IFO MnSCU Meet and Confer
Unofficial Notes
December 15, 2006
IFO Present: Bruce Svingen (substituting for Mary Kesler), Steve Bohnenblust, Cindy Phillips, Russ Stanton, Elizabeth Dunn, Annette Schoenberger, George Seldat, Cathy Summa, David Bouchard, Cindy Finch, Pat Arseneault.
MnSCU Present: Lynda Milne, Linda Baer, Gary Janikowski, Barbara Miller, Steve Franz, Chris Dale, Chancellor McCormick, Mary Leary, Al Essa, Manuel Lopez, Renee Hogoboom, Leslie Mercer, Deena Allen, Melissa Fahning, Bill Tschida, Judy Borgen, Mary Jacquart, Bev Schuft, Mary Rothchild, Whitney Harris.
SU President: President Jon Quistgaard
Called to order at 8:10 a.m.
Cindy Phillips chaired for the IFO while Nancy Black was attending an out of town funeral for a family member.
Core Student Outcomes Study:
(Handouts were given.)
MnSCU: There are several things we will be handing out in relation to a core student outcomes study. We’ve talked about what the 21st century needs to know and the transfer curriculum being over 10 years old. We are taking this the opportunity to talk with your campuses through your CTL Coordinator concerning what you’ve stated, any of you who have gone through HLC visits lately - what your core students are.
IFO: I’m on the Transfer Oversight Committee and I don’t remember talking about this at our meetings.
MnSCU: It was discussed at last January’s meeting.
IFO: It wasn’t discussed to the entire meeting.
MnSCU: It wasn’t brought as an action item; it was an update of the conversation in January 2006.
IFO: You can’t say this is something the Transfer Oversight Committee is in favor of.
MnSCU: This is an initiative for this fiscal year. The conversation came from the January 15th work groups. The ideas that arose there were to hold conversations on campuses about core student outcomes and values. Faculty identified that we ought to have more conversation on items in the draft work plan. What do we mean by a successful Minnesotan? What’s evolved over the last year in trying to put this initiative together is we’ve had campus conversation, those involved in CTL “core skills” conversation initiatives. CTL office faculty consultants (Stacy Wells from Century Community College and Julia Curtis from Metro State) are holding these conversations. Over the last few months the conversation got “sticky,” they didn’t want to cross with transfer, but to support those and other efforts. We transformed it into a study. The first step won’t be campus conversations; it will be the letter in front of you. Asking the campuses about their core goals, how did they come to those definitions (see questions we want to ask on the back page of the letter)? We’ve talked to Chief Academic Officers and said they all felt these would be questions they could answer and would be helpful to have systemwide comparison publicly available. Currently in order to find out about any particular goals, you have to do a lot of searching through the campuses website and catalog. We want to ask these questions and make this information available. We may offer to facilitate. Right now it’s a data gathering and reporting effort.
IFO: How much time is projected to be required to create and engage in this? What I’m seeing on our campus is that faculty, staff and administration are overwhelmed. PEPER is an example. This is another layer.
MnSCU: I was concerned about this and I asked the CAOs and Leadership Advisory Council, if this information is readily available. They felt it would be pretty easy to do. The Steering Committee advised if we find some campuses are taking too much time, we could do our own research and send what we have to them and ask if these are the right answers. I was going to start that way, first ask the campuses then fill in the blanks.
IFO: I noticed in the letter the word analysis or analyze; what is the purpose of the analysis?
MnSCU: I think what we want is an analysis that describes where we see commonalities or distinctiveness and the rational for distinctiveness. We want to analyze the process by which institutions have come to define these core outcomes. I don’t know if you’re aware of how differently our institutions define core outcomes. We want to gather the information and look at where are we as a system and put that out to the system as a whole. We would have in bold and underscore the sentence in the letter - no where has there been a discussion or intention to make this an effort to standardize core outcomes.
IFO: I think we will express a great deal of skepticism about that. We have a history of you folks asking for centralized information. I think that was illustrated by what you said, ‘we’ll get the information from the campuses, compare them, and ask for a rational for the differences.’
MnSCU: I said we’d try to analyze the rationale. I would hope it would be evident in the responses, the institutions would tell us for their students.
IFO: My point was you didn’t say ‘analyze the rational for the commonalities’ you said ‘analyze the rationale for the differences.’
MnSCU: I said commonalities. You made good points that could strengthen this letter.
IFO: On page 1 under Background, again that’s part of the concern that exists in analyzing. This is something that to me is an area the faculty feel strongly about.
MnSCU: This is referring to the history of this project coming out of the work of the Transfer Oversight Committee and the MN Transfer Curriculum.
IFO: A lot of what you’re saying is system, I’m assuming you are looking at the cc/tc/ and universities, how are you going to break that out? The universities won’t look at the same cores the same way.
MnSCU: That’s what we’re trying to show. We will see deeply rooted differences and we’ll reflect those back. Why not have those available?
IFO: I was present at the CTL conversation. I thought we decided your folks would look at the campus websites.
MnSCU: No, Larry Oveson argued strongly to support the idea. We should just do the work, Stewart said no, it would appear you are going on a fault finding mission to tell them where they couldn’t find the information. Larry said when you don’t get answers then go do the research and ask if this is right, I said ok.
