Faculty Meeting Minutes

 

President Philip A. Glotzbach called the meeting to order at 3:33 p.m.

 

President Glotzbach asked if there were any corrections to, or comments regarding, the minutes of the Faculty Meeting held May 18, 2016. Hearing none, he announced the minutes were approved.

President Glotzbach welcomed everyone back to the start of the new academic year.  He hoped that everyone found time for renewal during the past few months and that the summer was productive as well.  President Glotzbach said that the campus, as usual, was busy this summer, from Summer Programs to a great deal of facilities work:

• Drilling on the geo-thermal field has been completed, though a good deal of work remains for the next few months.
• The renovations on the Surrey are nearly completed.
• We did a great deal of work in the residence halls, creating new student rooms out of other spaces to accommodate our demand for on-campus housing this fall.
• Wachenheim Field has been beautifully re-done.
• And numerous other projects have been completed around campus.

Thereafter, President Glotzbach introduced Dr. Cerri Banks, the new Dean of Students and Vice President for Student Affairs.  Dr. Banks joined us in August, having come from Mount Holyoke College, where she was Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of the College, a position she held since 2011.  Previous to that, she was Dean of William Smith College, from 2009 to 2011; before that, she served as Interim Dean and held the rank of Assistant Professor of Education.  She holds a Ph.D. from Syracuse University.  She is the author, editor, or co-editor of three books and various articles and conference publications.  She is a strong proponent of liberal education and, as she wrote in her letter of application, she is “an educator committed to whole student development [who] understand[s] and appreciate[s] the interplay of curricular, co-curricular, and personal aspects in the lives of students.”  She will be a creative and energetic leader of the division of Student Affairs and a willing partner with Academic Affairs and other divisions of the College.  I remain grateful to the search committee members who assisted in her selection, a group which included some of your faculty colleagues. A welcoming round of applause was given to Dr. Banks.

President Glotzbach also announced that Sarah Delaney Vero, Esq., has joined us as our Interim Title IX Coordinator.  Ms. Vero is an attorney in Albany specializing in employment law and human resources consulting.  She will assist us with Title IX matters until we have completed our search for a new permanent Title IX Coordinator.  That search is well under way, under the leadership of Joshua Woodfork, Vice President for Strategic Planning and the Institutional Diversity, and it is expected that the search committee to bring final candidates to campus over the coming months.  It is expected that the search will be completed by the end of the fall semester.

President Glotzbach next asked Mary Lou Bates, Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, to provide an update on the Class of 2020.  VP Bates reported that the first-year class has a total of 717 students, with 680 on campus and 37 in London.   Statistics of the class include:

• a record 49 percent applied and were accepted early decision
• they live in 31 different states and 55 countries
• they were selected from an applicant pool of almost 9,200 with a 29 percent acceptance rate, which is tied with our lowest acceptance rate
• 60 percent attended public school; 40 percent attended private or parochial school
• 41 percent are male; 59 percent are female
• 24 percent identified as domestic students of color
• 11 percent are international; 7 percent are dual citizens
• 21 percent speak a language other than English at home, which represents 29 different languages
• 15 percent are first generation college students
• 39 percent are on grant assistance, including 9 Porter scholars, 4 Filene scholars, and 9 S3M scholars, which is lower than our target rate of 42 percent

Once again, the number of students in the class who have made a commitment to volunteerism and community service throughout high school is extraordinary.  VP Bates provided a sampling of the many volunteer roles, clubs attended, and jobs the students held while in high school.  The Class of 2020 is a wonderfully talented, energetic, and diverse group and are excited to be at Skidmore!  A round of applause was given to Dean Bates.

Following VP Bates’ report, Michael Casey, Collyer Vice President for Advancement, provided an update Campaign.  VP Casey reported that as of September 10, 2016, the Campaign stood at $118,556,335 in donations and pledges.  A round of applause was given to VP Casey.

Thereafter, President Glotzbach introduced Dorothy Parsons, SGA President, and Henry Jaffe, SGA Vice President for Academic Affairs.

