The Faculty Senate passed a resolution Wednesday calling on professors to outline in their syllabi how long it’ll take them to grade coursework and respond to emails, delivering a change long requested by LSU students.
The resolution was crafted in a collaboration between the administration, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and members of Student Government. Before being put to the Faculty Senate, it received approval from the full Student Senate.
Sam Staggs, speaker of the Student Senate, told the Faculty Senate that students sometimes feel communication from their professors is “not always there.”
“We just want to set a foundation for students, so they have some kind of support system set in stone in the syllabus,” Staggs said. “I don’t think they necessarily care if it’s specifically two weeks, week, two days — I think they just want some type of communication from professors and acknowledgement that they do know what their expectations are.”
Despite the combined support of the students, the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and the administration, the resolution was met with worries from some members of the Faculty Senate.
“This is a collective punishment for some faculty that are not doing the correct thing, and this is a failure of the management. And I understand that this is being collectively used against us,” said Robert Cook, an associate professor of chemistry.
“At the moment, the faculty experience at LSU does not seem to be on the radar of anybody,” Cook added. “We do not have a newspaper to voice our opinion, which the students do, and we do not have communications that the administration do.”
Some faculty senators agreed communication between students and professors is important, but questioned whether amending the syllabi was necessary.
“I agree that professor communications need to happen, and I endorse all of that, but what happened to following a chain of command?” asked Pamela Blanchard, an associate professor of education. “If a student has a problem with a professor not communicating, it seems like they could go to the chair, and if the chair doesn’t act, they go up to the dean’s level.”
Though the resolution ultimately passed, some portions of the original text were cut, including an appendix that showed an example of what a syllabus could look like after the changes.
Senators feared that the example could be used to pressure faculty into closely mirroring it, as it mentioned a one- to two-day return policy, which would pose difficulties for faculty with large classes.
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