The University of Arkansas board of trustees approved the hiring of Karla M. Hughes as the next chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Monticello on Monday.
Hughes, 64, will start Jan. 15 at an annual salary of $250,000.
Hughes comes from the University of Louisiana System in Baton Rouge, where she was executive vice president and provost.
The board of trustees met in executive session to discuss Hughes’ appointment, which was recommended by UA System President Donald Bobbitt earlier this month. After executive session, Trustee Cliff Gibson III of Monticello motioned to approve Hughes’ appointment, adding that it was a “privilege.”
Hughes, originally of Kansas City, Kan., will be the first woman chancellor of a fouryear university in the University of Arkansas System.
After the vote, Bobbitt said he “could not be more thrilled” to have Hughes on board.
“We have an opportunity to show the county that UAM can not only be an open-admissions university but a model for open-admissions university,” Bobbitt said.
“Open admissions” means a school requires applicants only to have a high school diploma or GED to become students.
The University of Arkansas System has a goal of increasing enrollment at its schools, some of which have experienced persistent enrollment declines.
UAM’s enrollment dropped 5.1 percent from 3,854 first-time, full-time students in fall 2014 to 3,659 this fall, according to the state’s Department of Higher Education.
The university was also at risk of losing state funding tied to performance-based measures, which include student progress toward graduation and the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded. But the school earned back the $182,000 in state funds after the Higher Education Department approved an improvement plan.
Part of the improvement plan includes hiring an institutional research officer to identify students likely to drop out, as well as evaluating programs and looking at potential new ones, interim Chancellor Jay Jones has said.
At Morehead State University in Kentucky, where Hughes was provost and a vice president for academic affairs for about seven years, she helped bump up firsttime, full-time freshman enrollment by about 16 percent for two years, she said.
That university now has more than 10,900 students, according to her resume. She had also helped to boost student retention from the first year to the second year by at least 5 percent, she said.
Hughes will replace Jack Lassiter, who retired in January after leading the campus for nearly a decade.
Information for this article was contributed by Aziza Musa of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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