President Glotzbach acknowledged that we are coming upon a sorrowful moment for our nation and the world: next Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  He highlighted and expressed his appreciation for Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Parker Diggory’s recent e-mail that includes a 9/11 Remembrance.  The acts on 9/11 set in motion a series of events and reactions that have led us to a world that looks and feels significantly different today than it did on September 10, 2001.  Many currents have run together to produce the tone and content of the current U.S. presidential election, but one of those streams surely traces back to 9/11.  

President Glotzbach went on to say that our current political and societal malaise presents the strongest possible argument for the importance and relevance of what we offer at Skidmore College, of what we want our students to learn and achieve in their lives.  Those of us who are engaged in inculcating in the next generation the values and forms of knowledge that constitute a liberal education can make a legitimate claim to be doing the most important work imaginable today.  In short, liberal education really matters, today more than ever.      

If we are to succeed in fulfilling this mission, President Glotzbach stated that we need to be a community that models the values and processes that characterize both rigorous thinking and respectful discourse.  Unfortunately, there also are currents within the academy writ large that have prompted questions about American higher education’s ability to do just that.  As colleges and universities have struggled to become more diverse and inclusive institutions, some critics have charged that attempts to address experiences of exclusion and both covert and overt forms of discrimination have led to restrictions on speech and limitations on the range of ideas that members of those communities might have to confront.  But, in fact, these critics present a false dichotomy: that somehow one cannot have a diverse and inclusive community while still maintaining a free and rigorous exchange of ideas.  Indeed, we need to take a stand and turn this critique on its head.  An increasingly diverse community presents a greater, not a lesser, capacity for debating different ideas.  If we are all the same, we are likely to see the world the same way.  If we see the world differently, because of different experiences, backgrounds, or perspectives we have developed through our individual labors, we have more to bring to the common table of conversation.  So we need to seize this opportunity to foster more vigorous discussions within a stronger and more capable academic community.

Education necessarily involves engagement with new and sometimes disruptive ideas, and while that process can and should be exhilarating and rewarding, it also can – and perhaps should be at times – uncomfortable.  President Glotzbach said that he conveys this message to our entering students each year in the Opening Convocation, and this was a topic that was addressed at some length in the preface to the “2013-14 Strategic Action Agenda,” where he noted that such inquiry is, and should be, difficult and demanding work.   

President Glotzbach stated that we also need to acknowledge that creating a fully inclusive classroom or ensuring that a public context fully supports difficult dialog at times can require courage on all our parts.  Therefore, if we truly care about creating open, inclusive, deeply educational contexts for discourse, the importance of nurturing and honoring this virtue in our community cannot be overestimated.  We cannot allow ourselves to privilege timidity; we need to expect from ourselves, from one another, and from our students the courage to stand up and own and share our ideas, regardless of how those ideas might be received.   President Glotzbach asked what can we to do to ensure that we have the best chance of realizing these values within a community that is committed to inclusive excellence, a key concept in our new Strategic Plan?  He suggested that we approach this question from a perspective that best reflects the strengths of the Skidmore community and that gives us the opportunity to create together a national model for engaging an increasingly diverse and therefore more intellectually promising community in addressing both the perennial questions that remain at the heart of liberal education as well as the pressing issues of our day – both external to and internal to the College.

President Glotzbach stated that this project begins with embracing complex conversations, conversations that should engage us in this election season about politics, the direction of our nation, the continuing role of race in the U.S., immigration, foreign and military policy (especially in relation to the Middle East), and other such topics that are animating the current presidential contest.  They will happen in your classes, to be sure, but they should happen elsewhere as well.  The Tang’s exhibit “A More Perfect Union,” for example, provides an overall context for relating a number of speakers who will visit campus this semester, along with other events that offer us the opportunity to engage these ideas.  One of these is the forthcoming Constitution Day talk by Dr. Gordon Lloyd entitled, “50 Ways to Love Your Framers.”

