A&M's Future Focus of Talks
By Vimal Patel
From the Bryan-College Station Eagle
The search for Texas A&M's next president will include a diverse advisory committee of regents, faculty, staff, students and former students, officials are expected to announce this week.
The three-day regents meeting in College Station that starts Wednesday includes an update from board Chairman Morris Foster about the progress of teams charged with making recommendations about what functions to merge between the flagship campus and the 11-university A&M system in an effort to save money. The groups are working under a mid-August deadline and the findings will be presented at a September regents meeting.
Foster's remarks are scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Thursday in Room 292 of the Memorial Student Center, following a closed-session discussion about the presidential search. More details about the search will be released then.
Those issues were of the most concern among Texas A&M faculty and others after Elsa Murano's resignation as president last month amid a public falling-out with McKinney.
Regents also are expected to hear the A&M System's final report on the sinking of the Cynthia Woods, the Galveston branch campus' sailboat that capsized in June 2008 after losing its 4,500-pound keel about 10 hours into a race to Veracruz, Mexico. Safety officer Roger Stone died and five crew members escaped and spent 26 hours in the water before the Coast Guard rescued them.
The board will consider the following:
* Establishing the Institute for Innovative Therapeutics, which will serve as a "one-stop" biopharmaceutical program to research, develop and commercialize biomedical discoveries. The new institute -- which will consist of units already within the A&M system -- will "result in a single, unified biomedical enterprise," according to board documents.
* Authorizing a year of paid development leave for H. Russell Cross, Murano's chief of staff who resigned the same week as his boss, before he returns to the faculty as an animal sciences professor. It was unclear how much money he would receive, but Murano will receive $425,000, a year's worth of her pay, during her yearlong leave. Cross' annual pay in 2008 was $310,000.
* Establishing the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue within the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, one of the A&M System's seven state agencies. Another state agency, the Texas Engineering Extension Service, already is touted as a world leader in emergency response technology, but this new center, officials say, will round out the academic side of rescue robotics. Funding would come from external grants, industry donations and agencies requesting expertise.
* Approving the appointments of Kate C. Miller, a former associate dean of the College of Science at the University of Texas at El Paso, as dean of Texas A&M's College of Geosciences; Christine Stanley, executive associate dean in the College of Education & Human Development, as the university's vice president and associate provost for diversity; and Jorge Vanegas, an architecture professor, as Texas A&M's architecture college dean.
Published on Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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