Meeting Minutes - August 30, 2007
1. Dean Keller reviewed the duties of the Graduate
Council. He emphasized the importance of their role in evaluating new
graduate programs and revisions in existing programs and in supervising
the codification of current rules and regulations of the Graduate
College. He also noted that members might be asked to serve on ad hoc
committees such as the Graduate Mentor Award Committee, the DC
Spriestersbach Dissertation Selection Committee, academic program review
committees, etc.
2. The minutes of the May 3, 2007 meeting were reviewed and approved.
3. The following announcements were made to update the Council on
activities that occurred over the summer:
• Winners of the DC Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize for 2007 in the
Arts/Humanities and Biological/Life Sciences were Michael Chasar,
English, and Michael Koenigs, Neuroscience. They became Iowa’s nominees
for the CGS/UMI Outstanding Dissertation Prize. The selection committee
was impressed with the quality of all the nominations and decided to
recognize two others with a Graduate Deans’ Distinguished Dissertation
Award. Deans’ Award winners were Kathryn Floyd, Art History, and Katie
Grinnell, Anatomy. All four winners will be recognized at an award
ceremony on March 28, 2008 as part of Graduate Student Recognition Week
and at the beginning of the Jakobsen Graduate Conference. Iowa’s
students have placed well in the CGS/UMI dissertation competition with 3
winners, tied with Princeton and Ohio State. Only Yale has had more
winners with four.
• The proposals for a BS/MS degree in Chemical and Biochemical
Engineering and for a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), approved by
Graduate Council last spring, were approved by the Provost; and the DNP
was also approved by the Board of Regents. All requests acted upon by
the Council and submitted to the Provost have been acted on.
• The new two-year COGS contract was ratified and went into effect July
1, 2007. The new contract can be found at http://www.cogs.org/.
4. Dean Keller distributed copies of The Iowa Promise: A Strategic
Plan for the University of Iowa 2005-2010, and referred Council
members to the section on Graduate and Professional Education and
Research (page 6-7) and to the Indicators of Progress for that section
(page 23). He then distributed the College’s response to those targets
as reported to the Board of Regents in March 2007. Since that report was
prepared and due to the new COGS contract, progress has been made toward
raising graduate assistant salary and tuition scholarship levels for TAs
from 6th of 11 in our Big 10 peer group to 3rd of 11. RA stipends remain
7th out of 11. With the new contract, graduate assistants will receive
@62% tuition scholarship in 2007-08 and @75% tuition scholarship in
2008-09.
5. In order to facilitate communication with Iowa’s new president and
with other external constituents, the College has published a 2006-07
Graduate College Annual Report. Copies were distributed at the
meeting and via campus mail. Dean Keller noted that the Graduate College
at Iowa was unique in that it is the administrative home of several
interdisciplinary programs on campus, plus it has four departments
(Center for the Book, Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, School of
Library and Information Sciences, and Urban and Regional Planning) that
report to the Graduate College. The College is responsible for their
faculty appointments, salaries and all promotion and tenure decisions.
Due to Dean Keller’s role as Associate Provost, the International
Writing Program and the Women in Science and Engineering program have
also shifted under the Graduate College.
6. Dean Keller next distributed a list of Graduate College goals that
will come to the Council for discussion during the upcoming academic
year. The College anticipates three or four new degree or certificate
program proposals that will require Council action during the year. It
is anticipated that the Council will also be asked to review and
evaluate the Responsible Conduct of Research offerings, recommendations
from the Postdoctoral Scholar Advisory committee, as well as annual
graduate education data and any proposed revisions to its policies and
procedures.
A Council member asked if the Graduate College would be doing a review
of graduate education across campus similar to what is being done at the
undergraduate level in order to ascertain if our graduate programs are
performing at an expected level. Should we be looking at this before it
is mandated from outside the College? How should the question be framed?
How should good graduate education be measured? How do we share good
teaching/curriculum methods? He suggested that this topic be added to
the agenda of a future meeting. Dean Keller reminded the Council that
the Graduate College collects data on several indicators that measure
the quality of graduate education at the doctoral level. These
indicators are the percentage of students who complete their degree,
their time to degree, and the placement of the graduates.
The meeting adjourned at 9:15 a.m.