I look forward to seeing everyone at commencement on May 6th. We will graduate the largest class in our 20-year history! At my last Faculty Senate meeting at Nevada State, I was happy to give the following updates. It has been an honor to be involved in shared governance with Senate for six years, and I wish you all the best in your efforts on behalf of the faculty of NS.

There are many positive gains for academic and administrative faculty from the recent internal budget process. The following positions that were on grant or gift money were institutionalized:

• Lecturer of Spanish
• Director of Teacher Academy pipeline program
• The Writing Center Coordinator

Other positions approved include:

• An Associate or Full Professor in School Psychology for the Ed.S program
• An Assistant Professor in Psychology and Counseling
• A Coordinator for the Sankofa program
• An Administrative Assistant for the Department of Psychology and Counseling (completing the reorganization of the School of LASB)

Outcome of Task Force Work

Nursing clinical contact hours to workload credits have increased from .5 credits for one contact hour to .67 credits for one contact hour. The task force that examined this situation recommended that four new Nursing Lecturers are needed to make this change successfully. Two were approved in the regular budgeting process, and we hope that external funding will cover the other two.

Increase in Pay Rate for Independent Study

The faculty recommendations were adopted and the initiative was funded. The new policy changes the modifier for independent studies from .056 x credit(s) x # of students x summer/overload rate, to increase the modifier to .2.

Increase in Summer/Overload Pay

These increases are tied to COLA increases, and with large COLA increases expected as a result of the legislative session, there will be increases in summer and overload pay to match.

It has come to light that how NS calculates summer and overload pay is not written into any of our internal policies. The rates are reported in the NSHE Policy and Guidelines document; however, our processes need to be codified. Gwen Sharp and I are drafting this policy.

Lecturers and Annual Evaluations

After extensive discussion around the annual evaluation of Lecturers, I have decided that all Lecturers moving forward will be evaluated on two categories annually: teaching and service.

I want to thank the Nursing and Education Lecturers for completing the three categories in this last round of evaluations. A broader assessment of the process revealed that it is not equitable for the academic schools to differ in how these annual evaluations are completed.

Gwen Sharp and I will work with HR to adjust the merit policy to address both tenure-track and non-tenure-track calculations for merit. HR has agreed to adjust the annual evaluation form for non-tenure track faculty to reflect this change.

The promotion policy for Lecturers will remain the same, based on the three categories of teaching, service, and growth and professional development. It is up to the candidates to keep track of their growth and professional development should they seek promotion.

Promotion, Tenure, and Review Expectations Documents for the Schools and Library

After extensive input from Faculty Senate leadership, the deans, and my office, the following additional adjustments will be made to complete the process:

• The alphabetical order of how effort is ranked will match across documents, with A being highest or best;
• The points earned for service by tenure-track faculty will be the same across all School documents, with an excellent being 8 points, commendable 6-7, and satisfactory 4-5.

With these revisions, the Promotion, Tenure, and Review Expectations documents for the Schools and Library will take effect on July 1, 2023.

Finally, I have asked Gwen to take all these advances that are applicable and plug them into the draft of the Faculty Workload policy to be considered in the fall of 2023 by the next Provost or Interim Provost and brought to the Deans and Faculty Senate for review.

My son turns 11 today. Along with my 30th high school reunion (also this year), this development has shattered my prior understanding of how the progression of time is supposed to work. Fortunately, even though my theories of time have not met expectations, my son has managed to surpass them by a fair margin as he continues to mature into quite a wonderful young person (though not without the occasional bout of mischief).  

Unfortunately, not everything is surpassing our expectations (*rough segue alert*). Our fall enrollment, for one, is still clouded in uncertainty as we wade through uncharted, post-pandemic territory. On the positive side, we are on pace to have a historically high number of first-year admits, with a projected total that is almost 20% higher than a very good pre-pandemic year in 2019. Unfortunately, last year we also set a new record for first-year admits, but a lower-than-average rate of converting those students into enrollments left us with a solid first-year class (450 students) that nevertheless fell short of initial projections.  

It's too early to reach any definitive conclusions in this new reality, but I’m seeing some worrying signs of a repeat performance of that low conversion rate (despite an array of ameliorative efforts). Perhaps at the top of the list is our comparatively low rate of scholarship acceptances, which for me is a good indicator of whether a student genuinely plans to attend the college. Moreover, orientation sign-ups, while solid, are not approaching historically high levels. Given that our pre-pandemic methods aren’t producing pre-pandemic results, and this year’s improvements may not be helping enough, our approach has been to leverage new strategies and initiatives as we head down the home stretch to the fall semester, just a few of which are detailed below.

Scholarships

The beauty of scholarships is twofold: they’re associated with increased student success for our “new majority” population, and they generate formula funding that easily eclipses their cost. However, we haven’t adjusted our scholarship amounts in 6 years, and the lower level awards have been less effective in enticing students to Nevada State (e.g., acceptances for our $1000 Black & Gold scholarship have declined in recent years, whereas our Presidential acceptances have risen). Consequently, we are increasing our scholarship levels for the Mt. Scorpion and Black & Gold awards, adding $500 to the former and doubling the latter up to $2000. Thanks to a heroic assist from the Office of Financial Aid, we are implementing this change for fall 2023 transfer admits and will apply it in full for fall 2024 first-year students. We also are doing an additional one-time award of $1000 for Black & Gold recipients who enter in fall 2023 to help them manage the heightened opportunity cost of attending college. Our hope is that these changes will produce positive results, and we expect that they will not negatively impact need-based aid for non-scholarship students.  

Transfer Endeavors

We continue to strengthen our partnership with the College of Southern Nevada. Leading the way is a new Memorandum of Understanding that essentially defines what will make our partnership successful, with efforts ranging from improved physical spaces for NS on CSN campuses to several measures that can guide students to success at the community college if they will not – or cannot – proceed at Nevada State. We recently punctuated the endeavor with a presentation to their executive leadership team on the success of CSN students and a 3-hour meeting with their working group to update the MOU. The hallmarks of the presentation were Sandip’s new CSN dashboard and the observation that success rates for CSN transfer students have steadily climbed in recent years, culminating in a 2022 graduation rate of 62 percent for those who earned an associate degree before matriculating to NS. Ample work remains, but I’m encouraged by the initial returns. 

Outreach

Outreach is nothing new when it comes to these endeavors, where the college has long deployed a multi-modal approach to guiding and engaging current and prospective students. However, in this cycle, we are ramping up specific elements in new – or more emphatic – ways, such as our messaging to the parents/guardians to students and our efforts to increase the personalization of our outreach for populations where it’s feasible (e.g., the relatively small population of seniors who are very close to graduation but for some reason have not re-enrolled).