Decisions, Decisions

The full Faculty met this week for the first time in nearly six months, but it quickly made up for lost time.

With just one professor dissenting, the body approved the division of the Biology Department into two separate departments, effective February 1.

And moments later, the Faculty unanimously lent its support to new codes governing professors' outside activities that require Faculty members with "potentially serious" conflicts of interest to report their involvements to a new standing committee.

Those guidelines, which supercede 15-year-old regulations that merely encouraged professors to discuss outside conflicts with Dean Rosovsky, will take effect pending the almost-certain approval of the governing boards.

Professors advocating the new codes stressed to their colleagues that the tougher regulations retain respect for the privacy of individual professors, particularly since they do not empower the new committee on extramural involvements to seek out non-complying professors, but only to review involvements disclosed by Faculty members.

Also at the two-hour long session, Dean Fox released statistics on Administrative Baord actions last year, indicating a sharp rise in the number of disciplinary cases.

But Fox told the body that increase does not reflect "any deterioration of behavior in the College" but an increase in the reporting of questionable incidents to the Ad Board on the part of professors. The number of cases brought before the board but then "scratched" because of insubstantial proof has also climbed sharply, he noted.