Okay. Thank you. I needed to be unuted, which was funny. My opening line is I was so relieved when the gallery came on. I'm always convinced on this machine that if I hit a different button or something terrible was going to happen, but to see all your faces was really good. Well, good afternoon. Thank you all for coming today on Friday the 13th. And on the Friday of Exam. This event is an open hearing sponsored by the University Faculty Senate. Open hearings allow faculty and community members to speak on the issues of the day. These are ways to express opinions and get information and to share information. So, I am John Jab. I am the president elect of the Senate, and I am from the Department of English. Working with controls today, and an impressive expansion of her duties as Senate president is Vicki Fill, who was an English professor from the Associate arts program. Vicki has developed incredible technical knowledge about how to run these meetings, intimidating me so, so we're going to rely on her for some of the technical aspects today. The Senate is recording this hearing and the recording will be posted. The Senate's administrator will share how that will be done. As we are on Zoom, everyone is muted, including me when I came in. So please raise a hand using the Zoom controls Zoom button to speak, and then when we get to you, Vicki we'll unmute you. And the chat function is not available today. And I don't know about y'all. I'm having flashbacks to 2020, 2021 when we had to teach classes using the system. Wow. Anyway, our guest is Dean Louis Leu Rossi, a professor of Mathematics, and the inaugural Dean of the graduate College. Which is great. We have six bullet points for Dean Rossi to discuss. The announcement had seven, but we merged the second and fourth, which are about values and funding. Now, what we're going to do is go bullet by bullet, we thought. And Dean Rossi will speak for about five to 7 minutes on bullets, and then we will take comments and questions. Now, we're reluctant to cut off any discussion. But we do ask that you all keep your remarks to about four to 5 minutes, maybe less if that's possible, just so we can get out what people want to say. Now, I thought I should begin by reading bullets. So here they go. And it's the six with the Merged one. First is graduate college's role in the University's mission. Second is the merged one. The value and funding of masters and PhD students at UD. Third is the flow of colleges revenue, especially to administration versus students. Next is policies involving graduate student travel and their rationale. Next is governance of the college. Including the role played by the graduate council. And next is the Dean's role in supporting the other colleges and chairs. Now students often ask. This includes undergrad students. What does a dean do? They of know what treasurers, what chairmen do kind of do with academic stuff. They don't know what deans do. So I want to start off and then turn to Lou. Here are some things from the bylaws of the college. There's two paragraphs that give what Lou has to do. The Vice Pro votes for graduate and professional education, and Dean of the College to long title them. Anyway, as Chief admin as chief representative, and administrative officer of the College, shall have general administrative authority over routine college affairs. The Dean shall exercise leadership in recommending policies to the graduate College Council, in the introduction of educational ideas and proposals to the council, and in the stimulation of discussions leading to improvement of the University's graduate programs. The Dan's responsibilities shall include strengthening graduate education and advocating for graduate programs to the university and to the community. The Dean, as chief executive officer of the College, shall have final authority to make budgetary and personnel recommendations to the provosts. The dean shall consult with the deans of the other units on matters which affect the other colleges, and shall consult with the college community concerning budgetary matters which affect the college as a whole. The dean shall have the opportunity to review and advise on the administrative and technical aspects of a new graduate program proposals before they enter the faculty senate approval process. So the programs initiated and housed in the graduate college. The deans shall serve the same function as the academic college teams. For existing programs housed in the other colleges, the dean's input shall be limited to making recommendations to the program or to the relevant dean of the college that houses the program. Dean Ross, you have a lot to do. Let's turn it over to you now. I'll be quiet for a while. Well, thank you, John. I appreciate you reading that aloud because I read it quietly every day. I think it's the first time I've ever heard it spoken. It's been my great pleasure and honor to serve as the inaugural dean since 2020. I'll just start by saying I know that we face some financial challenges, and the university is going through a transformative change in its budgeting processes to address it. Somewhere in all of that, there have been some communication challenges as well, and there's been some unintentional misinformation and miscommunication circulating. I appreciate having this opportunity to spend some time sharing accurate and as detailed information as I can provide about at least the graduate side of things. The fact is that since 2020, the graduate college has transformed graduate education at this institution and research as well. It's improved it in significant ways. Let me assure you right up front, that it's come at almost no cost to this university. Our work has been methodical. It's been collaborative. Graduate education and research is not a single thing. It's complex and there are many kinds of programs and many purposes to them, and Many activities that go into creating the environment under which we can achieve excellence, which is our mission, and I'm going to get to that in a second. So just to back up a little bit, though I will not get literary too often in this conversation, some of you know that I planted a crepe myrtle tree in my front yard about 20 years ago, and I see it every morning when I go to work and I see it every evening when I come home, and every day it looks about the same. But it's almost 20 feet tall now, actually it's more than 20 feet tall now. Just like that, we don't see graduate programs and graduate students change before our very eyes. But the fact of the matter is that in the last five years, being a graduate student at the University of Delaware and our graduate programs have changed profoundly. I appreciate this information or this invitation and this opportunity to speak to this audience. First of all, let's discuss what the role of the graduate college is and what it is. First, it was established in 2019 by this body, by the Faculty Senate working with the administration. The second thing is there was a search for an inaugural dean, and I was fortunate enough to be selected in that search in August of 2020. Finally, after becoming dean, the graduate college worked across all nine colleges that have graduate students. With faculty, students and staff from around campus to create a strategic plan for how the graduate college would achieve its mission, and that was released in November of 2021, and it's been referred to regularly ever since. I just want to share with everyone who might not know that as an administrative unit, the graduate college also includes professional and continuing studies. That's important to understand that it was important in its creation. Professional and continuing studies has three pieces to it. The first is the OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute. This is a network of members, not students, members, thousands of them across the state and actually some nationwide. Who are lifelong learners? That unit is self supporting, that comes at no cost to you. The second is the non credit unit. They provide non credit education to adults across the state who want to learn a new skill or live a better life. Again, they are self supporting. They come at no cost to you, and actually, they generate a modest amount of revenue to the graduate college. Finally, there's the access center. When we think about nontraditional students, someone who comes here as an undergraduate, but they didn't just graduate from high school, or it could be someone who had to leave the university and is now coming back. They need to get their grades up, or it could be any other early college credit, it could be any other dual enrollment program. That's all run through our access center. That's an important name for that. It's the third door into the university. If undergrad and grad are the traditional or the first two doors, the access center is the third door. That's on the basic budget. So those things compose the graduate college. Now let's talk about our role, Excellence in graduate education and research. One sentence. That is our mission. So I'll just say that the approach of the graduate college to doing this and this came out of the planning process is we would lead on issues that a university wide perspective is advantageous to graduate education and research. That university wide perspective is valuable to us, and so we use that to help the university. In areas where it's better to do something at the unit level, either the department or the college, we support. We don't lead there, we support to do that. That's our general approach to things and in the graduate college. In putting this together in our strategic manner in what areas could we achieve this role at the university? There are five of them and I know that five is hard to remember, all at once if I were to speak them. They are community, innovation, professional development, recruitment and retention, and research. Everyone in the graduate college understands that and they live and breathe that. Those are the five things we are working on. We do many little things to get that done at this place. But if you think about it a little bit, let's just talk about change since 2019 in any of those areas, There are nine interdisciplinary graduate programs in the graduate college. We started with zero. I'm sorry. There's seven in the graduate college, there's nine at the university. We started with zero, now we are at seven. There's over 140 graduate students that wouldn't be here otherwise because of that. There is an open and transparent data management system for our program directors, our chairs, and our deans. It is the envy of deans all around the country to a point where I will not give them the name of my data analyst because they envy it so much. Those of you who have used it, know what it is. Program directors have a TA scheduling tool now. Program programs now benefit from the graduate college taking the lead on large recruiting events like Saknas and Abercom. We have active engagement with the graduate student government. I'm there Dan too. They've made significant progress on stipends, on housing, on healthcare. They've got a grad lounge where there wasn't a grad lounge before. They've made progress on advisor student relation problems. The graduate students now have a coherent newsletter that comes every two weeks instead of having their inbox spammed with tons of miscellaneous announcements. We have an alumni mentoring program for our graduate students. All of these things didn't exist five years ago. Strategically using our assets, we have helped support teams of faculty across departments and colleges to bring training grants to this university. And that includes an NRT proposal to the University of Delaware that was successful, an NIHT 32. And a Lafferty McHugh Foundation support and the recent NSF Skype support or Skype grant. I'll say that we didn't write any of these proposals. We supported them. But the idea is enabling the conditions under which excellence and graduate education can happen. Students who have children and which we have an increasing number of those now have a resource page where they can tie into assets both at this university and in the state to help them. Over half our graduate students are going to go into jobs that are not academic. For the first time, we have a program called Accelerat Industry that helps them learn the skills they need to succeed outside the academic environment and pursue a non academic career. And many other things too. But I think I'd like to stop right there. I think we're close to time, and John, you can correct me if I'm wrong, and field any questions about our role at the university and our purpose and what we do. That's a good it's a fun overview of stuff, Luc so thanks a lot. And let's see if anybody has a question or any comments before we get into values and money, which maybe more uthority. But what do we have about sort of the overall stuff that the dean and the college do and provide? Anyone would like to have anything the hand. Wow. Okay. Okay. Well, let's get to the next one, Ben Lew. This is the one that I think people are concerned about, and we'd like to hear from you on. And that's the value of the masters and PhD students to UD and their funding of the