Document Actions
06-02-03 Faculty and Staff
02/03/06
Dear Colleagues:
At least once every semester I write to faculty and staff to share announcements, information about issues facing the College, and highlight achievements by faculty and staff in the past few months. In this email, I am pleased to inform you of several new appointments in the College and to highlight briefly several issues that are being discussed by the Executive Council or the Liberal Arts Council.
Announcements
Dr. Amy J. Glass has been appointed as interim head of the Department of Economics to serve from the 2006 Spring Semester through the 2006-2007 academic year. The Department of Economics will re-initiate its search for a department head later in the 2006 spring semester.
Dr. Pam Matthews of the Department of English has been appointed interim associate dean. Dr. Matthews will assume many of the responsibilities previously held by Dr. Julia Kirk Blackwelder. In the coming few weeks, I will be appointing a committee to conduct an internal search for an associate dean whose primary areas of responsibility will be undergraduate programs and interdisciplinary programs. This associate dean’s responsibilities will also include international programs.
The College has reorganized responsibilities among senior staff members which has allowed us to redefine Judy Jordan’s position to be Project Coordinator for International Programs We hope to have this position filled by no later than spring break in March.
The College continues to develop its new website (http://clla.tamu.edu) providing information for faculty, students, staff, and e-visitors to the College. Please let us know if you have comments or reactions to the content or presentation of information in these new web pages.
Issues
Many of you will recall that I indicated in earlier communications that we would have discussions of two issues for the 2005-2006 academic year – a change in the College’s budget policy and development of policies to advance interdisciplinary programs. I am pleased to tell you that we have made progress in both areas.
Budget Policy. For the past several years the College has been in the fortunate position of having new funding added to its annual base budget – primarily to cover new faculty positions and enhancement of academic programs. With the exception of funds associated with reinvestment faculty hires, the College is not expecting new funding after this fiscal year. Nevertheless, funding needs for partner placements, special opportunities in hiring faculty, and new program development will continue. The only source of funds for these demands is funding now located in departments since virtually all of the College’s base dollars reside in departments.
The Executive Council and the Liberal Arts Council have discussed ways to retrieve funding from departments. I will not review those discussions, but they are well documented in Liberal Arts Council minutes of November 9th and December 14 as well as in the Executive Council Synopses from October 4th through December 20th. All are posted at http://clla.tamu.edu/committees/lac/.
The final budget policy emerging from these discussions is outlined in a memorandum sent to departments in December. A copy of that memorandum is available at http://clla.tamu.edu/publications/deanltrs/. Previously, departments retained the position and the funding for all faculty departures. Under this new policy, departments will retain the positions and 100 percent of the funding for departures of untenured assistant professors. Departments will retain the positions and 80 percent of the funding for departures of tenured faculty. I encourage you to review both the discussions of how this policy emerged and the memorandum outlining the policy if you have any questions.
Interdisciplinary Programs and Faculty. Last year the faculty in the College discussed the importance and the challenges of developing interdisciplinary programs. Key to the advancement of interdisciplinary programs is the development of interdisciplinary appointments and the clarification of personnel policies for interdisciplinary faculty. We have made good progress in this area, and by the end of February should have policies in place that will allow us to move toward structured interdisciplinary faculty appointments.
In the fall, I appointed a committee to review the College’s personnel policies and to make recommendations concerning changes or amendments to the policy to accommodate interdisciplinary faculty appointments. The letter appointing this committee and its subsequent recommendations may be found at http://clla.tamu.edu/committees/IDPFacAppComm/. The Executive Council and the Liberal Arts Council have discussed their recommendations, especially those involving the review of faculty with joint appointments in departments and programs. A copy of the current policy under discussion may be found at http://clla.tamu.edu/committees/IDPFacAppComm/.
The Liberal Arts Council is scheduled to discuss this recommendation at its February meeting. I urge that you discuss your reactions to the policy with your department’s LAC representative.
