Administrational Castling




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  • 2012-09-17 11:46:08
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AUBG probably appears a bit different to every returning student this year, coming back from the American East Coast with a sleep-deprived brain and pockets full of greens. There are bunch of newcomers whom they had never seen; all the Erasmus party-goers whom they held dearly last semester are replaced by new ones; the new Student Center is standing tall, eager to open its doors for its future inhabitants. And, needless to say, to the freshman, AUBG looks completely unlike anything else. While the student body and the looks of the campus have undergone significant modifications, the university administration has also changed. Oddly and unfortunately, in the course of a single year AUBG lost two of, arguably, its most important administrative officials: Dr. David Huwiler retired from his position of president while Provost Cyrus Reed suffered a fatal car accident in Michigan, USA. As the Fall semester begins, a new administrational trio emerges in charge of the only liberal arts university in Bulgaria. Dr. W. Michael Easton, president at the American University from 2005 to 2007, has returned to his former position. Former Dean of Faculty Dr. Steven Sullivan has become the new interim Provost, while his previous position has been temporarily taken by Dr. Lucia Miree. Having all been involved in higher-education teaching and university management for a considerable time, it is interesting to learn what the administrators thought of AUBG when they first became part of it. What were your first impressions of AUBG? [caption id="attachment_5363" align="alignleft" width="323" caption="AUBG President Michael Easton with his wife Louise [www.aubg.bg"]"][/caption]President Easton: I guess I would give my impressions now since many of my first impressions then are the same. I found an excellent institution, high quality. Good students, motivated students that did very well. […] I was impressed with the quality of the education here and how well the graduates do – they were getting in the best graduate schools wherever in the world. Int. Provost Sullivan: [I came here] just after the financial crisis in Bulgaria in 1997-98. So I walked around town and saw all the closed shops and people planting vegetables in the grounds around their apartment buildings. I thought “Wow, people are going through hard times in this country”. But the students seemed really enthusiastic and really bright. I had so much hope for them and such high expectations [while] the surroundings seemed so full of hard times. It seemed like a very exciting place – something was going to happen. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be but something was going to happen. Int. Dean Miree: I loved it. […] I liked it all. I had excellent colleagues, very close. We were a much smaller department then, now we are thirteen, we were six then, I think. We were very close with the students. It was a different student body, much more regionalized than internationalized. I used to work with Student Government, I was an advisor [for them] for a number of years and I was very much involved in student clubs and activities. How do you think AUBG has changed since you first came here? [caption id="attachment_5364" align="alignright" width="240" caption="AUBG Provost, Steven Sullivan [www.aubg.bg"]"][/caption]Int. Provost Sullivan:AUBG was a very, very young institution then. Any place that's really young has a little bit of, in a way, craziness to it. People are figuring things out for the first time, doing things for the first time […] The bureaucracy is like a crisis because we've never solved [such] problems before. [Today], there is a greater sense of security, a greater of sense of professionalism, in a way, but I think if you ask most of the faculty and staff, if we go all the way back to those early years, they'll say "Oh, it's not quite as exciting as it was back in those days!"   President Easton: Coming back after five years, the noticeable difference to me is that the student body is more diverse. In those years, the majority of the students were from Bulgaria. [Their] numbers have dropped proportionally so there is a more diverse student body. More countries are represented; greater numbers from some countries, such as Russia. Same with the faculty: there are, I would say, fewer American faculty than when I was here before, more international faculty and more Bulgarian faculty. Particularly Bulgarians who went to school in the States, got their Ph.D’s, perhaps have taught in the United States or in the UK and now are coming back. Int. Dean Miree: Our campus has gotten huge. When I came we only had Skaptopara I and II. We’ve [also] internationalized. I think universities go through cycles: we’ve certainly changed the administration a number of times. I think we are a highly-energized campus now […] There is energy here this semester, which I hadn’t seen before on the faculty side. What are your immediate plans and goals? What are some of the challenges AUBG faces? Int. Provost Sullivan: The first thing is that we have to keep the wheels turning and the ship running for a year until a permanent provost is in place. We have a new president and the new president has to get his initiatives and the things he wants to get on the way off to a start so I have to be supportive of what he needs to do. One of the things we need to do is figure out how we can be more successful in recruiting new students to come to AUBG because we are opening this beautiful new facility, the Student Center. We’ve got more space for more students – more classrooms, more athletic facilities, more space for clubs, for offices. This was all designed for the idea that we would have a growing student body. Frankly, we fall a little bit short of where we thought we were going to be so we need to catch up with that. President Easton: We have an immediate issue of replacing the Provost. […] Another high priority for me is to make sure we are doing the best job we can in recruiting new students. I think we need to reemphasize in some degree the recruitment in Bulgaria and see if we can increase once again the Bulgarian numbers