Schedules, meeting time to change
A motion passed by the University Senate on Monday will increase the number of Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes offered but will possibly limit those classes to morning times.
According to the motion, the three hours for the common meeting time – currently Mondays and Fridays from 12:30-1:45 p.m. – must fall on Mondays between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. and Fridays between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. The motion is unclear whether it can be both days or one day a week, but will not eliminate Monday-Wednesday classes entirely. The motion passed via a 25-12 vote.
The Provost will decide on the common meeting time implementation with input from the Student Government Association and the University Senate, according to Zach Mullins, SGA president.
“(The motion is) coming from the faculty who are trying to increase efficiency for the university and that’s the true motive behind it,” Mullins said. “It’s not that we want to just have Friday classes, and we’re doing it because we hate students, (but) because we’re trying to look at efficiency for the university.”
Ken McGill, chair of the Department of Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy and a member of the Senate’s Classroom Utilization Committee, which drafted the motion, stressed if the common meeting time is set on Fridays, no classes would be scheduled during that same time slot.
The previous common meeting time policy was written in 1998 when GCSU had about 4,200 students. Before, the common meeting time was on Friday afternoon. Now that the university has about 6,500 students, scheduling classes has become more of a challenge, McGill said.
The new policy is expected to ease these challenges.
“There’s about 80 classes that are having scheduling conflicts that we can’t schedule right now and students are saying they want these classes, and they don’t want to take them in the evening,” Mullins said.
The motion was a cause for contention at Monday’s meeting especially for faculty in the College of Business, including John Swinton, director of the Center for Economic Education.
“I believe it would be an academic policy issue not a classroom utilization issue that should drive these decisions,” Swinton said. “Different disciplines have different pedagogical reasons to prefer different class schedules. The determination of classroom schedules should be left to college deans in consultation with the program heads and faculty members.”
Increasing the number of Monday, Wednesday and Friday classes was proposed to more efficiently use classroom space and encourage state Board of Regents funding. Currently, five Monday-Wednesday classes or seven Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes can be scheduled from 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. The new policy would allow up to six and nine, respectively. This does not account for the common meeting time .
“The meeting time that we have right now is prime real estate in terms of class times,” McGill said. “Noon to 2 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, is a very valuable time for classroom space.”
Another concern voiced in opposition of the policy was that it may hinder student organization meeting times.
“The present policy would unduly constrain the meeting times for student activities,” Swinton said. “It is my experience that some of the more active students participate in multiple programs and the limitation proposed could force some of our more active students to make difficult choices as to which student activities they would partake. This may have the undesired consequence of reducing overall student participation in campus groups.”
A Facebook group opposing the motion boasted 1,392 members as of press time Wednesday and some students e-mailed university senators their opinions.
McGill said he encourages all student responses, but he suggests that the SGA be utilized more in these cases.
“SGA has been very active and a good advocate for the students here on campus, and I think (voicing opinions through SGA) would have been a better approach than the Facebook page,” McGill said. “I think some of the faculty were a little annoyed by the spamming. The spamming may have swayed votes the wrong way from the student’s perspective.”
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