So far, I've only described the CoH glass "half-empty." Now, here's the glass half-full:
· I think the CoH has a great administrative team. Our associate deans and chairs/directors are truly outstanding senior colleagues - smart, hard-working, and thoroughly team spirited.
· CoH has talented and productive faculty and staff. Retention has been impressive, and we've been able to pull in impressive new faculty despite a "semi-freeze" last year.
· CoH
enjoys strong demand for our students and our graduates. We produce 700 graduates a year, all of them
vitally needed. Our degree programs are,
on the whole, strong, with projections that they will stay so. Our enrollment is up 6% this fall, the
highest in the university.
· CoH boasts of outstanding clinical and community service progams - of which the Children's Center for Communication and Development and the DuBard School of Languague Disorders are the best know.
· CoH continues to birth new programs and projects - the new Doctorate of Nursing Practice program; a new social work education project geared to public child welfare workers; the Early Oral Intervention program; the newly approved interdisiciplinary Center on Aging. More good stuff is coming - an on-line master's in coaching education; an on-line master's program in medical technology.
· CoH has the second best record of external funding in the university (behind Science and Technology) - over $10 million last year - funding an impressive array of projects spanning instruction, research, and service. We have good projects doing good work, often with an immediate positive impact on people's lives.
· CoH has a new opportunity to make some headway on a stalled building project, with external funding for planning a nursing building. We have major challenges with inadequate and insufficient physical plant throughout the college, but this is one bright spot - with thanks owed to Dr. Nugent, Vice-President for Research Burge, and President Saunders.
· CoH has a reinvigorated Dean's Council - 25 enthusiastic supporters, mostly leaders in the health services community of South Mississippi (here the kudos go to Meredith Cothern, our development officer). We had an excellent meeting last week, and I'm greatly encouraged by their commitment.
· CoH has a great position vis-à-vis the university's strategic priorities - academic success; image development; community connections; healthy minds, bodies, campuses. Our missions dovetail the priority concerns of the university quite well.
· CoH will eventually benefit, I believe, from the university's commitment to a new budget model - "responsibility-centered management," in which better performance translates into better funding. You'll be hearing more about this in the future; quite possibly, once we learn more about it, we will have a college convocation focusing on the model.