LSU President F. King Alexander told Faculty Senate on Thursday that Student Government wants to campaign to inform students about free services available to them on campus.
Alexander said the goal is to get information out to students in all areas of their lives, including health and sexual matters, tutoring and financial matters to the point students say “quit telling me about it.”
Alexander said the University has overestimated how much student know about these services. He said his daughter, a University freshman, didn’t know where she could receive tutorial
services.
The University is working toward improving faculty members’ benefits by offering credit hours to spouses, with more information coming next month. Alexander said it’s also working on the development of three-year contracts to faculty members who currently have annual contracts to increase their job stability.
The longer contract length available would come after a 3 percent career salary increase, which Alexander said took a lot of effort to “eek out” last
summer.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Stuart Bell said the raises will help the University match salaries of other schools.
Because it took four years without salary increases to put the University in its current position, it will take years to bring all positions’ salaries back to market value, Bell said.
The Faculty Senate discussed a resolution to protect faculty members from institutional censorship when writing or speaking as citizens outside of the University.
The resolution is a response to events at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Virginia Tech professor of English Steven Salaita received an offer for a position as an associate professor last fall, said University professor of French studies John Protevi.
The Washington Post reported that Salaita, after leaving his position at Virgina Tech, was informed by UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise on Aug. 1 that his employment at the school was blocked. Wise issued a statement saying the University could not employ people whose disrespectful words or actions demean others, referring to the professor’s Twitter posts.
Salaita’s tweets refer to political topics, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Protevi said it was dangerous for administrators to judge faculty members’ free speech on their opinions expressed privately, even though it may be okay to evaluate them on their speech in classrooms.
The resolution states that the Faculty Senate joins with the Campus Faculty Association of UIUC, the American Association of University Professors and 60 professors at UIUC who have publicly called on Wise to reinstate Salaita’s employment.
The resolution says the actions taken by her and the University of Illinois Board of Trustees were an assault on academic freedom that would produce a “chilling effect on the ability of faculty members everywhere to speak openly on matters of public concern without losing their jobs.”
The Faculty Senate also discussed a resolution opposing changes to Office of Group Benefits-administered health plans used by University employees.