Meeting Recording

00:37:47             Hadas Ritz:          Hadas Ritz, MAE (COE RTE at-large)

00:38:00             Qiuming Yu:        Qiuming Yu CBE senator

00:38:08             Jonathon Schuldt:            Jonathon Schuldt, Communication

00:38:30             Laurie Miller:      Laurie Miller Brooks

00:39:22             Charlie Van Loan:             Charlie Van Loan, CS

00:39:39             Roxanne Marino:              Roxanne Marino EEB

00:39:41             Weijia Song:       Weijia Song, CS

00:39:51             Suzanne Shu:     Suzanne Shu, business

00:39:53             Rachel Sandwell:              Rachel Sandwell, History

00:39:54             Adam Anderson:              Adam Anderson, Psychology

00:40:05             Peter McMahon (Cornell University):       Peter McMahon, Applied and Engineering Physics

00:40:07             Nancy Pollak:      Nancy Pollak, Comparative Literature

00:40:44             Richard Bensel:  Richard Bensel, Government

00:41:01             Debbie Cherney:               Debbie Cherney, Animal Science, UFC

00:41:09             Denise Ramzy:   Denise Ramzy, Dyson/JCB RTE

00:41:14             Andrew Campana:           Andrew Campana, Asian Studies

00:41:15             Kathryn Caggiano:            Kathryn Caggiano, Engineering RTE

00:41:20             Devin Sanera:     Devin Sanera, Library RTE

00:41:21             Erik Born:            Erik Born, German Studies

00:41:27             Risa Lieberwitz: Risa Lieberwitz, ILR

00:41:31             Christine Holmes (she/her):         Christine Holmes, Postdoctoral Studies

00:41:32             Simone Pinet (she/her): Simone Pinet, Romance Studies

00:41:51             Annetta Alexandridis:     Annetta Alexandridis, History of Art

00:42:02             Florentina Bunea:             Florentina Bunea, Statistics and Data Science

00:42:07             Emily Gier:           Emily Gier, RTE CHE

00:42:13             Marten van Schijndel:     Marten van Schijndel, Linguistics

00:42:25             JR Keller (Cornell):            JR Keller, Human Resource Studies

00:42:32             Donna Haeger:  Donna Haeger Dyson

00:42:35             Anne Weber:      Anne Weber, Landscape Architecture

00:42:47             Angelika Kraemer:            Angelika Kraemer, RTE, CAS

00:43:01             Rajesh Bhaskaran:           Rajesh Bhaskaran, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

00:43:12             Robin Dando:     Robin Dando, Food Science

00:43:29             Tamer Uyar:        Tamer Uyar, Human Centered Design

00:43:33             Misa Suzuki:       Misa Suzuki, Asian Studies

00:43:54             Steve Jesch:        Stephen Jesch, CALS RTE

00:44:08             Makda Weatherspoon (Cornell University):           Makda Weatherspoon, NES

00:44:09             Betsy Bihn (she/her), PSA Director:           Betsy Bihn, Food Science

00:44:54             Maria Gonzalez Pendas: Maria Gonzales Pendas, Architecture, AAP

00:46:23             David Field:         David Field, Psychology

00:48:11             Karla Hanson (she/her): Karla Hanson, Public & Ecosystem Health

00:48:25             Sofia Kalantzi:    Sofia Kalantzi, SCJCB, At-Large RTE

01:01:26             Risa Lieberwitz: from Resolution 181: Be it further resolved that the Provost, at the conclusion of the program planning process, solicit the approval from the Faculty Senate and explain how the implementation questions and problems raised by Faculty Senate committees were addressed before commencement of the part-time bachelor’s degree program

01:02:44             Tara Holm (she/her):       Reacted to “from Resolution 181:…” with 👍

01:03:17             Richard Bensel:  Hi, everybody…The most relevant words are “solicit the approval from the Faculty Senate…”

01:08:09             Dan Buckley:      Dan Buckley, Microbiology

01:11:02             Simone Pinet (she/her): Reacted to “from Resolution 181:…” with 👍🏼

01:14:41             Paul Ginsparg:   Paul Ginsparg infosci (belatedly checking in)

01:15:07             Kathryn Caggiano:            https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/3/6798/files/2024/04/T4-Response-to-RTE-WG-Comments-8b279c8e43a74a7a.pdf

01:15:11             Saida Hodzic:      Saida Hodzic, Anthropology (checking in)

01:18:38             Richard Bensel:  Thanks, Charlie!  As you know, changes in Graduate School regulations apply throughout Cornell University.  It does seem that the Colleges will be compelled to adjust individually.  However, this is a University-wide change in education policy and should be discussed in the Faculty Senate.

01:19:33             Jeffrey Perry:      Jeff Perry, Global Development — checking in

01:28:41             Allison Chatrchyan, Cornell:         Kudos to this committee! I learned a lot and agree with your assessment and plan!

01:31:13             Roxanne Marino:              Thank you to this committee for all their excellent work on this topic, and to Ashely for a very nice and informative presenatiton

01:34:57             Buz Barstow:      Buz Barstow BEE

01:35:51             William Lai:         William Lai Comp Bio

01:37:13             Sunny Power:     Alison Power STS

01:47:07             David Delchamps:            David Delchamps, ECE

01:55:52             Paul Ginsparg:   i found https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/03/completely-different-game-faculty-students-harness-ai-classroom   — is that the one that flashed quickly on steve j’s slide?

02:01:13             Brian VanderVen:             https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-innovation-awards-creative-responses-generative-ai

02:02:36             Paul Ginsparg:   yes, except the teaching.cornell.edu page still says “Check back later this spring for more details on our awardee’s projects and how they may be adapted for different courses and learning environments.”, so hasn’t been updated yet. steve said “even as we speak”, so i’ll give it another 8 min

Faculty Senate

Meeting minutes

April 10, 2024

– Jonathan Ochshorn:  Good afternoon. I’m Senate Speaker Jonathan Ochshorn, with a lot of echo and reverb on my voice today for some reason, but I like it. Emeritus Professor of Architecture. We start as usual with a land acknowledgement. Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York state, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ people, past and present, to these lands and waters. So, the meeting is officially called to order. We start with approval of the minutes. The minutes of the March 13th, 2024 meeting have been posted and distributed online in the form of a verbatim transcript. Are there any corrections? Hearing none, the minutes are approved and posted. If you have– see something later, please let the Dean of Faculty know. So, our first order of business is Resolution 181, prospective part-time bachelor’s degree for non-traditional students. Mary Loeffelholz, Dean, School of Continuing Education, will have five minutes, and I’m kind of going to keep track a little bit better this afternoon of time, followed by a Senate discussion of about 10 minutes. Is Mary here? Yes.

