UW-Madison Faculty Senate.
transcription of recording

>> All right. I am told that we have a quorum, so I am going to call the meeting to order. Can I ask all of the faculty to rise, as you're able, for the reading of the memorial resolutions. Let me recognize Emeritus Professor Millard Susman, to present the memorial resolutions for Professor Emeritus Seymour Abrahamson.

>> Professor Seymour Abrahamson died at the age of 88 on July 23, 2016. Seymour joined the U.W. faculty in 1961, and over his long career, taught courses in zoology and genetics. Students appreciated his enthusiasm, his wit, and his personal warmth. He served twice as Chair of Zoology. Seymour's research on genetic effects of radiation, using drosophila, fruit fly, made him a word renowned expert on mutation caused by radiation and other environmental factors. And for seven years, he directed the major study on the long-term genetic effects of atomic radiation on survivors exposed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among his many honors was an award from the Emperor of Japan. Seymour was the founding editor of the Journal of Environmental Mutagenesis. He engaged in community activities and traveled with his family, including his wife, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Shirley Abrahamson, and their son, Daniel. Seymour's joie de vivre and his playful inquisitiveness will be deeply missed.

>> Thank you very much. Let me call on Professor Patricia McManus to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus John Berbee.

>> Professor Emeritus John G. Berbee died on December 14, 2016, in Madison. During more than three decades of service to the Department of Plant Pathology and the Department of Forestry, Jack's program contributed significantly to the development of forest pathology as a science, and to applying research-based knowledge in the practice of forestry. His work contributed to success in reforestation and restoration of productive forests, and to the early discoveries of viruses that infect trees. Following retirement, Jack traveled the country with his wife, Flora, in a Volkswagen van, and to continue to share his enthusiasm for natures, trees and forests.

>> Thank you, and I want to recognize Professor Berbee's son, Jim Berbee, and his wife, Karen Walsh, are here. They are also very good friends of the University in many ways, thank you for coming.

[ Applause ]

>> Let me recognize Professor Richard Lottridge to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus, Robert Cole.

>> Robert F. Cole, Emeritus Professor of Music, died on December 23, 2016, at Oakwood Village, after a long illness. He was 93 years old. After graduating from high school, he was accepted under full scholarship to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. After a short stint in the U.S. Coast Guard Band during World War II, he became a member of the flute section of the Philadelphia Orchestra under the conductor, Eugene Normandy. In 1962, he joined the faculty of the School of Music, where he taught flute, chamber music, and helped establish the Wenker Quintet, the faculty ensemble in residence. As many students teach and perform in major orchestras in universities across the United States, Robert was a founding member of the National Flute Association, and served as its President for one term. He retired from the University of Wisconsin in 1988.

>> Thank you, and Professor Cole's daughter, Cathy Becker, and her husband, Larry, are here. Thank you for being with us.

[ Applause ]

>> Let me recognize Professor Peter Goff to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus, Jack Ferver.

>> Professor Emeritus Jack Ferver passed away on January 2, 2017. He became a faculty member in the School of Education's Department of Continuing and Vocational Education at the UW Madison in 1964. His work included developing programs for Wisconsin field offices for the Extension Division. He played an important role in the development of the Extension Program for Performing Arts in Women's Education. Additionally, he advised universities and government extension programs in Taiwan and Okinawa. During his time on the faculty, he served as Founding President of the Wisconsin Adult Education Association, President of the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education, and was inducted into the International Dalton Continuing Education Hall of Fame. He retired in 1986.

>> Thank you very much. And let me recognize Professor Ken Cameron, to present the memorial resolution for Professor Emeritus, Hugh Iltis.

>> Professor Hugh Helmut Iltis, a most influential botanist and environmentalist, died peacefully at his home in the UW Arboretum, on December 19, 2016 at the age 91. After fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1938 with his family to escape persecution, Iltis served in the U.S. Army interrogating Nazis for the Nuremberg Trials. He joined the UW Botany faculty in 1955, and directed our world class Herbarium for decades. An authority on capers and other plant families, he is famous for helping to discover wild relatives of maize and tomatoes, while on plant collecting expeditions to Mexico and South America. He mentored 37 graduate students during his long career, and often finished his lectures by admonishing his students to "be a good ancestor." Hugh Iltis practiced what he preached, and will not be forgotten.

>> Two of Professor Iltis' sons are here, Frank and Mike Iltis. Thank you for coming.

[ Applause ]

>> Let me thank everyone who was here for memorial resolutions. You need not stay for the next hour and a half of the meeting, and ask everyone to be seated. Let me recognize Vice Provost and Chief Diversity Officer, Patrick Sims, who is going to provide an update on the state of diversity and inclusion at UW Madison. I am going to keep this to 20 minutes, so Patrick, you have somewhere a little under 15, and then time for questions and comments, and we do then have to move on.

>> Thank you, Chancellor. I think I'm aiming for 10, so hopefully we'll have a good, robust 10 minute conversation. I'll move fairly quickly through this. Wanted to give an update on our respective activities concerning our strategic diversity framework. Many of you will realize that framework was adopted in the Spring of 2014, and it has been the document, the Bible, if you will, that has guided much of the work of my office, with some tangential efforts that happened through the office of the Chancellor, the Provost, and Vice Provost, and Dean of Students, Lori Berquam's office. So this report is sort of amalgamation of those efforts. Also giving you updates on some successes and progress that we've had along the way. I'll just simply start by stating portions of our campus strategic framework. We have tried to pull everything that we've done from documents that were already existing, so we didn't want to reinvent the wheel, but we wanted to build our case, our efforts, in terms of resource allocation, and resource, and did I do something here?

>> No...