masters and PhD students here at UD. And you've alluded to, you know, the difficult times. So I'll let you take off on that one. Thanks a lot. Sure. No trouble. I'll just say that graduate students, all graduate students, masters, doctoral, and we have many flavors here are essential to the character and success of our institution. We're an R one institution with serious research accomplishments and serious research ambitions beyond them. Graduate students are integral to being part of an R one institution, and they're embedded in all nine of our colleges that I'm I'm not excluded. I'm not counting the Honors College here. They have an undergraduate mission, but they're embedded in all nine colleges in different ways, and I'll go into that in a minute. That's a bit of a circular comment, because being an R one institution is defined as a certain level of doctoral productivity. Of course, being one, we have graduate students. But let me just put it another way. Many talented faculty want to be here and stay here because of our graduate programs in our graduate students. They want to educate them. They want to mentor them, they want to be around them. That is part of what it is to be at UD. To that point of mentorship, the graduate college has invested considerable time, energy, and resources into faculty research mentoring. I'm going to tell you why that's important to this in a second. An exceptional mentor changes graduate student lives and graduate students careers. That's value we give to them. But let me share with you another observation about value. I'll bet any chair here in the crowd, and most faculty members will agree with me. Excellent graduate students, make a good faculty member great. Let me just say that again. Excellent graduate students make a good faculty member. Great. Great students change the atmosphere in the climate in the classroom and out of the classroom. They challenge us with new ideas, unfettered by whatever you want to call it, our crystallized crusty knowledge and understanding of things. I'll tell you a little student, early on in my story. Early on in my graduate career, I developed and it's a mathematical idea, but I developed a core spreading vortex method for solving the Navy stokes equations. I created it, I proved that it would converge. A faculty member heard me give a talk on it in the grad student seminar, took me aside and he said, Hey, Caud Greenard, who's a very famous mathematician, proved that core spreading Vortex methods would never converge to the Navtoke equations. He did that about four years ago, and maybe ought to read his paper. Well, I was crushed. Then I read the paper and I realized that his assumptions were too restrictive. When I looked at it a little more carefully, I realized I was right, and he was right in his paper, too, but I was right. Poor spreading Vortex could work. That faculty member became my advisor. Claude Greenard invited me to the Caran to give a talk. It was a wonderful contribution. I guess backing up a little bit, I just want to say that students, like I was, can be inexperienced, we can be awkward, we can be careless, but we bring an energy and a passion that faculty often leave behind when we become more professional and more optimize. That's the value they bring to our institution. They're young and spunky and ready to change things. That says something about those in our research intensive programs, but speaking of being professional as a faculty member, let's talk about our professional programs as well. Course based masters programs are important to our educational mission as well. These are young people who want to and sometimes older two who want to have new and specialized knowledge and expertise, and they want to work outside a university or sometimes they're terminal masters or sometimes they're gateway masters. But we provide that energy and skill to them as well. There are faculty here who specifically want to work with those students. That's good too. There's the value question to you. I'm going to get to the funding issue. But I just want to show you a picture real quick, and John, you said I could have a slide or two. I hope this is okay. Because I think it's important for everyone to understand this notion of mission. And students. I made a little visual here of the kinds of students we have and where they are. They're across all nine colleges. The blue is doctoral, the orange is Master's level, The colleges are across the top and I hope you can parse the codes. You can see growth over time in some colleges like engineering has grown, for instance, The non degree students are either just people taking one class in which case it's continuing ed, or it could be a certificate of some kind two. There a learner, you see some red there at the top from a circ program. Both things are possible. Another thing I want you to just observe about the graduate college is you'll notice we're one of the colleges that's growing. If you look at, you can see the trend, you can see it's both doctoral and masters. Almost all of those master students are revenue generating master students. As we're going to learn later, all of that revenue flows into the other eight colleges. The graduate college doesn't see a dime of that. As you know from the budget modeler may have learned, it's who does the teaching? That's the important part. Generally speaking, that revenue flows to the left, which is fine. But I also want you to know when we talk about value. These are students who would not be here otherwise, were it not for the interdisciplinary programs that we're able to create and support within the graduate college. Okay Let's talk about funding for a little bit here because I know people are eager to talk about funding. There's no constraints on master's funding. I was asked about constraints. Backing up a bit. Let's talk about this. There are about 2,200. Students at this university who are on some kind of contract, a TA, a GA, an RA, a fellowship, tuition scholar. The vast majority of those, 90% of them are funded by the disciplinary colleges. The other eight colleges you see there, 90% of the funding flows straight through there, because that's where the revenues going. In the past, funds would flow to the colleges, and then the colleges would distribute those awards to the departments. They give so many to the chair and the chair would give them award them however they would do it. Now things are changing in the way we do that. That's fine. There are many of master students on different kinds of contracts. Let me just summarize some of those because I was asked about masters. Some master students are on grants and that functions just like a doctoral student. Some of the tuition goes on the grant and some gets paid by either the college or the department. There are some who are GAs or TAs who receive no tuition scholarship. They do the job, they're a TA, they get paid the stipend. They have to pay their own tuition. There are some who get a full tuition scholarship. There's a whole spectrum in there. There are some that get a partial scholarship. I'll give you an example in the music program, they wanted their ensembles to be of a certain size to work. It's hard to have a band if you just have one saxophone. The way they did that is they award their students partial awards, and then the students pay for the rest of it and they can have a larger graduate program that way. Anyway, different strategic reasons work different ways. I just returned from Winter Tur hence the Tie. There the Winter Tur Foundation covers the stipend. And the department covers the tuition. I can work either way. Anyway, I hope that helps you understand a little bit how the funding works. And then I'm happy to answer any questions about that. Okay. I guess ahead Go ahead. Lo thank you very much for that. I mean, you describe different ways which it's funded. I think the message you seem to want to present is a lot of this funding comes from the home college. And it needs to be negotiated in there. That's correct. And it flows to the college now with the new change in budget processes. Both the revenue and the cost are going down to the departments in a way determined by the dean of that college. Yeah. Used to be everything stopped at the college, and the dean would pay someone's always paid the tuition, used to be the dean paid the tuition, and they'd give out so many TA awards and RA awards and fellowships, right? So now that's not happening. Now the revenue that used to pay the tuition and the cost associated with it are both being pushed down to the department. Okay. Well, thanks a lot. Let's go to our people for 70. You've had your hand up first. So let's go to you. That we'll go to Dale. Oh, if you would identify yourself too when you come on and that's for the recording when people listen to it later. Yeah. I guess I'm just trying to get my mind around this decision that funds formerly went to colleges and colleges gave it to departments, and that is changing. And Why how, how did we make this decision and why is the budget model changing for students that we've already made commitments to? That's just number one question. I guess my overall question is, or are we not an educational institution with a nonprofit mission, basically, We don't pay taxes because nominally, we are not here to make profit. We're here to do research and to learn. My question is why? What is this going to do to us as an R one research institution reputationally. Thank you. Okay, Lou, you can take it. Okay. I'll do my best. First, I'll say that the budget model, to my knowledge, has not changed. The budget process has changed. That is and if there's an I'm not part of the budget model. If there's another dean on the call that wants to correct me on this, welcome to dive in. But my understanding is the model itself has not changed, but the process who who receives the revenue and who decides on covering costs that's changed by going down to the department level. And that's not an academic decision, so that's not a decision I make. It's not a decision a dean makes. That happens elsewhere at the university on the business side. In terms of are we a nonprofit institution? Oh, absolutely, we are. We are a nonprofit institution dedicated to education. Take that very seriously. That doesn't mean we don't have costs, and we don't need to pay for those costs. It just means we're not in the business of making profit. Okay. Let me go to go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Okay. Let me go to Dale next, and then we'll come back and then we'll go to Stewart and we'll come back to Psefone, if that's okay. Dale Norwood, go for it, sir. Yeah. Hi. I'm an associate professor in the history department. I've been here since 2018. So before the advent to the Grad College and in our current reality of the grad College. I just want to make a comment that I have some questions that are along the same lines as Persephone, but I want to actually get some more clear answers perhaps. One is just that the famous cyberneticis, Stafford Beer had this great phrase, which I think is really useful, which is the purpose of a system is what it does. For very complex organizations and ecosystems and markets, it allows you to black box step away and see what's happening. I was really glad to hear the Dan outline Putatively, the Grad good College does. It's focus, it's mission, excellence. It's a little bit of a vague statement, but that's what policies are to flesh it out in these areas, community, innovation, professional development, recruitment, retention, research. And I have to say that thinking about those categories, judged on what it does, at least from my perspective of somebody who trains graduate students and who's out there in the community and that kind of thing. The grad college has been an impediment to all of those things. It's increased administrative costs. It's slowed our community engagement, made it impossible. It's slowed innovation. It's really decimated our ability to recruit in terms of lack of resources. Partly, that is a tough environment, as you're saying, The universities Resources have grown over this time, but the graduate college and graduate stipends haven't kept pace with inflation. We're in a situation where a lack of improvement on graduate stipends for the last decades has not been made up. There's been a little bit of work and I'm glad to hear things like there's the grad lounge. That's a really important improvement, but recruitment is a real issue and quality of life has not kept up for our students. I think in terms of research and things like that, this is now there's more layers of bureaucracy. There's more administrative staff, there's more associate vice provosts and vice provosts and teens. There's layers of revenue that need to be paid. That's a bureaucracy that needs to be paid, but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of revenue generation coming from the graduate college. As you outline, these tough budget times, now we're moving into a budget model. I would push back a little bit on this idea that the budget model hasn't changed if the budget process hasn't changed like. This is a financial apparatus. If you're changing how it works, you're changing what the model