Minutes from
University of Kansas Unclassified Senate Meeting
October 9, 2008
350 Spencer Research Library
Minutes transcribed by Angie Claussen
In attendance: Debbie Baker, Diann Burright, Angie Claussen, Abby Coffin, Dan Coonfield, Susan Corrigan, Paul Farran, Ed Foley, Megan Gannon, Gail James, Jeanette Johnson, Danny Kaiser, Mike Krings, Paul Liechti, Angie Loving, Rebecca Mayer, Lucy McGilley, Jason O’Connor, Amanda Ostreko, Kathy Pribbenow, Aaron Quisenberry, Mary Ann Rasnak, Tom Ryan, Easan Selvan, Andrew Shoemaker, Heidi Simon, Carolyn Thompson, Xinkun Wang, Rick Whitmore, Audrey Coleman, and Phil Wilke.
Excused: John Augusto, Claudia Bode, Chris Claussen, Audrey Coleman, Allyson Flaster, Jamie Kramer, Noelle Kurth, Susan Mercer, Denise Modin, Lisa Shaw, Peggy Robinson.
Absent: Teresa Kopsa
The meeting was called to order at noon by President Paul Farran.
The minutes of the September 11, 2008 meeting were approved as submitted.
Reports:
President: Paul Farran
Nothing major has changed since our last meeting. Kudos on the great work happening in our committees. Highlights – thorough monitoring of attendance by Angie Claussen and attendance is up, Noelle creative ways on how to spend our funds and Paul is still looking for ways to spend money this year. She has learned very quickly. Allyson first time we have been able to telecast one of our events – and it has been archived. 14 people logged in that day and is still linked from our site. Mike fantastic job with all of the web site changes and looking forward to further enhancements. Megan excited about her efforts to recruit new senators in the spring as well as awareness to the campus of who we are. Phil has done a tremendous job with this committee, he and Paul are going through our by-laws and comparing with WSU and coming up with changes that reflect what we are doing.
Parking Commission – Andrew Shoemaker reported that they have had just one meeting, last month, and he will have a big report in April for the Senate on what they have been doing.
Organization and Administration Committee – Kathy Pribbenow reported that they have not had a meeting yet this semester and have no plans for a meeting yet.
University Libraries Committee – Kathy Pribbenow reported that they are meeting for the first time today.
Kathy Pribbenow is also on the Presidents working group on document repository with Rick Whitmore, Audrey Coleman, Easan Selvan, Tom Ryan and Andrew Shoemaker. The group is looking at Xythos for our group to use.
International Affairs Committee – Alexis McKinley Jones reported that they will hold their 3rd meeting next Monday to look at topics related to international affairs, recruitment and retention of students, ways for faculty staff and students to interact, and admission standards for international students. This year the committee has been charged to look at the academic calendar. The University Calendar Committee is looking at winter break especially which could impact the international programs offered between fall and spring semesters and the summer and fall programs. There are over 60 short term programs offered during the 3 breaks so any change would have a large impact on these programs. The committee’s specific charge is to reassess from last year and to look at faculty, student and staff to see how they can we get more people involved with international experiences. Providing more incentives to faculty and departments to teach abroad is one item they have discussed along with having an international whirlwind tour. This would give more faculty and staff an opportunity to travel abroad. The University of Missouri does something similar with their faculty and staff so they are looking at this as a model. Another charge is to get students involved in some of the less commonly taken languages and providing awareness about those languages. Some academic programs/schools do not require a language so the committee is looking at how to incorporate an international component to those programs. Alexis commented that she really enjoys this committee and the people she gets to work with through the group. One of the challenges is that the tasks are so varied – her knowledge is study abroad and doesn’t have the admissions requirements experience and so they break into small groups based on expertise. Everyone has a different perspective and looking forward at the 2015 initiative this will be helpful to have the varied expertise. Rebecca Mayer asked how many post-doc international students there are and Alexis did not have an exact number but there is a handbook and report on the Provost web site that would have this information. Gail James asked about one of the Assistant Vice Provost candidates that had mentioned an initiative for global awareness among staff she asked how Alexis saw this unfolding at KU. Alexis said there is not a lot of money right now but looking at how to do this in the future.
