UCGE Meeting Minutes – September 26, 2007
Present: Barry Trimmer (chair), Arthur Donohue-Rolfe, Larry Feig, Shafik Islam, Peter Uvin, Vin Manno, Peter Walker (minutes).
1) Minutes from previous meeting were approved.
2) Provost Fellows program
We reviewed the Fellows program evaluation, focusing on its implications for how the program can best move forward.
Discussion focused around the relative merits of keeping the administration of the program with the committee or handing it off to the Schools. We also looked at whether the criteria for assigning the fellowships needed to be augmented.
We agreed that:
- We need better proportional material for the program
- We should hand off to the Schools the task for selecting fellows, following a quota handed down from this Council
- Council members should be involved in advising on fellow selection at the School level.
- Schools should submit, to the Provost Fellows Blackboard, documentation describing their choices. The Council can the review this to ensure the program is staying on track.
Vin was charged with taking this process forward
We also, asked Vin to see if the evaluation data could be broken out by School, particularly over issues like dissatisfaction with Labs as a reason for not coming to Tufts.
3) “Operational changes” document
Postpone discussion to next meeting where we should also think about the structure of the meeting with the Provosts Council.
4) “Structuring Doctoral Programs at Tufts”.
We discussed how best to take the document forward. We were in agreement that the document was essentially aspiration and its purpose was to stimulate discussion in the Schools with a view towards lifting the quality of PhD education and its consistency. We had some discussion around whether the proposals should apply to only new programs but agreed in the end that they apply to all, recognizing that for established programs, coming into line with the proposed structure will be more of a challenge.
We agreed that the document needs to be edited to make it more discursive and positive. Barry has offered to do this before the next meeting.
Vin has been charged with seeing if we can gather data form pour peer group universities no how they have sought to promote their PhD programs.
Suggested topics for next meeting
A) Finalize the PhD document.
B) Start looking at cross school, inter-disciplinary research and teaching
C) International aspects of Tufts graduate level scholarship
D) Improved support for grant applications especially across departments and schools and for large training grant (IGERT, PIRE, ERCs, etc)
