Archive for August, 2010

08.26.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

UNC President named today

Davidson College President Tom Ross has become the University of North Carolina system’s next president. A university official familiar with the decision told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the UNC governing board’s search committee is recommending Ross to succeed Erskine Bowles as head of the 17-school system. Bowles, once President Clinton’s chief of staff and a former U.S. Senate candidate, announced in February his impending retirement after four years on the job. The official requested anonymity to avoid preempting the announcement of a formal vote by the full board today. Ross is expected to be approved by the Board of Governors because he’s the only candidate being offered, board members are well aware of him and the 32-member panel generally reaches consensus on presidential picks, the official said. UNC system spokeswoman Joni Worthington said she couldn’t comment on any speculation regarding candidates before Thursday’s emergency board meeting. A Davidson spokeswoman didn’t immediately provide a comment from Ross about the system presidency.

Ross, 60, became president just three years ago at his alma mater. He has taught at the School of Government, once led the UNC-Greensboro trustee board and served on a special commission recently to examine the UNC system’s long-term future. Then-Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, appointed Ross in 1984 to a Superior Court judgeship. Ross also served briefly as chief of staff to then-U.S. Rep. Robin Britt, D-N.C. As director of the Administrative Office of the Courts from 1999 to 2000, Ross had to work with the Legislature to try to get more funds for the judicial system’s budget. Ross served as executive director for the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation for seven years before becoming Davidson’s president in August 2007.(Gary D. Robertson, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 8/25/10).

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08.20.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

NC State Faculty Named Fellows Of American Statistical Association

Two North Carolina State faculty members have been named Fellows of the
American Statistical Association. Statistics professors Dr. Subhashis
Ghoshal and Dr. John Monahan were among 53 statisticians worldwide to
receive the honor this year. They were recognized at a ceremony on Aug.
3 at the annual association meeting in Vancouver, B.C.

Ghoshal received his bachelor’s degree in statistics in 1988 and his
Ph.D. in 1995, both from the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta.
He joined the NC State faculty in 2001 as an assistant professor, and
became a full professor in 2008. Ghoshal received the Sigma Xi
scientific research award in 2006, and was elected Fellow of the
Institute of Mathematical Statistics that same year.

Monahan received his bachelor’s degree in statistics in 1972 and his
Ph.D. in 1977, both from Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the NC
State faculty in 1978 as an assistant professor of statistics and became
a full professor in 1990. He has written two books and published over 35
refereed articles.

The American Statistical Association (ASA), a scientific and
educational society founded in Boston in 1839, is the second oldest
continuously operating professional society in the United States. The
Department of Statistics is part of NC State’s College of Physical and
Mathematical Sciences.

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08.19.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

Type o’s not mi problam

From www.aol.com today: Top 10 Most Common Typos in America Today
10. Subject-verb disagreement: Lemons sure is tasty.
9. That place where you go to eat: Restaraunt, restauraunt
8. The double-letter fumble: They’re shiping dinning room furniture.
7. The A-for-E sabotage: America loves its independance.
6. The confusion of tasty treats and arid sands: Try our homemade deserts.
5. The misplaced apostrophe: womens’ secret society.
4. The wrong “your” or “you’re”: Your the best at you’re job.
3. The wrong “its” or “it’s”: Its in a class of it’s own.
2. The missing apostrophe: mens fashions
1. The unnecessary apostrophe: We sell hundreds of car’s!

Pasion Roles!

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08.18.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

Circus dogs for all to see! This is gonna be big.

Dogs

The 19th Annual Dog Olympics to be held at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh on Sept. 11. This family/community event keeps getting better and has been expanded for 2010 based on the response to holding it at Moore Square last year. The Terry Center construction continues to prohibit holding the Olympics at the NC State CVM.

This is a great campus/city event and the City of Raleigh is pleased with the community response and glad to provide the venue.

Here’s a link for more information: http://www.cvm.ncsu.edu/news/2010-08-16-Mark-Your-Calendar-Dog-Olympics-Sept.11.html and a link to the official Dog Olympics site: http://www.cvmdogolympics.com/

Passion Rules!  Pups too.

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08.11.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

100 Days in “The Wolfpack Nation”

FPRA 2010 Annual Conference: General Session,  Joe Hice, APR, CPRC

C10_7242

Joe Hice, APR, CPRC recently completed his first 100 days in a new job as Chief Communications Officer at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. During that time, Joe learned a little about the complexities and challenges of making the switch. Prior to joining the “Wolfpack,” he was the architect of The Gator Nation campaign at the University of Florida (UF).

