Inside Iowa State

Aug. 24, 2007

Introducing ... Sedahlia Jasper Crase

2007-08 president, Faculty Senate

Position at ISU: Professor in human development and family studies

Arrived at Iowa State: As a graduate student in 1969; hired as an instructor in 1972 while completing her doctorate

Previous service on the senate: Senator (2003-06), Executive Board member (2004-07), president-elect (2006-07), Faculty Development and Administrative Relations chair (2004-06)

Senate's top goals this year:

Crase plans to meet independently with the chairs of the senate's five councils (Academic Affairs; Faculty Development and Administrative Relations Council; Governance; Judiciary and Appeals; and Resource Policies and Allocations) to develop and bring forward their top priorities.

"I want to meet with each of those five councils and lay out what they perceive as their major tasks this year. Much of our work really comes through those five councils. When those councils are busy, then we're very busy."

Ongoing task force work already under way includes:

• Checking compliance of governance documents at the college and departmental level.
• Examining promotion and tenure language in an effort to make it more clear.

Issue that could be the most important to the senate this year:

"One of the big issues is how we're going to deal with, and what will be the outcome of, the recommendation from the task force on appointment of non-tenure eligible research faculty. It was just introduced at the last meeting in the spring. That will be one of the big, all-encompassing kinds of issues that affects faculty and some P&S staff a long time down the road. It also impacts the way we think about who we are as faculty."

Thoughts on the year ahead:

"I really want to be the kind of president who empowers people to do what they were elected to do. I would also like to see a progression toward having every faculty member know that the Faculty Senate works on his or her behalf. My goal is to get the senators communicating with their constituencies back in their departments. We do less well with shared governance at the college and departmental levels, and we need them to see that shared governance applies to these units, too."

Photo by Bob Elbert.

"My goal is to get the senators communicating with their constituencies back in their departments. We do less well with shared governance at the college and departmental levels, and we need them to see that shared governance applies to these units, too."

Sedahlia Jasper Crase