A second initiative to advance interdisciplinary appointments and programs is the development of program-level by-laws that would outline faculty governance and personnel procedures for faculty affiliated with interdisciplinary programs. Dr. Claudia Nelson, director of the Women’s Studies Program, has taken the lead in working with Women’s Studies faculty to develop by-laws for its program – see, http://clla.tamu.edu/committees/IDPFacAppComm/. These by-laws have been discussed by the Executive Council and will also be discussed by the Liberal Arts Council in its February meeting. I think these by-laws outline very well faculty responsibilities and privileges in the Women’s Studies program. Hence, I would expect that other interdisciplinary programs will develop similar by-laws if they wish to create more structured affiliated faculty for their respective programs.
Differential Tuition. A new topic that we will be discussing this Spring will be the possibility of differential tuition for students taking classes in the College. Discussions about differential tuition are taking place at the University level and in the Colleges of Engineering, Business, and Architecture. I believe that the College ought to consider differential tuition as a way to support the enhancement of undergraduate education called for by the President’s Taskforce for Enhancing Undergraduate Education. I will be appointing a committee composed of faculty, students, and staff to review the possibilities for differential tuition, and I hope to make a recommendation to the University-level Tuition Advisory Committee later in the semester. I will keep the Executive Council and the Liberal Arts Council informed as these discussions take place.
Congratulations from Departments
Faculty, staff, and students in the College garner numerous awards for outstanding achievements. The College relies on departments and programs to let us know about such accomplishments. I would, therefore, ask that faculty and staff let their departments know and that departments, in turn, let us know about achievements for which the entire College community should be extending congratulations. As I noted in my previous e-mails, this part of my letter is called “Congratulations from Departments”
Anthropology
-Wayne Smith was awarded a Hillcrest Foundation grant to “conduct special research project as scientific studies of the skeleton of the Kennewick Man by anthropologists and archaeologists; for scientific investigation and DNA analysis of the earliest physical remains found in the New World.”
Communication
-Scott Poole received the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Distinguished Scholar Award at the NCA annual meeting in November.
-Linda Putnam received Organizational Communication Division Book of the Year 2005 for Handbook of Organizational Discourse. David Grant, Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick & Linda Putnam (Eds.)
-Barbara Scharf was named 2005 Outstanding Health Communication Scholar by the Health Communication Divisions of both the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association.
English
-Giovanna Del Negro was awarded Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize by the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society for The Passeggiata and Popular Culture in an Italian Town: Folklore and the Performance of Modernity (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005, paperback).
-Jimmie Killingsworth was named an Outstanding Academic Title, Choice magazine for Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (Iowa Whitman Series: University of Iowa Press, 2004).
- Jimmie Killingsworth was selected as one of the Twelve Outstanding Professors by the Panhellenic Society.
Performance Studies
-Marian Anderson String Quartet was awarded the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Excellence in Culture and the Arts from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Psychology
-Hsin Chin Chen, (Ph.D. student), was awarded a 2005 APA Dissertation Research Award for “Mapping orthographic and phonological neighborhood effects on word recognition in two different orthographies.”
-Angelica Rocha, (Ph.D. student), awarded National Award of Excellence in Research by a Student, National Hispanic Science Network on Drug Abuse
Political Science
-Alisa Hicklin received the Paul Volcker Junior Scholar Research Award from the Public Administration Section of the American Political Science Association for her dissertation “The Quest for Diversity: Increasing Minority Student Representation at American Universities”
-Kenneth J. Meier was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration
-Kenneth J. Meier received the 2005 Adalijza Sosa-Riddell Latino/a Mentoring Award for outstanding mentoring of Latino and Latina graduate students in political science, American Political Science Association’s Committee on the Status of Latinos y Latinas in the Profession
Sociology
-Holly Foster [with John Hagan, Northwestern University], received the “Best Publication in Mental Health Sociology” award given by the Awards Committee of the Mental health Section of ASA. Their paper entitled “S/He’s a Rebel: Toward a Sequential Stress Theory of Delinquency and Gendered Pathways to Disadvantage in Emergine Adulthood” was published in Social Forces.
-Rogelio Saenz)– received Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship and Research Award given annually by the American Sociology Association’s Section on Latino and Latina Sociology
