The Council on Academic Affairs unanimously rejected changes to its proposal regarding The Open Meetings Act during its meeting Thursday.

The proposed revision would have changed the language in the bylaws from “all meetings shall adhere to the provisions of the Illinois Open Meetings Act,” to “all meetings shall be scheduled and function in a fashion consistent with the spirit of the Illinois Open Meetings Act.”

The revision was introduced to the council last semester and has been discussed and tabled up to the meeting Thursday afternoon.

After much controversy surrounding the change regarding the council not being OMA compliant, the bylaw will remain the same.

As reported on Feb. 21, The Daily Eastern News pushed back against the council changing the bylaw, and a grievance was filed with the Illinois Attorney General’s office by The News. The council responded by suspending its bylaws until a ruling had been passed on the matter.

The council then unsuspended the bylaws because the council members were not comfortable leaving the bylaws as they were while the CAA was not in compliance with the OMA, and it was expected that the council would change the bylaw after citing advice given to the council by Eastern’s General Counsel Laura McLaughlin.

Following that meeting, the council decided not to make changes to its bylaws and to make the changes necessary to become compliant.

During the meeting, CAA Chair Marita Gronnvoll said she had already begun hanging up the council’s weekly agenda outside of her office and said future chairs should also post the agenda outside of their offices so the council will be compliant.

She added that future agendas will need to be more detailed than the previous agendas.

Following the unanimous rejection, all academic agenda items were approved unanimously.

Six of the approved items were changes related to the music programs and include:

• Revisions to the music minor

• Concentration revisions to Music Performance: Composition, Instrumental, Jazz Studies and Vocal

• A new course called Class Instruction in World and Classroom Percussion

• A new course called Contemporary Topics in Secondary General Music

• Course revisions to Functional Skills in Piano III

• Course revisions to Functional Skills in Piano IV

Two program revisions were also voted on during the meeting.

The Computer and Information Technology program will have the courses Computer Science I, Advanced VB.NET Business Programming and Web & Mobile Application Development removed from the electives for the program and the course Data Structures removed from the technical core for the program.

The changes will also add Computer Science I to the technical core and Data Structures to the electives for the program.

The total required semester hours will change to reflect the changes, going from 122-125 hours to 123-126 hours.

Changes to the University Honors Program were also made.

University honor students will now be required to earn a total of 26 hours in places of the original 28 to reflect the honors freshmen seminar being taken from the requirements.

Corryn Brock and Luke Taylor can be reached at 581-2812 or at dennewsdesk@eiu.edu.