GRADUATE COUNCIL MINUTES

November 22, 2022

Present: Wissam AbouAlaiwi, Marcelo Alvarado-Vargas, Arun Anantharam, Brian Ashburner, Tomer Avidor-Reiss, Larissa Barclay, Frank Calzonetti, Saurabh Chattopadhyay, Madeline Clark, Jim Ferris, Bashar, Gammoh, David Giovannucci, Andrea Kalinoski, Kristen Keith, John Laux, Patrick Lawrence, Linda Lewin, Mark Mason Scott Molitor, Ling Na, Patrick Naranjo (GSA), Jeanine Refsnider-Streby, Patricia Relue, Jason Rason (for Sharon Barnes), Barbara Saltzman, Youssef Sari, Connie Schall, Joseph Schmidt, Rebecca Schneider, Zahoor Shah, Snejana Slantcheva-Durst, Weiqing Sun, Jami Taylor, Jerry Van Hoy, Eileen Walsh, Kandace Williams.

Absent: Noella Haughton, Gary Insch, Ahmad Javaid, Bindu Menon, Joseph Slater, Rebecca Zietlow.

Excused:

Guests: Diane Miller, President Gregory Postel.

Grad Students: Mohammad Alhusban, Angshuman Bharadwaz, Kelly Clemens, Kingsley Kanjin, Niloufar Shekowdi, Akshay Mathur, Xue Mez, Abhishelk Podda, Ishtaq Raham, Katerina Turner.

Grad Advisors: Andrew Geers, Dragan Isailovic, Champa Jayasurya, Bina Joe, Matam Vijay Kumar, Qian Chen.

Call to Order, Roll Call, and Approval of Minutes
The meeting was called to order and roll called and the Minutes of September 13, 2022 were approved.

On behalf of Graduate Council, Chair, Dr. Wissam AbouAlaiwi welcomed Council members and guests, Dr. Postel, graduate students and their advisors to the first in-person meeting of the Council for fall semester 2022. In the interest of time guest students’ and advisor’s schedule, the agenda was re-ordered.

Information and Discussion Items
Recognition of Graduate Students Excellence Award recipients with their Graduate Advisors

Chair AbouAlaiwi was pleased to welcome graduate students and their advisors who were able to attend today’s Graduate Council meeting in recognition of noted excellence by graduate students. Recipients were introduced along with their graduate advisors and were photographed with President Postel, Graduate Council Chair, Dr. Wissam AbouAlaiwi and Interim Vice Provost of Academic Affairs and Acting Dean of the College of Graduate Studies.

Certificate reads:

Graduate Student Recognition Certificate

Be it known to all that we of the Graduate Faculty

and the Graduate Council do hereby honor

Student’s First and Last Name

as a graduate student whose demonstrated excellence in research and scholarship in their graduate program, thus contributing to the expansion of knowledge and advancing professional development through scholarly activities.

Council applauded the award recipients and their advisors.

No.	Graduate Student	Level	College	Program	Graduate Advisor
1	Katerina Turner		SM	Biological Sciences	Tomer Avidor Reiss	YES	YES
2	Kimberly Panozzo		AR	Spatially Integrated Social Sciences	Patrick Lawrence
3	MD Ishfaq Ur Rahman		AR	Spatially Integrated Social Sciences	Patrick Lawrence	YES
4	Marjory Marshall		CE	Foundations of Education	Lynne Hamer
5	Xue Mei		MD	Molecular Medicine	Bina Joe	YES
6	Kelly Clemens		AR	Experimental Psychology	Andrew L. Geers	YES	YES
7	Angshuman Bharadwaz		EN	Bioengineering and Biomedical Eng.	A. Champa Jayasuriya	YES	YES
8	Adelyn Sherrard		AR	Experimental Psychology	Cin Tan	NO	NO
9	Akshay Mathur		EN	Electrical Eng. and Computer Science	Ahmad Y Javaid	YES	NO
10	Kingsley Kanjin		AR	Spatially Integrated Social Sciences	Minxuan Lan	YES
11	Niloufar Shekouhi		EN	Bioengineering and Biomedical Eng.	Vijay K Goel	YES	NO
12	Hasaruwani Kiridena		SM	Chemistry	Dragan Isailovic	YES	? TENTATIVE
13	Abhishek Poddar		SM	Biological Sciences	Qian Chen	YES
14	Nicholas Henkel		MD	MD/PhD	Robert McCullumsmith	NO	NO
15	Rachel M. Golonka		MD	Molecular Medicine	Matam Vijay-Kumar	YES	? TENTATIVE
16	Mohannad Alhusban		EN	Civil Engineering	Parvin, Azadeh	YES	YES

Information and Discussion Items - continued
Discussion with UToledo President, Dr. Gregory Postel

President Postel thanked Council for inviting him and indicated he would like to provide some brief remarks on a couple of items, address questions the Graduate Council provided already.

