Chaparral 2024-2025: Making an Impact with Cameron Hastings and the Senate Executive Committee

The Academic Senate’s Executive Committee put together the following list of motions that we felt would have an impact on faculty and the broader college community. They reflect the efforts of some of our subcommittees and task forces this year.

Our fantastic Academic Rank Committee always works hard to give our faculty the recognition they deserve for their years of service. They also make improvements to each year to make it easier for faculty to complete the process. On their advice, the Senate passed Motion 2025-01 to recommend that faculty who have completed the four year tenure process automatically advance to the rank of assistant processor. This does not preclude faculty who reach the four years of service prior to the end of the tenure journey from applying sooner, but it does reduce the bureaucratic necessity of reviewing applications from faculty who have knowingly reached that milestone.

Similarly the Senate’s Committee on Distance Education (CoDE) is always looking for ways to improve the distance education process and stay up to date with ever-changing policies. Sometimes their work is dealing with exogenous factors that negatively affect faculty and students. The recent emergence of “bots”, fraudulent actors attempting to enroll in our online classes in order to access financial aid, have become a major headache. In response, CoDE brought a motion to the Senate to help mitigate the impact of bots on legitimate student enrollment and participation in online classes.

While bots are probably not going away soon, at least we know we have a dedicated distance education team and committee working to get ahead of this problem.

One political football the Senate dealt with this year was, in the absence of an existing policy, how the college should approach the reorganization of divisions and departments. A taskforce was charged with developing something that would give faculty an opportunity to weigh in on proposals through a more formalized process. The taskforce was thoughtful and pragmatic and the resulting process should provide a solid guide for future efforts to change existing academic structures.

Last, but not least, our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Committee put together a Glendale Community College DEIA Statement that is currently moving its way through the shared governance process toward approval by the Board of Trustees. I want to highlight this specific task because it demonstrates our college’s commitment to ongoing efforts in this sphere, despite political threats and an uncertain future.