Fourth Biennial AAS Astronomy Chairs Meeting 6 November, 2004 Chicago O'Hare Hilton Draft Agenda: 3 November ----------------------------------------------------------------- Astro 101: Friday evening session. Dinner 7pm, discussion to move to the bar around 8:30pm. (Meeting place to follow) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Draft agenda for Saturday November 6: Athens Room Breakfast is on your own 8:30am Coffee available 9am: (Rood) Opening remarks 9:15am: (Sparke) Round-table discussion of Chairs' concerns. We will distribute the program descriptions that you have mailed in to Judy Johnson Note that the round-table will be organized to group the concerns that you expressed in your questionaires and department profiles. 10:30am break 11:00am resume 12:15pm lunch (Berlin Room) Topical sessions 1:30pm The future of the BAAS (Bob Milkey) Departmental Statistics a) (Bob Milkey) Should the AAS substitute collection of a small number of statistics from each astronomy program for the research reports now published in the BAAS? Publication lists can now be obtained from ADS, and these describe the research fields. A possible set might be: -- program faculty members by rank -- PhD scientists -- (names of PhD students graduating) -- observing facilities -- major instrumentation or survey projects (>$2M total?) b) Should this group plan to collect a different set of data, such as salary levels and university-provided resources, useful for programs making the case for more resources to their Deans? We have had various sporadic efforts at this (e.g. Stan Dermott's 2002 survey of 12 programs comparable to U. Florida's). Would a central effort save work overall? Bruce Balick will present some thoughts. c) In 2005 the National Research Council will again conduct its 10-yearly survey (last done in 1993) of all graduate programs. They propose to use an extensive set of questionnaires that have been posted on the web at www7.nationalacademies.org/resdoc/, questioning faculty and graduate students as well as program chairs. This is an early warning for those who haven't seen the questions, and we'd appreciate hearing from those whose institutions have a strategy for coping. (Sparke) 2:10pm Undergraduate and Graduate Majors: 3a) Graduate student recruitment/undergraduate preparation: Some chairs of PhD-granting astronomy programs will talk briefly about what their departments look for in their PhD recruits, in response to representatives of undergraduate and MS programs, who asked how they can best prepare students for Astronomy PhD programs, how PhD-granting institutions recruit their graduate students, and what kind of undergraduate curriculum they should be trying to develop for these students (to include Lew Snyder, Gareth Wynn-Williams). 3b) Graduate programs, both PhD and MS (Rood) Operation? curriculum -- what does a grad student really have to know? 3c) Resources for education: AAS-supported new faculty workshop and comPADRE, online and other resources for physics and astronomy education: Milkey. 3:00pm: Action items (surveys?) so far, before we lose some folks. 3:10pm: Break 3:30pm: 4) "The system" of optical/IR telescopes as described in the Decade Survey. Debra Elmegreen has attended a number of meetings on this recently; we'll start with her summary and then have some discussion. 4:00pm: 5)Discussion of a) telescope consortia and university-based instrumentation programs (participants to be confirmed) b) Running large programs (participants to be confirmed) c) Living with the 800-pound NASA gorilla -- what can we do, apart from writing letters for Congress? (do we have people willing to lead?) 4:45pm: remaining action items Place of next meeting (back at O'Hare or elsewhere?) and timing (2006? was it useful to team this with the Midwest Physics Chairs?). Who's going to organize the next meeting?