In a move that disappointed several faculty members anxious to get the ball rolling in re-examining representation on the Faculty Senate-with regard both to allocation of senate seats and equity among electoral units-the Faculty Senate Executive Committee voted at its April 18 meeting to postpone submitting any proposal on the issue to the Bylaws Committee.

The senate's charter mandates that senate seats be reapportioned every five years to reflect the current number and distribution of faculty members, explained Marilyn Kramer, head of the cataloging department for University Libraries and chair of the Elections Committee. The number of voting faculty currently totals 1,759, according to statistics provided by Human Resource Services.

At issue, according to Judith Hopkins, technical services research and analysis officer in central technical services of University Libraries and chair of the Bylaws Committee, is the fact that while the charter affords no electoral unit more than 25 percent of the senate seats, the charter's formula for achieving that end "assumes there is only one large electoral unit, and in fact, we now have two"-the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences. So while the medical school, with 704 faculty, is capped at 25 percent of the senate seats, the current formula permits the CAS, with 440 faculty members, to exceed the 25 percent quota.

Hopkins appealed to the executive committee to first determine how to allocate senators for the 2001-02 academic year and second, to offer its suggestions on how to rewrite the charter to "deal with multiple, large-size electoral units in a way that is equitable to all units."

This would be the first re-apportionment since the charter was revised in 1995.

Hopkins explained that under a formula provided by James Faran, associate professor of mathematics, all electoral units would be capped at 25 percent, with a senate of 100 members. Both the medical school and CAS would be capped at 25 members each under this formula. In another alternative suggested by Faran to the Bylaws Committee, the Senate would have one senator for every 15 voting faculty members, with only the medical school given a cap.

Given that the bulk of work handled by the FSEC deals with undergraduate issues, Judith Adams Volpe, director of Lockwood Library, suggested that there be no cap on the CAS.

"I think it's important to have the full allocation for arts and sciences because so many issues, according to our charter, fall into that area," she said.

Henry Durand, director of the Center for Academic Development Services, expressed concern over the possibility of a cap on the CAS, given that no cap existed on any of the individual faculties of Arts and Letters, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Social Sciences before the three entities merged into the CAS in the late 1990s.

"The fact of the matter is it's an artificial cap," he said. "When arts and sciences was three specific schools, there was no cap.so why, because they're merged, should we lose representation?"

In other business-and on an issue not included on the agenda-FSEC members voted to establish a subcommittee to look into possible misuse of undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) in the Department of Economics. The major concern among some UTAs and faculty within the department is that since 1998, the department has required UTAs to supervise two sections instead of one, resulting in a disparate workload between UTAs in micro economics and macro economics courses taught by different faculty members, explained John Boot, professor and chair of the Department of Management Science and Systems. While some UTAs are assigned administrative-type tasks, he said, others have been given more substantial responsibilities, and so for some UTAs, teaching two sections would be a much more taxing ordeal.

"The students are very unhappy," said Boot, noting that some of the UTAs are well supervised, while others are left largely to their own devices.

"I'm for using them, not misusing them," he told committee members.

The issue has been presented to the Office of the Provost and the CAS, through which a formal committee has been established to look into the issue, Boot said. No formal grievance has been filed by students.

The subcommittee-comprised of James Bono, associate professor of history; Gaspar Farkas, associate professor of physical therapy, and Dennis Malone, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering-is charged with talking with students to see if the current practices warrant a recommendation to the FSEC to pursue the matter further.