The largest class of new freshmen ever – 2,266 – has enrolled at New Mexico State University's main campus this fall. It is the fourth consecutive year that the number of first-time freshmen has grown. This gratifying trend is due in part to the availability of scholarships – the state's Lottery Success Scholarship and a number of others offered by the university – that make a university education more accessible than ever for New Mexicans.

The Lottery Scholarships are a bright spot, but frankly there are other areas of higher education funding that concern me greatly. One of these is faculty salaries. NMSU and the other research universities in the state compete nationally for top-notch faculty members, and although we offer quality-of-life advantages that many richer universities cannot, our salary levels put us at a definite disadvantage. Last year, the mean salary for all faculty at NMSU was only 87.4 percent of the mean at 16 similar universities that the Commission on Higher Education has identified as our peers.

Bringing salaries closer to the average will be a priority issue for the Council of University Presidents as the next legislative session approaches. We are fortunate to have world-class faculty members in our classrooms and laboratories now, as some of the following items illustrate, but we must be more competitive to continue attracting and keeping faculty of this caliber.

Excellence on the field and off

The New Mexico State Aggies' 35-7 upset of the Arizona State Sun Devils last month brought national attention to the Aggie football program, which has been generating a good bit of excitement in Coach Tony Samuel's third year at the helm.

All of our intercollegiate athletics programs emphasize the "student" in "student athlete." That is evident in the Academic Wall of Honor, located in the lobby of the Pan American Center, where student athletes with grade point averages of 3.0 or higher are recognized for their achievements. And it is evident in the fact that the average GPA for all NMSU student athletes for the spring 1999 semester was 2.89, the highest score in the 11 years we've been keeping track of this statistic. Of the 303 participants in NMSU spring athletics, 151 – 50 percent – had a GPA of 3.0 or higher.

Center focuses on "green" manufacturing

Technologies used by the U.S. military to cut down on waste and pollution in its manufacturing operations may help commercial industries along the U.S.-Mexico border become more environmentally friendly. That's one of the objectives of the new Thomas E. Davidson Applied Technology Center at NMSU's Physical Science Laboratory. Bob Silver, PSL's Sustainable Green Manufacturing Program manager, says cost-effective technologies already developed for the Army could be used to solve environmental problems facing industries on both sides of the border. PSL has been awarded $722,000 in federal funds for its green manufacturing program. The same amount will go to each of PSL's three partners in the initiative – the Industrial Ecology Center at the U.S. Army's Picatinny Arsenal, the National Defense Center for Environmental Excellence (NDCEE), and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

A "Hidden Treasure"

High school guidance counselors surveyed by the publisher of a national college guide ranked NMSU among the nation's "Hidden Treasures" and "Schools Representing the Best Value for Your Money." Editors of the Kaplan Newsweek College Catalog 2000 said they contacted about 4,500 guidance counselors from public and private high schools around the country for the survey. Schools recommended as "hidden treasures" are described as "terrific colleges that aren't as well known as they should be." NMSU shares that status with 166 other colleges and universities, public and private, out of more than 1,100 that are profiled in the college guide.

Making their mark

Recent reminders that New Mexico State's faculty and students are among the best:

Antonya Nelson, who teaches creative writing at NMSU, has been named one of the 20 best young fiction writers in America by The New Yorker magazine. A story excerpted from her forthcoming novel, "Living to Tell," appeared in the magazine in June.

NMSU graduate student Robert Marquez was interviewed on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" last month about his research on a low-technology method of reducing border-area air pollution caused by brick-making kilns in Juarez, Mexico. Marquez, a Ph.D. candidate in analytical chemistry, has designed a kiln that is cheap to build, can be constructed at every brick factory in Juarez, and can reduce the particulate and chemical pollution from kilns to nearly undetectable levels.

Denise Stephens, a doctoral student in astronomy at NMSU, will use one of the world's largest telescopes to examine a number of recently discovered astronomical objects known as brown dwarfs. Stephens and NMSU astronomer Mark Marley, her adviser, will visit the Keck Observatory in Hawaii in January for three nights of observing on one of Keck's two 10-meter telescopes, the biggest optical telescopes in the world. The awarding by NASA of time on these telescopes is highly competitive.

If you would like more information on these or other developments at NMSU, or if you have comments about this newsletter, please let me know. I'd like to hear from you.

Office of the President
New Mexico State University, P.O. Box 30001, Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001
505-646-2035  wconroy@nmsu.edu  http://www.nmsu.edu
Volume 2/Number 3/October 1999