President Tim Hall

I spent time the last few days talking with our faculty, staff, and students about the budget for next year. We are still not sure how matters will finally resolve themselves, but the passage of the federal stimulus legislation seems likely to mean that Austin Peay won’t suffer such a tremendous budget reduction as we first thought. We will still need to examine our budget carefully since the stimulous funding will last only two years and Tennessee’s financial situation may still not have rebounded by the end of that time. But I am hopeful that sudden, drastic reductions to the resources we have to serve students will not be required at the present moment.

Heidi Leming, our director of Student Life and Leadership was presented the Outstanding Diversity Achievement Award for an Individual at the annual National Association of Campus Activities conference, held last week in Nashville. Heidi was instrumental in applying for a diversity access grant through the Tennessee Board of Regents and secured $13,000 to start a peer mentor program for Hispanic students on campus as well as several other programs to bring greater awareness to Hispanic issues. She has also helped to raise the awareness of other international issues among our students. Congratulations, Heidi.

Austin Peay has also benefited this past semester from the work of Beulah Oldham, who currently directs both our office of disabilty services and is serving as interim director of the Wilbur N. Daniel African American Cultural Center at APSU. Beulah keeps the African American Cultural Center humming with activity, not the least significant of which was the trip she helped coordinate through the Center for a busload of our students to attend the inauguration of President Obama last month.

Thanks to the work of people like Beulah and Heidi, Austin Peay continues to be one of the most diverse campuses in Tennessee. This past fall, our overall enrollment increased by about 4%. At the same time, our enrollment of African American students increased by 9% and our enrollment of Hispanic students increased by 7%! Even more significant, the percentage of first-time, full-time African American and Hispanic students who started as freshmen in the fall of 2007 and returned to the university in the fall of 2008 was even greater than that of our freshmen generally.

Last week, Dr. Walter Kimbrough spoke at Austin Peay’s annual Unity Dinner. Dr. Kimbrough is the president of Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. His bio notes that he is the first college president from the hip hop generation. He gave a great speech about learning to think of “our kind of people” as all people. We discovered during conversation at dinner that we both blogged and had facebook pages, and I was happy to learn that I wasn’t completely out of date yet!

Dr. Kimbrough’s blog is here:
http://www.philander.edu/blog/default,date,2009-02-19.aspx.

Earlier this week, Colonel Renee T. Finnegan visited my office. She is currently the Commander, 7th ROTC Brigade, Eastern Region, Cadet Command located at Ft Knox, Kentucky, and she came by to brag about our ROTC program. Earlier this year our program won the MacArthur Award, ranking it among the top eight programs in the country. To give you some idea of the field, APSU’s program beat out 272 other college ROTC programs. Added to this distinction, this past summer many of our cadets attended a summer training camp at Fort Lewis, Washington, and nearly half of the 25 who attended scored at the highest level, receiving an “e” for excellent performance. I actually had the chance to attend this camp for several days, and was awed by its rigor, and by the achievements of our cadets. Along the way, folks put first an M-16 and then a grenade launcher in my hands to try out. I didn’t do so badly with the grenade launcher, but I’m sure there is a secret file located somewhere now in the bowels of the U.S. Army with my name and the notation–”Never let that guy get his hands on an M-16 again!”

Congratulations to our cadets!