– Mary Loeffelholz: [Inaudible] five key areas. Distinguishing this proposed degree from other degrees at the university, the pace of the degree’s development and rollout, what the tuition model is for the new degree and how we came about it, faculty effort, how is that to be assigned and compensated, and finally, the government structure we look forward to in the new degree. Next slide. Here’s a proposal for differentiating the proposed part-time degree from existing Bachelors of Arts and Sciences at the university. The Bachelor of Professional Studies degree is available in New York State. It exists. It is something recognized by the New York State legislature. We think it’s appropriate to this degree. If you want to look at other degrees there, you can follow that link. The Bachelor of Professional Studies requires at least 25% of its content be in liberal arts recognized areas, but that is a floor. It’s not a maximum. In fact, the degree content proposed is at 50% recognized liberal arts and sciences disciplines. Next, please. Another concern, a piece of advice that came from the enrollment, the Education Policy Committee a couple of years back, rolling out the degree to some well-defined populations to test its proposition. What we’d like to do is, at the earliest possible date, assuming that we make that in fall 2025, enroll two cohorts of 25 students apiece in the first two semesters of the degree’s offering. 25 and 25. We’d like to aim at two important target populations for this degree. One is veterans, and the other is people coming out of SUNY-connected community colleges who have earned an associate’s degree. These are both important populations for us. eCornell already has a great relationship to the military community, and veteran students come to the degree with excellent funding. You’ll see this. So, they’re an excellent population for us to consider and put a priority on. People coming out of the SUNY system with associate’s degrees are also an important population for us politically in New York State. Some of you may know that Cornell at this moment has a SUNY-funded project that is intended to further transfer admissions into all parts of the university, not exclusive to this new degree. The degree proposal itself that goes out to SUNY requires us to demonstrate a couple of transfer pathways. It’s an important priority for the state of New York for students to be able to graduate with an associate’s degree and move onward to high-quality degrees. This proposed degree has been very well received by a couple of community college partners in the region with whom we’ve shared the initial ideas. And both of these populations, veterans and people who have received associate’s degrees, would bring to this degree life success. In the one case in military service, and the other case in completing the associate’s degree. And we’d hold on additional degree proposals or majors until we saw the results of this initial offering. Next slide, please. Here’s how we’ve modeled the tuition in the new degree at $925 per credit hour. It’s pretty close to the veterans’ tuition benefit. It is higher than some of our peer institutions, Harvard and Penn, for reasons that I think we can justify. It is below the kind of crazy Weber State University out-of-state student rate. I’m not sure who pays that. I don’t know that that would be a benchmark for us. But we would be close to receiving the full price of the degree from veteran students, and we’d be modeling a 35% internally supported, not endowment supported, but internally supported tuition discount. At its simplest level, that means you could enroll 65 students at full price and 35% paying nothing. Of course, no students will really be paying nothing because TAP and Pell benefits are available too. So, you can figure out how the actual spectrum– That’s just– that’s a schematic. The actual spectrum of variation will be quite different. Next, please. What would we do about faculty effort to bring faculty members into it? We have modeled, again, in the finances for the degree, sending to the unit, the home unit of participating faculty members, $10,000 per semester hour for teaching the degree, and up front of that, $5,000 per semester hour for the initial course development, which would recognize as labor intensive, and then allotted some further on for updating it. It would be for the faculty members and your units to decide what the best way is of compensating faculty effort, whether on–

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Wrap up in the next few seconds if possible.

– Mary Loeffelholz: Okay. Is there anything else? And that’s what we’d like to see, transitioning into a faculty governance structure that would be composed of faculty members who are teaching, elected by and from the faculty members who are teaching, and also other representatives of the faculty of the colleges who are contributing courses to the degree. Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Are there any comments or questions from the audience? Or if you’re online, raise your digital hand. Now that I’ve been so strict with the time, we should have at least some reason for it. Do you have any– Yes. Do you want to come to the mic, please, and identify yourself? And try to keep it to two minutes.

– Alan Mathios: Sure. I’m Alan Mathios, Brooks School, former dean of human ecology, and I say the latter just to give a sense of how high quality I think these programs can be. So, when I was dean, I started the conceptual development of two online programs, a master’s in health administration program and a master’s in public affairs. And those programs were conceptual when I was dean and now are implemented. And I teach. There’s a little residential component to those, and I teach in that, but it’s followed by the intro to economics course taught online, asynchronous, but with the faculty member, Nick Sanders, who teaches the econ 101 and is beloved for the undergrads here. And when I get the students after that online experience, they just know Nick Sanders really well, better than actually the resident students because he’s online with them discussing issues, and giving office hours, and things like that. And then when I see the learning that has happened from that course, when I get them in person, it’s phenomenal. They feel very affiliated with each other from their online experiences. My work with eCornell on this, developing these programs has been phenomenal in terms of coming up with strong pedagogy for online learning. So, I just know sometimes there’s skepticism of online learning. My personal experiences with this, offering two programs that are very, very prominent now. And in fact, there’s sort of the promotional discussion by students of why they should come to these master’s programs. And they talk about how they get to know the faculty, those types of things. So, I just wanted to put my real support for what this could be for the undergrads because I think they translate these issues right to undergrad online education as well.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. We have another commenter in house.

– Tara Holm: Thank you. I’m Tara Holm. I’m in the math department. I appreciate the comments and I appreciate all the work that Mary’s done to bring this to fruition. At the same time, I have to caution that what I hear from around campus is that students are not prepared mathematically for their STEM classes, and AP exams are not conveying the information they used to, and online classes, passing an online class certainly does not certify that a student is necessarily ready to move into a physics class or a chemistry class. And we’re seeing more and more students who need more and more academic support. And those are students who are here on campus. I’m sort of seriously concerned about how on earth we’re supposed to handle– In the math department, we handle an awful lot of transfer credit. And this is a little bit orthogonal to what Mary was talking about, but it’s not unrelated, especially with any articulation agreement we might be signing with SUNY. I’m very concerned about how– I guess I don’t understand the faculty’s roles. I thought my role was to certify that a student is capable of doing some amount of mathematics that they need for their chemistry class, or their physics class, or their engineering class. And with the sort of rash of online classes that exist, it’s becoming harder and harder to do that. So, I’m just concerned about that.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Donna Haeger. Unmute.

– Donna Haeger: Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: By yourself.

– Donna Haeger: Thank you. In response to the last comment, I just wanted to say that the courses that are being developed are by the faculty members themselves. No one is dictating what the curriculum should look like or changing how students are assessed for passing those very important levels. That’s just an aside to what I wanted to say. I wanted to also share that I got the feeling at the last meeting that online education through Cornell seemed really new to many people. So, I wanted to make sure that we reviewed the Masters of Engineering, which came out in 2008, but starting in 2015, Cornell has been very, very involved with assisting in the design, but not designing. The faculty members are in charge of that. Executive Masters of Human Resource, and then 2019, Executive Masters Health Administration, 2020, Masters of Engineering, Engineering Management, 2021, Legal Studies, Public Administration, and then 2022. So, there’s quite a bit of Masters and Executive Ed that are already out there being offered, and they are state of the art. They’re designed by the faculty themselves, but we are so lucky to have eCornell as our instructional designers. And for those of us who have gone through this kind of a design process, it’s really priceless to have this team of people helping us make our courses even better. So, I really just want to spend a moment saying that online education at Cornell is not new. It’s just we’re trying to reach individuals in the name of any person, any study, reach individuals who can’t come to campus but really are smart enough and would like to have a degree.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: I see one more online. Risa, could you identify yourself?

– Risa Lieberwitz: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Risa Lieberwitz, ILR. Could somebody review the nature of the asynchronous coursework compared to the synchronous coursework that’s done online and also provide a review or update on whether there will be any in-person component to these courses because those were very real concerns that people were raising? So, that would be very useful to hear. And then also, on a governance kind of process matter, are we being asked to vote on something? And if so, what are we voting on, and when will we do that? Thanks.

– Mary Loeffelholz: On the process, I will refer to Eve or another member of the Senate who knows that. On the asynchronous versus synchronous elements, there will be synchronous elements in all of the courses. There will be not only office hours but meetings with, for example, thinking of courses in writing that I’m working on, dialogues between me and faculty members who have written the works, Cornell faculty members who have written the works that will be the scholarly works that we’ll be reading about, as well as one-on-one meetings with students and small groups of students that are essential to developing student writing, especially in this age of AI. The governance piece, the faculty governance piece, are we voting on something?

– Risa Lieberwitz: I’m sorry, but could I just follow up on– I still don’t quite understand. What will actually be asynchronous? I’m hearing meetings with students and office hours.

– Mary Loeffelholz: What will actually be asynchronous will be the fully elaborated content, the recorded lectures, exercises for students, visual material. We reviewed a little bit of that, gave some slides, some PowerPoint presentations, giving an inside view of one of the more important recent courses put online. Earthquake is the name of the course. Fantastic course, taught in the National Education Equity Lab. One of the most popular courses in its in-person version here on campus in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. I’d be happy to share that again, but it’s a rich variety of materials that include embedded assignments that range from easy to much more challenging. Great stuff.

