Baker faculty senate approves new classes

Baker+faculty+senate+approves+new+classes

Story by Larran Williams

This article was originally published prior to June 2, 2013. Due to a change in the content management systems, the initial publication date in not available. 

Faculty senate members accepted and passed a package of seven motions that involve program revisions and the addition of new courses into the Baker curriculum Tuesday.

Departments impacted include biology, language and literature, history, business, theater and math.

However, changes will not be made until the next school year.

“Since they are catalogue changes for the next catalogue, they won’t affect current students at all,” Professor of Biology Darcy Russell said. “These are program changes that will be in effect for incoming freshmen starting next year.”

Some changes will widen the course options for current students in each of these disciplines.

Russell said the changes in the biology department will give students a chance to be recognized for their research work done during their time at Baker.

“In biology, though, we are hoping that it will also give current students a little bit of a boost, because one of the things that we did was we added a course line so students can get transcripted for when they do research projects,” Russell said.

University President Pat Long addressed the senate Tuesday and said the decision was made not to do a search for a new vice president of finance to replace Jo Adams after her resignation in February.

Susan Lindahl, chief communications and strategic planning officer, will assume various duties in regard to the position for the remainder of the year.

“We made the decision to postpone the search until next year, and Susan will take on those responsibilities,” Long said. “She has a lot of expertise and is very familiar with the budget.”

Rand Ziegler, vice president and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the decision has been made to put together a first annual student research and honor symposium.

Zeigler said the interdisciplinary conference will provide a chance to honor students doing outstanding work outside the Baker campus.

He said he hopes the event will bring attention to the hard work done outside of the classroom and inspire younger students to set their goals higher.

“It really brings to life the kind of things that they hear about but never see,” Ziegler said.  “One of the outcomes of it is for our (younger) students to see what the upperclassmen are doing so that they can realize what opportunities there are, and they can aspire to that.”