January 13, 1995

Meeting of the Faculty Council

Friday, January 13, 1995, 3:00 p.m.

209 Manning Hall

Attendance: Present 59; Excused Absences 10; Unexcused Absences 22.

I. Chancellor Hardin’s Remarks:

[Chancellor Hardin introduced Professor Barbara Moran Dean of the School of Information and Library Science, and thanked her for the use of the room for the meeting.] Let’s ask her to stand and receive our appreciation. [applause] Would you like to s ay a word or two? Dean Moran: Well, sure, I’ll be glad to. I just want to welcome you and tell you how happy I am that you’re here in Manning Hall and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that all of our high tech [equipment will work]; it usually does. Provost McCormick: Barbara, your door is especially high tech. Dean Moran: Thank you; I really like that; it’s like a new piece of modern art. Chancellor Hardin: Very subtle, Barbara, very subtle. I’ll try to get you in the renovation budget.

I’m going to make my report short for two reasons. One, you’ve got a very interesting show-and-tell coming up in terms of our communications technology. The other reason I’m going to be brief is I’ve been fighting the bug that I’ll bet many of you have had, and I’m on antibiotics, and I’m going to get out of here in a minute, both for my comfort and your protection. Just a couple of things. As you have seen in the press, I’ve just come back from the annual convention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association held in San Diego this year. As you know, the main topic up for discussion was initial eligibility requirements, that is, what kinds of high school students are eligible to compete in Division I athletics as freshmen. We have been raisin g those standards gradually. Prop 48 was the initial step in that direction. Prop 16, which actually was initially approved in 1992, has been under study to be refined and we faced the test because there was a very strong move to weaken the impact of Pr op 16. That move was not successful and the reform movement has gone forward. And I think especially the kind of reform that’s practical and fair. We now instead of having a 2.0 are having, or really have 2.5 as the basic threshold for the high school record, and the SAT score remains about where it was on a sliding scale. If you’re down below 2.5, you have to have a much stronger SAT score. There is something called a partial qualifier on a sliding scale with a slightly weaker standard than the full qualifier, but still stronger than the old Prop 48, and that’s where the battle took place. The battle was that there were some who said once you admit a student as a partial qualifier, he or she should be able to earn four full years of eligibility by doing well in the freshman year. Many of us felt that was a very bad signal to send because — particularly in football. The freshman red shirters are the norm now, and the standard career is five years, four years of playing after an initial red shirt year. And as I pointed out on the floor, if the partial qualifier can earn four years of eligibility, where is the incentive for people to do a good job in high school and become full qualifiers, because that just puts them on a par with the full qualifiers the first day they are on campus. I also felt that it would tend to make all intercollegiate athletics a five-year proposition at a very time when not only in North Carolina but across the country we’re trying to move people toward a four-year graduation rate instead of a five-year graduation rate as the norm. In any event, we won that battle. And the reform movement under the auspices of the Presidents Commission is well along and has good momentum, and this was the most serious challenge to it, m any of us felt. And it was defeated.

The land-use planning is going on. As many of you know. Some of you are working feverishly to help us, our internal committee, make some recommendations to JJR, the consultants from Chicago. I want to thank all of you who are participating in that exercise. And I want to encourage you — I’ve heard some panic expressed, “My, we’re on a short time table.” No one is going to foreclose you or your department from any area of growth because you can’t imagine it exactly right this minute. But we need some starting points for how we develop those outlying lands. Not with the feeling that anybody’s going to break ground this year or next year or the next. I think we’re definitely, we’re probably planning for the next millennium. But we have to start somewhere. And we appreciate the help we’re getting, and we’re getting some wonderful conversations internally, and we’re getting some good conversations outside the campus: people in the broader community are having an opportunity to have input at a ver y early stage in our planning. Those are the two matters that I wanted to mention to you today. Are there any questions of me or comments? On with the show. Thank you.

Professor Brown: I want to thank you publicly for representing us with such integrity at the NCAA. Chancellor Hardin: Thank you, Jane.

II. Chair of the Faculty Jane D. Brown.

Welcome. Happy New Year. Congratulations for getting through the first week of classes, which is always high intensity and anxiety for some of us. And I want to introduce our new Secretary, David Thompson, who comes to us from UNC News Services where he’s worked for five years, so I’m hoping he will help with our media relations as well — which I find in this job is the most difficult part of my job, even, ironically, being a Professor of Journalism, on the other side of the pen at this point, or th e camera.

I have a couple of things to talk about. Things are moving quickly with the Legislature, as you know. Over the holidays — we have what is called a Faculty Legislative Liaison Committee, a rather lengthy title for basically our radical faculty group t hat’s trying to figure out how to work with the Legislature. And this group worked diligently over the holidays. We met with the Governor, in cooperation with NC State. We had representatives from both NC State and Carolina to meet with the Governor to push two primary goals that we’ve been working on for a couple of years. First is competitive faculty salaries. We continue to work on that, to get us back to where we were in the early 80’s. The second piece that we’ve now begun to discuss is greater support for graduate education. This is a tougher sell. We haven’t really talked about this in a way that the State understands yet. And so we’re working hard to make that understandable and have the State understand all that that brings to the State. We have made an economic argument to the Governor which he endorses and supports. A couple of years ago Michael Luger in City and Regional Planning did an economic analysis, and he’s updated it. And basically what we know is that for every dollar the State gives to support the University at Chapel Hill, we generate another three to four dollars for the State. And so basically every year we are generating almost $1 billion for the State economy. So if we need to be speaking in economic terms, which I think we do need to be speaking about at this point, we would say that we are a great investment for the State. And so when the State is in a situation as we are in now, in economic good times, we would argue that it is time to continue investing in the University.

However, we are now at a point where we should probably be very pragmatic about the political environment we’re in as well. This morning we saw that the UNC Board of Governors has begun to talk about which programs we’re going to cut. The measure they ‘re using to decide which programs they would cut is the number of graduates. I think most of us would argue that may not be, certainly wouldn’t be, the sole measure we would want to use to decide which programs to cut, that there are a number of explanations for why we may have small, very high quality programs. And graduates take longer to graduate in some programs than others. And part of it may be, especially at the graduate level, that they’re not graduating because we don’t give them enough to live on. And so they have to be having two or three jobs to support themselves while they try to get through the degree program. So these are complicated issues. And what I would argue at this point is that we as a faculty, rather than criticizing the Legislature or the Board of Governors for the kinds of solutions they’re coming up with, is what we need to say is that we want to be involved in this process. If cuts are to be made, we need to be in that conversation. We need to be involved in deciding what measures should be used, to decide what should be cut if we have to cut.

So, what we’ve been thinking about, that is the Executive Committee of the Faculty Council, is to — this is a bit of an awkward segue, but I think it’s related — is that what we’ve been working on is, there is a convergence of planning efforts right now. The Chancellor just spoke about the land-use planning. You’ve been seeing that all over the newspapers. And a number of faculty are involved. And a committee that’s working diligently, with Tom Clegg as its chair. That’s one planning effort. At this point we’re beginning to say also that — I’m sorry — so the planning effort that’s also in place or moving is what we have coming out of the SACS reaccreditation process. So for a year-and-a-half we’ve been involved in a self-study. We’ve basically been self-critical, looking at what are we doing well, what still needs to be done, what’s missing. I see this as a possibility right now, that we put these pieces together and we start looking at the future in a way that, so we will be prepared to speak to the Legislature about where we want to be going in the future, where we might, could perhaps cut if we need to. Like that. So we will be talking more about that planning process, getting that in place in a way that really will work for us. I encourage you all to speak with us about how this can proceed. Some of you are experts in planning. Some of you have expertise in thinking about the future in a way that I perhaps don’t. I’ve only just come to this, thinking of 25, 100 years hence. Some of you do that every day. So, if you do, please let me know about that. And we’ll start talking about how we can make this happen. And if you want to talk about it right now, I’ll be happy to. I have a couple of other — So that’s where we are. That’s what I’ve been spending a lot of our time thinking about and the Executive Committee’s been thinking about — besides basketball tickets. That will come up again.

I’ll tell you about it since it’s been in the press again. We will talk about it at the next meeting probably. It comes back to the Agenda Committee in a couple of weeks, and so the Agenda Committee will decide whether we are going to talk about it he re. I’ve heard some comments from you. If you want to give me more input now, fine. As you’ve read in the paper, I think this isn’t the most important thing we could be talking about right now, but John Swofford assures me that this is an issue that never goes away. So perhaps we just have to keep dealing with it. So, your advice and counsel on that are appreciated well.

Three announcements, or I would say, in the church I go to we call them “invitations,” when they’re announcements — opportunities for you as faculty. George Jackson is here. George Jackson is the Academic Affairs Officer for Student Government. I think I just botched his formal title, but we’ve been working on a couple of issues together and he wants to speak to us about the Carolina Course Review quickly.

Mr. George Jackson: I’m here because Student Government wants to invite you to a forum that is designed to offer the University community an opportunity to discuss possible revisions to the Carolina Course Review survey. I don’t know how many of you have actually seen a copy. This is the latest Carolina Course Review that came out for this semester. The Carolina Course Review is essentially designed to give information to students about the classes for which they may register for the following semester. It includes both information provided by faculty about the courses, including course descriptions and requirements for the course, as well as information from a survey that’s filled out at the end of each course. This survey both provides information to students as well as possibly help with feedback to faculty. Hopefully we can get a good conversation between students and faculty to discuss what really needs to be on the survey so that the survey will provide information to students that they really feel is needed, as well as information to you that feel can give you constructive feedback on your courses. This forum is going to be this coming Tuesday, January 17th, at 5:00 in the Student Union, Room 205 and 206. We would really appreciate it if you could come. Thank you.