– Eve De Rosa: And, Risa, you can look at the February slides for the February Senate meeting. And then, in terms of governance, we passed resolution 181, I believe that’s the number, in 2022, approving for the university to move forward designing this program and this degree program. And so, that’s what’s happening. And so, there’s nothing to vote on at this time.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Are there other comments before we move on? Seeing none, I think we can move on safely to the next agenda item. This is a proposal to establish a teaching professor track. Michael Ryan Clarkson, Senator of Computer Science, and Charlie Van Loan, Computer Science Emeritus. We’ll have 10 minutes, and then another 10 minutes or so for comments. Go ahead. Any hands should be removed.

– Michael Clarkson: I’m Michael Clarkson, computer science senator and co-chair of the teaching track title task force, which was convened at the end of last semester to explore this new track. Next slide, please. So, this is the T4 membership. We had broad representation from almost all of the colleges at Cornell. We had representation from RTE and tenure track faculty. Charlie Van Loan and I co-chaired it. These are the other excellent people who I’d like to thank for their work on that task force. Next slide, please. So, as background, let’s start with some data. I am a scientist. Approximately 35% of all credit hours taught on campus are delivered by a little over 500 plus full-time faculty on the lecturer, clinical professor, and professor of practice tracks. Of these faculty, about 370 of them, about 70% are lecturers or senior lecturers. That track that they’re on was created about 50 years ago in the 70s before I was born. Clinical professor was created in 2002 and professor of practice was created in 2014 much more recently. Next slide, please. Here are three reasons we believe that we need a teaching professor title. The first is equity. A professorial teaching professor track would restore equity to our full-time lecturer track faculty who are and have been devoting their careers to teaching, and yet have been excluded from professorial titles despite the university recently granting them to clinical professors and professors of the practice. The latter being people who have spent significant time in industry, and then have pivoted teaching, and now get a professorial title, whereas lecturers who have spent their entire careers teaching do not. A second reason is professional advancement. We have only a two-rank lecturer track. A three-rank professorial track could accrue benefits to us by incentivizing and benefiting curriculum development, having logical innovation, degree program leadership, external visibility, and many other things associated with high-quality teaching. And finally, a third reason, recruiting and retention. For some colleges, mine especially, it’s hard to compete with our peer institutions who offer professorial level teaching titles. In the study that I did over the last summer, I looked at 20 of our peers and found that half of them had a professorial teaching title. That was a study of Ivy League universities and major R1 public and privates. Next slide, please. So, the charge to T4 from the dean of faculty came in two parts. Part one, create a professorial teaching title. And part two, use the enabling legislation approach to accomplish that. So, I’ll frame the rest of my remarks today on those two parts of the charge. Next slide, please. Part one, the teaching professor title. I’d like to spend a little time reviewing what is in the actual proposed title description. The full title description can be found posted online for the materials for today. Next slide, please. So, what is the proposed title? Number one, teaching professors are faculty who are long-term teachers. The actual text in the title description says that teaching professor titles are available only for long-term, non-tenure track faculty members whose efforts are devoted primarily to the teaching mission of the university. Next slide, please. Number two, teaching professors are faculty who teach at a professorial level of quality. It is hard to define quality. In fact, our own tenure track policies for the university declined to define what quality means across the entire university, but we can try to use words that point to it. So, the title description says, “Teaching professors are those whose skill and independence are at the level of the tenure track faculty. Assistant, associate, and full teaching professors are expected to achieve a similar level of professional expertise within their areas of responsibility as their counterparts on the tenure track. Teaching professors at higher ranks can demonstrate impact inside and outside the university through activities such as pedagogical innovation, curriculum development, and leadership roles.” Next slide, please. Number three, teaching professors are faculty who contribute service to the university. Consistent with their rank and local needs, teaching professors are also expected to contribute teaching-related service, especially in areas that concern advising, mentoring, curriculum, and the management of degree programs. Next slide, please. And fourth, teaching professors are faculty who do not replicate the tenure track. The teaching professor titles may not be used to replicate the combined teaching and research responsibilities of the tenure track faculty. Accordingly, job duties of a teaching professor appointment should not require conducting research, publishing its results, or advising graduate research students. Teaching professors may choose to participate in such activities, especially when related to pedagogy, and they should stay current with research in their area to best incorporate it into their teaching. Nevertheless, research activity must not be required for appointment, reappointment, or promotion along the teaching professor track. Next slide, please. That was a summary of the most important parts of the title description. Now, we move on to the enabling legislation, which is how this all gets implemented. Again, I can only say a few words about this here today. The full enabling legislation is posted online for you to review. Next slide, please. So, what is the enabling legislation approach if you haven’t encountered it before? Instead of making the teaching professor title and track available automatically across the whole university, with this approach, colleges have to submit a proposal to the faculty senate in which they explain why and how they intend to implement this track. The college’s response is then reviewed for completeness by CAP and voted on by the senate before the title becomes available in college. This is the same approach that is used for the other RTE professorial titles. It’s intended to balance [inaudible]. This is called failover redundancy. Okay. So, I was saying we were trying to balance the unique needs of each college against a university-wide understanding of the titles. So, here’s what a college proposal has to do. It has to– Next slide, please. –justify the need for a teaching professor title, describe what a teaching professor position would look like in the culture of that college, outline the processes for appointment, renewal, and promotion, state limitations regarding the scope and numbers of teaching professors, define the rights extended to these faculty, discuss the impact on nearby titles, and explain the transition process from lecturer to teaching professor. There’s a lot of in-depth details about that. I will have to align them here in my 10-minute slot that I’m about to use up. So, here is the proposed resolution. Next slide, please. Great. Whereas the current range of RTE teaching titles does not always meet the instructional needs of colleges and schools, whereas it is important for Cornell to staff its RTE teaching positions with the very best faculty, given the large fraction of instruction that’s handled by that group, whereas it’s important that a teaching professor track be governed by carefully developed procedures for all appointments, renewals, and promotions, whereas it is equally important that there be carefully developed procedures for processing a request to transition an individual from the lecturer track to the teaching professor track, whereas all such procedures should be shared among the colleges to promote transparency and the dissemination of best practices, be it resolved that the title of teaching professor be added to the university’s approved list of titles, that the attached title description be adopted, and be it further resolved that a college or school that wishes to use the teaching professor title must comply with the attached enabling legislation and have its proposal approved by the faculty senate. That concludes what I wanted to say today. I’d be happy to open up for questions.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: If you have questions and you’re here, come down to the microphones. They’re both working. If you’re online, raise your digital hand. Give it a few seconds to see. Ah, we have a hand. Normally, we don’t repeat people, but since there are no other– Ah, there is someone. Come up. Risa, you’ll go next.

– Elliot Shapiro: Thank you. Elliot Shapiro from the Knight Institute and arts and sciences and a large senator from arts and sciences on the RTE side. So, first, I wasn’t going to speak right away because I’ve spoken whenever this has come up before this body or associate bodies, but since there was a little gap, I thought I would jump in. First, I want to thank the task force for this work. It feels long overdue, and it feels like you’ve really covered all the bases. I think the one thing that I want to say, and I’ve said versions of this in other settings, is just how important it is to pay attention to the equity side of things. I mean, you mentioned as two primary justifications, equity and recruiting, both of which are crucial, but with the huge core of existing lecturer and senior lecturer faculty across the colleges to really– again, I know this is up to the colleges to have a plan, but to emphasize the importance of considering how the existing lecturer faculty will be brought into this, and hopefully in a timely and fair way because there are built-in inequities between this and the other teaching ranks, and I hope that will be rectified. And thank you again.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Go ahead.

– Michael Clarkson: Thank you, Elliot, for your remarks. I just want to quickly say RT working group of the Senate prepared a review of our proposal, and we wrote a response to it, and I encourage anyone who has concerns like this to look at our response where we outline some ideas about this. I want to say right now, though, that if you look at the history of adoption of the professor of the practice title, it all happened within about one year by all of the colleges that existed at that time. So, it happened quite quickly on that one.

