Present: Julie Miller, Julie Morales, Tony Macias, Christie Miller, Duane Elms, Katherine Woodard, Dan Tressler, Rick Johnson, Donna Rees, John Counts, Kathie Gilbert, guest Bob Tacker

Bob Tacker, CHECS Acting Director, spoke with Cabinet about an initiative to allow public schools to join the CHECS network. The implication for Higher Education is that the costs for delivering IT distance education will be virtually free. However, this is a double edged sword; it makes it easier to connect to school districts for us but also easier for our competitors. So expanded market and expanded competition. CHECS is asking the Legislature to fund the infrastructure for this as well as a Web CT upgrade. Santa Fe keeps urging cooperation, consolidation, working with K12. CHECS is being pro-active in this initiative.
There will be a promotion and tenure process meeting this Friday. All interested faculty are invited.
Chairs Council will meet on Thursday.
The students had a good meeting with the Governor last week. He asked specifically what he could do for Western.
Governance heads will meet on Thursday.
An additional $2500 in emergency student loans has been made to students by the Foundation; this makes $6000 in emergency loans this semester.
The Foundation will focus on three areas for scholarships which are weak: scholarships for undeclared students, out of state students, and stipends for band students.
The Foundation is supporting the publicity for the GO Bond; it needs about $950 to meet its costs on this effort.
On the endowed professorship program, Dr. Counts has pledged $5000. The faculty group and DanTressler are meeting on this project today. Faye Vowell asked that all the Cabinet make a donation to support this effort.
Faculty Senate met last week. To further the faculty evaluation initiative, two faculty will attend a national conference that will focus on evaluation.
General Assembly will meet on Thursday.
The State Faculty Presidents will meet probably on Oct 29.
We painted the W in record time on Friday.
The online training initiative is open to the campus and all are invited to participate. The President, VP Farren, and VP Vowell are enrolled in this effort to upgrade computer skills.
Cabinet discussed the efforts made to encourage enrolled students to finalize. We discussed ways to increase enrollment in the short term and the long term.
We will have a Nursing accreditation visit this academic year. Dean Katherine Woodard will be working on helping Nursing faculty on this effort especially in assessment for this visit.
Someone tried to break into the Alumni Office by breaking windows. Nothing was stolen.
Alumni Bulletin will be mailed out this week.
Alumni Pete Morales, Dudley Sikes, David Darling, Charlotte Mandril-Boyle will be a part of the alumni speaker program for
The University Party will be on November 20 at the Buffalo.
New computers have been received in the Dell Lab. the old Dells have been moved to the Language Lab. New faculty have their computers. Some new computers are available in the library.
IT will kick up our bandwidth from 3 megabits to 6 megabits.
Tomorrow the Admissions Office will have a retreat to discuss its recruiting strategy for the year. We have a new recruiter, Alex Ribeau
IT has a fairly high help desk backlog. The technicians are working down the list in order of arrival.
IT staff and AT faculty did a great demo to the Regents of our ongoing IT initiatives: Advising Space, Degree Audit, online courses, general IT projects, and new instructional technology in Applied Technology. Regent President Janos and Student Regent Miller were especially complimentary..
The Academic Affairs report to the Regents focused on the theme of Helping Students Learn and showcased the Con Confianza, BEAMS, and ADP efforts. Rick Johnson demonstrated an joint assignment he and Kay Hinds are using in their learning community.
IT is investigating employing personal firewalls for each computer to help deal with viruses.
Configures DMZ so Residence Halls are there and separated from the campus network
Steve Liebhart and Dean Foster are being trained on the new portal product which will come up at the end of the semester.
We will have an ITT meeting shortly. We will invite the superintendents from the Gila Consortium to join us.
Kathie Gilbert will make a presentation to General Assembly regarding a possible new Helping Students Learn initiative for AQIP.
The contract for imaging software was signed yesterday.
The AQIP reports are due today.
We will be having the AQIP quarterly meeting probably the week of 11 October.
The systems portfolio feedback will be slow in coming because NCA just sent them out in late August.