Professor Brown: Do it again, George, where is it? Mr. Jackson: It’s in the Student Union, Room 205 and 206, on this coming Tuesday, January 17th, at 5:00. Professor Brown: I will ask for volunteers. Are there a couple of people in the Faculty Council who will be willing to work with Student Government on, I think, an important piece — this is something that the students have given money to. It’s now part of student fees to support the — am I right about that? Mr. Jackson: Yes — Professor Brown: to support the Carolina Course Review. And we brought it up to the Agenda Committee, and the Agenda Committee was not high on the Carolina Course Review. They were not very supportive of it. And I think that it behooves us at this point to say okay, if we don’t like it, what can we do to make it better. The students are paying for it, it’s going to be coming out, and our classes are going to be evaluated. So we need some people to work with the students to help them make it a document that we can use, and that works for us. Yes, Barry?

Professor Barry Moriarty (Geography): I think one way of improving it is, any norms that you compare, present rankings to that in the early 1980s, is the time when many faculty did not respond to that survey. And I think you need to send a new survey. Mr. Jackson: We are encouraging as many faculty as possible, we even send out some surveys for courses that were taught the previous semester then attempt to get the information back. We would encourage all of you to send those documents that you get as well. Professor Brown: Any other comment about that at this point? Any volunteers? Great, will you do that? Thank you very much. Ah, good, Larry, from the Center for Teaching and Learning, thank you, Larry, Larry Rowan. If you don’t want to be public about it and will tell me later, I’d appreciate that. Professor Steve Bayne (Dentistry): Just pick a name from somebody who’s not in attendance.

Two other invitations. The Johnston Scholars is a wonderful program of scholarships here on campus. They have been, each year a 100 outstanding students are chosen for the Johnston Awards Program. It’s in its twenty fifth year. And this is the first year that they’ve decided — they are taking on, creating a program for the campus. This program will take place in September, 23rd to the 30th. They’re focusing on “Media and the Mind, Shaping Political and Ethical Consensus in America.” They’ve invited Charlie Kuralt to be the keynote speaker, and a number of very interesting people to come and be on campus for a week to meet with students and give presentations, forums, and seminars and so on. They are looking for faculty participation, widespread faculty participation. So I encourage you all, when, if a student calls you and asks you to be involved in some way, to look to see if you have the time and energy, and I hope that you do, to work with them. I think this is a valuable program on campus . Okay.

And thirdly, there is the eighth annual Show of Hands for Peace and Unity. How many, anybody ever participated in that before? It’s on Wednesday, January 18th. It’s in support, it’s in celebration of the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday, and apparently it’s a very moving experience. It’s been primarily students previously, and we’d like to have some faculty participation there as well. It takes place noon to 1:00 this coming Wednesday, on Polk Place. Where is Polk Place? Is that the Old Well, or is that behind the South Building? So, great, I hope we see you there. Anything else? Invitations, announcements from you. Opportunities, comments, criticisms, celebrations?

Professor Joy Kasson (American Studies): Just comment on your earlier comments about the need to get into the discussion about budget cuts and planning. I don’t do planning, but I do think about words, and I would love to see us control the vocabulary in a different way. The idea that the only way that we could respond to pressures to be more efficient in our budget is by lopping off programs is something that I’d like to see us move from that concept to another kind of concept, efficiency, accountability, something else. So when you go in there, I’d like to see you try to get control of the vocabulary and move it to another level. Professor Brown: Great. I think that’s very important. One of the things a small group of us have been doing is to talk about intellectual themes for the University as another way of getting clearer about our sense of the University, and the framing of that is very important, of how we’re going to talk about who we are and what we’re good at, so that’s excellent. Goo d. Thank you. Anything else?

III. Annual Reports of Standing Committees:

Professor Brown: David Godschalk is not here yet, he has a class, he’ll be here in a minute. So we’ll move on to Madeline Levine.

A. Faculty Hearings: Madeline G. Levine, Chair.

Professor Levine: I’m here as Chair of the Faculty Hearings Committee, and I’m going to take questions about the report. Professor Brown: It was an interesting report in that, I think previously you had talked about I’m not sure you called it conflict negotiation, conflict resolution, but that you all were participating in negotiation skills or something? And that you have been rather, it looks like you have been successful. Professor Levine: We haven’t been formally trained in it, but what we have attempted to do since I don’t know if there is anyone in the room right now who has gone through a faculty hearing, but for the grieving faculty member who feels that he or she was dismissed or not reappointed and for the chair who is accused of making mistakes or of malice or some other impermissible ground, these hearings are tremendously disruptive, very, very difficult processes, and so what we have done informally and the chairs of the committee when contacted by a faculty member, is to see if there is any mediation that we can do, but it is not a formal process, and if it doesn’t work, we can go ahead immediately with what we are mandated. Some hearings have been called off in the process. They have not gone further because the parties agree that there was some misunderstanding and were able to resolve it. Professor Brown: That’s great. Thank you very much. Any comments for Madeline?

Professor Steve Bayne (Dentistry): Just sort of an odd question. Hopefully most of the grieving faculty never get into the grievance process; there’s some sort of resolution. But some of the people that are unhappy just end up leaving. And I wondered if we were collecting exit information from some of our faculty who go other places for whatever reasons to find out what the problems are. Sometimes it’s salary, but other times it’s problems with your supervisor or the administrative structure, or you feel like you’re a minority being discriminated against, or whatever. Professor Brown: Have you read the women’s report? Professor Bayne: Yes, but what I’m thinking of is the people that are exiting will have a whole range other than just the minorities, the other things that account for it, and I wonder if we could collectively sort of look at that periodically. I don’t know whether there’s an exit interview process for faculty, cause I sort of came to stay — I’m loving it, so I don’t know about that part. Professor Brown: As far as I know there is with the Affirmative Action Office, does do yearly exit interviews, and are you using that data, Pamela, or are you using other data? Not yet. It’s not quite what you want yet. Professor Bayne: And so feeds that committee, but we also could also look at maybe an overview of as it comes up. Professor Brown: More broadly. Good.

Vice Chancellor H. Garland Hershey (Health Affairs): I’m just going to note for Professor Bayne that indeed Bob Cannon’s office does collect those. We do have questions about that from time to time which might be worth it, Bob, either with the Council or through some other mechanism providing just an overview of what they do do. Professor Brown. Good. Can you make that happen? Yes? Okay, great, thank you. Professor Bayne: Thanks, Garland. Professor Brown: Anything else about hearings? So that’s duly noted that Garland’s going to take care of that. Right?

B. Status of Women: Pamela J. Conover, Chair.

Professor Conover: You all have the report. I just have two comments to add. The Committee feels it’s very important that the faculty, particularly those serving on search committees, continue to recognize that increasing the presence of women faculty at UNC is a need that we haven’t fulfilled yet, and therefore we would urge you to guard against complacency in terms of recruiting and finding for women on campus. And the other thing I’d like to add is the Committee would like to publicly thank Garland Hershey and Dick McCormick and their offices — Professor Brown: Pamela, I’m going to have to ask you to come forward so that we get every stellar word. Professor Conover: We’d like to thank Garland Hershey and Dick McCormick and especially the staffs in their offices for all the help they’ve given us this past year in gathering the data for the glass ceiling study that we are currently engaged in, and hopefully next year we will have in our report the conclusions from that study. Questions? Professor Brown: Comments for Pamela?

Professor Bayne: I don’t want to ask two questions in a row but I will. When I first saw this report in the Agenda Committee I had two reactions and I want to sort of express both of them. One is I think as a University we’ve made great strides, certainly in the last two, three, four years, and I’m very proud of those. But I did something for the Agenda Committee which I didn’t bring to share with you all, but I’ll tell you. I just took the data out of this report and did a linear regression analysis to find out at what point in time we would have 50% women on the faculty in tenured and tenure-track positions. And the answer, the correlation coefficient was very high, about 98%. The number, the break-even point for men and women on the faculty is the year 2056. Now, on the one hand I think we’ve done an incredible job of getting to this point. I mean compared to other universities I think we’re a decade ahead. But on the other hand, I think we should be at the point now of developing sort of secondary levels of strategies about how we empower women, okay, more than just having a few to count. And I don’t know how that process should occur, whether it should occur it in this committee, or a different committee, or whatever, and I know Dick McCormick has made great contributions, and others in this past year, and maybe they have some questions, but I guess I’m looking forward to saying how fast can we get towards that goal? I mean can that happen in the 2000 – 2010 range, or do we have to wait until 2056. That’s sort of crazy, but that’s the pace we’re going right now. That’s when it’s going to happen. And I thank you, Pam, because I think the Committee’s done a great job. Professor Conover: Thank you. Professor Brown: Great. And I’ll be dead by then. Professor Bayne: And you wouldn’t be counted then.

