The UTRGV School of Art and Design director and Parking and Transportation Services executive director have responded to complaints made by an art major and member of The Rider staff in the Nov. 7 opinion column.
In the column, the student complained about the schedule of the Valley Metro bus in Edinburg not aligning with her class schedule, a professor disclosing a student’s GPA in class and a professor showing YouTube tutorials as part of class.
Ed Pogue, director of the UTRGV School of Art and Design, said the school has almost 40 full-time faculty and 803 majors. The school is happy to have strong enrollment numbers, but it can cause issues with scheduling.
“I mean, we take a look at the bus schedule and kind of look at that in relationship to the class schedules,” Pogue said. “But, as you know, it’s very difficult. There are a lot of moving factors in looking at the schedules.
“Certain faculty, you know, are involved in other types of community work and different things. But I mean, with that many students, it’s going to be very difficult to find a way that every student can get into a particular class based on this schedule. It’s a very difficult thing to align. So we do look at it. We are concerned about it.”
He said the school is working on alleviating the distance and travel of most students by offering more hybrid classes.
“So we’re working very hard to try to help those students, in particular from Brownsville … knowing that these students have a difficulty in having to travel,” Pogue said. “Also, as part of that, one of the reasons that we know that is because many of our faculty also travel and use the bus. So, you know, those faculty are very aware of the issues of travel and the scheduling.”
Arendi Garcia, a graphic design senior, said she travels to Edinburg Monday through Thursday. When Garcia took the campus connector for the first time, she thought the Visual Arts Annex would be on the main campus.
“I didn’t know there was another bus I needed to take,” Garcia said. “I got [to the Edinburg campus] and I was asking, ‘Where is this [Visual Arts Annex]? I don’t see it on the map.’ They said, ‘Oh, no. It’s, like, three minutes away. You need to take another bus.’ And I hate that part because it’s like, ‘Why are we away from the campus?’ Like, the [Edinburg] campus has restaurants [and] the bus back to Brownsville is [there], when we have to take another bus, every 15 minutes.”
She said the Valley Metro bus from the Edinburg campus to the Visual Arts Annex can take up to one hour to arrive, depending on the bus driver and bus they are driving.
“So it’s counterproductive,” Garcia said. “They could have made the art building another floor in the main campus and be done with it.”
Pogue said the school is working on getting computer labs to offer courses in Brownsville.
“We have a lot of potential for growth in Brownsville,” he said. “That’s very exciting for us. And we’re working very hard to meet that demand and the university is aware of it, and we’re working to resolve these issues.”
Rodney Gomez, executive director of Parking and Transportation, said students can file a complaint regarding Valley Metro with the Parking and Transportation Services at UTRGV.
“Sometimes, I know they go directly to Valley Metro, which is fine,” Gomez said. “But if they want to let us know, we’ll communicate directly with the executive director of Valley Metro and let them know what’s going on. We’ll take it as far as we have [to] make sure that it’s addressed.”
Regarding the complaint about a professor disclosing a student’s GPA in the classroom, Pogue said he has not been notified of the situation.
In the last School of Art and Design faculty meeting, which was around Oct. 25, he addressed a concern made by a student in which a faculty member released information “that should not have been released.”
“It was done very innocently,” Pogue said. “It was not done for any other purpose than just an accident. But I did have a discussion with the full-time faculty of the School of Art and Design to discuss these issues.”
Another issue that was addressed in the meeting was the critiques of students’ artwork.
“I just talked about being very careful not to compare … students to other students directly within conversations in front of the classroom, to be very careful about how we speak about information in front of other students and be very careful about when we’re talking from one faculty member to another faculty member,” he said.
Asked if YouTube tutorials are allowed for use in classroom instruction, Pogue replied that it is not a question of being allowed or not but how it’s used and why it’s used.
“If a faculty member is using YouTube videos to teach what they should otherwise be teaching, that’s inappropriate,” he said. “I’d be very concerned about that as director and we need to have a discussion with that faculty about that, about when to use and when not to use a tutorial system or video system.”
Pogue said if students have concerns about a professor, they can email him anonymously or file a complaint with their name.
“An anonymous complaint comes to me and I basically look at it and look at the situation as best I can,” he said. “Students can file a complaint with their name and that comes to me. I usually look at specifics from the student and then I will approach the issue with the faculty member. When I approach the issues with the faculty members, I protect the students. I never mention students by name.”
