At Tuesday's faculty meeting, President David Schmidly said his focus this year is to improve communication and diversity in the administration and faculty.
He appointed an executive team to evaluate these issues that includes Josephine De Leon, vice president for equity and inclusion.
"One of our goals is getting minorities in undergraduate and graduate programs," De Leon said.
She said her priority is developing an inclusive campus atmosphere and that one of her first initiatives was to reach out to ethnic centers and encourage diversity on campus.
Carmen Brown, vice president for enrollment management, reported plans to open a communications center to improve relations with students and faculty.
"We want to help students and faculty get from point A to point B," she said. "I have heard a lot of complaints of offices not answering their phones, and I promise that once we have a communications center, all the calls will be handled."
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Marc Nigliazzo, vice president for Rio Rancho operations and branch campus academics, said some of UNM's Main Campus resources will need to be invested in Rio Rancho in the coming year.
"Don't think of this as a new campus but as something that is a mini-version of this campus or in competition with this campus," he said.
Vice president of research Julia Fulghum said she has been working to promote faculty research and find ways to maximize funding since she took the position in May.
"As a flagship, it is our responsibility to integrate research into educational efforts," she said.
Fulghum said she and the Office of Research are trying to make it easier for faculty to initiate research proposals.
"We made a lot of changes, and we want a lot of feedback," she said. "This fall, we will start a lot of pilot programs to fast-track straightforward proposals so they don't have to go through so many levels of approval."
Fulghum said faculty need more direction from the Office of Research to increase research productivity.
"We are developing guidelines so that faculty doesn't have to guess what they are doing," she said.
Fulghum said she made changes in response to feedback the Office of Research received this summer.
"We will have faculty research support services," Fulghum said. "We are being very active in going out and providing training for research."
Roughly 150 faculty and community members attended the meeting, including Rebecca Ortega, mother of a UNM student.
Ortega said the University is forgetting its mission as a place of higher learning.
"Students really need to be treated with respect, and their needs need to be met," she said.
Ortega said she has seen too many young people graduate from college only to be unemployed or get a job that is not in their field.
Lawrence Guy Straus, an anthropology professor, said students would get better treatment if the faculty and administration could work together on the issue.
"There is a growing gap between faculty in the trenches - and students who are not very well-treated by the people they have to deal with - and the administration that we perceive as growing increasingly large and increasingly well-remunerated," he said.
