Alan's Monday Message for January 22nd 

To start the week, I attended the Doña Ana NAACP's MLK breakfast at the Las Cruces Convention Center (see below). Afterwards, I went to my office to prepare for the week. On Tuesday morning, I participated in Spring 2024 Convocation at the Atkinson Recital Hall. It is always enjoyable to recognize our faculty awardees. I want to thank Associate Provost Tara Gray and her team for organizing a wonderful event. In place of President Gogue, I gave an update on NMSU's legislative agenda, which started last Tuesday. During the spring convocation, the awardees were selected for their research productivity and community engagement. It was wonderful to recognize the many awardees. They include the following: 

Early Career Awardees: Eric Magrane from Geography and Environmental Studies and Dennis Nicuh Lozada from Plant and Environmental Sciences. 

Distinguished Career Awardees: Monj Shukla from Plant and Environmental Sciences and Rebecca Palacios from Public Health Sciences. 

Excellence in Team Research Awardees: Pei Zu; Yanyan Zhang; and Huiyao Wang, all from Civil Engineering, and Robert Young from Research Cores Program. 

Research Recognition Awardee: Jose Ortega-Carranza from Plant and Environmental Sciences. 

Community Engagement, Extension, and Outreach Awardee: Ross Marks from the Creative Media Institute. 

Award for Overall Excellence Awardee: Nancy Chanover from Astronomy. 

To conclude the Spring 2024 Convocation, the NMSU Brass Quintet consisting of Jacob Dalager and Pancho Romero on trumpet, Angela Winter on horn, Allan Kaplan on trombone, and Jum Shearer on tuba performed three tunes for the audience. 

Later in the morning I attended the ACES Water Town Hall in the Corbett Center, Doña Ana room. I want to commend Jay Lillywhite and Lara Prihodko for organizing this town hall. It was interesting to listen to all the presenters share their work. At the end, I congratulated everyone in attendance for sharing their work and challenges them to work across boundaries towards developing "breakthrough solutions" to address the water sustainability and quality issue. I hope this is the first in a series to bring together a cross section of interested faculty from a diversity of disciplines to address the water challenges from not only a scientific perspective, but a policy, sociological and economical perspectives. During my time in Texas and New Mexico, I have become sensitized to the importance of water sustainability to our quality of life in this region. NMSU can be a national and international leader if we can develop solutions to this challenge. 

In the afternoon, I attended to administrative duties. last week, I asked all of my direct reports to submit their self-evaluation, so that I could start my annual performance review of them. I gave them a heads up that philosophically I do not believe in evaluation inflation and as a result, I believe meeting expectations is a good standard. TO receive anything above this demands very strong evidence that person is going above and beyond consistently of what is expected of them. To end my day, I attended the College of Engineering Convocation in Jett Hall (see below) and shared some remarks on the legislative session and answered questions about graduate assistant benefits and our new graduate school Dean/Associate Provost for International Affairs, Dr. Ranjit Koodali. 

On Wednesday, I had a number of 1:1 and group meetings. Sandwiched in between, we held the 4th operational learning session in the Health and Social Services Building Annex Auditorium 101 with Dean Kevin Comerford providing an overview of the libraries activities.

To start Thursday, I had some 1:1 meetings. Later in the afternoon, I met with James McAteer and Diana Molina-Barragan to review the Provost’s budget. As I have shared with others, the Provost’s office has very little discretionary funds available. With previous Provosts, retired faculty or faculty who left NMSU, their salaries were swept to the Provost’s office and then the Deans would have to request those funds for any replacement hiring and sometimes they received the funding and other times they did not. I reversed this process whereby faculty salaries are being retained in the academic colleges. As a result, the Provost office does not have a lot of discretionary resources. Later in the afternoon, I attended a surprise birthday celebration for HEST Dean Yoshi Iwasaki in O’Donnell Hall. In the evening, my wife and I went to the men’s basketball game. The Aggies came back from a twenty-three point deficit to beat Western Kentucky, 72 – 70 at the end. It was exciting for the Aggie faithful and it was nice to see student section relatively filled up.

On Friday morning, I attended a meeting to discuss academic personnel issues. I also met with PSL Director Eric Sanchez to discuss whether NMSU should explore a potential partnership with a satellite space technology entity. After the discussion, I am going to leave it up to Director Sanchez, Dr. Steve Stochaj, and Paolo Oemig to determine the feasibility of this pursuit. To end the work week, on Saturday evening, I attended the 4-H Senior Leadership Retreat banquet at the Las Cruces Convention Center. I want to thank Laura Bittner, Amy Zemler and many others for organizing the 4-H Student Leadership Retreat Banquet.

NMSU's Unsung Heroes

I received three nominations for being NMSU unsung heroes this past week.

Ruby Gutierrez (Associate HR Specialist) As Judith Flores Carmona shared Ruby Gutierrez has been a gem—pun intended. Ruby, in HR, has been immensely helpful these last 2 weeks — h​helping me add a dependent and being beyond patient with me. Gracias. Thank YOU. I nominate Ruby—thus making my two nominations the Rubys—for being unsung heroines at NMSU.