– Elliot Shapiro: Thank you. I think one point that I would want to add was in my college, Arts and Sciences, the professor of the practice title was designed to exclude senior lectures and current lectures from being eligible for it. And that’s what I’m talking about, not just the speed at which it’s implemented, but to say it doesn’t just include people we’re recruiting now, but dealing with these other people who have put in decades of service already. Thank you.

– Michael Clarkson: Thank you for the explanation. Now I understand. Indeed, I would say as a co-chair of this task force, a lot of our discussions were around, how do we make sure that lecturers and senior lecturers are absolutely 100% eligible for this? And I had a personal stake in that because I had to vote a couple of years ago on my own college’s adoption of professor of practice that made me ineligible to have it because I was a senior lecturer. 100%.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: We’re gonna go to Richard Bensel and then Risa. I have to bump you since you’ve already talked. So, Richard first. Two minutes.

– Richard Bensel: Yes, I am currently the director of graduate studies in the government department. And there have been a number of changes in rules from the graduate school that will reduce the number of teaching assistants and graduate students throughout the university, evidently. The College of Arts and Sciences has in reply to a question posed to them, the College of Arts and Sciences has said that, yes, they recognize the decline, impending decline in TAs and graduate students, and that they are anticipating changing some of the TA positions into lectureships in which they no longer be graduate students, of course. The question that I would pose, is this anticipated in this resolution and planning? And if not, are we going to consider this in the future?

– Michael Clarkson: Thanks, Richard, for your question. This is not a thing that was brought up in discussion at the T4 meetings. However, something relevant to it is that the title description for teaching professors says that it is for long-term members of the faculty, leaving open the possibility that a college might choose to continue implementing a lecturer track for people who are short-term. Now, there are other titles out there that are appropriate for short-term faculty as well, and we could get into that, but I don’t believe that we intended the teaching professor titles to be used in the way that you just described.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Charlie Van Loan, you’ve unmuted. Do you want to say a few words?

– Charlie Van Loan: No. Michael covered the correct response there. A lot of things are delegated to colleges. It sounds like a very important issue, but it’s sort of outside the purview of the committee. That’s a very important issue for each college to consider. And it’s the first time I heard of that dynamic.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Risa, two minutes.

– Risa Lieberwitz: Yeah, thank you. I certainly agree with the need to promote equity, and that is absolutely clear. But what I really would like to do is to actually have equity, and that is to take all this energy that’s going into titles, and I’m not dismissing at all the importance to people of titles that show respect, but I’d like to see that energy go into substantive issues of job security because all faculty, whether they’re engaged in research or teaching, have the right to academic freedom under our policies, but they don’t have the material conditions that are required to really protect their academic freedom. And so, under AAUP policies from 1915 on, the point has been that academic freedom is our fundamental right to have, but it needs to be protected by job security of tenure. And so, I would like to see us talk about job security and think about tenure track positions in broader ways, including if it’s for a teaching professor, or do we wanna have other bridges for people to move into the tenure track. Even if we don’t call something a tenured position, is there the job security of continuing contracts without reviews after a certain point that would be de facto tenure? To me, that is respect and equity, is making sure that all of our faculty can exercise the academic freedom that all faculty should be able to exercise on an equal basis. Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Are there any other comments before we move on?

– Risa Lieberwitz: I would love to hear a response about that.

– Charlie Van Loan: Okay, yeah. I’ll say a few things. So, we do mention a few things about renewals, minimizing the heaviness of the process, and so on. And so, there is some points in the enabling legislation that speak to those issues. I think RTE tenure is a very important issue, but to be realistic, I don’t think it’s going to happen in the near future. We did clinical tenure, if you recall, a couple of years ago that was passed by the Senate, but was denied at the provost level. I think the tenure system is threatened. We all read about that. When we did the presentation in September, the data suggested that although student enrollments had increased, the number of tenure track faculty has not, so I think we should put energy into that. I think another resolution we passed several years ago, 170, which had to do with the visibility of tenure processes. Not all the colleges have complied with that. And I think that’s very important to get the system out there so people can see what it is, not only on campus, but from the outside. So, in general, I think the job security component, paying attention to the tenure system, looking at RTE tenure, and so on, are worthy topics. I think what we did is a step forward, and I think it does bring a heightened appreciation of teaching and awareness of RTE issues. So, I do think there’s forward motion here. I think the long-term thing is ongoing.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. Kimberly Kopko online. Could you unmute? Two minutes.

– Kimberly Kopko: There we go. Thank you. I just wanted to provide a comment to the Faculty Senate that Michael had vetted this presentation. And with the RTE working group, he presented this as a dry run for our feedback and comments, and we had produced a one-page paper that we shared with the Dean of Faculty with some of the comments that we had about the proposal. And Michael and the T4 committee responded to all of our comments to our satisfaction. So, this was vetted through the RTE working group. Thank you.

– Eve De Rosa: And I can say that the RTE working group’s letter and the response are publicly posted.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay, thank you. I think we will move on. The next item on the agenda is a proposed resolution, maintaining a water competency graduation requirement for all Cornell University undergraduate students. Ashleigh Newman, Senator of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences will have 10 minutes followed by about 10 minutes of faculty discussion. Go ahead.