>> Wow. Well there you go. It's a good thing I have the thing memorized [laughter]. But basically wanting to up-build the case for our activities. So I'll quickly, you know, maybe I can pull it from my PowerPoint on my iPad here, but, this doesn't count against my time allotment, right? But I'll simply say this, I can talk some parts of this. There are 18 initiatives that our office focused on as the implementation plan of our strategic framework. Of those 18 initiatives, we have carved them up over the course of three different phases for the next decade. So we are forecasting from 2014 to 2024, with a three-year increment of phase one and a three-year increment of phase two and three, and so forth. Which means, of those 18 initiatives, we're targeting roughly six initiatives per phase. So we are nearing the end of phase one, which is the first set of three years. I'm pleased to report that there are six initiatives that I can give you a heads up on. If you spent any time on the website diversity.wisc.edu, if you click on reports, you'll see a document called the reel change, R-E-E-L, Reel Change document for implementation and it maps out a series of these initiatives that I'm talking about. Our first initiative was really focusing on ways we can assess and impact the variables. One most notable variable we talked about and implemented this past fall was the first ever campus climate survey for our students. We know that Wisely does an amazing job of surveying our faculty, but we hadn't had formal data to take a look at with respect to our student experience, and by students, I mean all students. Undergraduates and graduate students, and professional students as well. Hey, looks like I'm back. So I'll quickly move through this. But basically the goals that we have are pulled directly from, and I'm not working here, the technology is not working with me. There we go. There is our implementation timeline. All right. So let me back this up a little bit. So here, the framework goals. Improving institutional success through improved attention, institutional access through efforts of recruitment, improving coordination on our campus diversity planning, promoting shared values of diversity, and engaging in the campus leadership for diversity and inclusion. This is that ten year timeline plan that I was talking about for implementation, phase one, two, and three. And this body, almost to the date, May 2nd last year, 2016, this body adopted a resolution that would encourage faculty, commit faculty to engage in ongoing professional development and cultural competency experiences. My office is working in tandem with some of your units already, but we are putting together a new effort called our faculty diversity liaison program, which is designed to identify a cohort of faculty members and instructional staff, who will be a resource to work with departments, to work with other faculty who are interested in revamping their syllabi, to more intentionally embed elements that address diversity, equity, inclusion. This is a new effort for us. We're launching that officially this summer, with the hopes of having a cohort each year for the next four years. So we'll have a group of about 20 individuals that will be able to move in similar fashions the way that our Wisely colleagues provide resources for unconscious bias, this body will be a space that can bounce ideas off of and collaborate with respective units to think about how they may embed elements of diversity more intentionally into their work. We also created our learning communities for institutional change in excellence, or LCICE, as we like to say. And this is that space that if you're interested in doing the more personal work, using yourself as the instrument of change, as we often like to say, how we think about engaging diversity inclusion, and to what extend we personally are playing a role in helping or hindering many of our respective diversity and inclusion efforts. So Initiative One, Assessing and Improving the Quality of our Interactions. So we expanded cultural support and well-being services for students, faculty and staff. Working very closely with University Health Services, and the Dean of Students Office. We launched the Our Wisconsin Program. How many of you have heard of the Our Wisconsin Program, hopefully? None of you? We're so busy doing research, right? But the Our Wisconsin Program is a way to onboard incoming students to think more intentionally about the kinds of sort of lenses that they bring with them when they come to campus, and how they understand some of those nuance differences, engaging others, who are coming from different spaces, and thinking more intentionally about ways they can intersect and collaborate and engage across those different lived experiences. This week, as a matter of fact, this Wednesday, May 3 will be the kickoff of the Black Cultural Center. This is an effort that had been in the works for the last year and a half. Our Dean of Students, with support of the Chancellor's Office, committed resources to respond and create a space for students to engage more intentionally around cultural aspects related to identity. This is working in tandem with the Multicultural Student Center. I talked a little bit about our climate survey. Then we'll talk about strengthening relationships with our campus and community partners. This past fall, we launched the first-ever Chancellor's Community Advisory Council. This is the space where we interact with community leaders who can have the tough talk with us. Who can let us know when we are perhaps misstepping on certain things, but also serve as great contacts and references, to help us think through some of the challenging aspects of managing our diversity and inclusion activities on campus. So it has been a quite useful body for us. Initiative 5. Making sure there is a consistent message tied to our diversity and inclusion activities. Many of you may be familiar that this body, along with our academic staff, and our university staff, adopt unanimously a statement on our institutional commitment to diversity. This happened this past fall for us as well. So we are excited that we have language that we can point to that represents the broader institutional commitment. It's not my language, it's not the Chancellor's or the Provost's language, but we really use the shared governance process to come up with language that we felt reflected the various interests and commitments that we know live on our campus, with respect to equity and diversity inclusion. We were formalizing that statement. We created our Diversity Inventory Project, which I'll talk a little bit about later. We are also going to be providing reports. We are preparing to release and update this coming fall, once our committee has been identified, to look at the analyses from the campus climate survey. Then, of course, we added in my office a director of communications to work more intentionally with central communications, to think about how we message and build positive stories connected to our diversity and inclusion activities. Designated diversity inclusion as a strategic priority for us, with respect to our fund raising efforts. Last fall, excuse me, last spring, we received a single largest gift, $10 million dollars, to support our diversity programming, specifically the Chancellor's Scholar's Program, with our scholarship effort there. We work very closely with the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association to hire a Director of Development that can help support the activity of my office. We have had efforts along the way, but being intentional, and having someone who is specifically thinking about ways in which we support the infrastructure has proven to be quite beneficial for us, as is having a director of diverse alumni engagement with the Foundation Alumni Association as well. We are in the process of identifying that person. And then our diversity inventory project, Initiative 8. This is the effort that helps us get a sense on what is actually happening on our campus. There is a lot of activity. We want to be able to capture that activity, and more importantly, talk about it in a way that encourages others who may be interested in doing research, or knowing more about respective commitments for diversity and equity inclusion on campus, that you can have information at your fingertips, grasp, so we are collecting that information and building a process by which that data can be accessible to our campus community. Certainly my office will be thinking about this information and working very closely with the Chancellor and Provost's office. So we understand what is the scope and scale of our commitment? We know it is large and significant, but we want to be able to say definitively that this is what we do, and more importantly talk about why we do what we do. And so tying this effort with our institutional statement on our commitment to diversity and the fact that this body, along with the other governor's bodies, have committed themselves to ongoing professional development. I'd like to say this is what change looks like. It is moving the Titanic and a very slow pace, but a steady pace nonetheless, to have the kinds of outcomes that you're looking for. So more to come over this next seven years that will guide our activity for the remainder of the initiatives. A few bits on our outstanding students. We have an amazing student who is a finalist for the National Youth Poet Laureate. She was runner-up, Hijar Baban [phonetic spelling], and Hijar Baban. And then of course Mr. Deshawn McKinney [assumed spelling], who is one of the accomplished students at UW, who is a Marshall Scholar winner, Truman Scholar winner, and Road Scholar winner. They are both affiliated with the First Wave Program that my office supervises. So we are really excited to tap their successes. You know about the Black Cultural Center. There was a sort of soft launch February 28, but we talk about this as community building experiences. Ways in which we get to know each other outside of the sort of formal dynamics of what it means to be a faculty member or academic staff, but just as a person who is committed to equity diversity and inclusion on our campus. Our Latino Youth Summit just happened, kicked off fairly recently, so we are excited about that, 80 students, Latino students, had a chance to participate in the program that gave them a sense of what it would be like to be a student here at UW Madison. This is an effort that has been going on for the last decade or so. So we are excited that we are able to continue that effort in concert with Centro Hispano, which is our community partner. And of course, our pow-wow. We had over 6,200 individuals participate in the annual pow-wow that my office works with the student [inaudible] to produce. And it has been a class A operation. So if you have not had a chance to go to the pow-wow, y'all are missing it. The pow-wow is a really fabulous experience, and you can check out, I believe, a photo slide if you go to news.wisc.edu, type in pow-wow, you'll find some of the photos and exhibits that are on display at the pow-wow. Resources you can use, and actions you can take. We sent an email out to you early February as a heads up, as a way to think about how you can be a resource. How you can be an ally for students as we engage some very complicated issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion. So we talk about simply acknowledging the impact of these diversity related challenges and incidents have on students, and encourage you to keep an open door for discussion. All right, very simple, basic things, address, of course, inappropriate and disrespectful behavior, when it occurs in the classroom, and so there are times, given our respective expertise, we may not feel that we have the capacity, but our students are looking to us as the quote-end quote authority in the room, to be able to shape that dynamic. So whether we feel equipped or not, our students are expecting us to respond. The last thing I'll leave you with is when in doubt, seek to clarify what the students' needs may actually be. And it is simply taking each scenario on their face value. Having the opportunity to address it case by case. To find out what the needs are, and more importantly to demonstrate that you are attuned and sensitive to some of their challenges, and that you're not this, you know, sort of robot person that only cares about the concept, but you actually care about the lived experience of your students as well, and I know that's the case for almost all of us. So we felt it would just, wouldn't hurt to go along the way. If you're interested in learning more, you can visit diversity.wisc.edu. You can also visit our campus climate.wisc.edu, and you can get a written narrative of some of the things I've talked about today when you click on that initiatives tab. Yeah, and then if you want to say hey, Patrick, you're doing great, or you're not doing so great, you can contact me and say that too. Patrick.sims@wisc.edu, then of course you can call 890-3117, but you won't get me, you'll get my assistant. So anyway, I'll pause there. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Any questions?

>> Sure, any questions?

>> I had a question.

>> Yes.

>> Mark Edsol [assumed spelling], District 11. So, great job, I'm really happy to hear what you're trying to accomplish, and I appreciated your comment about trying to move the Titanic [laughs], because I think that's kind of how it looks to me. So you know, as we move forward and the budget problems are coming in, and a lot of universities, including Madison, are trying to attract students from out of state who pay full tuition, and you know, a lot of these kids are from the Chicago north, the Chaumberg [assumed spelling] Suburb, and you know, other places, it's starting to make our campus look whiter and whiter. And you are talking about bringing students of color in, who, you now, maybe I'm misinformed about this, but typically, are not the kids that are wealthy and their parents can pay full out of state tuition, and so it seems like there are forces working against you to try and bring more students of color in, because we're trying to recruit more students that can pay full sticker price for the university. You know, and Chancellor has this really admirable program that Badger promised, and so maybe that can help deal with this issue, but how do you see it as sort of moving that Titanic, given these forces that are trying to steer it in the other direction?

>> Right, that's a great question. Part of this, part of me wants to point a little bit at the Chancellor on the question of the fiscal pieces, but what I can say is from my experience, given that we have six of the eight major pipeline recruitment programs on our campus that are in my office, if students feel like there is a community, where they have a sense of belonging, that someone understands them, and that someone can be there for them when they need that additional support that goes beyond the academic, but includes that social and emotional support, they will come to this institution. Right? So our job is to ensure that those resources are in place to provide that kind of support. It has always been present, but I think one of the challenges that we wrestle with is in some ways our messaging. Right? So how we message that Madison is a welcome and inclusive space for everyone, there are external forces that, as you say, work against that effort. But my sort of take on this is, you know, keep your nose to the grindstone, and let the work speak for itself, and not give up when you have those hiccoughs, or sort of road blocks, but highlight those successes, because they're definitely there.

>> I've got to say something. Yeah, this year's class is the most diverse ever. Our applications this year are more diverse for the next year's class, than they have ever been, and the net effect of out of state admissions is to increase diversity on this campus, particularly among historically disadvantaged groups. In case you haven't noticed, Wisconsin is a pretty white state, and we are recruiting from a lot of other parts of the country that are more diverse, and so the net effect actually of out of state students is more diversity, and that is particularly true if you're looking at Latino students, who are very hard, or is a very small share of the population here, but it's also true for African American students as well.

>> You can also add, Chancellor, I think we talk about the retention piece, because it's one thing to recruit folks, it's another thing to keep them. We've done a very good job at retaining our students, particularly our under-represented students, so much so that I believe the data is just about a point above our normal retention rate for majority students, about 96% plus, for under-represented students. So that is an unrealistic, unheard of stat, that you know, we ought to be jumping from the rooftops.

[ Applause ]

>> I'd like to think that some of that activity and support I was describing earlier comes from the folks who work in my shop and do the heavy lifting, along with folks in Dean Berkram [assumed spelling] shop, for providing that student support for our incoming students, and those who are already here. I think it's time for one more question, or are we done?

>> If there's other questions? I don't see anyone moving to the microphone.

>> All right, well thank you very much.

>> Thank you, Patrick, I appreciate it.