is. That's what the word model means. This is an idea of how things work. We've been told to increase revenues and float on our own bottoms as you outlined there on that kind of. Without any of the tools to do so or the tools that are provided are not fit to the purpose. I'm thinking about some things like ideas about having masters programs that are revenue generating, predatory programs on the model of the University of Phoenix or other universities like that, which has happened at a lot of places, including, I am sorry to say that it sounds like a lot of what the administration wants is on those models, and I don't think those winners, long term for us, but even in the short term for paying masters programs in a lot of fields, not just the humanities and social sciences sciences. I want to say that to my colleagues here. This is not only a humanities issue, but those masters are not market winners. They've been tried at other universities, other places I've worked. I'm sure my colleagues can share on this as well. They've been losers. They've attracted faculty attention in our time, and it's been a net sync if we were accounting for faculty time. I guess my observation here is that this world that you're describing of all these improvements sounds great, is very little reality. Very little connection to the world that I've experienced as a faculty member and as a trainer of graduate students. I suppose what I wanted to ask just to put a concrete question on this is that your point about R ones is really well taken. And UD is in the middle of this Carnegie reclassification, which has changed the schema quite a bit in terms of what graduate education plays to it. And it's shifted to what could be an embrace of a predatory on the master's level model and a stem only model for graduate education. That also seems to track quite closely to the policies that UD has advanced. There are other parts of the Carnegie classification that have to do with community engagement that UD has seemingly not pursued in other ways. So I would like to hear from the Dean and colleagues and other members of the faculty Senate, if they want to speak to these issues too. Where does this Carnegie classification play into policy to emphasize and ask again, and I really would be very curious to hear where the answer is in this. We were these processes these decisions about processes made? If it's not happening at the graduate college level, then why not? Why is that only an academic decision? Why isn't the leadership of this new institution that has a budget that is trying to increase revenues and push for all these departments to float their own bottoms on this. Why is that a decision that we were involved in in some kind of significant faculty governance way? So kind of Carnegie broad policy, but also this kind of why is the money going in this direction and why is this kind of being slow rolled out in an unclear and very murky kind of manner? But thank you. Well, thank you, sir, and the Dean took a lot of notes while you were speaking. So I think we should let the dean give it some of the things he wrote down. Yeah, thank you very much. Dan, it's good to meet you this way. I think it's our first time together. I'm sorry you're not impressed with the work of the graduate college, but. Let me first start I think to your point about revenue generation and Carnegie classification and opportunities for things. So first of all, having students cover their educational expenses is not necessarily predatory. Well, it isn't predatory, depends on how you go about doing it. But I'll say that the work of the graduate college has advanced some of these goals. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of the things we do is help improve the University of Delaware brand, and recruit and retain the kind of students we've seen. The fact of the matter is that we've increased applications to this institute, quality applications by about 50%, which is profound. But the second thing is we sometimes have quality programs and the awareness isn't there. Yes, they generate revenue for the university. Examples of that might include the strategic communications program, the computer and Information Science program, finance program and so forth, and we're there to help. On this. Again, these are faculty driven efforts. I don't think the faculty believe they're being predatory when they create these programs, they're excited about them, the MBA programs, another example of that. The motivations may be different. There may be different objectives, but that's the way it is. In terms of the budget model and budget processes, honestly, that is beyond the scope I think of this conversation. Different people need to be involved in that and perhaps the Faculty Senate wants to create a forum or something with the people who do make those decisions. But I do not. The question is, why not? Because my mission is excellence in graduate research and education. That is my mission. It's on the academic side of the house, and that's what I do. You mentioned stipends. God, that is profound. So let me just show you something. I know you're questioning the value of the graduate college and that's fine. Another thing that we do is we actually participate in the grad So survey, which is a national you know, a national instrument for understanding what the graduate experience is at our university. Now, it happens every other year. We'll do it again this spring and we'll see how we're doing, but two years of the graduate college improved things significantly in all of the things that matter to graduate students. And the graduate college is mostly staff. We're not doing it. By the way, you mentioned growth of administrators in the grad college. That's just not happening. But you'll see that in key indicators that are important to students, we have made improvements as an institution. Because of our renewed focus on graduate education. You made a good point about about stipends and financial support. We can't control the world around us. We can't control inflation. We can understand how students feel about it, and they feel terrible about it, as you can tell from the survey results. That is why the graduate college did lead an effort to figure out where we need to be with our stipends and do something about it because you cannot be excellent and underpay the funded graduate students. Then we're not competitive and our students are unhappy when they come here and they have trouble affording food and housing. Yes, I keep an eye on that as well. If you look at our progress on that front and we're going to make more progress next year, what I did is I looked at Essentially what you could call yield. Usually yield refers to whether a student deposits or not. That's not apropo for grad students because they don't deposit, but here we're measuring ultimate yield, which is who enrolls. This is our yield rate. You can think of that as our competitiveness. You've got a great program, a students admitted here and somewhere else, who also has a great program. Do they choose to come here or not? Then on the horizontal axis is the ratio of the minimum stipend and most of our students are close to the minimum stipend to our consumer price index. It takes inflation out of the picture. It just tells you how much a graduate students dollar can afford here in Newark, Delaware. You can see the trend. We reached a high water mark in 2019. Then over time even those stipend stipends grew, they did not keep up with inflation, and our competitiveness went down. Last year was the year, the president got behind it and said, we're going to raise stipends, two big steps this year, next year, and I know it's causing pain all the way around. We can talk about that more or later. But we do it and remember what I said. Excellent graduate students make us better. Our yield is going up and it will go up again next year to mark my words. I just wanted to share that data with you too. I think I answered all the questions. On Carnegie Classification, I'm going to step back from that one a little bit. That's up to the faculty to embrace those values and design programs that embrace those values. The graduate college is here to help faculty do that. So There we go. I want to leave time for more questions. Okay, Thank you for mentioning graduate housing, too. I know that one of the big things you're concerned about is the day to day life of the graduate student. That's a huge consideration, and so money and housing are big. But now, let's hear from Stewart, Judy, and actually, I have a Black light blocking. I think it's Parkel, and then Pev will be able to come back. So, let's go to you first. Yeah. Thanks, John. Hi. I'm Stewart Kaufman from the Political Science Department. I'd like to follow up on Dale's question with a slightly different twist to it. So my department is a social science department in the College of Arts and Sciences. And we are typical department in that respect in the sense that we don't pay our graduate students don't pay any tuition. We pay them, right? That money comes almost exclusively from the University of Delaware because there isn't grant funding available for us to apply to that's going to that's going to fund any significant numbers of them. I get some, but really a very small amount, relatively speaking. We are a department that teaches a boatload of undergraduate students. Our graduate program is a PhD oriented graduate program because we share the values of an R one institution. We want to do what that part of the mission. The problem is that that graduate program is just a pure money sync according to the budget model, It's all money going out, it's no money coming in. We could change that by setting up a master's program. But I think what Dale meant when he said a predator masters program, he meant a program that gives you a credential that's not going to pay off in terms of jobs. We could have a master's program in political science, but it wouldn't get anybody a job. We don't do that. We could specialized ones that might have that effect, but I'm pretty sure that my time is better spent teaching two or three dozen undergraduates than teaching one dozen master students in the same amount of time. So I can't see a way that in the terms that are defined by this budget model, our graduate program is defensible at all. In fact, people in my department are already raising the question, can we even afford to maintain it in this current budget environment? My question is, I'm just asking for you for advice. What is your advice on what we can say to justify a graduate program that has been defined as a net dead loss. Thank you so much, Stuart. So du. Are you the graduate program director in Poly? No, Joanne is, right? Yes. Joanne is. Okay. Maybe you two can be co directors. I love working with Joann. Don't push her up, but maybe we could all work together. I just want to say something first. So value is not just dollars and cents. And no one looks at it that way. So I know what you're saying about how, hey, maybe my program doesn't have a way to fuel itself except on the undergrad side or something like that. That is why money flows differentially like this. I don't know about the conversations that have happened in your college around your particular program, and I don't know if that's appropriate here. I know deans are applying smoothing to different departments so that departments like yours where traditionally, there's not external funding available in amounts that make a difference and so forth can sustain you to achieve your mission, which is our mission. It's everyone's mission. I'm a mathematician. I don't want to work at a university that doesn't have a strong music program and a strong poly side department and all that stuff. So we all believe we can all start from there. There is smoothing being applied. Later on this afternoon, I hope we'll get a chance to talk about block allocations too. The graduate college does send funding into the colleges, discretionary funding that my understanding is historically that was to support programs like yours. The third point, which actually I missed out on with Dale is we all have access to a resource. It's the incubator program out of the Provost office to help if you do have an idea for something, that you can go to the incubator and that's run by Kimiset. And she will do a market analysis for you to see, is that a real thing? Are there jobs for that? What are the jobs for that? How do we design the curriculum and we have a lot of really cool tools for analyzing that. The last thing is I'm not pushing you because I believe when you say, like, Hey, I think my time is better spent teaching and doing my scholarship, hey, that's right. That's what faculty are for. I get that. But I know there are other universities that have successfully had training grants where they create or pilot, plus X program. Imagine a program that is like, I'm just making this up, but chemistry plus you name it, policy, ethics, political science. Stewart, I don't need to tell you the important role of your discipline in how this world is working right now. It's not just by political scientists. It's everyone. Students want the interdisciplinary preparation? You can participate in a revenue