The Daily Reveille
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FACULTY SENATE
New ‘W’ policy extends drop date Celeste Ansley Staff Writer
Faculty Senate passed a resolution Thursday to change the University’s “W” policy at its monthly meeting. The new policy allows students to drop a class without receiving a “W” up to the seventh class day, and the last day to add a class is now on the eighth class day. The current policy allows students to drop classes on or before the sixth class day and add classes up to the eighth class day. Student Government Senate passed a resolution Sept. 29 to extend the “W” policy by two days. Faculty Senate’s Admissions, Standards and Honors Committee rejected the SG resolution during the fall semester, but the two sides made a compromise to have the policy extended by only one day. The Faculty Senate passed the new resolution Thursday with one opposing vote. “This is a policy students really do want and care about,” said SG Vice President Dani Borel. Jeffrey Wale, SG director of academics, said many faculty members use the first class day to go over syllabi and don’t get into course material until the second class day. Under the current policy,
BENJAMIN OLIVER HICKS / The Daily Reveille
LSU System President John Lombardi discusses budget cut predictions for the next legislative session Thursday afternoon at the Faculty Senate meeting.
students taking classes on Tuesday and Thursday only have one class day to get a feel for the class, Wale said. Wale said passing the resolution is the first step in making the change, and details must still be worked out with the Registrar’s Office. “We do see a lot of students adding classes on the seventh and eighth class days,” said Robert Doolos, University registrar. The final decision for changing the withdrawal policy belongs to the Provost’s Office. LSU System President John Lombardi spoke at the meeting to answer questions from senators on budget cut topics like fee increases,
budget proposals and TOPS. “The first good news is that it does not appear the budget will be as catastrophic,” Lombardi said. Lombardi said his best guess is the budget presented to the Legislature will feature less than a 10-percent cut to higher education. Faculty Senate also discussed issues like guidelines for interruptions to the calendar year, admission requirements to the University and faculty members’ right to assign student grades.
Contact Celeste Ansley at cansley@lsureveille.com
Fate of more than 72 library databases depends on Gov. Jindal’s budget Morgan Searles Contributing Writer
Librarians, students and professors alike wait in limbo to hear if the Louisiana Board of Regents will refurbish funding for university library databases in the state. LOUIS, the Louisiana Library Network, has received the majority of its monetary support from the Board of Regents since 1995 but lost that support in September 2010 because of budget issues. Now Louisiana universities are waiting for the governor’s budget to be released. If the Board of Regents is budgeted enough money, it may be able to refurbish funds for LOUIS, said Sara Zimmerman, LOUIS executive director. “In the meantime, we are preparing to talk to state-elected officials and Regents themselves to see if we can become more of a priority,” Zimmerman said. “We will fight for funding, but we will give the board a chance to see if they will reinstate funding before we go directly to [the] Legislature.” The University has lost six of its 72 electronic databases. These include WebFeat/360 Search, SPORTDiscus, Oxford English Dictionary Online, CQ Global Researcher, WorldBook Online and International Political Science Abstracts (IPSA), according to the University library website. LOUIS member libraries are funding the remaining databases until July 2011, Zimmerman said.
“When the Regents in July 2010 eliminated all funding, LOUIS was going to have to cut every database,” she said. “But the libraries managed to cover almost everything. Your library funded all of this through June 2011, but we do not have funding for July.” If LOUIS funding is not refurbished, the University will have to pay for databases that need to stay, Zimmerman said. “These resources have to be here,” Zimmerman said. “They support accreditation, research and teaching in the classroom. Universities will have to figure out which ones they need to have and buy those, which will cost them more than if they continued to buy it as a consortium.” The six unrenewed databases caught the attention of library users last semester, said Faye Phillips, associate dean of libraries. “We had complaints at the first of the fall, but it dwindled off when people found other resources,” Phillips said. “But when the spring semester starts and people start doing research again, they will probably have more complaints.” Zimmerman said the libraries received many letters from faculty and students concerning the cut of certain databases. “I was surprised and enlightened so many students are aware of products and use them extensively,” she said. Losing more databases might change the nature of the library
instruction course offered by the University, said Michael Russo, instruction coordinator for the library. “The primary ones that we focus on in the course were saved,” Russo said. “But we had a meeting among the library instructors to discuss, ‘If we didn’t have databases to work with, could we accomplish the goals of the course without the databases?’ We have some ideas to fall back on, but it’s not the same.” Students and faculty have played a part in securing temporary funding in the past and should continue to work for a restored budget, Russo said. Contact Morgan Searles at msearles@lsureveille.com
Friday, Jan. 21, 2011