Welcome and welcome back. I will try to keep my remarks as brief a possible, but there is a great deal to report and my report should take about 20 minutes. My apologies.

Before we do anything else, I want to express on behalf of the FA our deep condolences to Bea Cronin on the loss of her son. The Faculty Assembly will be sending a donation in his name. A Celebration of Court Demas' life will be held Sat. at 5:30 at the Unitarian Society in Ridgewood. Dorothy Echols- Tobe has sent out particulars by email.

Thanks: On a happier note I would like to extend our thanks to Eddie Saiff

for his committed work in leading the faculty for the past four years. I would also like to thank last year's Faculty Advisory Council: Amruth Kumar, Frances Shapiro-Skrobe, Jennifer Mazza, Ellen Kaiden, and Carter Meyer. Let's also show our appreciation for the hard work of the retiring secretary of the Faculty Assembly, Ed Shannon and the many years of excellent service as the Faculty Assembly's Parliamentarian, Judith Jeney. I would like to express our appreciation once more for the fine leadership and hard work of Donna Crawley as acting VPAA for the past two years and, finally, although she is not here to hear it I would like the minutes to record our deep appreciation for the tremendous help provided to the assembly by Marie Voijtovitz, the secretary to the VPAA who retired in July.

Speaking of retirements, I would also like to acknowledge with gratitude the many contributions of the faculty who retired this year: Richard Bond, Grace Borowitz, Isabella Drew, Raymond Gramkow, Kay Gura, and Newton Levine and those now in the phased retirement plan: Will Kollock and Sydney Weinberg. They are already missed.

Welcomes: I would like now to welcome and introduce this year's Faculty Advisory Council, Amruth Kumar, Ellen Kaiden, Carter Meyer, Anita Stellenwerf, Roger O. Johnson. Let me also introduce our new secretary, George Gonpu and our new Parliamentarian, Gabriela Wepner. Finally let me welcome and extend our thanks to our new interim provost, Ed Cody for agreeing to defer his retirement to take on the role of provost and to Barbara Trottere, the new secretary to the Provost who has already been a tremendous help to me and to the Assembly.

Policy: I would like to say a word about our Faculty Assembly policies: This is a faculty assembly, not a faculty senate. We have chosen --wisely I believe -- to reach for inclusion and completeness of all the faculty rather than for "efficiency." As a New Hampshirite, I am a great fan of the Town Meeting form of governance -- but I do know well some of its vulnerabilities. Given the limited time available at FA, I am asking that faculty exercise restraint in delivering reports. Please be as concise and to the point as possible and confine yourself to a maximum of ten minutes -- less if you can manage it. Supplemental details and materials can be provided and posted on the web. I am asking too that the deans refrain from joining in the discussion except where directly invited or when you have a specific piece of information to provide.

I would also ask that we maintain civility in our discussions at all times. Disagreement, debate, and differing opinions are important. Not only do I not want to suppress them; I hope that we will see a great deal of them aired here as the route toward coming up with the best collective answer to whatever question is before us. But let us disagree with specific ideas and not with the people who bring those ideas before us. Finally, I will be invoking the rule (which already exists) that comments during discussions be limited to 3 minutes top. I will ask Gabriela to watch the clock for us. We want to have time to hear the voices of all those interested in the issues before us.

Faculty Assembly Room: I am sorry to say that we were not able to have SC136-138 wired this year because of prohibitive costs. Consequently, I have set the first meeting here so that you could get to see the Pavilion (which is already wired) and decide whether you want to hold the meetings here or there. I will ask you to vote on this later, but if you decide on the Pavilion you must be willing to make the pilgrimage down here -- even in bad weather. You don't have to admit aloud that you might let a little rain keep you away, but if it would, vote for returning meetings to SC136-138 -- please!. I am not willing to sacrifice facultyattendance for the convenience of some nifty technology.

Faculty Assembly Website: Speaking of technology, as I indicated in my recent email we have now a new faculty assembly website at http://phobos.ramapo.edu/facassem I will now demonstrate the technology that is here by showing you this site ... I should note that the link on Ramapo's web pages is still to the old site. I hope that this will change shortly. The website is currently rather plain, but I hope it will get better. Suggestions for links, info, etc. are welcome. I will be posting agendas and minutes here, of course, but I will also email the agenda to everyone each month.

I will post announcements on the website regularly (as well as sending them out when appropriate by email). So please send me the announcements that you make at faculty assembly by email and feel free to add the detail that there isn't time to provide at the meeting itself. You can also do this for announcements in between faculty assembly meetings.