President Glotzbach announced that his office is also planning to sponsor additional events on topics of diversity, dialog, and divestment throughout the year, including:

• This past Tuesday, the First-Year Experience Office held a talk for our new students by Teja Arboleda on identity, which was stimulating and very well received by our students.
• On Monday, Dr. Emily Bernard will present the FYE lecture on the topic of this year’s common reading, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
• On November 15, as part of International Education Week, Off-Campus Study and Exchanges, in collaboration with Joshua Woodfork, as our Chief Diversity Officer, will be hosting Aman Ali, who will give a talk called: “Ask Me Anything – I’m Muslim!” where he will give a “crash course in Islam 101” and field questions from the Skidmore community.
• On December 1 and 2, the President’s Office is co-sponsoring an effort spearheaded by Jeremy Day-O’Connell in Music to celebrate the 150th birthday of Harry T. Burleigh, a famed African-American singer and arranger.  (It happens that the young Burleigh sang in a choir at Saratoga Springs’ Bethesda Episcopal Church while working in a local hotel.  He was reportedly “discovered” by the priest there and soon became something of a local sensation before moving on to New York City.)  The celebration will include a concert, a master class, and panel discussions.
• This past summer, Joshua Woodfork piloted a successful book reading group of 30 staff members from across the College to discuss diversity and inclusion.  He will be repeating this with staff again this fall.
• In response to our faculty discussions last year and student activism, Marie Glotzbach has worked with Eunice Ferreira, David Howson, Joshua Woodfork and others to bring back the DNAWorks residency featuring both a performance and campus-wide discussion at the end of this month.
• Professor Sarah Willie-LeBreton, from Swarthmore College who keynoted our last Academic Summit, will return this year, and we will determine how best to utilize her visit.

As we lean into this work, President Glotzbach repeated his charge from last year that academic departments and our administrative divisions continue to ask what they need to do to create contexts in which all their members have access to what they need to flourish.  We have added resources this year that can help us achieve this goal. He indicated that he asked Joshua Woodfork and Associate Dean of the Faculty Crystal Moore to reach out to individual academic departments to partner on these efforts.  Dean Moore is working with COACHE Collaborators to follow up on the survey data regarding institutional climate.

President Glotzbach noted that he also asked Dean Moore and Joshua Woodfork to continue considering our retention efforts, particularly as they relate to historically under-represented groups.  In this light, a Faculty of Color Discussion and Reception will be held at Scribner House next week, and he knows Dean Moore and Dr. Woodfork are working on a faculty book discussion related to the first-year reading: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.

President Glotzbach stated that there are a wide array of opportunities to participate in shared conversations that matter, and this list doesn’t begin to encompass all the other speakers, performances, art shows, and events that will occur across the year on a wide array of topics.  We will continue to create opportunities for all members of our community to engage in strengthening our campus climate.  So let us celebrate these opportunities, encourage our students and one another to take advantage of them, and see them as part of the collective work of the Skidmore ‘we’.  

President Glotzbach strongly believes that we are united in caring about what happens at this College –about the work we do, the context in which we do it, and the people who make up our community. There is nothing trivial about caring either for one another or for our community as a whole.  For fourteen years, he has said to our new faculty members – to many of you in this room today – that students can hear the critical feedback we frequently need to give them as part of their educational journey, provided that the students understand that their teachers are fundamentally committed to their success.  He also has said, on numerous occasions, that teaching at Skidmore is fundamentally a relationship not a transaction.  These ideas coalesce around the realization that relationships matter.  Creating an inclusive and successful classroom is first of all about creating relationships of care, respect, and understanding among the participants centering on the course’s educational goals.  These relationships are professional and not personal friendships, at least not at the beginning.  But they are important relationships nonetheless.

Likewise, our relationships to one another are enormously important – they matter as well.  We can create the context we need for our larger, more public, and sometimes challenging conversations if we begin by remembering that we owe one another respect as a matter of course.  And it is helpful to remind ourselves that even when we disagree strongly with someone else’s opinion, we can begin by giving that person the benefit of the doubt – affirming, if only to oneself, that the author of those beliefs, who has had the temerity to express them, also cares about our community and is acting in the attempt to make it better.