C. Buildings and Grounds: David R. Godschalk, Chair.

Professor Brown: Is David here yet? David Godschalk. Buildings and Grounds. Maybe he can’t find us. Well, he’s on Buildings and Grounds, he should be able to find us. Professor Bayne: Maybe we can just ask if there are any questions about the report. Professor Brown: Are there any questions about the report? We’re going to be hearing much more about buildings and grounds in the near future. Professor Pete Andrews (Environmental Sciences & Engineering, Public Health): I’m sorry David is not here; is anyone else from Buildings and Grounds here? Let me just for the record then say that one of the comments that was indicated in there is that the Buildings and Grounds Committee has approved the statement, or advised, that the renovation of the Campus Y building would not be advisable or cost effective and that its replacement should be planned. Professor Brown: There he is. Come on up, David. We just started talking about your report. Professor Lensing: Why don’t you go ahead with your point, Pete. Unless David wants to say anything first about the report, then I can come back to it. Professor Godschalk: Well let me just say that I’m here on the occasion of the stepping down of John Sanders who’s been Chairman of Buildings and Grounds for some time and certainly devoted an enormous amount of energy and knowledge and care to the Buildings and Grounds Committee. So I feel like Harry Truman or some others might have felt when sort of the mantle falls on you, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions. John has basically summarized the actions of the Committee in the report. And I think the thing I could do is try to respond to points in question. Professor Brown: Pete has a specific question about one of the recommendations. Professor Andrews: I hope this isn’t a Trumanesque question about dropping the bomb or not, but I was going to say, speaking of the Committee’s advice that we now have to accept the idea that the Campus Y building ultimately must be replaced rather than renovated, is one of the statements in the report. And I’m a former member, it has been my privilege to be a former member and also former chairman of the Campus Y Advisory Committee, and I just would like to remind all of us of the importance of the Campus Y as an organization on this campus. It has a 130 or more year history here as a truly unique and remarkable institution that is part of the life of this campus, not only intellectual life, but something that by its centrality here is it was a point for students to express their concern about society, and their sense occasionally the conscience of the University, and their sense that now are amplified by other organizations like APPLES that service learning as an important part of what we do, so whatever happens to that building as a structure, I would hope that the Committee and the other organizations that must deal with this, would reaffirm a commitment to keep that organization, perhaps combined with APPLES and others, quite centrally located here on campus, where it will be visible and a major part of our lives, and not become confined to the outskirts somewhere.

Professor Godschalk: Okay, well, I’m sure if you didn’t read into the report any imputing of the Campus Y — Professor Andrews: Certainly not! Professor Godschalk: It’s a very valuable institution. It was just simply the building seemed to have not kept up with the vitality of the institution. Professor Andrews: No, it’s simply that the two have been — when buildings get changed, then other uses get dealt with, so I just want to make sure that we keep that before us as we deal with these difficult decisions that may have to be made. Professor Brown: Anything else for David or Buildings and Grounds? Great, thank you for coming.

IV. Presentation: A Policy Framework for the University’s Network: Electronic Rights and Responsibilities: William H. Graves, Associate Provost for Information Technology.

Professor Brown: Okay, the reason that we are here in this room is to discuss a Policy Framework for the University’s Network: Electronic Rights and Responsibilities, which you all received. A number of faculty have been working hard on drafting this policy, working with Bill Graves, and developing a policy for how we’re going to be coordinated with the information highway and electronic future. I think this is especially appropriate as I talked earlier about planning and what we’re, who we are going to be in the future. The University has made a big investment in this already. We are asking for more resources for this in the future, and so I thought it was very important for us as faculty to look at what this really is. I know a number of you ar e much more up to speed on this than I am, and so I would hope that you could contribute to this conversation from a point of expertise as well. The Executive Committee saw this demonstration a month or so ago, and I was amazed to see where we already ar e, and to consider some of the possibilities of the future, both for us as teachers, as researchers, and in terms of communication internally as well as externally. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity here, and I hope that we can look at this from that perspective. Bill speaks about this better than I, so thank you very much for being here.

Professor Graves: Thank you, Jane. I’m going to use the mike. Is it on? Thank you Jane and George and the Executive Committee for inviting me to represent the Information Resources Coordinating Council here today. And I want to make sure you know w hat that is. Our Provost and Vice Chancellors put the Information Resources Coordinating Council together about two years ago for the purpose of coordinating the various central investments in information and information technology. The fact is we’re spending lots of money on information and information technology. Read libraries and information technology into that. I’d like in fact to ask the members of the IRCC, we call it, to stand up because I want you to see other people you can talk to about these issues, since I’m going to be the main voice up here today. But there are many others here. Our librarians, our chief librarians, Joe Hewitt and Carol Jenkins and Lolly Gasaway I think are all here and on the committee. We represent Information Technology itself, Leonard Strobel from ADP, Anne Parker from our office. Tim Sanford, I won’t say that you represent Information Technology, since you represent Institutional Information which is another key piece here. We have, let’s see, Herb Paul, represents Information Technology, in the back of the room, Physical Plant, responsible for parts of the networking on campus. And then we have some faculty input in the person of Professor Evelyn Daniel who chairs the Advisory Committee for Information Technology, and advises my position. She can’t be here today, but she’s a faculty voice on this Council. And then there’s also a Dean’s voice on the Council, and that’s Dean Barbara Moran, Dean plus the specialist expertise she brings in information science to this whole thing. So these are other people you can talk to about this as we proceed.

I want to make this as interactive as possible, so please feel free to ask questions of me or my colleagues here. And I want to begin by trying out a quip that always seems to me appropriate even if over-used by myself. And that’s from Ogden Nash: Anyone read Ogden, The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery? He said that progress is okay, but there’s just been entirely too much of it recently. And the fact is that in terms of the technology that’s absolutely true. We mathematicians would say it’s exponential progress. But on the other side of the coin, our human capacity to comprehend it, to take advantage of it, is not progressing exponentially. It progresses by fits and starts, in a very human way. And that’s appropriate. But we really need to make progress now because of the massive investments we’re making, and let me tell you what I think they are off the top of my head, but a very good estimate. All across the campus, departments, central and otherwise, we’re spending at least $30 million a year on information technology. Now add to that another $25-$30 million on the library and information, and add to that other forms of information, administrative information, and so on. The bill gets pretty high. It gets up to be around 10% of the institutional budget, the EMG budget. And if there’s any overarching message here today it’s probably this: that that investment is going to continue to go up. It’s really inevitable that it will go up, because technology is here and it’s here to stay. And there’s a transformation afoot in the way information is stored and so on. Given that massive investment, we probably ought to do it right, make sure we’re investing wisely. And secondly, we ought to make sure that the investments are serving our institutional mission, connected to the academic mission, and doing so in a way that helps us meet some of the external pressures that were already alluded to today, things that were talked about earlier, the pressures to look at how we’re doing business and drop programs and change things. So, very much, that is what this is all about.

Now what we’re going to try to do is use the technology and see if we can get the lights down a little bit here. [visual demonstration] I’m giving you maybe more opportunities than I should. Let’s try that and then try this. Let’s see here. Can you see that? Okay, well the title that we’ve chosen, “A Policy Framework for the Network: New Windows on Old Issues.” I’m going to pause and give a little two or three minute description of how we came to be where we are. About three years ago, two-and-a -half to three years ago, the Advisory Committee for Information Technology, which advises me, was looking more and more at what we would call information policy issues. One example would just be the privacy of E-mail. Those kinds of things were coming up in committee. And so the chair of the committee put together a subcommittee which was chaired in fact by Carol Jenkins from our Health Sciences Library, to look at that issue, possibly to come back with, we thought, a spanking brand new information policy. It wasn’t that simple. Carol and her subcommittee went off and did some nice work, came back with a nice document that really sketched out for us all the issues, around a framework. At about that same time, the Information Resources Coordinating Council, which I’m representing today, was formed. That was about two years ago. So at the time that report was coming to be on the table of the committee, the new Council was being formed, and the committee passed the report along to the Council as a m ore appropriate body to look at it. And so we set out immediately to do that. And so the work that we’re representing today came out of the Information Resources Coordinating Council via the subcommittee report on information policy from the Advisory Committee for Information Technology.

What we discovered was — well, it’s really exactly this: that there are a whole lot of issues that are extremely complex, but they’re really old issues. All the technology does is open up new windows on these issues. And we decided early on that we really couldn’t formulate a single policy, that what we really should do is find the direction and frame that direction for the campus to generate the right kind of discussions and debate so that policies could emerge over a period of years: policies and practices. So, very much what we’ve put in your hands is what it is labelled: a framework document, not a policy document. It is intentionally sparse, and if read as a policy document, you’d say, “Oh these people are dictating to us that this and this needs to be done.” Not so. All we’re really trying to do is frame the issues so we can have these discussions.

Having said that, let me try to suggest what some of these new windows are, what’s the context here. Well let me take some ideas, some of which seem to be in opposition to each other but just by way of illustrating some things. Standards have always been here. In the paper world we’ve always had standards for how we do business. Fill out this form, pass it along to this next office, get it out there, pass it along, and so forth. We’ve had standards. They’re very rigid. People have said for some time in fact that they’re too rigid, don’t have the flexibility I need there. What does information technology offer if not flexibility, lots of it? So we think suddenly we can design more flexible processes. On the other hand, the paradox is that you can’t do that unless you have some campus-wide standards, indeed, national standards. More accurately, campus-wide standards that fit into a national context, so we can share information with other institutions, as well as within. And so we need both the flexibility and the standards, but the standards today don’t mean what they meant ten years ago in technology, that we buy one machine and everyone has to use that. It’s not at all that kind of standard thinking anymore. Going over here to the right, [ visual demonstration] “document,” a word we all understand, but a word that’s becoming increasingly fuzzy because today’s documents are no longer single documents. They are made up of objects. You may have heard the phrase “compound document.” Let me try to illustrate this going to the Network…. By the way, I need to ask now, how many of you use technology? Anything ever go wrong? We had about three minutes to set this up. You saw us struggling to do it. This machine was on the network when we s et it up, but some time has passed and I’m hoping that it still is. I’m going to find out. But the real point is, what is a document today? So we’re going to open up — now without a lot of explanation what is one of the hottest applications of networking technology today, something called the World Wide Web, and this particular client on the Web is called Netscape. I will just see if we’re there by trying to send it to our so-called home page, while I talk a little bit about it. While I look to see what’s happening: not a good sign; that probably means we’re off the Net. I’m going to take the unusual step of rebooting this machine because I just think we must have lost the connection.