IFO: With all due respect, this will be some work. Even with highly developed missions, even if you’re asking about process. This would involve interviewing. The process wasn’t written down. I question why you need to know about the process and do the analysis. I’m frustrated that you have these projects and we have to do the work. You have extra staff and we’re supposed to put this work on top of our work load. The CAOs won’t do this; they will assign to the faculty member or CTL rep.
MnSCU: I think you can take this back to the group. This group is saying it isn’t easier to take it back to the campus.
MnSCU: We could make it optional for campuses. We could write that into the letter. If you’d like to give it to us first, fine. If not, we’ll do some research give you what we’ve got and then you can fill in the blanks.
IFO: I’m not sure what we are trying to accomplish, understanding that would help. If we want to provide a central source of information, we could put a page together and be done with it. What is the purpose of this?
MnSCU: If you go to the first paragraph on the letter we just passed around, this is in keeping with an initiative aligned with Strategic Direction 2: Goal 2.2: Produce Graduates who have strong, adaptable and flexible skills - our Board is asking about this. We can anticipate that if we’re going to talk about this goal you say that when you talk about your student learning outcomes. That’s where this started.
IFO: That’s my issue. You know we need to report this when we have an HLC or AQUIP visit, but we’re being asked to do it outside of those visits. We know when our next HLC visit is and now we’re being asked to respond outside of that timeframe; it’s a hoop that may be jumping the gun.
MnSCU: If this came to my campus, I’d go to my HLC report. We didn’t look at this as a huge task; we thought you’d go back and look at your report.
IFO: Then why did you need to hire two people to help with this? Earlier you said you hired two people?
MnSCU: They were hired to contact the campuses, creating the website, if you can imagine the tasks involved when you ask any campus for this much information, there’s a lot of interaction with the campus.
IFO: Exactly my point. I don’t understand why you can’t request what campuses reported to the HLC last time, and put it up on the website. I don’t know why you need to hire two people for this.
MnSCU: This is an initiative that I wrote in cooperation with the MN Transfer Curriculum group and it came out of the discussion last January.
IFO: You can’t be saying that; you didn’t.
MnSCU: I was at that January conversation, the work group asked…
IFO: I remember no such discussion.
MnSCU: CTL did not initiate this on its own, in fact we have more work than we can stand to do right now. Like you, I feel frustration. When work comes from people who give it to one another, do they realize the implication? It was not the intention to create work, just get the current status of how they define core outcomes for students.
IFO: There are other easier ways. It underlines the fact we need to have discussions at the table much earlier on. A sub group of the committee does not satisfy the open dialogue for these positions.
MnSCU: Can you suggest how we would bring this? It was on the CTL January, May and September agenda. This decision was made in November; it was on the CTL Steering Committee agenda. No one said this better go to meet and confer. How do we get things here earlier?
IFO: Yes, you’re correct it came to that committee, but we were never asked, ‘should we do this.’ We were told we are doing this.
MnSCU: It’s an initiative. No one said I don’t think we should be doing this.
IFO: We weren’t given the option to do that. As a member of that committee who attended these meetings, we were told this needed to happen.
MnSCU: By summer that was the case, but not in January.
Chancellor: Cathy said it’s out of sequence. Can you use what you reported to the HLC as a basis?
MnSCU: There are a variety of ways we can do this. The present plan came from our last CTL Steering Committee. I can craft another way to get the information and bring it back here.
MnSCU: If we can agree to take the information from the HLC reports…
MnSCU: It’s a great way to start and we’ll use that as a first step and see where we are.
IFO: Let’s talk more about this next time - about the second and third steps. It would help if we could alleviate the reporting burden.
MnSCU: Would it be fair to ask your Board for a detailed report from your reps? Will be it be discussed again at the CTL Steering Committee?
IFO: The issue is how it’s presented to CTL. If committee members are told, ‘The OOC must conduct this study.’ That’s part of why we’re concerned.
MnSCU: Now that it’s on your radar screen. Would it be fair to keep it there?
IFO: Yes.
MnSCU: You’re free to suggest the agenda be discussed in any manner.
IFO: How do we go about deciding and agreeing upon what items we’re gong to work on? My sense of the CTL Steering Committee is that this was something we needed to do. There was no sense on the wisdom of why. HLC is changing their accreditation criteria of whether this is directed toward the 21st century learner. Our old reports don’t address those kinds of things. This is something that is jumping the gun on our next HLC; it’s true our campuses should be looking at this already.
MnSCU: We have very current information particular for AQUIP. It should be very current, let’s start there – with the HLC language. That’s a good compromise.
Chancellor: One great fear is that we would be one size fits all. With a very diverse system like this, we are trying to meet the needs of Minnesota. It wasn’t the intent to make this a one size fits all.
MnSCU: To summarize the comments, we want to tell our Board about the great diversity of our system, and this was an attempt to converse about that.
Chancellor: If I were a president, I might be interested to see what some of my colleagues are doing. That might be helpful to me. This information may be helpful and help us all get to a higher level.
Quistgaard: I would agree.
MnSCU: During the meeting in August I spent a day with them defining critical thinking. We are very interested in knowing how other institutions are defining critical thinking and how that’s defined within the curriculum. That’s what I was hoping for.
