Volume IX, Number 2
Editor: Paul Aucoin, pgaucoin@samford.edu
Associate Editor, Scott Dittman, sdittman@wlu.edu
Subscription Manager: Erika Watts, wattse@aacrao.nche.edu
Each year in March we send students on spring break so that we can sit back and watch the NCAA Tournament, often
referred to as March Madness or the Big Dance.
For some March Madness ended early. Ohio State fell in the first round, Boston College in the second, and Kentucky in
the third. It is rumored that AACRAO Vice President Paul
Taylor has been curled up in a dark room ever since. Other AACRAO members whose teams failed to advance spent the rest
of March halfheartedly watching Duke, Maryland, Michigan and Arizona while stirring impatiently in their La-Z-Boys munching Fritos.
This issue of NetNews is brought to you in the spirit of
this season of restless anticipation. Anticipation of spring, anticipation of the Annual Meeting and, best of all, anticipation of seeing each other in Seattle.
- Louise Lonabocker, AACRAO President
Former AACRAO President Paul Anderson recently announced that he intends to search for the worthy recipient of an award reported to be valued at 10.3 million dollars. Anderson, who recently won the Alabama lottery, was rumored to have visited several of the institutions and areas where he has worked seeking a suitable beneficiary. It is rumored that he has recently been swayed by Disney, which announced substantial layoffs this past week. It is not known to whom Anderson will be donating any of the remaining 6.2 million dollars of his winnings, though sources close to him said that he did intend to donate substantially to some worthy cause.
Christine Kerlin, former Associate Dean of Enrollment Services at
Everett Community College (WA), recent Chair of the AACRAO 2000 Task Force and a prominent member of NAFSA, has taken a new position as Director
of Admissions, Records, and Re-education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Ed Johnson, former Registrar at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana, is
thrilled with his new position as Assistant to the President for Communications at City University of New York. Ed said that he was
getting tired of living in the wide open spaces and needed a change. His new job was created by CUNY in response their attempt to recruit a
more diverse student body. CUNY folks were having difficulty getting people "out West" to understand what they were saying and thought that
Ed might be able to help. At least he looks the part when he wears his cowboy boots and that big belt buckle.
Elliott Baker, Director of Academic Records at Slippery Rock
University, reports that his institution will be changing its name in the near future and is asking for help from other schools that have gone
through a name change. It seems that Slippery Rock gets too many hits on their home page from people using search engines to search for sites related
to "Geology" or "Rocks". The change comes shortly after Beaver College changed its name for related reasons.
NB: Borrowing from John L. Lewis, "He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooteth." If you have news about yourself or others which may be of interest to our colleagues, please send contact information to Scott Dittman at sdittman@wlu.edu so it may be considered for inclusion in a future issue of NetNews.
(This is the second of two installments on AACRAO Financial Ratios. The first installment provided an introduction to financial ratios and a discussion of AACRAO’s Income and Expense Ratios. This installment focuses on Balance Sheet Ratios.)
As reported in the first
installment, your AACRAO Board and AACRAO Staff have worked diligently to
improve AACRAO’s financial status during the past two fiscal years.
In an effort to determine how well AACRAO is doing financially as
compared to peer organizations, a series of financial ratios were computed
utilizing the year-end financial statements for FY 2000, ending June 30, 2000.
Balance
sheet ratios are often referred to as a financial check up, similar to a
physical examination.
They attempt to determine the financial health of organizations.
The following are key ratios based on the balance sheet information.
These ratios imply a mathematical relationship of the computed number to
one, or X.X:1
Unfortunately, I do not have a clue
as to how to compute a balance sheet ratio.
I have searched the web and found numerous references, but I do not
understand a word.
I am really in over my head with this financial gibberish.
As a result, I have enrolled in Accounting 101 at my institution and
hopefully I will be able to compute these ratios by the Annual Meeting.
