Dr. Laura Naumann Delivers Provost Lecture

Please join me on October 11th at 3:30pm, KAB auditorium, for Dr. Laura Naumann’s sabbatical presentation, Pursuing Equity to Enhance Retention at Nevada State College. Student groups, entire classes, and the public are encouraged to attend!

Laura’s sabbatical activities ultimately resulted in a $1M NSF ADVANCE award. She will discuss grant-related activities that current academic faculty can participate in and benefit from over the life of the three-year project. The NSF AVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers that impede the full participation and advancement of diverse faculty in academic institutions.

Dr. Naumann’s lecture is part of Nevada State’s year-long events celebrating our 20th anniversary.

School and Library Updated P&T Documents

Almost two years in the making, the updated Promotion, Tenure, and Review Expectations documents for the academic Schools and Library are complete, each having been voted on by their respective faculty members. The revision of these documents at the same time and in collaboration with one another is significant for ensuring the fairest, most transparent guidance to academic faculty as they progress in their careers. The documents also contain a legacy policy for those eligible to choose between the old and the new.

The Provost’s Office has worked closely to oversee the process and to ensure consistency across all four documents where appropriate. The Faculty Senate will be taking a Sense of the Senate vote on the four documents at their November meeting.

Also, at the November Faculty Senate meeting the advanced draft of the Educational Philosophy will be discussed as an informational item.

After about 2 ½ years of ducking and dodging the dreaded virus, COVID finally caught up with me last week. I was one of the fortunate ones – for me it was like a multi-day bout with the flu – but I can still say with conviction that having COVID is nowhere near as good as NOT having COVID.  

Nevertheless, stuff continued to happen . . . 

Existing Program Review

Also known in the Nevada State parlance as “10-year program review,” these Board-mandated reports are a colossal examination of an academic program, covering everything from student success metrics, to faculty achievement, to learning outcomes assessment. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Dean Eastridge and Associate Dean Collier, we just completed reviews for the BS in Nursing, the BA in Elementary Education, and the BA and BS in Secondary Education. It’s such a massive undertaking, and one so impressively executed, that I’d like everyone to give Dean Eastridge and Associate Dean Collier a hand. Just, wherever you happen to be right now, if you could start clapping for 15 to 20 seconds, or until a person in authority politely asks you to leave the premises, that would be great. Also, thank you, again, to Gwen Sharp for facilitating the effort. 

More Reports!

They say you haven’t lived until you’ve worked on multiple reports for NSHE while in the throes of COVID, so I did a LOT of living this past Monday (moral of the story: don’t procrastinate). In addition to finalizing our existing program reviews, I also worked on our new program follow-up report, which is a much simpler IR-oriented analysis of programs at the end of their 1st, 3rd, and 5th years of existence, our Planning Report, which is like an abridged version of the strategic plan, and our Low Yield Reports, which identify programs that are under the threshold of graduating at least 20 students in the last three years on record.  

Accreditation Affairs

We continue to prepare for our Mid-Cycle Evaluation Visit from the Northwest Commission on Colleges & Universities (NWCCU). The visit schedule is being finalized, the report is in the hands of our evaluators, and we just printed copies for folks to have in hand on Oct. 24-25 when the visit goes down. 

I also had a conversation with our new NWCCU liaison about renaming the institution, clarifying and confirming the process we’ll follow moving forward. 

First-Year Recruitment

I’ve been promising this for two updates and consistently running out of space, so at the very least I’ll provide a mini-update. For fall 2022 first-year recruitment, we have three over-arching goals: 1) Strategic Enrollment Growth, 2) Establish “First-Choice” Status, and 3) Academic Diversification (i.e., recruit broadly across all of our academic programs). These goals are pursued through an array of strategies, from high school presentations, to events, to communication and outreach plans. Moreover, we have four particular areas of emphasis this year: Parent/guardian engagement, Dual Credit recruitment, Increased awareness of scholarships/financial aid, and increased campus visits, and we are doing what we can to help prospective students learn what NS is like through the perspective of our current students.