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Basketball team adds new staffer
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“Grown Ups” not fit for anyone grown up
Friday, July 16, 2010 Issue 13
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UT vice president Yegidis to resign from post Robby O’Daniel Editor-in-Chief Bonnie Yegidis, UT system vice president for academic affairs and student success, spent 18 years at the University of South Florida. Now she’s going back. It was announced last week that Yegidis was resigning her position to become professor and director of the School of Social Work at USF. Meanwhile, Katie High, who previously filled the same position two years ago before Yegidis was appointed, will fill the position once again in the interim. Yegidis’ last day in the role will be July 31, and High’s first day will be Aug. 1. Yegidis, who got her doctorate in measurement research and evaluation at USF, said she was called sometime in late spring and invited to apply for the position. “I was thrilled to get the opportunity, and I’m happy to be able to lead the School of Social Work,” she said. It’s a School of Social Work that Yegidis is a founding faculty member of. She helped build the master’s program in social work and was there during the development of the school in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Yegidis grew up in upstate New York, near the Catskills Mountains area. And it was this life that led her to find West Virginia, where she got her master’s degree in social work, and Tennessee, where she served in higher-education administration since 2008, attractive. “That’s one of the things I loved about Tennessee and West Virginia, frankly, was the mountains,” she said. It was never a question for Yegidis about what she would do for a career. When she was in junior high, she watched a television program that featured a social worker, a community organizer in the South Bronx, and it left a big impression. She majored in social work and then got a job in social work right out of college. “I knew my whole life from the time I was 12,” she said. “I wanted to be a social worker and help people and communities to thrive and also ensure that public policy is responsive to what people need.” After her years at USF, she left to become dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia for nine years, and it was here where she was first introduced to UT properly — predictably, it was through football. “One of my most vivid recollections at the University of
Georgia was going to a Georgia-Tennessee football game,” she said. “It was my second year as dean. ... It was fun.” She said she was introduced firsthand to the power of football rivalries there, and her past at UGA was the source of many jokes when she went to UT. After Georgia, she served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla. Then she took the position at UT in 2008. Yegidis said the achievement she was most proud of accomplishing at UT was working to lead a state-wide initiative to make sure students had the ability to transfer into UT and across the system without losing academic credit. She also worked with nursing to allow UT system and Tennessee Board of Regents students access to becoming nursing students. And she worked on making accountability measures more transparent, so stakeholders would know clearly what higher education does and how UT is measured. But the most critical initiative in Yegidis’ mind is one that is still ongoing — improving graduation rates at the state level and the university level. “We have to be able to get students through,” she said. “We have to develop schedules that work with students. We have to ensure there is access to coursework online. We have to provide students with support services for students who are at risk and generally make an all-out effort to graduate the students we admit.” She said there’s a lot she’ll miss about UT. “I think the people, the staff and the students at UT are so outstanding,” she said. “I will miss the contact with students and with staff and with faculty leaders. I think UT has incredible faculty and good leadership.” Returning to the role High is returning to a role she served just two years ago, but working in different positions in academic affairs is nothing new to the administrative veteran. “Actually I’ve been in the academic affairs office for 23 years, so if there’s been a position in that office, I’ve held it,” High said. From a northwest corner of Ohio, High grew up in farm country, where all you needed to know was a letter and a number and you could place someone’s geographic location. “The roads going east and west were called A, B, C, D, and the roads going north and south were called 1, 2, 3, 4,” she said. “... So someone who lived in G7, you knew exactly where
Bredesen appoints two to board Kevin Letsinger News and Student Life Editor Two new members will join the UT Board of Trustees upon appointment from Gov. Phil Bredesen. J.A.M. “Toby” Boulet, associate mechanical engineering professor, and Carey Smith, senior in political science, will represent the Knoxville campus on the board for the coming term. The board has two faculty members, stated by Tennessee law, and the two members rotate amongst the four campuses. When the rotation comes to Knoxville, it is automatic that the representing member will be the outgoing Faculty Senate president. When a new faculty member is appointed to the position, they claim non-voting status for the first year and are handed such power the second year of the two-year term. The voting member for the upcoming term is from Memphis, while the Knoxville campus perspective will be voiced by the non-voting member. Being new to the board, Boulet offers his experience
