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Faculty Senate Minutes
May 10, 2016
Meeting convened Tuesday, May 10, 2016 at 7:04pm by Michael Barnett, Chair of the Faculty Senate.
Senators in attendance: Charles Ross, Kris Belden-Adams, Patrick Curtis, Brice Noonan, Sasan Nouranian, Greg Tschumper, Ahmed Al-Ostaz, Brad Cook, Tossi Ikuta, Feng Wang, Tom Garrett, Ann Fisher Worth, Mary Hayes, Jay Watson, Andrew O-Reilly, Yang-Chieh Fu, Oliver Dinius, Noell Wilson, Antonia Eliason, Dennis Bunch, Ashley Dees, Savannah Kelly, Kristin Rogers, Dwight Frink, Lifeng Yang, Sasha Kocic, Tejas Pandya, Heather Allen, Amy Fang-Yen Hsieh, Mary Roseman, Michael Repka, Travis King, James Bos, Breese Quinn, Ben Jones, Danielle Maack, Jody Holland, Amy Fisher, Minjoo Oh, Mark Ortwein, Joe Sumrall, Michael Barnett
Senators excused: Robert Doerksen, Marcos Mendoza
Senators absent: Rachna Prakash, Richard Gordon, Darren Grem, Jim Lumpp, Robert Magee, Stacey Lantagne, Lorri Williamson, Milam Aiken, Adam Estes, Michael Gardiner, Meagan Rosenthal, Allan Bellman
Approval of April 12, 2016 Minutes
Minutes of April 12, 2016 meeting were approved by the Faculty Senate as a whole without comment.
Presentation by Chancellor Vitter Regarding Contextualization of Historical Buildings and Statues on the University of Mississippi Campus
Thanks for the opportunity to be here and congratulations again on the Semester. I wanted to mention that we worked hard and really want to credit Larry Sparks and Morris Stocks for working within the means of the University given a pretty significant budget cut by the State going forward next year – working within our resources, especially enrollment management – there will be a 1% raise pool, which is not as high as previous years but remarkable that we were able to put it together given the upcoming budget cut.
One of the interesting points from the past that we will be dealing going forward is dealing with Confederate symbols. We will be forming a committee on history and context. I am here to get important input from you on how to take this forward to make this as professional as possible.
As you know, there was a committee appointed last summer that worked through the fall and last Fall came up with some wording to contextualize the Confederate statue on a plaque – this was installed mid-March. The great majority of comments that came in were positive, but there were some questions from people that did not know there was a process so they weren’t able to provide input. There were some comments from both sides – some thinking it was disrespectful to the graves; some thinking it didn’t go far enough.
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I met with some faculty in history and sociology and some students from the NAACP in late March – and a committee of 4 people expressed interest in reviewing the input that came in. This is a very esteemed committee – Chuck Ross, Chair of African American Studies, David Sansing, Andy Mullins and Donald Cole, our chief diversity officer.
We opened the process for two more weeks of input and presented it to the committee – it was several hundreds of emails and inputs and the committee is in the process of going through it and reaching out to various faculty members to get input while they deliberate as to how or if they should change the plaque. The deadline is June 1 to get input.
I asked the committee for guidance as to their wishes to revise this or work it into the upcoming expanded Advisory Committee. All along they have been reaching out and have decided unanimously that they would like to complete this. Then we will launch a nomination process for the new Advisory Committee on History and Context which will be expanded from the original 4 members. I would like to get your input – I have a handout with five questions – if you have other thoughts, please send them to me.
I’ve met with student governance, including leaders of many student organizations, including the NAACP group, the Isom Center, the African American studies program leadership, the LGBTQ standing committee. I will be meeting with the Winter Institute very soon. I have been reaching out to faculty, staff, students, alumni – asking these five questions. I would appreciate your input now or later. The first two questions are about the kinds of traits or expertise that are important to be on this committee – this is not a political process – we are trying to ground this in academic truth/study/accuracy. We want this to be a scholarly project. The third question concerns the optimal size of the Committee. Four is what other input groups would be useful for me to touch base with, and fifth is what should the Committee be charged with so they can ensure they get input from the Committee.
The charge is roughly twofold: 1) what are the recommended places that need contextualization, and 2) once that recommendation is made and vetted, they will be charged with recommending the wording for the means of contextualizing these projects. I have also been working closely with the IHL to get their buy-in. The IHL has committed to support us. They have asked that we do the contextualizations together so they are all one big project and all come forth together. This has a lot of advantages – 1) it doesn’t become a disruptive process and 2) they become part of a comprehensive approach and no one plaque bears the responsibility of telling the entire story. I think this will give a fuller picture and will by no means diminish the ongoing work being done by the UM Slavery Group – including the archaeological dig that will take place at Rowan Oak this fall, or possibly on the Circle, where there is a remaining slave quarter site without a building on top of it.