– Ashleigh Newman: Hi. Thank you, everyone. I am here today on behalf of FACAPE, the Faculty Advisory Committee for Athletics and Physical Education. And the goal of this resolution is to affirm the Cornell swim graduation requirement for undergraduates to address its current unequal application as well as to revise the swim requirement. And we’ve moved towards a more thorough evaluation of water competency using industry standards. Next slide. To give you all some background, the Cornell swim requirement was put into place in 1905 for males for military fitness and 1920 for females for a well-rounded education. In the 1970s, the requirement was revised to unify across genders for a 75 yard swim, 25 yards on the front, 25 on the back, and 25 choice. Those who were not able to complete that were to enroll in beginning swimming until which time they were able to complete that 75 yard swim, be it one semester or two semesters. This requirement was paused in 2020 due to COVID-19. And also important to note that transfer students have always been exempt from this requirement. So, that’s what we mean by the unequal application of it. So, with the pause of this requirement in 2020, the classes of 2020, ’21, ’22 were exempt. Prior to it restarting in the fall of 2022, the Chair of FACAPE, Frank Rossi, as well as the VP for Student Campus Life, Ryan Lombardi, came to the Faculty Senate, and Frank presented the data on the beginning swimming enrollment, as well as Ryan Lombardi basically posing the question, should we keep this? So, prior to restarting, it seems like a good time to have a conversation about it and its justification. So, I won’t go through all of that in detail, but this is just a quick snapshot on the beginning swimming enrollment data for the fall of 2018 and 2019. And we can see that the majority of students enrolled are women of color. And this data, particularly the racial data, really mirrors that of the wider drowning statistics in the United States, in which black children die at a rate anywhere from 2.6 to 7.6 times higher than white children, depending on the age range and the setting for that. Next slide. So, I think as any faculty member would, if you’re asking, is this course good? Is this a good experience for our students? Do they hate it? You look at your course evaluations. Granted, they may skip a few. For the most part, the testimonials, really the course evaluation when I read them, they were really overwhelmingly positive. And so, even though these students are theoretically– It’s not their choice to necessarily– Some do choose, but those that aren’t passing the requirement are not choosing necessarily to enroll in beginning swimming. The comments are really positive. And so, these were some that I wanted to share. One student said, “I left the course getting a whole new life skill. I had a few traumatic experiences with drowning as a child and never thought that I would be able to learn how to swim.” Another, “This class was amazing. Not only did she teach me how to swim, but she helped me and my other classmates get over our fear of the water.” And a fear is a very strong driver in this, and it is passed down from generation to generation. So, if we teach individuals how to swim, the idea is you break that cycle because as a parent, you would likely pass on that fear to your child and keep them away from the water for fear of them drowning. And then, the last comment is, “This class provided me with a safe environment to de-stress while also learning valuable knowledge.” And I would argue that at a university, we’re trying to impart knowledge. This is just a different kind of knowledge. There’s also an interesting article in the Cornell Daily Sun that you can read of someone who originally wrote an article arguing against the swim tests, but then wrote a retraction article after her experience in beginning swimming, supporting the requirement. Next slide. So, moving on to our discussion as a committee, we basically said this requirement saves lives. We didn’t disagree on that, but we were charged with asking, yeah, but should we still keep this given our enrollment data or is this an undue burden on students of color here at Cornell? And so, we’re a committee of white folks, so let’s reach out and get a little more perspective and not be close-minded about this. And so, I was actually connected with Nick Eskew from Howard University. And I wasn’t aware that Howard University actually has a swim graduation requirement. So, it seemed like a great person to reach out to to get insight on this because I think it’s one thing for Howard and HBCU to have a swim graduation requirement, but maybe it’s tone deaf of Cornell, an Ivy League predominantly white institution to have one. And then, he also introduced and recommend we also meet with Dr. Miriam Lynch, who’s the executive director of an organization called Diversity in Aquatics. And so, we met with both of them on Zoom in the summer of ’22 to talk about this. And in that meeting, Frank Rossi presented our beginning swimming data, the same data presented to the Faculty Senate and said, “Should we keep this?” And to my surprise, they said resoundingly, “Yes. Yes, you should, you are a part of the solution.” And I’d like to read a little bit about their organization. I didn’t know about it and I think it’s amazing. So, they’re 100% volunteer-led member organization. They work to promote water safety and drowning prevention education, focus on creating opportunities in aquatics, and addressing drowning disparities in BIPOC communities. They approach water safety and drowning prevention through the lens of social justice, education, and public health to address the impacts of race, socioeconomic circumstances, and cultural stereotyping effect in the communities they serve. Prior to the meeting, we read some of the literature. Frank shared it with all of us and we read some of their publications. And it was really eye-opening because as a clinician, I’m a veterinarian, I like to understand the underlying cause of disease. Why are these drowning disparate rates? Why do they exist? And it’s really, as you can imagine, generations of unequal access to swimming education, to facilities dating back to legalized segregation. And so, they said by having this swim requirement that you are helping to cause a ripple effect. So, our graduates will go back to their communities, whether it be their children, getting them involved in swimming, or helping potentially start swimming lessons or encouraging it in their communities. And so, it’s doing good. But beyond that, we said, okay, we have this 75-yard swim requirement. It always seemed kind of arbitrary to me. They recommended moving towards– Next slide. –the American Red Cross definition of water competency. And water competency, this five sequence of skills, was developed by the American Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council. And as you can see there, even though 80% of Americans say they can swim, saying you can swim and being competent in the water in a variety of situations and being safe, less than half of Americans could actually do these five skills. And what they are is jumping or stepping into water over your head, coming to the surface, treading water or floating for one minute, turning around, finding a safe exit. If in a pool, swimming 25 yards without stopping and safely exiting the water. I shared a YouTube link you can watch later. It’s super short, but it has these two doctors who are on that advisory council explaining a little bit more about it and the reasoning behind it. So, we thought this was a great revision to the 75-yard swim and actually more evidence-based and an evaluation of water competency. Next slide, please. Updates. Where have we been since that meeting? Starting in November of 2023, the physical education group, they have allowed students to choose at this point. They can either do the 75-yard swim of the previous requirement or choose to complete the five-step sequence for water competency. And so, that has been happening ongoing. And there’ve been updates made to the Cornell physical education website to help with communication, explain where these five things came from. And then, more recently, Eve and I met with several Cornell student campus leaders from the organizations here, so Black Students United, the South Asian Council, and Women of Color in Athletics to get their feedback. They were shared with the background of the resolution as well as the resolution document that you all have access to online as well and to get their feedback. And I kind of felt like there were three main takeaways from it. One was that they were in favor of this revised requirement. It certainly seemed less arbitrary, more evidence-based. They definitely drove home the need for improved and more frequent communication as well as the messaging around it, not being something punitive that’ll keep you from graduating, but really something to be celebrated, and why we do this, and the positive impact that can have on future generations. And then, they shared some really great ideas that I’m excited to share back with the physical education group that administer these tests on how we can improve accessibility and inclusivity around it. And so, that’s work to be done. Next slide. I have the whole language of the resolution. I’m not gonna read it for you here, but next slide. I would like to highlight the last three, be it resolved. So one, the main thing of what we need the Faculty Senate vote on is we feel that it’s important to expand it to include transfer students so that way, it’s a uniform graduation requirement of all undergraduate students at Cornell. The next is to make sure, which I felt like in the beginnings of our discussion, it became clear this was not well-known, that number one, no one is forced to do this assessment. If they can’t swim, they can just immediately enroll in beginning swimming. And really importantly, is that even if in two semesters of beginning swimming, an individual is never able to achieve water competency, if they attend class, actively participate in good faith, they will graduate from Cornell and satisfy the requirement. And then last, we will, as it became clear in our discussions, we charged the Office of Student and Campus Life that there really needs to be developed a comprehensive, inclusive, and diverse communication strategy to help inform incoming current students, as well as faculty and staff. Some of you may have advisees to help with messaging on this. And I should say one of the students at that forum that we met with offered to help us with that. So, we’re excited to get more involvement. And with that, I thank you, and I’m happy to take any questions.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: So, if you have questions or comments, please step down if you’re here, or raise your hand if you’re in Zoom land. I see Kathryn. Unmute and take two minutes.

– Kathryn Caggiano: Thank you. Kathryn Caggiano, Engineering RTE. This is a little tangential, but I’m just wondering whether the new part-time bachelor’s degree for non-traditional students will also have this as a requirement or will be an exception.

– Ashleigh Newman: That’s an excellent question, Kathryn. So, that actually came across my email more recently because, with the current requirements and course signups going on, the school was asked and they assumed yes. We had a brief email, not a whole committee-wide discussion on this. I will share my personal philosophy in this in that I think that if it is an online degree, I think that this requirement should continue in that online remote spirit, as you will. And I think there could still be a different physical education. There are plenty of online modules and things that the American Red Cross puts out. But I don’t think that it would be realistic or fair to ask students to come here and do our water competency. Granted, Jen Gudaz, who’s the Director of PE and Rec, has said that they certainly have had students have it administered at a different site. So, they have partners at other locations that could do that. So, I think either way, it could work, but we have not broached that at this time.

– Kathryn Caggiano: Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Betsy Boone. Unmute.

– Betsy Boone: Thank you. I was going to ask the same question about the remote, and I agree there are many ways that people could do this if it remained a consistent requirement, your YMCAs, your American Red Crosses, whatever. I think there are– What I was really unmuting for was the secondary point, which is that I’m 100% in favor of this, even without knowing the new information that was shared today. I was unaware of this requirement until I had a student who had to do it. And the amount of camaraderie and excitement that goes on when you are somebody who has to practice to do this, the friends that come out to support them, and I think it’s a unique requirement. And so, from that perspective, the university’s on a lake, right? So, for all these reasons, I think it’s really important, but this new information that was shared today is really fascinating, and I appreciate it, but I’m just 100% supportive of this. It is a life skill. And not only that, for some folks, this is really something that they remember about their experience at Cornell.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: We have a question or comment in-house. So, just identify yourself. Two minutes.

– Clyde Lederman: Hi. I’m Clyde Lederman, non-voting senator representing undergraduate students. We’ve had a number of discussions about this, and to my surprise, a couple things were noted that came up, and I think hope would be helpful. One is, when identifying this equity issue and lifesaving potential, everyone was supportive from the students. Even though it’s difficult, it’s also viewed as a real rite of passage. Almost all students, from my understanding, complete this their first week during orientation. And so, we will actually be sending out a poll about this to students, including with the American Red Cross standard, but I hope what we’re expecting to find is that there’s actually a lot of support among student populations for this. One, because of the sort of serious scientific and physiological aspect, but also just because students feel like it’s part of the Cornell experience and something that is notable about this university. And I hope that’s of some use in considering this resolution and maintaining the water competency standard.

