King To Become President and CEO
The growth of the WSU Foundation has led to a need for a full-time president and CEO. To meet that need, the foundation’s board of directors approved a proposal to create the position of president and CEO and move Elizabeth King, vice president for university advancement, into that role effective July 1, 2006.
“As the WSU Foundation has matured in assets and complexity, more focused attention toward organizational issues and fund-raising is needed in order for the foundation to make an even greater impact on the health and vitality of Wichita State University,” says WSU President Don Beggs.
In 1993, the total market value of the WSU Foundation and Board of Trustees’ assets was $67 million. Today it is more than $138 million. Says Barry Schwan, chair of the WSU Foundation board of directors, “Elizabeth’s appointment will enable the foundation to manage those complexities and enhance its ability to continue the growth well into the future.”
Matrix Revisited
This summer, President Don Beggs and his administrative staff studied a number of issues, such as WSU’s accountability planning matrix and facilities planning. Beggs first introduced the accountability matrix to the WSU community in August 1999, to be used as a way of looking at how the university should be performing and planning for the future. The matrix looks similar to a Rubik’s cube with 24 cells representing WSU’s plans, values and constituents.
He particularly wants the WSU community to understand that the university’s lengthy mission statement is essentially about learning and that everyone contributes to that mission in various ways. The university’s teaching, research and service roles are all related to learning. “When we do research, we learn, and when we teach, it is for others to learn. We don’t sell widgets, we don’t make airplanes, but we create an environment for learning,” Beggs says. While faculty determine what learning goes on in the classroom, others in the WSU community contribute, for example, by ensuring buildings and classrooms are clean and functioning.
The matrix outlines Wichita State’s constituents as students, faculty, staff, and alumni and community. WSU’s values, as indicated in the matrix, are recruitment, retention, support, enhancing learning, intellectual exploration and honoring excellence. Other priorities that Beggs and his staff have identified for the upcoming year include the following:
• A search for the vice president for academic affairs and research — John Hutchinson, who took that position following the death of Robert Kindrick in May 2004, agreed to serve through this academic year.
• Facilities — A recent Kansas Board of Regents study identified a maintenance backlog of $584 million among its six state universities. The maintenance at WSU is $33.9 million. The board plans to take up this issue during the upcoming legislative session. Work is continuing at WSU’s West Campus at 37th and Maize Road.
• North Central Accreditation self-study — WSU is preparing for an accreditation visit by the NCA in March 2007.
• Staff benefits — Since the regents allowed Fort Hays State University to provide tuition assistance for its employees’ dependents, through revenue generated by its virtual college program in China, the other Kansas regents universities are studying how to offer a similar benefit. Only two options seem feasible at this time for WSU to fund such a program: grow enrollment or conduct a fund-raising campaign, Beggs said.
Enrollment (which dropped by 222 students this fall compared to last fall), credit hour production and the continued implementation of the WSU Information Network, a comprehensive computer database for all university functions, continue to remain priorities, as well.
- Amy Geiszler-Jones
New High — Again
Funding for research, training and service projects at Wichita State has again reached a new high. During fiscal year 2005, which ended June 30, WSU garnered $41.1 million in funding from external agencies, which is a 14 percent increase compared to funding received in FY 2004. This marks the 12th consecutive year that WSU faculty and staff have set a record for external support for research, training and service projects, reports Gerald “Skip” Loper, associate vice president for research.
More than half the funding ($21,739,599) came from federal agencies, while state and local government agencies provided 26 percent of the funding. Industry, business, service centers and private foundations provided the remaining funding.
Research funding for the College of Engineering and National Institute for Aviation Research showed significant gains this year, Loper says, thanks to upgrades to NIAR laboratories and acquiring the use of a hangar at Raytheon Aircraft for research. WSU’s wind tunnel underwent a $6 million upgrade, and its crash lab received $3 million in upgrades. Both reopened in 2004. Also in 2004, Raytheon not only provided WSU with a hangar but also runway access and millions of dollars in equipment to conduct research. NIAR set up its Aircraft Structural Testing and Evaluation Center in the facility. WSU also opened a friction stir-welding lab, which uses a relatively new technology to fuse metals together.
Among the research being funded:
• With a $59,816 grant from the National Institutes of Health/ University of Iowa, chemist Dennis Burns is doing research to find better bacteria-killing drugs. With more drug-resistant bacteria, coupled with the threat of bioterrorism, scientists are trying to find different ways of fighting bacteria. In his research, Burns is studying the body’s natural defense system of microbe-killing peptides, found in the body’s membrane system, which can kill 99.9 percent of bacteria in a matter of minutes. The peptides are indiscriminate in their killing sprees, however, and often kill healthy cells as well. Burns and his team of researchers are studying what kinds of pharmaceutical agents could be manufactured that would bind with the peptides and make them more selective and less lethal to healthy cells.
• Rocketplane Limited contracted with WSU’s Walter H. Beech Memorial Wind Tunnel to have aerodynamic tests conducted on its Rocketplane XP Spaceplane, a space vehicle that would send commercial passengers more than 300,000 feet above earth.
• With a $50,000 grant from the Department of Justice, WSU’s Regional Community Policing Institute, which is directed by Andra Bannister, has been providing counterterrorism training to both law enforcement officials and citizens in a number of states.
• Mechanical engineers Kurt Soschinske, Hamid Lankarani and George Talia are trying to figure out a way to develop a portable friction stir-welding device that would allow astronauts to make leak repairs. Their research has been funded with a $41,237 grant from NASA EPSCOR and $4,166 from the Kansas Technology Enterprise Corp.
Engineering First
Zulma Toro-Ramos, WSU’s new dean of the College of Engineering, is the first woman to head the college, as well as the first Hispanic. But being a first is nothing new in her career. She was one of the first women to earn a doctorate in industrial engineering at Georgia Tech, and was the first female chancellor at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Most recently she served as dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, which is a private institution. “I am really delighted to have been appointed dean and am looking forward to working with the faculty, vice president, president and the community,” says Toro-Ramos.
Healthy Dollars
The Kansas Health Foundation has provided $2 million to fund the Kansas Health Foundation Distinguished Chair of Strategic Communication in the Elliott School of Communication.
This is the largest gift endowed to support faculty in the history of the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The gift is part of the WSU Foundation’s We Are Wichita State campaign, which focuses on support for scholarships and faculty.
“This gift will enable us to better teach the full spectrum of skill sets — strategic planning, writing, speaking, videography, graphic design and communication technology,” Elliott School Director Susan Schultz Huxman says. Strategic communication involves all aspects of communication taught in the Elliott School, she adds, including public relations, advertising, organizational and interpersonal communication, and journalism.
A national search will start immediately, in order to have the position filled by fall 2006.
- Amy Geiszler-Jones
They Write the Songs
By day, they are carpenters, writers and web directors for Wichita State. By all other accounts, they are songwriters and singers whose individual participation in Wichita’s acoustic music scene is long — and maybe even legendary. Ron Land, a carpenter for WSU’s Physical Plant; Michael Carmody, an editorial associate and online magazine coordinator for the WSU Alumni Association; and Bryan Masters, WSU’s director of interactive communications, have each created a varied roster of songs, the range of which can be glimpsed from the scantest list of titles: “Seven Angels” by Land; “Planet Vulcan” and “500 Cigarettes” by Carmody; and “Leap of Faith” and “You and the Buffalo” by Masters.
