Following a Faculty Senate retreat, many University of Idaho faculty members have a better idea of improvements and changes to come this year.
One of these faculty members is Katie Brown of the College of Agriculture. She said she was surprised to see some common threads of thought between her and her colleagues from different colleges.
“The College of Agriculture shared concerns with other colleges related to the possibility of increased enrollment in terms of resources, personnel and distance education,” Brown said.
Faculty Senate, she said, could form a committee or task force to look into these issues and work toward a solution to propose to the university administration. Some of the concerns about increased enrollment included discussions of space, especially lab space, how to maintain the quality of education if additional sections need to be taught for certain classes, and strains on advising.
“Then there’s concerns about the efforts to grow enrollment for departments that already have high enrollment,” Brown said.
Liz Brandt, incoming Chair of Faculty Senate, said Provost and Executive Vice President John Wiencek announced on a project that faculty knew was coming — a teacher education center. She said there was broad support among faculty for the center.
Brandt, who has been part of Faculty Senate for four years now, said one of the issues she expects will come up this year is the effort by ASUI to get more teachers to post grades to Blackboard in a manner timely enough to be useful to students.
ASUI, the Student Bar Association and the Graduate and Professional Students Association also have representatives on Faculty Senate. One of these representatives is senior Nate Fisher, former ASUI president.
“One of my main priorities is going to be to continue working to get more grades onto Blackboard,” Fisher said. “Ideally every student would have universal and immediate access to their grades, but professors who don’t have a variety of reasons for being reluctant. So what we want to do is to continue the conversation.”
Lindsey LaPrath, a previous Faculty Senate representative from ASUI, presented their request to last year’s senators. While Brandt said an outright requirement would not be feasible because it would break other rules, members of Faculty Senate listened to the proposal and tried to implement it in their respective departments.
“That message was heard loud and clear,” Brandt said. “Some of the faculty went back to their colleges to inform them of the demand. If that doesn’t make a difference, I expect ASUI will come back to us to find another solution.”
Brandt said what the Faculty Senate does greatly affects students and staff at UI along with faculty.
One example is course evaluations, which were changed in the spring as a result of Faculty Senate working with students and university administration. Brandt said the form hadn’t been changed for a long time.
“The student input is really important,” Brandt said. “What ASUI thought about it mattered to many faculty so they could make the evaluations more useful to them.”
Brandt said she expects the implementation of the new tobacco ban to be a major topic this year. Though she said the policy is a done deal, Faculty Senate will at least have a role as a forum of communication between faculty, students and administration.
Neither Faculty Senate nor ASUI will be able to do much about the new tobacco policy, she said, besides make noise.
“In my personal opinion, I have a lot of reservations about banning a legal substance unless we’re providing support to not smoke,” she said. “I’m worried about the smokers. Where do they go? It’s an addictive substance and we know going cold turkey isn’t feasible.”
Brandt said discussion at Tuesday’s retreat also included faculty compensation. She said the president has made it a priority to bring average pay up to 100 percent of market value. The way she sees it, faculty compensation circles back to the enrollment issue again.
“There’s a chicken and egg issue with pay and enrollment,” she said. “We can’t have good programs to boost enrollment unless we have teachers who are paid well.”
Nishant Mohan
can be reached at