05/10/1999

New UT President - On Friday, the Board of Trustees voted to offer the UT President's job to Dr. J. Wade Gilley. He's currently president of Marshall University and is scheduled to take office in Knoxville on August 1. Here's some background from the Marshall home page.

J. Wade Gilley, an environmental engineer with a doctorate from Virginia Tech, plus post doctoral work in education and management at the University of Florida and the Harvard Graduate School of Business, became president of Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, in 1991. From 1967 to 1991, Gilley served as president of three colleges, secretary of education for Virginia and as senior vice president at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

He is the author of several highly regarded books including The Interactive University and Searching for Academic Excellence which have been translated into Chinese and Japanese, respectively. He is the author of hundreds of journal articles and newspaper columns.

And here's the reference to their home page
http://www.marshall.edu/president/
and to the UT story on his selection.
http://ur.utenn.edu/news/may99/elect.htm

Professional Development Database - As noted on the email pointer to this UPDATE, we have extended the deadline to complete the professional database from May 10 until May 31.

TNII - The State, UT, and the Board of Regents have been working for five years to put together a package of network services to serve all three instead of the three overlapping systems we have now. The apparent low bid was from a consortium headed by BellSouth and would cost around $118 million over a five year period. The advantage to cities is that it would help give all better Internet access. The advantage to MTAS is that it would improve our access throughout the state but particularly in Nashville and Jackson. There has been a protest to the notice of intent to award the bid so it will be some time before this project gets underway. In the meantime, IPS is considering other ways to improve Internet access in Jackson and Nashville. The new Notes server we will install in Jackson will help with Notes access regardless of what happens with Internet access.