News From the Dean

August 10, 2011

Dear Board Members,

Summer is passing too quickly and before I know it I will be moving out of the Dean’s office.  Jeff Wright, the incoming Dean of the College of Sciences and Technology, will assume the duties of the office beginning September 1.  Jeff has been in Bellingham twice during the summer getting his housing lined up and working with me and the College office staff on the leadership transition.  I am happy to report that everything is going smoothly.

As I indicated in my June 15 note to you, the budget situation for next year has turned out to be less difficult than we had expected during much of last academic year.  We have had to eliminate two faculty positions and some operating budget, and even though that will put pressure on our faculty who will have ever more students to deal with this fall, it will be manageable.   Now, if the economy of the State can maintain a positive course and no State revenue downturn occurs, we could have a stable 2-year biennial budget period.

For the past two years because the budget situation has been so uncertain, we have been unable to do any hiring of new faculty or hire replacements for faculty who have recently retired or resigned from Western.  We have had several senior faculty retire during the past two years and we have lost three junior faculty to other universities. All in all, beginning this fall we will have 11 or 12 vacant faculty positions.  In a normal year we almost always have a few positions empty, but now we have too many vacant and we need to do some hiring.  Every department is down in faculty numbers from what they had three years ago, so of course every department would like to recruit this year to fill positions.  Some will not be able to to that, but I hope we can recruit to fill at least four or five positions.  I have submitted a hiring plan to the Provost that I hope she can accept.  Hopefully, faculty recruiting will be one of the big activities of the coming year.

During the summer we have been working actively to maintain our College development and fundraising efforts.  As you recall, Jim Johnson left us last spring, and that interrupted for several months some of what we had planned.  However, I am happy to report that we again have a development officer working with us. Manca Valum, who some of you met a couple years ago when she was working part-time for us, is working with us again and getting things back on track.  She will be attending the Leadership Board meeting in the Fall (October 28), but in the meantime contacting some of you to get involved with the various projects that we had discussed and put in place at our May Board meeting.  She is a great idea person, very energetic and very experienced in the development area and in working with leadership boards. I am sure you will enjoy meeting and working with her.

As I indicated above, the next meeting of the CST Leadership Board will be held on Friday, October 28, here on the Western campus.  Rick Kaiser, Jeff Wright and I will be making plans and setting an agenda for the meeting and getting some pre-meeting materials to you in a few weeks.  Although I will no longer be Dean of the College, I do plan to attend the meeting and help in any way I can.  I am looking forward to seeing all of you at the Board meeting.

We were fortunate this spring to receive a grant from the Murdock Foundation, a grant that was matched by Western, that allows us to begin remodeling space in the Environmental Sciences building for our Advanced Materials Engineering and Science Center (AMSEC).  Associate Dean Kathy Kitto, who is also the Director of AMSEC, played a pivotal role in getting these fund which result in the consolidation of AMSEC operations (teaching and instrumentation activities) at one location.  Not only will this allow

us to potentially expand AMSEC, it will also greatly enhance the instructional experience for the students.  In addition to funds for space renovation, Murdock funds will be available for the next three years to support several faculty/student summer research stipends, an area of support that is very important to the students in our College.

This spring Western hired a new Director for our Office of Extended Education and Summer Programs, as part of an effort to beef up the instructional work Western is doing off campus and in the community.  During the past year, considerable time has been spent debating how and where Western could/should be doing more in the way of distance education and internet based instruction.  These are areas that Western has not developed to the fullest extent possible. We have learned from our alums and community friends, and through the 100 Community Conversation process last year, that more off-campus instruction in several areas might be good.  Given this interest, you might expect that there will be some discussion of these matters at the October Board meeting.

We have been working over the past year to increase the level and scope of activity in our new Technology Development Center.  We are working to get more projects into the center and more Western faculty and students and community partners using the facility.  As part of this effort, in collaboration with the Port of Bellingham and the local Technology Alliance Group, we obtained a $25K grant from the State to increase our center development efforts. This work has been going well and we believe is showing promising results.  We have now established a TDC Advisory Board, made up of campus and community members, a Board that will be extremely important in setting future policy and direction for the Center.

As I near the end of my tenure as Dean of CST, I reflect on the many things we have done over the past eight years.  We have founded a new College, a college that I think is doing quite well. We have hired and developed many new faculty members, strengthened our departments, established new interdisciplinary programs, improved our student recruiting and advising, made significant progress in building diversity in our departments and developed new outreach and collaborations with the community.  It has been a busy time.

But one of the most exciting and satisfying things we have done is to establish the College Leadership Board, an effort that has been successful because of the participation and commitment of all of you.  Our Board is up and running and making increasingly important contributions to the ungoing challenges of the College, its faculty, staff and students.  For this I cannot thank you enough.  Your efforts in support of what we do is sincerely appreciated.

I hope the rest of your summer goes well and that you will be making plans to attend the Board meeting in October.  I look forward to seeing you.

Cheers,  Arlie

Arlan Norman
Dean, College of Sciences and Technolgy