NIU President John Peters is calling on faculty, staff and students to support a Higher Education Lobby Day.

The Lobby Day, which is slated for April 25 in Springfield, is designed to raise awareness in the state government about issues important to state-funded higher education.

Peters outlined the details surrounding the day at the University Council meeting Wednesday.

The day has been loosely coordinated and supported the Higher Education Legislative Coalition, Peters said. The group consists of universities, colleges, boards and bargaining units.

Peters said it would be a classic-style lobby day that hasn’t occurred recently. Various groups rally for their cause before dispersing to talk to individual legislators in addition to gaining media attention, he said.

“I hope we have a good turnout,” Peters said. “This is an activity that I support and encourage.”

Peters said NIU will send a Huskie Bus to the rally for interested students and staff to take. However, Peters said he wouldn’t recommend faculty cancelling class or students skipping an important class to attend.

The rally will feature speakers such as legislative leaders and university presidents and may feature some board members from the Community College Board and Illinois Board of Higher Education.

“Higher Education is important and should not be neglected,” Peters said. “It should be included in any discussion of investment in education in this state.”

Also at the meeting, University Council members debated proposed changes to the NIU religious observances policy.

The current policy was addressed because of concerns that wording in the existing policy was not strong enough.

“The policy ‘encouraged’ people to accommodate individuals and that was considered rather weak-wording,” said Jody Newman-Ryan, University Affairs Committee chair.

The University Affairs Committee is proposing changes that would require students to let faculty know in advance and establish procedures in the event a student encounters an issue, Newman-Ryan said.

However, there are situations where holidays occur during the first few weeks of school, Dave Sinason, an associate accountancy professor and adviser to NIU’s Hillel, said.

“The first five years that I was the adviser, I had these issues come to me and I thought they were isolated incidents,” Sinason said. “After about five years, I realized that almost every fall there was an incident.”

The issue was brought to the university’s attention last semester and faculty has not yet reached an agreement on how the policy should be modified.

“I think the way the committee has approached this, and that is to have a really broad-ranged discussion about religious tolerance on this campus, is critically important,” Peters said. “The issue here of religious tolerance is most important at this university and this is the kind of thing that has to be chewed over by the faculty and others.”

Several members expressed concern that changing the policy to accommodate students unconditionally would lead to both abuse of the policy and too many accommodations for faculty to reasonably handle.