Faculty Senate went over business that moved to elect the new president-elect during a meeting Tuesday afternoon, along with a special order given by Sarah Nusser, vice president for research.

Nusser overviewed its plans in her PowerPoint, “Plans for the Research Mission.”

Its vision, she outlined, recognizes and respects Iowa State for its “research excellence and contributions to solving challenges faced by society,” how ISU researchers “are engaged and well supported in pursuing novel ideas throughout their careers,” along with promoting the university’s strengths to sponsors and stakeholders.

Nusser’s plans include work within the arts and humanities department through seed funding and publication subvention grants.

“We also have begun working with liberal arts and sciences to approve a process for publication subvention grants — these are grants that help offset the cost of publishing a book,” Nusser said.

Nusser also touched on sponsored funding by proposing a departmental proposal and award system.

“We also have early indications that sponsored funding, maybe for research per se, may be increasing,” Nusser said.

Nusser lastly touched on enabling infrastructure by improving research facilities and instrumentation on campus by beginning with bite-sized projects and hopefully working on what she called the “greenhouse project.”

“The project that we’re most active on right now is to look at building a new greenhouse at Iowa State,” Nusser said.

Following the special order, Faculty Senate President Rob Wallace called for nominations for the new president-elect, and then asked current nominees to come and make their case as to why they should be elected.

Tim Day, biomedical sciences professor, spoke first, beginning with a brief of his relations to Iowa State, particularly through his children, of whom one is currently enrolled and another is an alumnus.

“Now there has been some times where I’ve had some degree of anguish over the state of higher education in institutions like ours, but in fact I remain overly and overwhelming optimistic about the central endeavor that we’re involved in here,” Day said. “If you don’t believe me I could show you my checkbook.”

Day said that since a lot of issues, especially social issues go on here at Iowa State, he thinks it’s important that they work together as a faculty in order to speak out on those issues and be leaders in the community and campus.

Vern Schaefer, professor in civil, construction and environmental engineering, then took the floor for his chance to speak about why he thought he should be elected.

“My vision as Faculty Senate [president-elect] would be quite simple,” Schaefer said. “We talk often about student success, what I would like to focus on is faculty success.”

Schaefer touched on several things that he feels need improved such as the large enrollment increases and the larger classes and asked, “How do we deal with those [things]?”

Ultimately, Day was elected the new president-elect.

Wallace then gave his president’s report, which outlined a few goals for the semester, including reviewing the office of the senior vice president for business and finance and creating a task force on enrollment management, which will examine various scenarios of managing incoming students.

The new business, a merger between the department of anthropology and department of world languages and cultures for the Faculty Senate, was introduced and will be voted on within the next few meetings.

President Steven Leath will be at the next Faculty Senate meeting Feb. 9 and will provide an update on budgets and initiatives, along with other items.