President Tim Hall

Hall and Executives from Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning

On December 15, 2008, Austin Peay State University was the site for a momentous announcement. Governor Bredensen, Senator Corker, and other state and local officials were on hand to reveal that Hemlock Semiconductor and Dow Corning Corportion have decided to build a $1.2 billion facility in Clarksville to manufacturer polycrystaline silicon, a key component of solar panels.

APSU played an important role in the decision of Hemlock and Dow to locate the new facility in Clarksville. The new plant will employe hundreds of workers, and many of these will require a specialized college curriculum which Austin Peay will provide. The university is taking steps to secure approval from the Tennessee Board of Regents and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission to offer a two-year associates degree in Chemical Engineering Technology. The new plant expects to need about 80 graduates from this program a year once it is operational.

Because the new Chemical Engineering Technology program requires specialized lab facilities, the state of Tennessee has agreed to give Austin Peay $6.4 million to build a new facility with the necessary laboratory space. We expect design of this new facility to begin almost immediately.

The location of this new industry to Clarksville is perhaps the most important single development for the community since the arrival of Ft. Campbell in the 1940s, and I’m very excited that Austin Peay will play a part in the new plant’s future.

Budget news from the state continues to get worse, but Austin Peay is as poised as well as any of the Tennessee universities to weather our current stormy conditions. The state now predicts a revenue shortfall of as much as a billion dollars, and the Governor is seeking immediate plans from higher education institutions of how they will cope with a significant reduction in state funding next year.

I’m working with our faculty, staff, and administrative leaders to explore ways APSU can adjust its budget to sustain this loss in state funding with the least impact on the quality of education we provide our students.

In early December, the Tennessee Board of Regents voted to adjust the way tuition is charged to students so that students will, beginning in the fall of 2009, pay tuition for each course taken. Currently, students pay only for up to 12 hours of course credit and can take additional hours for free. This practice has the effect of letting our part-time students subsidize the extra courses taken by our full-time students. This did not seem fair to the Board of Regents, especially since our part-time students have the least access to financial aid and our full-time students have the most. Staff in our financial aid office will be working hard over the next month to understand and communicate to students how the new tuition structure will affect financial aid.