Academic Senate Report to the Board

Information/Discussion items:

The Senate is actively engaged in a discussion about electing our next Vice President/ President Elect. The issue is that we are out of sync with our elections and are debating how to move forward. It is highly likely that we'll hold an election well before the end of the semester.

Our Director of Research and Planning, Rob Simas, presented the Senate with partial ARCC
data and a first draft of the College's 500 word report. The data in the ARCC report comes from performance data that is aggregated at two levels—the individual college level (core indicators) and across the community college system (system-wide indicators). The system-wide indicators are based on peer groupings (i.e. similar size and distance to transfer partners, similar levels of academic preparedness upon entry). It truly is an apple to apples comparison. Our response is, and our numbers, are important because the State Legislature uses this data to make decisions about California Community Colleges. Our local Academic Senate Senator's will come back to our next meeting ready to report back from their constituents and provide comments on the ARCC report.

Dr. Laguerre had presented to the Senate a few weeks ago the idea of having the Academic Senate President as a standing member of the President's Cabinet. I wanted to ensure that the Senate was in agreement with this move. Our discussion showed that indeed the Senate approves of this move.

Transfer Center Coordinator Barbara Pavão gave a very informative presentation on transfer rates at Solano. Here longitudinal data supports that a growing number of students are transferring from SCC to both UCs and CSUs. I think that because transfer is one of the three pillars of California Community Colleges' mission, it would be a good idea for Ms. Pavão to give a version of her report to the Board.

Finally, I wanted to share with the Board the response I got from Dean Rota from Fine and Applied Arts/Behavioral Sciences regarding the elimination of courses in the area of textiles and clothing the Board was concerned about in a previous meeting:

"Many years ago (maybe 15) the faculty in Fashion Design and Fashion Merchandising retired.  Their positions were not replaced and over the years we stopped offering most of the courses.  We have moved the Textiles course to Interior Design and some of the costume related courses were moved to theater.  We haven't offered the courses in these majors for more than 10 years and they should have been removed from the Curriculum during the last curriculum review.  I took on the task of cleaning up several areas where we have no faculty and no courses offered (this is reflected in the Curriculum Committee minutes)"