The Faculty Senate Task Force said Friday its first priority is determining the specific responsibilities of a faculty senate and discussed collecting information from other universities with faculty senates.

William Monat, NIU regency professor and chairman of the task force, said its first job would be deciding the proposed faculty senate’s responsibilities.

“If we do not begin by defining responsibilities, any other work we do would be cosmetic,” he said.

Monat referred to a report developed by task force member Gordon Dorn and the American Association of University Professors last fall, which supported the establishment of a faculty senate at NIU.

“Last September, prior to the development of this report, the AAUP sent a questionnaire on university governance out to the entire faculty. We felt the time was right to pursue the establishment of a faculty senate here, and we wanted to know if faculty felt as strongly about the issue as we did,” Dorn said.

Dorn is the president of the AAUP’s chapter at NIU.

He said more than 200 faculty members returned the survey, 90 percent of whom favored the formation of a senate to more adequately represent the concerns of NIU faculty.

The AAUP presented the report proposing an NIU faculty senate to the University Council at the council’s meeting last October. The report made four recommendations.

It stated a faculty senate must have clear responsibilities, sufficient funds to carry out the reponsibilities, direct faculty representation and must be able to communicate information for faculty input and feedback.

Task force member James Lankford said, “Establishing the relationship a faculty senate would have with the existing system” of the University Council and the UC Faculty Assembly will be a large part of determining its responsibilities.

The task force has received information from 22 institutions, including the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Bowling Green State University. This data was gathered by the AAUP and the task force working on NIU constitutional revisions.

“There are significant differences in the half-dozen (schools) I’ve looked at so far,” Monat said.

He said the task force should wait to draw conclusions from the information until it has had a chance to study more of the data.

Monat said, the earliest any action toward formation of a faculty senate might come would be in the fall, because of the time required to establish its guidelines. “We should have clear-cut options developed by the end of the spring, though,” he said.