A theme of change permeated Tuesday afternoon’s Faculty Senate meeting-change, that is, in the form of information technology at Saint Louis University and the Senate’s constitution and bylaws.
Vice President and Chief Information Officer Thomas Moberg presented a report on the development of Managed, Integrated, Distributed Support Systems (MIDSS), a new University comprehensive support system.
Currently, the IT support staff is a combination of two groups: centralized staff, or formal employees, and decentralized staff, or workers who report to various schools and divisions. “There are some problems with that structure,” Moberg said. “It’s a very inequitable distribution . Some are very skilled, some are not. Others are not well-connected to the general direction of IT at the University.”
For the past 18 months, new staffing positions, or models, have been developed and implemented, distributed evenly throughout the University’s schools and divisions. “These models are working well. It’s time to scale these up to the University,” Moberg said.
Moberg referred to several objectives including: treating the IT support staff as a single, combined support system; managing the support staff consistently as a part of ITS; integrating the support staff and its functions to provide reliable, comprehensive support campus-wide; and distributing the support staff in zones across campus to aid those members of the SLU community.
Benefits to MIDSS include better, consistent and evenly-distributed IT support, a more knowledgeable support staff, and better accountability for services provided.
“The move toward a centralized [system] is a very positive one,” Moberg said.
One senator voiced concern over whether or not administrative support needs would take precedence over faculty needs with the new support system. Moberg said that ITS’ academic support staff-an entirely separate support staff from MIDSS-would continue to assist faculty and students.
Following Moberg’s presentation, Faculty Senate President John Slosar introduced the main business of the evening-a revised copy of the senate’s constitution and bylaws. “They’ve held up well, but they’ve become somewhat out-of-date,” Slosar said, referring to the documents’ original birthdate of 1979.
Most of the amendments to the original documents reflect vernacular and habitual changes that have developed since 1979. Revisions were also made to eliminate redundancy or repetition of material already stated in the Faculty Senate Manual. Notable changes include eliminating references to other executive officers-as no such officers exist-and the extension of the Faculty Senate’s secretary term held now to two years, or until a successor is elected.
The revised bylaws also included a new clause specifying actions to be taken in the event of removing an elected officer from the Senate.
“What we’ve tried to do is make the guidelines very open-ended,” Slosar said. “They should be as broad as possible so that you don’t have to continually revise them.”
The Senate approved the wording of the revised documents and will vote on them during its next meeting on Feb. 20. The constitution and bylaws will then require a final vote by the entire SLU faculty.