Student Health Insurance
The Graduate Council and the Graduate Student Association have previously voiced concerns over the past year about student health insurance. This has been a concern to us and we are making progress in looking into the matter which is why I wanted to give you an update on the matter. We heard the concern that the current insurance options were too expensive for those who had to purchase it, those who were not able to opt out.

We have been looking at a couple different ways to do this. There are a couple of ways to do this when you are thinking about starting an insurance company. Of the considerations, one is the history of loss, in other terms, the utilization of medical services over the past few years, the more years the better, for the group in question to give some idea as to whether insuring yourself would work or not. I am happy to report that that analysis, at least over the last couple of years, for our data is quite good. And over the last four years it is okay, but not quite as good. The data is fine showing that the loss, the amount of use for medical services, is just fine in terms of trying to put a program together that would be self-supporting. That was not a big surprise to us because we're talking predominantly a younger, healthier population. It works from that perspective.

An extreme example - if you own a company with six employees, and you were thinking about putting your own insurance plan together, you could never do that because everybody would pay $1000 dollars a year premium totaling $6000 for six people. And then if one person has a catastrophic health problem with $100,000 worth of bills, but you have only collected $6,000 worth of revenue. The point is there is a calculation to determine if you have critical mass (enough people) and we are potentially okay there as well. I will explain what I mean by potentially. The concern is that we are not talking about our entire student population. If we were talking about the whole student population, it would be simple because there would be thousands of students. However, most students opt out. They are able to do because their parents have them on insurance plans, and this is less true at the graduate level. We have looked at the numbers to try to see if we can make it or not, and the circumstances under which we can do it would be domestic students would still be able to opt out, they do today, but, international students would be required to use this as the option for insurance, unless they had an embassy sponsored insurance. If someone has embassy-sponsored insurance, that is okay. But short of that, all international students would have to use this as the way they are provided health insurance. Then there would be enough people in the program for it to work.

We will have to have a continued conversation as to whether that is a good solution and whether it represents more of a problem than the one we are trying to solve for.

Perhaps with the right number we can make it work, but not if everyone opts out, because then we would be dealing with a very small population. We are looking at doing this ourselves or we have a bid that is coming back in the next few weeks from an outside insurance company that is a lot cheaper than Anthem.

We are going to compare and contrast those to our own malpractice captive, which you can map, was willing to backstop the losses and so that box is checked. We started to talk to what we call that a third party administrator (TPA), which is a company that manages the claims themselves. Medical Mutual of Ohio is interested, but we have to talk to them a little bit more from the perspective of the TPA, and the challenges with a graduate student population in that a lot of people come in and go out within one or two years, which means a lot of enrollment and disenrollment. It is obviously more work for the TPA and something they have to take into account. With faculty and staff, there is not as much coming and going out as people in general tend to stay longer.

We have really encountered no roadblocks at this point that make it impossible for us to do this -- we're getting far more yeses that no’s as we ask questions. I wanted to give you all a sense for the complexity and the considerations we are tasked with. Spring semester this year we talked about being prepared to offer such a thing at the beginning of the next academic year, and that's still what we're looking to do. I will give you another report between now and then as we progress.

I would like some feedback from all of you about the one concept that I brought up about the international students because I think that is an important consideration that we have to take into account. And then we can do what is best for the group as a whole.

Are there questions or anything that I can answer that I may or may not be able to tell you more than I already have?

Question – Dr. Tomer Avidor-Reiss
What is the cost range? Students complained when it was about $3,500 dollars per year. Is the proposal designed to take down the cost?

Answer – President Postel
Of course. We would not do it if we didn’t think we could offer at a lower price. It would not make sense to do all this work. We feel that we can offer at a lower price point. We are still getting some quotes so we hope to have soon after the holidays.