– Eve De Rosa: So, this is one of the first set of data I collected as a new dean of faculty, and was very struck by the fact that 95% of the beginning swim class are BIPOC, and 65% of them are women. Talk about intersectionality. And I spoke to black students, black faculty, and they were on both sides. So, I personally came in as somebody who thought this is a life-saving skill, and we should keep this until I started to speak to more people, and there are people who were very concerned about this being a barrier to graduation for some students. They could be 4.0 students, yet not be able to graduate from Cornell without the stress of addressing it, an anxiety of theirs and lack of access from childhood. But once FACAPE started to do the work, and read the evidence, and speak to a really broad audience, it was very compelling, the work that they did. They worked hard, they were open-minded, and they didn’t come to this with a perspective. They really took it from a very evidence-based perspective. And when Ashleigh and I met with those young women of color, it was an affirming experience. They were excited, they came up. They were very generative and came up with wonderful ideas of how to support each other, make it inclusive. And I just wanted to share that, that I’ve been moved by the evidence and also by the spirit of the students.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: I see no other comments. I need to have a conference here. We’re a little ahead of time, which sometimes is a problem. I’m wondering– Okay. Someone’s swimming on down to the front. Identify yourself.

– Tom Fox: Tom Fox. I’m from molecular biology and genetics, and I’m also on FACAPE. With regard to people who are really panicked about the water. It occurs to me that we have student disability services. In other words, there may be some small number of people who are simply going to freak out, but presumably, they could be exempted somehow through some kind of process. Oh, am I not talking to the mic? I’m sorry. What I was suggesting was that somebody who has a real phobia and just cannot do it could be exempted through some kind of SDS, student disability services thing. I don’t know that we discussed this in FACAPE.

– Ashleigh Newman: Yeah, but you’re quite right. So, there is a process, and it’s laid out on the physical education website. So, students with disability can reach out to SDS and go through the process of receiving an approved accommodation just the way they would for any academic course. I will say that I can’t remember the exact number, but I think there’s only been about four exemptions in many, many years. So, it’s certainly not something that’s widely taken advantage of, but certainly, there are also religious observances that are granted for this as well. So, there’s certainly a process for that for that reason.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Go ahead.

– Kent Hubbell: I’m Kent Hubbell. I’m an emeritus faculty member in architecture and the past dean of students for 15 years. And in my experience, this requirement, while I advocated for it, did create a lot of anxiety amongst a certain group of students. So, I’m really gratified to know that this change will be taken by the university. It’ll benefit students greatly. Not only will they become acquainted with the water, but we’ll avoid the trauma that’s associated with the water among many students. You’d be surprised how many. So,

[indiscernible]

. Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay, by unanimous consent, we’re gonna switch the next two agenda items in order to accommodate someone who needs to be here for the first one, which is now the second one.

– Eve De Rosa: Yes, so the vice president of research and innovation, Kristin Dently, she asked that she could be able to attend. So, we’ll just change the agenda a little bit so that we can accommodate her schedule, and she’ll be online with us soon. Are we ready? Okay, thanks, Jill. And I’m gonna shift like this. Nope, I’m gonna shift like this. Nope, I’m gonna shift like this. Okay, so next slide, please. Okay, so we voted over spring break. So I’m very impressed that over spring break, we were able to achieve really good engagement. I want to remind everyone that engagement, when you abstain from voting, that is still a measure of engagement. And so, those last 20 or so senators that did not vote, we hope for these two resolutions that we spoke about today that we can get your votes. And I want to remind people also to sign in as they walk in and also over Zoom. Okay, next. Oh, and I did note to self, that’s me. A reminder to you, especially because we have two resolutions coming up, to please share the Senate summaries that I send with your faculty before the vote, get their feedback, and let that inform your vote. You are being representative except for the at-large professors. But I just want that engagement with your faculty and your constituents. And then, what was another one? Yeah, that’s it, okay. And then, yes, share the outcomes as well. So, we also, as part of our recent vote, had an election for who we would like to send to the president and provost as potential representatives of the Senate. And so the three top vote getters were Senator Lieberwitz from ILR, Senator Cornell from Law, and Senator Schaffer from Biomedical Engineering. And so, those names will be moved forward as the president and the provost build the committee that will refine and create a free expression or expressive activity time, place, and manner for the university that meets our current time. And then, the last thing I think– Oh no, not the last thing. I wanted to share I’m working with the RTE working group, and I would love feedback from any Senator on what it feels like to be included and to feel equal as an RTE faculty in the departments. And so, we had a work life survey that was presented in 2022. Those results show that where the inequities happen is in the unit, in the departments themselves. And so, I have an opportunity on the Provost’s Spring Academic Leadership meeting that’s happening next week to speak to chairs, senior associate deans, associate deans, and deans, and all the vice provosts about what it looks like. Having RTE faculty listed under faculty on the website, not calling them academic staff, including them in the picnic, and when grades are due, very simple, small things, but that have impact. The termination letters that come through HR. So, the working group has been speaking to the provost, deputy provost, the chief human resources officer, IRP, the institutional research, and planning group. They have been really speaking about how to change the culture and the climate here for RTE faculty. And so we’ll keep doing the work. And I just wanted to take advantage of that opportunity to be able to speak to all academic leadership at the university. And so, I will obviously consult with RTE working group, but if anyone else wants to give me feedback, this is an opportunity for that too before next Tuesday. Next slide, please. And this is who we are. These are the faculty who have university voting rights at the university. We’re about to have an election, so starting next week. And again, really encouraging engagement. And we have built a kick-ass ballot, if I may say so myself, I don’t know, ourselves. But the nominations and elections committee of the Senate have been extremely active, and thoughtful, and just really thinking about how to get all voices. And so, I hope you like our selection and you’re engaged in vote. Next slide, please. Oh, thanks. So, as you will see, there are eight elected positions right now. So, we have the university faculty committee, nominations of elections committee, and senators at large. Do we have anything else? Oh, yes. And one trustee. Abby Cohn has been an amazing faculty trustee, and her term is ending. And so, we’re looking for the next person to fill that, as you can see. And I could say also that we, the office, CA, in particular, has been wonderful. And we’re virtually finished with all 123 appointments to our Senate committee. And it’s a huge thank you to everyone that’s contributed in our– Yeah. So, thank you. And with that, I’m available until Kristen is ready. So, we’re good? Okay. So, let’s move on to the next agenda item and then–

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Well–

– Eve De Rosa: Oh, there is a question.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: We have time for some questions.

– Eve De Rosa: Okay. Yes. Hadas.

– Hadas Ritz: Yeah. Hadas Ritz, College of Engineering. I just guess I had a follow-up question about the update we had on resolution 181. So, I just wanted to read the last. Be it further resolved from that resolution 181, be it further resolved that the provost at the conclusion of the program planning process solicit the approval from the faculty Senate and explain how the implementation questions and problems raised by faculty Senate committees were addressed before commencement of the part-time bachelor’s degree program. So, my question is, when is that solicitation and approval process happening?

– Eve De Rosa: In the fall.

– Hadas Ritz: Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay. Oh, is this– Shared Governance Generative AI Advisory Council, Steve Jackson, Professor, Vice Provost for Academic Innovation, and Ben Maddox, Chief Information Officer, Cornell Information Technology. Five minutes, and then about 10 minutes for faculty discussion. You’re on.

