Meeting Minutes from 12/7/12 Executive Committee Meeting

(more or less in order of importance)

 

 

Course evaluations: They are happening!

• We’ve worked on a number of drafts of the evaluations, getting lots of feedback from various faculty
• The goal is to collect information that will be valuable primarily to students in choosing classes, but also helpful to the EO and faculty
• There will be evaluations for this past Fall semester, which will be used as somewhat of a trial run to see how well the designed evaluation works, collect preliminary data, etc.
• The current plan is that the results will be available online, potentially on the Political Science Student Representation website
• Fall 2012 Course Evaluations were sent out to the student listserv last Friday, and by Margaret earlier today. The link is here.

 

New Fellowship program: will go into effect for incoming Fall 2013 class

• A fixed number of students: 12, all of whom will receive funding
  • 9 “GC Fellowships”
    • expectation to be full-time students
    • 3 Tuition-only fellowships
      • directed to incoming students who have full-time jobs and/or other sources of funding
    • There was much debate about whether 12 is an absolute cap
      • President’s office and Provost’s Office say yes
      • Questions about whether we could add more if there weren’t fellowships attached, or if there was other money in one way or another
      • If there’s going to be any effort to admit more than 12, it will be on an individual, concrete case-by-case basis
        • More-or-less a consensus among the faculty on not wanting to make hypothetical challenge/request for flexibility
    • Our department has been at the 12 number give or take a few for the past couple of years
• Process/logistics
  • The GC Fellowships will be a $25,000/year stipend, with NYSHIP, for a 1/1 teaching load (probably can be adjusted to a 0/2 or 2/0 depending on student and campus needs on a case by case basis)
    • Will probably be able to “bank” up to one year leave of absence
    • The Admissions Committee will be ranking all candidates and go down the ranked list to fill the 12 spots
      • MA students applying to the PhD program will apply like everyone else, and will essentially be like “new” people in the applicant pool
    • Will not lose department Grad B’s
    • There will be money (unclear from where?) provided to campuses to hire more adjuncts
    • MA programs will be used to “fill bodies in classes”
• Concerns and Criticisms
  • Some departments (especially Sociology) has voiced concerns about the cap on the number of students
    • Especially if there is money at the department level to support more students
    • Concern that this will lessen the number of minority students
    • Possibility that this will make it more difficult for international students given visa-related and other restrictions they may be facing
• We raised the (in our minds completely legitimate) concerns that many of you have voiced regarding the inequities that this creates: in addition to the current funded/no-funded stratification, there will now be another stratification where incoming students will be receiving $7,000/year more than current ECFs for half the work/year, not to mention the inequality created between incoming funded students and people without ECFs. The response was unsympathetic. The common responses included that this benefits us all in the long-run (reasoning: better students and a better reputation) and that isn’t a matter of great concern.
• From the administration’s perspective, this is  a done deal in all regards.

 

Moving forward: this spring, EO wants to discuss the possibility of more strictly capping enrollment in courses

• Concerns include too many students in some classes, too many students from other programs, too many MALS students
  • Possibility that non-political science students would have to “apply” to take (all?) (some)? POLSC classes
• One potential problem is that if the department was to limit the number of non-political science students in POLSC classes, it might make it more difficult for us to enroll in non-POLSC classes.
• Stay tuned…

 

Archiving of select dissertation proposals: per a request from the DSC, the department will (soon?) be implementing an online archive of select dissertation proposals

• In attempt to collect only the “good” ones, this will be a decision made by each student’s committee at the send of the Second Exam
• There was also discussion of adding a central database of titles of those currently working on dissertation
  • Perhaps they get added after passing Second Exam?
  • How to systematically collect for people who have already passed Second Exam?

 

Student Satisfaction Survey

• We received results from the GC-wide student survey from this past Spring
• EO and other faculty understood the data very positively (and there are some things to be positive about)
• Also much to be concerned about in the report, which we plan to bring up at future meetings (discussion was cut off due to time constraints)
• Data to be used in future professional development workshops and other areas
• Still a question how public this data is going to be made – our hope is that at the very least all students have access to it
• EO wants the raw data so that further, more refined analysis can be done to it

 

Career Development Office: A new Career Development Office will be opening in February

• Will centralize letter-writing services (as opposed to using Interfolio)
• May help with workshops on the departmental level 

 

Budget: Effect of Hurricane Sandy on budget is unclear