Members Present: Chancellor Carter; Vice-Chancellors Remak, Turner; Deans Shull, Harvey, Yamaguchi, Pinnell, Endwright, Fry; Professors Breneman, Gray Johnston, Lynch, Murray, Newton, Osterburg, Otteson, Pratter, Stolnitz, Thomas, Weiles, Wentworth, Berkeley, A. Brown, L. Brown, Daniel, Daugherty, Farmer, Holland, Long, Ludwig, Maxwell, Panschar, Pilder, Richey, Shiner, Wennerstrom, Willbern; Messrs. Parker, Maguire, Turner
Alternates Present: Professor R. Bruce McQuigg for Dean Clark; Dean William B. Christ for Dean Bain; Professor Robert Milisen for Professor Auer; Dean David W. Kramer for Professor Case; Professor David Bleich for Professor Gross; Dean John Thompson for Professor Stryker; Professor Ira Horowitz for Professor Panschar (part of meeting); Mrs. Mary Kleinhans for Mr. King; Mr. Marty Levy for Mr. Parker (part of meeting)
Members Absent Without Alternates: Professor Schornhorst; Miss Zilli; Messrs. Coller, Eherenman
Visitors Present: Mr. Earl Hoff (News Bureau)
The meeting of the Bloomington Facility Council was called to order by Chancellor Carter at 4:45 p.m. Chancellor Carter said he had no Presiding Officer's Business; he then asked for Agenda Committee Business. The Secretary reported that the only member of the Agenda Committee in town on Wednesday, May 6, had been Professor Gray; he had conducted a telephone poll of the Council, on which he would report. Professor Gray said he would review briefly the reason for the poll. About 5:00 o'clock that afternoon Mr. King and another student gave him, through Dean Schreck, a petition with 6,000 signatures asking that Thursday be declared a day of mourning for the students killed at Kent State; that a service be held in the University Auditorium; and that classes be dismissed for the day. Two of those requests had already been authorized, and he then agreed to put to the members of the Faculty Council, in response to that petition, a recommendation that Chancellor Carter dismiss classes at 9:30 and 10:30 on the following day. He had worked under two impediments: one, all his colleagues on the Agenda Committee had left town; and, second, the only list he had of the Faculty Council was issued in September and the Faculty Council had changed since then, so a few members were never called. He did reach 25 members of the Council; the vote, listed below, was 18 in favor of dismissing classes, 5 opposed, and 2 abstentions. At 11:00 p.m. he had reported to Chancellor Carter that there was strong feeling in the Faculty Council for dismissal of classes for those two hours.
Telephone vote on the recommendation to Chancellor Carter to dismiss classes 9:30 and 10:30 Thursday, May 7, 1970:
Vice-Chancellor Remak wanted to say something about that mourning service. He thought that a number of speakers at that service really fulfilled the function of the mourning service, putting the campus together for the purpose for which it had come; he was grateful to them. However, he was appalled, he said, that there were other parts of that service which were much closer to a political propaganda meeting than they were to a memorial service. He felt that if we really wanted to have a community spirit, that this kind of function should not be used for purposes of political propaganda. He thought there was room for political proselytizing on this campus but not in a memorial service for dead people.
The Secretary said he had been asked by several people to make clear that the referendum conducted the previous day had not been held as an official action of the faculty or any part of the faculty; it had been conducted by student groups and participation in it by faculty was on a voluntary basis. The representative organs of the faculty or the various controls of the faculty with regard to voting rosters, and so on, had not been used.
As another item, the Secretary said he had been approached by representatives of the Student Government and asked to designate faculty members to be associated with them in engaging in conversations with representatives of the city government with regard to the possibility of joint meetings. The Agenda Committee, in pursuance of its responsibilities to refer matters to committees, had asked the Student Affairs Committee to designate certain of their members to participate in these conversations.