This Committee is going to have spectacular people on it – but we don’t want them to miss anything and we want everyone to be able to provide input.
Question: How would we provide feedback and is there a timeline?
Answer: I am hoping we can announce a nomination process when the current committee has finished its work on the Confederate statue – so May would be a great time to provide input on these questions.
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Chairman Barnett: I would be happy to gather responses from you and your colleagues.
Comment: I would like to invite you to invite the Committee to think beyond the plaque – the question of medium is very important – how is the information to be conveyed? If you put them on a plaque, it freezes them in place in a way that can make it very difficult to change.
Answer: There have been comments that perhaps a brochure be put together to allow people to go on a tour. There were four original projects that the Committee was tasked with – not just the Confederate statue – other sites have been suggested. There could be other mechanisms with interacting with information, not necessarily a plaque. That would certainly be in the purview of the expanded Committee to think about and make recommendations.
Question: In some ways given the status of the place of history in this particular context, this is almost in a way a reconciliation process – some of these are not necessarily historians by training – in some ways it is like a truth commission – so maybe that would be helpful to consider.
Answer: Yes, there is an art in commemorating historical sites – not only to convey information but to do so in a way that brings people together rather than tearing them apart. We would like to consider our university to be a leader who is sought after for advice in these matters.
Comment: The polls that have been put online have been helpful – not terribly painful for me to do, and possibly useful in gathering information.
Presentation by Dr. Kathy Gates, Chief Information Officer, Regarding a Revision to Email Storage Capacity and Security
Appreciate you giving me a slot on your meeting agenda – I know this is a busy time of the year. I also wanted to specially mention Kristen, who has done a great job coming to meet with me and sharing some of your thoughts on email. We put this agenda item on about two months ago and a lot has happened since then – so I’d like to give you some background and inform you where we are heading.
In IT we usually keep a set of projects on the front burner and we have to be careful how many projects we have going at one time because we want to be successful. We have made some big changes like making Ole Miss responsive, and MyOleMiss responsive. We also carried out a project in December where we changed out the database that sits under the SAP system to a much faster database – we were one of the first universities in the world to have done that.
We have also added a lot of access points around the perimeter of the Grove, and nearly every building has wireless. We also upgraded Blackboard.
Employee email had been on the backburner. Now on front burner. A few years ago, we moved student email to gmail and left employee email on site. There was less risk with student email since in the worst case if we didn’t like the cloud vendor, we could stop providing student emails. But employee emails are critical for university function – we took a much more conservative approach.
So what I’m hearing from you is that you don’t have enough disk space – Vault was an attempt to give you more disk space – it is not ideal and requires some manual configuration – and doesn’t really
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give you that much compared to some free services. On our side the deal is storage – if you think about the nature of the data – it is constantly changing – when you send attachments it often goes to lots of people – so we have some challenges on our end and we are also looking for ways to help with this. Another challenge with email is e-Discovery – an example is that in 2014 there was an NCAA lawsuit where a female student soccer player started a lawsuit saying that all college athletes should get paid minimum wage. At that point the lawyers ordered NCAA universities to capture historical and future emails for key people at the university and keep them – like athletic director, chancellor. So one of our concerns is that when it is on premises, we can get to it, maybe not in a real pretty way – but we can. If you go to a cloud service, it may be that you don’t have the tools.
Other issues that play in are privacy and security of data – we have to make sure that the content of your email is not mined and that our email addresses are not sold. When you go to a cloud vendor you have to make sure you have contractual protection for these kinds of issues.
In December we saw 2 directions forward: 1) bolster our internal system and 2) move to the cloud – 2 big players are Google and Microsoft. We feel that Microsoft is the better system for an enterprise – to ensure data is in the US, to make sure we have the contractual provisions we talk about – we feel like Microsoft is the stronger player. Also, many of you already use Outlook so you are used to it.
Many of us are very skeptical – so we started looking at all these options. One factor that changed in the Fall that pushed us to wanting to pursue the cloud option – until the Fall, the University would have had to pay for e-Discovery purposes with Microsoft – after that they said that universities would get it for free. That tipped us over towards the cloud. We have learned a lot about how the system works – what the details of sharing calendars; how attachments work. We’ve had webinars for our staff on the e-discovery services. We haven’t figured out everything yet. We have devices all over campus that work on email – like printers and scanners. We need to make sure they work. We had a feature that Chancellor Vitter needed that he couldn’t have – we migrated him over.
I would like you to send me any concerns – and what your thoughts are if we migrate.
