Winters, Clint: President

“The King is dead! Long live the King!” President Rankin is in some way unable to continue as SAU president, and the school needs a new head. Being the obvious choice for the position, I throw my hat into the ring. A few board meetings and ceremonies later and I'm the president! But will I be a paragon of hope and education for miles around? Or will I bring the school crashing down alongside my career? Only time and my plans will tell.

  

My main goal as SAU president will be to continue the pattern of growth and development started by Dr. Rankin himself. New buildings and programs everywhere the eye can see. My vision would be a college that rivals the big campuses in facilities and services while keeping the atmosphere and (hopefully) tuition costs of a small college.

“How will you get the funds?” I hear you asking even as I type this. There's no doubt that all of this development will cost money, and lots of it. I plan to cover the costs by increasing enrollment by various admission incentives (the brand new facilities being one of them) and by improving our already impressive tours and preview days. Another way will be in some of the buildings themselves. The new buildings will include more campus stores and restaurants, which if successful should bring in a fair amount of revenue. A program that will cost a large sum initially but that would pay for itself within a few years would be to make the new buildings more energy efficient and also retrofitting some of the old buildings with the same environmentally and wallet-friendly technology, much like OU has just finished doing. On the academics side. I'd like to have SAU offer even more majors and minors, and possibly expand its graduate program. Having doctorates come out of SAU would be a great thing to see, and be a pretty big plus when potential students look at the campus for all their higher education needs.  Part of this would be to expand (or start, I'm not really sure) SAU's research programs and agendas. Letting the next Nikolai Tesla do research in Magnolia would be a pretty cool thing. Last, but most certainly not the least, I would like to expand the Honors College, and I'm not saying that because of who's reading this. It would help with admission rates, expanding our graduate program, and almost every other goal I have in mind. Plus, having a building full of the smartest people in the area would be pretty awesome (albeit catastrophic in the event of a fire).

My reign as president will hopefully be a fruitful and prosperous one, and if successful, our little campus may just become a household name like the big name colleges that people get tattoos of. On that note, maybe a campus tattoo parlor would be a great idea...