Faculty Senate encourages faculty attendance at graduation

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Faculty Senate is concerned with lack of faculty participation at graduation and wants to do something to make a change.

"From an instructor's standpoint, it's (attending graduation is) fulfilling," said Faculty Senate President John Fech, who is also an extension educator for the Southeast Research and Extension Center.

Suggestions to improve faculty attendance included requiring at least one faculty member from each department to attend the ceremonies.

There are "intangible rewards" in attending and participating in graduation, Fech said, and encouraged more professors to go.

The senate also discussed a new research misconduct policy, but decided not to vote on the new policy until their next meeting.

"The wording that was presented was not possible due to federal regulations," said Faculty Senate President-Elect and associate professor of agronomy and horticulture John Lindquist.

Changes to the policy were proposed by Leo Chouinard, associate professor of mathematics, who wanted the accused researcher to be able to review and rebut witness testimony.

"I think giving a person the evidence against them, giving them a chance to provide evidence to rebut them is a fair thing," Chouinard said.

Finally, the senate heard from Paul Royster, university libraries coordinator, who described UNL's institutional repository, also known as Digital Commons.

An institutional repository is an online place for collecting, preserving and circulating published work, Royster said.

UNL has the second largest institutional repository in the country for a university, he said. The university that has the largest is the University of Michigan.

"Inclusion does not alter copyright status of the article," he said. "We only post articles for which we can obtain the publisher's or copyright holder's permission."

Robert Katz is the most popular author on Digital Commons — his work has been downloaded 17,945 times.

"He called me up after reading some of the numbers and said, ‘This is incredible, these numbers are astronomical,'" Royster said.

The senate decided to postpone voting to endorse the online database until its meeting in April.

kimbuckley@dailynebraskan.com