Modification of Faculty Handbook - Nine Selected Sections RPC 05/06 - 2
At the Faculty Meeting on December 1, RPC will move that the faculty vote to recommend to the President that certain Category #2 content (namely, the sections concerning Associate Deans of the Faculties, Academic Calendar, Daily Class Schedule, Examinations, Exceptions to Curriculum Requirements, Honor System, Honor Council Observer, Student Evaluations of Courses and Instructors, and Summer School) be incorporated into the Faculty Handbook.
The text being presented to the faculty for a vote is posted on the web at this URL:
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr/rpc/canary
N.B.: In response to questions raised when the draft text was circulated among the St. Olaf faculty, RPC decided to remove from consideration at this meeting the section on Student Rights and Academic Freedom and to refer it to the Dean of Students Office for clarification. The policy statements in this section have been in the Student Handbook in their current form for a long time; any changes in their wording could have broad implications.
N.B.: At the faculty meeting on November 3, RPC had volunteered to examine the issues of (1) allowing students to work on an exam beyond the confines of the regularly scheduled class period and (2) requiring students to take an exam at a particular time outside the regularly scheduled class period. RPC, in consultation with the administration, did draft two paragraphs to be added to the “Examinations” section of the Faculty Handbook, but then decided that the issue should be discussed in a wider forum before a draft text is circulated for review.
Rationale:
In November, 2003, the St. Olaf faculty voted that “material from the current Faculty Manual, the old Faculty Handbook, the Student Handbook, and the current Administrative Handbook be divided between the new Faculty Manual and new Faculty Handbook.” Now, two years later, the new Faculty Handbook is available from the Dean's website, but some of the Category #2 content in it still needs to be reviewed and voted on by the faculty.
N.B.: The Faculty Manual defines Category #2 content as “rules, policies, regulations and guidelines related to academic matters about which the President is to seek a recommendation from the faculty before the content is added, modified, or eliminated from the Handbook.” (The President is not required to seek the faculty's recommendation for adding, modifying, or eliminating content in Categories #'s 1, 3, and 4.) Whenever the faculty votes on Category #2 content, the purpose is simply to recommend (or not recommend) to the President that the proposed policy be incorporated into the Handbook. The final decision rests with the President.
Procedure:
Each month the faculty is asked to comment on selected sections of Category #2 content. RPC then takes the feedback it receives on the draft text and discusses it with the administration; whatever final version of the text emerges from that discussion is put to a vote at the next faculty meeting. This is an unusual sort of vote since the motion from RPC is simply to support (or not support) the final version of a text that has been presented to the faculty by the administration. Amendments to that final version are out of order during the faculty meeting since it is the administration’s proposal, not the faculty's. Because of the unusual nature of this process, RPC uses a canary-yellow sheet rather than the ordinary green sheet.
