At Faculty Senate’s April meeting, faculty and staff presented topics regarding the coming summer months, when Ohio University will be under construction and when the university’s budget will be approved.
Beth Quitslund, associate professor and vice chair of the Ohio Faculty Council, gave updates on the council because of the issues Ohio’s public universities have faced in recent months. A complimentary presentation from John Day, associate provost for academic budget and planning, detailed the evolution of the university’s budget planning process with regard to the state’s budget and monetary inflation.
“(Ohio Faculty Council has) been fairly busy in the past few months because there has been a lot to do regarding Ohio’s higher education,” Quitslund said.
Her presentation gave updates on College Credit Plus and textbook cost legislation. She recently testified in the Ohio House, which “underlined some of the issues from perspectives of our own institutions,” Quitslund said.
Because the process has constantly been tweaked for the past five years, Day gave a presentation on this year’s budget planning process for the university. He said the decentralized method seeks to balance the budget while taking the specific needs of various colleges into account.
“(The) primary two features of this process is that it is much more decentralized, and by that it is also a lot more complex,” Day said.
The form of budget planning is called Responsibility Centered Management because it looks at the various colleges and campuses as individual units as opposed to the whole. That seeks to give more control to administrative positions in the departments and better assess costs and revenues.
The idea behind that process is that the units are the best option to represent themselves, Day said.
Also in the meeting, Greg Robertson, associate vice president for architecture, design and construction, gave a presentation on summer construction plans. Joe Lalley, senior associate vice president of Information Technologies and Administration Services, was in attendance and was scheduled to give the presentation but Robinson took his place.
Robertson talked about exterior renovations and road closures. The construction relates directly to the state’s and university’s budgets because of the backlog of repairs and construction on the Athens Campus.
Deferred maintenance is dealt with by a century bond, which is essentially a 100-year loan, Day said.
Although some construction plans are not yet complete, three residence halls could be demolished over the summer and repairs will take place throughout campus, such as on South Green Drive and Union Street.
After the presentations, Charles Buchanan, chair of the Educational Policy and Student Affairs Committee, addressed the second reading of the resolution to change the terminology of failing grades. That will serve as an effort to better document the dates failing students last attended classes without requiring faculty to take attendance.
“The primary thing during this is wanting to continue university compliance with federal regulations concerning financial aid,” Buchanan said. “It seems like it won’t be so onerous. One thing that is significant is that the registrar will provide us with emails when someone has withdrawn from a class.”
The resolution passed in response to previous federal action, which reprimanded other universities for not recording the last date the failing student attended class in reports on federal financial aid allotments.
At the end of the meeting, Joe McLaughlin was named the chair of Faculty Senate for another term, David Thomas was named the vice chair and Robin Muhammad was named next year's secretary.