Status of IT Committees:
IFO: We are quite confused about all of the different technology committees. And how this relates to the report we got last spring from the D2L ad hoc committee. If someone could explain the charges; do we have them all? What’s the deal?
IFO: Why are there four technology committees?
MnSCU: I’m gong to pass a document around before I refer to that I want to tee-it-up. As you know, we are in the midst of major changes. Whether we get zero or $70 million in the budget we do have to make changes. That process of change is underway. A critical element of change is governance. It has to do with effective decision making process from a governance perspective. I make sure our stake holders understand how decision are made, who makes the decision, what’s the process and how stake holders participate and plug in. A clear governance process is needed. With that in mind, Ken Niemi asked me to put together a process that would list a set of recommendations to streamline our governance process which includes these committees - clarifying roles and responsibilities so it’s more coherent. It’s a given, all the IT committees are very confusing; I myself don’t understand them. Ken said let’s clarify this. The process that Ken requested was in consultation with the stakeholders which included the IFO and then issue a set of recommendations to Ken by the end of January and he will take it to the Chancellor and the Leadership Council in January 2007.
IFO: Faculty are on break; you want clarity, governance…
MnSCU: That process doesn’t end in January 07. He’s gong to confer with the Chancellor and Leadership Council. These are all negotiable.
IFO: Why would you even start out with something that has a schedule like that and say it’s negotiable? This is an insult!
MnSCU: I’m going to offer a caveat which will say this is proposed. I come from a world of open software development, release early and release often. What you’re seeing is raw thinking that’s going to undergo changes. There will be changes to this document. I want to call your attention to the goals of this exercise; it’s to put in the right governance structure. The narrow set of questions this morning is ‘what is the status of these committees.’ These committees are subject to review. Why would you want to start this process now? You ask ‘why the end of January?’ I do want to say there is urgency here. We do have to have put in place an effective decision making process ASAP. We need a coherent process soon. We can’t wait. We have major investments we need to make and we are trying to find a way our stakeholders can provide input. While I understand the concern this may be rushed, I want to emphasize we have do to do this ASAP. Within reason, we want to work with stakeholders to say, ‘how do we do this and what is the right methodology and timetable?’ How can we engage in making sure we come up with the right results?
IFO: Are there other IT committees in the system that we are not aware of or is this it?
MnSCU: No. We want to streamline.
IFO: I know you’ve met with President Black, our concern that most of us know, is the earlier everybody is involved the better the outcome will be. Are you discussing this with all of these committees?
MnSCU: Yes, part of the challenge is the members of the committees. In some cases, we understand the charge of the specific committee. But don’t know how they relate to the other committees.
IFO: You hit on one of our concerns. You have to be careful. Where you’re starting from is right. You have to understand where the stakeholders are with this. Not all of the stakeholders understand all of the pieces. One of things that tends to happen is you get a fractioning of the different view points, no one has a good view except for the people at the top. We may want to consolidate rather than create new ones.
MnSCU: I prefer simplicity. That’s a primary goal - simplicity and streamlining the process. That will help with coherence.
IFO: I appreciation your open-source background. Please send any new proposals to Nancy when you have the draft at the end of January. You’re still going to get hit. A lot of people won’t have a chance to look at that document.
MnSCU: How should I engage at the IFO? What should the process be?
IFO: You need to engage with President Black. We might ask you to a Board meeting. As long as you’re engaging with our faculty reps on these committees, the caution being the faculty reps as you said may only see something from their point of view. At meet and confer we’re looking at different perspectives. If you keep Nancy Black posted, and it’s discussed at meet and confer and with the relevant committees would be best.
MnSCU: I welcome feedback. The intent here is to release early and often. We want comments from anyone.
IFO: There should be an email address on the front of this handout you’ve given for comments. There isn’t even an email on this.
MnSCU: Send comments to my email.
IFO: Often the materials we get from MnSCU never have on them where you can send your feedback. They don’t have the address of the author.
MnSCU: You’ve never lacked for getting feedback to us.
MnSCU: If you don’t know where to send feedback, email me.
MnSCU: Mary’s point is valid, it’s always appropriate to communicate with her. She’s our point person.
MnSCU: If there’s ever an issue we want to facilitate that.
MnSCU: This is the most important thing I’ll be working on over the next few weeks, any feed back is welcome.
IFO: Our academic calendar is the same, it’s as though you don’t realize we’re working on an academic calendar. The people in this building don’t understand an academic calendar.
MnSCU: The world doesn’t revolve around an academic calendar.
IFO: It does in our world.
IFO: Let’s move on.
Taskforce on Associate Degrees:
MnSCU: The work is complete. It’s been incorporated in the policy review and in the academic program review unit of which Nancy Black and Debra Japp have the report which hasn’t been finalized yet. They are incorporated into the policy. Are there other issues about baccalaureate degrees?
IFO: We want to know what’s going on.
MnSCU: The taskforce has completed the work. It’s incorporated in the policy committee.
Technology and Security:
IFO: In technology, an issue was raised about us going to an Oracle product for our system. We want to know if there is information about whether or not campuses would have full access to their own data.
