December 11, 2009 - Faculty Governance

Meeting of the Faculty Council

Friday, December 11, 2009
3:00 p.m.
Hitchcock Multipurpose Room
Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History

Chancellor Holden Thorp and
Professor McKay Coble, Chair of the Faculty, presiding

Agenda

3:00 Chancellor’s Remarks and Question Period

Chancellor Holden Thorp

3:10 Provost’s Remarks and Question Period

Interim Provost Bruce Carney

3:20 Committee Reports

Faculty Executive Committee (Prof. McKay Coble, Chair)
Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure Committee (Prof. Michael Gerhardt, Chair)

3:30 Panel Discussion: Getting Engaged with Global Initiatives

Advance Reading: Strategic Roadmap for Globalizing UNC-Chapel Hill (Complete draft, March 2009)

Mr. Daniel Lebold, Director of Development for Global Education, moderator
Prof. Peggy Bentley, Associate Dean for Global Health, Gillings School of Global Public Health
Prof. Myron Cohen, J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, Immunology & Public Health, School of Medicine; Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases; and Director of Institute of Global Health and Infectious Disease
Prof. Suzanne Gulledge, Clinical Professor of Middle Grades Education, School of Education
Dr. Niklaus Steiner, Director, Center for Global Initiatives

4:30 Resolution 2009-5. On Reappointment of Lecturers in the College of Arts and Sciences

[Note: As of 12/9/09, this resolution has been tabled as this issue has been addressed by Dean Gil. See Dean Gil’s memo to College department and curriculum chairs and administrative managers.]

5:00 Adjourn

Minutes

The General Faculty and Faculty Council of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill convened at 3:00 p.m. in the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

The following 55 members of the Council attended: Aaron, Anderson, Bagnell, Bechtel, Bickford, Binotti, Blocher, Bloom, Bowdish, Jane Brown, Cornell, DeSaix, Earp, Gerhardt, Gilliland, Greene, Gulledge, Guskiewicz, Halloran, Hayslett, Irons, Janken, Koomen, Lee, Lopez, Lothspeich, Maffly-Kipp, Mauro, McMillan, Melamut, Morris-Natschke, Morse, New, Owen, Papanikolas, Paul, Persky, Quinonez, Renner, Rhodes, Richardson, Shea, Sheldon, Shields, Stearns, Sweeney, Sweet, Szypsak, Thrailkill, Tisdale, Tobin, Troster, Van Tilburg, Wallace and Williams.

The following 25 members were granted excused absences: Andrews, Blackburn, Brice, Carol Brown, Coleman, Egan, Ernst, Fuchs Lokensgar, Gerber, Hartnett, Heenan, Hodges, Katznelson, Kelly, Koroluk, Mieczkowski, O’Connell-Edwards, Paquette, Rodgers, Schoenfisch, Stein, Stotts, Thorp, Toews, and Yankaskas.

The following 5 members were absent without excuse: Blalock, Catellier, Dilworth-Anderson, Marr, and Verkerk.

Call to Order

Chancellor Holden Thorp called the meeting to order promptly at 3:00 pm. He announced that Chair of the Faculty McKay Coble would not be present due to some medical treatments, and that Secretary of the Faculty Joseph Ferrell would preside in her stead.

Chancellor’s Remarks and Question Period

Chancellor Thorp invited faculty to attend the winter Commencement on December 20 at 2:00 p.m. and noted that Prof. Lisa Carey, Associate Professor of Medicine and Medical Director for the UNC Breast Center (part of the new North Carolina Cancer Hospital), would speak.

Thorp said North Carolina is doing “extremely well” in garnering research funds from the federal stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. UNC and Duke together, he noted, have attracted $287 million from the stimulus. North Carolina is ranked fifth in the number of jobs created or saved by the stimulus, sixth for receipt of funding from NIH, and tenth for total stimulus funding. He said that the Fourth Congressional District (our district) is the third highest funded district for NIH stimulus funds after Boston and Seattle. Thorp thanked everyone for making Carolina a part of this story.

The chancellor asked for questions, but there were none.

Provost’s Remarks and Question Period

Interim Provost Bruce Carney announced that Senior Associate Provost for Finance and Planning Elmira Mangum has accepted a position at Cornell and will depart within the next two weeks. Her interim replacement will be Dave Perry.

Carney thanked those who served on the five-year review committee for University Librarian and Associate Provost for University Libraries Sarah Michalak; he said that Michalak has been reappointed for another five years.

Carney described progress on work to develop a new Academic Plan. Senior Associate Dean Bill Andrews and Prof. Sue Estroff have agreed to chair the undertaking, and Carney said that about two-thirds of the rest of the committee of about fifteen or sixteen people has been appointed. They expect to begin work in January by evaluating the previous plan. They will seek to involve faculty in the conversation through public forums and subcommittees.