– Steve Jackson: All right. Well, there’s a lot to talk about, so we’ll be fast. Next slide, please. So, we wanted to come to you today to share some updates and next steps, some additional background on how Cornell is responding to generative AI in all of its operations. So, we’re gonna talk, remind you a little bit of the three key taskforce reports that have come out earlier this year. Ben is gonna talk a little bit about the wider program that we’re engaging in now in terms of generative AI at the university. The main item I actually wanna bring to you today is a new structure that we’re developing called the AI Advisory Council, which will involve substantive faculty, staff, and also some student involvement as we navigate this landscape in the months and years ahead. And I’ll take the opportunity to do a shout out for some awesome teaching awards that have just come out, the activities of our faculty. So, next slide, please. So, many of you will remember that we’ve had three major wide ranging committee reports that have come out to address the question of generative AI in different aspects of university operations. First of these was the Generative AI Artificial Intelligence for Education and Pedagogy report, which came out in the summer. Later in the fall semester, we had the research report, which Kristin Van Bleep was centrally involved in. And finally, generative AI and administration. You may not have tracked this one quite as closely as faculty, but this was a wide range and many staff involved understanding how generative AI might be impacting or could impact staff and administrative functions at the university. All of these reports are excellent. You can get them at the website there. But what I wanna say is that these are snapshots in time. So, the world has already changed since some of these reports came out. And they’re also just meant to be a starting point for how the university navigates this environment in the years ahead. Next slide, please. So, I’m gonna turn things over to Ben to talk about the bigger picture of things that we’ve been working on.

– Ben Maddox: Thanks, Steve. And thanks in particular to the Senate for having me. I’m Ben Maddox. I’m the new Chief Information Officer. I started late in the fall semester, just as these were being delivered. So, it was an incredible gift to me for the dozens and dozens of faculty and administrative staff around the university helped form these reports. And as Steve mentioned, it’s a changing landscape, even in just these past few weeks, which is why we come today to ask for your help on formulating this advisory council university-wide, faculty, staff, and students. That advisory council is really the cornerstone of what we’re referring to as this AI framework. I’m not sure how formal it could really be as a framework, given that it’s changing almost daily. But the four cornerstones of this artificial intelligence framework at Cornell begin with this advisory council. And again, Steve’s gonna walk you through some of those key priorities. The task forces, as you know, raised both risk and opportunity, and the advisory council will be critical to that, and the faculty voice helping us guide and interpret actions around artificial intelligence at Cornell. The second key opportunity is, again, an invitation. On that same website, there’s an opportunity to submit projects and ideas. We’ve already had several dozen projects submitted through the website, research, administrative, student, and teaching projects that could leverage AI in new ways. The third key pillar of AI at Cornell is that there is a cross-functional, mostly volunteer team of technologists, and instructional designers, and researchers who are interested in AI, and they’re serving as an enablement team. So, if you submit an idea, there’s someone on the other side to receive that idea. Lastly, you may have already seen, and I hope you’ve been experimenting with a more secure version of Copilot. So, through our relationship with Microsoft, we have a more secure, login-able Copilot available for you to experiment with. It’s not meant for HIPAA or FERPA-related materials, but can be used to practice and experiment with a large language model that is secure. So, you’ll see more information about that online. So, we’re excited about the participation, and I’m happy to come back at any point and report on, and the Advisory Council will have some reporting responsibilities back to this body.

– Steve Jackson: All right, so the Advisory Council is meant to do a number of things. Fundamentally, it’s meant to ensure that there’s a regular mechanism for faculty, staff, and student input into the AI processes at the universities and the policies we adopt around AI. So, there’s a part that’s about strategic guidance around initiatives that we are undertaking, might undertake, should undertake, the needs that we need to fill at the university. There’s an important element of reporting and accountability. So, as the university moves forward in its AI investments, and activities, and policies, et cetera, how do we make sure that that’s communicated back effectively to all stakeholders? There’s an important piece of policy development as well here. So, there’s a lot to figure out in this world. So, for example, I’m centrally involved in the teaching and learning space, and one of the things that we will be tackling in the working group that I’ll talk about in a minute is questions around AI and AI. So, artificial intelligence and academic integrity, and what do we need to do to address those concerns? Community engagement and risk management, all part of the accountability mandate here. And next slide, please. And only to indicate that, following the structure of the reports, we also have important goals in education, research and innovation, and administration. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is what the proposed structure of the council would be. There would be a plenary committee, which is kind of a small upper level body to make sure that the findings of the working groups are effectively communicated and translated to university leaders. But the real meat of this is gonna be in the subcommittees on education, research, and administration. So, three separate subcommittees. These have not been formed yet. That’s why we’re coming to you today for input on the plan and the idea, but also very centrally nominations and or volunteers for people who would like to serve on those. We have some ideas from people who have done work on the prior reports, but we want to make sure that we compose committees that are representative across the university in every dimension. So, if this sounds exciting to you, this is something you want to engage, you need more committees in your life, you can email Ben, myself, or Eve, and all three of us will communicate. And we will, from the volunteers, we will form committees that meet our goals of kind of broad representation across the university. Next slide, please. Do I get one more slide? Okay. This is just a shout out for now in the teaching space. I want to remind everyone of the great CTI resources that continue to develop across the course of the year. I’ve been really impressed that we’ve had 500 faculty engage around generative AI with CTI activities this year, either in our workshops or in individual consultations. So, the Cornell faculty is really digging in on this. And I think they have found the resources quite useful. Next and last slide, I believe. All right, last thing I wanna shout out, this is actually being officially announced tomorrow at the Provost Teaching Innovation Showcase. So, this is a lead, sort of an early release. We’ve had some amazing projects. We ran a competition, a new kind of competition, this fall and this winter, called the Teaching Innovation Award, in which we ask people to tell us about all the great things that they’re doing with generative AI, whether that’s to bring it into the classroom, whether that’s to find creative ways of holding it out of the classroom when that seems to be the appropriate stance. And these are our award winners drawn from across the university and also our honorable mentions. And if you wanna read more about them, you can look at the URLs there. One piece of this award is that in exchange for getting the award and the money for the award, people work with CTI to develop a teaching, what’s becoming part of a teaching innovation case series. It’s kind of modeled after Harvard Business School kind of model of case education. So, they’re meant to distill these lessons in ways that can be taken up, and adopted, and adapted in other classrooms. So, that is really it. Open to any questions, thoughts, and discussion. Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: If you have questions and you’re here, step down or raise your hand.

– Ben Maddox: And as we move to the Q&A, we can– The leaders, KB, Kavita Bala, Krystyn Van Vliet, and Kurt Cole are on the phone. They were all instrumental in the task force reports. So, they’re here to answer questions. Steve and I can also comment.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Okay. Identify yourself please. Two minutes.

– Betsy Lamb: Betsy Lamb, Cal’s RTE. I’d like to know where you’d like to put extension in your list for the advisory committee because if you want community engagement, that’s what we do.

[Inaudible]

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Talk to the microphone, please.

– Ben Maddox: I was asking where you would naturally see it fitting.

– Betsy Lamb: Well, sometimes we get our own slot, but it would fit in potentially in under education as well.

– Steve Jackson: Yeah, so for me, absolutely under education, all teachers, all job titles, all formats are welcome. But I appreciate the additional shout out around community engagement. So, I think some of our RTE folks will have great expertise to bring to the community in that regard.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Go ahead.

– Chris Schaffer: Hi. Chris Schaffer, Biomedical Engineering. My sense is that different AI systems have variable degrees of intelligence and capability in different spaces. And this feels very hard to navigate as a faculty member who’s just dabbling with something here and dabbling with something there. It would be really helpful to have some kind of guide. And I realized maybe a motivating factor for the co-pilot was the fact that it can be secure and private, but that’s probably not the biggest concern for all of our uses. So, a guide about what should we use for various things or what should we try first would be very helpful. Thank you.

– Ben Maddox: I’m moving the mic back up. Sorry about that. No criticism intended. Yeah, so the real– Thank you for that question. We’re feeling the same way, just to let you know, meaning folks who are kind of immersed in this. Kurt Cole and I were with the Research One universities last week, and then late in the fall semester, we were with 30 other peer universities hosted at an AI event in Notre Dame. And this sort of mindset tool set question keeps coming back and forth. That project submission process is really meant to give Cornell exactly the experience that you’re looking for. Behind the scenes, we do have a HIPAA environment, we have a FERPA compliant environment, and multiple tools and multiple systems. We’re partnering with AWS, with Google, and with Microsoft on this. We’re also experimenting with open source AI tools, particularly in the research space. So, if you’ve got an idea and you’re not sure where to go, please hop on the it.cornell.edu/AI site. And there’s a quick form in there, and we’d love to hear your ideas and learn from that as we grow.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Krystyn, unmute. Two minutes.