MnSCU: We’ve got to distinguish between technology and data ownership. We have a number of background changes going on. One is moving to an Oracle database. It’s not really relevant, we’re switching one engine from mrdb to Oracle and that’s going on as we speak. Who has access to data is a data policy issue. Employee records, HR information - there are data owners and those owners determine who has access. That’s not an IT decision. The technology changes are independent of data ownership.
IFO: We’ve heard campuses will be restricted to their own data, and we want assurance that this is not true.
MnSCU: What the data that people are trying to access, who is trying to access, it can help you identify the data owners. If it is employee records, HR owns that data. If someone is having an issue of not being able to access particular data, we can facilitate the information with the user and data owners.
Chancellor: How do we deal with the rumor?
MnSCU: There are several issues and we can talk about this with data security issues. To prevent against the downloading and the loss of personal data it has nothing to do with switching to Oracle.
MnSCU: What particular areas are you concerned with?
MnSCU: What’s the business purpose? If there are issues, we’d be happy to facilitate that.
MnSCU: If it’s student data then the president is not the owner. As part of the security, this is ongoing. Here’s an example, UCLA had a break in and 800,000 records which included social security numbers were exposed over a two year period of time. The security issue is something we take seriously; there are constant changes we’re making. Again this has to be in conversation with our stakeholders, there’s a security committee. How people access data will be changing, in some cases it’s more difficult to access data.
IFO: Another example, I spent Wednesday on a retreat. We are working on our business accreditation. There is data you supply with meeting standards. At the present time, our folks can access student data. Is that going to change?
MnSCU: What shouldn’t change is you having access to the current data. What may change is if currently the way a campus or the OOC has allowed people to access/download confidential data on their laptop - that will change. You may not have the ability. We don’t want people to have confidential information on their laptops.
IFO: We would consider taking a look at that whenever there’s a change. Taking it from a policy standpoint, we want you to ask what effect this would have on our campus. Being more proactive with us will make a significant difference (changing the security grid without warning to the users).
MnSCU: This dovetails the governance discussion. Having an effective governance means when we have a change, there’s a discussion, an understanding, and we’ll know how the users will be impacted. We lack that now.
IFO: You’re right. It’s important people understand the various implications of a change.
MnSCU: That’s what happened. This decision had policy implications. One committee did the work and the others didn’t know what was happening.
Chancellor: I’m taking away from this that the chemistry is really good between Al and the group and see this coming together. I want to add there isn’t one major meeting where there won’t be a conversation on transparency and data security. This is a battle. I don’t know how to do this, but we need to talk that through and get the best balance between security and transparency. The public wants this as well. I sense the mutual respect.
IFO: Correct.
Applied Doctorate Update:
MnSCU: You already know there are three (3) proposals involving five (5) state universities in line with policy and internal process. They are being reviewed by the internal review unit and then will be submitted for external review. One of the doctorates is more extensive. We have the external reviews that are brought in by the institutions. The external reviewers, the consortium, are coming in next week. All the external desk reviewers, based on a pool of suggestions, are all under contract and have the materials and we will have written responses by mid-January. Some of the visits have occurred, some are pending. The next step is for my staff to look at external reviews, and their own reviews to craft a recommendation for the Sr. Vice Chancellor.
IFO: Any questions about the process? No? I am recalling Judy’s comments at the last meeting about the allocation formula being revised for this. Where are we?
MnSCU: The Leadership Council at their December meeting, all agree with that and it’s put in place in the allocation on a two year lag. The universities, once they are going on the programs as the allocation takes place, the will start to be recognize for those costs and compensated in the formula. That’s gone through.
IFO: What are you thinking about now? How would it relate to the master level formula to the third tier?
MnSCU: We have lower and upper divisions. It will be as you’re spending occurs in those programs. The program will be unique. What you’re spending is what will be recognized as we move forward with those programs. It’s the universities challenge to recognize the costs that they will attribute to those programs. New programs may be in the system I think that it will be how the campuses code their material to recognize the students at that level.
IFO: The formula will be determined when we get a better handle on the programs?
MnSCU: I don’t know what the cost will be for each student. It may be high; whatever you’re spending will be the dollars in the formula for doctoral.
IFO: MnSCU’s going to look at the cost and then you’ll look at the formula to recognize those costs and approach a break even point?
MnSCU: To some degree. We’ll try. At the beginning the cost of doctoral programs will be higher.
IFO: What is the opportunity for faculty input on costs and the formula?
MnSCU: The input is what you’ll be spending. We’ll recognize that as we do the cost comparisons on the formula. You’re impact will be how much you talk about the costs with your program.
MnSCU: Does the TACT committee talk about this?
MnSCU: We certainly will. We’ll be monitoring those costs and make sure the costs are being recorded appropriately.
IFO: Are we talking about new dollars for these allocations?
MnSCU: It’s how you are funding them now. It may be that as we have a zero sum gain in the dollars we have to spend, it’s the reallocation of those dollars, it may or may not end up, in a fairly efficient program it may or may not bring dollars into your institution. I can’t say.
IFO: Where do you get the dollars you allocate in the allocation formula, it allocates appropriations, if you didn’t get an appropriation it came from somewhere else.