generating program. Without hosting the revenue generating program. I'll give you an example of that. Without the ethics course offered by philosophy, Our data science program would not be nearly as exciting and nearly as power. Everyone's excited about that. It's a unique signature feature of that. There's all this graduate activity in the philosophy program that doesn't have a graduate program. Anyway, I hope that answered at least some of your questions. Smoothing block funding, the incubator program is there to help. Happy to brainstorm with you about ideas. I don't have the ideas, but if you have an idea about something you might like to try, I'm happy to work with you to make the process work. Anyway, I'll stop there. I don't think you're a budget sync. I think that's the wrong way to look at. Good. Thank you. Thank you both. Now, Judi Sally can go next. Now, I screwed up Malick's name. So Mallick if you're still with us, you're allowed to go next. And we'll hear from Denny Galileo. And psfane, once we get through all the first timers, I have you written down. We'll turn to you. But, Judy Seli you're on. Thanks. Thank you, John. And thank you, Dean Rossi. Judy Sley. I'm a senior instructor in D LLC, and I work very closely with graduate students in our department to train them to be teachers, which I don't know if that happens in a lot of departments. And so my At actually, my question went to a comment, then went back to a question, then went back to a comment based on all of the discussion, which has been very helpful. But I think it looks to me as if there's a lot of miscommunication and a lot of information that's being put out before it's been checked. So I do have one question and I would like to also offer you some information because I think the more information you have about individual graduate programs, the more you can advocate for us. But my question is, are you able to refute the rumor that there are going to be significant cuts to departments that only offer masters programs and no PhD programs? And then the information that I would like to pass along to you concerns the role of the graduate students in our department, and I'll be as succinc as possible. We intensively train our teaching assistants. We supervise them all semester. I personally meet with them once a week. They are trained to be teachers, whether or not that's their goal. For example, if they're going to go into a PhD program, it's most likely they're going to have to teach, so we want them to do a good job at that. Others will go on to be certified to become K through 12 teachers. So because of that, we are able to put them into our 100 level courses and staff those courses extremely well with direct supervision and positive student evaluations. But in addition to that, they also staff a tutoring center that we offer to our undergraduate students. And if those services that these TAs provide were to be cut or unable to be funded, it not only impacts faculty who will have to take up extra assignments and teaching, it affects the graduate students too, of course, but it also affects our undergraduates, and it mostly affects the undergraduates that have less money, which is a real shame. They can't afford tutors, and so we provide this service. Our grad students provide that service for them. I think a lot of times the university is so big and our departments are so diverse that not everyone is always aware of the services and the good that some graduate students provide. So I just wanted to make sure. It's not often that an instructor gets the ear of a dean. So I wanted to make sure that you know what how valuable they are to us. And it just seems to be an inefficient use of funds to cut them and then have to go hire faculty either on S contract or full time to staff those courses that they could teach. Thank you. And thank you, Judy and I'm sorry, I mispronounced your last name. Oh, it's okay. I I don't argue with my in laws. They say CLE, I know it's supposed to be Chelly, but hey. I got it for the future. Lou. Well, Judy, it's a pleasure to meet you here, and I do go by Lou. Usually Dean Rossi means I'm in trouble, which has been known to happen, but not too often. So I'm just going to say first of all, no, there's no systematic plan to cut graduate students. I think we are going through a time of change right now. I think we can all acknowledge that. And chairs and unit leaders are faced with budget decisions that they didn't used to face. And one of the levers they can pull. Is funding to graduate students. That is true. I'm the dean of the graduate college. I do not want to see cuts to graduate students. Just hear that. I want to see strong robust programs with lots of students in the m and figure out great ways to support those students educationally and in other ways too. In terms of their role interacting with graduate students, absolutely, you're not the first one to make that clear to me. I totally get it and you're not the only unit that functions this way. I'll just say that that is an economic argument for sustaining your program. Under our budget model, and not that this should always be a budget driven conversation. We need to get away from that a little bit. There's more values than just dollars and cents. But in the budget model, undergraduates generate revenue too. We have to support them, whether it's in a tutoring center or whether they're enrolled in your courses. I know those conversations are happening at your deans level, and so forth, and they're thinking about it that way. I do have the university wide perspective. I don't necessarily yet have eyesight into your algorithm, how is your dean looking at it. But those are being shared with me now so I can get a better sense of how that works. So I can't make you an assurance. But I can say you're thinking about it the right way. They bring value and we want them here, and that value can be measured in dollars and cents and also value to the educational mission. I hope that answers your question. Yes. Thank you. Thanks. Let's hear from Denny Galileo next. And then we'll hear from Susan who's the first timeer, and then Persephone and Dale want to come back. Yeah, thank you, John. Dean Rossi, thank you for showing up here and fielding questions. And I got here late. So I don't know if you've answered this. I think somebody told me that you said back, I'm trying to think of when this notion of not fully funding master students came into being and how it came into being. And from what I can gather, from the minutes of the College of Arts and Sciences Senate meeting in the May meeting in 2023, you said, within four years, internal funding of master students will effectively end. This will put us on equal footing with other institutions. And then you showed some slides and a slide that was from the May graduate council meeting that you showed at the College Senate meeting that was titled Stipends, where we need to be by fall 2025, it says, full internal funding of masters students is effectively ended, except for terminal masters. And then it says, to have the grad students we need to have, we require changing how we do some things, including enrollments and tuition scholarships. So You know, to me, this is not there's no other way to receive this information other than you're telling everybody that this funding for master's students is going to end. I realize you didn't have the authority to say that, so maybe people shouldn't have taken it that way, right? Because you can't say that. But I think a lot of people did take it that way, not knowing that the college bylaws say that you don't have the authority to mandate something like this. Nevertheless, I think this was kind of the root of the beginning of all this faffle about master students. And I'd like to know, you know, if you think it was a miscommunication, what did you mean then if you said that full funding ends and where we need to be and within four years, internal funding of master students will effectively end. I mean, if you weren't saying that as a mandate, what actually did that mean? Thank you. Hank you. You're on. Yeah. Sorry, someone else speak? You're on L. Go forward. Thank you very much. Thank you for bringing that up. This has been a journey. So dialing back a couple of years, the budget processes were very different and stopping at the college level. And I I actually think this is coming to pass. That slide combined two key ideas. It combined stipends. And combined financial aid. I think my words were full and you have them in front of you and I don't, I'm afraid, but full internal funding, which was certainly what I meant. That means our basic budget is powering a full tuition scholarship for master students. You saw that stipend curve or maybe you missed it, but you saw the stipend curve when we fell off a cliff. It wasn't it wasn't because deans didn't want to increase the minimum stipend, you know, that they had the money and and they didn't want to do it. They wanted to do it, they couldn't. They were tied down with commitments to providing strong financial aid packages to graduate students to master students, and there are historical reasons why those were there. But they weren't necessarily mission aligned. So my comments were addressing the point that what was going to happen is what happened, right? So our yield went down. We were no longer competitive anymore. We have to get stipends up. Now, the budget model has shifted and now or not the budget model, but the budget process has shifted, and now chairs do have to make those decisions, and they are, and they are. There's an entire landscape across campus of different decision makers, funding master students in ways other than giving them a full scholarship powered off the basic budget. That is happening. In terms of, do I have the power to do that? Of course, I don't. I'm projecting a vision of where we need to go. And where we need to go is where our stipends are competitive and I'll add humane. Okay? And that we operate within the budget we have to do that. So I hope that answers your question. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Now, let's go to Susan next, and then Persephone and Gaye are going to come back. Oh, Malloch, you're back. Good. I can let me go to Malloch after Susan, the first time, and then we'll hit again. Go ahead, Susan. Hello, how are you? Interested in interprofessional activities. The question becomes, how we have so many great colleges in the university and many programs and great courses. There's almost like a fear to think about how do we have interprofessional interdisciplinary across colleges? Because with their budget miles, everyone's holding onto their own. What do you see the graduate college position is looking to help facilitate that because I think we would have stronger programs if we were able to feel comfortable collaborating across colleges, not just within colleges, but across Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh, Susan, are you psychic? Okay. So when I'm not thinking about how to prepare for this meeting and a few other things. I am exactly thinking about the problem you just highlighted. So we've got to think ahead on this. It is doubtless that faculty want to work with each other or many faculty, maybe not all, but many faculty want to work with each other across disciplinary lines. They want to mentor students across disciplinary lines. Students want interdisciplinary programs, and this new budget process, I believe discourages that. Having been a chair, I know what it would feel like to look at my 50 faculty, and ten of them want to be involved in an interdisciplinary program in the other 40 are disciplinary, and you want to tell them, we're going to allocate our graduate tuition dollars to those interdisciplinary students. That is going to go nowhere, and that chair will not remain chair long. You will defend your discipline. As part of a chairs responsibility. I don't want to get ahead of my skies here. But I have some ideas. Those of you who know me as the grad dean, I have a lot of ideas, yes, many of those ideas and the ideas of my team have improved the graduate environment here on campus. I have ideas on how we can handle this. I've begun discussions with the deans about it. Everyone is supportive. I've discussed it some with the provost as well. We're going to put together a plan, but you're right. The current process doesn't do anything for interdisciplinary. We got to pink that one through. When you look at our competitors, many do have those programs, and they're stronger for it. So we lose students because we don't have the ability to offer the best from all the different areas that we have. Thank you very much for looking at that. No trouble. I first and it's like the number one problem. Malik, you're back, I think I missed you before. So Malks go to you and then we'll go to Rebek. Oh, yeah, no worries. Hi, Lou. So I was actually just thinking about some of the things that you were mentioning earlier about wanting a large, robust graduate college with lots of students. But it doesn't seem as though this graduate college can afford that many graduate students, at least not ethically. Just as somebody I'm in the biology department, I'm one of the lucky ones who