Reflections on Professional Development Day

Thank you for attending Professional Development Day on February 10th. I would like to thank Gwen Sharp for putting together a truly outstanding program. I have heard many good things from folks about the program and the keynote speaker, Dr. Anita Tijerina Revilla, activist scholar and Professor at California State University, Los Angeles.

I was honored to give a short talk on what will be my last Professional Development Day (convocation) at Nevada State. As most of you already know, I will retire at the end of June after 6 years as your Provost. I offer here a few highlights from my remarks:

I have been in the business of trying to improve higher education for over 30 years, first as a professor and later as an administrator. It’s been my life’s work and an incredibly rewarding experience.

I want to share with you my major goals for the rest of the semester:

• Take the Masters of Science in Nursing Leadership through the Board of Regents, first at Academic Affairs Council in March and then for approval by the full Board in June
• Usher budget requests through all the processes
• Complete the implementation of our new School and Library Promotion, Tenure, and Review expectations documents
• Coordinate the search for a new Dean of Education
• Hold down the fort while President Pollard is in Carson City
• Complete annual evaluations of direct reports
• Manage any issues as they arise 🔥

Since this was a professional development day talk, I wanted to reflect on the important role professional development has played in my life and career. For example, professional development gives you the opportunity to learn:

• More about your field/discipline
• How to achieve your next promotion
• About yourself
• How to build great teams
• How to shape change in an organization

My first lessons about leadership and responsibility came from my dad. He insisted I FEED THE ANIMALS FIRST! We always had pets, horses, and at various times, cows and bottle calves. I had to feed and water the animals first before anything else, such as getting ready for school. Christmas morning was no exception!

Looking back this was my first lesson in the guiding components of servant leadership: Put others first, show compassion, develop empathy, and take responsibility. My first formal leadership role was President of my horse 4-H group, the Mustangers! When I was a whiny teenager, not wanting to go to 4-H, Mom and Dad would remind me — you are not doing it for you, you are doing it for your club. Be the example of the person who shows up and shows loyalty. "Feed the animals first" can easily translate into “take care of the people in the organization first.”

Sabbaticals

Join me in congratulating Bryan Sigel, Hon-Vu Duong, Laura Rosales-Lagarde, and Christine Beaudry for securing sabbaticals in the upcoming academic year.

External Funding

It has been an absolutely intense year for securing outside funding! I want to congratulate all those who have worked tirelessly to bring in $10.6M in grants, and $11M in federal earmarks.

Common Read 2023-4 and 2024-5

The Common Read for the next two academic years is: The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown, an anthology featuring “45 unforgettable true stories about risk, courage, and facing the unknown.”

Special thanks to Alena Manjuck from the Marydean Martin Library for chairing this committee and finding such an outstanding recommendation.

Spring is in the Air

Gwen Sharp and a host of contributors did a wonderful job with the spring Professional Development Day this past week, and I heroically managed to avoid screwing it up with a presentation of my own. If you want to know how I managed that feat, you can check out the presentation slide deck here. It’s a faithful reproduction, minus some videos of my dog, Boba Fetch, that probably wouldn’t make sense out of context anyway.  

In short, the talk looks at enrollment trends, both nationally and at Nevada State, examines some of the factors that contribute to those outcomes, and briefly outlines a few of the measures we’re taking – and can take – to put the college in a healthy position. If you want to know more I would be happy to talk/answer questions. 

There’s No Friend like a Transfer Friend

In our previous update, I mentioned something called “enrollment invigoration,” which is a term I completely made up to describe an array of efforts to boost enrollment (and student success) at Nevada State. Part of that array – a big part – is the development of a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with CSN regarding our transfer partnership. The MoU basically outlines the expectations of both schools in this partnership, and the actions we should take to ensure our collective success.  

It’s still in the early phases, with a draft almost ready to share with our transfer specialists for input, but I already appreciate two of the core elements. One is that it alludes to evidence-based practices and our own data on what works, and the other is that it makes a concerted effort to serve CSN well in this partnership. One of the challenges with transfer relationships, especially with NSHE’s funding model, is that they inherently provide much more practical benefit to the institution receiving students than the one sending them. By intentionally taking strides to ensure that CSN benefits from this relationship (e.g., reverse articulations) it hopefully creates circumstances that make it more worthwhile than ever for them to invest in the partnership, with students at both institutions being the ultimate beneficiaries.