Minutes of Physical Sciences Task Force

November 2, 2001

Meeting Place: PIN 302

Meeting Time: 1:30 pm

Participants: Ivy Abraham, Dean Becker, Dale Biggs, Bob Blodgett, Chris Cavalli, John Cise, Saad Eways, Ron Johns, Martin Prahovic, C. D. Rao, Elliot Richmond, George Staff, Tom Stege, Laura Tacheny, and Allen Underwood

1.) Approval of Agenda

2.) Approval of Minutes for 10/12/01

3.) Information items presented:

a.) Hiring Committee Progress — An ad has been placed in Physics Today for the new full-time faculty positions in Physics. The cost was reduced to $380 form an initially outrageous fee of $1200. Kudos to Saad Eways for getting this in under the publishing deadline.

b.) Lab Coordinator Duties — A finalized version of the duties of Lab Coordinators has been made. This led to some discussion wherein it was decided that our highly trained lab techs are quite capable of running open labs by themselves. Our programs do not have many of the safety issues faced by the biology and chemistry programs.

c.) New Adminstrative Asst. at RVS — Mark McCaffery is the new Math/Science administrative asst. at RVS. Yay!

d.) Office Hours — All full-time faculty need to have at least tried to register their office hours on-line. Glitches have prevented some faculty's hours from being accepted.

e.) Budget Warning — Because of budgetary shortfalls, we need to spend our budget money now rather than later. If we wait too long, some of the money will be swept away.

4.) Items presented for discussion:

a.) Tutoring by Lab Techs — The item had never before been formally discussed. The TF gave its approval for lab techs tutoring students either through the college or outside of it. The only issue of concern was if the lab tech had inside knowledge of instructor's exams, but since our lab techs have integrity and no privileged access to exams, this shouldn’t be a problem.

b.) Departmental T-shirts — A resounding sense of apathy surrounded this item. Since no one was interested, we're not going to have any.

5.) Items presented for action:

a.) Faculty Workload Forms — Forms for Spring. '02, were distributed to faculty for review. Everyone present approved of their forms.

b.) Full-time Faculty Positions — Only one full-time faculty position in Physics has been approved for replacement according to the Executive Vice-President's list. Since we had two unfilled vacancies from faculty leaving last year, this is absurd. Apparently, the funding for one of the positions has been used for a developmental reading temporary full-time position, which will evaporate come next May. The money is then supposed to return to us for the second position. The TF decided to inform the Dean of our concerns and bide our time.

Minutes of ESTE/GEOL Subcommittee

November 2, 2001

Participants: Ivy Abraham, Bob Blodgett, Ron Johns, George Staff, and Tom Stege

1.) The subcommittee approved of a departmental policy against smoking on field trips. Smoking will be not be allowed at exposures or in the vans, but is permissible at other stops, such as for lunch.

2.) The Office of Institutional Effectiveness balked at scheduling a SWOT meeting for the Geology and ESTE program reviews on a Sunday, but they are seeing what they can do.

3.) Lab fees were not included in the catalog for any geology courses. According to Dianne Olla, the higher-ups decide not to include them for reasons known only to them. However, they still charge them.

4.) The process of getting approval for increasing the half-time geology lab tech position to full-time is progressing slowly.

5.) The chemistry program is involved in a major overhaul of safety procedures and safety upgrades. The only potentially hazardous chemical our programs currently use is very dilute HCl, which, it was agreed, does not really pose any significant hazard at all since it is much weaker than even stomach acid.

Minutes of PHYS/AST/ENG Subcommittee

November 2, 2001

There was no PHYS/AST/ENG subcommittee meeting.