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Faculty Senate proposes longer semesters
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A Faculty Senate bill proposing to add a week of classes to the fall and spring semesters is causing concern among Boise State faculty members.
The bill will shorten the winter break, currently three weeks, to two. It will also expand both fall and spring semesters from 15 weeks to 16. The Faculty Senate Calendar Committee will place the bill before the President’s Cabinet on Monday, Oct. 14.
Joanne Klein, assistant professor of history, said the bill developed in the Faculty Senate and never reached the rest of the faculty.
“The general faculty, as well as the students, clearly have a stake in this,” she said.
“This came as a complete surprise. We should have been consulted.”
She said that most of the faculty isn’t sure how the new academic calendar year would look. It would have to be approved by the President’s Cabinet before the changes could be laid out clearly.
Klein is in the process of crafting a letter to the calendar committee expressing the faculty’s concerns. She sent out an e-mail to all non-senate faculty asking for feedback.
“I got one positive response out of the forty faculty I e-mailed,” Klein said.
The faculty concerns include pay, research time and recovery time from one semester to the next. One response to Klein’s e-mail stated that if faculty must work two weeks over their original contracts, then BSU should pay them for the additional two weeks.
“The issue of money hasn’t even been addressed as far as we know,” Klein said.
“We are on 9 month contracts, and to expand that without additional monetary compensation for the faculty is going to cause problems.”
Klein added that there are larger issues then pay involved. Faculty tenure is decided with 40 percent teaching, 40 percent research, and 20 percent service as criteria.
Many faculty have other responsibilities to uphold during the summer break and therefore rely on the Christmas holiday to conduct their primary research.
“A week can be essential when you have grant proposals to write, experiments to perform or need to travel as part of your research,” Klein said.
“With less time allotted for break, many faculty on the tenure track just won’t have time to do the primary research which they need to get their tenure.”
Klein also expressed concerns that the shorter break will cause faculty fatigue. Most weekends, she said, are taken up by grading papers and devising the next week’s lesson plans.
“We rely on winter break to recover from fall, get ready for spring, and somewhere in there, most of us like to have a little time to celebrate Christmas and the New Year,” she said.
“As another faculty member put it in an e-mail to me, the new calendar is absurd.”
Elizabeth Puckett, The Arbiter