[ Applause ]

>> I get to make a few update comments at this point, and we are as you all know near the close of the academic year. And I want to thank all of you, and please pass my thanks along to all of your colleagues for the teaching, the mentoring, the intellectual work that you've all done over this year, and I hope the summer ahead brings many good things to work on as well. Our PhD Commencement is going to be a week from Friday. On May 12, the larger commencement for everybody else is Saturday at noon at Camp Randall. You are all invited to either of those two events, should you want to come. As I hope you've already heard, two of our distinguished colleagues have won, have been named Andrew Carnegie Fellows, for 2017. Greg Mehmet [assumed spelling] in the LaFollette School of Public Affairs, in the Nelson Institute, and Greg Mittman [assumed spelling] who is the violist research, and William Coleman, Professor of History, of Science, Medical History and Environmental studies. They are two among 35. It is great to have two from Wisconsin in that group, and they are both superb scholars. I congratulate them on that accomplishment. I was in D.C. last week at a meeting of the AAU University, but I did a number of other things while there. I gave testimony before a hearing chaired by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, on duplication and waste in government operations. And talked about the need to lighten the regulatory burden, particularly on the research side, at major research universities. Some of you will understand that concern. I led a number of Big 10 Chancellors to talk with Speaker Paul Ryan, about both the budget, as well as H1B visas. I am not saying there is any correlation, but if you've seen the budget agreement they came to, we actually have an additional $2 billion dollars in the NIH budget for this year, 2017, that of course has only three and a half to four months left in it, that ends the end of September. And the big debate is going to be about the next budget. But it resets NIH at a higher level, and that is very good news. And has almost no cuts. I won't say none, but almost no cuts in other major funding agencies. So that was the good political news of this morning. Now they all have to pass that agreement, but they do appear to have all signed onto it. Related to the research investment issue, last week, AAU members unanimously approved a statement on the need to renew and recommit to the research partnership, between the government and U.S. universities that over decades has fostered innovation and jobs and economic growth, and better health, and improved national security. That statement notes that this partnership at this particular moment in time is facing a threat. And with the proposed budget cuts, it's a particularly bad time to be dealing with this, when other countries are pouring more and more research money into their universities, in order to jump ahead of us and get on the outer edge of innovation. And I know that all of the different universities around the country are working on this issue, and we will see how it evolves. As you know, U.W. Madison, like most of higher education, has been grappling with the issue of sexual assault. Two years ago, we did a survey, which many of you read about, talking about the extent of sexual assault on our campus, and there were some 26 other universities, major research universities around the country, that implemented exactly the same survey, so we have comparable data. The AAU this last half year went back to those universities and asked them what are you doing differently as a result of that survey? And I was involved with several other presidents at a meeting of the Washington Post, to talk about what came out of that follow up, and you know, it was very good to talk about some of the things we're doing here in Wisconsin, and that survey has helped shape those. So it has always been true for a number of years, that our first year students had to do an online program called Tonight, about sexual assault and in-person violence prevention. But we, as a result of that survey, have added to that now a mandatory in-person module for an hour and a half, after they come to campus. And we offer that module in different flavors. So there's one flavor aimed at international students. There is a flavor that is aimed at bystander intervention. There is a flavor that is aimed at the LGBTQ community. You know, so you can sort of choose what type of module you want to follow up with. We are also, as a result of that survey, adding, starting this year, training specifically geared to graduate and professional students. A group we quite honestly had been ignoring on this. And the survey really caught us up short about the number of those students who reported themselves having experienced sexual violence on this campus. We've added staff members to the Violence Prevention and Survivor's Services Unit, and you know, we're doing a number of other things in this area. We are not going to solve the problem of sexual assault on this campus, by my goal is to make it less common, and to make sure that when it does occur, students report, in our numbers of reports, have increased substantially in the last year and a half. That is good news. It means more people who experience this feel like they can come forward and say something. So we are working on it. It is a work in progress, as they say. The state budget. They continue to work on the state budget. The news continues to be pretty good on the dollars front. We are still working on the capital budget about buildings, and we are still a little unsure about exactly the amounts that are going to come out for compensation increases. I'm pretty confident at this point there will be some compensation increases. We will not, I think, be held up and be subject to getting our money from any savings that come out of a movement to self-insurance. I think they're going to put us into the regular employee fund, and fund us out of that for compensation. That is very good news. None of this has quite happened yet, but this is what we're hearing, and you know, so there, you know, we'll see how large and when those compensation increases occur. The best piece of good news was they dropped all of the non-budget items out of the budget bills. And there were a number of non-budget items in there, such as requiring that all Bachelor's degree candidates must, by mandatory process, head onto an internship. The requirements around faculty workloads, and reporting, and I think about 11 items that affected us, that they dropped out of the bill. Now, some of those can come back as separate legislative bills. One of them has already been introduced, but in general, I think the news on the budget is moving forward, and we expect by the end of this month that if not sooner, they will have sort of settled the higher education piece in the Joint Finance Committee, and it will be ready to move with other things. The big issue is transportation, and they have to get that settled before this all goes to the full assembly and the full senate for approval. One of the things that did come back as a separate piece of legislation, you've probably been reading about this, is a piece of legislation on free speech. That would mandate the Board of Regents to develop a policy related to expression of free speech on campus, and sets out a number of specific statements that have to be in that policy. Now, those who are paying attention know that last spring the Board of Regents established a policy on free speech, basically almost entirely based on the University of Chicago's statement that a lot of other campuses have adopted. So you know, in my opinion, this is not a very necessary thing to be doing, but there is real concern as legislators watch everything happening around the country, that they want to prevent some of this happening here. So I agree with the desire of Bill's authors that we do need to worry about this issue. We need to have serious policies in place, but this legislation is not necessarily the best way to do this. There are also a few aspects of the legislation that concern me. There is sort of mandatory punishment for students who violate these free speech codes, as opposed to leaving this up to the disciplinary committees to take account of time and place, and other things. There is also a statement in here that limits the ability of the university to make statements about current policy concerns, and as it is currently written, it is rather a concerning statement, saying, you know, we might not be able to talk about things like budgets or federal research funds, and I'm hopeful that might be re-written in a little bit narrower way before anything happens on this legislation. So finally, to conclude, two key appointments, I want to make sure you know about. We have a new permanent U.W. Madison Arboretum Director, Karen Oberhouser [assumed spelling], who comes from the University of Minnesota. She is an expert on Monarch butterflies, and so any of you want to talk about Monarchs and their migrations, she is the person to talk to. And we have a new director of the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene, which is closely associated with our Medical School. It is a faculty member from UW, Jim Shower [assumed spelling], Jim Shower, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Water's Science and Engineering Laboratory. He has long been affiliated with the state lab, and will take over as its share in the next few weeks, I believe. Finally, of real interest to this group, the Board of Regents, since we last met, did approve our post tenure review policy without discussion and without any dissention. So that is done for the year, and I'm very pleased to announce that. Those are my comments. Any questions, issues, things people want to raise?

>> Mark Edsol [assumed spelling], District 11.

>> Yeah.

>> So I had a question about the sexual assault on campus, you brought that up, and you know, two years ago there was the AAU report, and Wisconsin, the Madison Campus didn't do too well. We had pretty poor scores in several categories, one of those was that for female graduate students and professionals, 24% of the students reported that they were harassed by or sexually assaulted by their co-worker, boss or supervisor. And 70% of those students, the graduate students, did not think the university would take seriously if they reported that incident. So...

>> Well when I mentioned the grad students particularly, that part of the survey caught us by surprise, as we had not been focusing on graduate student issues with relation to sexual assault on this campus, and as a result of that, we are now implementing training to all incoming graduate and professional students, and have done a number of things around training of reporters, and are talking about what we need to do with regard to staff and faculty, work with graduate students on that.

>> So that is what I wanted to talk about, I mean, we definitely have a problem here, where we've got, I mean, we shouldn't have 24% of grads and students reporting that they are sexually assaulted by a supervisor or co-worker. We shouldn't have 70% of them saying that the University wouldn't take their claim seriously. And in fact, one of the people from University Health Services said in the Badger Herald, I think it was, that graduate students are disproportionately targeted for sexual harassment, compared to undergraduate students, and I think that data comes out.

>> That's not true in the report numbers that we have, but it may be true at some other data.

>> And so you know, we have these faculty, these people that are employed by the university basically, they're perpetrating these harassment events and sexual assaults against graduate students, but your training is for the grad student.

>> Let me be clear, the training is, first of all, about what do you do and you know, if you--we are very concerned about, since we don't know how to report, right? Or we don't trust that. And part of this is to say here is what you have to do, here is how you reach out. The other part of the training is about how do you help others? How do you be a good bystander, if you're in a lab with someone and see something. Now, the next question, rightfully, is what training are we going to do around sexual assault for staff and for faculty, and I must say the faculty issue was as big as the staff issue. And we are in the midst of talking about that. Mandatory sexual assault training for all faculty and staff would be contentious on campus. But there clearly are some needs to think about how we target it in places where there have been problems.

>> It just seems odd to me that you're focusing your attention on training the victim, and not the perpetrator.

>> Well, part of the issue is we can identify the graduate students, but they're all over campus. And we have 22,000 staff and faculty. And the question of how we focus, you know, virtually all of you have connections with graduate students. You know, I can't identify the one thousand people who we really need to focus results on. We have to do this across the board, because, you know, but for anyone who is in touch with graduate students. And you could ask the same thing about undergraduates, right? And how do we get training out to everyone there too?

>> But now you just train everybody that comes in.

>> We certainly, to some degree of new staff training is important, and we do a module in new faculty training on sexual assault and violence prevention.

>> I mean for all the new students that come in, you just give them all training.

>> We give all students training.

>> Yeah.

>> But we're saying for new faculty, and I believe for new staff as well, someone can verify this for me. We do sexual assault and violence training for new people coming in. The question is how do we go back and get the other 20,000 who didn't start work in the last two years.

>> Okay, so the other question I had was, you know, that U.W. Madison is being investigated by the federal government for four cases of mishandling of reports of sexual violence against students and employees. And yet, the current title 9 coordinator is resigning in May, just this month, and we haven't heard anything about whether you're going to get a replacement for that.

>> Of course. Of course, I mean, he's retiring. And we have a search underway to replace him.

>> Okay.

>> No question about that.

>> So there will be an interim period where we don't have anybody?

>> Well we have an interim person, if there is a break here, who will cover this. I don't remember the name, but if Ray is here, you can say something about that. Of course we're covering that. Yeah. We can't go without a Title 9 Coordinator. Yeah.

>> The current Title 9 Coordinator is working through the end of May, and the new Title 9 Coordinator will be appointed before the end of May, so there will be some overlap.

>> Yeah?

[ Inaudible ]

>> Mm-hmm.