Question – Dr. Patrick Lawrence
Have we looked at peer institutions with graduate schools or profiles with the same number of student domestic and international and see how they're handling and whether there any commonalities in terms of how they can manage that coverage and student health insurance structures we can learn from?

Answer – President Postel
We have talked to Medical Mutual of Ohio about that. We do not want to reinvent the wheel here if at all possible, so we are obtaining some data from them and schools handle in very different ways. There is no uniform way to do this.

A lot of it depends on the size of the population in question. More people in a program results in lower agreements. When you have smaller populations, it is always tricky hard to keep the price status.

Dean Scott Molitor – UToledo is not an outlier in terms of requiring all students to carry health insurance. I believe that was across the board.
Marketing Graduate Programs
Another thing I wanted to mention, and this, this is actually exciting and I think shows a lot of opportunities. One of the things that we became concerned about at least a year or so ago, is that the university had really never done any type of concerted marketing for graduate programs. Some of the individual colleges and schools had efforts of their own where they would reach out either to former students, people in their circle, or national societies, or those kinds of things. But, the university overall, did not have targeted marketing of graduate programs, which is such an important part of what we do. This is an enormous miss and so we have started to change that. We are investing more money in it this coming year.

Graduate Programs Week – November 5-10, 2022

Sharing some initial data from our recent Graduate Programs Week. We did some marketing and have collected some data with a dashboard. As a result, our total ad performance resulted in 190,305 impressions, a big number representing the number of people who viewed the ads, whether for 10 second or an hour. As we view further down the funnel we see responses and clicks and we determine the cost per click for the work, RSVPs and inquiries. The bottom line is we got 399 leads. Obviously a lead is a much more specific than an impression in that someone has expressed interest in a specific program and wants more information.

Graduate Program Week leads (399):
Engineering 124
Business 110
HHS 40
Medicine 30
Nursing 23
Pharmacy 14
Law 4
Other

This this is by no means meant to be a final result of a new strategy to market but rather an initial look at interest, and there is a fair amount of interest. This was only with about a $380,000 investment. There was not a huge amount of money put against this, but it is the first time any effort has been made to reach out to prospective graduate students.

I think you are going to be seeing a lot more of that. One of the things that we are going to be doing in our five year financial forecasting, and there will be some money put aside for strategic priorities, will include marketing and communications to prospective students, both undergraduate and graduate, and online programs. Historically, UToledo has not advertised its online programs which is surprising, and therefore, it is not surprising that there have been small numbers of students. This is a real opportunity to emphasize our graduate and online programs which are judged to be of high quality. The problem is not the quality but the lack of advertisement that has resulted in poor enrollment performance.

We are excited about these initiatives and it was a nice to kick off for Graduate Programs Week. I wanted to show you that we are actually trying to measure some of these responses as opposed to just having a gestalt about how things went because we have a more specific pattern in response.
Strategic Planning and Financial Forecasting Process
I wanted to say a few words also about our strategic planning and financial forecasting process to let you know where that is. The strategic planning committee, a large committee, has put it on a lot of time, more than they've bargained for. They have compiled input from across the campus: surveys town halls and various forums where the campus community had an opportunities to weigh in on things of importance to the university in the next years ahead. The committee's work is largely done. The results of all of that work is being distilled and massaged into a plan that is a typical length and readable. And most importantly, has measurable things and metrics and goals associated with it.

Metrics and goals are progressing which is a good thing because the Board of Trustees (BOT) has insisted that it be finished by the end of the calendar year. The plan will be presented to the BOT next month for their review and they will vote during a special meeting in January. They're going to be very interested in the metrics and in the goals, how we're going to measure those things and how they tie into our ability to forecast with our finances will look like in the years ahead. The Board is tasked with ensuring the financial sustainability of the university. It is their fiduciary duty and probably the thing that the state cares the most about. They want to make sure that their entities are all solvent and Boards are tasked with that responsibility. This is interesting because this type of forecasting over time is something that higher education has not really done. As we have talked to a lot of folks in financial meeting and consultants we work with about financial needs there is kind of a mad scramble for universities to do forecasting more than a year in advance. But financial forecasting more than a year in advance is not something that universities have done. They have figured someone will support us whether the state, the governor, enrollment will go up and hospital will get busier and we’ll be okay.

