Faculty Senate met Nov. 1 with the Curriculum Committee, Transportation Services Advisory Council and President Denise Trauth at Wednesday’s meeting in order to discuss useful campus resources, market branding and talk about the parking situation on campus.
Faculty Senate met with President Trauth to discuss their president academic advisory group agenda (PAAG). While discussing the PAAG agenda, the senate mentioned the email responses to flyers from white supremacist groups.
The faculty suggested that the emails provide resources for students who feel affected by this. The president agreed that this was a great tactic in order to keep students well informed.
“Talking about the resources is a positive approach as opposed to just slamming the bigotry,” Trauth said.
The meeting proceeded to the a solution for branding of Texas State University marketing. The proposal was for faculty and staff to access academic logos through a link in the university marketing website. From there, there will be a form to request the logo for noncommercial use, where that faculty member will be rerouted to a page for immediate download.
The senate then presented their questions on why The New York Times was not granted a site license. Trauth concluded that, though it would be a useful teaching resource, the university already has access to the newspaper through a different outlet- The New York Times Historical. This outlet provides content from 1851 through last week. It is not the same format as a physical newspaper would be- the Historical only provides the content of the story without a full laid out page.
The main reason that the Times was denied access was due to recent budget cuts from the state.
“Given our physical situation, you have to look at $40,000 a year in that context,” Trauth said, “We’re in our pretty flat budget times right now.”
Since this policy was previously shown support, the senate voiced they still wanted to see its success. Vince Luizzi, senator for the college of philosophy, questioned the implementation of the resource.
“I don’t think there was ever any real creative thinking about how can we do this, how can we make this work,” Luizzi said.
One idea presented was to have each department gather a small portion of the payment to cover that amount as a group. A decision was made to talk to academic units to see if each department could collect the $40,000.
The curriculum committee joined Faculty Senate to discuss its report. New program proposals include adding a graduate minor in Creativity Studies in Education and merging the Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice Corrections and in Criminal Justice Law Enforcement into just a Bachelor of Science Criminal Justice.
Creativity Studies classes are only available to students completing their graduate degree. The committee found that knowledge on creativity makes graduated students more employable to companies. This minor is open to anyone completing their graduate’s degree, not just education majors.
There was a motion to endorse the recommendations from the committee, and as a result all senate members were in favor.
Steven Herrera, director of Transportation Service, and Nancy Nusbaum, associate vice president of finance and support services, joined Faculty Senate to discuss improving some parking areas on campus.
The senate inquired if it would be possible to tell drivers which lots are full and which ones maintain empty spaces throughout the day. Most parking garages are mixed with different colored passes so it would become difficult to regulate each garage.
Parking Services will soon implement license plate recognition in place of parking passes, however these two programs will run simultaneously for the first semester of the new program. Nusbaum was hopeful that they would have the program running by January 2018.
Nusbaum addressed the popular demand that a new parking garage be built, saying that there is no way a new garage could be built without first paying off the debt for the past construction of other garages. Instead, they expect to build a surface lot in the near future.
Some questions still remained with the faculty about parking services. They were advised to send all questions directly to Herrera.