>> At any rate,
this is August 30,
2022, and this is
our third interview with President Swag.
I thought maybe a good question to start with today is
that KSU has grown a lot throughout its history,
but I was looking back and noticed that it
was not until 2016 that we reached 35,000,
and last fall, we were almost 43,000.
You may know what the latest figure is now that
a fee-paying is over with and what the number is now.
But we've grown alike.
And I thought maybe a good question,
it took us almost a quarter century
to reach the first 10,000.
And we continued to grow exponentially, it seems to me.
I thought maybe the first question would be,
how do you explain all the growth
that we've experienced,
and it's not just the numbers,
we've grown in other words too.
>> Sure.
>> But why do you think that KSU it's become, I guess,
a destination university that so many people,
students are attracted to?
> Sure. I think
my experience in the 20 years that I've been at
KSU answering that question
has more to do with the people that have been here,
and that would be faculty staff,
certainly the leaders here.
I don't think this place and
these people have ever been status quo-minded.
I think we're always looking
for what is the next step for the university.
Tom, you were here when the
university was a junior college,
and you saw it become
a state college and then a university.
You saw that trajectory.
I think it's the nature
of organizations as they look for what
is that next step and what is that next thing.
I also think and Betty
Siegel would have talked about this.
I think there was a study years ago that said this was
a very vibrant location where we are right here by I-75,
here in the northwest quadrant of Georgia,
and close to Atlanta.
I think all those things,
the location of this university has played a big part.
>> She used to talk about that by the way.
>> I remember she was president when I got here,
and I remember her talking about it a good bit,
and it stuck in my mind.
So now, I don't think a place would grow like we've
grown if there wasn't a good reasons to grow.
So again, I think, people
have been attracted to the programs that we have.
I think they're attracted to the faculty.
I think a lot of times you'll hear
students feel that our campus is more like
a home maybe than it is a non-familial type place,
and that people feel like they're at home here.
And you still hear that even though
we're 40-plus thousand students, which is amazing.
I think it's a combination of place.
I think it's a combination of people.
I think it's a combination of leaders.
The leaders that have been here, if you think about
presidents or provost they can't do
a whole lot unless they
can rely on the folks
that are here and people that are here.
I also think we're always
recruiting a new type of faculty member
and a new type of staff member that has
that innovative spirit and wants to take that next step.
So I think part of it
is the steps that you've seen from
junior college to State College University.
I remember a few years ago when we
became a comprehensive university and what that means.
So all these things define
different things that you do in higher education.
I think it was back, I'm
not going to get the year exactly,
but I want to go back to maybe 2009 or
so when we began to offer doctoral degrees here.
That's a big major change in an institution,
defines an institution differently when we
started offering master's degrees. That's a big change.
A lot of that certainly
dictates the students you attract,
but it also dictates the faculty that you hire as well.
There's just been markers along the way.
I think becoming an R2 in
the 2018 time frame certainly defined our future
for us and made us think
differently about who we
are and a lot of times folks will talk about well,
Carnegie just changed the criteria
and how they calculate it,
but it still put us in
a pretty elite group of schools with
about 6% of universities that
are R1 or R2 are classified as research universities.
I absolutely think it had us think
differently about ourselves now
that we're in that position.
So think there these different markers along the way.
>> Some people say that when we got
the football team that was also [OVERLAPPING].
>> I would agree. I would say that's another marker.
One of the things I think that did Tom was,
I think it really created
a campus culture in a lot of ways.
If you didn't see prior to that time,
you're probably more likely to see a UGA shirt or
Georgia Tech shirt than you would see a KSU shirt.
And so I think it began to create culture,
our own identity for student life,
and a place to have
fun and have a great experience, not just in education.
It's the classic. We were
predominantly a commuter school,
and now we're building more of a residential campus.
>> One of the things I forgot when I sent you
the email the other day is that one of
Betty Siegel's visions was
also an athletic program at all.
We didn't have any intercollegiate
athletics before she arrived.
