Wednesday, February 4,
2004
Albrecht
Auditorium
Panel present: President
Steadman Upham, Provost Phil Dreyer, Vice Provost Teresa Shaw, Senior Vice
President and Treasurer Bill Everhart, and Vice President for Student Services
and Dean of Students Jim Whitaker
Stead began meeting at 6:00
p.m.
Stead opened by saying that
the meeting would be a question and answer session. He welcomed everyone to the spring
semester 2004 and noted that this is an interesting time in the school year
because students are beginning to think about graduation. CGU has anticipated 580 students
graduating this year. The spring
term symbolizes each student’s hard work towards this endeavor. The faculty brought in a huge number of
research grants as well. The
university is a very active place and Stead noted he is delighted the students
are part of it. He introduced the
panel before taking questions.
Student
question:
Do we have a housing
update? Has any progress been made
since our last Town Hall meeting?
Bill
Everhart:
We have hired an architect
firm to do schematic design plans and other landscape projects. There was already one meeting to
organize the work timeline, building designs and cost estimates. On Monday, February 2nd,
David Salazar walked through with the city of Claremont to discuss approvals and
everything went well. The plans
were right on track with the city and that is a major accomplishment. Now we want to do a programming piece
and interview students who live in the dorms and relatively nearby. We want to meet the students’ needs and
the best way to do this is through interviews and surveys. The schematic design will take about
three months and then we can work on commissions with the city. Our goal is to present the plans and
design to the Board this summer and hopefully put a shovel in the ground late
spring or early summer 2005. There
are no foreseeable obstacles in this project and we are very optimistic about
this.
Stead Upham:
We have reached a tentative
agreement with the city about the infrastructure improvements and the college
thinks it is acceptable.
Student suggestion and
question:
The student wants to recruit
students for housing interviews.
The student also wanted to
know if there will be a program to offer financial assistance for
housing.
Stead
Upham:
Stead said he is certain
that there will be an increase in rents because they are builind a brand new
state of the art housing facility.
He also says that while financial aid has been and will continue to be
available for all students there is no specific program to provide additional
financial aid for housing.
Student
question:
Mario Villareal, GSC
President, raised concerns about current housing at CGU. He wanted to be sure that CGU will
continue to put money into something that will not be here much longer.
Bill
Everhart:
We will not decrease the
maintenance budgets on 1111 N. Dartmouth and we will try to structure the new
housing to provide options on the students’ rent (i.e. 1, 2 and 3 bedroom
apartments).
Student
question:
Student would like to see
committees created to look into alternate funds to offset the rent in the new
housing. Would the panel be open to
something like that?
Stead Upham and Jim
Whitaker:
We are always open to good
ideas.
Linda
Bandov:
Could you please expand on
the transdisciplinary course so students have a better
understanding?
Stead Upham:
Discussions with faculty
regarding core course requirements have been on going for a while, but the plan
faded away. The discussions have
been re-started with faculty and we have gone a different direction as to what
course the core course will be.
Also, this is going into effect for the next group of doctoral students
(fall 2004). Current doctoral
students do not have this requirement.
Phil Dreyer:
Transdisciplinary
discussions came about when we received a ($5 million) gift from George
Kozmetsky. Mr. Kozmetsky’s desire
was for CGU to incorporate transdisciplinary studies in our programs because we
should have a more exciting way to do graduate studies. Undergraduate studies include a broad
general education and then the last two years you concentrate on your
major. In higher education you
focus more narrowly and learn more and more about less and less. Transdisciplinary studies will create a
different, if not better, graduate education. The first idea was we would have one big
course, but that flopped. What
would be the focus, the syllabus, the subject? One large course with few faculty was
not a good idea. Now we will have a
lot of faculty with relatively few students. We will have faculty volunteers to teach
a relatively small group.
Right now we have twenty
senior faculty volunteers who will work with a tutorial group of about twelve
students from different schools. We
will put faculty together in groups "pods" of two or three so we will have about
twelve students to one faculty group.
The faculty will be from different schools and a student can not be a
student in any of the schools represented by the faculty heading that tutorial
group. This way the students and
faculty can share ideas and common experiences. Content will be laid out by faculty
scholars from the George Kozmetsky department.
The theme for the course for
the first year will be poverty, capital and ethics. This will rotate but it is not certain
how often it will rotate. The
faculty and students will operate within the content of the theme, but do it in
their own way. This is a 4-unit
course required for new PhD students and is part of the 72-unit program, this is
not an add on. We are also
requiring this at the beginning of the students’ programs because we hope to
influence students enough to use these ideas in their research and work.
