Meeting Minutes - November 8, 2007 - DRAFT

1. The minutes of the October 25, 2007 meeting were reviewed and approved.

2. Announcements:
• Dean Keller introduced Associate Dean David Bills who will be replacing Professor Liu as Graduate Council representative for the College of Education while Professor Liu serves on the Provost Search Committee.
• He alerted the Council that the November 29 Graduate Council meeting has been cancelled in order to accommodate a meeting of the Graduate Deans with President Mason. The next Council meeting is scheduled for December 13.
• The proposed Graduate Council meeting schedule for the spring semester was distributed. The Council members were asked to let Dean Keller know if they had a conflict on any of the proposed dates.
• The Provost has approved the proposal from the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology for a combined AUD/PhD degree program. No further approval is needed since both degrees were existing degrees.
• Dean Keller announced that Michael Chasar (English), whose dissertation was selected for the D.C. Spriestersbach Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities and Fine Arts, has been selected as the winner of the CGS/UMI Distinguished Dissertation Prize in the Humanities and will be honored at the Council of Graduate Schools annual meeting in Seattle. This is the 4th time the University of Iowa has had a national winner and places Iowa 1st among public institutions and tied with Yale as having the most number of winners.
• Tim Flanagan’s master’s thesis in Physics has been selected for the L.B. Sims Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award and has been submitted as Iowa’s nomination for the MAGS Distinguished Master’s Thesis. He and the DC Spriestersbach winners will be honored at a reception on March 28 during Graduate Student Recognition Week.

3. Graduate students Jennifer Lee and Alexander Nica updated the Council on plans in place for the 2008 Jakobsen Conference and on the status of the Travel Funds program. The 2008 Jakobsen Conference will be the 10th anniversary of the conference and the Graduate Student Senate is hoping to make it a special event by increasing participation and attendance, providing a more formal environment similar to outside conferences, inviting undergraduates for their exposure to research at Iowa, and by providing special offerings, a special keynote speaker, and a social mixer. This year they will be soliciting faculty judges for abstract judging, poster session judging and oral presentation judging. A sign up sheet was distributed. The conference is scheduled for March 28-29, 2008. The abstract submission deadline is February 4. Judges will be giving a month to score abstracts (March 10 deadline). In the past, there was no competitive forum for the creative works of students in the performing arts. The Council supported shifting some awards to the arts. Professor Aubrey offered to advise the GSS Conference Committee on names of potential judges, etc. and also recommended they contact Alan MacVey and Kristen Thelander.

The Graduate Student Senate oversees the distribution of travel funds for graduate student presentations at conferences. A few changes have been made to the travel funds application to a PDF fill-in form with clearer instructions and cleaner format. Over the years, the travel funds budget has increased from $25,000 to $45,000 and this year the Graduate College will add an additional $15,000 for a total of $60,000 for FY08. The College is looking into ways of making that additional funding recurring. Funding is distributed six times per year and the application deadlines can be found on the GSS webpage. Fixed awards have been put in place with $400 awarded to international conferences, $300 to national and $200 to local/regional. Each application is scored with a total of 23 possible points. One point is given to students who are presenting for the first time. To be eligible for an award, the application must receive at least 18 points. More information can be found on the GSS website at http://www.uiowa.edu/~gss/travel/.

4. The discussion on the Postdoctoral Scholars Advisory Committee was deferred to the December Council meeting.

5. Associate Dean Berkowitz updated the Council on the Ballard Seashore Fellowship program. This fellowship is intended to help students complete the writing of their dissertation during the year of the award. However, over a five-year period, only 40.7% of the awardees have done so. Approximately 63% have completed in 2 years. One explanation for the added time is that the stipends of $18,000(FY) or $15,000 (AY) are lower than the minimum stipends mandated by COGS for graduate assistantships. Fellows are not supposed to be working while on the award, but the lower stipend level may make it difficult for them without other employment. The stipend may lessen the prestige of the award giving the student less incentive to complete the dissertation. Ideas were discussed on how to change the criteria of the award to better meet the goals. Some of the ideas were: a) to require completion in at least two years for the faculty advisor to be eligible to nominate another of his/her students in the next cycle; b) to look at the defense date rather than the degree award date; c) to limit students who had completed their prospectus to one attempt at receiving the award; d) to cut back on the number awarded which might increase the status of the award; e) to do mid-award review and defer the award if progress had not been made; f) to not link the award to completing the dissertation in a certain timeframe (similar to other fellowships), but only allow students to apply once. Dean Berkowitz will continue to review the criteria and the data, including the number of reapplications, in an attempt to improve the outcome without making the judging of the nominations more difficult.

6. Professor Honey asked if there was any follow-up to report on the embargo issue discussed at the last meeting. Associate Dean Wurster reported that there is nothing new externally. Internally, the Graduate College is continuing to think about the process and working on storage. It is his intent to keep the process simple while still protecting the students.

The meeting adjourned at 9:35 a.m.