For more information on AACRAO Income and Expense Ratios, contact Joe Roof, AACRAO Vice President of Finance at roofj@dbcc.cc.fl.us.AACRAO Financial Ratios will be discussed in more detail during the 2001 Annual Meeting at a Roundtable Discussion scheduled for Monday, April 23 at 5:30 pm.
- Joe Roof, AACRAO Vice President of Finance
The Seattle LAC announced today that it is now easier to get to downtown Seattle and the AACRAO meeting location than previously advertised. Attendees should now make their plans to fly into Juneau, Alaska since downtown Seattle is now closer to Juneau after the most recent earthquake in the northwest.
"Oh yes," stated Janet Ward, LAC chair, "Juneau is a much better airport that SeaTac and much closer to downtown now that we have moved the meeting site about 1000 miles north and west of where we were. The meeting facilities are still fine, however. In fact, we have much more room for exhibitors now that there are no walls on the buildings to confine us to a certain area of the convention center."
AACRAO members are urged to make their new travel plans quickly as only four passenger airplanes fly into JNU airport and flights fill up rather quickly.
The AACRAO Board of Directors has approved a survey of the membership to get their opinions about methods to increase association revenue without having to increase member dues. Members will given several options and be asked to rank their preferences. In order to give members time to prepare before logging into the web survey site, NetNews lists the options here:
A monthly car wash held in the fountain of Dupont Circle
Candy sales at the corner of 19th and Massachusetts Avenue
An annual Bake Sale in the exhibit hall during the Annual
Meeting
A rummage sale in the lobby of One Dupont Circle
A web auction of copies of Board of Directors meeting minutes
from 1995 to 1999.
A "Date an AACRAO staff member" charity auction held on
Tuesday of the annual meeting in place of the Town Hall Meeting
Members are encouraged to log into the survey site as soon as the URL is released by the Board.
According to Paul Aucoin, Chair of the 2000-2001Nominations and Elections Committee, all of the ballots for election to the 2001-2002 Nominations and Elections Committee have been invalidated for various reasons, none of which were hanging chads. Of the only 457 ballots received 234 were postmarked after the deadline, 220 had votes for more than seven candidates, and three were dimpled.
Because of this invalidation, according to Bylaw 7.2b, a hand count will be taken at the Annual Meeting in Seattle. Vice-chair elect Suzanne Anderson and Chair-elect Eliott Baker are both concerned about the amount of time this might add to the Business Meeting.
President Louise Lonabocker said that she is confident that if participation levels at the Annual Business Meeting follow past trends, "there will actually be more members involved in the selection of the new committee than attempted to participate using the mail in ballots." She added that a task force has been appointed to study electronic balloting for future elections.
Due to the receipt of an anonymous cashiers check in the amount of 6.2 million dollars, the AACRAO Board has declared that the current membership will be allowed to remain members for 2001-2002 without paying dues. New members may be accepted, if qualified, at a rate of only $10 per year.
This announcement comes on the heels of a projection to hold the dues for 2001-2002 at the current level, as printed in the February issue of The Data Dispenser, where it was also announced that that issue may indeed be the last printed issue.
After repeated questioning by your editor, Executive Director Jerry Sullivan revealed only that the envelope the check arrived in was addressed to Associate Executive Director Barmak Nassarian, and was postmarked in Greeneville, South Carolina.
The winter storms that continue to blast New England have created a new opportunity for one of the newest AACRAO task forces, Outsourcing. Louise Lonabocker, President of AACRAO, decided that it was time to investigate new cost-saving measures in her own office when Boston College outsourced snow removal from the Newton, Massachusetts, campus.
BC tried to get a Maine company to do it at first, but Meredith Braz of Bates College and a member of the Outsourcing Task Force told Louise that all of their snow removal companies were busy digging tunnels through the snow on their campus so that students could get to classes.
The VP for Association and Institutional Issues, Tom Bilger, recently reported that a large number of state association presidents not associated with PACRAO, SACRAO, or MSACROA have agreed to form TROTSACRAO (The Rest of the States ACRAO). The new region will meet for the first time at the annual meeting in Seattle.