>> I was glad to hear you went to Washington D.C., to talk about faculty workload and reducing the [inaudible] burden, especially for folks who work in [inaudible] and so on. So I would like to hear more about this and if there is anything we are doing here on campus to help us in this venue, because it is really a big problem for us right now.

>> So we have a D.C. based office that coordinates through Marcia Malik's office, to be in touch with people who are doing research, and particularly around funding issues, and around regulatory issues. And if you were not in touch, and don't know who that person is and how to be in touch, you should be sure to, you know, come talk to me, or be in touch with Marcia's office. I mean, we're working very hard at making sure Wisconsin is present in the conversations that are taking place in Washington D.C., it's too important to us not to be there.

>> Yes, just from my experience for the last 15 years, I have seen that I used to spend like about 5 to 10% of my time to aspects now, it has been almost 30% or 40%.

>> Yeah, you're not alone in that.

>> Two more people to help me with that, that's really a lot of folks.

>> You know, we are at a moment in time where we have an administration that is quite concerned about over-regulation, and we all believe within the higher university education community we should take advantage of that, and that was the point of my testimony, and some of the work that people are talking about. You know, I heard Joseph Collins talk, and met with him a little, when I was in D.C., and you know, he was talking about a whole agenda that they have, some of which has been stymied for a variety of reasons in the last several years, and you know, he's planning to push that, to try to move it forward. The level of time that goes into the requirements these days is just unconscionable.

>> Thank you.

>> Many of you know this. All right? Yeah.

>> Sorry, Brett Pacer, District 23, this is to address comments that were made a few minutes ago. I think it's time for faculty and staff to be required to undergo training. Just like we require students to do. I can't think of an excuse not to.

[ Applause ]

>> Eric Sandgren [assumed spelling] District 113. I'd like to speak to your comments on regulation. I encourage you to continue to push to do what you can to communicate the realities, and to reduce the extent of regulation. I think, though, many of the regulations are there for really good reasons, and certainly they can't all be eliminated. They shouldn't all be eliminated. By working federally, maybe we can get a 10 or 15, 20% reduction? But if you want to make a difference, in the amount of time that faculty and staff have to devote to research and their activities, I think you'll have to look at some way of providing assistance on campus. And there are models for this that have been used, and have been successful. That is a way, maybe to eliminate by up to 50%, just something to be thinking about.

>> I understand that. I mean, one of the things that Marcia Malik is working on is the question of where do we need to provide better assistance to our researchers at a central level, than we have been providing. But I will also push back at all of you, because there are some of you who are regularly saying you're hiring too many administrators. If we are to do this, that does mean hiring some additional administrators who can take on some of that load that right now is on faculty. So. Any other comments, to be continued. All right. If you turn to the minutes from the April 3rd meeting, are there any additions or corrections to those minutes? If there are none, I am going to take the minutes approved as distributed. And I realize that I have been remiss in my duties, because I was to make sure that before I turn to the next item of business. I thank Amy Wendt and Tom Broman who are leaving the U.C. after three years of service, and thank them for all the work they have done.

[ Applause ]

>> And I'm delighted to let all of you know that Anja Wanner is going to be the U.C. Chair for the next year, so you can bring all your problems to her, after the end of May [laughter].

[ Applause ]

>> And the two new incoming U.C. members are Steve Ventura and Terry Warfield. I know Terry is around here somewhere as well. There he is. And we are delighted that you're both coming on to the U.C., thank you for taking on that job.

[ Applause ]

>> All right. I have now done my business that I was supposed to do. Let me recognize Associate Professor John Hall, who is going to present the Annual Report of the Officer Education Committee for informational purposes only. John.

>> Thank you Chancellor Blank. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that this is not an annual report, rather this is a bi-annual report. We missed our report last year, for which I am deeply apologetic. I am rotating off this committee, more or less the moment I am done rendering this report. I am not embarrassed to admit, however, that you didn't miss much over the last two years, in that there are two constants for the officer education committee in the ROTC programs. Those constants are these programs continue to be among the best in the nation, and I'm not, it's not any kind of idle exaggeration if you've read the report. And I am going to hit some of those highlights here very briefly. You can see that's true, and they've continued to be among the most excellent programs for each of the three services across the nation, and the other constant is, if there is any concern, it is not a very strong one, but it is sort of hanging around in the background, is the facilities that the different programs have, which are adequate at the moment, but there is always a but. And that is where I will conclude my report. Just hitting some highlights here, if you care to reference the reports here, it does reference the scope of the duties, size of the Office of Education Committee, mentions the meetings. Our most recent meeting was in March, at which time we interviewed two new cadre members who will be coming in over the summer, and replacing two members, the senior leaders or commanders of ROTC detachments that are retiring. So the incoming new colleagues of ours are Lieutenant Colonel Christina Hastings, who is an Air National Guard officer. She will be both the first woman to command our Air Force ROTC detachment, and she will also be the first National Guard officer to command ROTC. Air Force is changing things a little bit in this regard. Traditionally, the commanders of all these detachments have been active duty officers for a variety of reasons, mostly operational tempo and personnel strengths and so forth. The air force is beginning to experiment with assigning Air National Guard officers to these posts. The outgoing commander, Colonel Greg Gore, thinks this is a great, great development in point of fact, because it strengthens the bond of detachment with the community. She's coming from just over by the airport, and also a number of the Air Force cadets that will commission into the Air Force will, in fact, commission into the Air National Guard, and they'll have other cadre who are active duty, so it's a better representation of the so-called total force into which they're commissioning, and then the new commander of Navy/ROTC is Captain, excuse me, Greg Sakarski [assumed spelling]. We interviewed them both, they're both phenomenal, spectacular officers. We are fortunate that they are the ones selected by the respective services to come here. Looking forward to working with them in the coming years. Just want to highlight from the second page, continuing under the officer education committee heading, you'll note that the university budgets a little over, or not quite, rather, $200,000 a year to support these different programs, and that support is essential to their operations. In return you can see that each of these, well, not each of these programs, I'm sorry, collectively, these programs bring about $3.3 million dollars into the university. And that is the financial dimension, but that's not the most significant dimension of this. Of course, these men and women that are in these ROTC detachments represent an opportunity for the University of Wisconsin and the future leadership of our military to get to know one another better, and to make sure that those military organizations are part of and representative of society, and led by people who have been educated by outstanding colleagues such as yourselves. Moving on to Navy and Marine Corps highlights, you mentioned, I mentioned, some of their performance bragging rights at the very top of the third page, it mentions that they do drill meets, travel to drill meets in Colorado and Villanova. They just recently returned from their drill meet in Villanova, where they placed third out of a field of 19 different competitors. The paragraph immediately below that, the first full paragraph on that third page of the report represents, I think, what the commander of naval ROTC, Captain Murdock, is most proud of. That is the community engagement, the blood drives, the cleaning up the lakeshore preserve, and those sorts of things. And each of the detachments takes special pains to make sure they're integral to the campus community and the Madison community. And they want people to know about it, frankly, which is why I'm telling you about it. Beyond that, there are a number of social functions hosted by each of the ROTC programs every year. The big one in the fall is the Joint Ball, which used to be a celebration of birthdays of the Marine Corps and the Navy, but has now become a more broad joint ball. These programs would love to see faculty and staff come to their events. They don't flood everybody's inboxes with invitations, but if you are interested in attending any of these social events, their awards ceremony in the spring, their commissioning ceremony, which is right after commencement, on graduation day, please do reach out to me or Jim Johannes, who is the Director of the Office of Education program, and we can make sure you're on their mailing list. It is educational if nothing else. The very bottom of page 3, the system language from Captain Murdock, where he encourages everybody to support the ROTC programs, maintain visibility. I think that he would like it if every single morning the university communications would run a story of U.W. Today, and what ROTC is doing for everybody. Of course, they're not going to do that. But they are doing stuff so frequently that it is, in fact, a possibility. My colleague, Jim Johannes, who is the Director of the Office of Education Program, has also let me know that in his estimation, right now, the relationship on campus between the ROTC programs, their cadets, midshipmen, faculty and student body at large is as healthy and warm as it has been in his time at the University of Wisconsin. In my own anecdotal observations, suggests the same thing. Moving on to Army. One thing that is unique to point out about Army is this ROTC program is not exclusive to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that program actually encompasses four schools--us, Edgewood, White Water, and Maranatha Baptist Bible University, but the overwhelming majority of the cadets are Badgers here at U.W. Madison. There is an update to this report, that this year again the Army ROTC program has won the MacArthur Award for the best ROTC detachment in its Brigade Geographic Training area, which is the highest recognition that one of those detachments can win, and that is a great credit to Lieutenant Colonel Katie Blue, who is the current commander of that Army ROTC detachment. Moving on to Air Force. They, likewise comprise four schools. The difference there is that all of those students from other campuses have to commute to Madison to take their Air Force ROTC classes, whereas their dedicated cadre at Maranatha Baptist University and White Water for Army ROTC, that is not the case for Air Force. The Air Force ROTC has really cleaned up under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Greg Gore, winning top awards for Best Medium Sized Attachment in the nation repeatedly, and almost on an annual basis being recognized for being the most physically fit of all the Air Force ROTC detachments in the nation, which I suppose may have something to do with their proximity to the shell, they're right across the street from it. And this brings me to that last item, the facilities. So facilities are, at present, adequate. Air Force ROTC has great facilities in the vicinity, right next to the police department, the campus police department, across the street from the Shell. Navy is in a very quaint place right now, it used to be a car dealership. It's an odd floor plan, big enough that they've got a big naval deck gun on the grounds, inside what used to be a showroom floor. If you would like to visit it, I highly encourage you to do so. The current commander, Captain Murdock, thinks it's a great, wonderful spot. I'm not convinced that every subsequent commander is going to be happy with that building. And the long range building plan, that building is slated for demolition so that a newer building can take its place. Army is down with large animals on that end of campus, they can't complain too much either. It's adequate for their needs. When the day comes that these facilities get a joint facility for each of the three programs, which is something they believe they've been promised since the 1940s, or thereabouts, of course, the new model is that there needs to be a fund raising effort to help sort of build the seed money to build a new facility. This is very difficult for the ROTC programs, because each of the chairs, the commanders, the detachments, is barred from fund raising. And they have no U.W. Foundation support. So one of the things we've been talking about most recently, the last time we convened, was the possibility of assembling a Board of Visitors, Joint Board of Visitors, for all of the ROTC programs, and perhaps, perhaps purchasing some support from the U.W. Foundation, so that they can do some fund raising and potentially down the road get a facility that is not worthy of mentioning at this annual event. With that, I'm happy to take your questions.