Finally, the Secretary said a formal request by the University Ministries had been presented, asking that the Faculty Council in effect adopt certain resolutions dealing with the question of the policy governing the use of force on campus and the general matter of distress and unrest among students, and faculty concern about this. The view of the Agenda Committee was that the Council had addressed itself to these matters in some respects at its last meeting and probably would be discussing the subjects in other respects at this time and that, therefore, these resolutions would not be put on the agenda. They would, however, be reproduced and distributed with the minutes (Circular 55-70). He had no further items from the Agenda Committee, but thought these reported items might produce some comments.
Mrs. Kleinhans said that the students on the campus, at least the Student Government and student leaders, had taken collective stands on, especially, three issues—the Southeast Asia war, the situation of blacks in the state of Indiana, and the Kent State killings. She wished that the Faculty Council would also consider taking action upon those matters. Professor Maxwell said the faculty, along with the students, had been polled on substantive questions, and he understood there would be a separate tabulation of the responses of faculty as a whole to these various issues. It seemed to him somewhat redundant for the Council to consider them.
Professor Gray said one of the consequences of the resolution of the Faculty Council commending students who wished to devote their time and discussion to current issues, was that some of the faculty and many of the students were now left puzzled about final grades. He thought this should be considered. Professor Johnston said he had a motion about grading practices for the end of the semester. He had been struck, he said, by the logic of a proposition made at a student meeting, suggesting that it would be good if universities in general, and particularly this University, would respond to non-violent expressions of concern as rapidly and as precipitously as they did to violent expressions. If we had come to the impasse of violence and that kind of disruption on this campus, the matter of grades, and courses would, for the time being, seem irrelevant. There were many students, he said, to whom these issues of formal education and grades at the end of the semester seemed, in their own moral judgment, irrelevant now. In the light of this background, he wanted to move that we commend favorably to our colleagues and to the administrative heads of the various schools of the University, that they consider, when requested by individual students, several different grading options rather than the single way that they would normally proceed to a grade in a course. Some of these options a faculty member always had at his disposal: a request for an incomplete or a request by a student that his grade average as of the present moment stand for his final grade. Two other options, he said, were proposed in a petition by a group of faculty members which he read: "As citizens we recognize that we should play an active role in the political life of our country; we recognize that our students have been doing just that during the extraordinary events of the past ten days and with an exemplary sense of responsibility; we recognize further that there has been great educational value in this and that for many students it has not been without cost to regular academic work. We want to comment them for their efforts and facilitate in whatever way possible the completion of class requirements. Therefore, we request the College of Arts and Sciences [and he would add other schools) to allow the following two grading procedures for the current semester: One, satisfactory-fail, S/F. At the discretion of individual faculty members the student who so requests before the end of the semester, may be given an S or F grade for his course. Such a grade allows full credit but does not count for grade point averages. It should be pointed out that a number of universities throughout the country have already instituted such a policy in the past few days. Two, deferred grading—at the discretion of individual faculty members, a student who so requests before the end of the semester may have his final grade deferred until October 1. This means that where a final examination is involved, a student may arrange to take it at the beginning of the fall semester; furthermore, term papers and other assignments due for the spring semester will be accepted at the beginning of the fall semester. We note that such a procedure has just been established at the University of Wisconsin Law School. We are mindful of the fact that faculty members who honor requests for the second procedure take on extra work. However, students have had extra work too. These are unusual times and many of our students have risen to the occasion in a manner worthy of our respect."
Professor Johnston said he was proposing this motion because he was opposed to all suggestions that the University shut down, and to blanket solutions to apply to all students. He did not want to penalize those students who wanted to finish the semester in the regular way. On the other hand, his sense, as a faculty member, was that if a student said he simply cannot finish the work in his course, he was disposed to think that there was adequate evidence that he might feel this way. As to the student who came with this request feigning a moral concern for the war and just speaking to get out of the rest of the work of the semester, he would say that truly this student had his reward; he had to face himself morally.