Faculty Assembly Office: Another wonderful development and one that I think will help us in our organization and communications is a new Faculty Assembly office made possible with the gracious help of Kwesi Aggrey. The Faculty Assembly Office will be in E-221. The phone number will be 1-201-684-6849. The office will be outfitted with a computer and scanner and a keypad lock so that our work study students, Faculty Advisory Council members, Faculty Assembly secretary, myself, etc. can have ready access. Faculty Assembly Archives and relevant files will be located here. The office should be operational within a couple of weeks.

Faculty Listserv and Picture Book: At faculty in-service day (and I congratulate you on the excellent turn-out for that event!) the suggestion was made that we develop a faculty listserv. Johnathon Lipkin and Nico Halpern have taken this charge on and Johnathon will be telling you more about it later in the meeting. At the same event, David Freund asked about reissuing the faculty/staff picture book. I am delighted to report that Cathy Davey and Rosa Mulryan have agreed to make this happen and will be combining the features of the old picture book with the old contact book so that you will have a face, name, title, office address, extension, and email handle for each member of the community.

Strategic Plan: I will report as briefly as I can on the numerous things that have happened over the summer. At the May meeting of the Faculty Assembly a resolution was passed regarding the Strategic Plan asking Dr. Smith for the opportunity for more faculty input. He was quite responsive and the deadline was extended. The Faculty Advisory Council had a long meeting in June and put together detailed responses and suggestions to the Strategic Plan. Dr. Smith tells me that all responses (including those from the Faculty Advisory Council) have been considered and many incorporated in the new draft which is coming out shortly. As soon as it is posted I will add a link to the draft on the Faculty Assembly website and ask each of you to read it and to send your thoughts to the Faculty Advisory Council or to me. You can contact the entire faculty advisory council by sending a message to fcouncil@ramapo.edu. We will again be going through the document closely and making recommendations to the faculty committees and to the faculty assembly for how the faculty should address this.

Child Development Center: At the May Faculty Assembly meeting we also passed a resolution asking the President and the BOT to reconsider their decision to close the Child Development Center. In response the president asked for a fact-finding committee to be established. Mary Ellen Allison who served on that committee will report to us later on the work of the committee and the subsequent events.

Board of Trustees Committees: At the July Board of Trustees meeting (about which ME will tell you more) the Board announced a restructuring of its committees to break up Student Affairs and Academic Affairs into two committees; to combine Finance and Human Resources into one committee (a suggestive move I fear!); and to create a new Institutional Advancement Committee. We will be naming representatives to these committees later on in this meeting.

Administrative August Retreat: At the administrative retreat in August, all the administrative staff met and with the help of consultant Bill Weary reviewed Ramapo's current goals and the state of the college. I am relaying to you how I heard the discussion on those two days. The official report on the retreat is not yet out. The conclusion as I heard it was that we definitely need clearer, and more concrete goals and plans of actions and more of an across-the-board understanding and commitment to the mission. Some restructuring may be called for in the administrative levels to have clearer lines of authority, less of a silo mentality, etc. Some dramatic changes, in fact, have already occurred since the retreat with "The Move" which brought the top administrators together in the Mansion and which will necessitate more effort on the part of faculty and administrators alike to keep lines of communication open and flowing readily. One such significant restructuring you will hear about a bit later when Ed Cody speaks to us after the introduction of the new faculty.

Several concerns were expressed at the administrative retreat regarding tolerance of mediocrity, incivility, and conflict. The entire group reached substantial agreement that among our key needs over the coming years are increased fiscal sources (including significant endowments and grants); new faculty lines; classroom and academic space; sustainability for the campus; and better understanding and relations with the New Jersey Legislative branch and governor. The President has now asked each unit to follow up the work of the administrative retreat by developing detailed action plans with objectives, steps, deadlines, and costs. One thing that I did observe about this retreat was that there was relatively little discussion of the faculty or the academic programs and I had the sense that we, as a faculty, need to better communicate our concerns and needs to the administration and perhaps to listen a bit more attentively to theirs to close what seems to be a rather significant gap in our common understanding.

Meeting with President Smith: As a step in this direction, President Smith has requested the opportunity to meet with the Faculty Assembly and to discuss in a session closed to all but faculty assembly members, the provost's office and the deans a number of issues around goals, and plans, and administrative changes. The second hour of the October Faculty Assembly will be set aside for this purpose. We are trying to arrange a full faculty retreat later in the year similar to the summer's retreat for administrators to work on developing a coherent and widely shared vision of Ramapo in the coming years.

