Board honors soccer team

The board of trustees ended its first meeting of 2004 in a fashion like never before as members paid tribute to men's soccer head coach Jerry Yeagley and the rest of the national championship winning team. \nIt was the first time the trustees had ever called in the entire team for recognition, Yeagley said.\n"I think it is great that the trustees did that because they are here for the students and most of the time the students don't even know who the people are," Yeagley said. "We also wanted to thank the board of trustees, as I did on behalf of the team, for providing a championship caliber experience."\nThe ceremony, which featured a large cake and personal handshakes from the trustees to each of the players, concluded a two-day stretch of committee hearings and approved proposals.\nFriday's conferences featured several important committee meetings, including the Academic Excellence Committee, which set up parameters on IU's conflict of commitment and conflict of interest statements. The policies basically establish guidelines pertaining to faculty and staff's involvement with the external community and looks to keep people's interests with IU instead of outside agencies, IU-Bloomington Interim Chancellor Ken Gros Louis said.\n"This board of trustees encourages our employees to engage in their communities and these policies are in no way aimed at curtailing those activities, they simply are there to set the parameters and the borders for the manner in which we encourage them to participate with their communities," trustee Patrick Shoulders said.\nIssues pertaining to graduate students, recruitment of high-ability students and the budget were also discussed Friday. Kathy Smith, associate director of IU state and federal relations, presented to the external relations committee that 998 bills have been filed in congress in this non-revenue, non-budget year, of which 445 have been followed up on by IU. The discussion of work being done at the capital also brought up the state house visit which will be made by a number of students, and other administrators to help in the petitioning process.\nThe final topic on the agenda for the board of trustees was to make all the appropriate appointments and reappointments for each of the IU campuses. Headlining those from IU was the reappointment of Blaise Cronin to dean of the School of Library and Information Science. Cronin will take over for Interim SLIS Dean Debora Jane Shaw effective July 1, 2004. The move comes after Cronin stepped down from the dean's position last year.\n"The faculty had just voted not to participate in the proposed merger of computer science and informatics," Gros Louis said. "(The advisory committee) believes that Blaise is the right person to negotiate the relationships between informatics and library and information science because there is some overlap."\nThe board of trustees will next meet Feb. 26 and 27 in Bloomington.\n-- Contact senior writer Brian Janosch at bjanosch@indiana.edu.