Chancellor: We could ask in the future, some of us remember that we told them [legislature] we wouldn’t be back with an appropriation, then they took away the enrollment increase. We haven’t asked for it this year, but that doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. Right now it’s coming out of the reallocations we have. I think a university could lose 300 students and pick up 12 doctoral students and they would get the best money. The presidents will have to make a commitment to transfer resources. I think it would be wrong to ask for it now, but that doesn’t mean we can’t later. We put ourselves on the line to work this out. The change in environment is unfortunate, given the environment we have now, we may be able to readdress this at some point.
IFO: We have a concern with rescheduling the Graduate Council meetings.
MnSCU: The Graduate Council’s role is open review of these programs. Last year and early this year the process was set in place for doctoral review. The council is where concerns are raised and discussed at this point with the programs in, it’s up to the external reviewers.
IFO: This spring as soon as we have our board calendar established, we’ll give that to your office but we are still wondering if we can reschedule one of those meetings?
MnSCU: I can work on that.
Executive Director Teaching Center Metro Update:
(A handout was given.)
IFO: We understand the original search has been cancelled and a number of revisions have been made.
MnSCU: I thank you for your input.
IFO: We understand there’s a revised job description.
MnSCU: Yes, it is being passed out. There isn’t a revision to the plan. Two reps from Metro State have been named. The main thing that has changed is the timeline, and we decided we would not have a firm date. It is January 18, and we will continue to consider candidates. It’s being advertised in the Chronicle and several professional groups. The main change in terms of any deadline is the starting date of the executive direct which may be mid-March. The candidates are being notified that the deadline is being extended and that there is a new qualification and they need to reapply. This is taking place at Metro State.
PEPER:
MnSCU: Last month you brought concerns. We talked with COPE about this and one of the things they agreed upon was that the process may be overzealous. Probably only faculty and administration that are more involved with teacher education were more aware of that. We need to make sure you as well as faculty know what the Board of Teaching is doing. Cathy Summa attending the standards committee meetings will help. The executive director of the Board of Teaching is new, and doesn’t have a history or ownership of this process and is interested in a discussion hearing/forum where people can talk about our concerns. We don’t know when that will happen, we will pledge to you that we’ll make a point of letting you know when that is so you can be present. That Board of Teaching is appointed by the governor - half are teachers and half are not.
IFO: Does someone from the OOC represent the system at MACTE; does Cyndy Crist do that?
MnSCU: Yes, Cyndy attends those meetings, but we don’t have a formal seat. That professional organization will be speaking about this process.
IFO: I wonder if someone from MnSCU represents MnSCU’s teacher education. Department of Teacher Education are separate from the scope of what universities offer and the communication isn’t as clear as it might be. To have someone in the system office advocate for the system, in particular advocating for STEM.
MnSCU: Cyndy attends those meetings and can do what you’re asking.
IFO: I thought Leslie, Cyndy, Nancy and Cathy Summa would have a meeting to strategize.
Chancellor: I hear all of the problems. It would be interesting to have that collaboration, we need to have our act together if we have that hearing. If this thing doesn’t work there is legislation.
MnSCU: We have not sat down yet, but we certainly can do that. It’s a matter of time. I thought the information coming from the Board of Teaching director is a positive first step.
Chancellor: I hear there are people deciding on our programs who aren’t as qualified as we are and we need to explore that.
IFO: Who is your point person?
Chancellor: Linda Baer.
MnSCU: We’ll get that meeting together.
Chancellor: It’s the liberal arts faculty as well as the teacher ed faculty.
MnSCU: We’ll address that.
Pandemic Planning:
MnSCU: We think this issue of “syllabus b” at Bemidji has been resolved at the local campus level already. Did you meet over this at meet and confer?
IFO: We met on Tuesday. The general concern is whether we are working toward a system wide policy in the pandemic planning on alternative means of courses. Should we shut down for a pandemic, the local resolution was we won’t have a “syllabus b” or any proposal that delivers the course through another means. The concern is a system wide proposal along those lines.
IFO: We want to know what MnSCU is asking the campuses with what to provide with the plan, suspension of the campuses/course, etc.
MnSCU: We asked all the campuses to develop a plan, a template went out, you saw that template last spring. This is our concern, it was given to us so late that we couldn’t honor our commitment to the academic calendar.
MnSCU: It was given to us by the government that we mandate a plan.
MnSCU: We tried to honor that with students and faculty with what we call a draft plan in September/July and working in small groups and were asked to go back to have full discussion with students and faculty before the plan would be submitted as a final document. Our belief is that this has happened. If not, we want to know.
IFO: I believe in some cases the campuses are not addressing the academic side of the pandemic planning - they are addressing the logistics. And we’re hearing not to worry about the academics.
MnSCU: I would agree. I have asked the academic and student officers, are there issues that should have statewide impact where students who are affected should be treated similarly across the state? What I’m hoping is to bring forward a group and I want your participants to look at some of those issues such as what happens when we have to close in terms of credits, grades, international students, L-service, athletic events, for a long term emergency. The pandemic plan has a lot of what-ifs. Currently our legal folks are looking at drafting policy language to assist with providing some authority.
