Academic Council approves updates for bylaw changes

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After about four years of work, the last of a series of Academic Governance bylaw changes were approved to move on to the next step of the process during a Tuesday Faculty Council meeting.

“That is it for the bylaw changes,” University Committee on Academic Governance, or UCAG, Chairwoman Susan Kendall said as council members applauded after approving the final revisions at Tuesday’s meeting. “Thanks, everyone.”

The changes, which include wording alterations and revisions to Academic Governance lines of reporting, will help make the university’s governance system more efficient, Executive Committee of Academic Council, or ECAC, Vice Chairman Robert Maleczka said. The changes also serve to make the document more up-to-date, he said.

“Some of it is to make Academic Governance a little bit more responsive — just a cleaner and more effective part of the university,” Maleczka said.
“I think the changes that are being made are good and they reflect changes that, in some cases, have already started happening on the ground and now they’re being formalized so there’s not any sort of confusion.”

Although the changes might not be immediately noticeable to most students, they are important to the way the university is governed, ECAC Chairman Harold Hughes said.

“A lot of people can function without even knowing these bylaws exist,” Hughes said. “But on the other hand, if an issue comes up, sometimes it gets very involved.”

Tuesday’s Faculty Council meeting was dedicated to sending the revisions forward, Maleczka said. The goal is to have the document through the next step of approval — Academic Council — by the end of April, he said.

“In a sense it had to be done and we were going to stay there no matter how long it took,” Maleczka said.

The amended document now will move forward to Academic Council members for approval before review by the MSU Board of Trustees, which would implement the changes, Kendall said after the meeting.

It is slated to be presented to Academic Council as an information item during the council’s March 23 meeting and during a special meeting March 30, Secretary for Academic Governance Jacqueline Wright said during Tuesday’s meeting.

“One of the reasons we wanted to get it done in Faculty Council was to give Academic Council enough time,” Maleczka said.

Maleczka said Faculty Council members hope to have the document on the Board of Trustees’ radar by next fall, before Academic Governance is led by a different set of students and faculty members.

The question now is how to present the revised document to Academic Council members, he said.

Council members spent part of Tuesday’s meeting discussing how best to present the material.

“The idea is just to go through all of this and make sure we give it the time that it deserves,” Maleczka said. “There’s just no way you do this in one meeting.”

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