AFA MINUTES FOR APRIL 8, 2004
 
Present: C. Bellomo, K. Edgin, K. Green, T. Lumumba-Kasongo (Acting Chair), L. 
Miller-Bernal, N. Pellegrino
 
1. The April 1st minutes were unanimously approved.
 
2. T. Lumumba-Kasongo reported on his discussion with Faculty Secretary 
Christina Wahl. We will be having a special meeting of the faculty to report 
on the survey on May 4th. Dean Ellen Hall will be present, too.
 
3. We were distracted by the late arrival of the pizza. It was eventually 
delivered and much appreciated!
 
4. T. Lumumba-Kasongo made some suggestions about our Powerpoint presentation 
to the faculty: We should begin simply, explaining the goals of the survey, 
the number of students who responded (as well as their class years, how many 
were transfers, and their major fields), when the survey was carried out, how 
many questions the survey had, and who was on last year's and this year's AFA 
Committees. Other people at the meeting added that we should explain that the 
questionnaire was student-generated and describe the sections of the survey, 
noting which ones we had finished analyzing. Moreover, we should remind our 
audience at the faculty meeting that the "big issue" on campus last year was 
tenure, which is reflected both in some of the questions the survey asked and 
in the responses obtained.
 
5. We discussed how we should proceed after this introductory material. K. 
Edgin showed us some Powerpoint slides that she had done quickly to give us an 
idea of how the material might look. We discussed how we should introduce SPSS 
into Powerpoint, an issue that K. Edgin, N. Pellegrino, and L. Miller-Bernal 
will be looking into before our next meeting. We also noted that we want to 
intersperse students' comments with the other data rather than making these 
coded answers a separate part of our presentation. We noted that we will have 
to explain to faculty that the average number of themes we detected in 
students' comments represent the number of times each theme was mentioned, 
i.e., a particular answer may have had more than one theme.
 
6. We discussed the issue of interpretating the data. Most people on our 
committee seemed to favor concentrating on showing the data and only making 
interpretations at the end of our presentation. We also will have the raw data 
available for faculty to see in a folder in the Dean's Office.
 
7. We noted that faculty at the special meeting are likely to ask why AFA is 
not doing more to bring a greater number of students to Wells. We discussed 
how this year our committee has mainly dealt with the questionnaire and has 
not met with the Enrollment Management Team as the committee has done in other 
years. N. Pellegrino wondered whether given the upcoming coeducation decision, 
should we discuss marketing next year? She reported that many students feel 
that no one is looking at how well Wells markets itself. This comment led to 
further discussion of what, in fact, Wells has done to try to increase 
enrollments (or to increase the number of applicants, about 400, out of the 
more than 10,000 inquiries Wells receives).
 
8. We adjourned at about 1:35 pm.
 
Respectfully submitted,
 
Leslie Miller-Bernal
Secretary Pro Temp.