gets paid a stipend and gets paid a decent amount. However, you know, tried applying for food stamps because the stipend has not been that great wage and is slowly, but surely becoming less and less livable, especially in this area with grad student housing not being as accessible and landlords taking advantage of the fact that if you're close to campus, you can charge way more. I've seen rent prices go up 40% and just mine alone is going up 40% next year. And so I won't be able to live in my current living situation. But how I guess, do you balance then wanting more graduate students in these programs, but not being able to pay a wage that is livable for myself, I tried applying for food stamps, but I was just $100 too much for food stamps. However, I do get $150 every paycheck taken out for student fees. Actually, I do take home less than what would qualify me for food stamps and also just like, social services. I have had roommates who are also graduate students who don't get paid a stipend and are actually required to pay tuition and have experienced homelessness, have had to take out loans just to pay for their rent and have had to budget out how much they need for groceries. On top of that, they are told by their graduate directors that they are highly discouraged or just not allowed to take a job because it would distract from their graduate studies. How do we balance the time commitment that it takes for a student to As somebody mentioned earlier, this is supposed to be a teaching program. This is a mentorship and training program. However, there are many students that have had to take out jobs and loans just to survive and how that distracts and takes away from our productivity if we're wondering where our next meal is going to come from. And also, I guess I would like some clarity on Right now, at least my graduate contract is being paid the minimum stipend for 20 hours a week of work. Then the rest of the time, but realistically, we spend 40, 50 hours a week for our graduate studies, and that doesn't really leave much time to get another job or something, at least not comfortably. I would actually like to question, if I'm done with my classes for my PD, I am a PhD student, Why is it that the overall compensation package is still so much larger and a large percent is going towards tuition if I'm not taking classes, or, why is my PI? Why am I so expensive for my PI if I'm only taking home a small fraction? There Lewin's about the human factor. Thank you, Mal. So first of all, Mallick, it's great to hear from a graduate student and welcome. I know you face special challenges with your time and energy, and I appreciate you taking the time for this town hall. I really do. I say that to every graduate student who's here today. I'm sorry that you have to apply for food stamps too. That's one of the reasons why stipends are so important is livability and competitiveness. You're right, that it would be unethical to induce a student to come here who would struggle financially or personally. By being here, which is why another service the graduate college has provided is honest, clear, total cost of attendance information to students, and they get counseled on this when they come, and why we're pushing so hard for higher stipends, and we're going to get there, and I know for the faculty who are PIs, for the chairs who are trying to make ends meet, this is a challenge. It's worth it. Malek you're one of the reasons why. Let me first. You've also touched upon housing, which is a challenge. It's another thing we're working on. I can't build a building, but I will tell you, I've advocated for building buildings, and there have been consultants who have studied where a graduate housing complex might go near campus and what that would look like and what the market would be for it. So if we improve our financial condition at this university, maybe that's in the cards. Again, not my decision. To do that. But my advocacy, my responsibility to make sure graduate students are well cared for. I'm so glad you talked about graduate student life. The graduate college can't be everything. But the graduate college has a huge network of partners, including the student life office, which has pivoted enormously. My time, I won't say that because I have friends in the research office, but they have been such a great friend to graduate students, and this is an evolution at this university, but they have done a lot too. Should we staff it more? Yes. I know there's criticism of hiring more staff and that sort of thing. Having a person in student life, de, a professional, dedicated, skilled, and trained to work with graduate students, and there are some who help fill some of those gaps, but doing that is one of my goals. Not there yet. I got to work with what I have, but that's so important too. Away, I hope that answers at least part of your question. About your tuition and fees and so forth. First, on your personal situation, I can have someone in the office sit down with you on it. I don't want to do that here to figure that out. On fees, one of the things we do, we don't control the fees student life does, but we do partner with them and make sure graduate students receive the value that they're paying for with their fees. No question this was an undergraduate focused campus. We're evolving away from that to represent who's actually here. In terms of wellness services, student center services and all that, they have changed. That's because in part, there's a graduate college. Students say these things are important to them and we work with student life to do that, and they've been wonderful partners. Hey, Lou, before we go to Rebecca, if a grad student has a financial question, like Malloch was presenting, what office should they go to? The graduate college is a good first stop. Kay? Depending upon what the financial question is, we will route them to the right place. It could be student financial services or something else, but yeah. Thank you. And if that word can get spread, that would be good. If people should not suffer in silence, but there should be some outreach and then Lou's office can send you all to the right people who can work with P one on one. Thank you, Lou. Thank you, Mallick for being willing to share this information. Now Rebecca we're go to go to you, and then for seven she's been waiting patiently for her second go round as has Dale. Hi, I'm a professor in the Department of History and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. I wanted to amplify some of what's been said, because I know Lu from being on the grad Council that you have the bird's eye view of the college. But I think you are hearing today from people telling you how the policies play out in their departments. And so I am concerned about what appears to me to be people telling you this is what I'm seeing and this is what is happening and a response from you that says, Well, no, that's not what's supposed to happen. That's not really the intent. I think that what we're trying to convey is what is happening in our colleges, how these policies are affecting our graduate programs. Much like Stewart was saying in the Department of History, we are similarly looking at cliff that our graduate program will fall off of because smoothing block grants, all of that aside, we cannot continue to pay grad students with the current model. We used to get TA lines. We would get money from the college according to the number of teaching assistants that we were funding. That has gone away. We tilted toward PhD students last year based on all of the discussion that Denny mentioned about really wanting to shift toward PhD students, only to then find out last month that we don't have money. That, in fact, by welcoming people on five year stipends, we have written away our budget safety net. So we are facing that. Whatever the intention was, whatever the golden vision of what the college is supposed to be and how this should work. That is the reality of what's happening in our departments. At the same time, we're told we under this budget model, we need bigger classes. Well, how are we going to teach writing in a class with 100 students? If we have no one to grade the papers, we can't students who pay their own way aren't TAs. You have to pay a TA. How are we going to pay a TA if we have no money in our budgets to do that. Then we're not fulfilling our mission for undergraduates. I mean, this is the reality of what's going on in the departments, this feeling that we have to make choices that are not to the good of the education of our students, that are not to the good of advancing our research or mission as an R one university? That is what we're seeing on the ground. I just want to I don't really have a question. I just felt a need to sort of Amplify what I'm hearing my colleagues say. We listened very carefully. I was in a lot of meetings asking about MA funding for the last year and a half. We asked a lot of follow up questions. We got a consistent message that funding for MA students was going away. Whether or not how that was going to come to pass, that was a consistent message. We listened, we tilted toward PhD students, and now we're not going to have a graduate program. And unless something dramatic changes, and we are not hearing that dramatic changes are coming. We're being told this is the model we have. You have to figure it out with this model. I also just want to credit my colleagues. We are being creative. We are coming up with all kinds of proposals. People are working extremely hard to find out ways to bring in revenue to their departments, to do four plus one programs, to do non credit earning programs. We are coming up, but one of the reasons people are hesitant is that the rules them to keep changing. So that if we put a lot of time and effort into coming up with something that addresses today's problem, like we did last year when we tilted more heavily to PhD students, where will that put us a year from now? Will the rules have changed by then again in terms of which dollars actually help our department, which dollars actually go to someone else on campus, so we never see them. We need clear guidance about not only what is expected of us now, but how that's going to play out down the line because we don't want to make promises to students that we can uphold. And we are truly and earnestly smart people, thinking really hard, able to hold multiple concepts at our head at one time, working on this and getting so many mixed messages and so few resources from the university to do the things we need to do for graduate education. Thank you. I think you better come back on that. Sure. So Rebecca, first message received. Thank you. I do hear you. So remember what I said before, right? And I'm not pretending that your problems are not real. I hear you. The specific problems you're facing in your department are managed capably, I think, well, I don't know. But, you know, by your college, right? So most of the graduate revenue flows through your college. Right? I understand the structural problems you're facing. I get that. I'm happy to sit down with you and talk it through. I would never reach into your department around your college, but I'm happy to partner with your college to talk about that, think about how we can improve that. I know you gave me a lot of specifics. I can't I can't handle that here in an open house right now, but I'm happy to go through details with you and help you if you want my help, try to come up with a reasonable chance. I'm not a historian. I'm not a subject matter expert, of course, but many of my friends are. Okay. It sounds like part of what you're saying about what you're hearing is that if people have concerns particularly about their master students. That's actually an internal college decision, but if you're willing to help people. I you are inviting people to call and have contact with you and you sit down with them and maybe some people in the college and see what you all going to work out. That right of the message that we're getting? That's correct. At least that and the support for master students that the graduate college has consistently applied is not changing. So know that. I'm not changing that part of it. I think I'm going to say if you're lucky, if you're lucky, you're going to get a lot of calls next week. People will love to talk to you and say this would be great. And we want to take up these offers. Sure. Sure. Okay. Now, let's go to Ps. We've held you off for like a half hour. Now I'm going to go to Dae, and then Mark Parcells just put his hand up. So we got three hands in the way. Persei you're on next. Thank you. So I'd like to underline, I think what Rebecca said. This is what she described as affecting all academic graduate degrees, essentially, not professional. I say academics opposed to professional degrees. I'd like to go back to something that Lou said about the colleges passing the revenue as well as the costs of graduate tuition and stipends down to the units. First of all, A tuition and about stipends. What good is a better stipend if a student has to pay tuition. Following on that, we've always had a compact with students where there is no revenue coming in in an academic, a postgraduate degree program. There