The strength of an academic institution is directly related to the vigorous free play of ideas that it supports.  The word ‘play’ in that expression is not accidental.  We should relish a heated discussion and help both our students and non-students alike find the “fun” that can be inherent in the robust clash of ideas and viewpoints.  The notions, first, that what we do in our conversations is supremely important and that we can be personally and energetically invested in pursuing a given line of reasoning and, second, that this work can be exhilarating and even fun are not incompatible.  So let’s see if we can hold these two apparently opposed ideas in our mind at the same time.  As we do our individual work this year, the work that collectively makes us the vibrant College that we are, let’s be intentional in seeking ways to embrace the ‘we’ that reflects the realizations that what we are doing does matter, that it can and should be fun (even when it is difficult), and that we are all in this together.

In concluding his report, President Glotzbach announced that Beau Breslin, Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs, will return to the faculty, in the Department of Political Science, following a well-earned sabbatical.  VP Breslin will be entering his sixth year as Dean of Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs, and because of other administrative offices he previously held, has been away from his teaching and research for ten years.  With reluctance, President Glotzbach has accepted his decision, and at this request, VP Breslin will remain in his post through December 31, 2017.  President Glotzbach indicated that he asked him to stay on to the middle of next year because there is important ongoing work he needs to complete to implement the funding plan for the Center for Integrated Sciences.  In addition, next fall will see an unusually large number of tenure cases, and it makes sense for VP Breslin to see these through.  Finally, the faculty has significant work to do this year regarding the revision of the general education curriculum, and the Dean’s Office has an important role to play in this process.

Beginning next fall, we will conduct a national search for VP Breslin’s replacement.  President Glotzbach has informed the Faculty Executive Committee, the Committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure, and the Vice Chair of the Institutional Policy and Planning Committee of these decisions, and he will work through the appropriate governance channels to appoint an Interim Dean for Spring of 2018 and on other matters relating to this search.  President Glotzbach stated that VP Breslin has been – and will continue to be for the next three semesters – a strong voice for our academic life in Cabinet and throughout the College, an advocate of our faculty, and an invaluable advisor to me.  In due course, we will have ample opportunity to celebrate VP Breslin’s accomplishments.  A standing ovation was given to VP Breslin.

Thereafter, President Glotzbach opened the floor for questions.  Discussion was held on the size of the incoming class, how other colleges are faring with regard to making their classes, and plans to involve faculty in the redesign of the website.

There was no new business.

DOF/VPAA Breslin introduced the new faculty members for this academic year (see attached for complete list). A welcoming round of applause was given for the new faculty.

 

• On behalf of the Faculty Development Committee, Associate Professor Rachel Roe-Dale announced this year’s Faculty Development Opportunities Handbook is now online and encouraged everyone to review the new guidelines and process for the Faculty Student Summer Research Program.   She also announced the upcoming deadline for the Distinguished Faculty Service Award and encouraged faculty to submit nominations of their deserving colleagues.
• Ian Berry, Dayton Director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, introduced new members: Patti Sopp, Assistant Director of Finance and Administration, and Sean Fuller, Store and Publications Manager.  He also announced upcoming events and exhibitions at the Tang.
• Associate Professor Mimi Hellman announced this year’s Tang Mellon Faculty Seminar, the central goal of which is to explore the cultural significance and pedagogical potential of museums across the disciplines.  The Seminar will begin with four-day group trip in January to Houston, Texas, followed by six campus sessions over the course of the spring semester.   Associate Professor Hellman indicated she would send an email shortly with more details and requested that anyone interested in participating to contact her.
• Professor Pushi Prasad announced the fall’s Skidmore Research Colloquium scheduled for September 27, 2016.  This fall’s speaker will be Professor Mehmet Odekon, who will present “Exploitation of Labor in the U.S. Economy,” a talk in which he will be giving us an entirely new perspective on workers and wages in America. Professor Prasad encouraged anyone interested in attending to RSVP to her as soon as possible.
• Kim Marsella, Director of Academic Advising, announced two upcoming workshops for faculty this semester hosted by the Office of Academic Advising to help faculty better understand and respond to important campus-wide issues that may impact faculty in or out of the classroom.  On September 30, a workshop will be held on Title IX issues, and on October 30, a workshop will be held on issues of anxiety and depression.  Ms. Marsella will send an email with further details.
• On behalf of he and Marie, President Glotzbach invited everyone to the President’s Reception being held today at Scribner House immediately following the faculty meeting.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:58 p.m.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

Debra L. Peterson
Executive Administrative Assistant