Faculty Council Corner

Faculty Council Corner is a regular Thursday morning-ish feature (that sometimes shows up later) , presenting an open thread for you to bother your HWFC members with pressing questions (or for us to post the pressing questions that you have). Also, you can expect this to be the forum where we post regular updates about what is happening with Faculty Council and when.

This Week’s Updates: Lots of stuff to report this week (which is why it’s late!)

1.8th Annual Meet and Greet: Social Co-Chairs and awesome people Jenny Armendarez and Rachel Iannantuoni (pronounced: Yan-a-TOE-ni) have decided to revive a tradition started by the late great Isabelle Belance to get the school’s faculty (full-time and part-time alike) in a room together for a little frivolity and grousing and morale boosting and music and convo. I’ll let Rachel and Jenny give you the details:

[This year’s HWC Faculty Meet & Greet will be on]Wednesday, March 28th, 2-5pm in room 1115. As usual, we look forward to meeting any new faculty and encourage everyone to stop by! Music will be provided by the first one who gets to the audio jack with their IPOD/MP3 Playlist.

Some games will be available and if there is enough interest, a Words With Friends competition! Potential topics of conversation for the event: March Madness, Spring Break Destinations and the usual investigatory conversations about who is the Realist!

Food, like paper, is no longer provided for College activities, so we are asking those who are interested to bring their specialty dishes or contribute to a fund for cheese/fruit platters.

Please RSVP to Rachel by Mon, March 26th regarding whether you would like to bring a dish to share or contribute to our cash food fund–contact new faculty member Rachel Iannantouni:  RIannantouni@ccc.edu, ext. 5616.

For more general information please contact Jenny Armendarez at jarmendarez@ccc.edu, ext. 5898.

2. Budget Request: At our last HWFC meeting, we discussed whether to ask for any Budget lines though the office of instruction and, after some discussion, came to a consensus (of sorts) on three:

A) Release time for the President of Faculty Council (every President does a TON of work, meeting attendance, communication, and more; plus we figured that this would be a way for the administration to formally recognize the value and importance of Faculty Leadership);

B) A Chunk of Money for Funding Annual, Faculty-Driven, Curriculum Related Events and Festivals (a few years ago, some of us kicked around the idea of a kind of ad-hoc Arts Council that could disperse money to groups and faculty who want to do special events (i.e. Latino Heritage Month, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, etc.). In the past, Faculty have had to choose between unsavory options like: 1) raiding/begging for scraps from a department budget; or 2) going through Student Government (putting some of us in the weird position of asking students we were teaching to fund our special projects and also led to difficulty for fall events given that SGA usually takes a few months to get settled and funded and going (by the time they held a meeting, it was often too late for some of the events); or 3) pleading with and administrator to release the hounds, as it were, which put the groups asking for money in the spring at an advantage relative to those who asked in the fall (unless it was all spent, in which case the people in the spring went begging elsewhere). So the hope is to set up a mechanism/application process whereby faculty would apply to Faculty Council for the funding for these types of events and FC would approve/recommend approval (not exactly sure how it will work yet).)

C. Some Cash for Hosting Faculty Wide Speakers/Events Related to Curriculum (e.g., ICCB, IAI, Programs), Academic Issues, etc.

We are happy to report that all three requests made it into the draft budget anyway. We’ll see if they make it from the draft into the approved budget sometime soon.

3. Joint Union-Faculty Council Meeting: Next Tuesday, March 27th, from 3:30 to 5pm somewhere (assume room 1046 unless you hear otherwise) there will be a joint faculty council/union meeting to discuss the proposal to change the tenure process AND the work that the same team has done on a proposal to change the Post-Tenure Review Process (which is contractual). Watch your email for more information on this as it develops.

4. Emergency Plan: I’m sure you were all as pleased as I was to see that, in response to the Tribune investigation kerfuffle, the district”s emergency plan, which includes the college specific emergency plans, has been submitted to the state, per state law, as of March 19th (as reported in your email on March 19th). Unfortunately, they are about the only ones who know what it says…I mean, am I crazy to think that the biggest threat to our college is the fact that, by their own admission, most of our faculty don’t know what to do in emergencies and don’t know how to access the information? The gates are going to be “great” and all, but unless they have magic powers, they’re not going to be very helpful. Raise your hand if you have a safe key and an index card in your classroom when you’re teaching (you know, those two things that you’ll need for a lockdown in the case of an active shooter or something awful like that). Better yet, ask that question at your next meeting (departmental or otherwise). I believe it was three years ago, or so, that Faculty Council asked for LARGE PRINT signs with the security number on it to be posted in each classroom. Still waiting. (sigh).

Last “Week’s” Pressing Questions: Anonymous asked: Does anyone know are CCC classes being taught at Chicago high schools? I have no new information on this besides what I wrote in the comments last time. Anyone else?
Everything else, especially the stuff I got wrong or missed, in the comments please