MCFC members present: Gady Agam (CS), Glenn Broadhead (Hum), Jeff Budiman (CAE), Kevin Cassel (MMAE), Jeffery Duan (AMAT), Steffany Evanoff (student representative), Andy Howard (BCPS / Secretary), Vijay Kumar (ID), Ganesh Raman (MMAE), Ken Schug (BCPS), Phil Troyk (BME / MCFC Chair), Judi Zawojewski (MSED).

MCFC members absent: Joyce Hopkins (Psyc), Robert Krawczyk (Arch), Christena Nippert-Eng (SOC), Kenneth Noll (CHEE), Jay Schieber (CHEE), George Schipporeit (Arch), Miles Wernick (ECE), Geoff Williamson (ECE), Michael Young (Psyc).

UniFC members present: Howard Chapman (Kent), Joel Goldhar (Stuart).

Committee Reports:

1. Undergraduate Studies (Ganesh Raman) Chemistry tracks (not shown in memo) Discussion of whether there needs to be action by this group on this program. Certificate in premed Moved (Broadhead) seconded (Schug) to accept recces of UG Studies (10-0). Also: short preliminary discussion of reduction in IPro requirement. Qs: can we learn enough from one? What happens to the 3 hours that are there? pov1: those hours are part of the general ed requirement so removing the requirement doesn't remove those from general ed req pov2: it should be up to the department, and the dept could itself require a second IPro.

   History: Schug: was only one of the two IPros taken from the GenEd Req? Troyk: more complex than that. But the fact is that the gen ed requirement is a fixed # of hours. We need to know how it's worded. Ganesh: reason for proposal: admin didn't really deliver on promises for compensation ($4K, then $2K?); also, some depts don't recognize faculty efforts. Further: proposal for more sponsored projects being run as IPro: in that case fac member is responsible for deliverables, and then the student-independence of the project could be compromised. ...That's an opinion, not a fact. Some students loved their first IPro, and didn't like the 2nd; some only enjoyed their second. Academic Units are supposed to be discussing the issue, and the option is to enable individual depts to require more. Proposal wording: Whereas General Educ presently requires students take >= 6 credits of IPRO, &whereas Depts can require and students may elect to enroll in more IPRos than demanded by GenEd, and Whereas the Ipro pgm is not adeq funded & academic units are not adeq compensated for faculty resources assigned to the IPRO program: be it resolved: the Gen Ed req be reduced to 3 credit hours of IPRO. Joel: original argument for them is still valid (differentiating an IIT UG educ from a non-IIT UG educ) but they don't always work. Distinction between idea of IPROs and execution of them. His experience is with EnPros--a lot don't work.

   Troyk: asked Ucci what it thinks. If admin can't afford it and fac don't like it, what do we think? Unclear what the provost thinks. Phil & Margaret Huyck interviewed fac who had done IPros; the ones who had done it liked them and no one was being forced to do them against their will. Steffany: her friends liked IPro. It's cool to get together with people from other depts to solve a problem. Joel: other people do this--e.g. Wooster Tech. Ray Bauer, "Interdisciplinary means you have no field." Can we solve these problems? yes. Ken Schug: admin _is_ looking into the funding issue and whether they're working. Maybe keep 'em at two till we've seen whether they can be fixed? Glenn: has done four of them. IPro program has tried to get more guidelines together; now there are too many guidelines to be followed, because the criticisms have given rise to a perceived need for accountability. Phil: residual dislike of IPros for non-academic reasons, namely that these are holdovers from Nagib era. Kevin: are they steady-state? Phil: probably, apart from hoped-for increases in enrollment. Vijay: overall review of program by the faculty is needed to figure out whether it was working. Joel: we've lost the program-review-every-five-year concept. Maybe IPros need to be reviewed more often? Once UG studies passes or doesn't pass this, it comes to us.

   Grad Studies (Glenn): no report.
   There are issues: (1) IP guidelines: Carlo presents. He originated this in his role as an administrator for grad studies committee. Original motivation: how do we handle IP rights for courses distributed over the internet, particularly if they're re-mounted over the internet? This is an effort to provide incentives so faculty and their AUs to offer courses over the Internet. The idea that the faculty member is the primary owner of the IP rights to this material. Other Universities are grappling with the same issues and arriving at similar conclusions. Phil: what do we do this? Handbook doesn't clarify what we should do with this next. Carlo: it's really an agreement bw Univ and faculty members. Natural progression is to Faculty Council. Provost approves. Glenn has been using some replayed lectures but not entirely for TCom. He doesn't think a single policy regarding stale-dating would be appropriate. Kevin: what about initial Internet development? Carlo: that's an administrative issue. The admin needs to resolve that. One way (e.g. via 2(b)) is for IIT Online to help more; other way is at the departmental level. #4 is an attempt to motivate depts to do that. Kevin: the problem with this proposal is that the incentives are back-end loaded, not front-loaded. So apparently the hope is that the depts will be farsighted enough to recognize the value of these programs and plow the money into course development. Phil: an academic dimension to this: 1st time that a model would be deployed at IIT in which returns are keyed to enrollment. Several people: the extra income will get pulled back. Phil: therefore it's not as simple a situation as we might think. Carlo: PSMs are good revenue sources. There's no good formula for paying for those people. Joel: if it's part of the dept base budget it'll always disappear. The only way it'll work is if it goes directly into the fac member's salary. Carlo: Univ & AU, not the faculty member, mount the program. Joel: Univ of Calif rule for patents: 1/3 fac mem, 1/3 individ, 1/3 Univ. That kind of formula works well. Phil: wants to delay this so further discussions can occur. But maybe a small group should work through that: Joel, Ken, Carlo, Glenn. They'll come in with a distillation.

   Degree Proposal: Professional Masters Degree in mathematical finance. Jeffery Duan (AM). Jointly sponsored by Stuart and College of Science & Letters. Business opportunity for univ and benefit to students. Argument is that it will pull in underemployed engineers who want to make more money--also some UGs. Some courses already exist. UofC pgm is join among Econ, Math, and Stats. Significant discussion. Will it be online? No. Is it really a one-year program? Probably not, because of pre-reqs. Jeffrey moved, Andy seconded, approval of program as presented. Joel: this will be fine tuned so don't obsess over the details. Glenn: speaking against making a decision now because there's insufficient evidence that the econ model for the program works. Joel: maybe cross-list the program as UG? Ralph: make the approval conditional on adequate enrollment? Vote: 7-2 in favor.

   Other committee reports: to be shelved. Sabbatical leave committee did meet and forward recces to Provost. Adjourned 1:45pm.