General Faculty, Faculty Senate meetings

Acting President Targett discusses UD initiatives and accomplishments

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Editor's note: For more detailed information on the Faculty Senate, including meeting minutes, visit the Faculty Senate website.

1:52 p.m., Oct. 9, 2015--University of Delaware Acting President Nancy Targett discussed campus initiatives for diversity, enrollment and development during the semiannual General Faculty Meeting held Monday, Oct. 5, in Gore Hall, which was followed by the monthly meeting of the Faculty Senate. 

Ongoing initiatives identified by Targett included the unfolding of the University’s newest strategic planning initiative, Delaware Will Shine, led by University Provost Domenico Grasso. 

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“We need to work together to drive our plan to meaningful outcomes,” Targett said. “I really do believe that we are responsible for shaping our own future.” 

Targett noted that UD once again exceeded its first year student enrollment goals of admitting 3,800 new students to campus. 

“We are on the positive side of this,” Targett said. “Some 60 percent of colleges across America are falling short of their admission goals.” 

Although undergraduate admissions have exceeded enrollment goals during the past two academic years, more needs to be done to grow the number of grad students choosing UD, Targett said. 

“About 19 percent of the degrees we award are master’s or doctoral degrees, while among our peers, the median is 37 percent,” Targett said. “One of the things we’re doing right now is looking at our whole enrollment picture and seeing where we need to improve.” 

Targett also discussed efforts around creating a more diverse and inclusive campus. 

Becoming a more welcoming community to all students involves a sustained commitment from all members of the UD community, Targett said. 

“It has to be systematic and systemic. It has to permeate every fiber of UD, every college, every student, every staff member and every administrator,” Targett said. “We all have to live it.” 

Provost’s report 

Grasso noted that an important goal for UD lies in realizing the ideal of a campus community united in its efforts to be more inclusive and welcoming to all members of the University. 

“Delaware Will Shine makes a bold statement on the first page of its plan that sets the tone for what is to follow,” Grasso said. “To paraphrase, the University of Delaware is committed to excellence and consequentiality in everything that we do. This high standard forms the basis of all world class universities, and UD rightly deserves to be considered in the pantheon of the world’s distinguished universities.”

Grasso said that while individuals may not always agree on what is the best course of action to take on certain issues, members of the UD community should agree on where UD is going, and when differences occur, to so civilly, respectfully and constructively. 

An example of a successful collaborative process, Grasso said, is revision of the UD budget model, which resulted from a comprehensive review of the process that included a faculty-led task force, an external review team and discussions with academic and administrative leadership.

“We were ever mindful that it was our core academic priorities that should drive the structuring of any budget model,” Grasso said. “I am happy to announce that we will be implementing our new model in July 2017. I would also like to note that I’ve invited the senate executive committee and budget committee to meet with us, and we will be posting publically the details of the new model by midweek.” 

Report on enrollment and admissions

Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, provided senators with an enrollment management and admissions update, as well as a look ahead.

“I’m going to focus down on the area that most everyone here would like to talk about,” Lucier said. “If you recall, when I came here a year ago, we were on the heels of the first-year enrollment being 4,178, against the target of 3,800.”

Lucier said the idea for this year’s class arriving in September was to admit 1,000 fewer students this year, and that the aggregate yield for the University would decline from 25.3 to somewhere around 24.7 percent. 

“That is exactly what we did. We admitted 900 fewer students,” Lucier said. “What happened is that the yield actually went up over a point. Quality went up significantly. We had consistent diversity, as we did with last year, even as a proportion of the entering class.” 

Lucier said UD is among a rare set of institutions nationally that are becoming more selective while their yield is increasing at the same time. The result was another 4,000-plus first-year class, with a record number of students in triple rooms in residence halls.

“Those students had an amazing experience in your classes, and they had an amazing experience in co-curricular activities and student life,” Lucier said. "The best recruiters are our current students. We didn’t put more money on the table, we didn’t compete on price, we competed solely on what the quality of the UD experience is, and more students said yes to it than we thought.”

A strategic enrollment management plan introduced by Lucier identified strategic enrollment inhibitors and initiatives, which include making UD stand out from the crowd in the middle of the admissions market and developing a more diversified portfolio of undergraduate enrollment drivers for greater UD financial security. 

Additional initiatives include making UD a more broadly diverse and welcoming campus, protecting UD’s accomplishments in student success and improving retention and graduation of some underrepresented populations and transfer students.

Faculty Senate meeting 

Robert Opila, president of the Faculty Senate and professor of materials science, noted that the search for vice president and general counsel is in the final stages, with members of the senate's executive committee and the American Association of University Professors meeting with the final candidates on campus.  

John Jebb, Faculty Senate parliamentarian and professor of English, gave members of the senate an overview of the history of Robert’s Rules and its application to how senate meetings are conducted at UD. 

During its regularly scheduled meeting, the senate voted to move to a later date a discussion and vote on a resolution stating that no one holding an administrative position at or above the level of department chair in a particular college may be a member of any departmental promotion and tenure committee in that college, or be a member of the college promotion and tenure committee of their respective college. 

By a 39-5 vote, senators defeated a resolution stating that the UD Faculty Senate reaffirms its commitment to reserving for the colleges certain rights, including the powers to seek the continual improvement of academic programs, standards, and achievements in the respective colleges. 

Senators did approve, by a 38-5 margin, a resolution noting its concerns regarding the limitations of the completely confidential nature of the presidential search process. 

The senate further resolved that that the search committee be requested to determine which short-listed candidates would participate in open public forums and to invite at least three and preferably more willing candidates for this purpose before the next UD president is selected, so that UD students and faculty and members of the public and their elected representatives can provide meaningful input into the selection. 

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the Faculty Senate is Monday, Nov. 2, in 104 Gore Hall. 

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