Last night's Graduate Student Senate meeting marked one of the shortest meetings of the year, adjourning less than 15 minutes after it started.
The meeting featured a handful of reports from various Graduate Student Senate members. The senate did not have enough members present to vote - only about 20 were in attendance - but there were no proposed resolutions on the agenda.
The search committee for the new vice president of Finance and Administration will bring the three new candidates to campus during the week of May 24, said Sarah Templeton-Wilson, the senator for the College of Fine Arts.
We are inviting three candidates to campus and I think that they are better than our previous batch
she said.
OU named three finalists for the position in February but two withdrew from the search before visiting campus - which forced OU administrators to restart the search from scratch.
Templeton-Wilson stressed the importance of having positive attitudes when interacting with the new candidates.
One of things that came up in the discussion ... some of the candidates last time were beginning to question why they wanted to even come to campus because they were reading a lot of negative feedback Templeton-Wilson said. Obviously we want to be critical to make sure we get the right person but also try to sell OU a little bit too because we actually have some really good candidates.
Last on the discussion board was new business about the maternity-leave policy.
At the most recent meeting of OU's Women's Commission, discussion included a universitywide parental leave
said Chelsie Wollett, senate's Women's Affairs commissioner.
We are trying to rewrite the maternity leave policy
Wollett said. A couple of the things that we wanted to make sure that we included was the option for adoption leave
paternal leave and father leave.
After looking at a few different schools for parental leave policies, the new policy will propose a quarter paid leave for new parents.
We are going to include grad students now
Wollett said. So whether it is adoption
whether it is same-sex couple
heterosexual couples
birth mother
birth father - we are shooting for everyone.
The next step is for the committee is to officially propose the policy.
(We are going to) back it up with information that we have from like schools