Misty Haynes (Senior Program Manager in ACES) – ACES Assistant Dean Tim Nesbitt sent me this nomination. He wrote, “In an email dated October 11, 2022, Vice President for Research, Luis Cifuentes said, “ACES is killing it on external funding so far in FY 2023.”” In fact, in FY 2021 our fine college responded to Cifuentes’ directive to submit larger/multi-institutional proposals by submitting 234 proposals requesting $58,204,616.72 funding of which $24,379,705.85 was awarded. In FY 2022 our college submitted 164 proposals worth $144,499,483.30 which generated $24,901,714 in awards. And in FY 2023 we submitted proposals valued at $237,046,505.17 generating another record amount of actual grant and contract awards.

I know you are aware, these notable successes require much work, a considerable body of technical knowledge in the pre-award administrative area, and dedicated effort in supporting faculty to ensure their projects are successful from “cradle to grave.” Our lead pre-award grant and contract specialist is Misty Haynes, our employee for over 17 years. Her role requires a high level of attention to detail, significant knowledge of federal, state, and agency policy procedure and practice. Additionally, Misty has an impeccable working knowledge of the federal guidance defined in OMB 2 CFR-200 (Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards).

Misty’s experience, a master’s degree in business administration, her recognition campus wide as someone who can get the job done, have all enabled her to thrive and make our college the top sponsored funded entity on campus. Clearly, Misty has been directly instrumental in our success as a college. I consider Misty a true UNSUNG HERO and hope she can be recognized for her hard work and dedication to the College of ACES and NMSU.

Barbara Tellez(Associate Director and Academic Grad Management) – As Honors College Dean and former Interim Dean of the Graduate School, Phame Camarena noted, although all of the Graduate School staff has been working hard across a challenging year of transition, I would like to especially recognize the exceptional effort made by Barbara Tellez, the Associate Director with responsibilities for the management of admissions and degree certification. While the office has been short-staffed, Barbara has worked holidays, evenings and weekends to help keep important administrative processes running for all of the academic colleges while also serving as the representative of the Graduate School staff on the Graduate Dean/Associate Provost for International Affairs search committee. She now turns her attention to training the new staff and helping the new Dean master NMSU systems. Barbara continues to be a hero of the Graduate School!

Upcoming Events

Aggie Nation - We are sponsoring Keynote address by Dr. Corey Ciocchetti from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business on "Be a Leader You will Follow" on Thursday, February 8th from 3:30pm to 4:30pm in the Hardman Jacobs Learning Center Room 125. Dr. Ciocchetti’s talk will be about improving one’s culture and climate and what each individual can do to make it happen. We need all hands on deck. If you want to improve NMSU’s climate, then please attend.

The upcoming Critical Dialogue series include the following:

• February 27, 2024 from 12:00 noon to 1:30pm
  HSIs and Artificial Intelligence: Challenges, Opportunities, Ideas. Moderator: Dr. Enrico Pontelli, Dean College of Arts and Sciences
  Click here to register. 
• February 29, 2024 from 12:000 noon to 1:30pm 
  Creating a Robus and Intersectional EID Framework to Strengthen STEAM Grant Proposals. Moderator: Dr. Teresa Maria "Linda" Scholz, Vice President of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity. 
  Click Here to register. 
• March 1, 2024 from 12:00 noon to 1:30pm
  What Kind of R1 does NMSU Want to Be? Moderator: Dr. Alan Shoho, Provost and Chief Academic Officer. 
  Click here to register. 

Sharing Information Process

Recently, Sarah Edwards received some questions as to a process for tabling or sharing information on campus. ARP 3.63– Freedom of Expression (https://arp.nmsu.edu/3-63/) and ARP 14.92- Sales and Solicitation (https://arp.nmsu.edu/14-92/ ) are NMSU’s primary reference points related to such activity and provide an overview for those events/activities that may require prior approval/registration. As a public campus, many spaces at NMSU are considered public forums and allow individuals to enter and speak without permission “provided they do not disrupt the university missions or functions.” These spaces include parks, sidewalks, and building lobbies to name a few. Setting up tables, passing out flyers, attaching or placing materials anywhere on campus, and selling any items have different requirements depending on the location (i.e., individual building policies) and the classification of the individuals (student organizations versus individual faculty/staff/students versus departments versus members of the public). Student organizations are required to complete a Crimson Connection event form to reserve their space for all events. University departments and/or offices are not inherently required to do the same, but many of the building space monitors require an activity/event to be registered through Crimson Connection. Once the request has been made via a Crimson Connection event form, sales and solicitation approvals will be granted through the Office of Student Involvement and Leadership Programs (SILP). Anyone with questions about how to navigate any of these processes may email silp@nmsu.edu and SILP staff members will be happy to assist.

Quote of the Week

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." - Martin Luther King