Mrs. Kleinhans seconded the motion. Chancellor Carter called on Dean Shull, since part of the motion related to a petition which had been sent to the College of Arts and Sciences. Dean Shull said petitions carrying somewhat more than 160 faculty signatures had come to him, and it was his understanding that there were several still outstanding that had not yet been received. His cursory examination suggested that these signatures were essentially valid ones and that this represented somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. He had convened the Policy Committee of Arts and Sciences at 1:00 o'clock that day to discuss this petition and to give advice to the dean on action to be taken in respect to it. The Policy Committee of Arts and Sciences, he said, is an elected body of 9 faculty and 7 students; the 7 student members were not present because, thus far, he had not been presented with a method for election of the 7 students, so only the faculty part of the committee had participated. Dean Shull said the two options presented in the petition—S/F grading and deferred grading—were taken up individually with respect not only to the intent of the petitioners but also the mechanics of the process. Deferred grading is already available at the discretion of the individual faculty members, under the "incomplete" option. The current rule permits up to one full year for the removal of incompletes. It was the recommendation of the elected faculty portion of the Policy Committee that the Chancellor be urged to call the attention of the individual faculty members to this option, under the circumstances of the present time; that in the case that the Chancellor did not wish to do that with respect to the entire faculty body of the Bloomington campus, the dean of the Arts and Sciences was urged to call the attention of his faculty to this. He would do so, he said.
With respect to the satisfactory/fail grading option, the discussion was considerably longer and much more involved, Dean Shull said. There was a real problem because "satisfactory" grading and "pass/fail" grading are not synonomous. At the present time, "S/FW grading is a type of grading that applies to a course as a whole for which approval in advance needs to be given; then the entire student body in that particular course is graded upon an S/F basis. The option called pass/fail grading, he said, was an option which within the College of Arts and Sciences was restricted to two courses in each calendar year, September 1 to September 1, in which an individual student before the end of the third week of the semester opts for a pass/fail grade, goes through the entire course, receives a letter grade from the instructor which is subsequently, in the Registrar's office, changed to pass or fail depending upon the grade he received from the instructor and also depending upon whether or not he has indeed fallen within the relatively strict rules of the pass/fail system, which include, for instance, the require-ment that it not be in his concentration major and that it not be one of the degree requirements. There are a number of restrictions, he said. After considerable debate upon this particular point, and especially in recognition of the implications of the action of the Faculty Council in commending students to work in the political processes involved in the current times, the Policy Committee did recommend that the Arts and Science Faculty respond to this special occasion by a relaxation of the pass/fail options, for the current semester only and in only the following respects: that petitions be accepted from students to convert one additional course to the pass/fail option if received before the last day of classes, subject, however, to all the remaining conditions that it not be in the concentration major and things of this sort. Dean Shull added that there were several warnings that the Policy Committee felt the students and faculty should be concerned about in the application of this particular relaxation of rules: first of all, students should be reminded that the appropriate presentation of credentials for graduate and professional education would remain before them and some institutions now say that they will not accept credentials containing more than 10 percent of pass/fail options without substantive alternative credentials. Second, on the pass/fail option, this was not an option for the faculty member to avoid grading the student, as the individual faculty member must give a substantive grade to the student which would be then converted by the Registrar to pass/fail. Third, it was impossible for the pass/fail grades, once requested and given in this way, to be changed back to a letter grade.
As a final comment, Dean Shull said this particular recommendation of the faculty committee would avoid a particular issue that he personally had been somewhat concerned about in the original recommendation, and that was that "at the discretion of the individual faculty member" served to put an individual faculty member under potential stress with respect to particular pressures from particular students. The option recommended by this faculty committee would remove that pressure since it was not the discretion of the individual faculty member that would be involved—a student would have the right to obtain this option if he were eligible. Professor Breneman said proposals for a deferred grade would really put the faculty member under pressure—to grant such requests would create an additional load in the fall. Dean Shull agreed.
Professor Pilder spoke in favor of the motion. He thought the initial motion did not have the restrictions in details that were brought in by the Policy Committee in the College, and he preferred the options to be much freer than those restrictions made it. Professor Arlen Brown said the petitions were widely circulated j he did not believe that anyone in residence in his department had not seen them, and the number of signatures was roughly the 20 to 30 percent of the department that Dean Shull had reported across the board. He would vote against the motion on the basis that his colleagues had already spoken to this and they were not in favor of it.
