Faculty Senate members heard about future plans to ease vehicular traffic concerns in the DuSable Hall area.

The city of DeKalb, Campus Parking Services and the Department of Public Safety are working together on plans to help solve traffic problems in the Chick Evans Field House parking lot, Lot 20, Sen. Chhiu-Tsu Lin said in a report from the resources, space and budgets committee.

The plan includes: widening the exit by 4 feet to 24 feet, adding or modifying landscaping to facilitate pedestrian flow, adding two new bus shelters and a speed limit control system.

Senators commented that traffic from the DuSable bus turnaround has only been relocated to the Chick Evans Field House parking lot.

“There is no place for people to drop students off at other than the library,” Sen. Joseph Stephen said. “There is no place like that for the west side of campus.”

The senate approved physics professor Augden Windelborn to complete a term on the academic policies and procedures manual advisory committee.

Senators expressed concern to Senate President Paul Stoddard about the consistency of support to faculty members from the senate’s computing facilities advisory committee.

“We are looking for better representation on this board for the faculty,” Stoddard said. “The needs for one department are not always the same as the others.”

Patricia Henry, NIU representative of the Faculty Advisory Council to the Illinois Board of Higher Education, gave a report to the senators about a letter to the editor that will be sent out to newspapers throughout the state. Drafted by the Illinois Board of Higher Education’s faculty advisory council, the letter says that Illinois public universities are being privatized because they are more dependent on student tuition.

“The concern is to maintain a balance,” Henry said. “We don’t want public schools to become privates; we already have those.”

Students are working a lot harder now to pay for tuition, sometimes between 30 and 40 hours a week, said Sen. John Knapp.

“I used to assign eight to 10 big novels for my class,” Knapp said. “Now I am fortunate to get five or six small novels done.”

The next Faculty Senate meeting is on Dec. 1 from 3 to 5 p.m. in the Holmes Student Center’s Clara Sperling Sky Room.