And I’m going to talk for a moment about what the Web is. The concept is that, by agreeing to certain standards, we can put information on larger machines called servers all around the world. And that web of information becomes known as the World Wide Web. Then the trick is — how do we as individuals gain access to it? And this application I was trying to show you — I hope I still can — is one of the best ways of doing that. It’s called — it came out of the University of Illinois under the name of Mosaic. How many of you have used Mosaic or know about Mosaic? That’s really what we’re trying to show here. We’re just showing a slightly different version of it called Netscape. Now I need to watch this for a moment just to see if we get on the net here. Professor Brown: Bill, this is why we don’t use this in class. Professor Graves: Well I do understand the comment, and let me respond to it that way. It’s a good comment, a fair comment. And my response would be, “Fair enough.” But if you think that only because I failed today, and it always happens, of course, in public — that because that happened — we’re going to be excused downstream from taking advantage of this and paying attention to it, you’re probably wrong. It’s here, and eve n though it may not be mature today, it’s getting there. Now we seem to be connected, and I’m hopeful that will stay with us this time. This room was recently reworked and, in fact, as recently as this morning, and I suspect that’s the problem we’ve had . This is one of the master classrooms that the Office of Information Technology puts together on behalf of various schools and departments. And this one was recently I think retrofitted, wasn’t it, Barbara? Pardon the logo, which you may not know, but that’s our Institute for Academic Technology out in Research Triangle Park, and I just use that as my logo because I’m often in a situation where, let me see — all right, now I hope I can get back to where I wanted to be here. Of course it could be that that particular source was not available. I may not have had to do all this. I didn’t take the time to really find out. I’m going to try one more time. It doesn’t look good. Let’s try one more. Professor Brown: Let’s look at “What’s Cool.” Professor Graves: Let’s see if we can see anything. That seems to be the problem. [Unidentified]: Did you know that this meeting was taking place on Friday the 13th? I’m just trying a couple of things to see if it’s really all gone or just the — it’s all gone. Let me go back to the theme anyway, and ask our technicians in the back of the room if they have any ideas about what’s happening here. We’ll go back to where we were. I’d very much like to show you that, so I’d like to try it one time later, if we can get it working. I don’t understand; it did work when we came in.

We can show some things that don’t depend on the Network. I think I was right here, talking about this context. And I was wanting to make the point that today things called documents often are electronic and electronic documents often have embedded in them graphics and video and other kinds of so called objects, and that sort of erases the boundaries around what an object is because those pieces of the document, because those pieces of the document in fact come from different places and are stored different places, and no one person or department may be the owner of the entire document. There’s the whole loss of distinction between what a text is today and what it was some time ago. Multimedia today can be quite powerful. And I think I can show you a multimedia application. And it might be good to do that. Since I fell on my face on this other one. The point is that more and more of human experience can be stored in digital form, meaning not just text and numbers, but now increasingly audio, oral, visual, even motion video. So what we’ll look at here very briefly is such an application, I think. Here it comes.

This happens to be one of my favorites, coming out of the Department of Romance Languages and the Institute for Academic Technology, Jim Noblitt, Frank Dominguez, other people are working on this kind of application. This is a learning application so this takes us a little bit away from information, but I think it’s well worth thinking about in terms of thinking about where we’re headed, namely the context here is language study. We require it of all students. And we’ve all studied a second language and of course many of us, at least I have, forgotten all of that language and we’ve had that awkward experience of boning up on French, in this case, before going to France and then getting off the plane, saying something in French, and a real French-speaking person answers back and then it’s all over. It gets at this, but I’m sure our language faculty tells us that language study is about much more than just listening comprehension. It’s also reading comprehension, writing comprehension, speaking comprehension, and perhaps most of all, it’s about opening up non-American windows on the world for students. It’s about cultural comprehension. So although this ostensibly gets at listening comprehension, I think it gets at much more. Because if you look a t the table of contents, this is still in lesson form, so this is an old style lesson that is much like a textbook. Let’s see what we’re doing here. We can learn to greet each other in French. Get a little information which says, “Well, one way of doing that, of course, is the handshake, fine. But what’s this about a kiss on the cheek, something that’s a bit foreign to most American students?” We don’t typically in America at least greet each other that way. And I suppose our language instructors might find it a bit difficult to walk into a classroom and talk about French kissing, or lecture about French kissing. So here we can get some — . I’ll take it once more here. Let’s listen. Okay. A couple of points to be made. It’s a lesson format. It’s what I might call as someone who was born a Southern Baptist, an immersion learning experience, because you get sort of pulled into this if you’re a student. And it’s learning in context. And, by the way, all that sort of background noise, of course, is real. You don’t learn English by just listening to one person speak in a classroom. Nor should you learn French by listening to one person speak in a classroom. So what you’re listening to there are real French-speaking people in a real context — traffic noise, birds singing, etc., etc. It’s still a guided lesson format. But on board here is another tool that allows us to do more than that, allows us to ask the student to become not just a listener but a creator. And this is called Systeme D. And what you’ll see here in the top window is a place to do some word processing bilingually and in the bottom window is a dictionary. So if I want to write about what I’ve learned there and I want to say that I find so and so to be true or such and such to be true about this habit of kissing, I might decide that I’m simply a poor freshman and I really don’t know the French verb for “find,” so I look it up in English. I put the dictionary in English, type in “find,” and say, “Go off and find ‘find.'” And it does that pretty quickly, but it finds the wrong form, brain wave or coinage, not what I had in mind. This is probably it: to find, to think, so I click there. It says, “Yes, the verb ‘trouver’ – you want to see some examples? Click there.” You get examples in context. “You want to see the conjugation? Click there.” You get that in context. Negative, reflexive, the whole thing is right there. So if you think about what you do with the word processor, you probably have a thesaurus and a spelling checker on board, but you don’t have anything quite as rich as that. It gets even richer here because we have also some help with phrasing. If I’m writing to apologize, I click on that, say okay, tell me about apologizing. It helps me do that. Well, because the bread I brought to dinner was not very good, I click there and I get some help with that vocabulary. So there’s a fairly rich data base here.

Now what I’d like to suggest about this — the video is still back there playing, by the way, and I can go back and forth between the two. What I’d like to suggest is that that kind of application in terms of our instructional responsibilities actually probably does add quality to the student learning experience. In fact, there’s been some testing with this particular application to indicate that that’s absolutely so. But one of the problems is it does so at added cost, it’s bolted on top of the existing instructional model. It does so at an added cost, because we have to build laboratories for these machines or we have to ask the students to buy special equipment. So it comes at additional cost. So we need to sort of think that through as we look at the pressures that are upon us to contain the costs of our instructional programs, to contain the cost to the institution. That means containing the cost of the instructional program because that’s where the majority of our costs lie. And we think that these kinds of applications when you begin to think networking can help do that. And that’s because, why shouldn’t E-mail, in fact, have that same data base behind it, that same capacity to write in French or Spanish or German, write bilingually, to have these data bases of interlingual and lexical tools behind them and have that in the E-mail environment so that students can, in fact, take more responsibility for their own learning. Why can’t I, as an instructor, send-off E-mail in that context in French to my class? How many of you know about listservs, the sort of E-mail device for communicating to many people at one time, a class, for example? Send off an E-mail message to my class in French, ask them to respond, and they have to then, what? They have to read it — reading comprehension. They have to write back — writing comprehension. And I have the ability then to make some judgments about individual students and how well they’re progressing. And maybe I don’t have to put off that judgment or assessment until the 16th week of the first semester of French. Maybe I begin to think in new ways about how my role as a faculty member plays into the student’s learning experience. And, by the way, this video — this morning we saw this video coming from the Microelectronics Center out in the Triangle, coming across a network into this little machine. So the little machine was running this application, but the video itself which happens to take up lots of space on a machine and it’s not really very practical for every student to own it, the video itself can be stored on servers and when we hear in the entertainment industry or the newspapers about the information highway and video on demand, and entertainment and so on, we should be thinking about education. We should be thinking about video on demand in this context. And it is all possible, barely becoming possible, but it is possible today. All right, let me close that one down. At least there’s one instructional application or example. And go back here. And that’s what I meant by text multimedia. You saw there various and different forms of human expression, stored digitally, accessed digitally, and expressed in fairly human terms. The next best thing, perhaps, to being there in France or in Montreal.

Other ideas that we’ve been dealing with are the “draft” and the “archive.” [visual demonstration] When things are on paper, and they’re a draft, usually marked draft, are circulated usually to a small group, to a committee. But if things are electronic they often get circulated, whether they’re in draft form or not, marked draft or not, they get circulated very widely — more and more people have access to them. When is it a draft and when does it become official? And when it becomes official, by the way, how is it archived? And are these all different ideas or are they the same idea, and when do you put out information when you can do it so easily now? At what point should you really do that?

