In a nutshell, if you don’t want to read all what we do in Faculty Policy and Procedures (FP&P), we approve the creation, modification, and elimination of certificates, majors, centers, and departments, as well as reviewing campus wide academic issues.
As this was our first meeting, we spent some time reviewing the charge of the committee and our processes. Five minutes into the meeting, when we were just reviewing the roster of the committee, a member wondered aloud why the student member was non-voting, and quickly we decided to add to the agenda for our next meeting a recommendation to the University Committee to consider changing FP&P to give voting rights to the student member. I don’t know how long this process will take (our next meeting to even make the recommendation isn’t until the end of December), so I am not expecting to have an official vote this year. However, there’s a good chance that future student members will have voting membership on the council.
When we actually got down to business, our main item was reviewing the annual report of the University General Education committee. The Gen Ed committee oversees things like the CommA/CommB and Qualitative Reasoning A and B requirements, along with the UAPC. This past year the Gen Ed committee studied in-depth the Comm A courses and what sort of effects they had on students. In summary, students who take Comm A courses benefit from the experience, no matter which of the five different Comm A courses they take.
We also approved a new certificate program in the Engineering Physics department in “Engineering Risk, Uncertainty, and Decision Analysis”. This is for undergraduates, and packages together existing courses in Engineering and Statistics, as well as a new Engineering course, to produce a 15-credit program.
Our website is at http://apa.wisc.edu/acad_plng.html - the annual report from the 07-08 academic year is a fast read and gives a good feel for what we do.
