The Council on Academic Affairs met at 2 p.m. on Wednesday in Booth Library to go over waiver reports and discuss plans for the semester.

CAA chair Stacey Ruholl said because the council has reduced in size, a minimum of four votes is needed instead of five. Additionally, for quorum to be reached, six members must be present.

Waiver reports from each college were reviewed for the months of April, May, June, and July as well as grade appeal reports.

In a previous meeting with Provost Jay Gatrell, doing waiver reports once a semester instead of on a monthly basis was a topic of interest, Ruholl said.

“(It) would streamline what we do and streamline information,” Ruholl said. “One of the good points Gatrell mentioned is then we can look at a bigger picture of the pie to see if there’s a trend.”

Ruholl said she brought it up as a discussion topic to see if any CAA member had any objections or support for the idea.

Although the Council of Deans would still have to approve the change, Gatrell said the idea has already been brought to its attention.

“We’ve already discussed it with the deans,” Gatrell said. “With staffing changes obviously, it would be to the benefit of the offices and the core operations to streamline that process.”

CAA member James Bruehler said he saw no downside to the suggested change.

The change was agreed upon by CAA members as a good idea. No members had any objections to it.

The structure of the general education committee as described in the CAA’s bylaws was also briefly discussed in the meeting.

“We need to get moving on that. We need to have something for that,” Ruholl said. “With the reduction everywhere in faculty, it’s going to get harder and harder for people to spread out more and more. We do have a proposal that’s come forth.”

Ruholl said while it is not a formal proposal yet, Karla Sanders, the executive director of the Center for Academic Support and Assessment, will be coming in at a future meeting to share a plan that may work as a short-term solution.

CAA vice chair Richard Wilkinson said in light of issues that happened with class proposals last year, he wanted to send proposals with obvious mistakes back to the college level instead of just having the professors revise them.

“There were obvious errors in things like the number of face-to-face contact hours didn’t match up with the number of hours they were asking for credit to be given for,” Wilkinson said. “I’m not saying every proposal that needs revising needs to go back, but it is really frustrating because we had these one-hour courses that came through that we may here again about later that were just meeting half the hours they were supposed to.”

Because the CAA was not filled in the spring elections and it is a faculty-elected council, the Faculty Senate will hold an election this fall to fill any vacancies.

“We do have one vacancy that we’re hoping to fill here at the special election this fall,” Ruholl said. “It is an at large position, so any faculty member who wants to run for it can get elected regardless of college or department.”

Chrissy Miller can be reached at 581-2812 or clmiller9@eiu.edu.