The Auburn University Board of Trustees met for the first time in the fall semester on Friday, Sep. 5, announcing a few updates that will occur on and around Auburn's campus. Perhaps the biggest project the Board of Trustees approved was the initiation for the repair and renovation of Cater Hall.
Cater Hall was originally built in 1915 and since that time has served as the President's residence, the social center for the Quad dormitories, the administrative offices of Katherine Cooper Cater, Dean of Women, and most recently, as the home of the Honors College.
In 2003, Cater Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places due to its historic and cultural value to the University. Ninety-nine years after its construction, the Board of Trustees approved the initiation of the project, authorizing the commencement of the architect selection process.
The proposed project is expected to cost in excess of $1,000,000.
The trustees along with those in attendance heard a report from the Chancellor of A.U.M., John Veres III, the first graduate of Auburn University at Montgomery to serve as chancellor. In his report, Veres announced that AUM signed an agreement with Southern Union Community College in Opelika.
Veres said these agreements allow for students at community colleges to begin looking ahead at their future.
"The way these things work is by providing smaller scholarships for their better students and one full scholarship to the presidential scholar that the president of their college will select," Veres said. "We're doing this to get some of their better students to start thinking about AUM moving forward."
Veres also discussed bridging the gap between first generation students and their parents, a problem which he said was very apparent at the Auburn campus in Montgomery.
"We serve a lot of first generation students," Veres said. "We have found that part of the issue we have with retention is not only the students but their families don't really understand that much about the college experience and how things work. Our orientation program, for the second year provided a family orientation to discuss what goes on in college with family members as well.
The Board of Trustees then heard from Auburn University organic chemistry professor Stewart Schneller, the professor who has headed Auburn's Ebola research for some time.
Schneller describes the virus as having the ability to turn off the body's immune system.
"People don't recognize when the virus originally starts," Schneller said. "It can be passed through bodily fluids so if you try and assist someone who is bleeding, you may in fact end up with the virus."
Schneller believes his team of researchers may have found a way to reverse the virus in a small molecule known by its lab identification number WY3161.
"The goal is to block the process that Ebola uses to turn off the immune response," Schneller said. "So far, this molecule has showed it can block that process and people may wonder how we got it so fast, but you have to keep in mind we've been working on Ebola for nearly ten years."
Professor Schneller along with his team of researchers has been working with the National Institutes of Health and will publish the details of their work this month in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.
In closing, President Jay Gogue discussed the large incoming freshmen class which is about five hundred students above the class average.
"This creates a huge demand," Gogue said. "It may not sound like a lot when you compare it to 25,000, but you have to think about the faculty to student ratio which is currently 1 to 18. We're going to have to add more faculty and it's very hard to find people with the right credentials in this part of the United Sates. So, we have to go out and find them and that can be expensive to do."
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