The focus of his presentation was his transition to a new university and the “golden rules” he followed during his first 100 days in a senior public relations job.
To start, Hice explained that the first 100 Days are critical because many managers fail in the first 18 months on a new job. To help ensure success, managers must remember that the first 100 days on the job is:

  • A transition period
  • Shorter than you think
  • A period where you are temporarily incompetent in your job
  • A window of opportunity for change
  • A period where your Management expects change
  • A period where the Organization you have taken charge of, expects change

As a result, Hice says, you must take advantage of this and be committed to the following tasks during this time period to succeed:

  • You MUST communicate
  • You need a good plan
  • You must select your Management Team
  • You must communicate strategic themes
  • You must produce results (more…)
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08.05.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

Have we reached the point where more is less?

You have got to love Randall Munroe’s sense of humor.  His comic illustration featured below had me chucking all day.  Was I chuckling because his cartoon hit so close to home, or because “we’d never do anything like that.”

I think it’s the later for us.  Our Web team is among the very best in the business and we track the habits of everyone who visits the homepage.  Sure you’ll find alumni in the news and research facts and figures, but know what, people actually like that stuff. Survey says kind of thing.

I think Munroe’s most important point is about clutter.  We all tend to try to hard with our marketing efforts, not just our web pages.  How many universities out there have a dozen or more key messages?  How many universities out there try to jam all 12 of those key messages into a single print ad or onto a :30 second television commercial.

Have we  reached a point where more is actually less?  I think so and Munroe’s cartoon points that out beautifully.

Read more: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/campusnotes/home#ixzz0vjO4sShG

Passion Rules!

university_website

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08.04.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

Hiscoe from NC State featured in The Chronicle

An Academic Rip Van Winkle
By David Hiscoe

http://chronicle.com/article/An-Academic-Rip-Van-Winkle/123707/

Without much fanfare, I cashed out my stock options 18 months ago and quietly returned to the academy, after more than 20 years in devoted service to corporate interests.
The time I spent in the hollows of cutthroat capitalism (profitably plying, believe it or not, the skills I learned while earning degrees in medieval poetry) was, on the whole, surprisingly rewarding. But at age 60, I felt ready again to follow those wild, drunkenly idealistic impulses that had made the academic life seem so worthy and honorable when I was 20.
With some luck, good timing, and recommendations from friends around the university, I found myself back employed by one of my alma maters, as a director of communications. If all goes well, I plan to spend the latter years of my working life at one of those most successful embodiments of practical, sturdy idealism, an American land-grant university.
For the past few months, I’ve felt a strong pull to report on what university life looks like to one who has found his way back after strange travels outside the village walls. As much as I initially fought the analogy, every time I start to frame my story, I keep finding myself identifying with Rip Van Winkle. (more…)

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08.02.10 | posted by Joe Hice |

Provosts at convention hear it’s time for change. Reported by Inside Higher Education

August 2, 2010

By Doug Lederman/Inside Higher Education.com

CHICAGO — Like many advocacy groups, higher education associations are notoriously self-referential (if not self-reverential). They’re quick to promote the good work of their own members, but are typically loath to draw attention to institutions with which they compete.

Which made it all the more striking when George L. Mehaffy, a vice president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, opened a meeting of provosts here late last week by projecting on the video screen overhead the bold commercial that Kaplan University has used to promote itself — in large part by not-so-subtly dissing traditional colleges and universities like those that belong to AASCU (“It’s time for a different kind of university,” the professor at the lectern tells students apologetically. “It’s your time.”)

“It is our time,” Mehaffy told the public university provosts when the commercial ended, “time to get serious about the process of change in American higher education. It is important that we resolve to make substantive changes — major changes, not changes around the margins — and that we do so with a fierce sense of urgency.”

To the chief academic officers in the audience at AASCU’s Academic Affairs summer meeting, virtually all of whom are facing intense budget pressures at the same time that state and national leaders are telling them their campuses need to be more productive and efficient, the idea that something needs to give was not a hard sell.

They also seemed to accept the idea that if significant change was to come from within higher education, rather than be imposed on it from outside, provosts were those best able to bring it about, situated as they are between presidents focused increasingly on fund raising and often distant from the front lines and faculties focused mainly on their disciplines and often wary of, if not hostile to, transformative change. (“Someone has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us,” Mehaffy quoted “that great philosopher,” the Grateful Dead’s late Jerry Garcia, as saying.) (more…)

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