Other ideas: “static” and “dynamic.” [visual demonstration] And this one I can make sense of I think in a couple of ways. A telephone conversation I think you would agree is dynamic in the sense that something is happening electronically and once it’s over, it’s over. It’s gone. Unless someone recorded it. Of course that is usually not the case. What about an E-mail message, though? Well there’s something similar happening, that is, electronic bits and bytes are flowing over a network, much like a telephone conversation. But it may be the case that to send that message you first prepared something in your word processor, a note in your word processor, and then put it in E-mail and sent it, and it may well be that the person at the other end saved that message. Now does that make it different than a telephone conversation? What about privacy? Is it different because it gets stored on hard disk some place? Or should it be private? Those are the kinds — one of the kinds of issues, at least — that we’ve been thinking about. Another thing to simply think about here is that digital information itself comes really in both a static and dynamic form. You store things onto your diskette or your disk or on the server. And in dynamic form, because it’s always flowing across the network. So this whole issue about wiretapping, about privacy, is very different even though it’s an old issue. It’s very different in this new medium.

Another pair of ideas here is, well, the “original” and a “copy.” [visual demonstration] Usually the original paper form gets stored at the office that generated it and you know when something’s a copy, typically. On the other hand, electronically, i f my office generates something, it may also get stored electronically many different places, and how will you if you access it from a different place, know that what you’re accessing is really the original? Because it can be changed obviously. Enough of you have used technology to know that that’s part of the flexibility, it’s so easy to change things. So there are some pretty deep issues in there about what constitutes an original and how do we decide that, and how do we proceed when these issues are not easy to resolve. In spite of the fact that there are many new windows on old issues, and that is what I’ve tried to point out here. What we really learn is that there are some underlying issues.

And I think from our perspective they look much like this: the two chief ones are “governance” and “operational” [visual demonstration]. Governance meaning, well, who’s in charge here? Who decides what is official information when it is so easy to create information electronically? Who decides who has access to it, what person, what bodies or committees? That’s kind of the governance issue and it certainly has both ethical and legal dimensions. And I think most of us would agree that those two are not quite the same. Then there are the deep operational issues. If we’re doing this, and we are, then where do we get the technical expertise that has to be there, and where do we get the budgets, the economic dimension of it all? These are very operational issues. And we have to sort those out. Now I’m the technologist standing up here, but it might be that if one of the librarians were standing up here, the focus would be more on information. Nevertheless, it’s really both. The line between is blurred.

And our main thesis is that we’d better come to see these things as strategic assets. And I think we all, as faculty members, do see the library as a strategic asset. We need to see information technologies as a strategic asset. It’s quite unlike power. Even though it needs to be there all the time, the network for example, it’s not like power. Power’s not strategic. It has to be on, sure. But we don’t have to debate how we’re going to use it. Well with these kinds of investments in information technology we really need to debate how we’re going to use it and harness it to the academic mission of the University. And that’s the strategic idea here. So, as we saw it, we’re in a period of change. Things that look square today, if you will, may look round tomorrow. Some of our programs are going to undergo change, and the way we do business is going to undergo change. It’s almost inevitable. But we ought to be guided in all that, and the network of course as suggested here is the sort of vehicle, the conduit, for change. But we ought to be guided by some key principles. We’re really trying to increase or enhance our institutional effectiveness and efficiency, meaning quality and cost containment. And we’re also very interested in this whole business of publishing institutional information. That may have too much the ring of data about students, but we intend it also to have the ring of the Library. That’s also institutional information. Faculty research is institutional information in many ways. So this is really very much about publishing. Now one of the things that we did early on is stop talking about public information and start talking about institutional information. It’s pretty hard to define what is institutional, but I think we have to agree that there is such a thing. So one of the issues we want to confront is to firm up this idea about what is institutional information. Because our vision for that is that that’s what gets published electronically.

Well, we titled our document, “A Policy Framework for the Network,” so let’s talk just a little bit about just why we did it that way. And that’s because we saw two dimensions to the issues here. One is the technical dimension, the connections. Who’s responsible for connecting whom to the network in this physical sense of providing the cards and the wires and so on that connect computers to networks? That’s a connection, a technological idea. But the other idea is the information itself, that is, w hat’s on the network. And that’s the information idea. And these two, we think, are brought together in the network, so we need to understand the differences. So we were first guided by issues of, well, departmental rights and responsibilities. Departments have rights to be connected to the University’s backbone network, but who has the responsibility for connecting them? If you read our document, you’ll see that we say that, well, that is a departmental responsibility as well within the constraints of the overall technology plans and the standards adhered to. And at our Institution, because there’s never been any money centrally flowing to making departmental connections, it’s also a departmental responsibility. The current practice, of course, is to try to cooperate and use central plus departmental monies just to get the job done. But we certainly need more money than we have to finish that job. On the other hand, the central administration does have some responsibility for connections, and th e way to describe this perhaps is a safety net responsibility. That’s what the public labs are all about, a guarantee that everyone can have access, even if it’s not in the most desirable way which would be at one’s own desk or one’s own home and so on. But that safety net is there.

And then there’s the kind of deep issue of, do we have any responsibility to the larger public outside the University community, our constituents, to connect them to the network? In fact we do some of that right now as kind of a public service. And our viewpoint is that, no, we don’t have that responsibility. We can always choose to do it and may when it makes economic sense, but we don’t have that responsibility. On the other hand we do have a deep responsibility to make information available to the public. That’s not the same as the connection to the network. That’s what’s on it. And the point is it is becoming very possible today to simply call it up at home, the so-called Internet service, from an Internet provider. And if you do that, that means that at home you can get at our information. It’s on our network as part of the Internet. So we do have a responsibility to put that information there both for internal use within the University community as well as for use by the public, because the public has a right to that information. But when we confronted the information issue, we found it very fuzzy to talk about public information. What is public? Well, for example, faculty salaries are public. I think we all know that. Yet our guide lines would say, well, we’re going to publish financial information including faculty salaries, but we would never publish them electronically as individual salaries. They would always be aggregated so the public would know how the University’s spending its dollars in various categories, but would never know through our general publication program what your individual faculty salary is. It doesn’t mean the public wouldn’t have a right to know, couldn’t come get it in some other form, some other mechanism, but our publication program ought to be designed to give good information, aggressively good information, that people can really use, but to do it wisely, to aggregate information, to make meaning of it, in advance to try to make as much meaning as we can of information before we throw it out there as just lots of bits and bytes and so much detail that it overwhelms people.

So in a nutshell what we really found was that we ended up talking not so much about public information but about what gets published and what remains private. What gets published and what remains private. And we’d really like to see essentially that as kind of a dividing line. And, for example, we personally feel — this is not a University stance, and this is not a legal opinion — but we personally feel that E-mail is private, except when it’s clearly institutional business, such as a memo from the Dean’s office, for example, clearly marked as institutional business. It’s otherwise private, the same way a telephone call is private. So much of E-mail is just like a telephone call, one colleague communicating with another across the world about work in progress, so on and so forth, much like a telephone call in that sense. And so we believe that the proper approach to this as we mull these kinds of policies is to — one strategy put this way, I guess — is to increase the openness of information, to be aggressive about sharing with the public what this University is and is all about. At the same time be aggressive about protecting the privacy that we all feel we’re entitled to. But we have to do this in today’s context, and these other items up here are really nothing more than just an indication of the kinds of things that are going on. The World Wide Web, which failed spectacularly on me twice a moment ago, is very alive and well usually — all except on Friday the 13th in public demonstrations. E-mail is very alive and well. Student information, scholarly information, imaging, and so on. These are all things that are already there. They’re happening quickly. Departments are publishing information. I hope to show you some; I may try ye t again. And it’s in that larger context of everything speeding along that we’d like to evolve policies, the purpose of which is to increase the openness of information so that we can use it wisely within the Institution to manage and govern ourselves as well as to protect the privacy which we all thought really should be there.

So, our process then for trying to have this debate includes events like this, but in particular we’ve been going about this in, I guess, four dimensions. I don’t much like this word “vetting” but it’s very much in the vernacular today. So we’ve been vetting these ideas. We’ve been proofing them against existing policies and seeing how they stack up — old policy against what we’d like to have as a newer kind of policy evolving. We’ve been conducting sessions like this. We’ve had a smaller session, we called a focus session with some faculty members. We’ve been to the Health Affairs deans. We’ve been to the Academic Affairs deans. We’ve been to the Executive Committee of the Faculty Council. We’re going to the Chancellor’s Administrative Council. We’re debating these ideas in the general thrust of this framework and that’s the vetting part. So far we’ve been received, I’d say, at worst warmly and in some cases enthusiastically. By we, I mean the ideas. And so we are very much trying to promote these ideas. We think that requires some – vision is a big word, but we have to illustrate to people what we’re talking about — examples. And I hope to do a little more of that today. I hope the French examples give you some idea of where things are headed. And of course if we succeed, that is, if we among ourselves agree that there are certain things, certain issues we have to confront dead on, then we have to line up the support to do that. And that’s mostly in the form of infrastructure, technology itself, and we’re not there yet.