>> Thank you very much.

>> Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Let me recognize Professor Parmesh Ramanathan, who will present the annual report of the Advisory Committee to the Office of Equity and Diversity.

>> Thank you. This is primarily informational, and you have the report in front of you. Just a few highlights. An issue with this committee has been working for a couple of years is the conflict of interest, potential conflict of interest that the way we have been doing it has. One of the basic issues is that the investigator for various complaints, like Title 9, and all of those offices, report that directly to the Office of Legal Services. So the complaint investigator, until last year, they reported directly to Legal Services. The Legal Services is supposed to represent the University against the complaint. And when the complaint investigator reports to the person who is supposed to defend the university, there is an obvious conflict there. And there has been, we have tried, the University has tried to address this issue a little bit. Now there is an Office of Compliance, and there is a new director for Office of Compliance, and so now, at least, there is one level of hierarchy in between the office of--the investigator reports to the Office of Compliance Director, who then reports to Legal Services. But still, the chain we still feel is too short, and the campus administrators look for ways to remove this inherent conflict that exists. Otherwise, any such issues about the issues that we talked about, sexual assault, Title 9, there are many other things, ADA compliance, all those issues, if any one lawsuit comes up, we will be in trouble as long as we have this conflict of interest. The second issue that I want to highlight about the office of equity, and so this committee, I don't know how long it has been set up. This is a chapter 6 committee for advisory committee to the Office of Equity and Diversity. And the role of the Office of Equity and Diversity has been changing and evolving over the years. Now, especially with the establishment of the Office of Compliance, many of the functions that were there in the office of equity and diversity have now moved to the Office of Compliance, and movement of these functions has, again, created some oversight functions to get diluted. Because this advisory committee now does not have some issues that were originally in here, that this advisory committee was taking care of, and now it's in the Office of Compliance, and this advisory committee has no role in what the Office of Compliance does. And so in the long run, I would urge the University Committee of this Faculty Senate to somehow reuse the charter of this advisory committee to kind of address what has happened with the establishment of the Office of Compliance. Those are the two main issues that are there. I will answer any questions that you have.

>> Mark Edsol, District 11. I am so happy that you brought this conflict of interest up. You basically said that the person that investigates sexual assault complaints reports to the person who defends the university against lawsuits against sexual assault. To me, that is almost like when we appointed a climate change denier, to head the EPA. It's almost comical that we have that structure at the university. I really think that we need to have some kind of outside person whose stake isn't to represent the university against complaints, but is to represent the student who brings the complaint.

>> So I think you misunderstand a little bit the process of who does complaints and who doesn't. Greg, do you want to address this one?

>> Sure. Let me first speak to the question of a conflict of interest. You know, there can be theoretical conflicts of interest. Vis a vis, the actual conflicts of interest. So merely because an organizational chart could present a possible theoretical conflict doesn't mean there is an actual conflict in practice. What we do in these areas are, if there are complaints alleging violations of our sexual assault policies or practices, they are properly investigated. Once an investigation is concluded, the results of those investigations will go to the director of compliance. Now, the Director of Compliance will make some kind of a decision as to where those would go beyond that, in some instances, if there is a faculty interface that will go to the appropriate faculty disciplinary bodies, if there is an academic staff interface, it will go to the appropriate faculty interface bodies, etc. I don't see all of those as a general council. And also, another thing to remember is the general council's duty is to vindicate the law. It is not always to vindicate every practice that the university engages in. So again, merely because we've settled on this particular organizational arrangement doesn't mean, in fact, that A, I see all of these, but B, that there is a conflict of interest in each and every instance. In those instances where the Director of the Office of Compliance talks to me as the general council, then I would be screened from those matters as to the appropriate advice from those who might be opposite that particular determination. So it is no different than that which happens in the Office of the Attorney General. The Attorney General is often called upon both to prosecute on behalf of the state, and at times, defend on behalf of the state, and that is why you have appropriate screening mechanisms, where appropriate.

>> So Mark Edsol, District 11. B.S. This is all B.S. If a student brings a complaint against the university, say a student brings a complaint against their thesis advisor. Then that complaint goes to the Title 9 Coordinator, who reports to the Chancellor, and goes to your office, who you report to the Chancellor, or it goes to the U.W. system, then the U.W. system that triggers the defense mechanism. Your job, and the U.W. system, legal's job is to limit liability for the U.W. at Madison, and U.W. system. Liability means to make the lawsuit go away. So I don't see how you can see that differently.

>> Well you must have missed a discussion. Because I see it completely differently.

>> Will you please explain it again?

>> Well, sure.

>> If a student brings a complaint, how does that get handled?

>> You know, if a student brings a complaint, that particular complaint will be investigated. Okay? By, it depends. It will be investigators that are, at the moment, in the Office of Compliance. Okay? The results of that investigation are then presented in the student instance, to the Office of Student Conduct, which is within the Dean of Students office. The Dean of Students office will then proceed with that case, if appropriate, to appropriate disciplinary committees, which will decide what the appropriate discipline is. Okay? So there is no conflict of interest in that instance, because that particular set of circumstances and procedures will be vindicated with a minimal amount of involvement from my office. It will proceed in accordance with those practices, to the extent legal advice is involved, on one side or the other, we would then screen those persons and make sure that there is, if appropriate, one set of lawyers on one side of that equation, and another set of lawyers on the other side.

>> And I should note the Disciplinary Committee, whether it's for faculty or student effects, run completely independently. I mean, they go through a whole process that is completely untouched by me and untouched by Ray. I cannot know what is happening, because I am an ultimate person someone can appeal to, and it is absolutely inappropriate for me to have any involvement in that. Because I'm a potential final decider in the case. So I have, you know, neither of us touch any of this, and there are a number of people who have been on those sorts of Disciplinary Committees.

>> Right, and some of this, if I could add, is just, you know, we have to be economical with our resources as well, otherwise ten times the number of persons we have would not be enough to resolve all these questions. So it is, I should add, also in instances where you have a disciplinary body that takes the results of the student conduct investigation, we would represent, typically, the committee and the university, we would seek assistance from system for those on the opposite side. So there is a way to divide these questions up.

>> So I'm not going to go into this anymore, because I don't know whether anybody else cares about how sexual assault cases are investigated on campus, but to me, we have a situation where the university investigates itself, against students who bring complaints. And then the university decides whether to settle those cases out of court itself. There is no outside body that is investigating these cases. And so a lot of these women that bring cases forward, they feel like "I was victimized again." By the university.

>> Right, but this, our organization, sir, is no different than many other organizations. There are elements of the university that can act independently of other elements to resolve these particular questions. The State of Wisconsin does this all the time.

>> Let me ask this. If a case, a student brings a case, and it looks like it might go to court, have you ever dealt with a case where you had to settle it out of court?

>> We don't deal with any cases in court. There are two proceedings that are possible with a sexual assault case. One is that there is discipline within the University. And the second is that the case is brought outside the university to the police, and to the District Attorney. We have nothing to do with the proceedings of the police and the District Attorney. That is independent, and proceeds on its own. Our Disciplinary Committee proceeds on its, in turn, on its own, independent of that. So one could find guilt or impose disciplines in one case, and not the other, at the university in a disciplinary committee and not in court. We've seen that happen in a number of cases, or vice-versa. We actually haven't seen that at all in recent history. But there is no correlation between what happens in a court room and a case that is brought through the police, and through the district attorney, and a disciplinary proceeding here. Those are separate. And that is what, you know, some students choose to go both routes. Many, many students do not want to go through the public route. And they stay within the disciplinary committees of the university. Sarah, you wanted to say something?

>> Also there are different ways of handling, whether it be a student complaining, bringing a complaint against a fellow student. Those would be handled through Student Life. If a student brings a complaint, or a fellow faculty member, brings a complaint about a faculty member, for being either hostile, intimidating behavior, sexual harassment, then it is investigated by the Provost's office, and I hire an investigator, and it's usually one of you. It's a faculty investigator who investigates any case of faculty misconduct. And so it's not just handled, you know, handed to legal counsel. There is a full investigation, and it goes through the U.C., and CFRR, and so on. It's, there is a whole process, and it is not just handled by legal counsel.

>> Other comments? We do need to move on to other business, but I am more than happy to engage in further conversation on this topic.

>> So just one, just non legalese answer, but this committee did look at other campuses, ten other campuses, I think we've asked how they are set up. I mean, they all have, I mean, issues are in every one of them. And we did have legal law school faculty members on this committee, and there are models that are different from how we are set up, and I mean, clearly, at some hierarchy cannot be removed, but there are other campuses that have slightly different models than what we have. Than what we have. Non-legal.

>> I would say all of us are subject to very complete regulations of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, under the Department of Education regs, and we adhere to those, absolutely as strictly as possible, and those regs change every year, I might note [laughs]. Thank you very much. Let me recognize Professor Irwin Goldwin, who is going to present for informational purposes, the annual report on the Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities, also not quite an annual report.

