I have been unable to locate any actual minutes of this May 9, 2003 meeting, which was attended by Provost Keith Miller to introduce the group to its charge. An email on May 28 2003 (from me to the ACCAA members describing the meeting's proceedings in minutes-like fashion) exists as a hard copy in my files, but I cleaned my Eudora mailboxes and accidentally deleted it. I have retyped this email below. 

Hello Everyone,

The opening meeting of the UW Oshkosh Advisory Council for Academic Advising (ACAA) [sic: the word Comprehensive is missing; the correct acronym is ACCAA] was convened the morning of May 9 by Provost Keith Miller. This Council has been organized in response to UW Oshkosh student concerns and to a consultant's study conducted last year. The Council's membership reflects shared governance: we include students, faculty, and staff. The Council is charged with assisting University-wide buy-in for the process of evolving student advising to the next step, for the common good. In brief, we will help to move UW Oshkosh from a "prescriptive advising" model to a "comprehensive developmental advising" model, a change which has been demonstrated (by national research) to result in a 60% increase in the number of students persisting to a degree within 6 years. Thus, our activities have very real consequences for retention, yet another key concern of our campus.

As the meeting minutes will show (thanks to Holly Lawryk of the Provost's Office!), the Council conducted some ground-level administrative work today:

• We will house all records of the ACAA's [sic] work in the Advising Office.
• A student employee from the Advising Office will be engaged to take minutes. That person will be teh same throughout the semester to help ensure consistency. [sic: either Robin Barrett, PA of the UARC, or ACCAA Chair Dana Vaughan, take the minutes.]
• We will meet monthly during the 9-month school year.
• Our first meeting will be in September 2003.
• Meetings will last 60-90 minutes.
• We will observe Robert's Rules of Order at meetings.
• The ACAA [sic] will be co-chaired by a UW Oshkosh undergraduate, Jane Reinhardt (Political Science & International Studies), and by myself, Dana Vaughan (Biology). [Ms. Reinhardt was replaced -- by OSA -- shortly thereafter, and the Council voted that Vaughan should be the sole Chair.]
• The Co/Chair position(s) shall rotate.

With this email message, Jane and I wish to poll everyone on the ACAA [sic] about meeting times that will work for all of us during FALL 2003 SEMESTER. Can you please email to me, in the next week or so, the bests [sic] days/times for a recurring monthly ACAA [sic] meeting next fall? Remember to allow for 90 minutes... We would ideally like to set the 2003 Sept, Oct, Nov, and Dec meeting dates well in advance, so that they are "hard-wired" into our busy schedules well ahead of time. With the change in class schedules each semester, we expect the ACAA meeting schedule to also be open to change each semester.

Lynn Freeman, a member ex officio of ACAA, will shortly mail each of us hard copies of various reports and documents that will form the basis for our first meeting in September. Each of us is expected to read through this material and, by midsummer I hope, begin to formulate agenda items based on it. Jane and I will thus be contacting you all in July, to prompt you for agenda items.

The Council's Top Three goals shall be:

1. To define Academic Advising in a campus-wide fashion, in written format that spells out the respective roles of the advisor, the student, and the faculty advisor. Our packet of materials from Lynn will include examples, so we need not re-invent the wheel.
2. To propose mechanisms to enhance faculty-student engagement at our campus. This means students coming to faculty, and faculty coming to students. Again, there are pre-existing models that we can adapt.
3. To make recommendations with regard to differential tuition: special monies for advising which are allocated by student decision-makers.

Another possible goal that was discussed today is to recommend transfer of advising activities into the "Teaching" component of a faculty member's job description, rather than their current relegation to the "Service" component. There seemed to be support for this, on the face of it. [sic: This discussion was based on an erroneous interpretation. Advising already IS a component of faculty teaching duties; the Faculty and Academic Staff Handbook is quite clear on this; see pp. 208-209 of the 2001/2003 edition.]

To assist you in communicating with one another, I have listed below all of our email addresses in a form that you can easily paste into your email address book. [superseded, so not included here; see http://www.uwosh.edu/departments/biology/vaughan/ACCAA.htm#Membership for the current list.]

Thank you, and please get back to me with your Fall schedule openings...

Dana