IFO: Our concern is that full discussion hasn’t taken place on the campus, with awarding grades and various issues. We want to be clear that while we will appreciate a full discussion, all other aspects that become terms and conditions of employment are subject for negotiation, not this kind of discussion about policy. We want to be clear that things that impact terms and conditions of employment are negotiable not meet and confer or Board policy items.
MnSCU: We would agree.
Security Awareness:
(Handouts were given)
MnSCU: I have some handouts for you. I’m not sure how many of you will remember this but it was a year ago when I visited this group. I work for Ken Niemi, I visited with all of the units to talk about awareness training for all of our employee so people are aware of what information is private or sensitive, what needs to be done to protect that info, what individuals role are, and if a breech occurs what happens. We have been working for the past year in putting together the program that will cover this kind of information. We’ve been working with the U of M and we address protection requirements that comply with our university or MnSCU policies and procedures, state laws and regulations. The intent is to raise awareness of what is private and sensitive, what needs to be done and people’s role at keeping information secure, based on security best practices. There are some technical issues covered in the training session. The training is in three modules provided to everyone, ten to fifteen minutes in length and are web-based and interactive. What I distributed to you on the one page document is an example of the exercise in the training program. There’s background information on what is addressed, a few scenarios of what will take place on the campus, and some interactive exercises to see if there’s an understanding of what is considered private or protected. This one screen shot handout is asking the individual if they understand what is private and what is not private. I’ve given you one color copy of the entire first module so you can see all of the information in the training module. The PowerPoint presentation shows why we are doing this and why it’s important. UCLA had a breech of 800,000 records. We want to make sure our campuses are not subjected to that kind of publicity and security breech and make sure everyone understand what steps we take to minimize whatever negative implications are in having that information breeched. A lot of information is carried on our laptops and we need to know how to secure that data. Laptops are stolen, even at the OOC, that contain private information. We want to make sure our employees’ and students’ information is protected to the best of our ability. We want to make sure everyone has basic information on security and secure practices. The first course is ready to go. We’ll pilot that the week between Christmas and New Years (at Southwest). If there are any modifications we can do some last minute tweaking. We plan to fully roll this out at the beginning of the spring semester/February.
Chancellor: What is the pilot?
MnSCU: Individuals will go through the module and give us feedback.
Chancellor: No faculty will participate.
MnSCU: Dakota decided they want to do it with a subset of the business office.
IFO: The issue is that if you want it to be effective training for faculty, then faculty need to be involved in the pilot, they are not on campus during that time frame. You can’t make assumptions with faculty.
MnSCU: I’d be happy to do that. If campuses are interested in piloting, my email is listed on the back page of this handout.
IFO: Why did you go to the U of M for consultation on this rather than resources within MnSCU?
MnSCU: The U of M has a higher education environment and have the same issues we have. We have both looked at materials available that were developed by the public sector, and did not feel that was a fit for our environment. We thought that by jointly developing the training program we could address those issues covered by HIPPA, government data practices that would not be addressed elsewhere. We wanted to do that together to combine our knowledge and resources.
Chancellor: We have said that Metro State will be the center for security, a center of excellence. Do you see were that center can helpful?
MnSCU: Yes, when we started this program a year and a half ago, the center wasn’t functioning at that point. We have established a very good relationship with the center and I see them playing a role in the future. The U of M rolled this out two months ago and they have a good idea of data privacy. With the new law that required notification of a breech is something a lot of people have not been aware of the. They’ve found it to be very informative and useful. We’ll be modifying this in subsequent years and more depth to the information that is provided. We need to bring people up to a minimum level of understanding.
IFO: Is this a joint project?
MnSCU: We’ve taking the basic security best practices content and modified it to fit our environment. We want to make sure this represents MnSCU. This is an example of some of the materials we will provide to the campuses. (Two posters were displayed.)
IFO: I know you’re concerned with having a good program; some of us are coming from the position that it gauls us that every time the U of M gets credit. We have the capability to do this without the U of M. It makes us look second class.
MnSCU: In all of the material, I believe it might be on a copy of what I gave you, there is recognition that is was jointly developed. All of the materials being produced, there is recognition that it is in cooperation with the U of M.
IFO: I see the regents of the U of M have copyright on this. That’s a different consideration.
IFO: Is this developed using the D2L environment?
MnSCU: It is delivered through D2L; there are quiz capabilities through D2L.
IFO: We did have a little bit of prior warning a few days ago. We want to be proactive. I’m also the director of graduate information systems and actively in charge of projects at the center of excellence. One concern is with the actual implementation and scalability issues with D2L. In the current environment version 7, version 7.4 does not support the new version, and we are having issues with the quiz function. Version 8 will apparently fixed the problem but have not released the date when they’ll fix this problem on 7.4. Timing is an issue if you’re using those things. The second point, is the load for handling this. With a pilot you want to test what will happen. D2L scalability is an issue; are we testing this? At our campus, being up on these issues, we talked to our online education people, and asked if it’s a significant load issue. How do we get people to use this in D2L? Usually we use registration data and load the sites based on class registration, to open this up to everyone, we are opening up several other classes of people to take this. There is a significant hacking opportunity in D2L, by introducing the security system we may be introducing hacking opportunities. The release date hasn’t been tested for scalability from the idea stage to the delivery stage.