>> Thank you, Chancellor. The Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities primarily hears appeals of non-renewal decisions, from tenure decisions, although it is also a hearing committee for discipline and dismissal cases, that would be covered in Chapter 9 of FPNP, and if there were layoffs due to financial emergencies, it would be a hearing committee in that case. But the primary work of the committee is to deal with appeals of non-renewals. CFR is a nine-member elected committee. Howard Schweiber [assumed spelling] is the current Chair of that committee, and I'm just simply filling in for Howard today. We heard seven cases during the period from those four academic years, from 2012 to 2016. All of the details on those cases, including the votes, and the outcomes, are listed in the packet of materials that you received for this meeting. I will only add that the committee, I think, is doing work that is very laborious and time consuming, but incredibly important for the integrity of the entire work of the faculty in the tenure process. And I think the committee is very fortunate to have the Secretary of the Faculties Office staff, F. Steve Smith, does an excellent job of helping keep the committee on track. Our job is, of course, not to determine tenure, but rather to make sure that proper processes are followed, as departments go through this process. So we spend a lot of time on procedure. That is a full scope of what I wanted to say. Does anybody have any questions about the materials that are in the report? Thank you.

>> Thank you. Let me recognize Professor Amy Wendt, who will present for informational purposes the report on elections to the Faculty Committees.

>> You have in your materials the result of the recent faculty elections, receipts on the Commission on Faculty Compensation and Economic Benefits, the Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities, the University Library Committee, the University Committee, the Committee on Committees, the four divisional Executive Committees, the University Research Council, and the Graduate Faculty Executive Committee. On behalf of the office of the Secretary of the Faculty and the Committee on Committees, I think everyone who voted and extend our sincere appreciation to the new continuing and past members for their service. And since I have the mic, and this is my last meeting as Chair of the University Committee, please indulge me for just a moment off script. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the University Committee, to all the senators, and to the campus administrators. It has been a real privilege to serve as Chair of the UC. And working with the senate has been truly rewarding. And the engagement, the respectful debate, and the thoughtful decision making really exemplifies the value of shared governance. And I am proud to be a part of it. And you know that participation is critical to keeping shared governance vibrant and working, and I've been told that there was some challenges with faculty willingness to run for these committees this year. And so I would like to encourage you to consider and to encourage your colleagues to consider, running for these committees in the future. And, any questions? Okay.

>> Thank you Amy, and thanks to everyone.

[ Applause ]

>> And thanks to everyone who was elected to one of these committees and positions. Let me recognize Associate Vice Chancellor Jan Greenberg, who will present for informational purposes the IRB Study report. It is not included in your agenda packet, but there is a link available, it's an extended report, so.

>> So, thank you very much. The idea for conducting these IRB surveys began the fall of 2015. The University Committee, at that time, under the leadership of Beth Myron, wanted to hear directly from faculty and PIs on campus about their experiences with the IRBs. The U.C., in consultation with Marcia Malik, the Vice Chancellor for Research in Graduate Education, decided that the VCRGE office would conduct a campus wide survey. Ryan Mosey, who is the Assistant Director of Research Policy, and myself, drafted the initial survey with the help of Dan Olreck [assumed spelling], who at that time was the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. The survey was developed through a series of steps. We reviewed surveys being administrated at a peer institution. There was a survey measured a couple of years ago by health sciences, IRB and there is also a survey that was administered by the Research Animal Research Center. Once the draft was developed, we sought consultation and feedback from a series of stakeholder groups, including the IRB directors, the Deputy Institutional Officials for both IRBs, the University Committee, and the Divisional Associate Chancellors. We incorporated their feedback into the survey, then we re-circulated it to the same group of people and got additional feedback. We revised it again. The office of the Vice Chancellor for Research in Graduate Education, we contracted with the Wisconsin Survey Center to assist with the wording of the survey, the formatting, and the programming of the survey questions and [inaudible]. The survey consisted of 14 multiple choice questions, and three major qualitative questions. One question was what is working well? What is not working well with the IRBs? And there was a question whether they had ever given up or almost given up pursuing a study because of frustrations of getting it through the IRB. This was a yes or no question, if they answered yes, we just asked them to describe their experience. I conducted the quantitative analysis for this, for this survey. There were almost 100,000 words of text that were generated by our qualitative questions. A researcher with over 15 years experience from the Wisconsin Survey Lab coded all the qualitative data, and did the analysis of the open ended responses. The survey was administered to PIs who had an active protocol in the past two years. Some PIs assigned a staff member to complete their IRB protocols. In these cases, the PI was given the opportunity to designate that staff member to complete the survey. The survey was emailed to 1,257 PIs, or their designated staff. Of these, 17 of these emails were returned, people had left the university. Of those 1,240 we received back 590 completed surveys. So the response rate was about 50%. Here is a breakdown of the responses. I won't go into detail. The report that, today's report, the results are based on 562 faculty members and academic staff. All respondents in the survey were promised confidentiality. I was the only one who had the link between the names and the actual survey respondents, the survey responses. We had, the report contains about 75 verbatim quotes from the respondents in the study. We emailed each respondent. We got their permission to actually use their verbatim responses in the report. So any of that, I'm going to be showing some of the actual quotes in the report, we have received permission. I just want to share a couple of caveats. One is that these are the experiences and the perceptions of faculty and PIs. Second, it's a 50% response rate, that means 48% approximately, that means 52% did not respond. We need to keep in mind that the university sets human subjects policies and the role of the IRB staff and the role of IRB Committees is to implement campus-wide policies. Some of the problems identified in this survey will likely require us as a campus to revisit campus wide policies governing human subjects research. And the challenges that we face at this university are not unique. They're occurring across our peer institutions. Let me turn and talk about some of the major findings. First of all, we had, there was overwhelming support for the staff, and high regard for the staff. We had over 400 comments that people wrote about the helpfulness, the dedication, their passion, and also their expertise of the IRB staff. And let me just share a couple of the few illustrative comments. Overall, the staff is great. I've always been able to pick up the phone and reach someone when I have a question. The staff is very helpful at anticipating some concerns ahead of time. I believe their efforts are helpful in mitigating some of the problems with the full committee. A second issue that came up, time and again, was the lack of ease of using Arrow, the system you use to enter your protocols and submit them. Only 20% of the respondents felt that Arrow was very or extremely easy to use. We received over 160 comments about the difficulty of using Arrow. And one investigator wrote, "The Arrow system has so many irrelevant questions for many of my projects. It's very frustrating how this process has so little streamlining." Another investigator wrote, "Arrow requires entry of the same information several places, and submission of the same information in the protocol. What a waste of my time, and the reviewer's time." A third major finding was that the length of time to obtain approval, about 40% of the respondents in the study expressed frustration with the amount of time and effort it took to get their protocol approved. This is especially true among researchers who are doing what are called minimal risk studies. We had 300 comments to the effect of the frustrations that some of the faculty members felt. And this is just one quote. "For researchers unquestionably going to be exempt, the amount of effort to get a protocol accepted seems exorbitant, and can take months." And one thing I wanted to point out, before I go on to the next finding, is that when one looks at the time of approval data, based on Arrow, based on the Arrow system, one finds that the U.W. IRBs are actually doing better. They're doing better than many of our peer institutions, with respect to the median number of days it takes to approve a protocol. However, investigators may perceive the time it takes a protocol to be approved differently than is measured in Arrow. For our comparisons of our peer institutions, the time that is reported is a time that you push the submit button in Arrow. For many investigators, we measure the beginning of the process, when we sit down to begin the actual protocol, and from my own personal experience, that can take actually weeks of sitting and working on a protocol. Second, another finding was, and this is not going to be any surprise to anybody, but this widespread perception, there is a widespread perception that IRB policies and procedures have instituted layers of scrutiny beyond what is required by federal regulations. And feeling, again, that this has led to an over-regulation and in particular for minimal risk studies. This is captured in a comment by one of the PIs, there seems to be an attitude of over-compliance, let's always be safe, and the regulatory perspective, regardless of the significance of the cost of the regulations. I do want to point out that this is far from a universal sentiment. We had many comments from faculty that expressed the appreciation to the IRB for their regulatory oversight. The IRB process is an important purpose of shaping research protocols, so they protect human subjects in a way that is compliant with federal regulations. A fifth finding was just a sense of inconsistency in the nature of feedback, that PIs receive from the IRB. The inconsistencies in the comments that PI had received for very similar protocols, but which were submitted at different points in time, inconsistency and comments received from different staff reviewers or inconsistency in the feedback from different IRB committee members. One PI wrote, "We had a project that required data collection with two separate samples using the exact same protocol, same instrument, consent forms, etc., only to get two completely different review requests for modifications. Another wrote, an extremely frustrating part of the IRB pre-review process is trying to navigate inconsistencies between staff reviewers. Research teams should not have to alter procedure or process a recruitment plan to accommodate each staff reviewer's interpretation of research regulations, policy or guidance." A sixth key finding is just a sense that sometimes staff reviewers overstep, and try to actually regulate the scientific approach. A number of survey respondents describe experiences in which they felt IRB staff member or committee members were overstepping their role by commenting on a scientific approach the PI was taking, and PIs feeling they didn't have the necessary expertise to be in this role. And our sixth finding was just consequences of some of these challenges. This open ended question whether people had ever given up or almost given up, 50%, one out of every two people said yes to that response. There are projects I've initiated because it will simply take too much time to initiate or modify basic minimal risk projects, due to the amount of work needed to achieve approval of an IRB protocol. Another person that last one was from somebody from the Educational Social Behavioral Sciences area, this one was health sciences. The whole IRB situation at U.W. is too cumbersome and expensive. I had a meeting with our research division last month, to express my frustration, and to inform them that I'm decreasing my involvement in research. That covers the major findings. I just want to spend a couple minutes, just telling you what our office, the VCRGE office is doing, to try to address these problems. So, first of all, what we've instituted is what we call an Arrow Optimization Plan, which our IT people are going to be devoting more time to redesign Arrow, so it is more user-friendly, and easier to navigate. Now, we've already begun this process. For some of you who have submitted a protocol in the last month or so, you'll notice that the process for submission has been streamlined, and much easier to navigate. We are currently working on an easier way to put through a change in the protocol, a change in protocol form. As part of this process, we'll also be working with the IRB directors and the legal office to continue to seek opportunities to streamline the Arrow application, especially for minimal risk protocols. Our plan is to actually post changes as we go along on our VCRGE web page, so you can see in real time the changes that we're making. Another thing we are doing, we've spent quite a bit of time the last three months trying to benchmark our practices here at the university with our peer institutions. As part of this benchmarking process, we hope to learn about practices being tried at our peer institutions to reduce administrative burden related to human subjects research, that we may consider adopting here at the U.W. Also we are hoping that this benchmarking data will allow us to look at how our peer institutions are dealing with some of the inconsistencies in the review processes that I talked about earlier. We realize that there may be other strategies for reducing inconsistencies, and our office is extremely anxious, and would welcome anybody's ideas. Thirdly we have appointed a IRB working group, to take the findings of this survey and the findings of the benchmarking data we've accumulated, and to come up with a set of recommendations the VCRGE, to improve the efficiency in the user-friendliness of the IRB process, at the same time, ensuring the protection of human subjects occurs. This is our list that I'm not sure how well people can read from the back of the room, but Dorothy Edwards has graciously agreed to chair the committee. Barbara Bowers will serve as a U.C. representative on the committee. Any of the committee members are former members of the IRB, several of them are former Chairs of the IRBs, and all of them have human subjects research underway. The committee is going to start its work in the next couple of weeks. Our fourth action step is where we are going to be analyzing the Arrow data, this summer, to try to understand what factors contribute to the length of the IRB review process. The goal is to try and identify opportunities to reduce time between the submission and actual approval of a protocol. And finally, we are in the process, we will develop a short survey to receive ongoing feedback. The PIs will receive a survey at the time the investigator is notified that his or her protocol has been approved. The survey is going to be very brief. It is just going to be three to five questions. But it will give the PI an opportunity to write in comments about their experiences, and it also will provide the PI an opportunity to make a request that somebody from our office contact them, if they like to discuss it further. So let me conclude here. And if we have any time, I'd be happy to take questions. But also our office would really appreciate feedback on the IRB report, or the directions that we're taking. So thank you very much.