As many of you know, our campus has been behind in moving the backbone network to fiber. That’s one of the reasons we have these kinds of problems here. We’re behind in that, but it is happening. And it takes a lot of money to do it. My estimate is it’s about a $16 million proposition overall to wire this campus, including your offices. Obviously we’ve never had that money in one lump sum, so progress is slow but it is there. The budget is the other part of it.

Professor Brown: How far are we? Professor Graves: Well, the contract — Herb can help out here — but I think the contract for the rest of the fiber network has been let and the work is underway. Is that correct, Herb? Mr. Herbert Paul (Director, Physical Plant): Right, about $6 million total. Professor Graves: And the work is underway today. When you see some orange lines marked and some holes being dug, that’s what this is all about. On the other hand, it will take a couple more years before it’s all in place. It will come in place and on-line gradually. So first I think, the next run will be up along, oh roughly from Peabody Hall up along the medical complex on Columbia Street. Up that way. And then it will reach over into the libraries here, this part of campus. Professor Brown: So the money is there to complete the network, to complete the fiber network? Professor Graves: The money is sort of there to complete the backbone network, the, if you think of it this way, networks are networks of networks. They’re put together by first having a small network in your department. So my machine here is connected to a network in this building — or not connected as the case is today. That network then gets connected to the campus backbone network. It may in fact get connected to an intermediary network. The campus backbone is a network that’s costing, well, this piece is $6 million; overall, $8 million or so. That’s just the construction cost. It takes electronic equipment. It takes people to run it. Then, you’ve got all the in-building costs. And we have lots of old buildings that are not yet wired for all of this, as some of you painfully know. And that’s the, actually, larger cost. And we have not identified the money for that. The Chancellor’s budget committee has been generous for the past three years on information technology needs, and that generosity has allowed us to do some of that in-the-building wiring that we couldn’t have done on the existing state budget. But there’s nowhere near the amount of money that’s needed, which is more on the order of $10 million, rather than $500,000 or whatever we’ve put into in the last year or two. So we’ve a ways to go, but we are getting there. I think the other thing I might do here since I don’t think I’m going to be able to show the network for reasons — let me take a consultation. Joe, get the Mac, we can try that. He’s going to go get another machine to see if it’s possibly my machine. I don’t think this machine’s down. In fact I’m going to go ahead and just make this talk and then we’ll try that machine, so that we don’t have to wait for something else to fail in case it fails.

What I want to talk about here is a larger context in which all of this is happening. And I’ve put it this way that the kind of pressures that were mentioned earlier today about dropping programs, removing programs — those are pressures being felt in all aspects, in all walks, of American life. And it’s with the restructuring movement. And whether it’s restructuring public schools, whether it’s restructuring higher education, whether it’s restructuring corporate life, it’s happening today. And there are a great many pressures all focused on budget to do more with less, to become more productive, I think is the key word that people use. And so what we’re trying to do is set in this larger context. And many people, both within the academic community and outside, do see the National Information Infrastructure — we know it as the Internet today — as the vehicle for restructuring. And there are some technical things here that we technologists would say are the reasons for that, but there are also some other ideas on this screen I probably ought to try to explain.

When we talk about the Information Infrastructure to include the North Carolina information highway, we’re talking about two forms of networking. These may seem like big words, asynchronous and synchronous, but read them this way: synchronous means re al time. And one use of the North Carolina information highway is the same use that we’ve been making of what used to be called the Concert network. And this was the two-way interactive video. Go over to the studio in the Phillips or there’s one in the medical complex — there may be several by now in fact — and you can share a classroom experience say with Duke or Charlotte or someplace else. That’s a real-time experience, though, and it requires scheduling, it requires a room, fairly expensive equipment in the room. It doesn’t scale real well so we ought to use that wisely. There’s the other kind of networking, asynchronous, which is what we typically think of as the Internet kind of networking, computer or data networking, and that’s any time, any place. It doesn’t depend on time. It doesn’t have to be scheduled. Any time, any place. And once you build the infrastructure it scales real well. You can add more nodes or work stations if you will on the network, more machines. So that’s a very scalable technology.

And as we think about how we use these and how we invest in them, we need to recognize those differences and make sure that we’re making the right kind of investments to solve the problems that we have, and not just blindly investing in the technology. Those investments should be driven by need. The other thing to say, and it really was I guess picked up with what I said, is that the one technology is mediated. One of the things that technology can do here is dis-intermediate many processes, whether it’s taking some human handling out of the paper process. Think about how many times a paper changes hands when students, for example, pay their bills here. But what if we did have digital cash? What if the student did have a card that was good for everything. You could take a lot of those long lines and a lot of waiting out of the process. And the same could be said of many of our administrative processes, and class registration. I saw in the Tar Heel two days ago there was a little spoof about Caroline being bogged down because it wasn’t robust enough. But it is more robust than the long lines that we used to have to deal with. And finally, we must be very certain that we’re not dealing with entertainment, that is, I think many of us are concerned that when we read the papers we read only about the entertainment industry and the National Information Infrastructure. And while I think we all agree that entertainment is not educational, I hope we’d all agree there’s nothing wrong with education being entertaining. A better word would be engaging. That’s, I think, the way we need to think about the technology when we think of it, is how can we use it to engage the student in terms of teaching and learning. So I do see an opportunity here and in instructional terms which, again, is one of our major mission components; it’s an opportunity to rethink our instructional programs.

We ought to be guided probably by at least three key items here: to increase the quality of learning — I don’t think anyone can argue that one. Maybe that’s simply apple pie and motherhood. We probably wouldn’t argue this one: to increase access to instruction. That seems a very viable thing today and a very necessary thing. Although we don’t feel it much here, over 50% of the students enrolled in higher education in America are not traditional, that is they’re not 18-22 years old. They’re — what are the phrases — life-long learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, training just in time, education on demand — all those things; they are very operative today. We’re somewhat immune from it because of our traditions on where we stand but we will not remain forever immune from it, and certainly there is the expectation in the state that we will help deliver some of the professional training and education that needs to take place in an ever moving workplace and an ever moving society. We need to think about access to instruction. And what happens when the state expects us to enroll 50,000 students and not 22,000? We know from the land-use report that there’s no place in the center of this campus for that to happen. I think we’ll continue to have 22,000 18 to 22 year olds and on-site professional graduate students, but I suspect we’ll also be enrolling many people using the technology who are not here, literally not here. We really need to think through what is our role as faculty m embers in the face-to-face contact with students. And I think there is a role, to be sure. But it’s not necessarily always walking into a classroom three times a week lecturing sixteen weeks, blocked up that way. That’s a fairly rigid model when you think about it. And last but not least, if we’re going to do more with less, as seems to be the expectation throughout the state, then the technology would seem to be, due to its flexibility and dis-intermediated qualities, perhaps our best bet for thinking about how to do that, and how to meet that social expectation. So from my point of view, what we’re really looking at here is not an information infrastructure, it’s a learning infrastructure. Faculty research is all about learning. This is an infrastructure which can enhance research. We hoped to show you some examples today but it’s failing us. But it can certainly also enhance learning and other dimensions. And here are the things that we might think about, primarily this line right here. We’ve been thinking too much in terms of inputs, too little in terms of outputs. How many hours do they sit there, how many weeks of credit hours do they amass over four years, and so on, rather than what did they learn? We’re asked by the General Administration to evaluate teaching. We’re hardly ever asked to evaluate learning. The assumption somehow is that we’re doing that, and I don’t say we aren’t. We give final exams and so on. But I think we need to rethink that and even put a little more emphasis on this side. More on the learner, a little less on the teacher, as lecturer. Not less on the faculty member as the creator of knowledge, as the person who helps package knowledge into course models and into textbooks. Not as the person who helps guide students through a degree program, indeed, who helps set the degree program for this Institution — that distinguishes it from other institutions. Those are all very valid faculty roles. But I’m not sure we always have to think of a primary faculty r ole as being lecturer, talking at them. In the old model, which was rather fixed, the technology allows us to do things in a more modular, scalable way.

Professor Brown: Bill, can we move on to talking about the policy? Professor Graves: Yes. The policy talked about here, or I tried to talk as much as I could in a general way about, I think there are the two main themes — let me go back to them, which is “increase openness” and “protect privacy.” So why don’t we pause right now and see if we can get some discussion going while you also see if you can get the network going? So why don’t we solicit some questions on the policy, or the direction? I t’s not a policy; it’s a framework. Any comments about this idea of publishing information and being very aggressive about that, expecting departments to publish information about their students, about their programs? I noticed today while preparing for this that, Barbara, your department, has on its home page, has a way for students to actually fill in some forms and get information back from — I should have said, “school.” Dean Moran: On the system there is a survey on it. They can fill in their names, their addresses, and what track they’re interested in, and send us an E-mail request for a catalog and information, and we will mail it back. It’s there on the World Wide Web for students. [Unidentified]: What department is this? Dean Moran: This is Information and Library Science. Professor Graves: Other comments about that?