People are realizing maybe not with inflation at 8 ½% this year the state is not enthusiastic about allowing the universities in Ohio to raise tuition. That means in money is short supply with increasing costs, labor, supplies, and buildings need repaired. None of those things are getting cheaper. We don't have the price elasticity and our tuition that was relatively flat. And what does that look like year over year.

You can limp from one year by making changes to the next but what does this look like five years from now. At a meeting of Ohio universities’ presidents recently I asked some colleagues whether they have done any five-year financial forecasting for their universities. One individual from a sophisticated university said, he had been doing it out of his own interest on the back of napkin, but that he had not been asked to. I asked what that looks like to which he replied ‘it is ugly’ but that we’re going to have to get serious. This requires a lot of people spending time on this using spreadsheets and forecasting. And while some of the numbers that you put into forecasts are guesses, they are well-educated guesses and also attempts to be realistic. This is where the rubber meets the road and you have to say what things are going to look like. You can always predict the expenses a lot better than the revenues. This is the exercise we are undergoing, and it's causing a lot of heartburn. Deans and Faculty Senate and even myself are worked up about this. It is a tough project, but one sets us on more solid footing in terms of better understand the realities of what we face and how we were planning to face those things. This will better prepare us to deal with those things as they come along as opposed to just letting reality do it one year at a time. That is where we are. It is going to be a busy month of December as we get to the finish line to try and finish this project and get it presented to the board. I feel good that the work we are doing that will make us stronger. I will stop here so there is time to talk about some of the other things you are concerned about.

Chair AbouAlaiwi presented the questions from the Graduate Council to President Postel:

Q1: What is the projected declined enrollment and its effect on graduate faculty numbers?

Answer – President Postel
Short answer is yes and the longer answer is we are not looking at doing something dramatic like Wright State did in declaring an emergency and violating tenure contracts and so forth. There is no talk of that. We are not in that kind of position. However, we do have the numbers of faculty and staff and facilities that more closely approximates to what the university looked like twelve years ago as opposed to what it looks like today. The answer is yes, we need to work to the middle. We need to compromise all the way around which is to grow and to consolidate and simplify some of the things we do. We are taking a hard look at demand. The State is insisting that we focus most of our efforts in areas where there is workforce demand. Workforce could be defined a lot of different ways. But the State wants to see our resources being used for things where there is a pathway to a job and something that that leads to workforce development before they will agree to use state resources. It makes sense. We have to tailor our offerings which we have not done for a very long time. We have areas where that is absolutely the case.

We have some other areas where we really need to think through how we are using our resources. That analysis is going to be ongoing. It is not the kind of thing that happens in a three-day period, it is a process not an event. As we are initiating that process I think what you will see is rather than people losing their jobs there will be emphasis on hiring. Every hire needs to be clearly analyzed whether it is essential and what would happen if that position were not filled. We have to ask ourselves if would be better to hire a different position somewhere else. Every time a person retires or leaves the University you have that opportunity, and considering the size of the university, the number of people who come and go in any given year is surprising. There is a lot of turnover and particularly among staff.

Every time that happens it is an opportunity to think about the best use of resources. Over time, that allows you to right size to the population that you serve as opposed to trying to do it overnight.

We are not wanting to do anything of a panic nature or anything that is going to cause people to concern themselves that their jobs are in jeopardy. We are just looking carefully at the use of all of our resources.

Q2: Affiliation between ProMedica and UTMC and its effect on UToledo COMLS graduate programs

Answer - President Postel
I will tell you what I know. This is not something that's completed but a process that is still underway. that that is still underway. You can read about them in the newspaper and follow the course of the company that has financial challenges like a lot of healthcare companies. They have recently divested themselves of very large chain of nursing homes. Those facilities are being operating them for Welltower. Their operation and ProMedica are being thinned down, they're probably going be half or a third the size they were a couple years ago. It is going to be a much smaller company. They're looking at all their expenses and their obligations much like we are except their problems are worse than ours. They have asked us to look at the agreement that has 44-years remaining in a 50-year agreement, in part due to their circumstances and also the fact that we are emphasizing the continued growth and strength of UTMC. I think it is a little different than what all the parties thought was going to happen years ago. There is no conclusion and nothing has been agreed to. As you might imagine they have wishes and we have wishes and they are pretty far apart. I believe we will have a relationship going forward with ProMedica. My sense is that it will be smaller than the relationship we have today but more durable as a result. The College of Medicine will have to flex depending on the amount of decrease. The school grew pretty dramatically during the ProMedica years with the assumption that that was a solid 50-year deal. If it is not, then they are going to need to compromise somehow to make some adjustments.

