Vol. 38, No. 18

3-17-2009
By: Jeff McCallister

University Senate OKs switch from quarters to semesters

What looked as if it might turn into a contentious University Senate debate March 12 instead turned out to be a blowout victory for supporters of the switch to semesters when the senate voted 91-19 to approve the Faculty Council proposal and send it to the Board of Trustees for final approval.

The board is expected to take up the issue at its April 3 meeting, and with approval, the switch would go into effect for the 2012-13 academic year.

After a group of 11 faculty members — including several high-profile researchers — sent a mass e-mail in the days leading up to the senate vote to arts and sciences faculty to raise concerns about the switch, senate leaders braced for a tough session and even told senators to be prepared to work into the evening.

But once the session opened, most of the  discussion was about the process of the debate — when and how to offer amendments, mostly — rather than the issue itself.

Tim Gerber, who chaired the ad hoc committee that studied the switch and brought forth thee proposal through the Faculty Council, made the committee’s argument by speaking directly to the student members of the senate.

In doing so, he stressed that coordinated calendars across the state would put OSU students on equal footing with students of other universities. Ohio State students get out of school about a month later than students at semester schools, who get that much of a head start in their job searches because they can start earlier.

When the motion with amendments did come to the floor, Faculty Council Chair Dick Gunther gave the final argument for the measure, while Richard Hart, professor and chair of biomedical engineering, spoke against it.

Gunther spoke of the political reality of the situation — that rejecting the switch would be a slap in the face to a governor and legislature that has been unwaveringly generous during these tough economic times.

Hart, on the other hand, stressed the lack of flexibility within the semester system as opposed to the “granularity” — smaller parts that move more independently — of quarters, and noted that the request was just that: A request, not a mandate.
The vote was taken by secret ballot and resoundingly passed.

As amended, the measure called for the senate’s Council on Enrollment and Student Progress to put together a specific semester calendar and bring it back to the full senate for approval. The calendar will include no fewer than 65 instruction days and, with the exception of professional colleges or academic disciplines whose accreditation standards require a longer term, no more than 70 days of instruction in each semester.

The CESP usually has authority to devise the academic calendar without full senate approval, but Faculty Council Chair Dick Gunther said that since the new calendar will have such a widespread affect on every corner of the university, he wanted the entire body to have the chance to debate and approve it.

The prospect of a calendar conversion had been debated twice previously in the last 18 years. It was rejected in the committee stage in 1991, then approved through committee in 2001 before being tabled by the full senate over concerns about what was an inadequate student information system.

The implementation of a new, modern SIS over the course of this year has done away with that hurdle, but the main impetus behind the current movement is the Strategic Plan for Higher Education put forth a year ago by Chancellor Eric Fingerhut.
The plan calls for a common academic calendar across the University System of Ohio to facilitate easier integration of the universities, trim costs by improving efficiency and facilitate transfer of credits between institutions.

Ohio State is the last of Ohio’s 13 four-year universities to make the switch, though it has been only recently that Ohio University, Wright State and the University of Cincinnati approved similar measures to conform to the chancellor’s plan.
Gunther gave a detailed rebuttal to the claims of the mass arts and sciences e-mail that claimed the measure had not been thoroughly studied and debated.

Because chancellor has called for a common calendar since before the strategic plan officially came out in 2007, the measure couldn’t have taken anyone by surprise.

“Faculty Council and relevant senate committees have been deliberating over this proposal for five months, and they based part of their analysis on the findings of a year-long study conducted by a similar ad hoc committee in 2001,” Gunther said in an e-mail to senators.

He said the initial discussion in Faculty Council took place Oct. 16 and informed the full senate of the formation of an ad hoc committee to study a switch at the senate’s Oct. 23 meeting. The committee was formed and given its formal charge on Nov. 7.

The committee presented initial findings and emerging recommendations in two subsequent meetings of Faculty Council, on Jan. 15 and Feb. 5, as well as the Feb. 12 meeting of the University Senate.

Faculty Council met for 2 1/2 hours Feb. 26, with the first hour devoted to an open forum for all faculty who wished to attend, at which a resolution to send this proposal on to CESP and the Senate was passed. CESP approved this report and proposed an amendment to the supportive resolution on March 3.

Finally, ad hoc committee chair Tim Gerber and his colleagues held numerous meetings with student groups throughout this five-month deliberative process, including a formal presentation to the USG Senate on Feb. 18, and an open forum for students Feb. 23.

Gerber’s committee said a conversion would eliminate a “competitive disadvantage” for OSU students applying for summer internships and job opportunities that they can’t begin until end of spring term in June, a month after semester-based institutions let out for summer.

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