Faculty Senate continued its discussions Monday regarding the restructuring of general education at Ohio University.
Senate reviewed a resolution to establish a fourth committee for general education through the University Curriculum Council. The creation of that committee would make changes to the faculty handbook to make general education a responsibility of the council.
The General Education Committee also proposed a viable general education model and revised its statements of intent to make them more straightforward.
The new model has 40 credit hours, which is a slight increase from the current model. It also replaces the tier structure with five categories. However, it was not explicitly laid out how that model would affect learning communities in terms of general education.
"90% of all of our students participate in learning communities because it is a valuable learning experience for them," Katie Hartman, UCC General Education committee chair, said. “So for the other 10% of students who don’t participate in learning communities, we have to decide what that looks like.”
The Promotion and Tenure committee also introduced a resolution to give faculty members without departments the opportunity for promotion. Currently, at least eighteen faculty members at the university are not part of a department or school.
"We need to have a mechanism at the hiring level to make sure this doesn’t happen," Jacqueline Wolf, chair of the Promotion and Tenure committee, said. “That faculty cannot be hired unless they have a designated (academic) home.”
The passing of the resolution would mean those faculty are given departments before the 2020-2021 school year to make them eligible for promotions.
President Duane Nellis also updated the Senate about ongoing efforts to reimagine the framework of the university to support the budget.
“We even have programs on the books where there are no students and the faculty, and it’s a time to sunset some of those, but are there places where we ought to make a restructuring,” Nellis said.