Professor Bleich wished to speak in favor of the motion. He prefaced his remarks with a statement from Professor Gross, with which Professor Johnston and he were associated: "We object to the silence of Indiana University on the troubles, anguish, and tragedies of the day, year, and decade. We think the silence is reckless and provocative; we think this silence expresses a profound disorientation of values, a displacement of humanistic commitment by an unhealthy combination of cynicism and obsequiousness, a combination which amounts to politics of disaster. We object to the fact that outrage has not been expressed through the citadel of reason, for if reason is not defended then unreason prevails. More specifically, we deplore the silence on the war, the silence on the expansion of the war, the silence on killing, the silence on the escalation of killing, the silence on the mean and crude language of the Vice President of the United States, the silence on the degraded accusations against the American university by the President of the United States and, finally, we deplore the despair and desolation of the national spirit manifested by a collective officialdom, academic, statewide, and federal. Professional responsibility need not mean acquiescence of death, should not mean moral suicide." Professor Bleich thought that to accept the limitations of Professor Johnston's motion worked out by the Policy Committee would be to add to our entire official silence on this matter. He thought the least the Faculty Council could do in terms of a meaningful and respectful, dignified, and considerate action to those with the feelings expressed in this statement would be to endorse the original motion and recommend that it supersede the restrictions placed by the Policy Committee of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Gray thought the restrictions that the Policy Committee had placed on the pass/fail options could be talked about, but Professor Johnston's motion as stated simply could not be implemented; the S/F option was not possible—it had to be a pass/fail option. He suggested that the Council adopt the College of Arts and Sciences Policy Committee recommendation, and then consider as amendments to that elimination of such restrictions as the number of courses and the concentrations. He offered as a substitute motion: that the Faculty Council endorse, or recommend to the Chancellor that he advertise to the faculty of the Bloomington campus, the option of giving an "incomplete" or the option of taking one additional pass/fail. Professor Newton seconded the substitute motion.
The Chancellor said different schools had somewhat different patterns; he was not fully acquainted with the rules on pass/fail which existed in some of the schools; some of them might not be as rigorous as those in the College.
Dean Harvey said he would oppose the substitute and favor the motion offered by Professor Johnston. There were, he said, significant differences among the schools and colleges on this campus. It seemed to him regrettable if the Council should get hung up on detail; he thought that what the motion said in effect was that we did not believe that students in Indiana University who had been working within the political processes, and responsibly, should be compelled to take academic penalties for having done so and that, therefore, this Council commended to the constituent units of the University and indeed to individual faculty members where the decisions rested with them, the adoption of modified grading practices which would eliminate the risk of that kind of penalty. Professor Gray said he preferred his motion to Professor Johnston1s, but he preferred Dean Harvey's suggestion to his own. Professor Johnston's motion, he thought, was unworkable, so long as it was tied to the S/F option, November 1st for removal of incompletes, and the rest of it. He thought a general statement such as Dean Harvey recommended would allow the College of Arts and Sciences to take its options and the other schools to make other arrangements. He offered to withdraw his substitute motion if Dean Harvey would make his. The seconder agreed to the withdrawal of the substitute motion. Dean Harvey thought he had simply a functional interpretation of Professor Johnston's motion. He moved: THAT THE COUNCIL RECOMMEND TO THE ACADEMIC UNITS ON THIS CAMPUS THAT THEY ADOPT POLICIES, THROUGH CORPORATE PROCESSES OR INDIVIDUAL FACULTY CHOICE WHERE APPROPRIATE, TO REMOVE INSOFAR AS POSSIBLE THE ACADEMIC PENALTY FROM STUDENTS WHO HAVE BEEN UTILIZING THESE DAYS FOR POLITICAL PROTEST. Professor Johnston accepted this as a substitute for his motion. Mrs. Kleinhans, the seconder, also agreed.
Professor Breneman said he was very disturbed at the implications of Professor Gross's statement that had been read. He did not think he was a war criminal just because he did not agree 100 percent with some of the current actions and statements of students. He thought the students had a right to do what they were doing; he thought they had a reasonable prediction that they were going to suffer academically if they did; he admired them for doing it. To accept these motions, he said, would place under very great stress and strain faculty members who had been trying very hard to do what they thought was their job; they had an academic responsibility to teach their subjects, and a hundred years from now maybe what they were teaching would be just as important as parading on Dunn Meadow. He thought they had a right to be protected.