while not detracting at all from our recruitment in the other countries, as well. [Another goal] is the completion of the campus, of the new building and, potentially, the additions to Skaptopara III. And there is one building remaining to be built at some point – a Classroom/Administration Building. Probably [it will] not [be built] in the near future, however. […] I think [the Board of Trustees’] first priority has always been and will continue to be to maintain the high academic standards of the institution and to ensure that the quality of education is good. Their first priority is the education of the students. Our second priority is the facilities and not only their construction but also their maintenance so that they are also first-grade. I think that [the Board’s] overall priority, as well, is to make sure that we are well-organized, well-administered, that we are as efficient as we can be. As you know, we only have, really, two sources of revenue. That comes from the students, the tuition they pay, and from the money that we can raise from private donors and foundations. […] The Board is committed to doing all that they can to increase private contributions to the institution and also to increase enrollment. [caption id="attachment_5365" align="alignleft" width="216" caption="Dean of Faculty, Lucia Miree"][/caption] Int. Dean Miree: Fundraising is always a challenge for every university. From the faculty level, there are two things I want to work on this year and one is increasing communication with faculty, students and staff. The other one is […] increasing the quality of some of the programs. […] We have a lot of accreditation reports happening this year, Bulgarian and American accreditation. […] I would like to see us fill some of the faculty jobs that have been open for a long time, particularly in the Business department. We need to spend a lot of time and energy on recruiting the kind of people who want to come here and be here, not the kind who are like “I’ve got two years in my life [to spend]”, although that’s how I got here! Generally, if we get people here on campus for job interviews, they fall in love with the place. How do you address the issue, raised by some students, that the tuition fee is incompatibly high with the income rates in Bulgaria and in other countries, which are represented in AUBG? President Easton: I think, the cost of education at a private selective university is always going to be a question. It’s nowhere even near the cost of a private selective university in the United States. […] The cost of education here is around $10,000 a year. You also have to look at how much aid is being distributed as well, so very few people are actually paying the [full] price of the education here. […] Tuition will continue to increase. As I said, it’s not inexpensive at all for Bulgaria. Comparing it to schools in Europe, I’m not sure – I cannot tell you the comparative cost. Some of those very good schools are public, some are private. When you factor in the living expenses of going to the UK, living in London, or another major city of Europe, it’s a significant cost. […] You have to consider the total cost of education. […] Private education is expensive, always will be. […] You can certainly find cheaper opportunities. Then, I think, you’ll have to factor in the quality and your own ability to pay. […] Tuition for years here has always been projected to go up with around 5% a year. […] I think one of the things the Board of Trustees has to look at is the cost and does it need to go up with 5% every year or doest it need to go up with less. I think you have to look at the ability of people to pay, as well. […] It’s that fine line between how much is affordable and how much is needed to operate the institution. Operational costs go up every year so there will probably always be some increase in tuition but our challenge is to manage the dollars well so that we can keep those costs as affordable as possible. Int. Provost Sullivan: You are right that we are more expensive than a state university, say, in Bulgaria or Albania or one of the other regional countries but we think we are offering a very different experience. The other part is that we are not a for-profit business, we are not charging you money so that we can pat a dividend to our stock-holders. We are charging students the amount of money it takes, that is necessary, to provide the experience that you are getting. The money that comes in, goes right back out again. The only way we can make it significantly less expensive is to significantly change the experience. […] Again, it comes back to what kind of experience you want as an undergraduate student. We are not the right choice for every single student. For a student who, say, wants to study medicine – well, we don’t offer this. A big university with a big medical school is where you want to go. […] But the liberal arts-based education is the kind of education that has been very successful in the United States. A lot of the top executives and a lot of the most successful people in the US, the striking thing that they have in common is that they all went to the type of small liberal arts college that we are, of which there are many examples in the United States. The data that we have and the data that the Ministry of Education publishes, comparing Bulgarian higher education institutions on a variety of different measures [shows that] we stand out amazingly, compared to all the other Bulgarian universities, in how much our graduates make. We are way ahead of everybody else. […] So it’s not just an expense, it’s an investment. Thus, a new school year begins at the American University in Bulgaria. Looking back at the small crazily-innovative liberal arts college that AUBG was in the first few years after its inception, we are pushed to think of what this unique place will become in the future and what kind of influence it will have on the region. Dr. Steven Sullivan expresses his idea with a smile: “I like to think of us as a laboratory for the Bulgarian higher education system. It is a small little corner where you can experiment with things that work differently and if the experiment works successfully then you can copy it and try to implement the same thing elsewhere.”