Transcript: Ok everyone, we have we have a quorum. We’ll call the meeting to order. I’d like to welcome everyone to our pre meeting of the governance, government relations and internal affairs meeting. We have six action items to preview before the in-person meeting next week. As is customary, we will not vote on any of these items today, but I will just preview them for you. And I will jump right into the action items. The first action item relates to DSO appointments. And prior to the meeting, we have sent a packet of proposed DSL appointment for the following DSOs. The university Athletic Association, the US Foundation and the UF leadership and Education Foundation and you can review the DSL appointments. As is customary, these appointments have been vetted appropriately internally prior to being submitted to you all. To the extent you have any questions prior to us voting on these appointments, you can call Mark or Melissa. Any questions on that before we move to the next item? Okay, the next item involves the UF regulation and I’ll turn it over here for Amy to go through the regulations on those that really are only substantive regulation amendment here involves the collective bargaining agreement amendments.
Chair Patel’s correct. Our single amendment for the board of trustees to vote on during this meeting will be a series of amendments that have been agreed upon tentatively by the University of Florida and the faculty union. These are related primarily to the evaluations, tenure and assignments for our faculty during the spring 2020 term. And then a second piece of this is an agreement to provide the 2019-2020 best and brightest recognition bonuses for eligible instructional personnel who teach our K through 12 TK-on research developmental school. That is something that has already been ratified by the faculty union and just awaits the board’s ratification. That is our only action item in that space. The one thing that chair Patel and I wanted to just mention to the committee is we are evaluating and we are reviewing and making any necessary changes to our Student Conduct code in the space of Title Nine. The new title nine rule was issued in May and goes into effect on August 14. So those changes will be coming to the board and to this committee at a future meeting for approval as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Amy. Any questions or comments on that item? Okay, next, the next item involves our UF Board of Trustees bylaws and bylaw amendments. As we mentioned during our last Governance Committee meeting in March, we undertook a review of our Board of Trustees bylaws to ensure that the bylaws were consistent with our adopted and amended governance standards. We have now conducted that review and assent prior to this meeting a draft of the updated bylaws, which we’ll vote on at the meeting next week. And essentially the substance of the changes are the bylaws simply add a reference to the governance standards and incorporate the governance standards, such that all of the approval and requirements of the governance standards are now formally included in our board bylaws.
Any questions on that? Okay.
Next, I’ll turn it over to our Vice President of Research, David Norton, who will discuss the next action item relating to facility security clearances. Ss many of you know, The University of Florida has a small but relevant, classified activity that’s actually under the Department of Defense jurisdiction. One of the requirements of having a facility with the state secret clearance is that the leadership has to hold whatever the top level of security clearances for that facility.
This board has in the past has been asked, and will be asked again, to defer to assign that clearance to the President, myself and some others, thereby making it not necessary for the board members themselves to undergo a security clearance by the DoD. We have two new members of the board coming on. Sylvain Doherty, who is a faculty senate chair and Trevor Pope who is Student Government president. Both will be new trustees and you’ll be asked through this action item to approve that assignment of those responsibilities to the leadership of the University.
Thank you.
Any questions on that item?
Okay, the next item involves the university president fiscal year 2020 assessment. As you all know, as part of the responsibility of this Governance Committee, we review and take a vote on the President’s fiscal year 2020 performance assessment, which we will do at the meeting next week. And I’ll note that in connection, that assessment is reviewed under our process and will be reviewed prior to our meeting with our board chair, our board Vice Chair, and the Chair of the Board of Governors. So just as a heads up, that will be coming. And similarly, the next action item involves the presidency. goals for fiscal year 2021. And like the assessment, part of the annual responsibility of the Governance Committee will be to review and take a vote on those goals, which like the assessment under our process, are reviewed by the chair, the chair of the full board, the Vice Chair and the Chair of the Board of Governors.
Any questions on that?
Mr. Chairman, I just do a couple of points. So, the President has presented to me his goals and the performance and we’re looking at it. I will be talking to the chairman of board of governors and ongoing conversation with the president. Not with me, but the president directly will notify the vice chair and chair of the Governance Committee of his goals and his performance to inform them. And again separately, and then after my conversation as we go forward, we will be presenting it to the Governance Committee next week and then to the full board.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Any other questions on that point?
Okay, that concludes our action items. We have two discussion items that I’ll briefly preview for our June 4 meeting. The first involves our use of brand projects and as we alluded to at our last meeting, we’re going to take a look enterprise wide at the processes and procedures we have in place for licensing marks, licensing US related marks to third parties, and allowing third parties to use the UF brand. And as part of that work, we have prepared a presentation that we will go over with you at the meeting next week. And I’ll highlight just a few topics from that presentation and what we have done to prepare for that presentation. First, we have undertaken a review of our current UF processes, practices enterprise wide, which includes the university Athletic Association, UF Health, UF Foundation and all of our other affiliates, and DSOs. Second, we have completed a benchmarking exercise of peer institutions around the country, including other top five public universities and other private universities and athletic peers. And so through our benchmarking process, we have also interviewed several of these peers and have started to put together a set of best practices. And fourth, and finally, we will discuss recommendations for next steps, which will include a working group and a timeline of goals for that group to formally review and recommend that appropriate set of processes enterprise wide, relating to the use of our UF brand, in all cases, making sure that we have appropriate oversight over those processes to ensure we are meeting our fiduciary duties. Any questions at this point on that? Okay, we look forward to making that presentation next week. And then the final discussion item is our Legislative Update, and I’ll turn it over to Mark for a preview on that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t expect it will be a terribly lengthy update at this point. The governor has not yet received the budget from the legislature. In fairly short order, he will go through precisely by line item veto authority. He’ll get that done we expect before the current fiscal year ends and so we are preparing for that in briefing all the effected players and interested players and already preparing for next session, and we’ll talk about that a little bit.
Thank you, Mark.
That’s all the discussion items. Is there any new business to be bought before the committee? Yes, Mr. Chairman, I’ve just a couple of points about next week’s board meeting in person. Again, the Board of Trustees of the University of Florida will meet in person at University of Florida. The people that can come is optional. And we will be hearing from the President and the leadership of the University [about] all their hard work and they have been working very hard to come up with a plan. A full and complete plan for return of our students, faculty. And so for us comes August 29th. We will have some 50,000 students, plus our faculty, will be in Gainesville and will be taking classes. They’ve been working very hard to make sure our students, our faculty are safe working [UNINTELLIGBLE]… And so our meeting will be in person and we ask everyone to participate in social distancing. Eeryone will be wearing a mask during the time that [they’re] walking around. When you’re sitting down, you’re six feet away, you’re fine. But once you’re walking around, you have to wear a mask. And we want to make sure that everyone is protected. So, everyone will be sitting separately, and the cabinet members be there. And their presentation is going to be long, but it’s something that is very important to listen to our president and to the leadership of the university so that everyone knows what the plan is. And we just got done with the presentation from the Board of Governors. They went over the big plan that all the universities have. And they’re now looking to us, the Board of Trustees of the University of Florida, to approve our plans within the major plan. We are detailing out the plan that the Board of Governors [UNINTELLIGBLE] that has to be presented on June 23rd at an in-person board meeting in Orlando at University of Central Florida. So the agenda is full. We have two days of full agenda. The one thing [that] is really important, and I know all of our board members are here, is that we can’t just hold back and say, “we have a COVID-19 Coronavirus and let’s just sit back and watch.” University of Florida is going forward. There’s [been] some great news coming out. I’m hoping they come out. So our President and Administration have been working very hard in many different ways [so] that our goal of being a top five never is out of our sight.