By Matt Collette
In a vote yesterday, the Faculty Senate agreed to consider the possibility of creating a single student handbook that would apply to all Northeastern students.
The movement is opposed to handbooks for the different colleges and schools at Northeastern some faculty members and administrators, however, feared that such a move would create unnecessary content that would not apply to all students and that it would require too much bureaucracy to complete the project.
A year ago, the Senate authorized an ad hoc committee to look into creating a single student handbook. The committee was chaired by Gerald Herman, a history professor and Faculty Senate member. Last year, Herman and his committee started to create a model handbook that would unify policies from a number of sources, but their committee was only authorized to work for a year, so they did not get a chance to finish it.
“The university counsel had a concern that procedures within different student handbooks were drifting away from each other,” Herman said. “We tried to see how much of a problem it would be to integrate those languages.”
Herman said his committee has had success in its attempts to create a single handbook and asked the Faculty Senate to vote to adopt a single student handbook based on the model they created. A major reason for this change, Herman said, was because it was getting harder to distinguish among undergraduate, graduate, School of Professional and Continuing Studies and law students.
He said the graduate handbook does not address on campus housing, though many live on campus, and many students in combined bachelor’s and master’s-degree programs still considered themselves undergraduates, so it would be difficult to draw a line.
Some faculty members were opposed to the idea of drafting a single handbook, saying many schools had policies that would not apply to students in other schools.
“Our academic rules are entirely different from those of the university,” said Richard Daynard, a professor in the School of Law.
Vice Provost for Faculty and Graduate Education Luis Falcon said creating a unified student handbook would be a logistical nightmare, as the project would require collaboration across school lines.
“Now we would have to integrate it with three or four different offices,” he said.
The Student Government Association is strongly opposed to creating a unified student handbook, said President Joey Fiore and Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs Michelle McNeilly, who both spoke at the meeting.
“Students are already looking at the handbook and saying, am I going to read that? No,” Fiore said.
He also called creating a unified handbook “unnecessary work.”
McNeilly said undergraduate students are already hesitant to read the 88-page document, which doubles as a planner. Adding more content would make students less likely to read it, she said.
Mathematics professor Tom Sherman presented an alternative to creating a single handbook for all Northeastern students. Instead, the university could draft a single handbook that would address issues affecting all students, and then supplement it with issues that addressed all students of a certain demographic, he said.
“Nobody has to read anything more, but they are, based on the nature of the structure, consistent,” Sherman said.
Criminal justice professor James Fox and political science chair John Portz supported the idea, and Herman said it would be simple to do.
Just before the meeting adjourned, the Senate voted to authorize the Faculty Senate Agenda Committee to determine how best to incorporate the day’s discussion into a new proposed handbook.