Our next step if we decide to go is to put in place an action plan – and to give you all some choice as to when this happens from you – would probably take about 6 months to move everyone over. Disk space would increase by about 10-fold. 50gb. There would be no more vault – so much simpler. One issue that we have had is that we have had to disable the Outlook app because of serious security issues. With the cloud version, the security issues don’t exist. For our office, this is a huge issue for the university attorney and athletics. There is an option to encrypt messages. Microsoft encrypts data at rest and in transit – but if you email outside of Microsoft customers it has a way to encrypt the data.
Eventually, we may want to bring the students back into Microsoft – to me the encryption is one of the key things – if you have both faculty and students on Microsoft, the encryption is seamless. But student email is out of the mix for right now.
There are some other tools that come, like Skype for business. The potential downsides are 1) is Microsoft going to be there and is it going to continue to make this free for education? What if we deconstruct our infrastructure and move over – and they start charging? Microsoft has been very education focused, so this may not be a worry; 2) another concern is the security and privacy of your data – when you move it to the cloud, you have to pay attention to what country it is in. The contractual
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language in the Microsoft agreement is very good. There might be some scenarios especially involving very sensitive research where we would want to look very carefully. Those are the potential downsides. The last thing is that when you go to a cloud service, it is what it is – it is a commodity – we can’t go in and tweak and give you new features.
Please feel free to contact me afterwards with questions as well.
Question: How would offline access work? Also, what would happen to the legacy emails that we already have stored away?
Answer: Offline access would work pretty much like it does now. If there’s something in the network that keeps you getting it, you can use Outlook offline. On the second question, we have scripts that we run to migrate your data. There is a different process for data that is in your inbox and in your vault – we would probably give you one folder that is the information in vault. In our testing we will figure out how many people we think we can do per day – you should be able to pick what is convenient for you. Then after some time limit force everyone else to change.
Question: Are we also going to move from Box to OneDrive?
Answer: No. There are some advantages to Box. Box is FERPA and HIPA compliant – it meets the security standards for students and medical records. Box is better for institutional data.
Question: Has there been any discussion concerning the email tag “olemiss.edu” and its continuation?
Answer: We have some technical issues in working it out to mask the Microsoft address – there are not a lot of really good choices. But it will stay.
Question: If you move students over, how long would they keep it? Why can’t we keep it longer?
Answer: We keep it almost a year now. We have limited resources – but it is a possibility. The best way to do that is to let us handle employee email and then decide with student email what to do – we could probably do the indefinite and I would like to see that.
Just two sentences about Blackboard – we have 4 application servers – and at about 1pm today they all began restarting – we looked at the logs which go crazy. I think some interaction of activity hit a software bug to cause the behavior to spike. Our systems group has collected data on what happened and we opened a critical ticket with Blackboard and we will be working tonight with Blackboard support. We restarted them and they went again at 2:30, restarted again and they were a bit sluggish. We don’t really know what caused it but we will.
Senate Committee Reports
Executive Committee: Nothing to report.
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General Academic Affairs: Nothing to report.
Academic Support: Nothing to report.
Finance: Nothing to report.
Governance: Nothing to report.
University Services:
Issues Related to Faculty Parking on Campus
We had questions concerning parking. There wasn’t much praise for parking so I met and spoke with Mr. Harris and spoke with him concerning the issues in parking. We are losing a lot of parking for Faculty and there are a lot of complaints about student parking. Our wages are also illegally garnished if we get tickets. Also, the interaction with sporting events and parking is problematic.
We have a faculty senate representative on the parking committee – it meets every month and Mr. Harris made it clear that he welcomes people with questions or concerns.
We will gain bit a good bit of faculty parking when the North End Zone construction is completed. There is also a new parking garage which is going to be for students which will free up a lot of parking on campus for us – will take 1500 cars. Potentially there are some other lots that may be converted to faculty parking.
There are a lot of lots that are primarily student parking but we are also allowed to park there.
One of the concerns was that the commuter lot gets taken up during football games or before them by RVs – so there are fewer spaces that will be allocated to RVs before 3pm Fridays. There is also another commuter lot which isn’t used as much – the South Lot.
As for the wage garnishment, that is in the agreement you all read when you purchase the parking pass. This is IHL approved, so probably not illegal.
Question: A major issue has been the lack of communication concerning the changes in parking lots – there has been no communication. A new map could have helped – there was a lot of frustration. Before the Pavilion lot opened, you couldn’t really leave the premises of the University. It would be nice to have good communication from parking services about any changes.
Answer: I went to the parking website and they do have some information – they could make it more obvious.
Question: Was the any discussion of prioritization of parking at the heart of campus in relation to Faculty and students?
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Answer: Yes – if you look at a map, everything in the center is really faculty parking. You can park anywhere in most of those, except for dorm lots and frat lots.
Comment: Students have an app that they can use to find available spots in student parking. That will be made available for faculty and staff next year.
Old Business
Nothing to report.
New Business
Nothing to report.
Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned. Next meeting, Tuesday, August 30, 7:00pm in Bryant Hall.