– Krystyn Van Vliet: Thanks. I’ll just share. I think that is a great question, Chris. And in the reports, including the one on gen AI and academic research, we did provide some examples of here’s several different gen AI programs. Here’s what they’re good at. Here’s some potential cautions about that. While that list gets quickly dated, that’s one place one could look and then also talk about it with your research group, right? So, some are used for image generation. Some are used for text generation. Some for code generation. So, depending on where you fit in the research space, and obviously that also relates to your teaching. But that’s just a start. I do agree that we need to have more awareness, and we’re trying to build that awareness by those of us who are interested using it and sharing those best practices. But that could be a start to look and the questions that you might have with using different kinds of tools for different kinds of research. Thanks.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Kavita.

– Kavita Bala: Yeah, and I just want to add to that a little bit. So, Chris, one of the things you mentioned was, for most of us our use cases, we don’t actually– it’s not very sensitive. So, you’re not actually worried about the HIPAA piece, et cetera. But I do want to say one of the things that we put in all these reports, it’s important to actually know, when students are writing an essay, they still own that property. And once they put it in these tools, it is not their IP anymore. So, that’s why we want them to use these tools. Faculty, things that you think are yours where normally you’re in an offline setting and you’re typing into your Word document and it’s yours, now in this new world is data for them to feed and to regurgitate sometimes verbatim in some other conversation with some person across the planet. So, we do recommend strongly use the ones that are negotiated with Cornell because you don’t even realize it’s your private data, but it is actually your private data and your private thoughts, and they should stay that way. So, I just want to caution that. I think I definitely agree that it’ll be valuable to have guides. One of the values of this new structure we’re trying to do is allow information sharing. And I think it’s a good question. Should we put out some online resource that gets outdated quickly, but we’ll see if we can put something that helps keep people as much up to date as we can manage given the fast moving field.

– Eve De Rosa: So, one of the things that came up with Steve just now is academic integrity and generative artificial intelligence tools. This is something that we are actively thinking about in the office of the dean of faculty, and the vice provost of undergraduate education, and the vice provost of academic innovation. And so, the three offices are going to create a committee to work through a one Cornell solution to academic integrity. And then, inside of that, we’ll be addressing academic integrity issues specifically with artificial intelligence tools. So, we are not doing that yet. We’re compiling the group over the semester, and we’re highly likely to have that group just study over the summer, and then we’ll start the hard work in the fall.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: We have time for a couple of comments or questions. Can one of your tools formulate a question for us? Okay, we have one more agenda item. I guess we can move on. Thank you. This is our good of the order section, which is a more general comments that are not– Ah, we have– We’ll back up. Paul, unmute. Two minutes.

– Paul Ginsparg: Sorry, it was just a quick question for Steve. I was intrigued about the awards, and I was trying to find more information about it. On the teaching website, the innovation awards just says that more information will be forwarded. I noticed that you had some URL. I think I located it possibly in March from the news.cornell.edu site. But I was curious to know when there would be more information about that.

– Steve Jackson: It should be up as we speak. They were waiting to update. They were finishing the last bit of the case studies. But there’s a URL. I don’t know, Paul, if you can see the screen right now, but the one on the bottom left should have– that should link you to the general thing, and then you should be able to click through to the specific cases from that. The URL on the right is a news article that the Cornell Chronicle did.

– Paul Ginsparg: Yeah, that’s the one I found. Can you leave that up long enough for me to slowly type it in?

– Steve Jackson: Yeah.

– Paul Ginsparg: Or maybe better just do us a favor and insert it in the chat.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: So, good of the order. David Lee, are you here or– You’re here, of course? Typically, we allot five minutes for this.

– David Lee: Good afternoon. I’m David Lee, professor emeritus in the Dyson School College of Business. And it’s in that capacity that I want to talk to you, not my other job, my weekend job as it were as one of the two faculty elected trustees along with Abby. I wanted to take this opportunity to offer a brief personal comment on the part-time degree program. I was on the ad hoc committee that put together the initial report back in 2021, and I’ve been serving on the advisory committee to Dean Loeffelholz’s office this past year or so. I too, like many that have spoken, particularly in February’s faculty senate meeting, was initially skeptical about our ability to pull off a program like this. But I’ve learned a lot over the last three or four years, and I wanted to just say that I’m very optimistic now and just wanted to share some thoughts along those lines. Many of the questions that were brought up in the February meeting, some of those today and earlier by the EPC, and their response to the 2021 report were good ones, they’re good questions. Many of those questions around logistics and implementation. Mary, I suspect, had she had more time, could have gone into great length about any and all of those points. And at some point, I think we probably will need in this venue that detail. Many of those questions are process-oriented questions, they’re operational questions. And while they’re important ones, I urge us not to get so wrapped up in these operational questions that we lose sight of the forest for the trees to use an overused expression. This is a different approach to education. It is not for the most part conventional on-campus residential education. Does a program like this entail some risks for us as an institution? Yes. Any new program creates challenges, creates risks. But in my view, there are any number of reasons why Cornell should take on this endeavor. First, as one of the commenters to Mary’s presentation indicated, any person, any study. Now, we hear this over and over again, but if we take it seriously, a part-time degree program based primarily, but not exclusively on online education is the modern version of Ezra Cornell’s vision back 150 years ago. Back then, underserved communities, quote unquote, were the rural communities composed of farmers and small merchants across upstate New York. Today’s underserved communities, as previously mentioned, include those that this program attempts to address, would attempt to serve and address, working adults, veterans, community college graduates, incarcerated individuals, international students, and so forth. Collectively, there’s a huge market and enormous potential out there. But serving that market is entirely consistent with our traditional mission and is essentially the modern, as I mentioned, the modern version of that mission as it was articulated more than 150 years ago. Second, we have a huge institutional capacity, and again, this came up a few minutes ago. We have a huge institutional capacity to provide this type of educational experience in a first-class way. We have many faculty who’ve devoted their careers to extension, as was mentioned, extension and outreach work. Remember, Cornell Cooperative Extension has been around since 1894. That’s a long time, not quite 1865, but close. Many faculty have taught in distance education programs, executive education, and similar training programs. More recently, in the COVID years, many of us have had our first exposure to online education. We’ve already learned a great deal, what works, what doesn’t work. There’s also this rapidly emerging area of educational research and field of education about what works best in online education. A lot of it stimulated by the experience of the last four years. For example, the importance, and this was mentioned in the February meeting several times, including by Mary, the importance of instructional design of courses to optimize student engagement. And that, again, is something we need to return to. Additionally, we have the resources and the past experiences of eCornell to assist faculty in designing and carrying out course development. Had we had even more time, I think it would have been great to hear from some of the folks from eCornell, and perhaps that can be done in the future. eCornell has already developed over 100 courses in concert with many faculty at the university. So, again, to repeat a comment, we’re not starting anew. So this eCornell is a terrific resource with very deep experience that can help us out. And of course, we have the institutional commitment of the university in seeing this whole project through. I could go on, but my point is a simple one. If any institution can get this right, it should be Cornell. Are we taking a risk? Yes. Most endeavors entail taking risks. But there’s a quote from someone, I don’t remember who, who said, “Whoever risks nothing does nothing.” Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dixon-White were taking a risk when they set up a new university in the cow pastures of upstate New York, far from any major urban area that might sustain a major university. The part-time degree program, in my view, yes, it’s risky, but it’s a prudent risk. As an economist, I’d be remiss if I didn’t leave you with the admonition, I’ll let the market work. I believe that Mary and her associates have covered over some time now, all of the key elements of a prospective program. Maybe not all of them, but virtually all of them. If there isn’t sufficient demand or if we are somehow unable as an institution to engineer a first rate program as proposed, we will know that. Experience will tell us, and it may take a few years to learn that. If it does work out as I’d expect, I think it’ll be a great success. And we at Cornell University certainly have many things going for us. Thank you.

– Jonathan Ochshorn: Thank you. We are adjourned.