Tuition, Regents' Professors, UAHS Strategic Plan on ABOR Agenda

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The Arizona Board of Regents will be asked to approve the proposed 2019-20 base tuition and fees at the state's three public universities during this week's meeting at the Student Union Memorial Center.

The proposal before them covers all student tuition and fee requests, including base tuition and mandatory fees, differential tuition, college fees, program fees, class fees and other academic fees, as well as residence housing rates and meal plans. The regents will vote on tuition and fees on Thursday. The meeting will be livestreamed.

On March 22, the UA proposed a 2 percent increase in tuition for all new-to-campus resident undergraduate students and 1 percent increase in tuition for nonresident students, with no increase in mandatory fees. The majority of current UA undergraduate students – 99 percent – will see no increase because their tuition and fees previously were frozen under the University's Guaranteed Tuition Program.

The increase is needed to fund priority initiatives under the University's new strategic plan and increases in external costs. The tuition proposal is the result of collaborative work among UA leaders and representatives of the undergraduate student government and graduate and professional student council.

The UA also seeks board approval for the appointment of five new Regents' Professors. Under ABOR policy, the honor can be awarded only to full professors with exceptional achievements that have brought them national or international distinction. It is the highest faculty rank and can be held by no more than 3 percent of the total of tenured and tenure-track faculty members at each of the state's public universities. The five UA faculty members whose names have been submitted are:

• Alfred McEwen, a professor of planetary geology and director of the Planetary Image Research Laboratory. McEwen is the principal investigator for the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has produced extremely high-resolution images of the Martian surface since 2005. McEwen may be the single individual most responsible for changing the scientific viewpoint of Mars from that of a dead planet to one with a dynamic surface, largely as a result of science done using the HiRISE camera, whose construction and operations he has led for more than a decade, according to board materials.
• John Rutherfoord, a professor in the Department of Physics. Rutherfoord was the principal architect for the Arizona design selected by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as the CERN experiment) to measure the energies of collision products, which led to the discovery of the Higgs boson, one of the most celebrated accomplishments in high-energy particle physics in recent years. Rutherfoord has played an important role in establishing the UA as a major player in particle physics – a field that explores the fundamental constituents of matter and energy.
• Dr. Marvin Slepian, a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology in the UA College of Medicine – Tucson. Slepian's groundbreaking work in medicine, engineering and business has had a dramatic and direct impact on saving and improving lives. Slepian led the development of the first FDA-approved total artificial heart and the first biodegradable coronary stent. Slepian also is the director of the Arizona Center for Accelerated Biomedical Innovation, a universitywide organization that helps faculty and students develop ideas into new products.
• Rod Wing, holder of the Bud Antle Endowed Chair in the UA School of Plant Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and director of the Arizona Genomics Institute. Wing was the U.S. leader of a 10-nation team that sequenced the rice genome, the completion of which was announced in Tucson in November 2004. This was the first crop genome to be sequenced and remains the highest-quality genome available for any crop. Wing also developed artificial chromosomes based on bacteria rather than yeast and called BACs. After many years, BACs remain the cornerstone on which DNA libraries from plants and many other organisms are still constructed.
• Lucy Ziurys, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a professor of astronomy. Ziurys has dedicated her career to understanding the processes where stars form, carry out nuclear reactions that transform their composition, and recycle this modified material back to space for the next cycle of making stars, planets and life-forms. Ziurys has revealed the rich carbon-containing molecular content of envelopes of oxygen-rich stars and demonstrated the long lifetimes of molecules in both planetary nebulae and diffuse interstellar clouds. Ziurys has created new capabilities that advance the field of astrochemistry. She established an internationally renowned astrochemical laboratory that provides the foundation for her observational searches for new molecules.

Also on this week's agenda (PDF):

• UA Health Sciences will present the UAHS portion of the UA's strategic plan. On Feb. 28, Dr. Michael Dake, senior vice president for health sciences, shared the preliminary themes and solicited feedback from the board's Research and Health Sciences Committee.
• The UA seeks board approval of a new academic organizational unit, the College of Veterinary Medicine, effective in the 2019-20 academic year. As Arizona's only public veterinary medical program, the college will graduate veterinarians "who are not only educated and trained to be “practice-ready” for today’s veterinary landscape, but also well-versed in the technologies and skills that will revolutionize the veterinary profession in years to come," according to board materials.