August 18, 1993

CEFO Minutes
(J. Carter, Secretary)

M I N U T E S

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING FACULTY ORGANIZATION Wednesday August 18, 1993 @ 2:00 PM Cameron Applied Research Center, Room 101

Dr. Rafic Makki opened the meeting at 2:04 PM. The following faculty and staff members signed the attendance sheet:

COLLEGE OF ENGR: R. Snyder, S. Middleton, R. Gwaltney, P. Bovender, C. Lilly, L. Hudson.

COMPUTER SCIENCE: R. Lejk, M. Adkins, M. Allen, K. Chen, B. Chu, G. Epstein, J. Frazier, J. Long, J. Maitan, T. Mostafavi, Z. Ras, H. Razavi, J. Schell, R. Shaw, K. Subramanian, B. Wilkinson, J. Xiao.

ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY: E. Braun, M. Sue, K. McMahon, F. Auchey, B. Barry, N. Byars, J. Carter, J. Chaffin, M. Kocak, C. Liu, R. Lollar, C. Mobley, T. Owen, J. Patten, H. Phillips, R. Priebe, W. Shelnutt, D. Smith, P. Wang, E. Willis.

CIVIL ENGINEERING: C. Conner, D. Bayer, J. Evett, J. Graham, D. Hanks, H. Hilger, G. Murgel, I. Runge, D. Young.

MECHANICAL ENGR & ENGR SCIENCE: L. Stikeleather, M. Brent, I. Bodur, H. Estrada, J. Hill, R. Hocken, R. Keanini, G. Mohanty, E. Munday, S. Patterson, J. Raja.

ELECTRICAL ENGI-NEERING: S. Mahaffey, R. Coleman, M. Feldman, R. Greene. F. Kiamilev, V. Lukic, R. Makki, W. Smith.

CAMERON A.R.C.: H. Leamy, T. Rufty.

ENGR RES & IND DEVMT: J. Roblin, N. King.

COMPUTING SVCS & LABS: J. Grant, D. Koontz, R. Wolny, T. Brown, J. Brien, M. Moss.

I. Dr. Makki introduced the new members of the CEFO Executive Committee: Dave Young, chair; Jack Carter, Secretary; Dave Bayer, Parliamentarian.

II. New faculty and staff were introduced by the departments.

III. Faculty Committee Reports

Ed Willis, Promotion and Tenure Document. Mr. Willis noted that the faculty will be voting on the document at the next faculty meeting since there was a lack of a quorum at the May 4th meeting. Bill Shelnutt, Creative Projects Laboratory. Application has been made for a SUCCEED grant to build a creative projects laboratory equipped with computers and development software to provide product development assistance to industry. The intent is that students be involved in the product development effort. Students interested in software development should be encouraged to investigate. IBM will be presenting an information session on September 2, 1993 from 1:00PM to 3:00PM open to interested faculty and students. Their intent is to describe the direction of their current product development efforts and open a dialogue with faculty and students for the purpose of initiating the program.

IV. Dean’s Report

Dr. Harry Leamy will be serving as interim chair of the Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Sciences department. Dr. Lejk will be serving as representative to the undergraduate administrative council. He will act as a point person for matters related to registration. Jack Roblin will be serving as the college coordinator for cooperative programs and point person for alumni affairs. He will be acting as a liaison between the faculty and the alumni office. A mandatory seminar on laboratory safety will be held for graduate Teaching Assistants and Research Assistants on August 23, 1993 at 3:00PM in Smith 219. Attendance will be taken. The University has submitted a proposal for an academy for disability studies. It is given the task of studying issues related to disabilities. Nominations for individuals to serve are solicited from the faculty. The Mecklenburg County School system is engaged in a “futures” project which may involve our faculty. Cochrane Middle School is preparing teams of students who will be building racing cars. Faculty mentors will be needed to provide one hour of help to the students per week for a period of five weeks. Teams will be competing, with the winning team (and their mentor) receiving tickets to the upcoming Mello Yello 500 race. Volunteers are solicited from the faculty. This is an opportunity to expose students to engineering. It promotes recruitment and retention. Recruitment & Retention. Dean Middleton will be focusing attention on developing more effective recruitment and retention. Ph.D. Programs. Proposals will be submitted to the Board of Governors by October 1. Funding is not yet be defined, but should be in the range of 50% to 100%. Budgets, Salaries, etc. There have been no budget cuts. Information on salary increases will be coming before the end of the month. We have tentative authorization to purchase equipment. All students will be paying a fee of $100.00 for the use of Project Mosaic. Two laboratories which currently house Personal Computers will be converted to use by new Mosaic Workstations. The PCs will be relocated. Costs relating to this action will dictate remaining budget allocations for additional equipment.

