legislature to announce they did not have a quorum therefore we presume the contract will go into effect in 30 days.
Adjourned at 11:50 a.m.