Canceled meeting costs faculty parking input

Tuesday’s Bloomington Faculty Council meeting would have been a final opportunity for faculty input about the privatization of parking at IU before the Board of Trustees discusses the matter at its meeting next week — but it was canceled.

“Faculty President Carolyn Calloway-Thomas and the Executive Committee of the BFC received significant suggestions from the faculty regarding the issue of parking privatization and had intended to use this meeting as a forum for discussion of this topic, but scheduling conflicts with relevant administrators and faculty have intervened,” Faculty Council Chief of Staff Craig Dethloff said in an email announcing the meeting’s cancelation.

The significant suggestions Dethloff referred to were raised at the Sept. 18 BFC meeting.

Faculty members and IU Student Association President Kyle Straub used a question and answer period to ask about potential consequences of parking privatization and how much a deal would raise prices for permits.

Calloway-Thomas said many of the questions will need to be answered after the trustees discuss the key terms contract at their Oct. 11 meeting.

“After the members of the Board of Trustees have had an opportunity to vet that document sufficiently, we will know whether we will privatize parking at Indiana University,” she said.

At the meeting, BFC member and informatics professor John Paolillo said he is concerned because the communication regarding parking has been minimal, and it is difficult to know what quality of information is being distributed.

He said a number of aspects of a private deal are worrisome, and he would like to see discussion before the BFC.

“(Chief Financial Officer Neil Theobald) assured me that after members of the Board of Trustees have had an opportunity to talk about the document and to determine the course of action they will take, it will be at that point that the document will come to the various faculty,” Calloway-Thomas said at the Sept. 18 meeting. “So we will all have an opportunity, from what I’ve been promised, to scrutinize the document as carefully as possible.”

But Gracia Clark, BFC member and professor in the anthropology department, said the process is not satisfactory.

“I guess we’re concerned that many of the inputs that faculty are supposed to have seem to come after the decision has been made, which is obviously not optimal,” she said.

Clark declined to comment further about the concern, as did Paolillo and other members of the BFC.

Calloway-Thomas said Clark made a very strong point.

“There is a history here of top-down as opposed to bottom-up, in some cases,” she said.

However, by acting as a liaison between the faculty and the administration, Calloway-Thomas said she hopes the issue will not be a top-down case of consultation.

In the meantime, Dethloff urged faculty to share additional thoughts or feelings on the matter with the Faculty Council Office. Those suggestions will be taken into consideration for the BFC Executive Committee meeting on Thursday, where Calloway-Thomas intends to discuss the concerns further.

He said the input will be passed on.

“Both (Calloway-Thomas) and her counterpart on the IUPUI campus, professor Jack Windsor, have pledged to faithfully and vigorously convey these concerns of the faculty to the Board of Trustees at their meeting next week,” he said.