Spears proposes Judicial Board changes

Author: Anthony Adragna

Members of the College faculty gathered at the Kirk Alumni Center on Nov. 5 to discuss work load for professors at the College, proposed changes to the Judicial Board and consensual student-faculty relationships.

Associate Professor of German Roman Graf presented a report from the Educational Affairs Committee (EAC) that suggested new faculty workload guidelines be written.

"We want to propose teaching load guidelines in the spring," he said. "We encourage people to express concerns with teaching load changes. The faculty will not get to vote on the final recommendations."

Graf added that, under the proposed changes, professors might spend less time both in and out of class with students.

"Under new guidelines faculty may find relief in the number of students, contact hours or preparations they must do each year," he said.

President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz said the problems professors currently face with class size did not exist when the current guidelines were written.

"Forty-five students in a class did not exist before 1992-93 when the current guidelines were implemented," he said. "Since then, the number of students in a class has mushroomed."

The discussion then turned to a timetable for the new changes to go into effect, but Graf hesitated to give a time when faculty would see the new guidelines.

Liebowitz suggested that resource use varied by department but emphasized that certain departments used more resources than they should.

"If you're looking at which departments are usurping resources, I think it's something that EAC has not looked at and I wish they would," he said.

Some wondered how the College decided what type of faculty members to hire.

"The pool for term candidates is significantly weaker than for a tenure position," Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry said. "What's the rationale for hiring for term positions as supposed to tenure positions?"

Dean of the Faculty Susan Campbell cautioned that only hiring tenured professors would allow every person hired to have a long-term impact on the College community. She added it would produce a certain kind of growth but that additional study was needed to determine if the growth is desired.

Following the discussion about facult resources, Liebowitz then approached the issue of student workload in terms of course credit.

"I think it's worthy of examining now why it is that a student who has two labs and Chinese gets the same amount of credit for each of those classes as someone who has a class that meets 3 hours a week," he said.

In addition to the discussion of workload, Dean of the College Tim Spears presented three recommendations from Community Council for changes to the Judicial Board structure. The review of Judicial Board structure followed criticism delivered against the College several years ago.

"Years ago, after a high-profile judicial case, a recommendation came out of the court's opinion that caused us to look at our judicial board," Spears said. "It caused us to look at the procedures and make recommendations about them."

One of the recommendations would allow for students to end a case without a full board hearing.

"This allows for the disposal of an issue without a hearing," Spears said. "It would allow students to take ownership of an infraction without a hearing. It gives the student the flexibility to own up and allow the Judicial Affairs Office to accept the recommendation or the petition can be refused and the case would go to hearing."

Spears quickly assured faculty members that this recommendation was not an effort to curtail the power of the Judicial Board.

"This is not an effort to diminish the importance of those acting on the Board," he said. "We see 25 cases a year. That is a considerable amount of time."

Another change would prevent students from leaving the College while their case awaited a full board hearing.

"This is a modification of existing language that allows students to withdraw with their case pending," Spears said. "[Under the current rule] they would have to have a hearing before they came back. From a lot of reasons came the recommendation that students withdraw from college immediately."

Spears added he understood why students would elect to take this option but stressed that the College needed to fight the practice.

"We can understand why students would not wish to have their case heard immediately," he said. "[When they returned] at that point the principle players in the event might not be at the College. People's recollections of events change."

The final recommendation would allow the board to rehear selected parts of an appeal instead of the entire case.

"We're asking for increased flexibility to carve up the case to rehear it," Spears said. "We don't need to rehear the entire case."

Miguel Fernandez spoke for the Faculty Council and stressed their work on consensual student-faculty relations.

"We are currently working on language concerning consensual relationships between students and faculty," he said. "We've carried out informal discussions with sources on topics. We will send out invitations to a random sampling of faculty to form focus groups on this matter. We are also setting up a blog so this can be an open discussion."

Towards the end of the meeting Secretary of the College John Emerson encouraged colleagues to get advisees to do their emergency plan on BannerWeb immediately.

"Faculty members should be sure to remind their advisees [to create a plan]," he said. "Our worry is that too many students will wait to register and that could crash our computer systems."