Lucas introduced the system at the Associated Students of MSU, or ASMSU committee meeting on Nov. 10.

SIRS was created in 1979 and has not been updated since. The redesigned system will be an instrument to provide more clear information about teaching and learning at MSU and combat bias, Lucas said. 

To start, SIRS will undergo a name change to properly reflect that the survey data is of student perceptions of the learning environment, rather than of the instruction itself.

Additionally, the survey questions will follow a cascading model. There will be several institutional questions that every student will be required to answer. Accompanying these questions will be specific questions selected by the subject’s respective college, department and faculty members. This model allows academic units to tailor the survey to be more useful for their specific content, Lucas said.

ASMSU president Jo Kovach said the emphasis on research at the university has sacrificed MSU’s educational values.

“People aren’t being taught the way they need to be,” Kovach said.

The redesigned SIRS is the first step in addressing the quality of instruction at MSU, Lucas said.

“SIRS needs to align with our teaching values as an institution,” Lucas said.

Discussion of the presidential search committee

At the academic committee meeting, ASMSU representatives also discussed their demands for the presidential search committee. The demands will eventually be written into a bill.

“The bill that we’re hoping to create would be our list of demands, so what this committee is going to look like as well as how the search should be conducted and what we expect from the next permanent president,” ASMSU vice president for academic affairs Aaron Iturralde said.

Several representatives suggested limiting the role of the Board of Trustees and donors in the search process. 

“At the end of the day, the president’s role does impact the community more broadly than it does the donors and the special interests,” Iturralde said.

There were four trustees and two donors on the previous presidential search committee. The representatives discussed allowing only two trustee and two donor seats on the committee to leave room for other MSU community members.

“Maybe we advocate that the majority of the people who sit on the search committee come from the community itself,” Iturralde said. “By community, we mean people who teach, live or learn at MSU.”

At least five committee members should be students, Kovach said. Their idea was that those members be the Board of Trustees student liaisons, which include the Residential Halls Association president, the ASMSU president, the Council of Graduate Students president and the at-large student liaison. Kovach said they also asked the board to create a new liaison position to represent both the Council of Racial and Ethnic Students and the Council of Progressive Students.

The next ASMSU general assembly meeting will be held on Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. in the International Center room 115.