Faculty Council discusses legislature's budget process

At the semester's final Bloomington Faculty Council meeting Tuesday, a representative of President Myles Brand's state relations office spoke to the council about the legislative budget process. \nDon Weaver, special assistant to the president for state relations, advised the faculty on how they can participate in the current budget process.\n"We have to help the legislators understand the importance of higher education," Weaver said. "A lot of people wonder why higher education and Indiana University does not do better. They deal with crisis situations. If they don't keep the funding going, that could happen."\nProfessor of public and environmental affairs Kurt Zorn also spoke about the budget process, emphasizing the limited ways in which faculty can get involved. Zorn has had much experience with the budget process during his career.\n"I'm not sure that there's an effective way to use faculty with the legislature," Zorn said. "I wouldn't recommend faculty members get actively involved."\nZorn said legislators often do not understand the needs of a research institution like IU, and only concentrate on the teaching aspect of a university. This could lead to lower funding, Zorn said.\nZorn and Weaver said the legislature usually responds with larger budgets in times of crisis in a university, and by many standards, IU is not in that situation.\nIn other faculty council news, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures Robert Eno spoke about distributed education at IU.\nEno is part of the Educational Policies Committee, which recently issued a report on the subject.\nThe committee needs more input from faculty, Eno said, before the council can take any vote on the subject.\nEno reported three recommendations from the committee. One involved the composition of a newly established distributed education committee, another asked the council agenda committee to seek funding to allow the committee to operate during its initial year as a faculty seminar, and the third recommended that there be inter-campus communication on distributed education policy formation and implementation.