>> So important. I'm grateful
for those things that so many leaders planted,
and obviously, Betty Siegel planted so much here.
But I think you have to decide,
do you want to be more of a traditional campus?
Do you want to be a non-traditional campus?
They're just elements of a traditional campus,
residence life, dining,
student experiences a robust student affairs program.
Athletics is a huge part of it.
We have about 450 athletes, roughly.
I think we play across men and women's
about 18 sports men's and women's.
We have great academic athletes.
So our athletes do well,
which I think is important.
So if you talk to our coaches,
you talk to our AD they
want our students to succeed in the classroom,
and they want them to succeed on the field.
And that's not just talking.
That's not just a statement.
That's a real thing.
And so super proud of our athletics.
I also think athletics will do more in
the future in terms of
helping us be known as a university.
We know whether we like it or not,
that that's a reality that
we can be known for a lot of things,
but athletics tends to get attention on
a national scale really more than anything else.
I'd love to see us capitalize on that.
>> Well, let me ask
the question just slightly differently.
I remember in the early days,
we were so anxious to
grow that we let students register right up
almost to the last minute so
that they could go to Georgia State or somewhere else
and not get the courses they want and
come to Tennessee at the last minute if they wanted to.
We were really excited when the numbers
grew by another hundred or 1,000.
>> Sure.
>> Whatever. But on the other hand,
places like University of Georgia
could be as big as they want to be,
and they have a pretty good idea
of how big they want to see.
So I guess my question is,
how big is too big,
or what is let me rephrase that.
Do we have any goal in mind of how big we want to be,
or is there a certain stage
we're going to say enough so enough?
>> I think it's a great question and it's I think it's
almost an obvious question given
the tremendous growth that we've had as
an institution and how fast we've grown.
I certainly understand and respect the question.
I would never say we're going to
cap enrollment at any place.
I think what we have to do is to grow strategically.
We have to make sure if we admit a student,
we can serve a student by serving a student,
we're going to make sure that they can get classes,
that they have the support that they need.
There was a time when we were growing so fast,
we couldn't necessarily guarantee
that the students would get
the schedules that they needed.
And really, we shouldn't admit if
we can't make sure that they can get those schedules.
So the intent from
an enrollment perspective would be that we would have
a clear articulated strategy
of what we want to do with enrollment.
So you have a steady growth at the undergraduate level,
I'd like to see growth about one to 1.5%
a year and then a very intentional growth at
the graduate level to where we're always keeping
graduate at a minimum of 10% of our overall enrollment.
Be nice, it'd be 15% of overall enrollment.
So, rowing at graduate also fits
our research profile as well as an R2 institution.
There's also something,
and Tom, I don't know if you've heard about this.
There's also something called the enrollment cliff
that is looming right now,
and that is expected to hit strong in 2025.
I think we're already seeing it now,
and certainly lots of universities are seeing it,
especially in the northeast and throughout the country.
There were fewer babies born during
the great recession during 2008,
2011, so that means there are
fewer middle school students
and high school students right now.
The pool of students to go to
college is smaller than it's been in decades,
and that's going to impact all of us.
So I don't think we grew in the last few years,
I think because of the quality of our programs.
I think because of who we are
as an institution and our reputation.
I also think it's because of
our location and where we are.
I don't think we had to be super
intentional about that strategy.
I think in the future to grow at
a steady rate, a predictable rate,
we will have to be much more intentional than we
ever have been with enrollment strategy.
There are just fewer students
to go to college now than what there
were really throughout the time
that you've had your career in hiring.
>> Well, I came at the ideal time
because all the baby boomers were going.
>> Yes, correct.
>> Just a little older than the baby boomers.
>> Correct.
>> There are plenty jobs there.
>> That's right.
>> But that's interesting. I hadn't
thought about the Great Recession as a problem.
I wonder if the pandemic is going to be
the same thing 18 years from now.
>> And it very well could be.
