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Present: Eric Cole, Alison Feldt, Anne Groton, Jonathan Hill, Heather Klopchin, Maria Lavardiere, James May, Todd Nichol, Alan Norton, Arnie Ostebee, Matthew Richey (Chair), Mary Titus

Matt Richey called the meeting to order at 3:38 p.m. in Dittmann 204.

The minutes of the RPC meeting held on October 18, 2006, were approved unanimously, with compliments to Alison Feldt for having squeezed everything onto a single page.

Since Matt had been out of town at the time of last week's RPC meeting, he first asked members to tell him what he had missed. This led to a summarizing of the points raised by the Tenure and Promotion Committee (TPC) members during their visit to RPC.

Alison then reported that Jeanine Grenberg, Chair of the Faculty Development Committee (FDC), was enthusiastic about how FDC could be absorbed or transformed into a Faculty Life Committee. Jeanine will visit RPC on Wednesday, November 1, to share her ideas.

Next came a discussion of the proposal to add two new (and controversial) paragraphs to the “Examinations” section of the Faculty Handbook. RPC members reacted to the e-mail responses that they had received from the faculty: we must weigh pedagogical goods against “order in the household” (Nichol); we must not be misled by anecdotal evidence (Hill); we must not say that students have a choice when in reality they do not (Feldt); we must not belittle the work of CEPC (Richey); with the Honor Code, take-home exams are simple (May); students will not mind taking an exam at some other time in the day if they are given multiple times to choose from, and if the exam is balanced by a day off from class; students are overscheduled and need to “take it down a notch” (Lavardiere).

Matt, Arnie Ostebee, and Anne Groton had had a conversation with Parliamentarian Greg Walter and discovered that whatever is presented as a “recommendation” is subject to amendment from the floor. Last year RPC inadvertently used the wrong terminology: whenever it asked the faculty to “recommend” (with no amending allowed) some new Category #2 content that originated from the administration, it should instead have asked the faculty simply to “accept a report.” In this case, however, since the proposal originates from the faculty, not from the administration, it is more than a report and should be presented as a recommendation, subject to amendment from the floor.

While it was the Faculty Handbook subcommittee of RPC that initiated this process last spring by drafting some text and passing it along to CEPC, the issue is clearly curricular, and the decision about which version of the text to propose to the faculty rests with CEPC. (All comments that faculty have e-mailed to RPC have been forwarded to the Chair of CEPC.) RPC does have to be involved, though, since it is responsible for proposing changes to the Handbook.

It was moved and seconded that at the Faculty Meeting on November 2, RPC present for discussion whatever text CEPC has approved; a motion to recommend the text could then be made at the Faculty Meeting on December 7 (with amendments to the text allowable). The motion passed unanimously .

Matt will arrange a meeting of the Curriculum Coordinating Committee (CCC) to draft Faculty Manual language for the proposed Curriculum Committee. He plans to have a proposal for stopping the tenure clock ready to be distributed to RPC (for editing) this week and then to chairs (for discussion at department meetings in November) next week.

The meeting was adjourned pleasantly early, at 4:39 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,
Anne Groton