President Jim Danko expressed a need for legal counsel at Butler University at the Faculty Senate meeting Tuesday.

The president said in the past six years  the university has spent about $2.5 million on legal fees for various reasons.

His presentation showed that from June 2008 to June 2012, the spending increased by 28 percent.

In the next two years, the numbers showed an 83-percent increase from around $680,000 to an estimated $1.2 million.

Danko said he wanted to hear feedback from faculty even though the senate is not needed to make this decision.

“I really do believe at this point that there is an advantage going in this direction,” Danko said. “The cost savings will offset a good portion, if not all the extra expense, by having our own legal counsel.”

Danko said he will also begin meeting with the Board of Trustees for additional reaction.

Other items of agenda were a report from the Student Affairs and Enrollment on alcohol abuse and crime and reports on the core curriculum, University Curriculum Committee and the Retirement Phase Committee.

Margaret Brabant, chair of faculty senate, gave a report on senate-level chair meetings from October.

This is the last faculty senate meeting for the first semester. Senate meetings will resume in January.

Faculty Senate approved a motion on Oct. 2 to affirm Butler University’s commitment to regular review of its administrators.

The Faculty Senate took more than two years to agree on four principles by which a tool for faculty review of administrators could be created.

Faculty Senate had to consider the language carefully, said Margaret Brabant, chair of the senate.

“This is important stuff,” Brabant said. “You’ve got to get it right because, if you don’t get it right, you can cause an enormous amount of damage.”

Such carefully-crafted language includes a principle that states, “While recognizing the confidential nature of personnel review, a method or means must be found… to ensure the transparency and accountability of the process.”

Gary Edgerton, dean of the College of Communication, said affording such transparency may necessitate access of the evaluations to everyone.

“I think, in general terms, if they’re talking about transparency, then in general terms I would think the tenor of the evaluation probably will be available to everybody in the Butler community,” Edgerton said.

Brabant said the language of this principle was included to keep administrators, such as the president, provost and Board of Trustees members, from being publicly embarrassed.

“In the situation where we might have stumbled and made a mistake, the confidential part of this is meant to help us develop, rather than put us in the stocks in front of everyone on the front lawn,” Brabant said.

Jay Howard, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said the review will need to be confidential to some degree and transparent to some degree, and finding a balance will be tricky.

Howard said he expects individual faculty members to retain their anonymity from any administrator they may be criticizing and have an opportunity to view a final report.

“I think faculty have a reasonable right to say we ought to be able to see at least some kind of executive summary that talks about strengths of the individual administrator and perhaps areas for improvement or areas where people have voiced concern,” Howard said. “And I would hope that there would be somewhere in the process as well for that administrator to respond.”

Brabant said the process would likely imitate processes from President Jim Danko’s past.

“He comes out of the business world,” Brabant said. “It’s a different kind of ethos. It’s a different kind of attitude about how you evaluate people.”

Brabant said only Danko could explain the difference between how the business and academic worlds evaluate people.

But Danko said in an email he thinks the objectives of evaluations in both worlds are consistent in their goals of assessing the quality of individuals’ performance and providing developmental insights for the person being evaluated.

“While there may be inconsistency with respect to the quality of evaluations being performed by organizations, it is not necessarily correlated to whether it is an academic or business organization,” Danko said. “I am aware of both good and bad systems in both the business and academic world.”

Danko said the dialogue with Faculty Senate has pleased him and he is interested in assuring Butler has an evaluation process that provides valuable insight for individuals to determine how well they are supporting Butler’s mission and the overall objectives of their position.

Chuck Williams, dean of the College of Business, said he already receives 360-degree evaluations from his college and echoed Howard’s sentiment that this would not be much of a change for Butler’s deans.

If he were to evaluate Danko’s tenure thus far, Williams said he really likes the president’s approach to innovation and openness to expanding Butler’s educational offerings online to reach out to students Butler wouldn’t otherwise be able to educate.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’re not left behind,” Williams said. “Butler can’t be on the sidelines and on the outside looking in.”

Faculty members will have to wait their turn to review administrators, as Brabant said the scorecard by which administrators will be judged should be created before the end of this academic year.

“We’re not inventing the first senior-level administrative evaluation tool,” Brabant said.

If and when a tool is put in place, students will likely have no understanding of exactly how it works, as Brabant said students may receive general information but not all of the details made available to the staff.

Volunteering takes on a new meaning at Butler University with classes that have a service learning component. This component integrates both the traditional classroom setting and involvement in the Indianapolis community.

Butler has offered service learning since the mid -1990s, but more students will be exposed to the program now because of the Indianapolis Community Requirement, which requires all students to take a course involving active engagement in the Indianapolis community.

Service learning is one route to fulfill the ICR.

“The experience in the community is directly related to the academic learning goals,” said Donald Braid, the director of the Center for Citizenship and Community.

Service learning courses vary widely, but each class meets in the classroom and requires 20 hours of community service throughout the semester.

Spanish professor Terri Carney has taught one of the service learning courses for students enrolled in Spanish courses.

“(The purpose of service learning is) to connect the real world with the academic world, which has traditionally been sort of separated,” Carney said. “It has a profound effect on the vast majority.”

Senior Alex Tallentire has been involved with service learning most of his Butler career. He has been a student in a service learning class, a student advocate for community engagement and a teaching apprentice for a service learning course.

Tallentire said he is particularly excited about the  service learning partnership with Nora Elementary School. At the school, 40 percent of students are English as a New Language students.

Butler students will go to the school during its lunch hour to interact with and help ENL students with homework. Tallentire said it is important to have consistent interaction with the students and said 20 hours is needed.

Butler service learning contains many different ways to  engage the community.

