Faculty Senate will discuss possible changes to the university’s foreign language requirements at its meeting today. The senate will hear from the Council on Academic Affairs’ foreign-language ad-hoc committee, said Les Hyder, the committee’s chair.

“We’re just going to give (the senate) a brief summary of our report and what our findings are,” Hyder said. “We’ll just present the committee’s report and answer questions that members of the senate have.”

In April 2008, CAA approved a proposal that increased the university’s required number of foreign language semesters from two to three.

President Bill Perry and Blair Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs, sent the proposal back to CAA for further consideration.

The ad-hoc committee was formed in September.

This was in response to Perry and Lord’s action.

The committee has studied the proposed changes and recently issued a report about them.

The report, which will be discussed at today’s meeting, recommend CAA reject its earlier decision. Instead, it encourages each academic program to review its own foreign language proficiency and lets each program decide to increase the requirement.

Faculty Senate Chair John Pommier said he hopes to hear about the committee’s decision-making process. “I’m pretty sure the ad-hoc committee from CAA is going to . discuss the process they’re using for the foreign language requirement,” Pommier said.

Aside from the foreign language requirements, the senate will also discuss student research with Bonnie Irwin, dean of the Honors College, and Bob Chesnut, director of research and sponsored programs for the graduate college.

Chesnut said he plans to answer questions from the senate.

“I imagine that . we’ll talk about undergraduate research and raising money for undergraduate research,” Chesnut said. “I’ll be mainly looking for questions from the senate members.”

The meeting begins at 2 p.m. in Conference Room 4440, Booth Library.

Joe Astrouski can be reached at 581-7942 or at jmastrouski@eiu.edu.