DSS News is a free biweekly newsletter from DSSResources.COM about
computerized Decision Support Systems.
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DSS News
D. J. Power, Editor
June 19, 2005 -- Vol. 6, No. 14
A Free Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Check the case by Dan Power and Carol Fletcher
"University of Northern Iowa Dining Services uses FoodPro"
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Featured:
* Ask Dan! - Report from AAUP Annual Meeting Washington, D.C.
* DSS Conferences
* DSS News Releases
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Ask Dan!
Report from AAUP Annual Meeting Washington, D.C.
by Dan Power
From June 9-11, 2005, I was a delegate to the Ninety-first Annual
Meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in
Washington, D.C. representing the University of Northern Iowa AAUP
Chapter. Such a large representative gathering reminded me of all of
the pluses and minuses of traditional structured, large group decision
processes. In this trip report I'll summarize the meeting, but I also
want to focus on computerized decision support for such meetings and
processes.
My first activities were Collective Bargaining Congress functions on
Thursday evening. Following an orientation for new delegates, we had
dinner and then a business session. AAUP has 70 Collective Bargaining
Chapters including very large Chapters from California and New
York. At the business session physical cards were given out to
delegates so they could vote on Friday morning from 7:30am-8:30am for
Officers and Council. Given that all Chapters were not in attendance,
it probably would have been better to have had web-based voting
following the meeting.
On Friday morning I took the subway into the Washington Court Hotel
from New Carrollton where I was staying. The subway ride took longer
than expected due to a mechanical problem and I didn't arrive until
after 8:30am. I attended a TIAA-CREF Estate Planning Seminar and then
a prescreening of the PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher
Education at Risk". John Merrow, the correspondent, was at the session
and responded to our questions and concerns. I recommend that people
watch it when it is released June 23. We only saw a preliminary cut
of the first hour of the 2 hour documentary. Merrow tried to present
a balanced answer to the question "How good is higher education in
America?" Sadly the response primarily dredges up all of the good and
bad stereotypes of Higher Education. The first hour presents little
that is new. The main problem we have is trying to educate too many
students, some of whom are poorly prepared and only weakly motivated,
in an underfunded, understaffed Higher Education System primarily
created for selective admissions rather than broad-based public
education. Clearly Higher Education must change, but how and with
what resources remains unanswered in the documentary. The official
website is http://www.decliningbydegrees.org .
Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs
at Columbia University, gave an outstanding Plenary Luncheon
address. Friday afternoon was focused on workshops. The Annual Meeting
actually started Saturday morning following an open dialog with Roger
Bowen, the General Secretary of AAUP. Dr. Bowen assumed his duties in
November 2003. He served as president of the State University of New
York at New Paltz from 1996-2001. Roger brings real commitment to the
job and is a strong advocate for Faculty.
The morning session involved recommendations to the delegates from the
Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (Committee A). These
recommendations dealt with removing and imposing censure on Colleges
and Universities that violate Faculty Rights. An elaborate
investigative process and committee review occurs before resolutions
are brought to the Annual Meeting. There was no evidence of
computerized decision support in the process, but there was much
evidence of careful scrutiny, systematic data collection and serious
deliberation. My guess is that email communications and word
processing facilitated the process, but that was about all that was
used and yet it was probably adequate given the number of complaints.
If Committee A was evaluating 25-30 complaints each year, then a
document-driven DSS with some web-based voting might be
helpful. Delegates voted to place Virginia State University, the
University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, and Meharry Medical College
in Tennessee on its list of censured administrations. We then voted to
remove Wingate University in North Carolina and Southern Nazarene
University in Oklahoma from the censure list. The delegates also
endorsed a supplementary report on Benedict College in South Carolina,
which is already on the association's censure list. I think the case
of Benedict College especially deserves our attention. The Web has all
of the details (check http://www.aaup.org/Com-a/Institutions/
benedictam.htm ), but briefly the college's current president,
Dr. David H. Swinton, decided that all faculty would weight effort as
heavily as achievement in their grading of first- and second-year
students. When two faculty members refused to comply with the new
policy, Swinton dismissed them. Dr. William Gunn is the President of
the Benedict College AAUP Chapter and he needs our help and support.
The Benedict website is www.benedict.edu and you can write to Gunn or
Swinton at Benedict College, 1600 Harden Street, Columbia, SC
29204. The Benedict College administration was censured in 1994 due to
deficiencies in official college policies governing faculty
appointments. The censure remains in effect.
Following lunch, Tariq Ramadan, a renowned scholar on the interactions
of Islam with western cultures, addressed the annual meeting of the
American Association of University Professors by video conference.
Ramadan was not granted a US Visa to teach in the US or to attend the
Annual meeting. Based on the video and a live question and answer
session, I was much impressed by Ramadan. It is disappointing that
he could not attend.
In the afternoon we completed voting on a constitutional amendment on
membership. A Call for a Proportional Vote would have wrecked havoc.
AAUP has no easy means for letting delegates vote based on the number
of members in chapters. Some computerized support could make
proportional voting much easier. For many years the US Congress has
had electronic voting because of the cumbersome nature of casting over
400 votes in an assembly. When some delegates have 50 votes and
others have 300, the casting and counting nightmare really escalates.
AAUP has about 44,000 members and approximately 200 delegates were at
the meeting representing the membership.
Also, in the afternoon we voted on Resolutions from the Committee on
Resolutions. Amendments and substitute amendments bogged down the
process, and providing the secretary with a portable computer to
display the amendments on the front screen would have improved
the decision process. Ultimately we passed three resolutions
supporting the right of graduate student employees to choose
representation by a collective bargaining agent, expressing our
concern over increased attacks on the academic freedom of teachers and
scholars across the nation, and supporting the teaching of evolution.