A few of the partnerships that service learning has are with the Kaleidoscope Youth Center, the Martin Luther King Community Center and the Indianapolis School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Butler students go to these places and work with youth and seniors through tutoring, mentoring and providing companionship.

Sophomore Molly Swigart said her service learning class met with an Iraqi refugee family and also went to the Nur-Allah Islamic Center to go to service and volunteer at the weekend school.

Tallentire said students may find difficulty fitting the service learning requirement into their schedules.

“The one initial hesitation of students is, ‘Well, I’m not going to have time for this,’” Tallentire said.

Margaret Brabant, a professor of political science, has been using service learning pedagogy since the mid-1990s.

“Our classrooms are enhanced and enriched by the kind of work the students are doing in the community,” Brabant said.

More than 30 service learning courses are offered now at Butler.

Brabant said the virtues students acquire from their service learning experience are courage, empathy and humility.

“The ripple effect of this is extraordinary,” Brabant said.

There have been only five female Student Government Association presidents in the past 21 years at Butler University—something candidates Kelsa Reynolds and Katie Palmer hope to change this election.

Despite Butler’s female majority and large female participation in SGA, the number of past female presidents is low.

There are certain stereotypes female candidates have to overcome in an election, even at the college level, Margaret Brabant, a political science professor, said.

“I think these stereotypes are actually reinforced in the way women run for office,” Brabant said. “Women run into the question of how feminine to appear.”

SGA presidential candidate  Kelsa Reynolds, current vice president of operations, said she doesn’t believe there is a different campaign route for females.

“I think it’s about seeking the proper people who share your platform,” Reynolds said.

Katie Palmer, who is also an SGA presidential candidate, said being elected president would be a huge honor, regardless of gender.

“It would be very impactful for me,” Palmer said. “The gender aspect is not as important to me.”

Reynolds said the lack of female presidents in the past might be due to a lack of exposure of the SGA.

“People haven’t been exposed enough to the SGA and haven’t developed an understanding of its importance,” Reynolds said.

She said it is important to increase SGA exposure, especially for freshmen, and encourage them to become involved.

“Personally, I got involved as a freshman and have continued to become more involved during my time at Butler,” Reynolds said. “I know the importance of getting involved early.”

Both candidates said the fact that two female candidates are running this year would help increase female presidential involvement in the future.

“I think this shows the equal opportunity of SGA,” Reynolds said. “I’m excited for the future.”

Brabant said she has doubts about the impact of having two female candidates on society’s perception of female leaders.

“I don’t think it will change much,” Brabant said. “I think it may have an impact on the way these candidates conduct their elections and articulate their platforms.”

The SGA assembly in general has a very balanced number of males and females, current SGA President Al Carroll said.

“Women aren’t underrepresented in SGA,” Carroll said. “Three of the SGA vice presidents are women, and there’s a good balance on assembly.”

In terms of how gender will affect their potential presidency, Reynolds said it is more about the attitude the president brings to the role.

“It’s just a matter of personality and an energetic outlook,” Reynolds said. “The male or female aspect doesn’t make a difference.”

Palmer said she would have a different perspective as a female president, especially considering her role as a resident assistant.

“I have a different understanding of campus being a female,” Palmer said. “I know what issues are affecting the female population.”

Reynolds said the support team a president builds around him or her is very important to a successful term.

“You have to have a great executive board, male or female,” Reynolds said. “It’s about how you are perceived during your presidency.”

Faculty members debated and discussed how to make committee meetings more effective at the Nov. 1 Faculty Senate meeting.

Some senators said the committees are not effectively communicating and meeting due to the lack of common availability and unreserved locations.

They said these conflicts are making it difficult to deal with the workload each committee undertakes.

At the meeting, senators discussed the possibility of creating a set dead time in the scheduling grid that would allow for a common meeting time to become available for committee members.

“If we want to do it, we as the Faculty Senate will do it,” Faculty Senate Chair Margaret Brabant said. “But there is no administrator in his or her right mind that can force us to do it.”

The dead space in the scheduling grid would better allow the faculty members to organize their workload and timing issues to ensure a stricter meeting time in order to follow through with the committee work.

“A number of variables are always at play whenever we undertake the effort to locate a common meeting time for faculty and staff,” Brabant said in an email.

Brabant said as of now, there is not any common unscheduled time or dead space within the faculty grid—meaning the faculty have differing schedules throughout the day and into the evenings.

“Part of the problem associated with finding a time in which committee work may be conducted stems from the fact that there is no such thing as unscheduled time,” she said.

She also said classrooms are usually booked throughout the day and night—making meeting location an obstacle as well.

“Finding a space that is appropriate to a given committee’s work is also complicated by the fact that classroom and meeting spaces are typically booked in full throughout the academic year,” she said.

Education Professor Arthur Hochman said he has not found scheduling a meeting time or location to be a problem but said he does sympathize with his colleagues that do.

“I would support finding a common time if it would help my colleagues,” he said.

Biology Professor Thomas Dolan said it is difficult to find a common meeting time with the committee he serves on, but that having a single dead space in the schedule might not solve all the issues.

“I am in favor of a common meeting time,” he said. “That said, I’m not sure a single dead space would completely solve the problem since there are dozens of committees, and often people serve on more than one committee.”

Dolan said the allotted time would most likely need to extend to multiple days to allow for a common availability for all committee members.

Registrar Sondrea Ozolins said the possibility of creating a committee meeting time was considered last year, but there was no available unused time in the schedule.

“Classes are held all day, five days per week,” Ozolins said. “Finding a common meeting time would mean replacing class time with meeting time for students, faculty and staff.”

Ozolins said if this change were to happen, early mornings on Tuesdays and Thursdays would be the best possibility, but it would cause a “considerable change in the number and time of course offerings.”

Though the Senators reached no consensus last Tuesday, the issue could be considered in the scheduling grid in the future.