Professor Long said he would support the motion, but he wanted to make it clear that he did not support it for the reasons given in Professor Gross's statement. He agreed with Professor Breneman, and thought Professor Gross's statement did not really belong in the Minutes.
The question was called for, a roll call vote was taken, and the motion passed with 25 ayes, 14 noes, and 3 abstentions.
Mrs. Kleinhans asked for the floor and yielded to Mr. Parker. He said that he had left the Council meeting to attend a press conference that he and Michael King had called. They had tried legal channels, he said, they had tried proper channels, they had tried peaceful channels; they had received assistance from very few people; they appreciated that assistance greatly and did not wish to reflect against those people, but they had issued the following statement; "To the peoples In our capacities as official student body representatives, we have spent the past two weeks in almost constant efforts to establish communication lines between students and the administration, especially concerning the issues raised in student rallies and the Student Senate.
"The response from the administration has been generally none at all—what has occurred has been characterized by deception, manipulation, bureaucratic pettiness, and outright lies.
"The height of this behavior occurred the night before the Kent State memorial service, when members of the administration, including Chancellor Carter and Dean of Students Schreck, attempted to ensure that no representatives of Kent State be allowed to speak—this, at a memorial for the Kent State students.
"University officials are overjoyed that no 'violence' or disruption has occurred since the beginning of the crisis. They have congratulated student government for keeping dissent 'orderly1 when they themselves have done nothing to attack the local problems raised by the dissent.
"They are glad that students have refrained from open violence, and have protected themselves—protected their defenseless selves from the ever-present threat of police repression and military violence.
"The absurdity of the administration blindness reached a second high point when, last week, they requested that student government provide marshals to 'protect1 the orderliness of the Little 500 bicycle race. To believe that students engaged in a struggle against war, racism, and genocide would consent to co-optation into frivolity, is an illustration of the extent of administration insensitivity and bureaucratic vulgarity.
"Such behavior deserves all the names the students keep calling the officials. We can no longer be responsible for any righteous outrage expressed by students against the rules of this institution. We can no longer be held responsible for events rising out of justified student bitterness and anger. We can no longer play policeman for an institution that is so insensitive to the people's needs that they want to strike back in bitter and terrible rage.
"Let the administration, politicians and bureaucrats of Indiana University protect themselves.
"We hold them completely responsible for their actions and inaction, their lies and cowardice, their petty arrogance and dull tyranny.
"Let them continue to ridicule and dismiss the wants and needs of the people—let the people make them pay for it.
"We stand with the people. All power to the people." The statement, he said, was signed by Keith Parker, Student Body President, and Mike King, Student Body Vice President. He wanted to make it clear that they were not policemen any longer, unless he and Mike moved into Bryan Hall.
Chancellor Garter said he had some comments in connection with this. In regard to the memorial service, he had been in consultation with both Mr. Parker and Mr. King through Dean Schreck, and he had talked with Mr. Greenstein who arranged the service. They had been told of the Faculty Council vote as it had come by phone and of the willingness of the administration to follow it if there were assurances that the Kent State people would not speak. This position was taken on the grounds, he said, that we did not know who they were nor what they were likely to say and that we were concerned to have a memorial service. He was told that they would not speak; they did. He did not think it turned out to be anything terribly undesirable, but they spoke. Chancellor Carter said he had been available and willing to talk to Mr. Parker and Mr. King and had done so, in the presence, upon some occasions, of faculty members. He wished to make it clear that in the future, while he was still willing to talk with them, there would be faculty members there when the talks occurred. He said he did not take lightly the charge of deceit, because he did not think there had been any deceit; nor did he take lightly the conversations about moving into Bryan Hall, nor the charges which had been made against the Safety Division, which he thought had acted in an extremely restrained fashion throughout the entire period; he did not think that all of the pickets on Friday had acted in that fashion.
The Faculty Council adjourned at 5:37 p.m.
York Willbern, Secretary