is an agreement that is tuition remission. There's no revenue coming in. If you're passing down costs where there's no actual revenue, that's new costs with no justification. Anyway, I'm not going to get into the mechanics of that. But tuition remission has always been this model. If that is not mission aligned, I wonder whose mission we're talking about. Because tuition remission is an agreement that we give students courses and education in return for valuable work that they perform. They're teaching classes, we're forming them as teachers, they're helping with research, we're forming them as researchers. Tuition remission they're not paying. There's no revenue. But tuition remission is a concept, and it's a pa, it's a compact. And how can colleges be passing revenue and cost to departments when there is no revenue. We're not dealing with a question of revenue. So I'll stop there. I am profoundly disturbed by this whole conversation. I really don't think it speaks to our values. But the tuition remission question, I think is my most important point. Thank you. Okay, Lou. Thank you for that comment. First of all, I would like to speak to some many of our masters programs. They're all academic. They all value academically. A MBA program is aligned with the prestige of our business program. Same with the international business Analytics program. Students happen to pay for those. Often these things are market driven. I hear what you're saying about no revenue coming in that way of thinking. I just respectfully disagree that as long as a since I've been involved with it, tuition costs and that's since I was a chair, I think, Tuition is real. There's a real cost associated with educating a student, and that gets paid somewhere, somehow, and the remission of that tuition is a choice we make for good reasons. Whether it's to bring the excellent student here, whether it's to bring a more diverse student here who is also excellent, whether it is to bring a researcher here that will help me be successful on my project. But we do it for a reason, and it is not universal. If we were not a publicly assisted institution, maybe we could think about it differently. I'm sorry to say it that way. But if we had a much smaller graduate enterprise or something. It doesn't mean we can't make ends meet have robust graduate education. I'm just saying that there's a sacred compact that all awards go with financial aid. I just don't think that's ever been the case. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you for engaging. Now, Dale, we're going to go next, then we'll get Mark Parcells in and that I think Mallick wants to come back. Dale, you go first. Sure. I appreciate hearing my colleagues takes on these things. I wanted to just draw our attention to a couple of points as they've come up in the conversation. One is this frustration with the rapid change and lack of clarity on core policies. It's impossible to plan for our financial future as departments when the way that budget processes, the flow of these things has changed year to year. My colleague, Rebecca mentioned some of the ways that has affected us in history, but I'm sure everyone on this call is keenly aware and keenly familiar that the budget model ever to be unveiled at some future date and the budget process always ever changing, and even the incentive structure that's behind those. That's why I brought up the Carnegie classification. I really would like to hear your take on how that's influencing policy. One of for those who have not spent any evening reading those guidelines, Carnegie's changed its allocation for how it judges institutions to make it more neutral about how the PhDs are produced. So that is to say, it potentially can for institutions, as this one seems to be, incentivizing production of some kind of PhDs versus others, faster, more per year, throughput, all those kind of things. Other institutions are making di reacting differently to this. But it also changes what the value of a master's program is and its prestige, lowers that. Departments, as you've heard, have been trying to be reactive, but the goalposts keep moving and Even farther away. They're receding into different territories, and that's partly because we don't have a good understanding of what incentives you're responding to, who is in charge of these things. And I think this point that you just made about that tuition is real, and I agree, it costs something to educate someone. Departments don't have control over what level of tuition we set for. The history department is cheaper than other departments. Because our labor costs are lower. I'm in an office that doesn't feel heated, so maybe our heating costs are lower, too, but You know, but we don't have control of any of that. We don't have no control of any of that. But yet we have to respond to incentive structures about what the price of these things are and make decisions, but we don't have this information. It's not communicated, and even if we're trying to base future decisions based on past experiences, that changes semester to semester month to month sometimes. That is intensely frustrating and also to the point at the top here, stifles innovation. If we want to make whole new programs that respond to market incentives, whatever the conceptions the market we come to, that is impossible to do and pivot even in a semester's length because of all this is so murky. Because it's unclear and because the incentive seem to be hidden here. Part of this is a dissolution of a prior cross subsidy model like our undergraduate programs used to subsidize our graduate programs. That is not allowed anymore. It used to be a regular semesters generated tuition revenue for us. Now it's only spring and it's only summer and winter somehow. These are all of confusing things to me just a simple country historian. That's part of the frustration. But in particular, the suggestion made about the incubator program, I think is really a great exemplar of the wrong solution for the wrong problem on a category level. This incubator program, which offers departments money and expects to get paid back with an interest and then offers tools that are, like what you described the marketing tools, which, for history anyways, were a jumble of badly curated consumer data and BLS Bureau of Labor Satistics data that didn't really apply to the kinds of outcomes that we know our students and museum studies as a particular program. We've run for 50 years that's now being slowed down and disappeared. Those jobs don't show up in those government statistics, thus aren't visible to the algorithm in that program. So the whole what's the market reality conversation produces its garbage in garbage out because of that tool is not built for these things. I suspect that's true for many different kinds of high education in part because the things we produce, the training we produce is more complex, than the data that is produced by these private firms by the labor department can do. It's a program that isn't really helpful for us. It could be helpful for some kinds of things, but it doesn't allow us to have the insight into our own operations, and we're also trying to respond to incentives that are unclear unstated, and seemingly, I really appreciate your comments on a lot of these things, Seemingly not the purview of the graduate college, even though they fall under things that affect graduate students, things that affect graduate education. That is to say, the tuition rates, the stipend thing, whether or not the graduate housing is bulldozed, et cetera, et, et cetera. It's not just that we're being profligate and don't know how to do a budget. It's not that we're hoary kind of moribund. We want to be innovative, but to do that, we need to be able to plan, and we're frustrated least from my again, very narrow perspective. I do not have the bird's eye perspective of other folks in this call. It has seemed like the ground has shifted every day under our feet. And what I'm curious about is what incentives you are responding to and what the larger situation you see on these things. Thank you for that, Dale. That's an excellent point. Like you, I would say the pace of change has been breathtaking. And as I won't say old but middle age sailor, I can't control the wind. I can just trim my sails and make the best of it. There you go, that's my one nautical analogy and then you're not going to get another one out of me unless I slip. How can we prepare for this? What the graduate college tries to bring to the table is try to see three or four steps ahead. At this. The way I see it right now, if you look at and say, you want to talk about Carnegie two. Here's There were just discussions about this at the last Council of graduate schools meeting. The general feeling about this is that the Carnegie Foundation is going to be ratcheting up standards to differentiate better. The different categories of institutions. So what was barely research one, maybe this year might not be next year, and so forth, I do not see that as a threat to the University of Delaware. I think our Carnegie classification, at least on the research activity area is not in any danger right now. So that doesn't enter in too much into my level of concerns. But in terms of incentives, for me, what I am trying to do which is, I think helpful to everybody is where we have existing opportunities to generate revenue. That is. Think of a program where students do pay to come. That creates a little room in the budget to help everyone. I've been doing just that both for spring and beyond. New sources of students that can do that. It doesn't mean We're not focusing on students and funded programs. The rising boat lifts off ships, but where we focus our attention is where we see existing opportunity with what we have. At the same time, we're playing a long term plan. I do always rely on the faculty and disciplinary leaders to come up with that. I sense your frustration, Dale. It sounds like you are an innovative guy, and I want to hear your thoughts on what you think can be done within your department. I'm sorry you didn't find the incubator helpful. I wonder if some deeper drilling needs to happen. It sounds like the data they gave you wasn't helpful. There might be other ways to get the insights you need. I can't comment on that except I could sit down with you or whoever in your department and try to think that through if there's genuine interest in doing those things. But again, that would be long term, and the pain we're feeling is right now. I think you're right. The pace at which these changes have come is stressing people out. The way we handle that stress is planning ahead and knowing clearly what we're going to do. You'll know first of all, that the graduate college is acting to try to stabilize things. We're not changing any of our funding policies. The second thing we're going to do is we're going to keep with the increase in stipend because lowering the quality of students that we admit isn't going to help anything. It's going to make it worse. We know that too. I hope that answers your question. Thanks. Thanks. Mark for selves, get your first question. Mark, How you do it? Mark is muted, so we really need to us almost. Here we go. Mark, let Vicki do it. Don't touch anything. And you're good. Okay. Hey, Lou. Hey, M. Thanks for doing this. I know you are looking forward to this afternoon, but it's a great estimate to your integrity that you're standing up here. One of the things I've been a big proponent from the very beginning about establishment of the graduate college because at other institution I was at. It really helped coordinate all the graduate programs across the different colleges and kind of the best practices became the common practices. I'm not sure if I've really seen that. I know that you've offered a lot of the common software that's available for looking at applicants, in terms of overall I know help with graduate programs. It's still every man for himself, every person for themselves. One thing I was really hopeful for the graduate college to do would be to seek some endowment or to develop a foundational support for addressing things like when because it would make you insulated from a lot of the agarties of our budgetary process where we would be able to have from year to year competitively awarded, but also maybe not have tuition taken out of graduate students at all, pick that up because that would be a relatively small lift for a foundation. I mean, because that would be income you could guarantee, and it would kind of alleviate a lot of the problems and the stressors on those receiving stipends and also having to pay tuition on that. And also, among the interdisciplinarity, I thought we would have more centers type grants. You know, have there been centers that the graduate colleges have helped form, you know, the cobrez and the large types because invariably, they not only support research, they support graduate and postdoctoral programs and really make this a competitive place. Yeah. Absolutely. There have been a number of competitive grants that we've supported, so we don't write them ourselves. Those come out of the ideas of faculty typically across multiple disciplines. There's a T 32. There's an NSF