The Assessment Convocation is mandatory. Everyone should make arrangements to be there all day. Vincent Tinto will be the keynote speaker. His presentation will be followed by concurrent sessions. In the afternoon, departments will have unit meetings and job classification meetings to discuss the future of assessment at WNMU. We will do the employee survey as a part of this day. The form has been examined and modified by the Presidents of the Faculty and Staff Senates.
The President distributed a reformatted and updated Strategic Plan. It will be placed on the Web. Carmen Maynes will send the electronic version to Steve Liebhart
Applied Technology Dept is meeting on a weekly basis discussing such things as industry certification, communication with the rest of the University, and a number of recruitment initiatives (brochures, public television , visits with admissions recruiters).
There was a community relations meeting last week. The small turnout was perhaps because Governor was in town. In response to community requests, the tennis courts will be open 24-7. Next meeting of the Community Relations group will be in November.
Julie Morales has been asked to assist with a new bond issue for public schools
There will be a candidates forum on Thursday at 7:oo in GRC. Gary King, Manny Herrera, and Diane Hamilton will participate.
Directories are here.
Julie Morales will be in ABQ tomorrow for a GO Bond meeting.
Regarding staffing in library, Julie Miller is interviewing for her secretary position; the multimedia a tech position will close on Friday.
Julie Miller handed out Elizabeth I exhibit brochures. There will be an opening reception on Oct 15. There will be programmed events to go along with the exhibit.
Two weeks ago Garth attended a meeting of the NM Film Board. Silver City needs a film office to play in this arena. He has sent out a report on that meeting. Garth is also on the Board of CATS. We will c continue to discuss this
We have had the first meeting for the Web PMT. The team will use a publication titled "Make your web site work" to enhance the Web page for recruitment and retention.
Dr. Farren will be at NACADA on Oct 6-8.
Enrollment figures as of this morning. Credit Hours are down 1793 total, off-campus down 359 CH, and on campus down 1434. Credit hours are down 5.9% Headcount overall is down 170, SC down 95 and EU down 75 students. We are up in concurrent students.
Around 200 students enrolled but never finalized.
Julie Morales will meet with Chris Farren and Donna Rees to write an article explaining our enrollment situation for the newspaper.
Junius Logan and Faye Vowell have created a form to capture information on students who were disenrolled and are now seeking to be re-enrolled.
Academic Support advisors are meeting weekly.
Donna Rees visited yesterday with Bob Tacker and talked about Playas. Playas is scheduled for activity for 150 days a year. They are thinking about leasing it to film companies for the balance of the year.
Harvielee Moore, the new Deming superintendent, has agreed this semester find tuition assistance for the Deming public school employees taking classes at WNMU. She is writing a grant to get the tuition for the spring semester.
Pat McIntire has spent between $16,000 and 17,000 on equipment for Nursing program in Deming. We will be reimbursed for this.
The NM Virtual college group will meet on Sept 28 in ABQ. Donna Rees will attend.
Mary Billings is visiting the RUS schools today and tomorrow.
Donna Rees will send out an rfp to people who want to put classes online. She also has some incentive money. Preference will be given to courses that address University priorities.
The Cabinet discussed the need to hire someone to help with grant writing because people cannot write grants easily with a full time job. Why can't we use our current overhead money to hire someone to help with this with the requirement that s/he make their salary in three years.
We discussed partnering with Gila Regional to explore telecommunications projects (telemedicine) and food services.
Computers for the lab in Gallup were delivered yesterday. Deming IT support people will be going to Gallup to install them. The IT position is vacant in Gallup.
Our students had a good meeting with the Governor last week. The President attended the Chamber meeting with him. Our students voiced needs in the areas of desks in Light Hall, lottery scholarships, buildings that needed work The governor requested our list for Building and Infrastructure needs to be sent to him directly. Comments from an Expressive Arts student about the lack of equipment in that area motivated the Governor to ask that we send him a list of Expressive Arts equipment needs.
Lottery scholarships--WNMU has fewer students receiving the lottery scholarships than other NM schools. This may be due to our older average age for freshman students among other things. The President asked that we take a look at the requirements for the Bridge Scholarship to see if we can use the money better.