as outgoing faculty senate president to the new post. “During my year as president, I handled the communication of the stimulus funds,” Boulet said. “We need for people to understand what is going to happen.” There have been multiple meetings on how to lessen the impact of the lack of funds, and Interim President Jan Simek has worked diligently to move people around so that only 60 individuals will lose their jobs. “The original number was 600,” Boulet said. “He (Simek) has done a great job there.” As for the upcoming search for a new president, Boulet said that even though he is not personally on the search committee, there are two faculty members who are represented, one from the Knoxville campus. “We are well represented,” Boulet said. “The Search Advisory Council will also play an active role, and there are two or three members represented from Knoxville.” One issue discussed was that of the future president’s
they lived.” She called it “the kind of town where if something happens to you, everyone pitches in to help.” Perhaps this was a precursor to a career in higher education. She earned her bachelor’s degree in American literature and master’s degree in teaching at Miami University in Ohio and taught public school in Knoxville and Clinton for nine years. She taught sixth grade but found it not as rewarding as the time she spent in Clinton teaching first grade. “The very best thing about teaching first grade is that, if there’s a day, usually in October, where 95 percent of the class has a light bulb go off, and they figure out how to decode the letters, and they learn to read that day,” she said. “Maybe when a baby takes his first steps, it’s that exciting. But when a little kid learns how to read, that’s the most gratifying thing for a teacher that I can imagine.” During this time, she went to get her Ph.D at UT, with the idea of returning as a principal or at least to the elementary school. But after just one month on the UT campus, she fell in love with the atmosphere and did not want to leave. So she earned her doctorate, all the while serving as a graduate assistant in the system vice president’s office, and her career in higher education took off from there. She worked at UT from 1983-2001, serving various positions and working on various projects, including director of licensing, designing the Leadership Institute, starting the Tennessee Governor’s Academy and revising high-school credit requirements for college enrollment. At UT-Martin, where she served from 2001-2005, she started that campus’ LEAD Academy, tore down old residence halls from the ‘60s to make way for more apartment-style housing and got a new student recreation center. High said, as part of her role at UT, she needs to focus on the entirety of the UT system and all its moving parts. “The goal of this office is to do everything they can to encourage and support all those institutes as they reach their goals,” High said. “Knoxville’s trying to be a top 25. Martin and Chattanooga are also developing specific goals that they increase in their stature among their peers. The Medical Center is doing similar kinds of things. “My expectations are to see all those pieces come together so that, as a system, we’re even more vibrant and more robust and more productive and more well-received than we are now, and you can always strive for improvement,” she said.
Office of Sustainability seeks to further compost initiative Kevin Letsinger
News and Student Life Editor
compensation. Boulet said that while the university does not pay the most for the position, the president is not paid the least either. The UT trustees approved a recommended compensation package for the next president that includes a base salary of $420,000 to $450,000, a
housing allowance of $20,000 and an expense allowance in the range of $12,000 to $16,000. As far as the budget for the presidential search, $212,375 has been allocated with the goal of electing a new president at the October 2010 board meeting.
UT is making new efforts to reduce waste on campus. One of these many efforts is the composting program, led by the Office of Sustainability. The compost comes from on-campus, pre-consumer waste and leftovers from the cafeterias students eat at everyday. Just a pilot program, it is expected to expand very quickly. “We are hoping to compost all food items by spring semester,” said Jay Price, environmental coordinator in Facilities Services. What is needed for the program to expand is a wood grinder, with an estimated cost of $230,000. At the moment, wood is being hand cut in order to bulk up the materials for compost. “There is a lot of support from the university,” Price said. “The coffee from both campus locations of Starbucks and the Haslam Business Building location of Einstein Bros. is collected for composting.” The locations where pre-consumed and leftover waste is collected are all food venues in the UC and the cafeteria in Presidential Court. At the moment, the compost is used for the organic farm, which is a student-run certified organic farm. Being on the Princeton Review of the top 286 green colleges in the U.S., the composting done on campus is completely university-ran, whereas the recycling collected is outsourced to private companies. According to a Tennessee Today press release, the university recently adopted a Climate Action Plan as part of being a signatory to the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. The commitment calls for higher education to take more efforts to mitigate human influence on the climate, including day-to-day operations and curriculum and research. In the works for the upcoming fall term, there will be two 23-gallon recycling bins in every classroom on campus to make the effort to be green minimal on students. “We are getting a brand new recycling truck for the fall,” Price said. “Every office and dorm room will also have a blue recycling bin.” By the spring, glass will also be something that can be recycled, with everything but plastic being recycled locally. Other initiatives are to place water bottle refilling stations all over the campus, expanding the ones already in place at the UC and TRECS.