Academic Senate President’s Report to the Board

Meetings:

I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Laguerre recently and we spoke of the importance of institutional trust, accountability, and adherence to process at Solano. He was able to clarify for me some of the apparent inconsistencies in job "morphing" as we adjust to budget constraints and move toward reorganization and we did have an opportunity to speak more at length about the proposed Vallejo expansion.

Dr. Steinback: You'll be happy to know that while accreditation is no less important to Dr. Steinback and me, we have been spending our time talking about other important issues to the campus. The Solano is doing some internal recruiting for Coordinator positions for Basic Skills, Ethnic Studies and Humanities, preparing for the Strategic Planning Workshop, and continuing with our discussions about faculty hiring priorities. Of course, we are continuing to work toward our next Self-Study and are working on training opportunities during our Spring Flex Cal.

Enrollment Management: Dr. Jensen was on campus today and gave an informative talk on the nature and importance of enrollment management. He sends his regards.

In the Senate:

We had an extra-ordinary Joint meeting with Education Administrators for an hour to continue our discussions on Full-time faculty hiring priorities for 2010-2011. Working on a compressed timeline, Deans have sought input from faculty and are now collecting data to put forward requests to hire two faculty hires. The deadline for their faculty hiring reports is December 17^th. The Senate and the Deans will continue their discussion on faculty hires in our next regular joint meeting in January.

Also, fulfilling our obligations to the Integrated Planning Process as a Review Group to Strategic and Operational Proposals that speak to Quality Teaching and Learning, the Senate and the Deans continued our discussions on proposals.

We also continued our discussions in the Senate after the Ed. Administrators left to get a Distance Education Report from the DE Coordinator, Sandy Rotenberg. I've linked to her presentation but would like that because the report is so informative that it be presented to the Board in a future meeting.

The Senate received an update on our Enrollment Management and Election Procedures Taskforces. With Enrollment Management the Senate can expect to have a discussion with Dr. Steinback, gather up best practices for retention and persistence from a faculty perspective and then a resolution or paper on the topic by the end of the spring semester. As for Election Procedures, while I had thought the taskforce was deliberating on the possibility of online elections… they've decided to consider more "old school" ideas like staffing an election booth for Senate elections. The Election Procedures taskforce will have a final report soon.