The Marshall University faculty senate met Thursday to vote on issues happening on campus.
The meeting started with announcements by Professor Larry Stickler.
Gregg Twietmeyer from Kinesiology presented the 2015 Lose the Training Wheels camp hosted by Marshall Kinesiology.
The camp is looking for volunteers from any major, faculty and also high school students over the age of 16.
The camp teaches special needs children how to ride a bike by themselves in a week.
Revised undergraduate class attendance policy was mentioned during the meeting. The committee recommendation policy states, “It is the decision of the instructor to excuse an absence or allow for additional time to make up missed tests or assignments.”
The purpose of the new policy is to lighten the workload of the dean of student affairs regarding minor medical absences.
“Some of my colleagues feel administrative duties are being unfairly cast upon the faculty with their already hectic schedules,” said Marshall Professor Anthony Viola. “Why can’t there be additional staff assigned to this task. Many faculty feel unqualified and uncomfortable fulfilling this additional task? There are potential problems if one instructor grants a university excused absence and another instructor does not.”
Salary increases for tenured and tenure-track faculty was approved.
Recommendations for course additions in the College of Education, College of Liberal Arts and College of Science were approved.
Area of emphasis additions in the college of health professions of outreach and continuing studies was approved, and program additions in the COHP was approved.
Interim President Gary White said Marshall received budget cuts.
“We started this legislative session with the governors budget recommending in round numbers about $2 million reduction overall to Marshall University,” White said. “The legislator worked through its 60-day session and with the help of our delegation and a lot of hard work from lots of folks involved from our varies constituency groups here at this university and higher education across the state we came out of the legislative session with a budget that would have restored the $1 million of that roughly $2 million reduction. Tuesday evening we received the governors vetoed it.”
The result of this veto brought Marshall to a budget cut of $1.3 million instead of $2 million.
White mentioned the search for a new university president. The advertisement for the position was recently released.
“At the current time, the timeline would say that the first weekend of May the search committee will be traveling to conduct personal interviews to whatever is determined to be the best pool of applicants that we have,” White said.
In May three of four finalists will come to campus for a visit and there will be a decision.
“As our consultant said to us ‘the only failed search is a search that produced the wrong person,’” White said.
The next faculty senate meeting is 4 p.m. April 16 in BE5 of the Memorial Student Center.
Sara Ryan can be contacted at [email protected].