FAC Meeting Minutes

February 12, 2004 - 10:30 am
Attending: Attending: Micheline Chalhoub-Deville, Rahima Wade, Ellie Herman, Joyce Moore, Nancy Jackson, Dave Jepsen, Scott McNabb

The minutes of the February 5 meeting were read, revised and then approved.

Scott shared his draft of a resolution/recommendation from the FAC in regard to the Program Coordinator issue. We discussed the draft and offered several ideas. Micheline and Scott will meet to work on revising this statement and then send it out to the rest of the FAC members for our feedback.

We briefly discussed the role of the FAC. Are we a body to set an agenda ourselves for what we believe are important issues concerning the faculty and the college or are we an advisory group for and to the Dean, acting as a conduit of information and feedback between the faculty and the Dean? We agree to revisit this question at a later meeting.

Ellie passed around information about the Peat Marwick audit report from several years ago. We spent the rest of our hour-long meeting discussing both how to approach the development of unique characteristics of our college and what those characteristics might be. Several of us liked Indiana's model of 5 or 6 key themes with one-word adjectives. We could then list our particular strengths (projects, programs) underneath these descriptors. We talked about trying to identify our core values. Here are some terms that were discussed as possibilities (in no special order):

High quality public education
Public education that works
Quality of life in Iowa City and Iowa
Putting research to work
Basic research reaching the populace (agriculture, medicine, business)

We discussed whether the FAC should come up with the distinguishing characteristics and then ask the faculty to react to them, suggest additions, changes etc. or whether we should engage the faculty in the process of developing the characteristics from the ground up. We also discussed whether we were trying to develop a list that distinguishes us nationally or within the state. We noted that the difference in emphasis might lead to choosing different characteristics.

We concluded the meeting at 11:30 am. Our next meeting is 10 am on Friday, February 20.

Respectfully submitted,

Rahima Wade