V. Dean Middleton, New University Academic Progression Requirements:

Progression Requirements and worksheets were mailed this summer to each faculty member. Advisors should read this document carefully. Changes in the “Time to Degree Policy” have dictated changes which will apply to new students and those who have been out for a year. The University will count hours attempted as well as those earned as part of the scale. Students who repeatedly sign up for courses and drop them will be subject to suspension. Some exceptions will be allowed in the case of medical or other emergencies. Permission will be needed to repeat a course. A new course exclusion policy will dictate that grades from all completed coursework will be included in the GPA. The student will be allowed to request that up to four of these grades, to a maximum of 13 credits, be excluded from the GPA calculation. Once approved, these changes are irrevocable. All new students will be under this policy. Currently enrolled students will be flagged. More information will be forthcoming on this policy. Degree audits will now include the catalog year the student is matriculating under. Dean Snyder charged the College Academic Progression Committee to look at the college requirements, and charged the departments to look at their academic progression requirements and revise, eliminate, etc. as necessary to come up with a set of requirements that may be in addition to those already in place.

VI. R. Gwaltney, Administrative Computing. An advisory committee needs to be formed to assist in the upgrading of computers currently assigned to administrative use. Volunteers are needed from each department.

VII. J. Grant, Project Mosaic:

Mr. Grant discussed the various advantages and disadvantages of the Mosaic platform when compared to networked PCs. The Mosaic system has the advantages of improved uniformity, cohesiveness and lower labor costs while a network of PCs provides better independence. He is making network cards available to engineering offices to provide electronic mail, shared office printers, the network file system, and access to central applications. Current Mosaic resources include 51 faculty workstations and 78 student workstations. Each workstation is to be upgraded to 32 MBytes of RAM. A new FDDI (100 MBits/sec) data link will be set up between the Kennedy and Smith buildings. The Solaris operating system will not be available until Summer, 1994. The PC labs in Smith 226 and 267 will be converted to use by 29 additional Mosaic workstations. Remaining seats in Kennedy 235 and Smith 249 will be filled with up to 40 additional workstations. Eighteen 486-Class personal computers will be installed in Bernard 108. We should see an overall improvement in support of both the Mosaic and PC platforms with these additional resources. However, since Project Mosaic can be designed to meet the needs of a large base of users more efficiently then PCs, Mosaic is here to stay. Dean Snyder noted that Project Mosaic can be used to get information to students through its electronic mail facilities. We should always be trying to improve information transfer throughout the college.

VIII. B. Coleman, SUCCEED

Work is being done on an Engineering Education Coalition for International Studies curriculum model. Models to substitute for the College General Education requirements are being studied. Four proposals have been funded, realizing $140,000 of new support. A project is underway with Harding University High School (Middleton) to send students as mentors in a science and technology management project. Some examples of projects include work with CAD, and work with video/data links. Studio for Engineering Practice. Will provide a hands-on component for students to take small projects on an extra work basis. Can be used to enhance recruitment and retention of students. There is a need for good project ideas. Please forward any to Bob Coleman. Information highway opportunities are available for investigation. A link with CPCC is currently under study.

IX. Dean Snyder, College Agenda for 1993-1999. (Attached to meeting announcement documentation). The following points were highlighted:

Faculty involvement is an integral part of the agenda. We cannot publicly announce the availability of PhD programs, but work needs to start now on establishing procedures, announcements, guidelines, etc. There is a need for establishing a new advising strategy aimed at getting information to students more effectively than we currently do. There is a possibility that each of the degree programs in the college may lose a semester of courses. New limits on total hours to graduation will require each department to make adjustments to fit the new requirements. The current edict is a limit of 128 credit hours to graduation. SUCCEED can be used to utilize resources of other campuses to assist in solving this problem. Library funding limits require a re-assessment of the use of library resources. Academic Planning. A vision draft committee of five faculty, two undergraduate students, 1 graduate student, two advisory council members and two administrators should be formed. Agenda Priorities: 1. Curriculum review, 2. Graduate PhD programs.

X. H. Leamy, Faculty Consulting/Conflict of Interest/Conflict of Commitment.

A summary of the following discussion will be mailed to each faculty member. A conflict of commitment exists when outside activities interfere with obligations to students, colleagues and university missions. This can be observed in annual department and school evaluations. A conflict of interest exists when a tension is set up between the campus and the consulting project making it difficult to make fair choices. Consulting in encouraged, though there can be no conflict of interest or commitment, UNCC resources cannot be inappropriately used, the name of UNC may not be used, and UNC responsibility for activity cannot be claimed. Faculty and Staff who do not have a professional obligation to the campus during the three summer months are not subject to conflict of commitment during that period. Case studies are needed to establish defined procedures. The purpose of this discussion is to raise sensitivity to the issue. Common sense will usually serve to determine conflicts.

The meeting was adjourned at 4:02PM.