Provost's Sep. 3 Report and task forces: For in-service day on September 3, Provost Cody prepared a rather formidable report identifying 15 significant agenda items for the year and establishing task forces to accomplish this agenda. I have posted the list of the provost's task forces on the website along with the name of the contact person. If you are interested in serving on any of these task forces send a message to the contact person. All the task forces will keep the appropriate Faculty Assembly committees apprised of their progress and will be reporting finally to the appropriate Faculty Assembly committee. Any resolutions that result from these task forces that the Facutly Assembly needs to address will come to us through our standing committees or through the Faculty Advisory Council.

Other task forces: Other agenda items/task forces this year include a committee on the values we should look for when hiring faculty over the next 5-10 years, since that hiring will be large-scale and will shape the college for the next 30 years. For want of a better name I am calling this the Faculty Qualities Task Force; There is also open task force (please everybody jump in) to help build and rebuild faculty community and integrate and interweave faculty from all schools, convening groups, and years of hire. There will be a general meeting of anyone with ideas and interest in the Faculty Community group on Oct. 2 from 1-2 (SC217). There is too a small committee working with the union to look at Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright Policies building on work already underway on this issue from last year, as well as a committee established by Security to look at parking practices and policies. We will have 4 faculty representatives on that committee. The President is working on establishing a task force to study and develop strategies to deal with the state legislators.

Committee on Committees: Finally, as you know, we have before us the report of the Committee on Committees which was sent out with your August letter and has been posted to the website for your review. This document is a proposal which, if accepted, would result in significant changes in the Faculty Assembly bylaws, in the design of our faculty governance , and in the way that we address curriculum and academic concerns. The proposal, as I understand it, is to rearrange the existing committee structure to merge the 4 Faculty Assembly committees which now meet once a month, into a single committee, the Academic Review Committee, which will meet 4 times a month -- and get release time to do so. This certainly has the potential for efficiency, but it also has the potential for significant bottlenecks -- since -- like the Tappan Zee Bridge, there is no route around should the traffic break down.

The Faculty Assembly committees, as they exist now, are responsible to report regularly to the Faculty Assembly, and the chair of the committee, under the bylaws, is expected to be available to meet with the Faculty Advisory Council (the elected representatives of the Faculty Assembly), the Faculty Assembly President, and the Provost. The new design removes the oversight of the Faculty Advisory Council. These, to my mind, are very significant changes and ones that should not be made lightly -- even on a two-year trial basis -- unless the faculty genuinely feels they are changes likely to significantly improve our handling of curricular and academic issues.

Because the implications of this proposal are so major, I have asked the 4 standing committees which would be affected by this proposal to review it and to generate a response at their October meetings and I am asking the Unit councils to do the same at their October meetings. The report will then come to the Faculty Assembly floor at the November meeting for discussion and debate followed by a paper ballot to be mailed out the following week. Dr. Padovano has indicated to me that he plans to ask you later in this meeting to waive this review step and to move debate and discussion of the proposal to the floor of the assembly at the October meeting. You will have to make the decision regarding this.

Before we move to the rest of the agenda items, let me make a couple of quick announcements.

Smoking shelters: I need a couple of volunteers (smokers only please!) to help me advise the President on where best to place the smoking shelters on campus. If you are willing to help with this please see me after the meeting or email me about it.

Convocation and Events Committee: On Sep. 18 the Opening Convocation will feature Julian Bond, Chairman of the Board of the NAACP speaking on "2002: A Race Odyssey" at 4 p.m. in the gymnasium. This year for the first time seniors are invited to process in robes which is a very nice thing. I have put on reserve two copies of In Struggle a book on SNCC and Julian Bond's role in the early days of the civil rights movement, if anyone wants to work this into your early coursework before Julian Bond's visit. This event is being guided by a new events committee that was established to better coordinate our key occasions: convocation, founder's day, honors convocation, and commencement. I am on that events committee. I know that some of you have some thoughts on how these events (especially commencement) should be handled and would appreciate your emailing me your thoughts on this so that I can bring them to the attention of the committee.

Website and web policies: There will be an open hearing on 9/25 from 1-2 SC138 regarding the college's website, web access and web policies. I have a number of concerns around these, and I believe that some of you do as well. Come speak to me or to Amruth on the 25^th about this, so that we can begin work on addressing your concerns. (Note that the meeting has been moved from 9/18 due to the lack of rooms).

Yearbook photos: Also on Sep. 25 Unit Councils will hold their first meetings and the Yearbook Staff will be taking photos of the faculty at these meetings. So wear your smile!

State of the College an