skype. These are ones that are successful, by the way, they already, of course, the MIDNRT proposal are ones that we are actively involved with right now, and that impacts dozens of graduate students, or forced multipliers. We benefit from the advanced training those students receive. It's a good example of synergies as well. You mentioned the sharing of best practices across units. The idea of actually training faculty to be mentors didn't come out of the graduate college. That came out of the CBI T 32 grant, the chemical biology Interface grant. But when we learned of it, we had complimentary expertise here in the graduate college, we realized We could help train a small cohort of facilitators from among our faculty who could then offer it to everyone, and that's what we do. Based on some of the things we've learned from that particular T 32 grant, we have applied for enhanced funding for four different programs on campus through the F score program. We're still waiting to hear on that one, but I hope we're successful. We do get involved in some of that. Now of course, there's only so many hours in a day and so many people in the grad college, but we pursue those kind of things. But I've been harping on this idea of the endowment since S Brazo the idea that you would have an independent, so distinct from the endowment of the university, a graduate college endowment that, you know, successful programs could pay into or, you know, just you know, a So yeah, it's not a well kept secret that there was a naming gift for the graduate college some years ago, and it didn't work out. So we remain open to that. I believe that is a presidential priority, though I'm not sure I don't speak for the president on that one. And so Hope Springs Eternal. I'm also working with donor and alumni relations to have a robust alumni engagement campaign aligned with you know, with building funds, not for an endowment, but for direct student support. We've had some success with that. We do have an endo actually, we have two endowed graduate fellowships that are very focused on certain fields, one in engineering, and a certain student, one in education and social policy. They'd like to do 50 of those, to separate the enterprise. Yeah, Absolutely. Absolutely. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Mel if you wanted to come back. So what do you have for us? Yeah, I just wanted to talk a little bit more about the masters program. And just to highlight Alisa perspective from a graduate student, at least in the biology department. I just wanted to say that currently the vast majority of students in our program are master students, and a lot of faculty would probably consider them the workforces of our department. And it just seems I'm not sure. I guess I was a little confused by the rhetoric around who decides whether or not a master's program is going to be paid or tuition based, and students would have to pay tuition rather than get a stipend. I'll just say that for at least the biology department, having a paid master's program that provides a stipend is a huge competitive edge for the university. And I know for a fact that that brings in a lot of talent from across the country there aren't that many paid masters programs. And so a lot of our very talented PhD students started off as master students who then transitioned into the PhD. So I myself, I probably started off as one of three total PhD students who were admitted straight away as a PhD, and the rest of my cohort, I believe, 20 other students, were all master students, and a good percentage of them, you know, they saw that they were a really good fit. We saw that they were very high quality students that were capable of continuing their education, so they transitioned to the PhD. And I just don't see how if, let's say, the biology department were to transition to a tuition based model for the master's degree, As of right now, masters and PhD students go through the same classes and the same amount of hours for research? Would that just mean that a PhD student and a master student would be sitting in the same class together and one of them paid to be there and the other one is being paid that mean that the master student would not be doing research? Would that mean that all faculty would have to account for when they're writing grants, that they're only funding five year six year contracts for PhD students and not able to have the flexibility, let's say they don't have an R 01 grant with millions of dollars and they can only fund a student for two years, does that mean that they no longer have the option of having a master student to work in their lab? I also just wanted to briefly touch on a point that was brought up, I believe by Lou saying that it does cost money to mentor graduate students. I would say that It probably would if faculty and mentors have the time to mentor their students because as of right now, how expensive the graduate students are for PIs in terms of the grant money that is going towards funding a grad student, which, again, we talked about not only the stipend, but also the tuition and overhead that's being paid off of these grants, actually leaves very little money in order to pay for personnel. They're constantly in this cycle of you know, get a grant, publish another paper, but you have to get another grant before the other one runs out. They actually have very little time on top of other administrative tasks that have been shoved onto faculty. They have very little time to mentor their students. I feel like the value of a graduate degree has actually gone down a bit, and we're kind of left more to our own devices. I was hoping if you could maybe touch a little bit on that as well as what would be the situation with a master student in this situation, for example, that I just described. Okay. Sure. Thank you, Mallick. There's a lot in there. So let me just make sure I'm understanding the questions. So it's who decides how to do all this? What about a paid program is highly valued? Not many universities do that. If we stop doing it, we might not get the quality of student that we would like to have. And how do faculty members arrive at this decision when they do it? I think those are the questions. So Who decides? That is faculty for sure. That is where we are right now in the new budget process. It is for the department faculty to decide how they're going to support their graduate students around paid programs being attractive, not many other universities do that, brings valuable students in. That's true. It does come at a real cost. The cost is real, and I guess that is another faculty decision. So Backing up a little bit. Years ago when my wife and I thought about buying our first house, my father sent me this photocopy of a book that he had received on home inspections. It was one of the first home inspectors in the country as a professional. Now there's a whole bunch of these people, but he was one of the first people to do it back in the 40s. He makes a comment right up front before he tells you what to look for. He says, a millionaire can afford a mansion that's got a millionaires everything in millionaires bedroom, bathroom kitchen, everything. Okay. You have to decide what is valuable to you and invest in it. You're probably not a millionaire if you're reading this book. But if the kitchen is what's important to you, you can find a house out there with a millionaire's kitchen that's not a mansion. You can have that, but you have to make that choice. I think this is a time of choices at the University of Delaware, within departments, and how they want to allocate those resources within their graduate portfolio and beyond is a choice that faculty have to make, and I hope it's a good choice and form choice, I'm sure it will be for these reasons. And I hope that think that answers all of your questions. Lou, if there are a lot of people here who are I mean, a lot of the comments have been defending their master's programs. If people want to defend their master's programs, it sounds like your recommendation is some of the faculty, the grad director, the chair, need to go to the dean, then maybe all the provost, and you're willing to help out in this process. Is that kind of what we're hearing? Yes. Absolutely. I think that the first stop is, of course, your dean. And I realize I'm everyone's second dean, but your first dean, the disciplinary dean. That's the one you need to start with or your associate dean. To think about these things. Now, this is not magic. We can't create resources where there are none. To Dale's point, things changed fast. Our financial condition is very challenged right now. There's less than there used to be at one time. But we're taking steps. We meaning all of us together are going to take steps to improve things so that we can do all the things that we want to do. Understand that when you go to your Dam, like, we're all working together here to deal with the shortfall, and we want to preserve what's most important to us. Thanks. Hey, Miguel. Come on in. Oh, no. Don't tell. Don't tell them, Miguel. Promise I want. I just wanted to make a comment and I apologize for doing it because I'm new and I like the historical perspective here, but I can bring a bit of an outsider's perspective, and I just wanted to share that and I'll admit to my bias because I served as a graduate dean in Stonybrook graduate school. I'm actually a fan of grad schools or colleges, part of the reason is actually Mx a first comment, I think it's really important to have a strong voice that advocates for graduate education and that advocates for graduate students. Again, another bias is that I've always been passionate about graduate education. I think I've heard a lot of frustration that really maybe is a little bit unfairly directed towards the words Dean Rossi because a lot of it is really based on unit level decisions that he doesn't control. And I understand we're also facing challenging times. But I just wanted to share that I come from a place that has had a graduate school that has existed for a decade. You really should remember that this graduate college is very young. And even at Stonybrook with all our decades of experience, we had not figured most of these things out and I think Dan Ross's dashboards are certainly an example of something that I don't think anybody does as well as he does. I think for graduates as they come, he's a pretty one, but good one. But my other comment had to do with and this is something that I think addresses a lot of the comments or the concerns that have been expressed, which is training programs. I realize that that's not something that's going to directly fund programs in history. But again, if you take an institutional view, We don't really have very many of these, and I think there's really an opportunity to expand that. That could provide a solution for both the financial piece and the financial concerns that I think are certainly a stress. But I think training programs also have this wonderful property that they catalyze this transformation in the training environment. I think they bring a lot of benefits to the institution. I think that's another argument for why I think there's so much value in having a graduate college because a lot of these training infrastructure that really are essential to develop this training environment. It's very, very hard to do at the graduate program level, and it's really important to have sort of the central structure that can provide all of that. Thank you for that perspective. