The following text was provided by Nancy Photo-Robinson, Senate President. Nancy requested that the part-time reps (Bell and Collins) give their comments. Yours are welcome, too:

Academic Senate Position on Student Access to Faculty (DRAFT)

The Mendocino College Academic Senate is concerned that students do not currently have equal access to the faculty who teach their classes. There is a great disparity between access to full-time faculty versus our part-time colleagues and it is our hope that by clearly articulating the need and offering some suggestions for solving the problems, we can begin discussions and make progress toward some adequate solutions.

1) A primary need is physical space for students to meet with their teachers and for departments to share instructional materials.

Possible Solution: The Senate Office Space Committee has submitted a proposal to PRMPC to rent or lease temporary modular office space to provide departmental resource offices in Ukiah. This would serve until more permanent solutions can be found.

2) Students need to have efficient telephone and electronic access to their part- time instructors equivalent to that available if a teacher is full-time. Currently, full-time instructors have on-campus E-mail addresses and telephone answering machines for phone messages.

Possible Solutions: 1) A voice-mail system for all faculty that would eliminate the need for part-time instructors to give students their home or business telephone numbers, and for messages to be taken in the duplicating department. As it stands, student messages are not necessarily received by part-time faculty in a timely fashion as they are often only on campus for class meetings. It is our understanding that Computing Services is looking at an updated telephone system that would include voice mail, and we would like to lend support to that effort and request that part-time faculty be included.

2) Computers in the departmental resource offices that are adequate to handle the e-mail correspondence between students and faculty.

Posible solution: [We may be missing text here: Ill check - Webmaster]

Copyright MPFA 2000
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited