MINUTES OF THE MEETING PAGE

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OF THE FACULTY SENATE FEBRUARY 10, 2016

collected, of the many classes offered by the CLASS faculty and the Mathematics faculty, only four did not meet. All of the rest of the classes met as scheduled. Provost Zhu said that he wanted to thank all of the faculty and everyone on the emergency teams, our Registrar’s Office staff for the Sunday before that Monday really putting a lot of efforts in trying to find classrooms at the last minute. He also wanted to thank the Marketing and PR Departments that got the message out to the students about the change in the schedules.

Provost Zhu reported that this brought up another issue: how prepared are we to deal with emergencies. He wanted everyone to think about what would happen if an emergency struck, because that could happen to any building or any department for different reasons. He stated that there are two sides here. As a university it is our responsibility to make sure that we have the system in place both to avoid accidents from happening and if an accident did happen, to make sure as quickly as possible that we open the door and provide access to the faculty. On the faculty side if for whatever reason that the building has to be closed for a short period of time, are we ready to continue our instruction so that the students won’t be adversely affected. He noted that for every faculty it is different and for every department and every program it is different; it takes different equipment and different material to teach a class and some faculty teach two classes and some teach three or four classes. The department won’t expect the faculty who teaches four classes to carry the books for all of those four classes every day between the office and the home. But, are there things that we can think about and to be reasonably prepared for example to have your class notes, if you use class notes, scanned into a USB drive and now at least every department should have a scanner plus a copier and it won’t be too difficult to scan the notes into a USB and take the USB with you every day and if you use a laptop, perhaps you can take the laptop with you every day. He reminded everyone to make sure, if it is a university laptop, that there are procedures about taking equipment off campus. We need to have the proper procedure and be aware of the data policy while we protect the system data on the university laptops assuming people have all that information. Provost Zhu stated that those are the kinds of things to please encourage your colleagues to give some thought on and see how we can be better prepared to deal with emergencies like that. We cannot project at what time or at what moment that reachability may come off line.

- X. Report of the Student Government Association (Report No. 31, 2015-2016)

SGA President Emily Halasah discussed internships and co-ops. She reported that SGA Vice President Malek Khawam and SGA Secretary Olga Grech have been working with Vice Provost Peter Meiksins on this and they are members of his ad hoc committee. She reported that they are satisfied with the progress that is being made and SGA hopes to see some recommendations for internships and co-ops in the future.

Ms. Halasah next reported on a couple of Senate project updates. SGA has the Freshmen Leadership Council that is designed to be a mentoring unit. She asked faculty who have the privilege of teaching freshmen to encourage them to get involved with the organization. She said that she will let everyone know when the mentoring unit is