Carney said he was excited to see the project get underway. In anticipation of the discussion of globalization later in today’s meeting, Carney said that although we no longer have funding for an Associate Provost for International Affairs (position formerly held by Prof. Peter Coclanis), Executive Associate Provost Ron Strauss has agreed to be the Interim Chief International Officer for the next nine to twelve months while things are reorganized. He emphasized the university’s continued commitment to globalization, embodied partly in the new Global Research Institute that has been established with Coclanis as the director. Efforts are underway, he said, to invigorate the campus’s engagement with globalization by redefining the international affairs advisory council and other institutes, especially those engaging health affairs faculty and students. Strauss, he concluded, will be studying thirteen of our peer institutions to learn how their internationalization efforts are structured.

Carney opened the floor to questions, but there were none.

Annual Reports of Standing Committees

Faculty Executive Committee (Prof. McKay Coble, Chair)

On Coble’s behalf, Ferrell filed the report of the Faculty Executive Committee by title and asked for questions. There were none.

Appointments, Promotions, and Tenure Committee (Prof. Michael Gerhardt, Chair)

Gerhardt introduced himself as the new chair of APT this year and presented the committee’s annual report. He noted that the statistics in the report covered the period when both previous chair Ruth Walden and he were chairs. APT’s workload, he said, has lately been lighter than usual. Ten applications have been approved since he became chair, while one has been sent back for revision and more information. He explained that the APT reviews tenure packages from across the university and makes recommendations that go to the provost. He asked for questions, but there were none.

Panel Discussion: Getting Engaged with Global Initiatives

About an hour of the Faculty Council’s time was devoted to a panel discussion about global initiatives on campus, moderated by Mr. Daniel Lebold, Director of Development for Global Education. Panelists included:

Prof. Peggy Bentley, Associate Dean for Global Health, Gillings School of Global Public Health
Prof. Myron Cohen, J. Herbert Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, Immunology & Public Health, School of Medicine; Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases; and Director of Institute of Global Health and Infectious Disease
Dr. Niklaus Steiner, Director, Center for Global Initiatives
Prof. Suzanne Gulledge, Clinical Professor of Middle Grades Education, School of Education

Faculty Council members had been asked to read the Strategic Roadmap for Globalizing UNC-Chapel Hill (March 2009) before the meeting. Lebold said the purpose of the panel was to give panelists the opportunity to talk about specific projects in which they were involved, with an eye to giving tips that other faculty members could benefit from. The panelists spoke in turn:

Cohen described his work since 2007 as director of the interdisciplinary Institute for Global Health and Infectious Disease. Faculty in health sciences are now working in more than fifty countries. Forming the institute helped immensely in fostering cross-university collaboration and incorporation of graduate and undergraduate students in research efforts. Partnerships with the Morehead-Cain Foundation and Proctor and Gamble have helped attract funds to support student work. The experience of the institute, he suggested, demonstrates the power cross-disciplinary synergies between the health sciences, academic affairs, and the professional schools. Cohen proclaimed UNC in a very strong position in terms of our global work.

Bentley said that the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health is the first school of public health in the nation to have “global” in its name, an appropriate appellation given the global nature of many public health issues (e.g. H1N1, SARS). Bentley called UNC’s ability to collaborate across disciplines “stunning.” She focused on how collaboration had allowed UNC to garner extensive support from the NIH for global health work; small Faculty Research Collaboration grants have now funded thirty-two faculty from eleven departments to establish new collaborations in public health work. Modest investment of about $154,000 by UNC, she noted, had generated about $1.7 million in external funding received. She also noted the success of collaborative work with the department of African Studies in language education, and of her own teaching of a course called “Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Global Health, which enrolls two-thirds graduate students and one-third undergraduates, mostly from the College of Arts and Sciences. She noted that this teaching has raised unresolved problems of how to pay for such interdisciplinary courses, who covers cover faculty time, and who provides TA support. Bentley concluded with a cautionary tale of the challenges of involving undergraduate students who may be unfamiliar with UNC’s travel policies, “do not travel” lists, and the IRB process, in international research.

Steiner discussed the Center for Global Initiatives, which he described as a catalyst for the global work of others, a grant seeker, and a grant maker that can work to find funds from government and nonprofit sectors to support faculty work. Steiner said the work has three dimensions: to raise global content on campus; to raise UNC’s reputation abroad (which he said is going less well than expanding international work on campus); and to attract more internationally oriented resources (grants, private donations) to campus. Steiner provided some examples of how the Center has supported faculty: supporting faculty working groups; providing course development grants to internationalize course content; providing course travel awards to enable faculty to present at international conferences. The Center also maintains a database of faculty expertise on international issues, manages grants for faculty, and organizes conferences, symposia, and workshops.

Gulledge described her own work international contexts as resulting from her own passion for international perspectives and her own initiative, and said that working this way had not yet become fully institutionalized as part of her unit, the School of Education. She said that garnering more state funds for international studies in public schools had been challenging because of state leaders’ desire to focus on North Carolina, but she had surmounted that by developing a Maymester course including a study abroad component in Scotland and Ireland that looks at how North Carolina history is seen in the countries of origin for many who emigrated here. She is now working through the Birch Honors Program to develop a new Education course to be taught in Cape Town, South Africa that will accommodate students in the teacher education curriculum. She hopes this will help pave the way for a semester study abroad component for teacher education students. Gulledge said that internationalization of the curriculum for Education students is difficult due to licensure and student teaching constraints, but emphasized its importance in preparing students to teach about the world and stressed how new technologies open new possibilities for connecting students around the globe.