We are in the process of
hiring a full-time faculty member to be the George Kozmetsky Chair. This is a rotating position and will
change every year. We
will also have lectures from folks under the George Kozmetsky Chair.
My purpose is to transform
graduate education. This is an
attempt and it may fail, but that's okay because you learn from failures.
Stead Upham:
Graduate students lament the
fact they ended up with tunnel vision when most complex and difficult problems
require more than tunnel vision. We
are creating opportunity for students to have this experience at the beginning
of their career.
Student
question:
The tuition is going to
increase for next year. Are there
specific plans for opportunity of weakness?
Stead Upham:
Tuition will increase
3.9%. The financial team and
leadership team has researched this increase. Higher education faces financial
hardship and we will increase financial aid accordingly. We will stay with our current service
level budget. We are not proposing
to cut anything out. It would be
great to hold tuition flat, but we cannot.
The public universities are expecting a 44% increase. And our tuition is still the lowest of
all the Claremont colleges. We are
also still in the lowest quartile compared to our competitors in the same
university bracket (Higher Education - Research Intensive). We will balance our budget this year,
and we will be able to balance it next year too with this increase.
Student
question:
Will there also be an
increase in doctoral study fees or student service fees?
Jim
Whitaker:
Doctoral study fees will
remain the same and the student services fee increases by
$5/semester.
Student
question:
The GSC does not appear to
be a very democratic organization.
Please tell me how they operate.
Mario
Villarreal:
The GSC is governed by a
constitution that is currently on its 4th draft. The GSC constitution is available online
and there are representatives from each school involved with the GSC. The GSC meetings are open to every CGU
student who wants to attend.
Regular emails are sent out about when and where the meetings will take
place. We are a democratic
organization.
Student
reply:
Disagreed with Mario. Would like to see the constitution
amended so there is more student participation and also added that he was not
even aware that Mario Villarreal was his GSC President.
Mario
Villarreal:
We can definitely discuss
this more to resolve these issues.
Aris
Karagiorgakis:
Spam keeps coming through on
my email. Students keep asking me
why this happens.
Stead
Upham:
This is the largest problem
with computing. Postini is an
effective Spam filter and does catch 90% of junk mail.
Jim
Whitaker:
All three CGU lists have
filters, but Spam is coming in from the departments because they do not monitor
their lists. Chris Wyatt is looking
at additional filters to put on the list serves. This is a big problem and we want to
correct it as much as the students do.
Aris:
Can you send an email out at
least letting the students know that you know this is an issue and are working
to resolve it?
Jim
Whitaker:
Yes, but we want to be sure
students are opening their emails and not deleting them thinking they are junk
mail.
Linda
Bandov:
How are you developing
positions for students at the university?
Stead Upham:
Discussions with the Provost
are ongoing regarding using students in classrooms.
Phil Dreyer:
We are continually looking
for opportunities for students to teach at the five Claremont colleges. We are speaking with the Academic Deans
of each of the colleges, but unfortunately, their marketing campaign is that
they do not hire graduate students for teaching assistants. They only hire full-time faculty, no
teaching assistants. This has been
a problem for a while and it is ongoing.
Phil encouraged the students to pursue opportunities themselves, and at
every college around here and not just the 5 C’s.
Teresa
Shaw:
Encouraged students to hook
up with a mentor in or outside of Claremont. The program that Dr. Laurie Richlin
teaches is a great program to incorporate teaching in Claremont.
Aris
Karagiorgakis:
Why train CGU students in
teaching positions when we can’t do that until we have our MA degree? The emphasis should be on T.A.
positions.
Teresa Shaw:
T.A. positions are what we
are working on. No one should be
teaching until they have passed their course work and have their Master’s
degree.
Tamer
Balci:
I have heard that the
funding will be cut for PFF, is there anything in place to keep the program at
CGU?
Teresa
Shaw:
We have to work on
that. We had a 2 year grant and
we're working on getting additional grants to continue funding the program.
Mario
Villarreal:
The whiteboards are terrible
and frustrating. He buys his own
Windex towels to wipe them because he cannot clean them with an
eraser.
Bill
Everhart:
He will figure out a way to
solve this problem. We tried some
solutions but we may have to start a replacement program. The windex towels worked? Maybe for the rest of the semester we'll
have to use those until we can figure something else out.
Stead
Upham:
Thank you for
attending.
Meeting ended at 6:59
p.m.