President of Marywood Sr. Mary Persico, IHM, Ed. D, and newly named Provost Dr. Susan Turell attended a Faculty Senate meeting to discuss a variety of topics and take questions from faculty members on Friday, Feb. 17 .

Faculty Senate President Dr. David Palmiter said the Feb. 17 meeting was productive. He said faculty members discussed several proposed models for the restructuring of the colleges, which was one of the main action items in the final Strategic Resource Allocation (SRA) report.

Turell said she is getting feedback from Senate members about the restructuring models.

“We’re really looking at … how do we look for ways that we can make sure structurally what we’re doing helps advance the educational mission and make sure that we’ve got resources in the right places to really support your learning,” said Turell. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Palmiter added that the restructuring process has “no affect on student life, but it does on life of faculty.”

According to Palmiter, faculty also discussed summer camp programs and collaborative ways for faculty to work together in a positive way.

Turell added that she spoke with Senate members about the summer camp programs and ways resources can be used wisely for the camps.

“If some of [the camps] are doing really well and some of them need help to support, we’re trying to look at that bigger view,” said Turell. “We talked about that larger picture about how can we look at offering camps as a whole.”

She added that these summer camps can be used as a direct recruitment tool to show off “everything that is good at Marywood.”

Turell said the university is looking at ways to shift resources toward advancing Marywood’s education mission.

“I know that the institution is really taking the opportunity to really look at what we’re doing and making sure that we have enough resources to be able to do things well so that [students] are getting a really high quality education,” said Turell.

Another topic of discussion at the meeting was possible changes to the commencement walking policy, according to Palmiter. He said these changes would not result in any significant differences, but instead would “tighten up the language to reflect what we’re currently doing.”

He added that the changes to the policy are not official and the policy still needs to go through several steps to get approved.

Dr. Craig Johnson, professor of mathematics, said it was a good meeting and Persico and Turrell were very open and willing to participate in the discussion.

Assistant Professor of Music Dr. David Charles Truitt said, “It [the meeting] was productive and in good spirits.”

Rachael Eyler contributed to this article.

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