The Council on Academic Affairs voted to reduce the number of members, eliminate a political science class, limit another class and grant more flexibility with the major’s independent studies options at their meeting Thursday.

The CAA is reducing the number of faculty members in the group by cutting one of the larger positions and reducing the student membership from three to one. The number of representatives from each college would drop from nine to eight, and the number of representatives from the faculty in general would drop from five to four.

The quorum for the CAA would also drop from eight to six.

CAA chair Marita Gronnvoll said this change reflects the number of faculty at the university in general.

The bylaw changes will take place in fall 2017.

Gronnvoll said the changes are not being made next semester because the positions for that time are already being filled.

Gronnvoll said the number of faculty members at Eastern has dropped for the past decade, but the number of CAA members has not.

When it came to the number of students being able to join CAA, Gronnvoll said they do not join often, so they dropped the number of students who can.

The CAA heard from political science professor Jeffrey Ashley about revising the political science major and the Civic and Nonprofit Leadership and International Studies options.

The first change is removing Research Methods in Political Science as a course.

“We added it not long ago,” Ashley said.

He said it was originally added because faculty members were not teaching basic research or qualitative methods in their own classes, but now, it is difficult to schedule the course for both students and faculty.

The second change is to limit their Legal Research and Argument course to one hour of experimental credit. The course was designed to be a prep course for their moot court course, but the professor of the class thought students were taking the Legal Research and Argument course instead of the moot court class.

When it came to the independent study option for the majors, Ashley said more flexibility was desired because there is fewer faculty teaching in the department.

He said if a student is missing a class, an independent study could help the student graduate in some cases.

The CAA also voted on amending a policy concerning high school students taking college courses while they are still enrolled in high school.

Karla Sanders, director of the Center for Academic Support and Assistance said the catalog copy would allow high school juniors to take these courses, not just seniors.

Sanders said the requirement of a 3.0 GPA from the high school has also been added.

In addition, the proposal changed its limit on the number of hours a student can take from eight to seven credit hours.

Samuel Nusbaum can be reached at 581-2812 or at scnusbaum@eiu.edu.