Members of the University faculty issued a petition to President John T. Casteen, III last week scrutinizing the creation of the 2005-2006 academic calendar and requesting a change in protocol.
Associate History Prof. Jeffrey J. Rossman created the petition in response to faculty concerns voiced in the spring after the release of 2005-2006 calendar, and 345 faculty members who work in the affected departments signed the petition.
"In February, the administration sprang a new calendar on the faculty, and it was a dramatically new calendar," Rossman said. "Faculty had plans for research, travel, vacation and suddenly classes started a week earlier."
The schedule change caused classes to begin two Wednesdays before Labor Day as opposed to one Wednesday before Labor Day as in the past.
Rossman said major complaints included giving six months of notice of the change instead of the approximately two years that University policy states. Concerns also included the lack of input from the Faculty Senate and the General Faculty Council.
What was missing was "a proper consultative process in which the legitimate concerns and needs of the faculty are taken into account in setting the academic calendar, and second, a calendar always published two years in advance," Rossman said.
Last May, Casteen addressed the complaints in an e-mail and reported the reasoning behind the calendar changes. University spokesperson Carol Wood said the changes were based on concerns Casteen was alerted to from parents and students who said they believed an earlier release for Winter Break was necessary to ensure that students could acquire holiday jobs.
Although the entire Faculty Senate was not addressed, a small group out of the Provost's Office, including faculty, students and staff, recommended the changes that were instated for the 2005-2006 school year, Wood said.
After this year's academic calendar was created, Casteen reconstituted a calendar committee, chaired by Vice President and Provost Gene D. Block, which will begin planning calendars for the successive years in their first meeting Oct. 17.
Block said the committee will discuss the issues highlighted in the petition.
"We will try to make the [calendar] decisions in a timely way," he said. "The hope is to get a system that gives us as much of an advanced warning as possible."
Faculty Senate Chair Houston G. Wood said there is a Senate representative on the new committee and that he is confident the Senate will have input in future calendars.
"The petition brings [the concerns] to a level of awareness where you can have a healthy discussion on the issue," Wood said. "I really think it won't happen again in the foreseeable future."
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