Spring 2008, Issue 1

Newsletter

Message from the Chair

Welcome to the first Faculty Senate newsletter. This will be an occasional electronic bulletin to inform you of the activities of the Senate and encourage your participation through your representatives. The principal business of the Senate this year is the revision of the Academic Articles and discussing the initiative to recruit outstanding Catholic faculty. In addition we have been exploring and adopting online technologies to increase communication between the faculty and Senate and promote greater participation among the faculty. As an example we will shortly be circulating an online survey to all Faculty to elicit your input on the Catholic Faculty hiring initiatives being proposed in the CROCF report

The Senate meets once a month during term time and minutes can be found on the faculty senate website. (All meetings are open to all faculty). A formal description of its function and rules can be found in the Senate bylaws. In brief the Senate is composed of four subcommittees, Academic Affairs, Administrative affairs, Student Affairs and Benefits which bring forth issues to the full Senate for consideration. The chair of the Senate and the four chairs of the subcommittee are voting ex-officio members of the Academic Council and the Senate has right of agenda at Academic Council. I encourage you to offer input to all Senate discussions through your Senate representatives.

Colin Jessop
Chair

Academic Affairs

The Academic Affairs Committee met at the beginning of the semester and identified priorities for the year. In the fall semester, we focused on the implementation of the ACPET guidelines. We met with Dennis Jacobs to discuss the guidelines and the ongoing reform of the TCEs. A report of that meeting can be found on the faculty senate website.

This semester, the committee is working with the Administrative Affairs committee in an effort to examine and respond to the report on Catholic hiring. The full Senate met with Provost Tom Burish, Susan Ohmer and Bob Sullivan and presented a number of questions formulated by the committee. The committees have been working on a survey on this issue, in hopes of presenting to the entire faculty. The survey was piloted by the Senate in December.

Judy Fox
Chair, Academic Affairs Committee

Administrative Affairs

The decennial review of the Academic articles has occupied much of our attention. We made a series of recommendations to the Academic Council that included the membership of Dean and Provost search committees, a procedure for written explanation of the reasons for tenure denial from the relevant Dean and a procedure for dealing with violations of the Academic Articles. These recommendations will shortly be voted upon by the Academic Council.

In addition we are collaborating with the Academic Affairs committee to study the recent intiatives to recruit Outstanding Catholic Faculty.

Seth Brown
Chair, Administrative Affairs Committee

Benefits

The Benefits Committee meets regularly with representatives from the human resources department including Director of Compensation and Benefits, Denise Murphy. We provide input to the process of reviewing and changing Health Care benefits that takes place each year. We have successfully lobbied for the University to provide retirement benefits to faculty in the summer months which will begin in 2008. We are currently collating reports of difficulties of individual faculty in dealing with Meritain and encouraging the University to act to ameloriate those difficulties. We also maintain a constant pressure to increase faculty salaries.

Nasir Ghiaseddin
Chair, Benefits Committee

Student Affairs

As the year began the committee took up issues left over from last year: Graduate Medical Insurance and Graduate Student Grievance Procedures. Action by the Committee was preempted by swift action on these topics by the Graduate School. The Committee also began looking at the issue of excessively expensive course-packs only to have various bodies--the bookstore, library, and copy-centers--take timely steps to reduce costs. The Committee worked with the Student Senate to implement a streamlined procedure for communications between Student Government and the Faculty Senate and unanimously passed a Student Senate resolution that all campus classrooms be equipped with clocks.

The Committee will be looking at these issues: Student deportment in the classroom; student class schedules and credit-hour loads and their impact on the general intellectual climate on campus.

Tom Noble
Chair, Student Affairs Committee