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Judy, do you want to come in? Yeah, thanks, John. I just want to I'll be brief because I know it's getting late, but I realize I think we all see that, you know, we don't want to shoot the messenger here, but I do want to point out that The bottom line is money, and we're constantly told, well, you know, there's a shortfall, the university is losing money. But the truth is, we don't know what the university does with a lot of its money. And I know that you're not probably able right now to tell us why we don't have access to that information. But I can tell you from just anecdotally. I would say 99% of us here don't believe that. We don't believe that there's a shortfall and we don't believe that the colleges don't have the money. So I'm not trying to be contentious. Again, I believe in sharing information, and I think the deans should be aware of, you know, what the faculty believes, and that's why we have the Faculty Senate, which is excellent. I've been here 37 years, and it's just very impressive with the current group we have. But anyway, I would ask you that when you're in your Dan's meetings to reiterate to them that we're not fools and we want to know where the money goes. And you know, they talk about transparency, but they never follow up on it. And you know, it just breaks my heart to hear people like Mallick talk about, you know, try and qualify for food stamps. That's just shameful that our grad students have to resort to that because who knows why? Because we don't know where the money is. And I think a little bit of transparency might help with some of the problems that for example, Susan was talking about. We don't know how to plan, because you know everything changes and so you know, I just I just had to say that, that sitting here listening to this and listening through 37 years of tenure at the university. It always comes down to money. And please tell us if there is a shortfall, prove it to us. Again, not being contentious, I'm hoping that you'll take this information to the deans and say, Look, you need to be more transparent with your chairs and your faculty. But I do want to thank you. I realize that you're on the hot seat and I appreciate that. It's refreshing. I. Well, thank you, Judy. Actually. I've heard various things hot seat and under fire. This is what I enjoy. I enjoy interacting with the faculty and students. And I enjoy talking about graduate education, even if the message delivered is not what I would hope to hear. That's how we all learn and do better. I see Vicki's got her hand up and actually, I think she has been an excellent representative of the faculty and I witnessed just a few minutes of it one day of her interacting with Dennis about the budget. Maybe she'd like to impart some wisdom on you. And also, John, at some point, we should talk about the grad budget just because I do want to reassure people, but go ahead. Let me just say, first of all, Vicki Fidell gets to unmute herself, which is like a wonderful technological thing. We're going to add it almost 2 hours. I was going to suggest, let's hear from Vicki. And then, Lou, I think you wanted to talk about block budget. And then if you want to say anything about, you know magic travel, something for us to take away. And then maybe leave us with like, two, three bullets you want to leave us with. And I know the budget, I think some travel, and then maybe two or three bullets you'd like us to take away, maybe even take back to our units. Let's hear from Vicki first. Well, thank you for that, Lou. I do appreciate that. And Judy, Oh my goodness, Judy and I go back to the bargaining team. And, you know, one of the big frustrations has been not just understanding the flow of revenue. And the Senate Executive Committee and the budget committee, I guarantee you in every single meeting that we have, we are constantly advocating for more information. And I will say that I am now seeing I'm hoping more doors opening. I'm meeting along with several people from the finance committee with Mary Rimler on a regular basis. And she is asking us questions. Does this make sense? What are your questions? And so she is trying to work with us to get that legibility there. So we aren't, you know, dumped with all of this jargon written language that you know, any of us outside business may not understand, but we've said it in board committee meetings. I've said it privately to board members. I've said it repeatedly and all the meetings that we have with Dennis and Laura, that transparency is absolutely key. I know everyone is frustrated because they feel like people that the administration has done transparency down to the unit level, but they want to see transparency up and we're still working on it. Any particular questions that you have, please e mail me, and I will walk these over to Mary Rimler, and or Dennis and Laura, and or the Board of Trustees members. I've been trying to figure out, let's get flow charts for where that $200,000,000 worth of surpluses went off the financial statements. L et's get an accounting of the 369 million that went out of the capital or went out of operating funds and supposedly funded capital. It's a constant discussion. But please, if you have specific questions, let us know and you can just let me know, I'll farm it out. But I do think this is the big source of frustration and I'm glad Judy landed on it. It's like, why don't we have money? We have a $2,000,000,000 down. Right? Why is this an issue? Why is the board only taking a 4% drawdown and they can take a 5% drawdown. These are constant discussions. But the more you e mail me and let me know you're concerned, I can make a better and better and better case to administration. But I do think we're making progress and we're going to start seeing more information. We're certainly trying on the senate level. Thank you, Vicki. And thanks for what you do. I know I know how good you are. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's only because of the team I have. They're great. So Thank you to the exact in finance and yeah. They're wonderful. Okay. Thanks. Why didn't you bring you said you do want to say some things about budget and about the grad budget. And I think you talked about used the term block. So we want to talk about that because I've been out for 2 hours. Give us some punchy things about budget to closely end with. Sure. There's nothing better for keeping people awake than talking about a budget. So let's do that. So first of all, let me just share with you how the graduate college budget works. And I have a slide to go with it. So the graduate college is not part of the University of Delaware budget model. If we double the number of graduate students here, we get the same. If it cut it in half, we get the same. We have three sources of funds basically in the graduate college. The first is, we receive a fixed basic budget allocation. That comes from the provost. This is what you get. It can change from year to year, but there's no algorithms behind it. If we double the number of interdisciplinary students, doesn't change a thing. We feel good about it because we're providing more opportunity, but all the revenue those students generate go into the other colleges. There have been some assertions made about different things about our budget, particularly about administrative costs and so forth. I actually did an audit. So in fiscal year 2019, the graduate college did not exist. We had a graduate office, and we had professional and continuing studies. In my audit, I removed UD online because UD online now sits in the provost office, neither the people nor the cost associated with them is in this calculation. So in 2019, if you combined the graduate office and PCS, there were 29.5 employees, full time employees. And now in the graduate college, there are 30. So we've grown by a half. If you take me out of the equation, we've shrunk by a half a person. Okay. The actual basic budget in 2019, what the university gave to those combined two offices was about 9.5 million dollar in 2019. Okay? And this is not taking into account inflation. Last fiscal year, The actual basic budget spend out of the graduate college was 8.8 million dollar. You're paying less for people and you got half a person more than you had in 2024. This is a unit that has accomplished, all the things I talked about at the beginning, all the things we've been discussing so far. Now, our personnel costs have gone up a little bit because of all this, you'll see that the rate of personnel growth doesn't even keep up with inflation, and it certainly doesn't keep up with the staff raises that people have received. If you have questions about how we were able to do that as a team and how I did that as a dean, that's another top, I'll answer that question anytime you want, but I want to take too much time on that. In terms of direct student support, that's fellowship, Stipends and stipend intuition blocks. Between those two it's about 50 50. Half the actual direct support are competitive fellowships. You know those, the graduate scholars Awards, doctor of Excellence, the UI Del distinguished scholars program. It's about 7.6 million in 2019. Now back in 2019, we didn't talk about tuition rates, but tuition rates were a mess. That values actually a bit understates exactly how many students you could fund on that. Actual support this year is greater. It's 7.6 million. Part of that is because of fellowship support. Again, these are donors that are attracted to the graduate college. Part of that is using reserves when needed to do that in the interest of the university. But that's going to be our actual spend this year. I just want to make a quick statement to just say, we have been good custodians and stewards of the resources that were given by the graduate college or by the university for the graduate college. We're doing I would argue, anyone would argue far more for this university with far less than there was when there was a graduate office. The move to create a graduate college at this university was a smart move. It really was. To say a few words about about travel and where we are on that one. I want to go into the history of the moving ss, John, you want to do that, but I know it's getting a little late. We have a committee consisting of students, faculty and one staff member, working out a new travel program for the university. Old one had the problem to say there wasn't a lid on the pop. And we need to have a lid on the pot. We need to be fiscally responsible. We totally blew our budget last year, travel budget for this year was a freight train ready to destroy us. As Dean of this graduate college, I will not run a deficit. You'll hear that I will not do that. That creates other problems for the university. Anyway, so You know, the graduate travel funding that is one of many things we do around professional development for students, and we want to support that as best we can. As we try to be fiscally responsible, we had to trim a lot of things and we did. I apologize if the graduate travel thing triggered a lot of emotional response and so forth. We do have a few more resources to cover. I think the new system will be better, and I'd be happy to talk about that more, but I don't think we're going to time for that. I'll also say that when you benchmark our program against other universities, not that graduate education is a competitive sport or anything like that, but I'll just say that our graduate travel program compares favorably to just about any other one out there, and we're happy about that. Give us maybe like two or three or you can two, three, four bullet points you would like to leave us with that you would like us to remember and to take back to our units. Yeah. I think the first one is this. The first thing is, we're having a lot of budget driven conversations this afternoon. But a lot of the values we discussed are not about budget. They're about people and teaching and research and the things we do. I guess the first thing I'm encouraging everyone to do is reflect upon the value that graduate education brings here. I shared that with you in my opening remarks and maybe it looks like this was recorded, so that's good. I don't know if I'm the best Orator, but maybe put that on your phone and listen to it. W is why graduate education is important because it is important to our institution for a myriad of reasons, and it's important to our future. I'll just say this. People will remember your student a lot more than the great paper you wrote. I know many of you have written many great papers, but the student you produced goes on and on and on, carries on your work, carries on your legacy and so forth. Let's remember that. The second thing is, I appreciate the large number of people who are still here. I know we were over 100, now we're down to 81. We were at 140. Which is Wow. Good. Good. Please take what you've learned here and share it with your colleagues. That is really important to. Then I'll just say stay informed. So talk to your graduate college council representative. Ask them we work on all of these things in the graduate college council. If you be the graduate college representative, we need the energy, get involved in graduate education, subscribe to the graduate college new newsletter. We try to make it exciting, and I think it is. Yeah. Then serve on the Faculty Senate Graduate Studies Committee. You want to see how a program is made, you're going to find out. I'll stop right there. I think that's probably more than three things. No. That was good. That was good to explain. And again, we were high at a bit I think we have 81 now, so I'm going to round it to 141. Our top. So we lost six. We didn't even lose half. This is really great. A lot of people who have heard things, and we're going to be able to take things back. I really want to express appreciation to Lou, and I'll use the formal title. Dean Rossi had to answer everybody's comment, and he was game to do it, and it's wonderful when people engaged. And so, Lou, thank you. T hanks a Thank you very much, John. I really appreciate this opportunity. I really do. And I thank everybody for being willing to be frank, because it's important for Lue to hear things that Luke can take back to his office, Luke can take back to the other deans, Lue can take back to Higher administration. And Luke can consider these things. And so this kind of dialogue is wonderful A. Thank you very much. Good. Well, I'm going to say thank you. Now, remember in Zoom days, I used to tell the students, like when we were doing the virus, I'll be the last one out. So Vicki and I are going to be the last people out. So thank you all for coming, and if anyone wants to say anything at the end, you can hang on and talk to us. Otherwise, peace and grade your exams and the essays.
Faculty Senate Open Hearing with Dean Rossi, 12.13.24
From Karen Holden December 15, 2024
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