MnSCU: We are making sure we are addressing all the issues you raised. We don’t believe the scalability or load will be a problem. We’ll be doing some more testing but have solid assurance this will not impact any other courses. We are very sensitive to this. We wouldn’t go forward if we thought there were negative implications. With the hacking and unauthorized information, we’ve looked at other mechanisms for loading and are trying to finalize that now. Obviously if we’re trying to give training to everyone to protect information, we don’t want to put information at risk ourselves. If there was any indication this was the case, this would not be rolled out.
IFO: We have significant load issues with our online people at the same time they need to deliver classes. You don’t want to add on more. Academics have to come first.
MnSCU: Right. We’ll pull back and won’t deliver if we think it will affect your online courses.
IFO: With the D2L version 8 issues…
MnSCU: I have made a note of this. I am asking for a response. We do have links in the course material. This will be addressed as well.
IFO: Who do you anticipate will take this training?
MnSCU: We’re taking this to the Leadership Council and requiring all employees of MnSCU to take the three general courses.
IFO: We’d have issues with that. I don’t want to go into that at this point. We’ll maybe have to have our labor relations address this issue of mandating faculty participation. There’s been no discussion on the campuses until this week.
IFO: We know about this.
IFO: You said you’d be testing this at Southwest. Who are you working with?
MnSCU: Betsy Draper and the CIO at Southwest.
IFO: She hasn’t contacted me. Are you asking for faculty participation?
MnSCU: I’ll talk to her today. We have not directed the campus participants or volunteers to determine the attendees in the pilot. We’ve left that up to the campuses. If we need to do additional pilots, we’ll address that.
Draft Code of Conduct:
(A handout was given.)
MnSCU: Last summer the HR Committee of the Leadership Council put together a taskforce to consider the development of an employee code of conduct. After reviewing state law and other higher education institutions, Minnesota already has all of the policies and procedures and things that cover conduct issues and it’s somewhat scattered and tough to find. We needed a document to pull all that together so employee can find out easily about aspects of conduct. We worked on that and now have a rough draft and will be going through that in a bit. We had three goals, easy recognizable primary ethics; the code of conduct is formatted as a system procedure so people could find it easily. The document is meant to be brief and conversational, with hyperlinks that cover the conduct issues and a discussion of some of the positive behaviors that was the only thing MN didn’t have - a positive values statement of some kind. We’re now in the process of bringing the draft to various meet and confer sessions over the next 2-3 months, collect feedback, and have it completed sometime in the late spring. The document contains 5 parts. The second part was something that was missing - what we expect of all employees. Part 3 is a code of ethics found in MN statutes. Part 4 various key policies and procedures that exist. Again, part 5 refers to how we report fraud and abuse. We are hoping to get feedback on original documentation and collecting. HR directs the kinds of questions they get from employees on codes of conduct. We want to put together a FAQ available on our web. We are also talking to HR to incorporate this into new employee orientations. Our goal will be to have this available on the system and institutions websites so people can find it easily so they are aware of what is required. This is a first introduction. There are a few ways to give feedback on this document. Gail Olson is overseeing this project and Dorothy Zenner can take your comments. Gail and I would be willing to meet with people in the next month or two if they want to discuss this document.
IFO: We’ve not seen this before and we are all starting to have questions. I see things in the state law that go beyond what the state law says. We won’t ask questions at this point and will take this back and will certainly have a number of questions about where these ideas came from. I don’t think we have anything to say about any of these substantive items.
IFO: In part 4 you refer to other policies and procedures. Applicable policy and procedures, can we find those hyperlinks to fully evaluate the policies and procedures that are referred to in these subparts?
MnSCU: The policies and procedures are available on the OOC website.
IFO: These are hyperlinks to statutes.
MnSCU: They are available online and I’ll send them to you.
MnSCU: I can send you an electronic copy of that which will show you the hyperlink. On the procedure on 1.B.1, those are found on the Board policies website and the procedures are listed, statutes are available on the MN statutes website.
IFO: You should have the actual URL listed in the document.
IFO: This is the same on page 5.
MnSCU: Are you clear with they want, Bill?
MnSCU: Yes, either the electronic document or a list of the URLs.
MnSCU: Are there any other items you’d like the Chancellor to be here for? He has a meeting that he needs to leave early for if he can.
Legislative and Budget Update:
Chancellor: The attorney general did make a great contribution to us. I’m not finished yet but I’m feeling good. Thanks for all the good work you’re doing!
IFO: We adopted our legislative goals on December 1. In the budget we adopted the same spending level as what the trustees did - $275 million. Where does the money come from? The position is this should come from state appropriations this time. We had a budget shortfall because the state didn’t appropriate enough money for inflation and the students suffered high tuition increases and now we’re sitting on a surplus - they were asked to share the pain now they need to share the gain.
Chancellor: I agree, if they want to do something for $73 million, they could have zero tuition for two years. I’m presenting that idea. We know of 300,000 people who would benefit from this.
IFO: We’re the same on inflation and there should be a tuition freeze if we have that 3.5 increase on inflation. Otherwise we put great importance in our budget on competitive salary compared to our national peers. We are talking about competitive salary, not pay for performance. Some of the narratives in the trustees’ seem transcripts to be code language for pay for performance. We are strongly against that.
