The Sacramento State Faculty Senate led a continuation of the previous week’s meeting on Thursday, March 10 in the University Union Foothill Suite.

Last week’s meeting was adjourned early due to disagreement on the proposed amendments and the lack of a quorum.

“Last time we were on the verge of taking a vote when we were reminded that we might not have a quorum,” said Faculty Senate Chair Sylvester “Jim” Bowie. “And when we did the quorum check, we did not. So we adjourned but, since then, a lot has transpired.”

The session continued with the Senate discussing language specifics for the field trip policy.

“It seemed like one of the issues we were struggling with last time was trying to specify when people could drop and when people would be able to withdraw because we didn’t have anything in place to deal with this in the existing add and withdraw policies on campus,” said Mathew Schmidtlein, associate professor of geography. “And in this place we are trying to insert language that would specify the difference between drop and withdraw. That it would conform with the timelines that would be expressed.”

The amendment to the field trip policy was later passed. Frank Li, the assistant vice president of International Programs and Global Engagement, also gave a presentation titled “Visions of International Programs and Global Engagement.” Li encouraged attendees to be more receptive to the idea of international students studying at Sac State, and invited senators and other faculty members to assist him.

“I am… wondering how this would impact international students coming in,” said Ghazan Khan, assistant professor of transportation engineering. “Speaking from a civil engineering perspective, when we get applicants from international universities and different countries looking for degrees, the transcripts were not [the same]. A lot of the courses are similar in name, however, we know the content is way different from the United States, so we’ll recommend for them to take some basic courses here and come up to speed with U.S. standards.”

Others in attendance suggested focusing on the students already currently attending Sac State.

“On the tone of serving our students first, one thing I did notice [is that] we have an extremely low foreign exchange rate as far as our students going out to international schools,” said Tucker Caruso, vice president of Academic Affairs for Associated Students, Inc. “As a student, I would really like to see the focus shift not only toward bringing students here, but also sending our students out. If we are going to bring students here, we [should] prioritize programs for the trading of students.”