UNM-Gallup faculty votes no confidence in Beth Miller

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — As the school years winds down on the University of New Mexico-Gallup campus, the school's director finds herself facing a massive rebellion by most of the faculty.

The Faculty Senate, made up of all of the full-time faculty and a portion of the part-time faculty, voted Friday 36-19 in a secret ballot to pass a resolution of "no confidence" in the leadership of the school's director, Beth Miller.

The vote came during a special meeting called to address what some members of the faculty were calling a growing dissatisfaction with the refusal of Miller to communicate with the faculty.

Brewing
The turmoil has been brewing for the past two years as declining enrollment has meant a decline in revenue, but it has boiled over in the last few weeks with talks of budget cuts, possible layoffs and a college reorganization.

This has generated hundreds, if not thousands of e-mails between faculty members questioning some of Miller's decisions and complaining that these decisions are being made without any input from the Faculty Senate.

At Friday's meeting, most of the charges cited in the no-confidence resolution stemmed from Miller's making decisions without bringing them first to the Faculty Senate, which faculty members said is required under the faculty handbook.

The latest example, according to the resolution, was a decision by Miller not to renew the contract of the school's Dean of Instruction, Christine Marlowe.The faculty was first told that the contract would not be renewed and then was informed by a letter from Miller read at Friday's meeting that an offer was made to allow her to continue in the post until January.

Marlowe apparently has refused to accept that offer because the extension comes with strings attached by faculty members said they are still in the dark about most of what has been going on between the school and Marlowe.

Faculty at the meeting said they were upset that no reason was given for the decision not to renew the contract and then criticized Miller for not coming to the senate before the offer was made to extend the contract to January.

Informed
Miller, who was not at the meeting, said in an interview in her conference room a couple of hours after the senate meeting was over that she felt that she did keep the faculty informed through memos and e-mails about what was going on and consulted them on various matters dealing with the current budget situation and the proposed reorganization.

As far as personnel matters were concerned, Miller said she is not allowed to discuss these kinds of matters with the senate because these are required under university and state policy to be confidential.

Some members of the faculty have complained that in recent years Miller has become more and more isolated in her office and is not as accessible as she was in the past.

"I can see why some would think I was isolated," Miller said, pointing out that in recent years she has traveled more than in the past on college business and that her work has been more toward the outside, seeking more funds, than on the inside.The current financial situation at the college, she said, hasn't helped the situation.

Expenses
This year, the college will be spending in excess of $535,000 more than it takes in. While that may not look like much as compared to the college's annual budget of $13 million, the fact that some $10.5 million of that is devoted to salaries shows that the college doesn't have much it can cut back on to make up that deficit.

It's managed to survive, she said, because of its reserves, which are now in the range of $1 million, but steps have to be taken now to address the deficit before all of the reserves are used up.

That has resulted in talks about reorganizing and budget cuts, which has generated plenty of e-mails as faculty members questioned just how the cuts will affect their departments and their jobs.

There have been some e-mails claiming that the department heads have been threatened with losing their support staff if they don't start actively recruiting more students to college classes and department heads have replied that is not their job.

Miller said that the reorganization will probably include some layoffs, but she expects that this will not affect the full-time faculty.

Instead, the layoffs will be in the lower, non-teaching positions and within the college's part-time faculty.

While part-time faculty doesn't cost as much as full-time, Miller said, a decision was made more than a decade ago by the college to place an emphasis on full-time faculty because it was difficult to find qualified teachers locally for some subjects.

As a result, the college staff is doing a study of all of the classes taught by the full-time faculty to see just how many students are enrolled in each one.

Reducing classes
The idea, said Miller, is to reduce the number of classes being taught in certain areas.

That way if a certain subject has four classes currently being taught with two of these classes just getting the minimum number of students, the two would be combined and the faculty member would be required to teach another course which might attract a higher number of students or take over a class now taught by a part-timer.

This still has many faculty members worried because it seems to them that these decisions are being made without faculty input and as long as that happens, faculty members said they would continue to have no confidence in her leadership.