Tom Dowd was elected secretary

A motion was made to modify the governing structure of the General Faculty Council by implementing a Chair, Secretary, Committee Chairs structure, which will be the executive committee of the GFC This motion was approved unanimously.

Elizabeth Fortune will be the GFC Web-Master. Joyce will approach Donal Day and Dennis DeSilvey to see if they would be interested in chairing the by-laws Committee (Donal) and the Elections Committee (Dennis). Jane Penner has agreed to serve as By-Laws Committee chair.

The recent GFC elections demonstrated that it can be a challenge to find qualified general faculty members willing to run for the GFC. There are currently two vacancies for GFC representatives from Arts and Sciences. At a later date the GFC will address the question of whether or not to abandon the current system of designated representatives for at-large representatives. We will wait until after the June meeting to decide how to handle a call for nominations to fill the two vacant A&S seats. Priority to the next meeting, Elizabeth Fortune will send council members an e-mail attachment of an Excel list of general faculty members to facilitate this discussion.

A question arose concerning the need for monthly GFC meetings. It was pointed out that our current by-laws mandate monthly meetings. Attendance can be a problem at certain times of the year. By-laws may need to be adjusted to allow flexibility to not meet monthly during the summer months. GFC members who are going to miss a meeting need to identify a member of their constituency to attend in their place, this is allowed and encouraged by the current by-laws. A suggestion was made to have more large group forums during the year in place of the GFC meeting to communicate with our constituency.

For intra-council communication gen-fac@virginia.edu has been updated and is relatively current.

Individual GFC members should continue to use their own e-mail constituent list to communicate issues of interest to their constituents. All members were encouraged to keep their lists up to date.

The working group met several times. The April '98 (Draft 5) version of the policy is on the GFC web site. There was wide spread response from general faculty to this draft and most comments were helpful and useful. Changes were made in response to feedback to this draft. The grievance policy has been fine-tuned as has the definition of who is a general faculty member. Editorial changes will be undertaken and Draft 6 will be sent out soon. The GFC will need to review Draft 6 and be prepared to vote on it at the June meeting.

$2500 will be transferred into the GFC account on July 1.