The faculty senate approved an amendment to the by laws of the faculty constitution April 1. The amendment creates a member-at-large position within faculty subcommittees in an effort to give the faculty within the College of Education and Human Services some electoral voice going into next year.

Nominations for the member-at-large positions will take place after the all-faculty meeting Friday. The actual ballots will be sent out to all faculty members electronically next week.

“It’s really just a temporary change,” Faculty Senate President Adrian Gentle said. “We didn’t want to rush into creating a solution that is permanent.”

The addition to the by laws specifically states that the amendment expires after the 2011-2012 school year, meaning the member-at-large position within the subcommittees will expire.

Currently, there are eight subcommittees within the faculty senate, dealing with issues ranging from curriculum to student affairs. Each subcommittee has five members: one from each college.

Without the new position, the subcommittees would be down to four members apiece, increasing the workload and taking away representation from faculty currently in the three moving departments: teacher education, physical education and social work.

The members of these subcommittees serve two-year terms, and next year will be the second half of the term. The members currently serving will no longer have their positions because they no longer have a college to represent.

“If your college no longer exists, there’s no one for you to represent,” said Stephen Zehr, liberal arts representative. “So those individuals will just no longer have the service function going into the next year.”

By adding the member-at-large position, the idea is to allow the faculty from the three departments to have an electoral voice going into next year’s senate.

Those faculty otherwise wouldn’t have representation. They won’t have their own representatives because their college doesn’t exist next year, and they cannot vote for positions in their future colleges because they aren’t officially a part of those colleges yet.

Since the positions within the subcommittees will be “at large,” any full-time faculty is eligible for nomination. Interested faculty can nominate themselves or have someone nominate them at the all-faculty meeting. Faculty can also ask their college’s senators to nominate them.

“This is a transitional move designed to help much of the faculty doing work on these committees,” Gentle said. “Is this solution perfect? No, but I think the more important question is what we do going forward.”