I thought I’d write a bit of a report on what will be happening at this Wednesday’s Senate meeting. There isn’t any super exciting or controversial motions but there are a few interesting presentations. The agenda can be found here.

I’m just going to go through the main items of interest. If you have questions or comments about any other items then use the contact form to get a hold of me.

5. Academic Policy Committee – Thursday Noon-hour Break (here)

So if you didn’t already know, you’ll be shocked to find out that there is a Senate mandated noonhour break (think primary school recess) between 12:30 and 2:00 each Thursday. The rationale behind this break is a good one: students (and maybe more importantly faculty) need some free time to do volunteer work. Our campus has tons of cool projects and options because faculty and students have the time to organize them. Effectively this guarantees that they have some time to do it.

The policy was suspended for a one year period because of last year’s extreme space limitations. This year the policy came back into play. Unfortunately there really isn’t a mechanism for enforcing it. The Academic Policy Committee was tasked with the ugly job of figuring out how to do this.

They came back with very little effectively saying that both sides have strong arguments. Although the break is vital to students and faculty, it is too overbearing to force the university to do anything about. They cite Place and Promise, blah, blah, blah. As an enthralled reader you are left with a suggestion to faculties to do it.

There will certainly be some questions here and I will be trying to suggest some other options for enforcement.

6 & 7. Admissions and Curriculum Committees

See the agenda for what is happening here. I don’t think there is anything really contentious. All of it came from the faculties and most of the changes are to calendar wording and admissions issues. Feel free to look through them here (for admissions), here (for more admissions), and here (for curriculum).

8. Teaching and Learning Committee Presentation on CSL (Community Service Learning) and CBR (Community Based Research) at UBCV (here)

Yay! Exciting stuff! There is a lot of talk about how to bring the UBC classroom into the broader community. The concept has very few critics, but the implementation is very difficult. It is expensive and requires changing our thinking around grades and ‘learning objectives’.

The questions that the Senate will be asked during the presentation include:

• In light of the goal for significantly increased participations, how do you think that UBC might best advance CSL and CBR over the next five years?
• Are there real or perceived barriers for faculty participation that need to be addressed?
• What would successful CSL and CBR outcomes look like from the student perspective? From the community perspective? Are there barriers to engagement?
• What are the implications associated with the plan to advance CSL and CBR?
• What role(s) should the Senate play to help advance the plan for CSL and CBR?

This will be a really interesting presentation and I encourage everyone to come and check it out.

10. Annual Report on Enrollment (here)

More exciting stuff! Wondering who all those first years are on campus? The Annual Report on enrollment has all of your answers!.

I’m not going to give any analysis here because there isn’t enough time. However, my initial thoughts are that the spelled ‘enrollment’ wrong on the cover so it should be very interesting.

Thoughts

Nothing super exciting this month but it would still be great to see all of you out there at the meeting tomorrow night. Especially if you are a candidate (see point 3 here).

And vote for Geoff’s Place in the VFM contest!