The annual meeting adjourned at 3pm and I attended the Committee on
Contingent Faculty and The Profession session until 5:30pm.
Universities need to reduce the number of contingent faculty
and current faculty need to fight for more tenure and tenure-track
faculty positions. The instability created by contingent faculty hurts
Universities and those serving in such roles. Well-educated citizens
are the foundation for maintaining freedom and democracy, we can't
jeopardize all that we have accomplished in the past 225 years to
create more staffing flexibility, to lower the cost per credit hour or
other illusory benefits of contingent faculty. So what did I learn at
the meeting?
Although the processes of democratic organizations can be streamlined
and in specific instances improved with computerized decision support,
traditional large group, democratic decision processes work. Clearly
the AAUP annual meeting could have benefited from technology to
display resolutions and allow for editing them. Also, more web-based
delegate or member voting prior to the annual meeting may actually
increase member involvement.
AAUP's purpose is "to advance academic freedom and shared governance,
to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher
education, and to ensure higher education's contribution to the common
good." Decision support technologies can help members and staff
accomplish this purpose. In the future, AAUP needs to do more with
discipline-oriented professional associations to enact, evaluate and
enforce codes of professional ethics and responsibilities. To support
this effort, AAUP needs a data base repository of such information and
AAUP should provide an ongoing evaluation of such codes.
Also, the AAUP is becoming the AUP. AAUP is becoming a global
Association of University Professors who share a strong commitment to
Academic Freedom and Academic Responsibility. Computerized decision
support can help maintain a democratic, participative organization as
it "goes global". The web site address is http://www.aaup.org.
Sunday, I journeyed back to Cedar Falls.
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Purchase Dan Power's DSS FAQ book
83 frequently asked questions about computerized DSS
http://dssresources.com/dssbookstore/power2005.html
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DSS Conferences
Upcoming Conferences
1. International workshop on context modeling and decision
support will be held July 5, 2005 in Paris, France.
Check http://ec.cba.hawaii.edu/context/program.html .
2. PACIS 2005 will be held July 7-10, 2005, Bangkok, Thailand.
Check www.pacis2005.ku.ac.th .
3. Eighth International Conference on Decision Support
Systems (ISDSS'05),Trends in DSS Research and Practice, sponsored
by AIS SIG DSS, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil,
July 12-15, 2005. Check www.ufrgs.br/dss2005 .
4. AMCIS 2005 with SIG DSS mini-tracks in Omaha, Nebraska,
USA, August 11 - 14, 2005. Check amcis2005.isqa.unomaha.edu .
SIGDSS meeting Thursday, August 11 from 5:30 - 7:30PM.
5. 2005 NPRA Plant Automation and Decision Support
Conference, October 18-21, 2005, Gaylord Texan Hotel,
Grapevine, Texas. Check npra.org .
6. Call for Papers: ACM Eighth International Workshop on Data
Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP 2005), November 4-5, 2005,
Bremen, Germany. Submissions due July 19, 2005.
Check http://gplsi.dlsi.ua.es/congresos/dolap05/ .
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Please tell your DSS friends about DSSResources.COM
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DSS News Releases - June 6 to June 19, 2005
Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News Archive
06/17/2005 Business Objects announces 11th Annual International User
Conference; "Business Objects Insight" aims to help organizations
perform on an entirely new scale.
06/16/2005 Dallas County, Iowa, selects Intergraph Web mapping
solutions.
06/16/2005 Executive Summit at Agile 2005 highlights growing support
for agile practices by senior managers.
06/16/2005 Microsoft taps OSI technology for coalition warrior
interoperability demonstration.
06/15/2005 New E-mail security mechanism for HIPAA and business
compliance.
06/15/2005 Poindexter Systems using SAS Enterprise BI Server to
enhance online marketing campaigns; comprehensive BI platform creates
'elegant' advertising reports, simplified data summaries.
06/14/2005 GoAntiques.com features PriceMiner(TM) at eBay Live! 2005.
06/14/2005 Business Objects to deliver trusted information throughout
the enterprise for Vivendi Universal Games.
06/13/2005 PlanReady(TM) announces new name, location and introduces
their next generation solution - RescueConnexion(TM).
06/13/2005 ProClarity teams with Microsoft to extend comprehensive
scorecard application.
06/13/2005 LoanCenter Consumer enriches Bangor Savings Bank's indirect
lending; APPRO Systems, Inc. enables bank to auto-decision loan
applications.
06/10/2005 ProClarity Analytics platform named Best of TechEd 2005 in
Business Intelligence Solutions Category.
06/09/2005 MicroStrategy Symposium in Chicago to highlight real-world
business intelligence solutions July 18-20, 2005.
06/09/2005 U.S. Mayors to glimpse new security technology; TechAlt to
demonstrate new interoperability solutions for first responders.
06/08/2005 NASA funds projects to develop decision-making tools.
06/07/2005 For Your Eyes Only! American Academy of Ophthalmology
explains iris scanning technology.
06/07/2005 MicroStrategy tops peer group as preferred business
intelligence product to standardize on, according to independent
survey.
06/07/2005 BusinessObjects XI deployed at Turner Broadcasting.
06/06/2005 Viewmark provides Frontier Airlines with usability lab to
examine and improve its online ticket booking process.
06/06/2005 Apple to use Intel microprocessors beginning in 2006.
06/06/2005 Ballmer outlines opportunity for IT pros and developers to
enable people to drive business success.
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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2005 by D. J. Power. Please send your
questions to daniel.power@dssresources.com.
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