The other piece is that as UTMC becomes stronger and busier the hospital will have the ability to help the medical school as well and replace some of the funding that that may be lost in a revised deal with ProMedica. It is not an event but a process by which we move from one reality to a more future- facing reality. Dr. Cooper has been working closely with me to think through some of the scenarios, and he is making sure that cutting faculty and hurting students is the thing on the list. I worry that that there is some vulnerability around some of the ways we fund research in this, which I don't like, but there has been an extraordinary increase in research over the years. It is that sort of thing that causes start up packages to be distributed over a longer period of time to cut annual expenses.

There are all kinds of things you can do like that. While they are not perfect solutions we are going to have to make some changes.

Question – from Dr. Tomer Avidor Reiss
Thank you for the explanations which help clarify our concerns. A few years ago, there was a decision at UToledo to change the way that we allocated grant money.

Faculty have been asked that when they have the graduate students that they are bringing in on a grant, when the grant is a certain size, that the grant needs to pay the tuition. This has a major impact because as tuition comes out there is not enough money in the grant to allow faculty to produce research. It has a negative effect on research productivity. Considering all the things that are happening, is there consideration to go back to the tuition support structure in place a few years ago when tuition was not paid out of the grant?

Answer - President Postel
It was discussed about a year ago but not as much recently. I am aware of the topic and I think it is still a viable conversation. Now that we are moving into incentive based budgeting, colleges and schools need to take a look at it both ways, particularly for those schools that have a substantial amount of grant funding. Schools that have a fair amount of extramural support for grants should create two scenarios for budget, one based on our current structure and the other the way we used to handle. Looking at the benefit and the risk for each school and where there is consensus, then work with Dr. Calzonetti in the Office of Research to see which policy makes the most sense. I am not driving an agenda on that but I would like to see the result and do that which makes the most sense for the largest number of schools that have skin in the game. It is clearly a topic worth revisiting. I know some people feel really passionate about it, and if it helps the overall equation for those schools and productivity, then we should do it. Everything is on the table is the best way to answer your question.

Terri Hayes-Lepiarz requested those asking questions to kindly speak up for acoustics and recording in the minutes.

Question – Dr. Linda Lewin
You mentioned there was a cost associated with graduate student recruitment. Is that a strategy going forward to measure the both the yield and the cost of recruitment?

Answer - President Postel
Yes, we do that routinely for all of our marketing expenses. We measure what we spend against what we what we receive in terms of impressions, clicks, and admitted students so that we can understand our return on investment. That is the industry standard for universities to do that. On the undergraduate side where we have more experience marketing, as we go into new areas like Chicago, and Dallas and other cities outside of the state, we compare the value of what we are spending to the benefit in each of those markets and determine whether to stay in that market or not. Having the data allows you to make a site by site comparison.

Question – Dr. Linda Lewin
Do we have an identity that makes us to stand out?

Answer - President Postel
I think we do. If you ask people around campus you will not get a uniform answer. I think our strengths are in three to five areas:
Health-Related fields
Includes our hospital, medical school, pharmacy school and nursing school, Health and Human Services.
Engineering
We have a lot of emphasis in engineering.
Graduate Programs
There is a lot of emphasis in graduate programs in general because that represent a significant portion of our overall student population.

After that, it starts to drop off really fast. However, you can’t cut it off right there. For example, in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, there is ongoing incredible work with water quality, astronomy and solar energy. They are small programs in terms of number of participants, but are big in visibility either because of the research that is being done with environmental impact or otherwise. Over the years the University has prided itself on being super broad, and in the days when the resources were infinite, you could afford that luxury. With 13 colleges and schools and everything imaginable, all cannot be a part of the elevator speech. It is something we have struggled with. If you were to ask where the most the interest is and where the most revenue comes from, it is what I said initially, that is 90% of who we are. However, it is not 90% of who we are in terms of all the things we value.

