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Cover Story
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 This academic year has been one of our most successful. Interest in our programs remains high: spring enrollment was up nearly 6.5 percent over last year, with 4,863 undergraduates and 802 graduate students. We continue to receive strong support from many constituents, including alumni like Willard and Leitha Richardson, whose recent $500,000 gift will support a world-class faculty member in ECpE. Construction is well underway on Hoover Hall, Phase II of the Engineering Teaching and Research Complex, and although we’re still a few weeks from commencement, most of our spring graduates already have either accepted engineering positions or made plans for graduate school.
However, the considerable budget reductions mandated by the state legislature have consumed a great deal of our time. The College of Engineering faced a reduction for the current budget year of $896,000. Since this budget was set, we have endured two substantial mid-year cuts as well. We met these reductions by being very conservative with our resources and, in certain instances, retooling some central initiatives (for example, producing a much smaller issue of our spring Muses newsletter). As I write these comments, we’re making plans to cope with a budget reduction of nearly $621,000 for the next fiscal year that begins July 1, 2002. We will meet this reduction by shifting the funding sources of some expenditures, more tightly focusing the AEEM department, reorganizing some central units to further increase efficiencies, and possibly eliminating two undergraduate programs, engineering science and engineering applications. |
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