I don't know what the demographics are for that time.
This is expected to last until the early 2030s.
It's for the foreseeable future.
>> Well, I keep seeing the cranial higher education
, junior college,
especially seems to have been hit
hard with the pandemic [inaudible].
>> Well, I think it would be a mixture,
probably of the pandemic and the expected cliff.
The pandemic certainly changed.
So our enrollment has been up
the last couple of years pretty
dramatically during the pandemic.
It was also during the time
that test scores were suspended for a period of time.
And so it's hard to know, really,
it's hard to have good clean data
on who these students are that came to us,
and would they have come to
us if test scores had been in place or not.
So we need to let a lot of that
settle so that we have good information to move forward.
But we will have, in fact,
I think I have a meeting next week where we're talking
about a very intentional enrollment strategy.
So it'll be more important now than
ever coming out of the pandemic, certainly,
but this enrollment cliff could change the nature
of a lot of
enrollment patterns throughout
the state and throughout the southeast.
>> There's a question I had, and I think maybe
the rest of the interview is going to
be related to it in some ways,
but the difficulty in managing enrollment growth,
and you've already started talking about this
with strategic planning, what have you?
And I guess what you were saying,
too about making sure that
we've got courses for people who are coming,
advisement fits into that too.
What have we done on advisement
that's different in recent years?
>> So while I was provost,
we hired a boatload of advisors,
so we really hired
probably 25-30% more advisors than we had before.
During that time, we talked about
having a hybrid approach to advising
where the advisors were decentralized into the colleges,
and the value you have with that is
that those advisors really learn those disciplines.
If you're in the business school, for example,
they're going to know what it means to get accepted to
the business school and
the core requirements that you have,
and then they'll understand
across the different majors that they offer.
The centralized part of that was
some centralized control to
have some standardization across the colleges.
What we're moving to right now is
a more purely centralized model.
So we have to be giving consistent messages to students.
Advisors are a great way to do that.
And so we need to have
better data to help advise our students,
and having a way to get that
to the advisors so that they can
understand how best to guide or advise a student.
A lot of that requires some
standardized training on the advisors,
really to help them
be more professional in
the way that they interact and communicate,
and they need the information
to be able to advise the students.
So we need to do a little bit better job
in that space than what we've done in the past.
So we're looking at restructuring that,
but in the Provost's office is
handling that right now, but incredibly important.
>> So are we away from
all the facts that all are advisors?
>> As far as I know, we don't have
any, and I may be wrong on that.
I don't know across every college and every department,
but for the most part, there's not faculty advising?
>> Really, my goodness.
Well, that's changed since 2011.
>> Sure.
>> That's interesting. But I
noticed that it looked that way in
humanities and social sciences.
>> I think it's true across campus.
>> Another question that certainly related to
good advising is
retention and graduation rates and what have you.
I was looking in the fact book,
and it looks like
there hasn't been a whole lot of change in
the six-year graduation rate in
the last several years: 43% in 2017,
46% in 2018, 47% in 2019,
47% again in 2020.
>> It's going in the right direction,
Tom, so we're going to be happy about it.
[LAUGHTER] Well, 43 now we're at 48% this year.
So 43 to 48 is a good jump, it's still not good enough.
Our long-term goal for 2028,
five years from now, six years from now,
we want to be at 60%.
>> Sixty?
>> Sixty percent. Now, that's an ambitious goal.
But also remember, I have
this fundamental statement or
philosophy that if students can't get glasses,
they can't graduate on time and we struggled with that,
especially in our Gen ed courses
in science and math and in humanities and
social sciences as we grew
dramatically in some years we were growing 4,
5, 6% in a fall semester.
>> And I don't think we
did all that we could do to source
those classes and to make
sure those units and those departments
had the teaching resources
they needed to serve those students.
President Whitten made that a
top priority when she was here,
and I'm forever grateful.
So in the last few years,
you've seen massive hiring of new faculty and
massive focus on waitlists,
and are students able to get the classes that they need?