Question – Dr. David Giovannucci
Regarding the affiliation agreement, right sizing and the College of Medicine, it seems there are two things happening: Declining enrollment on the undergraduate side and the delayed affiliation payments by ProMedica are a sort of a double hit of $14.5 million to college. For example, my department’s budget was asked to cut $600,000, so these are really difficult and destabilizing cuts. This puts enormous pressure on our graduate programs in the COMLS as well. Where does the $14.5 million come from?

Answer - President Postel
Dean Cooper is doing scenario planning which involves early stages of putting some of those kinds of decreases in place. They are not being done in any way related to enrollment issues. In response to potential losses of funding for the college itself through affiliation, we don't know what that's going to look like. It may not be anywhere near that bad, but it might be. The University does not have a good answer where an immediate replacement source would come from. If there is a small gap, sometimes the university can bridge that, but if there is a big gap, the University does not have the capacity to bridge. I know that that is not what you want to hear. I do not like it either, but it is where we are. It is not because of undergraduate enrollment or something like that.

Dr. Giovannucci expressed appreciation for Dr. Postel’s candor. He further commented in addition to the $2 million cut to the College of Medicine and Life Sciences budget, many faculty have the perception that the COMLS is subsidizing the University in general.

Answer - President Postel
That is not exactly true. There was confusion. It was characterized that way, but it was it was a little over $2 million dollars. The way the college paid for that, there was an external tuition support agreement in place with ProMedica. It was coming to an inflection point where it was either going to be renewed or not. It was $2 million annual expense that flowed through the College of Medicine budget, for reasons that were not entirely clear. It had nothing to do with the installation agreement with ProMedica and predated it. There was a decision to not renew, so that $2 million dollar line item dropped off. The College of Medicine used that as 95% of their budget cut. There might have been another $100,000 dollars, but that that was the vast majority of it. There might have been miscommunication around that but there was not a $2 million cut to the college. It was the pass-through that was eliminated.

Dr. David Giovannuccci thanked President Postel for clearing up that misperception.

Question – from Dr. Jim Ferris
Is there a sense when the affiliation agreement will be resolved?

Answer - President Postel
It's very hard to say but I would not be surprised if it took another year. There is a contract in place that both parties are obligated to.

Chair AbouAlaiwi expressed his appreciation to President Postel for always taking the time to speak with the Graduate Council and discuss issues of importance to our graduate students.

Executive Reports
Report of the Executive Committee of the Graduate Council
On behalf of Graduate Council, Chair, Dr. Wissam AbouAlaiwi provided a brief report:

Graduate Student Recognition
Appreciation to all of the graduate advisors that nominated graduate students and everyone involved in the process. Initially there were only a few nominations. Nominations were opened to all graduate faculty and the deadline was extended which resulted in nominations pouring in. Council is pleased to recognize these students and their advisors. There will another call for nominations in spring semester and recognition during a Council meeting. We are organizing the process that will include a nomination form.
Standing Committee Vacancies
A representative from the College of Medicine and Life Sciences is needed on the Curriculum Committee. A representative from the Health Science Campus is needed on the Bylaws and Constitution Committee. Those interested in serving should contact GC Vice Chair, Dr. Patrick Lawrence.

Report of the Vice Provost for Graduate Affairs and Dean of the College of Graduate Studies
Dr. Scott Molitor reported:

Graduate Student Recognition
Expressed thanks and appreciation to Chair AbouAlaiwi and GCEC for creating the initiative of recognizing graduate students and their advisors.
Graduate Programs Week November 5-10, 2022
In regard to the marketing and investment effort that went into Graduate Programs Week, applicants are being tracked and provided an application fee waiver to those who attended these events. Enrollment will also tracked as look at return on investment.