[ Applause ]

>> [Inaudible] 36, the human factors study to streamline the Arrow, will that itself require an IRB?

>> [Laughter] That is a great question. Go ahead.

>> Hi, Dawn Davis, Department of Medicine. So, I noticed in some of the frequent comments were about the high user fees, but I know that's not something in your action steps, so is that something that you guys are thinking about addressing?

>> Yes, I really abbreviated this. But it is something we are looking into. We've had frequent discussions in our office. We are going to be asking this working group to address that issue. So it is an issue. If the full report is online now, and please review it, because we do, we are, that is something we're asking this working group to address. To talk about. Any other?

>> I strongly encourage anyone, and please, communicate this to your colleagues, who is doing human subjects research, read through this report, and send any comments to Jan for transmission to the working groups. This is an important process that they are in the middle of. Let me recognize Associate Dean, Greg Downey, who is going to present a proposal to merge the Departments of Urban and Regional Planning, and Landscape.

>> Hi everybody. A brief story. Two years ago, two different departments that had long-time collaborations and connections decided they wanted to come together and see if they could envision a better future. This is the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, which is a department that is split between the College of Letters and Science, my college, and the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. They have four faculty now, six and four on each side, two Associate Deans, it can be an administrative challenge. The other department was the Department of Landscape Architecture, fully in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. That had done a lot of work with Urban and Regional Planning over the years, in fact, faculty had moved back and forth. A lot of collaborative projects. About a year ago, they asked for what is called permission to plan. This was a formal process. They had to go to both college APCs and ask for permission to try to spend a year intensively working with their faculty, staff, students, alumni, and stakeholders, to see if they could come up with a vision for a new merged, restructured future. And they came up with a really compelling vision. A vision that brought planning for livability from Urban and Regional Planning together with design for sustainability from Landscape Architecture. It merged the Master's degree, that is accredited, on the planning side, with a Bachelor's degree that is accredited on the Landscape Architecture side, and layered these two departments together in a really innovative way, and pointed the way for new reformulated doctoral and undergraduate programs that would benefit from the synergy, yes, I'm going to use the word synergy, from both programs. I found it a really exciting vision. Step one was figuring out, do we want to merge, do we want to restructure? Step two was figuring out how do we resituate? The options were move entirely into CALs, move entirely into INS, try to remain a department with two colleges, that they were accountable to and responsible to, or think of a different arrangement. They chose to ask to move to the College of Letters and Sciences. I think that's a great choice, because Urban and Regional Planning combined with Landscape Architecture, they want to call the new department The Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture. It runs the gamut from the national and physical sciences, through the social sciences, through the arts and humanities, with the design features. I think we will be great stewards for this department. I think they'll fit in well with our other professional programs. They'll fit in well with our departments of geography and botany and public affairs. I'm super excited about this as the Associate Dean who just got more work on his plate for having this department being put together. This has been approved by the APCs of both colleges, and the university APC, and we are in the stage now where the two colleges are coming together and trying to sort of un-knit to the budgets, and move them all to the new place, and make sure this department is on great, stable footing, going ahead. Again, excited. And I will take any questions.

>> This is not for vote. This is informational purposes. Any questions? If not, let me call on Greg to present a proposal to rename the Department of Zoology.

>> Let me tell you another brief story. About a year ago, and this is, again, both of these stories have long histories before this, but about a year ago, the Department of Zoology and The College of Letters and Science realized that the word zoology carries a lot of baggage that was not helpful to the Department of Zoology and to the futures and trajectories of their undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers. Zoology is an outdated name for a department like theirs. They did a survey of over 100 peer programs at peer universities, and I think only four used the name zoology and none of those are research universities. Zoology is an accurate name for the kind of research this department does. This department does not just focus on animal biology and morphology, but on biological processes across scale. From molecular and cellular processes, to behavior and ecological processes. And zoology is misleading, because, and I'm not making this up. I heard this recounted to me many, many times, parents would write us and email us and say "Is this where you learned about zoos?" Seems silly, but there is a lot of baggage with this term. This department, again, spent a very long time consulting with stakeholders across the university to try to figure out what was a name that was appropriate to the 21st Century span of looking at biological processes across scale? They couldn't pick biology. They couldn't pick biological science. Those were not feasible at a place like U.W. Madison, where curricula and research dealing with biology and biological sciences is spread across many different schools and colleges, and many different programs. And that is one of our strengths. And we wanted to recognize that strength. The name they came up with was Department of Integrative Biology. They shortened that to I-Bio. And those of you who are here at the last faculty senate meeting, this is not my master plan to put I in front of all the departments in the College of Letters and Science. We have an I-school, yes it's true. Now we have I-Bio. We are stopping there. Again, this has been approved by the LNS Academic Planning Council and the University Academic Planning Council. We are very excited about this. We think this moves this department, and gives it the recognition and prominence that it deserves. It will not change some fundamental things, though, including the fact that this department is one of the two partners with College of Cultural and Life Sciences in the Biology major, which will not be renamed. And this department, the Department of Integrative Biology, will still have a zoology undergraduate major, and that name is not going to change. So we are excited about this one as well. Any questions?

>> Thank you, Greg. One last item of business. On your last page, let me recognize Associate Professor, Ellen Samuels, who will present a resolution in support of transgender students, faculty and staff.

>> Thank you. I'm from District 116, Gender and Women's Studies. I have never presented a resolution before. I didn't know I was getting up to present it. You all have the resolution, should I--

>> You need to move the resolution and we need a second, and then you can speak to it.

>> I move the resolution in support of transgender students, faculty and staff.

>> Is there a second?

>> Second.

>> Would you like to speak to the motion?

>> Yes, I'm very happy to speak to the motion. This is a motion that I have brought because as it has been mentioned in the senate previously this semester, there is a really unfavorable climate right now in the country, in the state, and particularly at the university for transgender students, faculty and staff, owing to changes at the national and state level, most pertinently, changes to the long awaited health insurance coverage for gender related medical care that was begun on January 1, and then canceled as of January 31. In this climate, a number of bodies are working on responses to support in concrete ways trans people on campus. This resolution is a general statement of support underlining those. A similar resolution has already been passed by the ASM, and is under consideration at the ASEC [assumed spelling] and the University Staff Council. And I would also like to read a brief statement on behalf of Stef Tigh [assumed spelling] who presented the report from the Committee on LGBT issues. Professor Tigh regrets that they can't be here today as they are away for something related to a clerkship to a judge that took them out of town. So I am going to read Professor Stef Tigh's statement. First, I want to applaud you all for considering this resolution which comprehensively recognizes the need for inclusive health care coverage, and also expands upon the ways in which this university can support transgender members of our community. Second, I want to urge you all to vote in favor of this resolution. The adoption of the resolution is substantively valuable for those of us in our community who need health care support. Medical care for transgender members of our community is often not only costly to the individual, and as per our ad hoc committee report, relatively insubstantial when spread over the entire covered base, but also necessary for mental health and general wellbeing, at the same time, the resolution is also necessary for demonstrating community support and recognition for transgender members of our community. Members who are often excluded and alienated by state legislative discussions and pursuant administrative implementation as with the ETF. This is not only important as a matter of equity and inclusion, but also as a matter of retention and recruitment for the university. Finally I, still speaking here as Stef Tigh, want to emphasis what this motion will allow us to do. Support of this motion will allow those of us on the faculty, staff, student, LGBTQ committee to have official university support in exploring and pursuing university administrative options to provide full health insurance, and in other areas, such as bathroom inclusively and other needs, even in lieu of a more supportive state, legislative, administrative approach. Such university support is imperative in allowing us to fully explore and navigate the range of options allowable under state statutes and university regulations. So please help us by voting in favor of this resolution. That concludes Professor Tigh's statement, and I will just add my voice to it, asking you to vote in favor of this resolution. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Is there other comments or discussion?

