Planning for the Future
June 3, 2016
Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for your hard work this past year. It has been a challenging year, as we all knew it would be, but your efforts have made UTRGV’s first year a success. Future generations of students, staff, and faculty will look back and realize just how significant your achievements have been. Many of our colleagues outside the Rio Grande Valley already recognize the magnitude of what you have done. Although our work is clearly not finished, you should be extremely proud of what you have accomplished thus far.
As we move forward, we still have much to do. Over the next year we will focus especially on four things that are crucial to our success both as an institution and also for you individually: (1) people, (2) processes, (3) programs, and (4) planning.
- Faculty and staff are what make UTRGV a success, and we are committed to compensation for our faculty and staff that is competitive with that of our peers. As a down payment on this commitment and assuming we meet our enrollment projections, next fiscal year we will allocate more than $3M in compression and equity adjustments and merit increases to faculty and staff (but excluding administrators at the dean level and above). In addition, to help with workload and to enhance our security, we have added five new campus security positions and will add three more next fiscal year. We are also in the process of filling 70 additional faculty positions.
- Over the past year we have collected significant feedback from faculty, staff, and students on processes that present barriers to their work. In an effort to remove as many of these barriers as possible, one of our foci next year will be process redesign. This is a complicated effort and must be done in phases, but redesigning our processes to make them more user friendly is crucial to our success. We look forward to working with you in doing this.
- Expanding educational opportunities for our students is one of the reasons UTRGV was established. We have already made 20 programs available in Brownsville that previously existed only in Edinburg and 5 programs available in Edinburg that previously existed only in Brownsville. Over the next year we will continue to expand offerings on both the Brownsville and Edinburg campuses, but we will also begin to submit new doctoral and professional programs for UT System and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approval. The first (but not the last) of these will be the doctorate in Clinical Psychology. The recently approved masters in Disaster Studies will begin in September. These new programs will significantly augment opportunities for our students and enrich the academic lives of our faculty and staff.
- We began our strategic planning this spring. Over the next six months we hope to complete both that process and also a master planning process that will focus on logistical issues that must be resolved for us to be successful. Thank you to all of the faculty and staff who are part of these processes.
Thank you again for your hard work and your commitment to UTRGV. While we have many challenges and much hard work before us, we also have the most exciting opportunity in American higher education. I look forward to working with you in taking advantage of this opportunity.
President