Tuesday, Sept. 28, the Faculty Senate held its second meeting of the month via WebEx to discuss a new policy made for Title IX, developmental courses and the next meeting location. 

The Title IX policy prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program or activity that receives federal financial support, according to the UW-Whitewater website. 

The UW System administration created the new Title IX policy for all UW System colleges. During the meeting, the first sentence of the policy was recited and explained. 

“The chancellor of each university in consultation with faculty representatives shall adopt policies providing for the designation of the Title IX conduct hearing examiner,” Chair Tracy Hawkins, reading the revision of the Title IX policy. 

The Faculty Senate discussed an approach of selecting a hearing examiner. Hawkins asked the fellow senate members whether they like the approach of selecting an examiner from the pool that the UW System has trained and filling the remaining spots from the Faculty Grievances Committee. 

“I’m not as up to speed on Title IX issues on campus, and I feel like I got to be. I do know that it’s really important that we have faculty input into that, so I support that. I would be interested in finding out more about what kind of training is required for this person to be considered qualified,” Senator Crista Lebens said. “We had concerns about how issues related to Title IX have been handled, so it’s a really important committee that I feel like I need to know more about to say anything beyond that.”

Lebens will be working on finding more information about what type of training is required for a hearing examiner for Title IX. She will be providing this information in their next meeting. 

The next topic discussed by the senate is excluding developmental courses from the GPA calculation. Hawkins explained that in previous years, in the UW Colleges, developmental courses did not count toward GPA but continued when UWW joined with the Rock County campus. 

“Transcript and AAR [Academic Advisement Report] end up being a little funky because the developmental courses currently do count for GPA, but do not count toward 120 credits,” Hawkins said. “The GPA calculation is confusing because more units are counting in the GPA calculation than are counting toward the 120. Students often think they’re closer to 120 than they actually are.”

Hawkins continued to discuss the topic on how this issue could potentially affect the vulnerable students who are the majority of students who take these developmental courses. She mentioned to the other senate members to speak with their constituencies about whether excluding developmental courses will hurt or benefit the students. 

Before the meeting ended, all senate members voted on whether their October meetings will take place face-to-face or virtual. 

They have voted 19-2 to continue having their meetings virtual via WebEx for October. They will continue to explore face-to-face options for the month of November. All of the Faculty Senate virtual meetings are streamed on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/UWWfacsenate. 

The next Faculty Senate meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 12.