Q&A: Smatresk hits on a few key points on a big year

Skipper · July 8, 2016

Preston Mitchell | Staff Writer

Columnist Preston Mitchell asked UNT President Neal Smatresk some quick questions about UNT’s 2016 so far.

Looking back on the past school year, what changes to campus are you the most proud of?

Smatresk: In our last year, which was our 125th anniversary, we had a lot of high points. My team and I are proud to have brought in our largest freshman class and having the most national merit scholars. Those are huge achievements which speak to have better we have gotten about promoting our brand and promising newcomers that they can receive a great education. In addition, we’ve had a good year for fundraising. While it’s modest, all the arrows are moving up. To date, we’ve hired two very accomplished deans – signifying our improving leadership.

Coming here, I wasn’t even sure if we could complete our student Union. We experienced low bond ratings and pretty severe financial difficulties, including negative cash flow. So to not only complete Rawlins Hall and reopen the Union were both high points of the year.

Our the past two years, we’ve moved mountains in regards to deep infrastructure, landscaping, and physical changes to the grounds. A lot of people don’t notice and take it for granted, but we’ve made started to make the campus a lot prettier than it was.

We’re now focused on improving academic research and our scholarly reputation, which we’ll achieve by hiring more prestigious workers, remodeling Sage Hall into a student career students for those in need of support, and interacting with chairs more.

What are the changes that fell short? If so, how should they improve in the year to come?

Smatresk: One of our biggest disappointments sprang from dumping over $500 million into graduate education. We did it to offer tuition waivers for students who are funded on state lines. There is a complicated financial plan for graduate kids, led by Victor Prybutok, that he can elaborate more about if you do a follow-up article. A lot of the information proved to be inaccurate, the plan was implemented but was not communicated well and created confusion. There were certain departments and programs that were working their GA’s really hard, and several that were giving their students free rides. It was a division that created winners and losers (via perception) and it created discontent for a while. In the end, I think graduate students will eventually benefit because tuition waivers are more useful than the insurance benefits they were receiving beforehand. For scholarship students, the plan left them behind and that’s what I would call one of my biggest failures. It’s going to take us a year or two to sort it all out. Our graduate numbers have been static for quite some time and they need improvement.

A big project that has come to closure are our IT projects, which are hugely expensive systems that run the university. We’re currently undergoing a huge financial transportation and acquiring a data warehouse to improve customer service in the long run. We kind of how to be in on the specifics to fully understand it, and this should be invisible to a lot of people. After a year of stalling, work on the warehouse is finally moving forward.

We’ve fallen short with transportation and parking. For many students, one of their key interfaces with this university is that students drive their car to campus and can’t find a guaranteed parking spot despite paying for a permit. Those are all frustrating things. We have more or less completed a transportation master plan to correct this.

I think that we have fallen short of serving our students well with our current transportation and parking. We’ve already began changes that will cheapen and expand parking within the next year, including authorized two new parking garages. We also need to run our shuttles faster and more late to help students transport to class more effectively and ensure that students staying later still have their own means of transport.

In your opinion, how did the deaths of Ryan McMillian and Sara Mutschlechner shape the UNT community, as well as your presidency?

Smatresk: I think that the two tragic deaths of our students was a shock to our university. As for any tragedy, some people accepted it and moved along, while others were more impacted by it. That’s always going to be the chance. Internally, we had a lot of conversations on why these things happen and how we can properly teach the students about the importance of human life; even to the extent of changing the expectations of downtown Denton and how our students go about “having a good time.” We would like to enhance our students’ understanding of substance and alcohol abuse, and how to be safe and secure in their environments. Denton is not immune from the kinds of challenges that occur in many areas, which is what I think shocked so many about the back-to-back tragedies. It’s everywhere now. So, I would never see an event like this, it would be great. In a community of over 37,000 students, however, there will be tragedies. Anything we could do to mitigate them, we will do. We’ve already stepped up our counseling and clinical program.

We have to recognize that behavioral issues are of major concern in universities, due to the vast diversity of students’ backgrounds and how intoxicating many backgrounds can be on an individual. It’s our job as a community to be more sensitive to those experiencing life changes in this vital period in their lives, and support them in any way we can be. We knew that, but due to the tragedies, we’ve really internalized this as opposed to “Well, a lot of these kids have problems.”

Our athletics have recently undergone changes in leadership on their own. Do you believe that they can boost school spirit this fall?

Smatresk: I’m also very excited for the new coach and football program. It’s going to be a few years before we see the full potential of the program, but I believe choosing [Seth Littrell] was the right decision.

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DeepGreen · July 8, 2016

Our athletics have recently undergone changes in leadership on their own. Do you believe that they can boost school spirit this fall?

Smatresk: I’m also very excited for the new coach and football program. It’s going to be a few years before we see the full potential of the program, but I believe choosing [Seth Littrell] was the right decision.

Gosh, I sure should have liked to hear President Smatresk voice a "commitment" and backing for athletic success. And hiring a top athletic director to lead us.

Wag Tag · July 9, 2016

1 hour ago, DeepGreen said:

Our athletics have recently undergone changes in leadership on their own. Do you believe that they can boost school spirit this fall?

Smatresk: I’m also very excited for the new coach and football program. It’s going to be a few years before we see the full potential of the program, but I believe choosing [Seth Littrell] was the right decision.

Gosh, I sure should have liked to hear President Smatresk voice a "commitment" and backing for athletic success. And hiring a top athletic director to lead us.

Prez Smak down is a new kind of leader for UNT. Very impressed with his decisions and not be a stand on the sideline kind of Prez! He deserves all the credit for the recent athletic changes! GMG

Elvis · July 10, 2016

I am pretty sure they did not dump $500 million into anything. That is over half the annual budget for UNT. The real number is around $5 million which is nice but not enough for tier 1.

Monkeypox · July 11, 2016

So I'd been meaning to share this before but hadn't had the time and couldn't really find the right place. As some people know, I'm the rare TAMS kid who stayed at UNT and got my degree.

This summer was my 20-yr TAMS Reunion, and, for the first time, UNT hosted an official reunion for us. Now, we're not idiots (TAMS kids, remember?) so it was a pretty obvious money grab... and I applaud it. UNT has long needed to tap into a resource of people who leave UNT and go to places like MIT and CalTech and UC Berkeley. But a lot of those kids also go to places like UT and A&M.

One reason that happens is that UNT has not historically granted auto-scholarships to TAMS students, post-TAMS. Well, Smatresk spoke at the event and indicated the University was going to do this, and committed to coming up with ways to encourage and keep TAMS students in the fold.

This is the first time the University has really paid attention to TAMS alumni, who are generally doing pretty well out in the world. Now I'm admittedly a vagabond and weirdo who operates on the fringes of society, but most of my classmates are exactly what you'd expect. They're physicians and engineers and programmers and have letters before and after their names.

When members of my class opted to start an independent endowment fund for TAMS this past year, it hit $52k within about 6 months. Half of that total came from my class of less than 200 people. That was without any real formal push and minimum effort.

This is a resource that has been woefully underutilized for a long time. I'm glad UNT is finally working towards giving it attention. As the Zen Master said, "We'll see."

Edited July 13, 2016 by Monkeypox