“I’ve got the blues”
Inside
Vol. # 94, Issue # 24
May 31, 2011
Arts & Life, page 17
Tenure bias sparks petition, protests By CHERYL WAITY, Sports Editor & RACHEL METEA, Editor-in-Chief
Photo by Brianna Kelly
Brianna Powers, Carmen Dash, Darrina Minx and Brittney Shears perform in “What a Drag (II)” in the Lincoln Park Student Center on Wednesday, May 25.
Queens for a day By LINDSAY HART It’s no secret that DePaul University is one of the more liberal Catholic institutions. This was exemplified last Wednesday during the production of “What A Drag (II)” in the Student Center atrium. Attracting more than two hundred
students, the two-hour-long drag queen show featured numerous performances to the sounds of Britney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls, and Beyonce. The program started last year by Bill “Brianna Powers” Mattera, Resident Director for Corcoran/McCabe, who was also the emcee and performed in the show. Materra had help
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Thursday May 26, there was a protest in front of the student center, but the protestors weren’t someone you’d see sitting next you in class, they would be the ones standing in front of the class. It was in regards to a petition circulated by Valerie Johnson, an associate professor of political science, petitioning to call a council of the whole in regards to “discuss the unresponsiveness of the administration to faculty concerns, including but not limited to those related to the tenure and promotion process, a lack of shared governance in key decisions impacting faculty, and faculty morale and campus climate.” The petition will require 50 signatures to put it into action which they have received and will be presenting to the faculty council at their next meeting Wednesday, June 3. The problem comes with the current handbook not clearly explaining how to run a council of the whole, it just points to the fact that it is possible to have one. For a council of the whole to carry any weight it must attract at least 25 percent of the faculty. That would require this meeting of the whole to have around 250 faculty members attend. “Fifty signatures is easy, but to get the quorum of 250 to hold the meeting is a huge threshold,” said Phil Funk, the president of the Faculty Council. At the meeting, a referendum would need to be written and then it would have to be voted on by the entire faculty. “Could be an incredibly large length of time,” Funk said. Earlier this month, Johnson had
circulated two other petitions that she then replaced with this one. The earlier petitions targeted specifically Father Holtschneider and Provost Helmut Epp for decisions and actions in several specific tenure cases—arguments that have been active and heated in the entirety of the 2010-2011 school year. “The reason why we changed [the vote of no confidence] was that people have a number of issues that they are concerned with so we wanted to make it as broad as possible,” Johnson said. Think of what a big deal is to give someone a job for life. “You want to be very confident in the system that gives tenure,” Funk said. Why someone would start a petition like this in the first place: “My perception of how they feel is like they aren’t being heard,” Funk said. But the cases of professors Namita Goswami and Quinetta Shelby were not all based on Father Holtschneider’s opinion of the faculty members tenure cases. “There has been a lot of faculty input in those cases,” Funk said. A faculty member will undergo four reviews to determine whether or not they will receive tenure. The first review is by fellow faculty members from the same department. The second review is done by leaders of the specific college, which looks at all tenure cases from their departments. After the second review, the request is examined by University Board on Promotion and Tenure, which is a committee from faculty across the university, seven faculty members drawn from the nine different colleges. Lastly the request is examined by Holtschneider, and then a final decision is reached. Both Goswami and Shelby were denied by their own departments,
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FEST 2011: Cheap and satisfying By KATIE WEISS
Photo by Becky Holloman
David Macklovitch of Chromeo sings at FEST on Friday, May 27.
Arriving at Fest at 5:30 p.m., my friend, Annette Lesniak, and I had been hoping for a warm and sunny day all week. Unfortunately, the skies were grim and overcast, and the air was crisp, balmy at best. Luckily, you could sense the excitement from students as they hurried through security to get into the Quad.
Fest 2011 was my first foray into DePaul’s end of the year music concert. I didn’t know Chromeo or Wiz Khalifa’s music too well when I bought my ticket, but am overall pleased with the general tone of the concert. I am not a music connoisseur and, in fact, only really listen to it when I can go to a concert, but it was a lot of fun to hang out with my friends for fairly cheap. Although the beer served (Miller Lite
and Miller Genuine Draft) was not my top choice, after drinking a few while listening to Chromeo rock the smallish sized crowd, I was already satisfied. Chromeo’s set seemed to pass by pretty fast. The crowd danced as the neon lights blinked all around them. Though the number of people crowded
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