Mary Ann Rasnak reported on the University Senate Retirees Benefits committee. There were two issue from her meeting to bring to our group. The first is that the committee has been charged to do exit interviews with retirees. There is no budget for this committee so this would be a problem in doing interviews or surveys. Mary Ann offered to ask our group if we would be willing to offer a small amount of money to this committee to partially fund such an activity – interviewing retirees for their general sense of retirement. Jeannette Johnson commented that this sounded like something HREO should be doing this. One big concern that the retirees have is that they do not have a real line of contact or real organized individual in the organization to answer retiree questions. Parking and office space often comes up with retirees and they have lots of questions about this but nobody to ask. This committee did a survey last year but they did not have any money to send a stamp to have the retirees return the survey so the response was pretty poor. One of the retirees at the meeting commented that they feel they have been left on an ice float to die. Mary Ann would like us to think about offering some financial support to the committee. Jeannette suggested that this is a University Senate committee and there should be budget money there to use. Mary Ann said her understanding was that was not available. Paul would like a cost estimate so he can take it to the University Senate and talk with Dennis about our two groups helping. The question was asked if OIRP would be helpful for this committee but the group consensus was that they are usually way behind so their help would be difficult to gain and the committee would still be expected to be paid and they are very expensive. Paul wondered what Ola would have to say about HREO’s involvement. Mary Ann shared that one idea presented at the meeting was an Aloha basket with information about retirement. There is a handbook online and an annual dinner where they are given some kind of gift but the basket is meant to be an informational ready reference on what kinds of benefits exist. Where do they get discounts in town what are the perks of being a KU retiree, etc. Angie Loving will take this information back to Ola.
Secretary: Angie Claussen read the list of those people who were excused for today. Thanks to Abby for taking notes in November and Mary Ann in December while Angie is on maternity leave.
Treasurer: Noelle Kurth was unable to attend but Paul reported that our balance is still $5, 762. We are expecting a bill from the KS Memorial Union for the telecast of the Provost’s brown bag session. Allyson has set it up with the Union that we can continue to do these for a 50% discount.
Governance and Representation Committee: Phil Wilke reported that the committee has three projects going on this semester.
Updating the bylaws that Paul mentioned they are reviewing, we will discuss the proposed changes at our November Senate meeting. Paul mentioned that the bylaw discussion can eat up a chunk of time so we may want to change the format of the meeting to do bylaws only in November.
Legislative visit, Phil met with USS to talk about our spring visit and he will provide more details on this later in the meeting.
There are several subcommittees working on the areas that our survey a couple of years ago identified as being most important. They are parking, professional development, performance evaluations, and retirement planning. Phil will keep the group updated as action items happen. Some of these items are long term and some are going to be happening right now.
New Business
Professional Development Committee: Allyson Flaster was unable to attend. Paul reported for her that one of the subcommittees met to discuss how they can do some fact finding on what people think professional development is and what they would like from the Unclassified Senate in this regard. The group will be doing a survey on what we need as Unclassified staff sometime in the next year. Gail James said that they are looking at follow up on what people would like to do. Amanda Ostreko is on another subcommittee that is looking at the scholarship idea and this group could use 1-2 more people to help with funding ideas for the travel scholarship. This would be a scholarship to use as a stipend for professional development. Lucy McGilley and Debbie Baker volunteered to help with this task. The events coming up are the 2008 election brown bag tomorrow in 116 SMRC. Jonathan Earle will be presenting and answering questions. The committee thought this was timely and would be interesting to have a quick discussion regarding the upcoming election. Nov 12th will be the next event which is behind the scenes at Audio Reader/KJHK and then Dec 5th there will be an updating career documents workshop.
Public Relations Committee: Mike Krings reported that the email reminder for the Dole event Friday went out this week. He put the steaming video of the Provost brown bag on our web site so anyone can go out and watch now. The committee collected about 50 ideas for web site and they include: make the site more for all unclassified staff and not just for senate - there lots of ways to do this, beef up the home page with maybe a splash page where you would click to enter the site in a more dynamic way, reorganize links in a more structured way, feature upcoming events on the front page, next meeting of the senate on the front page, link for concerns or questions that will go to the unclassified senate account, list of top priorities and what we are doing about them, our purpose stated more clearly as many people do not know what we do, state what we do and how we serve staff, professional development promotion more as big want of the group, keep bylaws, minutes, etc. but move to inside page so not such a banner, legislative issues page – needs new info and could be improved, hiring University Relations photographers so we get good quality pictures of events, improve resources page so not just a laundry list of links, promote the site so that people know it exists and why you would go there to look at it, tuition assistance, classes to improve skills, child care, state employee discount program, document repository link to that, etc. If you have any other ideas let Mike know as they will meet again in two weeks to talk about how to do this. Paul suggested using a test site so we can review before it goes live. Andrew Shoemaker requested that Tom Ryan make sure the design is fully accessible. Jeannette Johnson suggested that we would need a group of people to moderate the questions that would come into the site because responding can be very time consuming and we would need a wide range of knowledge to do this to be sure we are 100% correct.