>> Hello, Nate Woldarczyk [assumed spelling], post-doc, in the Department of Medicine. I am on the Shared Governance Committee for GLBT people in the university. I was present at the Tuesday meeting, where the committee voted unanimously also to endorse this resolution. I don't believe I can add any more to the comments that were already made. I would also like to solicit your support on behalf of the committee.

>> Hi. My name is Autumn Kent. I am an associate professor in the Math Department, and I am a trans woman, and I just, so I just wanted to say that, you know, I feel like most of the people, most people, even most of the people in this room probably sort of think of us as an abstraction and we're here, and you may have heard of the Math Department [laughs], and you know, despite, you know, my research and teaching and mentoring, and bringing in lots of federal grant money, you know, I still feel like a dog basically, begging for what I need. And you know, in light of what the GIB did, and the callous way that they did that bigoted thing that they did, this is the least that you can do. Anyway, thank you.

>> Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Hi, my name is Elena Boyden [assumed spelling], and I am with the Department of Anthropology as a PhD student and teaching assistant, and I was also the Chair of the subcommittee on trans health care as part of the ad hoc committee for equitable health care, and what I wanted to say was just share an anecdote with you, because as Autumn pointed out, it's often an abstraction when we talk about transgender people in a university setting, and so I just want to share an anecdote that started my two-year process of trying to get transgender health care coverage here at the university, and it started in May of 2015, when I had some abnormal hormone level tests, and my doctor thought that potentially I might have cancer, and I should go to an endocrinologist to get that looked at, and as a university employee I had health care, but the health care had an exclusion for anything related to transgender health, and since hormones are part of being transgender sometimes, when I called the doctor's office at the endocrinologist to make an appointment to see if maybe I had cancer, the person on the phone told me "We don't treat transgenders here, go someplace else." So, that was a really difficult situation to deal with at the time, and it is something that is currently being dealt with by pretty much every transgender staff member, every transgender faculty member, every transgender graduate student. That is something that we are dealing with all the time. When I tell that story to my trans friends, there's no looks of shock, they're like, "Yeah, that happened to me too." So it's a situation where the very least the university can do is put out a statement of support, because there has been currently no statement of support, no material support, when I took complaints to the Office of Equity and Diversity, they blew me off. When I talked to Dave Blum, the [inaudible] coordinator, he told me to my face that transgender health exclusions were no different from exclusions for laser eye surgery. So we have a situation here at this university where this problem has been around for a long time, the administration has been aware of it for a long time, and nobody has taken it seriously for a long time. So thanks.

[ Applause ]

>> My name is Finn Anke [assumed spelling]. I am Professor in the Departments of History and Gender and Women's Studies, and I wanted first of all to thank my colleague, Ellen Samuels, and other people who have been working on this resolution. I literally wouldn't be here without the support of colleagues like these. I want to emphasize the importance of this resolution for the entire university community. I am transgender. And I know that for transgender and non-binary staff, students and faculty, barriers to full participation at U.W. are considerable. As a white, able-bodied, full professor, I'm well enfranchised here. And as a transgender person, I enjoy the support of my colleagues and administrators throughout the university. And yet, even for me, the social, bureaucratic, and built-in environments pose near constant navigational challenges and professional interference. For others, the lack of health care, restroom and other facilities, ongoing refusals to use our correct names and pronouns, lack of awareness and absence in the curriculum can make it impossible to be here at all. In the 16 years I've been here at U.W., select parts of the university have begun to make some changes that make our participation more possible. Now, as elected officials outside of U.W. generate bills that encourage explicit discrimination, I would like to see U.W.'s firm commitment to serve and actively support a diverse public. We are here. And we should be an authoritative part of any and all policy decisions that affect our employment and well-being. So I'd like to briefly touch on the area of health care, just to exemplify the ways that exclusions damage not only the trans, but also our wider community. As you know, most health coverage available to university community explicitly excludes transgender related mental and physical health care. Because I am transgender, this is meant that any care I receive sometimes gets defined as transgender care. I've been refused mental health coverage because, since I am transgender, my potential therapy was defined as transgender related. Recently, I went to urgent care to have symptoms of bronchitis evaluated, and the PA ordered multiple high-tech screenings, because she believed that being transgender put me at risk for numerous conditions having nothing to do with my presenting symptoms. Had I not declined, the entire appointment and screenings would have been billed and denied as transgender related, when all I had was a bad chest cold. If a health policy excludes transgender care, it is difficult to discern whether a transgender person's care is transgender care, or just care. And, why anyway would we not want to provide maximum coverage of all kinds, including and especially transgender related, for a population that is disproportionately vulnerable to violence, harassment and exclusion and suicide. We need not only to be aware of the many ways that our built environment and administrative practices are designed to exclude trans and non-binary students, faculty and staff. If U.W. is to make good on its mission as a public education institution, we need to change these environments and practices even more than we have. With elected officials seeking to create laws that directly undermine our ability to function as members of the public world, I would like to see U.W. offices make decisions that are informed by transgender people, and by those who are not ignorant of our lives. I would like to see this U.W. community send the strongest possible messages of welcome by providing tangible, concrete, active support to our transgender and gender non-conforming members, and to the state, and nation on behalf of transgender and gender diverse people everywhere. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Hi, my name is Maris Weednam [phonetic spelling]. I am an undergraduate student here at U.W. Medicine. So, uh [laughs], I urge you to pass the resolution to support trans students, faculty and staff. While support itself is a good first step, I encourage you to look specifically at the status of health care and bathrooms on our campus, and the negative mental and physical impact often uninclusive healthcare and bathrooms have on the folks at this university. On the trans folks at this university. And consider how trans incompetent services deny transgender community members the health and quality of life that the Wisconsin idea promotes.

[ Applause ]

>> Hi, my name is Shannon, and I work at UHS. I am a counselor, and I was hired specifically to focus on trans health. And I want to echo what other speakers have said, and just say that as a licensed professional counselor, I can point to a growing body of literature, including research from the Family Acceptance Project, that demonstrates the negative impact of marginalization on mental health. The literature demonstrates for us that acceptance and affirmation makes substantial difference in how TGQ identified people survive and thrive, and I would ask that you support this resolution. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Katherine Sherry Briggs and I work with Wisconsin Transgender Health Coalition. I sit on the Board of the Consortium of LGBT Higher Education Resource Professionals, and I am the Acting Associate Director at the LGBT Campus Center here in the Division of Student Life. So in all this work, I work with and serve students on navigating campus community, even, you know, regional, national news, and their reaching impacts, right? So remembering that all of our lives are touched by all of these different things, and not just the campus experience, but across the board, right? And not just students, even though at Student Life, faculty and staff, including those who we can't recruit or can't keep here, right? I've been here five years, and my friends keep rolling off because they can't stay, right? So keeping that in mind, you know, in the past 18 months, we've seen bathroom bills, both nationally and locally, including AB469 in Madison, which was shot down at first by local advocacy, but everyone knows it's coming back this fall. We've seen a devastating and climate-altering national election cycle. Title 9 guidance on trans inclusion in education rescinded, right? Equitable state health coverage, as other folks have mentioned, right, added and rescinded 30 days later, anti-blackness, police violence, community deaths, right? And also community growth. Resilience and power in the face of all these things, right? So it's not just this trauma or crisis model, there is a lot to be had from TGQ community. So the resilience is due to building our family together, taking care of each other, showing up for each other, not necessarily due to institutional policy, although in my job, I do elevate policy and practice, and work towards many. So I think it's both, and I ask and hopes for this resolution passing is that you use your status in the agency that not all of us are afforded, right? To push forward these upcoming efforts others have mentioned toward equitable health care, restroom access, and restroom provision, curricular inclusion, intervention in the classroom, right? My students, the majority of biased incidents that I deal with are from students who deal with bias incidence in the classroom from instructors. Right? That power imbalance. And campus sanctuary measures, remembering that queer and trans students show up across all demographics. And do so always by uplifting community and transgender clear voices, particularly those of queer and trans students of color. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Hi. My name is Sunny Sing. I am an undergraduate student here at U.W. Madison. I am also part of the Counseling/Psych Department's trans research lab. And not to violate confidentiality or anything, but part of my research requires me to read thousands of statements from trans and gender non-conforming individuals and listen to their stories, and look at their stories. And these people are my age. And these people are living their lives, and their lives are harder because of the things they have to experience. The core value at U.W. is equity, and creating a welcoming community. Equity means that individuals are allowed to access equal treatment and fairness. That cannot be possible unless steps are taken in order to assure that trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people feel safe, and feel loved. It's hard enough to face uncertainty and volatility with being part of the community, but equity and support don't just mean saying that you support them. It means taking action, and recognizing that things need to change. It means a higher amount of accountability amongst all members of the community, and not just students. It means that complacency and fear means that lives get harder and more dangerous to live. So I urge you to forward this motion. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> I see no one else moving toward the microphone, so I will assume that people are ready to vote. All those in favor of the motion, indicate by saying aye.

>> [Group response] Aye.

>> Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously.

[ Applause ]

>> And with that, I announce the meeting adjourned. Thank you all.