In today’s Academic Senate meeting, the Senate focused on advocating for lecturer representation in the statewide Academic Senate (ASCSU) and for lecturers to be compensated for their service work for the university.
The Senate also passed a resolution to grant permanent status to the Creative Media major, an interdisciplinary major that marries the arts with English and journalism which has been operating as a pilot program for the past five years.
Senate Fights for Lecturer Representation and Compensation
The Senate passed a Sense of the Senate resolution today in support of the ASCSU mandating three permanent Senator seats for lecturers in its constitution, and also presented a draft of a resolution which would compensate lecturers for service work—which includes participation in university governance—which they have been reliably doing voluntarily and without pay.
Senator Marina Gerson brought the Sense of the Senate resolution calling for statewide lecturer representation to the floor, and argued alongside others that the most vulnerable and lowest paid faculty members deserve representation so they can advocate for themselves.
The ASCSU implementing this policy would, according to Senator Dave Colnic, bring it in line with how Stan State’s Academic Senate has operated for years.
The resolution passed with 38 votes in favor and one abstention.
Lecturer advocacy returned to the floor again when Gerson also presented a draft of a policy which would financially compensate lecturers for the service work they perform at the university-wide or department-level—work which is outside of the terms of their contract.
Gerson says it isn’t much compensation, but that compensating them for their time and valuable service at all is an improvement.
Senator Cassandra Drake reported on a number of lecturers who have done fantastic and important service work for the university with no compensation over the years.
“Our lecturer colleagues, their commitment to our campus really needs to be appropriately compensated,” said Drake.
Senator Colnic, speaking in his capacity as the Chapter President of the CFA, says that this draft overcomes all of the union’s potential concerns with such a policy, which were that it might exploit lecturers’ service work or undermine the work of tenure-line faculty.
“It’s a way to compensate people for doing work out of contract for our lecturers,” he said, “and I don’t see any harm for our tenure-line or see it being exploitative.”
This draft will return as a more robust resolution as a first-reading item in a later Academic Senate meeting.
Senate Votes to Grant Creative Media Major Permanent Status After Five-Year Pilot Run
In this session, the Academic Senate voted to grant permanent status to the Creative Media major, an interdisciplinary program which involves the arts, literature, journalism, business and many more disciplines, with the intention of training versatile storytellers in a variety of mediums.
In this resolution’s first reading at the October 8th meeting, Senator Mechelle Perea-Ryan reported that, despite the program launching during COVID, the number of majors in this program has increased from 5 to 55, with this number being projected to grow even more.
In today’s second reading, Senator Drake spoke in favor of granting this program permanent status.
“It’s great to see another interdisciplinary degree being offered to our students and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of it,” she said.
Senator Al Petrosky also spoke in favor of the resolution, saying that it’s been a pleasure having students from this program in his courses and that it’s the kind of interdisciplinary, hands-on program the university should be supporting.
As the Senate voted in favor of this resolution, it now relies on the university president’s signature to go into effect.