Highlights from the February 2024 board meeting

Dear Texas Woman’s Community,

Two weeks ago, the TWU System Board of Regents held its first quarterly meeting of 2024, and I am pleased to share some highlights. Before I start, I want to thank my team for leading the meetings in my absence and the regents for allowing me to spend time with my mother as she journeys along in her final days. Being at her side right now is bittersweet, but I am also with my brothers, father, and entire clan. Thank you all for your expressions of love and support.

At the meeting, the regents welcomed Dallas Campus President Monica Christopher, who started her role on Feb. 1. I believe she is precisely what Texas Woman’s needs to grow the campus. We have scheduled an official installment ceremony on March 27 at the Dallas campus.

Provost Graves officially introduced J. Clinton Grant, director of the Doswell School of Aeronautical Sciences, to the board of regents. Clint began last fall as the aviation school’s inaugural director and has been working to establish partners for flight training and other essentials for the school, which is recruiting students for the fall. The provost also introduced Tracy Jordan, who we hired to lead a new musical theatre track in the Bachelor of Music degree, a degree name change the regents approved just a year ago.

Provost Graves also introduced the inaugural cohort of the Provost’s Fellowship Leadership Academy, which he announced at the November meeting. Members of the cohort attended in person to observe what happens at a board meeting. Dr. Miloch will continue to lead the academy even as she takes on the interim dean role for the College of Health Sciences. The provost concluded his introductions with Dr. Shannon Scott, who has stepped into the interim role of vice provost for faculty success.

Texas Woman’s first mariachi elicited some grito mexicano during the Academic Affairs committee meeting as they showcased some of our incredibly talented faculty and students and the diversity of culture within our community. Roughly half of the inaugural program’s 30 students performed three traditional songs. The mariachi program has two separate ensembles, Itza (sacred waters) and Alas (wings), which will perform in their striking new Texas Woman’s trajes on March 23 in the Margo Jones Performance Hall. I invite you to listen to their performance (around the 2:25:00 mark of the Feb. 15 meeting broadcast).

Lisa Rampy, interim vice president for University Advancement and Alumni Engagement, updated the regents on the Dream Big comprehensive fundraising campaign. The campaign has raised over $112 million—nearly 90% of its $125 million goal. Rampy also noted that the funds raised came from 16,162 unique donors. We are on track to reach our goal by 2026 when the university commemorates its 125th anniversary.
Among board action items, regents authorized a $35-per-semester-credit hour tuition increase for graduate students beginning in the fall and a $15 increase in the university services fee for all students starting in fall 2025. The increases are needed to offset rising instructional and operational costs. Our graduate tuition rate was not much different from the undergraduate. Yet, graduate courses are often more expensive to teach due to smaller class sizes and many other factors. This move will align us more with our peers’ grad-undergrad tuition differential, keeping us competitive in our excellence for the long run.

Javier Flores, vice president for Enrollment Management, reported that while our collective spring enrollment dipped 2.9% from spring 2023, students’ total semester credit hours decreased by less than 1%. A positive takeaway is that students are taking larger course loads. Dr. Flores noted several short- and long-term strategies as part of the Strategic Enrollment Management Committee’s work to spur student retention and recruitment.

^{Texas Woman’s Board of Regents with honorary doctorate recipient and alumna Glenda M. Payne in front center}

Regents approved an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters for Texas Woman’s nursing alumna Glenda M. Payne, who graduated from TWU in 1974 with a BSN and in 1980 with an MSN. She has dedicated her career to improving the lives of patients with kidney disease by creating state and federal dialysis regulations through her work as a dialysis facility surveyor for the Texas Department of Health and a surveyor for the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid. In 2018, Payne co-founded the National Dialysis Accreditation Commission to ensure facilities provide the best patient care. She should make us all proud for the example she has set.

^{Slide from AD Mott’s presentation on TWU Athletics}

Athletics Director Sandee Mott gave a spectacular report. It was so inspiring that I want to re-share much of it with you at the risk of making this message a little longer than usual. She started by telling a story from the weekend when we hosted the 1969, 1971, and 1973 TWU Track national championship teams. She said, “We offered them campus tours; however, two and a half hours later, I felt like we got the tour. We were told what used to be here and used to be there and what happened in some of those spaces—more than what we told them was happening in those spaces now.” It’s an incredible experience to honor our rich athletics history.

AD Mott went on to report the fall 2023 department GPA of 3.468—57 student-athletes earning a perfect 4.0 and 61 making their dean’s list—continuing 83 consecutive semesters of 3.0 GPA or higher. Basketball earned the highest team GPA of 3.845. She also noted the university came in sixth out of 304 Division II schools for community service hours in the fall semester, demonstrating how invested TWU Athletics is in our community.

On Nation Girls and Women in Sports Day—Feb. 7—the Committee on Women’s Athletics recommended women’s wrestling for NCAA championship consideration, moving it from an emerging sports status to championship status. We will host 15 teams at the USA Artistic Swimming Collegiate National Championship in Lewisville at the Westside Aquatics Center on March 22-23. We recently hosted the 2023 national champions, The Ohio State University, in the Pioneer Hall pool. The Texas Woman’s University crushed them with a final score of 93 to 58. I am proud of our artistic swimming athletes and Coach Barb Nesbitt Ng. AD Mott went on to share that TWU Basketball is #1 in the Lone Star Conference, #1 in the South-Central Region, and #9 in all of NCAA Division II. The LSC tournament is March 8-10 in Frisco. On March 10, TWU Athletics will host an NCAA tournament selection watch party to witness TWU Basketball selected for the third consecutive year. This basketball team is special under Coach Beth Jillson’s leadership as she leverages the blended talents of first-time recruits with some of the seniors on the team.

Finally, Couch Babak Abouzar reported our best start in TWU's soccer program history and pointed out that our team allowed only seven goals in 19 games this season. He introduced Erica Brelove, a first-year computer science major from Mansfield; Alyssa Valdez, a junior business administration major from Dallas, who is already pursuing a master’s degree while in her third year at Texas Woman’s; and Amanda Farris, a marketing junior from Bryan, who transferred from the University of Houston and played goalkeeper. This is our second time selected for the NCAA tournament in soccer, the first being in 2019. I am proud of all nine of our athletic teams.

I closed the meeting with a written report heralding our indisputable momentum, as evidenced by many reports and actions taken during the meetings. I emphasized the urgency to address our complex enrollment challenges with a particular focus on retention efforts. Finally, I shared some highlights from a February 9 interview with Charles Welch, “Regional Public Colleges as a Solution, Not the Problem,” and how, in Texas, we have already moved in the direction of performance-based funding for Comprehensive Regional Universities, thanks to a bill I helped champion two legislative sessions ago.

Our Texas Woman’s mission is a crucial asset for the State of Texas. I want to thank all of you for investing your time, talents, and heart into helping our communities realize they are stronger when Texas Woman’s brings its distinctive gifts to the table.
 
With a pioneering spirit,

Carine M. Feyten, Ph.D.
Chancellor and President

Page last updated 9:31 AM, March 1, 2024