Questions/Discussion

Prof. Jim Peacock (Anthropology) asked for commentary on environmental issues. Bentley highlighted a new global water institute that is being started and noted that there is a department of environmental sciences within the School of Public Health.
Prof. Diane Leonard (English and Comparative Literature) asked panelists to comment on the role of language learning and cultural understanding in preparing students to go abroad. She also wondered if globalization implied an anti-European bias and asserted that getting support for work in European countries has become more difficult.

Cohen responded that the health sciences are very sensitive to cultural and language issues, and that Title VI provides funding for an African Studies course that focuses on these issues (including language) as they relate to Malawi, which is one of our main areas of UNC’s global health activity. Bentley noted that as an anthropologist, she was quite focused on assuring that cultural matters were taught in public health courses. She also said that many public health graduate students take the FLAS (Foreign Language Area Scholarship) yearlong language training program.

Steiner said that foreign languages and cultures are heavily emphasized in grants held by the campus’s five international studies centers and that Europe is very prominent in this. He also pointed to the fact that FLAS scholarships are being opened soon to undergraduates, and he highlighted the LAC program in which non-language courses are taught in foreign languages (French, Spanish, and soon Arabic), although finding students advanced enough to undertake this is difficult.

Prof. Jane Brown (Journalism) asked what we are doing to attract more international students here. Steiner responded that we have not done as much as we might to integrate international scholars (and their families) who come to UNC into the community. Lebold noted that bringing more people from around the world to UNC is a focus of fundraising related to the “strategic roadmap.” Bentley described a new private partnership that is bringing more Chinese and Indian doctoral to UNC’s global nutrition program.

Prof. Ferrell (Government) asked how to help students become more aware of regulations that may impinge upon their ability to work abroad.

Cohen described several online programs to help students planning to work abroad, including the “Am I Safe” program (addressing personal health dangers – e.g. malaria) and the “Am I Doing Research” program (an introductory course valuable for every student going abroad to do research). Bentley said that faculty members who are advising these students need to know these rules and resources, including the travel advisory policy, which, if not followed, can result in large fines against the university. Executive Associate Provost Strauss added that some of the relevant policies (such as the travel restrictions list) are US State Department Policies, not our campus’s. Bentley proposed that since we often have students who want to work in countries with State Department travel advisories, the university needs a comprehensive registry of all UNC students traveling abroad.

Cohen cautioned that medical students can get in as much trouble eighteen-year-olds, and agreed that a registry could be important, especially as parents believe that if students are going abroad with our faculty, we are paying attention to their safety and well being.

Prof. Leonard pressed her point that the Center for European Studies focuses too much upon the European Union and does not represent the cultures, art, music, and literatures of European countries. She said that FLAS grants for study of European languages have been drying up as resources and focus shifts to other regions of the world, including the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Prof. Ed Blocher (Business) proposed that the summer reading book presents an opportunity to focus globally (Lebold noted that this had been done in the past). Prof. Lothspeich (Asian Studies) disputed Prof. Leonard’s characterization of Asia as part of the “Third World,” and said that, contrary to the suggestion that these other parts of the world are dominating instruction, Asian Studies is still struggling to create a greater presence on campus.

Prof. Virginia Shea (Cell/Molecular Physiology) asked whether it might be possible to work through the Friday Center to build UNC’s international reputation through online courses that could be taken by students from all over the world. Bentley said the School of Public Health is heavily invested in distance education, which it manages itself, not through the Friday Center. Steiner said he would speak with the staff at the Friday Center about Shea’s idea.

Prof. Jane Thrailkill (English and Comparative Literature) asked about the role of the joint degree program UNC has with the University of Singapore and the prospects for other similar partnerships.

Prof. Jonathan Hartlyn noted the growing numbers of students traveling to Asia and Africa, but said many still go to the United Kingdom and Europe and that language programs in the College remain vigorous. The Singapore program, he said, is still small because students have to commit to going there for a year. Many more students from Singapore want to come here than students from here who want to go there, he said; we would like to have more Carolina students participating. Strauss added that the first graduate in the Singapore joint program will graduate this May.
Chancellor Thorp said that one of the four new television spots UNC has developed will focus on the university’s global presence.
The panel discussion concluded.

Resolution 2009-5. On Reappointment of Lecturers in the College of Arts and Sciences

Ferrell said that Resolution 2009-5 has been withdrawn from the agenda because the situation has been resolved.

Adjournment

Its business having been completed, the Council adjourned at 4:25 pm.

Anne Mitchell Whisnant
Director of Research, Communications, and Programs, Office of Faculty Governance
For Joseph Ferrell, Secretary of the Faculty