Dean Molitor expressed thanks and appreciated to everyone involved in this endeavor. The College of Graduate Studies Staff, Terri Hayes included, MarComm and Enrollment Management have all done a fantastic job. A lot of work went into planning and coordinating this team effort. We will look at what worked: in-person events, online events, and information tables in various locations. Some of the in-person events were not highly attended but the information tables near Starbucks in Carlson Library were very well attended. These considerations will be taken into account for planning such an event next fall.
Prospective Student Communications in Slate
We are implementing systems to improve our communication with prospective graduate students similar to the undergraduate level so that we are responding to prospective graduate students who have expressed interested in our graduate programs. More to come on that initiative.
College of Graduates Studies Reorganization
I attended Faculty Senate on November 15th to talk about the reorganization of the College of Graduate Studies. As you are aware, this conversation originated from the Reimagining COGS taskforce that was convened last year. We will be submitting a proposal to the Board of Trustees to change the name of COGS to the Office of Graduate Affairs under the Office of the Provost. The leadership position would no longer include a Dean of COGS but only the Vice Provost for Graduate Affairs. This is the final step to follow all of the other changes executed before I started as Acting COGS Dean.
Commencement Saturday, December 17, 2023
Thank you for those who volunteered to serve as marshals.
Pipeline Programs Proposal Process
For the next GC meeting I will bring a proposal on pipeline programs. It is the same process presented to you in Spring 2022 by Dr. Thompson but we needed codify the process itself – how you get approval at the undergraduate and graduate levels. You will need to know this process when students want to enroll in these programs. Thus, there will be process document in addition to the policy on pipeline programs.

Discussion:
Dr. Tomer Avidor-Reiss quested whether more advertising and promotion should be done at the undergraduate or graduate level.

Dean Molitor suggested it be promoted at both levels but primarily at the undergraduate level. He referenced that when he was in the undergraduate office in the College of Engineering, Engineering pipeline programs were advertised to prospective undergraduates and their parents touting the fact that if they came to UToledo for their undergraduate program, in their senior year, they could take some courses toward a master’s degree and complete that degree in another two or three semesters after completing their undergraduate degrees. Marketing also should be directed towards undergraduates in their second and third years.

Dr. Patrick Lawrence added that it is worth promoting at the high school level. Through the college credit plus program students come into UToledo with 30 credit hours.

Report of the Vice President for Research
Dr. Frank Calzonetti reported:

Research Council
Reviewed letters of intent for URFO Awards, up to $50,000 each.
- Interdisciplinary Research – 10 letters received with five selected
- Research Innovation - 9 letters received with four selected

Dr. Rick Francis is in the process of notifying submitters and including Research Council comments. They are sent for external review. They will be invited to submit full proposals in January.
Staffing
There are continuing challenges with staffing. We lost one of our grants coordinators to Purdue. We also lost a person to review contracts, who was only with us one month. We are trying to fill those positions as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience.
New NSF Guidelines
Connie Schall, Rick Francis, Kim Thorne and University Libraries are looking at the new guidelines coming out from NSF and will be setting up a session with the Graduate Council to provide more details.

Report of the Graduate Student Association
Patrick Naranjo, President of the Graduate Student Association (GSA) reported:

Intramural Sports Tournament (Basketball and Volleyball) – November 12, 2022
Our first ever GSA sponsored sports tournament was a success. Shout out to the College of Medicine and Life Sciences who won all of the matches! Another sports tournament will be arranged for spring semester.
Executive Board/Officers
All of the positions are filled.
Midwest Graduate Research Symposium
Planning to get underway beginning during winter break.

Standing Committee Reports
Report of the Curriculum Committee
On behalf of the Curriculum Committee, Dr. Timothy Mueser, Chair, presented the committee report. Council approved unanimously.

Psychology program revisions - four proposals have the same change, adding a clinical practicum option.

Engineering two program modifications in MIME and one new course proposal. We used to ask what the enrollment was for classes, but since the answer was always the same, that there are students and it needs to keep going, we stopped asking assuming it would be converted to a regular class that is popular. This looks like an interesting course. The program revisions are mostly codifying what they are doing.

minutes

Discussion:
Q: How can a graduate student serve on the committee?

It is indicated in the Graduate Council Bylaws.

Q: Can Engineering students register for dissertation research before they pass the qualifying exam?

Prior to the qualifying exam, and I believe there are two ways to do this. You bring everybody in as master’s and then qualify to a PhD. A lot of programs bring in PhDs and they start out as PhD candidates from day one. It depends on the program approach, and this one appears that they bring them in as PhD students. Yes, they can register.

Report of the Membership Committee
None.

Old Business
None.

New Business
None.

Adjournment
There being no further business, the Council adjourned at 1:46 p.m.