Faculty Senate members were all smiles last Thursday after President John Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy announced that the University plans to make additional funding available for academic research in the humanities.

The announcement for the new funding came shortly after the Faculty Senate almost unanimously passed a resolution to institutionalize the weeklong Thanksgiving break that students have enjoyed for the last two years.

Speaking before almost 70 faculty and administrators, Hennessy announced the creation of the Presidential Innovation Fund for the Humanities — which, he said, would provide faculty in undergraduate humanities with $5,000 research awards. To be eligible for the new grants, faculty will submit proposals for humanities research, which will be awarded research funds after passing through committee review.

Etchemendy similarly unveiled an award fund for excellence in undergraduate teaching; the fund has an endowment of $2 million. The University, he said, will look to reward professors who make contributions to pedagogical innovation at the undergraduate level. He added that the awards would be available after consulting with the Undergraduate Advising Council.

“Both announcements demonstrate the University’s broader commitment to improving the quality of undergraduate instruction and research,” Etchemendy said.

The announcements for the new humanities research grants and the funding for undergraduate teaching excellence followed the popular resolution to preserve the weeklong Thanksgiving break. The scheduling modification would ensure that each quarter lasts 10 weeks and would guarantee that finals be held on a Monday through Friday schedule.

The Faculty Senate also considered the widening performance divide between American and foreign fourth and fifth graders. Kenji Hakuta, former dean of social sciences at UC-Merced, presented his findings on the glaring inadequacies in K-12 education in the United States and discussed the progress that Stanford has made to address these concerns.

ASSU President Elizabeth Heng, a senior, voiced her support for the University’s efforts to contribute to K-12 education.

“From a student’s perspective, there is a lot of interest in supporting this cause,” she said. “Not a week goes by that I don’t see an e-mail in my inbox from students who are taking the initiative to volunteer at schools in places like East Palo Alto. It says something that there are schools right next door to a university like Stanford that can’t even meet statewide performance standards.”

While the Faculty Senate addressed a number of academic issues in the meeting, it did not consider the addition of an interdisciplinary program in Public Policy that would add two new graduate degrees — a two-year Masters in Public Policy (MPP) and a one-year Master of Arts in Public Policy (MAPP).

The proposal, which has been criticized by some students because it does not create new faculty positions for Public Policy and would not initially offer a co-terminal program, was originally planned to be introduced at the Faculty Senate meeting, Public Policy Director Bruce Owen said.

Owen told The Daily, however, that the graduate program proposal was not introduced at the meeting because of an absence in the registrar’s office.

“Due to the illness of a staffer in the registrar’s office,” he said, “the MPP did not get onto the agenda.”

Owen said that consideration for the graduate programs would be delayed until one of the next two Faculty Senate meetings, on either Feb. 8 or Feb. 22.

During the open forum, Biology Prof. Russel Fernald expressed concern that student diversity in graduate education was slipping. He called for data concerning the University’s ability to recruit and retain minority graduate students.

“Are there ways that we’re mentoring students to understand what an academic career is like?” he asked. “We know what our advisees are doing, but I don’t think there’s a collective wisdom about what we’re doing to attract underrepresented minorities to our graduate programs.”

Senate members resolved to address graduate student diversity in an upcoming meeting. Senate business was adjourned following announcement of an upcoming panel discussion on ethics, a longitudinal study on writing and a discussion on the status of female faculty.