Professor Bayne: Bill, one of the things that I’m feeling more at risk when I work on the World Wide Web is I pull out information and I have no idea whether the information is true. There’s no doubt that it’s somebody’s data base, but the number could be off by a factor of ten or it could just be a lie. What has been the discussion about establishing the veracity of the data which we’re providing to the Network or understanding what’s bad coming down. Professor Graves: Well, there’s a lot of discussion, and some of us in the Triangle, mainly the technologists and the librarians at Duke, NC State, and UNC, and NC Central, are in fact talking about those kinds of issues and trying to decide on some common program to go after. Joe, do you think you’ d want to make a comment about that issue? Is this a big one with you? Dr. Joe Hewitt (Director, Academic Affairs Library): Well, if you’re talking about research data [Professor Brown: can you stand up, Joe], if you are familiar with the interest in electronic publishing, particularly peer review journals, that’s one thing that we would like to be able to test out here. We’re trying to get an appropriate group of scholars or scientists interested in working with us. But it is a problem. A lot of the data that you’ve pulled off the World Wide Web has not undergone the kind of scripting that you’d expect from a peer review scholarly publishers. In fact, very little of it has. So, it’s part of the standards that we want to work on, and developing will be after this part of the proposal, which is really centered primarily on institutional information and the private information that scholars pass back and forth through E-mail. Embedded in the framework more of an orientation towards research information and information that we publish as scholars and scientists. And that will come, I guess, though as an addendum to this document or another section that will fill out that aspect of the total policy that we’ll be working on. Professor Graves: Yes, I think that what we’re thinking is that over time there’ll be working groups working on various issues like this one. Under this framework that’s the general plan. Dr. Hewitt: There needs to be more filtering in our locale, what we provide locally, i f we’re to make some evaluation of the network, the information that’s on the network. In the libraries we will try to pull together what is most relevant to make that easily accessed and at some point in the future to apply some kind of validation of the information that’s there. But that will be a very difficult issue related more to the information than to the infrastructure, which is the primary thrust of what we’re talking about here. Professor Graves: Other comments?

Professor Karl Petersen (Mathematics): I just wanted to comment on the grading of information as public or versus private. It seems to me there could be several possible levels of privacy. And there might be some things that we really want to make available to everybody on the Internet or there might be some other things that we want available only to people connected with the University. There might be some things we want available only to certain people within the University and some things that’s absolutely private except to the individual whomever he or she decides to give those to. And so, I hope when these things are being developed or posted that we keep — first of all we keep the capability technically of being able to do this, of having passwords and other security methods of grading access to information. And second, I think the faculty has to develop some mechanism for seeing that this is done and reviewed in an intelligent way. I mean in the first instance whoever is posting information would probably decide what the level of access should be. But mistakes can be made in both directions. And information could be made too accessible or if information should be more accessible could be too closely housed. So we need some group or so me committee so levels of accessibility are decided on, and then also to decide who gets that access. The individuals that would have access to certain sets of information, how is that to be decided and monitored. Professor Graves: I agree with you, Karl, and those are the kinds of issues we hope now we can take on with the various working groups. Your first comment was of course that the line between private and what we call institutional published information is not really a hard line, though there may be gradations there, I agree with that.

By the way we do have I think now an active machine here. We’ve got a machine that’s permanently installed. And I’m not familiar with it. If I can make it work, we can probably get there. This is what is known in this parlance of the World Wide Web as a home page. This is UNC’s home page. In other words, anyone going to UNC on Web would first encounter this. And then from here we go elsewhere. So, for example, I have the pointer pointed toward “departments and organizations” and, if I know how to use the pointer — did I get it? This is not a mouse, and I’m not used to it. Is it doing anything? It’s just really slow. But here we see now a list of departments and organizations. So, for example, if I wanted to see, get information out of the College of Arts and Sciences, and I click there, and now I get information about the College of Arts and Sciences that I can scroll through. Presumably if I can do that, and find out that there are many, many departments in the College of Arts and Sciences. If I want to find out about any particular one of those, I could come over here, Geology, for example, and click there. And now we go deeper. And it’s going off. You see this information’s not all in one place. Now, presumably the information which might have been at some level on a central machine because it was the home page for the University, now it’s down to the level of the Geology Department. So that information may reside and be owned by in some sense — the wrong word — that’s the responsibility, as we see it, of the Geology Department. It’s the steward for this information. And that’s where the information should be created and managed because these are the people who know most about it. So here we would get a fair amount of information if I started scrolling through. Presumably about the Department itself — it’s going to scroll real fast now, about various upcoming events and so on and so forth. No doubt faculty information. Now I think some of our schools and departments have already found this to be an effective way to market their programs, to promote their programs. Barbara, I think when you put your information up on the Web about your graduate program, you had instantly how many responses back from students from all over the world, potential students? Dean Moran: And also a lot of them didn’t bother to write because our catalog was available too and they can read it and decide whether the program’s for them or not.

Professor Graves: Let’s take this back a level or two here. We’re going back to where we started. Professor Brown: So your whole catalog is on the Net, then? Professor Graves: Well, let’s show yours, Barbara. We’ll just go on down there. Let’s see, Information and Library Science, right there. So there it is, picture and all. This illustrates what I meant earlier about documents no longer being exactly documents. So we’ve got information about the faculty, we’ve got information about courses of study. I think you have — let me show this form if it’s here. This is a contact, is that where it is, Barbara? Dean Moran: I think so. I kind of like that. So, here’s a form that a potential student or anyone wanting information about the School can simply fill in, that gets shipped from wherever it came in the world directly to your staff or your colleagues and the questions can be answered and the information supplied electronically, or in the mail, or however. Phone calls can be initiated based on that information. So I think it’s a pretty good illustration of what we’re talking about, when we talk about accessing information about our academic programs.

Professor John Workman (Business): How interactive is this? Let’s say you were over in France doing this. Do you get a 5 or 10 second delay, or is the interactivity? It’s called the World Wide Web; I just wondered about physically. Professor Graves : Well, it depends on the connections between there and here. I was in England recently and did this live and it was fine. It was fast. On the other hand it can be slow, because it depends on the traffic on the Network, it depends on the various linkages around the world. There’s no one answer for this. Professor Workman: So it could be just as quick if you were in another country? Professor Graves: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it typically is unless it’s an underdeveloped country. The Internet has now been extended to — I’m going to lose track of this, but something like 80 countries in the world. And the rate of growth, in fact, on the Internet today, is at 15% per month. It’s compounded 15% per month. So this is for real. I think that’s part of our message, is that even though it doesn’t always work perfectly, it’s for real, and we’re going to have to, as a faculty, engage these issues and decide how we’re going to harness these investments for what we really want to do. It just won’t go away. Other comments?

You can do things like go to the Gazette here — let me see where we are because it’s about time to wrap this up, but let’s go back a level. Well, let’s show what some students have done. This is also, I think, quite interesting. Student World Wide Web Projects. I like this. Here’re some students taking classes in Barbara’s school, and they’ve put together a new form of the term paper. And if you think about it, this is really a bridge between research and teaching. I mean it really should be ab ut learning, our learning and students’ learning, and bridging those two in a research university. And so I think this illustrates some of the possibilities. Let me scroll down to one I’m familiar with. You want first on the science side and then one on the humanities side. I kind of like “Team Dopamine,” so let’s –. Here’s “Welcome to the Team Dopamine” home page, presumably some students working in biochemistry, perhaps chemistry, or somewhere in the School of Medicine that deals with these kinds of issues. I think actually this is Pharmacy now that I think about it. But telling us about the project with which they’re, telling us a little bit about some of the things they’re doing, such as investigating the vibrational behavior of the benzene molecule. We click on that. It reaches out to another machine someplace and pulls in this little movie that, if I now know how to start it, how do I start it, Barry? All of these machines are a little different. But we get this movie of a benzene molecule. We go to the other extreme, and that’s through — let’s see if I can stop this. Seen enough benzene for the day? Okay, let’s close that down and go to the other extreme.

The humanities. It’s very interesting that, oh, a month or so back, that, Joe, you hosted the Board of Visitors for the University. You hosted them in your wonderful Rare Book Collection, at least in the general vicinity there. You have this wonderful collection. You have within it the Southern Collection, unique Southern Historical Collection, within that the Folklore Collection, again unique, a real resource for scholars around the world, for people around the world. But something that not everyone can gain access to, because we cannot let everyone in that Rare Book Room, that’s pretty clear. On the other hand, we go up here and see what these students, working with probably one of your colleagues, Joe, I’m sure — we go off and bring in some of that collection in digital form. This little symbol up here tells us that it’s still working, so I’m going to let it finish its work while I go on, but you can see emerging from this kind of an attempt to see what it might look like if you tried to digitize this information, so some information about the holdings, what the music styles represented in the collection are, so on and so forth.