Members are requested to submit designs for a future historical site that will be unveiled in 2010 on the Washington Mall recognizing AACRAO’s 100th Anniversary and the second oldest professional organization.
We have heard that Stanley Henderson has already been hard at work transforming his ideas with an abstract of the quill pen and scroll. The AACRAO monument will be the first of it’s kind on the Mall.
Members need to submit their designs to the AACRAO office – wherever it’ll be, USA, by December 31, 2001.
In a corporate alliance coup, Executive Director Jerry Smith announced that the AACRAO Office would be the first professional association to provide direct services to its members. In conjunction with Airstream Trailers and Willy Byum, AACRAO will receive six brand new “silver bullets” that will reduce the high cost square footage overhead of its DC office and actually increase the usefulness by being able to hit the road and visit each of the members sites, and direct conference assistance at the state and regional meetings.
“The benefits to the members will be unbelievable!” Jerry exclaimed. Janie Barnett, Director of Operations and Membership Services indicates that AACRAO personnel have mixed feelings about the change, though “see the USA” will be among each of the employee’s future goal statements.
Jerry is personally traveling the Seattle meeting in AACRAO #1and will have it on display at the AACRAO booth in the Convention Center.
Barmak Nassirian, Associate Executive
Director is negotiating with several cell phone companies to provide nation-wide
toll free access to AACRAO members, rather than continue to bear the
institutional expense of a 202 area code.
These unnattributed tips for professional development are shared by our associate editor:
Aim Low, Reach Your Goals, Avoid Disappointment.
TEAMWORK... means never having to take all the blame yourself.
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings ... they did it by killing everyone who opposed them.
If you can stay calm, while all around you is chaos ... then you probably haven't completely understood the seriousness of the situation.
Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups.
Go the extra mile. It makes your boss look like an incompetent slacker.
Travel Farther: Just another dead end: http://www.noring.pp.se/
Travel Farthest: Use this site to stop wasting time browsing the internet and start enjoying the rest of your life: http://home.att.net/~cecw/lastpage.htm
Food: Want to eat with the Beatles? See http://www.vgg.com/fotg/
Language: Need to brush up on your Pig Latin? See http://www.klorg.com/latin.html
Professional Skills: How to make sure you are not chosen for Employee of the Month. http://www.jlc.net/~useless/
Aesthetics:
NB: If you know of a web resource or a bit of web humor that you think may be useful to your colleagues, please send the URL to Scott Dittman at sdittman@wlu.edu so it may be considered for inclusion in a future issue of NetNews. Tell a little about why you like it and be credited with the catch.
In response to the out-crying by the majority of AACRAO members unable to attend the annual meeting, all future AACRAO meetings will be simulcast on a link from the AACRAO homepage http://aacrao.org/.
Also being explored is simulcast voting during the Business Meeting as well as open access to all Board of Director meetings.
Gene Schuster, President-Elect is thrilled
with the opportunity to share the expertise of the annual meeting and open up
the internal workings of AACRAO business. “This
will be far better than C-Span!”, Gene exclaimed.
AACRAO Annual Meetings:
April 22-25, 2001, The Space Needle, Seattle, WA
April 14-16, 2002, The Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
April 6-8, 2003, The Washington Monument, Washington, DC
Other Professional Meetings and Workshops:
Closing
Thought
Critical warnings needed and heeded! See the following URL for a
list of urban legends about warning labels:
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6755-2001Mar14.html
If you have suggestions for a Closing Thought, please send them to Scott Dittman, sdittman@wlu.edu
End of NetNews, a special April 1 Edition ; -)
Special thanks to all non-editorial contributors to this issue: Louise Lonabocker, Joe Roof, Tom Bilger, Glenn Munson, Dennis Dulniak; and to Associate Editor Scott Dittman.
Send questions about your subscription address or about subscribing to:
Erika Watts<wattse@aacrao.nche.edu>
|
Last Update (Central Standard Time): |