The Citadel Faculty Council
Minutes of the Regular Meeting of April 19, 2001
Computer Lab, Daniel Library

1. Prof. Steve Silver, Faculty Council vice-chairperson, called the meeting to order when after some effort a quorum was achieved at 11:29 a.m.

2. Members attending: Profs. Bishop, Chen, Dunlop, Gordon, Jones, Kelley, Matthews, Pages, Silver, Skow-Obenaus, Templeton, Allen for Lally, Burkett for McDowell, Carter for Nath, Shields for Thompson and Rushing for Zuraw.

3. Members absent: Profs. Briggs, Britz, Brown, Lineberger, Moody, Williams and Woo.

4. Prof. Gordon moved and Prof. Dunlop seconded that the minutes of the Mar. 22 meeting be approved. This was passed unanimously.

5. Prof. Julie Lipovsky, chairperson of the Committee on Committees, was present to get Faculty Council action on three recommendations which had come out of its reorganizational work for the year.

(a) The Student Affairs Committee decided it no longer needed to exist: things it used to do, about foreign students or multicultural stuff, are now handled by paid employees and the only live matter before it is advising issues. Prof. Allen moved and Prof. Gordon seconded that Faculty Council accept its vote to disband and give the Internal College Relations Committee the job of placing the advising oversight somewhere else; this was passed unanimously.

(b) Prof. Gordon moved and Prof. Allen seconded that the Council accept the second recommendation, that the Fine Arts and Athletic Advisory Committees be removed from the purview of the Committee on Committees and staffed only by volunteers. The reason for this proposal was that these committees do not have either charters or college-wide representation by department and people get on them by asking. Prof. Lipovsky opined that these would not count in future as committee assignments which would preclude assignment to other committees since they were from affinity. The motion was passed unanimously.

(c) The third recommendation was that the pre-medical, pre-law and reading committees be counted as committee work (in the sense, Prof. Lipovsky clarified, that being on one of them meant that the Committee on Committees would only put you on one other committee at most, not two) but not staffed by the Committee on Committees since they are not relevant to all departments; rather, the departments that are concerned with them (like English, Political Science and History for pre-law) should work out a procedure for getting volunteers. Prof. Rushing moved and Prof. Allen seconded that the Council accept this. The issue was raised as to whether these three committees did enough work that they should count, and there was some discussion about what it meant to have committee work "count" when you could be on the most important committee on campus but do no work; Prof. Templeton suggested that the three be severed from the Committee on Committees but not count as committee work for its purposes. Prof. Lipovsky noted that these were not affinity committees like Fine Arts because departments probably pressured people into being on them. The motion was passed unanimously without acting on the suggestion to sever its two parts.

Prof. Lipovsky then gave some general remarks about the Committee's attempts at fairness in allocating committee burdens and raised the possibility that perhaps the personnel of the Committee itself should not change every year as the charter now mandates so that it could profit from experience by members with more than one-year terms.

6. Prof. Silver announced that Prof. Bishop had volunteered to continue as Faculty Council secretary and asked about other candidates; there were none, and Prof. Templeton moved and Prof. Kelley seconded that Prof. Bishop be re-elected as secretary. This was passed unanimously. Prof. Allen noted that past minutes and year-end committee reports were not up on the Web as they should be; Prof. Silver noted that he was going to show Prof. Bishop how to do that after exams were over.

7. Candidates were proposed for Faculty Council vice-chair. Those who were present said they had too much work to allow them to accept this and thus become chair the following year. Suggestions were made about absent people but it was pointed out that we'd better not elect someone unless we knew they'd accept. At this point it was noticed that the Council had just lost its quorum, so the matter was postponed until candidates could be sounded out before the next meeting on May 10th.

8. The meeting was adjourned at 12:05 p.m.