I also saw Doc Watson, a reference up there, so let me take it back up to that reference if I can. And just click on Doc Watson and see what we get. If we get any ideas that these hot buttons, these blue labelled words and pictures are hot: they link off to information elsewhere. Thus we have a web of information. Okay, it went off somewhere else. And it gives me a symbol that suggests that we’ve got actually some live Doc Watson. Live, meaning in this case, meaning we’ve got a sound file. What this is, Joe, you can correct me, but I think this is a digital recording of the original wax recording, and so it’s going off to bring that back. Now it takes a little while to do that. You can see it’s doing some work up there. It’s a big file. But if all goes well, we will hear Doc Watson. And so could anyone else in the world, who had access to this. It’s there Well, I don’t know if you want to end this meeting on a prayer. I certainly felt like we did when none of this was working. But I hope this gives you some idea — now, because we had some failures we didn’t get to all the categories I would have liked to have taken you through. Research. Access to information about research grants. Access to information about students, their records. Access to information about what we’re doing, that’s really embedded in the kind of thing that your school, and Geology, and so on are putting on-line. So our main thesis is we need to publish in this kind of format — this may not be the ultimate format, but this is a very viable one — we need to do that and we need to be aggressive about doing it because we’re here to serve the public, we’re here to serve our students, and we think we can do this more effectively with these technologies than we can without. So let’s be aggressive about that and let’s be open about it. At the same time let’s do it wisely so that we really are connecting these huge investments in technology to the academic mission of our University. And that requires, obviously, debate within the Faculty about how to do that. Let’s turn the lights up. If there are any other questions I’m sure that the Council would be happy to engage in them. Professor Brown: Great. Thank you very much. You’ve been a great model of what to do with technology. Professor Graves: As they say in North Carolina, if you live by the jump shot, you die by the jump shot. Professor Larry Rowan (Physics & Astronomy/Director, Center for Teaching and Learning): How many faculty people have computers in their offices that can have access to this software? Professor Graves: Well, Larry, as you might guess, it’s probably impossible to give a precise answer to that. But what we do know — I’m going to check some figures with my colleagues — what we know is there are more pc’s out there, meaning mainly pcs and Macintoshes out there, than there are faculty and staff. Now some of them are old and probably not very useful, but that tells us something. [Unidentified]: The faculty or the pcs? [laughter] Professor Graves: Larry, I think the answer is that many, many of us have access. That does not mean everyone does. And some people may not want it. Professor Rowan: You mean with the Mosaic capability? Professor Graves: No, that’s a somewhat different question. First of all, this capability requires a direct connection to the Internet. You don’t do this at home on a modem. Nor do you do it from your department on a modem, unless it’s a very special kind of modem connection. So you really need the kind of connection that we envision everyone having as part of the vision for all of this. And that’s what the fiber network will enable and the wiring of the building when we get there. This has to be for everyone who wants it. Professor Brown: Well, let me ask you a question, Larry. How are you equipped in the Center for Teaching and Learning to educate us in how to use this technology, as teachers? Professor Rowan: We have a local network within the Center for Teaching and Learning which is connected to the campus network, and we have the software facilities and capabilities available to us, and we’d like very much to work with folks to help them use those kinds of kinds of techniques for their courses. Professor Brown: How many rooms like this are there on the campus that we have access to? Professor Graves: Well, these classrooms number I think about 12, or even 13 or 14 right now. We have quite a few. I’d like to point out — and they’re very viable — people use them. But I’d like to point out that this model is not going to scale either. I think we need to build these classrooms and go through them and maintain them, because it’s the way we will learn to use the technology. But we’re not going to be able to outfit every classroom this way. This is just bolting the technology down on top of the existing model. So this is good. We’re going to continue doing it, but we won’t be able to do it for every classroom ad infinitum. Professor Brown: So, that’s when you’re talking about doing other models of teaching and learning. Professor Graves: Beginning to think how we might use the technology to create alternative models for what we’re charged to do, which is educate students.

Professor Joy Kasson (American Studies): As a humanist, I just wanted to comment that I think sort of seeing these opportunities, it strikes me that the gap between haves and have-nots is already pretty big, and it’s going to increase, and I take it to be the thrust of Larry’s question, too. There’re some fields in which your research gives you access to some of this equipment by grants, by this way and that way, but in other fields we’re kind of stumbling along with scotch tape. And I just want to put in humanists would like to be able to use this too, and some way in which the have-nots can get caught up with the haves. Professor Graves: Joy, I think you’re absolutely right. Maybe I can say that some of my best friends are humanists. I understand this, and think, in fact, some of the nicest uses of technology I have seen on this campus have come from the humanities. I think that our leadership, the Provost and the Vice Chancellors would all agree, it would be very desirable to have this on every faculty desk. The problem is there has just not been the money to do that, and therefore, those departments that have either reallocated the resources in this direction or have been lucky enough to get grants that allowed them to do that, have been able to move faster. We’ve been very lucky, by the way, to have a student fee. Students understand the importance of all this, and themselves a couple of years ago decided it would be worth that investment in order to make sure that the access was there. So in some sense the students are better off than the faculty.

Professor Steve Bayne (Dentistry): Would you follow up on that question, Bill, about where the money comes from. Because we talked about this a couple of years ago — whether individual units should be budgeting for technology or whether schools should be doing it, or whether the University should be doing it as an umbrella operation, or maybe coordinated by you. Professor Graves: Well, I think all of the above is the answer, because as you all know, you want the technology on your desk top. So it very much belongs with you and in your school or department unit, whatever. At the same time, it won’t work, you won’t be able to, have the kind of access I just demonstrated unless we have a backbone network, unless we have centrally coordinated standards. So we need both central investments, which is our responsibility, as well as departmental investments. And I think what’s missing right now in addition to money — obviously money is always missing, both central and department. But what’s missing right now we really have to get at is how to plan together so that the central investments and the departmental unit investments are coordinated, so that we’re all marching in the same direction to some common good.

Professor Miles Fletcher (History): I’ve been talking to some professors who have already made great strides in the use of computers [in planning work], and they all — and I’m beginning to work in this area myself — and what they all say is that it takes a tremendous amount of time to learn the technology, develop materials, and they’ve had to sacrifice a lot to make the time available to do that. They’ve had to take time away from activities that are perhaps more obviously rewarded by the University. And I think one issue is if we are moving in this direction, administrators and perhaps we ourselves have to decide how much these efforts are going to be rewarded, make the time available to do this, if we’re really serious about moving in this direction. Professor Brown: Good comment. Professor Graves: Good comment. And I think we do need to do that. Professor Brown: As we retool.

Professor John Halton (Computer Science): I think it’s good that this comment comes from someone in Computer Science. I’m very much aware, from my own experience — I guess I’m one of those old and perhaps useless faculty members — that, well, I’m re minded of the complain that we hear about the TV comedy shows and so on, about how difficult it is to use a VCR. And on the other hand, the teenagers find it trivial, and the engineers find it to be trivial. And I think what’s happening here is that not only, as you mentioned, there’s quite a bit of a learning curve to be thought of these days, a time when you have to get familiar with the equipment. But if you don’t do this very frequently that information disappears again. And you come back to it and you can’t remember what the rules are. And somehow — [Professor Brown: Or the rules have changed since you were there, as well.] The rules have changed, new equipment comes along, and there’s a pivotal piece [unfamiliar], and I’m reminded there’s another problem, and that is with archiving information. As the technology improves, you lose your archives. For instance, how many people now have a recorder which uses wire instead of tape? So everything that was recorded on wire is now extremely difficult to retrieve. But that’s another question. But the question really is how long will it take our culture to get to the point where we are so familiar with running the equipment and using computers and accessing information this way that we no longer forget from occasion to occasion how to do it. It’s taken us a long time to get everyone familiar with reading to the point where we don’t have to spell out each word letter by letter, and it may take us a lot longer than we think — or it may not — I ‘ m curious about that — to really get to use this new technology and not be left behind and suddenly it’s been two months and I’ve forgotten how to do it. So it has to become increasingly intuitive and increasingly frequently used. Professor Graves: I think that’s a good comment, John, and of course as you know there are people taking very seriously the human-machine interface and new interfaces to the machines are coming along every day. I suffer from the same thing you do. I’m always up here as a technologist promoting this stuff and literally saying this is going to be our salvation in some way or another, but I do believe that we have a long march from here to there. But the march will be made more easy if we think in advance about where we’re going and how we’re going to try to get there. And that’s really what I think the Council’s trying to get us collectively as a community to do, to think through all these issues. They’re very hard questions that you raised. There’re very hard questions about what’s false and what’s real, and so on.

Professor Brown: Last question? Professor James Stasheff (Mathematics): I think one answer to that question we see in some of our students. For us to retrofit our brain to adapt to the technology and they who come up using it without thinking about it. Professor Graves: I think that’s a good observation. What it really says is there are new ways of knowing, and we know from left to right. And they don’t, in some sense. There are new ways of knowing. We have to understand that to deal with our mission as [can] the students. Jane, I’d just to say one last thing. I apologize that we had some breakdowns, and I hope that, by throwing in the instructional example that we didn’t dilute the main message, which is about being aggressive in publishing information on the Network, and about protecting privacy, and about thinking through all of these issues. And I could raise many individual and even exciting examples of things that are going on today — and some not so exciting, some bad things — that technology allows people to do. But I don’t want us to lose track of that just because we had a minor failure here today. Thanks. Professor Brown: So what we understand is that this policy is in draft. It’s ongoing, and there will be other pieces put to it? That as we learn how to use this, we can communicate with you about it? Professor Graves: Absolutely yes, and I think what we’ll see is if all continues to go the way it has been going, we’ll see the working groups emerge to address particular issues. Professor Brown: Thank you very much. [applause]

V. Old or New Business.

Professor Brown: Thank you all. Is there any other new business or old business? Great, have a great semester, and we’ll see you in February.

The meeting adjourned at 4:53 p.m.

George S. Lensing Secretary of the Faculty _____________________________________________________________________________

Actions of the Council

Date	Action	Destination
Sept. 23, 1994	Resolution of thanks to Senator Howard Lee, Representatives Anne Barnes and Joseph Hackney	To Senator Howard Lee, Representatives Anne Barnes and Joseph Hackney
	Resolution of thanks to General Assembly	To Members of General Assembly
	Resolution of thanks to Elizabeth McMahan, editor of Faculty Handbook	To Elizabeth McMahan
Oct. 21, 1994	No resolutions
Nov. 11, 1994	No resolutions
Dec. 9, 1994	No resolutions
Jan. 13, 1995	No resolutions