president@tennessee.edu cc dpatter2@utk.edu,mnichols@tennessee.edu Our conversation yesterday in the University Center hallway President Petersen, This is to follow-up on our conversation yesterday after the Faculty Senate meeting. I appreciate your patience and that of your staff and your willingness to listen to my comments. I sincerely hope that this will be useful in finding a path forward that helps all of UT. Our discussion covered several topics, but here I just wish to emphasize some of the suggestions I made. I am including below the brief memo I sent to the IT Committee before the first (and so far only) meeting we had in December (Margie Nichols said she would pass this on to you as well) regarding point 1 below. I am ccing Margie and David Patterson on this so they are aware of my comments. 1. On IT, I urged you to quickly implement the plan you outlined in your Feb 23 memo of last year. I noted that it makes little sense to have the IT Committee I am on meet except perhaps to make recommendations to you regarding what counts as an "enterprise system" which perhaps should remain under System management. You noted that it may be appropriate to "hire out" for System services for IT from a campus operation, just as is the current plan for IR now. Doing this will also speed the ability to proceed for the search committee established for a System CIO. 2. Regarding IRIS, I noted that it had improved due in part to the suggestions regarding fiscal policy made over the past 4 years by the Federal Compliance task Force (I don't know if I mentioned it, but this has been led by Ron Maples who has done I think a great job in getting concordance on policies from all campuses). However there are numerous issues with using IRIS that impact many areas across the System and it would be good to devote some energy to identifying and fixing these with input from various campuses. 3. I noted that the campus leadership team that Chancellor Crabtree assembled is the best team we have ever had - I no longer hear the regular complaints from students about the Big Orange Screw that were typical until the last few years. I certainly hope that you can keep this team in place and one way to assist is to move quickly to release the financial "transparency" report you promised last November to have done. Even if this simply elaborated how much interest income above the $12M budgeted for the System last year was obtained and what it went to cover would be helpful in allaying concerns. 4. Regarding ORNL faculty appointments, I noted that many departments have significant numbers of ORNL staff in adjunct or other faculty appointments. One difficulty is obtaining funds to offer teaching possibilities for adjunct faculty (there is a standard arrangement in which UT pays 15% of the ORNL staff members salary for 10% of their time, due to benefits issues) or obtaining funds to provide them release time to direct graduate students and/or compose new grant proposals since OMB A21 regulations would not allow them to do so on ORNL funds. I suggested using UT-Battelle funding to support this, and believe many UT departments will respond quite positively and this will encourage more ORNL staff to consider requesting appointments through the processes set up in the bylaws of appropriate UTK departments. 5. Regarding your comments about the benefits to UTK of initiatives such as the NSF Track 2 supoercomputer, I urged you to encourage the project managers involved to inform appropriate UTK departments (I suppose EECS is the most relevant but there are others as well) that they have available a number of new GRA lines for next year and should suggest potential new applicants (or continuing students) for these positions. Providing 20-30 new GRAs now for next years entering graduate students (departments are doing selections within the next month) would go a long way towards pointing out the direct benefits of the HPC initiatives you have been fostering. I'd be happy to discuss any of these with you further. Cheers, Lou 1/23/08