by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
David Schmidly, UNM's next president, said the University's student and campus employees could alleviate parking problems by walking more.
"I'm a walker," he said. "I try to walk everywhere I can. I try to lead by example."
Schmidly, who tries to walk 10,000 steps, or about six miles, every day, held a videoconference Thursday with about 30 staff members.
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He showed the staff a pedometer he wears to count his steps.
"I don't always make it to 10,000 every day," he said. "But I will make it to 70,000 in a week. You can bet I'll get up at 3 a.m. if I have to."
Oklahoma State, where Schmidly is president, has a high-rise parking structure and a good bus system, he said.
"I don't know what the answers will be at UNM," he said.
Schmidly will begin his job at UNM on June 1.
Although people should walk as much as possible, the University has to accommodate special needs, he said.
"People have lives to live," he said. "They have families to support. You need to make sure that if you have a working mother who needs to get on and off campus to take care of her child, that has to be able to happen."
Besides helping with parking, more walking would lower insurance costs, Schmidly said.
The cost of benefits is a challenge for everyone, he said.
"It's spiraling out of control," he said. "Right now, at Oklahoma State, we consider that to be the biggest challenge we have."
Schmidly drew applause when he discussed the unfairness of the rising prices of medical care.
"It does little good to give someone a 5 percent salary increase when the cost of benefits goes up,"
he said.
Schmidly said he does not have a plan for combating those costs.
"I think you can make a mistake if you come on and say, 'We're going to do A, B, C, D, E and F immediately,'" he said. "What you need to do is listen to people. That's probably the most important challenge I'll face in my early tenure as your president."
Debbie Dobson, a development associate in arts and sciences, asked Schmidly how he would deal with students' parents.
Schmidly's wife started a parents' association at Oklahoma State.
"It costs enough now for parents to send their children to school that you need a vehicle for them to be engaged," he said.
Veronica Mendez-Cruz, director of El Centro de la Raza, asked Schmidly about hiring a vice president for institutional diversity.
The vice president would be responsible for increasing faculty
diversity.
"You can't pigeonhole every institution into the same structure," he said. "But frankly, I would be surprised if, within a few months of me beginning my new presidency, we are not doing some kind of search for a vice president for diversity."
