Members of the Urbana-Champaign Senate rejected proposed amendments to the senate’s constitution and bylaws that would have paved the way for academic professionals to elect representatives to the senate.
When the senate met Dec. 8, senators debated a proposal from the University Statutes and Senate Procedures Committee that would have amended the senate constitution so that Academic Professionals could elect 10 representatives – one from each district on campus – to the senate, in concurrence with the recommendations of the Sixth Senate Review Commission.
“Academic professionals bring a unique, distinctive prospective to all their service that complements the faculty perspective,” the commission wrote in its Final Report. “Given the increasing role that academic professionals play in delivering instruction and participating in the academic mission of the university, we recommend that they be given voting representation in the senate.”
APs have been non-voting members of many of the senate’s standing committees since the early 1980s, and became voting members on 10 of the senate’s standing committees in 2002. Additionally, Tom Korder, chair of the Council of Academic Professionals, acts as a liaison with the Senate Executive Committee. At the senate meeting, Korder said that APs, who serve in a variety of instructional and other roles, are an integral part of the academic community, and should be represented when senate committees are voting on matters that affect APs.
Peter Loeb, who opposed the proposal, was concerned that adding APs to the senate electorate “would water down the faculty’s voice on campus. It is only through this senate that our faculty has a voice.”
Among those supporting the proposal was H. George Friedman, who said: “Eleven representatives out of 261 (senators) is not a significant dilution of the faculty voice.” Additionally, Friedman said that the USSP plans to survey campus units to determine if there are other members of the academic community who should be part of the senate electorate under the existing senate constitution but who are being overlooked.
About 3,500 academic professionals and 2,971 faculty members work on the Urbana campus.
The UIC Faculty Senate has three AP senators; the UIS Campus Senate has one AP senator.
SEC chair Nicholas Burbules reported that the SEC met with President B. Joseph White on Dec. 1 to discuss the UI Board of Trustees’ decision to seek separate accreditation for Global Campus. In light of the trustees’ action, the SEC’s focus is determining “how we can move forward in a way that assures the success of Global Campus,” Burbules said.
The SEC, which planned to meet with White and two of the trustees in January, is drafting a new statement expressing the senate’s concerns about Global Campus. The statement will be available for the senate’s review at its Feb. 23 meeting, Burbules said.
Accordingly, senators voted to defer action until February on a proposal from the Senate Educational Policy Committee requesting that degrees awarded by Global Campus outside of the 2007 partnership agreement not contain wording indicating that they were awarded by the Urbana campus or upon the recommendation of the Urbana-Champaign Senate. The proposal had been drafted prior to the trustees’ decision to seek separate accreditation for Global Campus. While the Global Campus undergoes the two-year process of obtaining accreditation, degrees are being awarded under UIC’s accreditation in the interim.
In other business, the senate:
Passed a grade-replacement policy that, in addition to the extant course repeat policy, will allow undergraduate students to repeat courses under certain conditions to improve their grade-point averages. If students repeat courses for grade replacement, both grades earned would appear on their transcripts but only the second grade would count toward their GPAs. Under the current policy, a student can repeat a course once or twice and all grades earned are used to determine the student’s GPA. The new policy, which will take effect with the fall 2009 semester, will allow students to repeat a course for grade replacement only once.
Approved establishing a multi-institutional Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering with the National University of Singapore, the first degree of its kind for the Urbana campus. Under a 2004 memorandum of agreement, the Urbana campus has offered a cooperatively administered doctoral program in conjunction with NUS whereby students receive a degree from one university and a certificate from the other university. Under the new policy, students would receive a single multi-institutional diploma bearing both the NUS and the Illinois seals. The program enrolls about five students per year.