Chancellor: With the change in the House, that will be difficult. If we could work around promotions, they are our way of recognizing people - if there’s some way we can accomplish that in negotiations…
IFO: We think there should be more emphasis on trying to get more HEAPR money than the trustees approved. Last time we asked for $110 million and we got $70 million that leaves us $40 million not the $30 million MnSCU requested. Last year at a meeting with Senator Langseth he emphasized there is going to be $135 million for bonding and said there would be a ton of one time money available this time and bonding makes good use of capital projects.
Chancellor: We’ll tell them we want to go higher if we can.
IFO: We had a campus meeting yesterday for the segment of the I-90 legislators including some of the hold-overs and new ones. Why are we only asking for $30 million? They were surprised given the amount of money that needs to go into that area. That question was initiated by them as President Davenport was detailing the MnSCU budget.
Chancellor: That’s good. We’ve got the list. Maybe we didn’t realizes how the election would change. We had to get this thing through our own Board. The evening this was developing I couldn’t tell how this would come out. There was a lot of talking. The election changed a few things. The chair of the House and Keith are great chairs.
FAN:
MnSCU: We are launching FAN this year. The premise is we need substantial support for our budget request. One effective way is a grassroots network to build the scope of our support for our colleges and universities with the legislature. This is a pilot early launch, a number of colleges and universities are expressing public support for public higher education and our budget at MnSCU.
Chancellor: This is to the point of practice that went very well from the U of M - we heard this from legislature. This was an ideal of targeting the right people at the right time.
MnSCU: We want to have 2,000 sign-ons and hope to deliver the message to the governor and the key legislative leadership over the next week.
IFO: We’re hearing concerns on an overlap between FAN and efforts of the Foundation to raise money.
MnSCU: I will assure you that we will not use this system for solicitation, it’s legislative support only, it will not be used for legislation of state funds.
IFO: What about the lists of names?
MnSCU: We’ll let the institutions know who in their areas is supporting this. There is no intent to soliciting funds from the universities. We presented to the Foundation director about a month ago.
MnSCU: Mary’s comments are consistent with what she told me, the list would not be used for solicitation purposes.
Chancellor left the room.
IRS and Internet:
IFO: Our practice is not to continue once the Chancellor is gone. What we asked for before was not a copy of the statute but a reference to where in the statute you drew the conclusion that that particular type of reimbursement was subject to taxation and how you took that statute and established that position.
MnSCU: We are not gong to do a separate legal analysis. We’ll deal with that as an information request response. We told you why at the last meet and confer and provided the follow up statute.
IFO: The request was how you came to the conclusion on how those expenses are taxable. Where do you see the differential in those laws so we can understand the rational and if necessary challenge that.
MnSCU: We won’t create a separate document on the analysis, but we will point you to the statute.
IFO: Presumably you had a rational when you made the decision.
MnSCU: In fairness, it was more specific to us.
MnSCU: That’s an information request issue.
Request for Committees:
IFO: The Board of Trustees Teacher Award Group volunteers are due to your office by the December 29. That’s a New Years Eve holiday. The nominees don’t even have to be here until March. You need to be paying attention when you’re asking for this from us. Look at the academic calendar! We use a form and when you don’t give us the information before we need it, and the date you gave us was unrealistic. It gives us the impression that you’re not interested in having faculty on the committees because of how you give us the requests. There’s a difference between what you say and do; we are requesting you pay attention to the academic calendar and information we need to solicit people to your committees. Think ahead. Right now we’re doing all of our teaching schedules for the next year. We are scheduled for two years out. Most departments are a year in advance.
MnSCU: That’s an overstatement, we are aware of the academic calendar. Everything can’t be six months out.
IFO: When everything is an emergency…
MnSCU: In the charge document I realize the timelines were tight. MSCF has already given us their names. The nominees don’t come in until March, the committee has a great deal of work to do to once those 69 nominees come in. We realize the time was short and we are asking for your help - we said “if at all possible.”
IFO: Who looked at the calendar and gave this date? That’s a holiday. The first IPESL report was due on the Martin Luther King holiday. It’s astonishing!
IFO: There are two issues, those dates while not chosen to intentionally irritate and upset, they do. They signal to us a lack of familiarity in your office. The other issue is that we would hope, we know many of you have work plans and things your proposing to do, to make an effort to establish the committees you need earlier in that process even if you aren’t ready to meet. All too often we get the request too late. We need more lead time especially with our faculty. On many of our campuses we have to go through an extensive process there. We would like more lead time for folks in this office to think differently about the time point where you ask for these committees so we can do our job better.
Metro Alliance:
IFO: Could we have a update on the Metro Alliance?
MnSCU: I’m just consulting with Metro and we have provided support legislative dollars to Metro’s 10 college partners to expand the baccalaureate in nursing. It’s only offered at Metro in the public system. The intent is to provide an affordable option for students
IFO: Is a director position advertised?
MnSCU: The position is more for the management coordination of the collaboration, the school nursing of Metro. Marilyn Loen, the director in charge of any student enrolled, there is not a new search. An advisory/student counselor has been hired.
Adjourned at 10:50