Elections Committee: Megan Gannon reported that her committee will be meeting to talk about recruitment of senators and how to create awareness of the senate, if you have any suggestions on these email Megan. They will also be coming up with some samples for what to submit as information once you are nominated and looking at ideas on how to fill mid-term vacancies.
University Support Staff: Peggy Robinson was unable to attend so no report.
Student Senate: Mark Pacey was unable to attend so no report.
Faculty Senate – no report.
Unfinished Business – none.
New Business
Legislative visit – Phil met with Dennis, Betty Childers, and Jay from USS to discuss what we do on our visit and if there would be ways to piggy back or accompany us or if it would be beneficial for them to do a separate visit. USS does a visit with the civil service groups from the other universities but they are thinking of adding a day of visits on their own or joining us on our visit day. Phil could see pros and cons to a joint or separate visit. The pros would be that this visit involves calling scores of legislators to schedule 5 minute meetings, making handouts, coordinating with Government relations on what we should be representing as a University and as Unclassified Staff so a combined visit would put more boots on the ground. There would be more people so we could hit more twice as many legislators in the same time. We could really hit the same messages with both groups so there would not be confusion. The cons would be that we only get a few minutes of their time so if we are trying to give USS, Unclassified Staff and KU messages that may be too much clutter in too little time to get one effective message out to them. Another con would be that there might be a time when USS and US have divergent interests. Pros of separate visits would be more reinforcement of messages, learning backgrounds of legislators, more face time and cons would be that we might have people that think they just met with us and there could be some mud as to who represents what group. USS will be doing a common lobbying day and they will be there once already so it runs into the just met with you factor. Rebecca Mayer asked about the logistics of this. Phil stated that one USS and one US person would meet at the same time with a legislator and have a script to discuss with them. Our day would be separate from the day USS goes with other schools civil service groups. The question was raised about if there is a distinction in legislators minds between the US and USS and would that make a difference. That is one of the messages that might get lost –that we are separate groups. Another question was if legislation of some kind could come up that we would not agree upon or that could benefit one group and disadvantage the other, but there hasn’t been anything so far. Jason O’Connor asked where were with USS and meeting up with WSU and having lunch? He said that four or five years ago the group met with WSU but we have not done anything since. We might have more in common with US at WSU than USS here. Mary Ann Rasnak thought that a united front and strength in numbers seems good with te concern being that they would not really get what we do. If the message is more focused on rising or lowering tide if all our boats are in the same pool it might make the most sense. Phil commented that in the past the KU talking points have been deferred maintenance, pharmacy, Cancer center, etc. and they have about five minutes to say who we are. Reinforcing messages is good - or is it too much. We are never able to schedule with everyone per Jeannette Johnson and even of those scheduled we lose some of them. Perhaps having groups on different days might catch different people. Jeannette’s perspective is that it is not so important if we are together or not just that we be on the same page with talking points. In the past the people we have set up meetings with have been the leadership of both parties, committee chairs, education and procreation committees, and local Lawrence/Douglas county legislators. So we could hit the same people on two different days. If we combined forces could try to get everybody or we might want to stick with the people we have done in the past. USS has not done this on their own in the last couple of years – just with the Regents schools. Paul would like to put this to a vote as USS is wanting to explore options soon. They did not show a strong desire to do a joint or singular meeting. Aaron Quisenberry asked if there was any concern over USS being their twice and not getting the US message at all because we are only there once. Jeannette did not see this as being a problem. The Civil Service groups are trying to make a presence because KOSE (Kansas Organization of State Employees) have a strong presence in the capitol and they will imply that they represent everyone but they don’t represent us well. That is why Regents Civil Service and USS want to get their name out. We are hurt by this KOSE group so we too need to get our word out. The group decided they were not ready to take a vote today. Phil can forward to the group his pros and cons and we will have an email discussion or talk at the next meeting about this. Logistics don’t have to happen this week. Jeannette suggested that it might be useful to learn more about KOSE and their current agenda and the extent to which we need to make a distinction between us. Mary Ann moved to postpone the vote to next meeting and Paul will forward Phil’s bullet points. The group seconded and agreed. Aaron asked of the talking points were available yet and if they same or do USS and US have different points. There could be different opinions but we aren’t that far in the planning process.
Meeting was adjourned at 1:00
The Oct 30th executive council meeting has been cancelled. The next full senate meeting will be November 13th in 1 Eaton Hall from 12:00-1:30.