Not just the classes they want,
but the classes that they need.
And so I think we've done
a good job in getting focused on that.
So I hope that we continue to
see that steady change, and certainly,
I'd like to see those percentage points go up
2-3 a year as opposed to one.
So students have to get the classes they need.
They also need the supplemental instruction.
They need the tutoring that they need to be successful.
Not all of our students need that,
but many of our students need that.
And then you go back to this issue of advising.
Sometimes students are not
getting advised in a timely manner.
We still don't have required advising here at KSU,
which means students can
do their own schedule for a period of time.
So I think we need
to consider if we need to have mandatory advising.
But again, we need to get the data,
the information to the students.
I think there's still work that we
can do to look at our curriculum
to see if any of our curriculum can be simplified.
One of the things that can slow
students down are prerequisites.
And so if a particular curriculum was
established 25 years ago, have we re-evaluated?
Are those the right courses?
Is that the right sequence?
It's not my job to do.
It's the faculty's job to do that.
But to ask the question,
is this the sequence in which
these courses need to be taught?
When students change majors
from one major to another major,
are we helping them do that as efficiently as possible?
We never ever want to lower the rigor,
but we have to examine what we're doing.
We can't just do the same thing 5, 10,
15, 20 years and think that it's good.
That's not usually the case.
So there are so many things that we need to look
at to make sure that we're serving our students well.
And I will never ever ask any faculty member to lower
their rigor and their class to do anything that doesn't.
In fact, I think we should always strive for
how can I challenge my students more, not less.
But if there's some things that we're doing
because we did them 20 years ago,
or sometimes we do things
because this is the way it says to do them,
and we haven't examined it in
a while. We need to look at that.
There are a lot of things that we can
do to move that needle.
I think we have to recognize that a big thing that we're
doing is making sure that we can
get classes on the books,
and we just didn't always do that.
>> Well, I think there was a time for that.
And '40s are pretty good compared to what it was I
think maybe at the beginning
of Dan Papp's administration.
I think we may have even been in the '20s at that point,
and all of a sudden,
we started focusing on graduation rates.
But I guess the other maybe question
is who is the typical Kennesaw student nowadays?
Because there was a time when
the average student age undergraduate was 27,
and our bread and butter was
these women that their kids were off to nursery school,
and they were coming back to school,
the non-traditional students,
and oftentimes going part-time
and so they didn't necessarily get through in six years.
>> Sure.
>> Are those students still here today,
or are they overwhelmed by the traditional age students,
or who is our student today?
>> So I think it changes a little bit every year,
but I'm going to put a percentage out there
that I think is pretty accurate for right now.
We're about 80% traditional age.
>> Eighty percent.
>> Eighty percent is 18-22.
So whereas when I got here 20 years ago,
we were probably 80%.
>> The other way.
And like you said,
the average age was 27 or 28.
So we are definitely
more a destination institution for students that
are graduating from high school and coming straight
into college than ever before.
We're also a much more diverse campus
than we have ever been.
We are a majority minority campus
now in terms of the students that are here,
which is extremely exciting and also needs to
dictate some of the student support
and services that we provide.
We have students that
are a lot of first-generation students,
and we don't really have
a very targeted first-gen program right now.
And so we need to look at that and
look at what we need to do for first-generation students.
In my own experience,
I had a dad who went to college,
but I also had sisters and
a brother that went to college,
and so I watched them go to school.
I knew what it meant to graduate from college,
and not everybody has that.
And so we need to really carefully look at
our student body and make sure that
we have the services and support that they need.
And a big part of that is financial, big part of it.
I think we're a great value in terms of the tuition,
and we do everything we can to keep our fees low.
But we don't have
enough scholarship support for our students.
We have about 4% of our students get scholarship.
>> Only four?
>> Correct. And 75% have needs.
So it's a huge gap.
>> Wait a minute. Say that again, 75% have
need and 4% have scholarships?
>> Have needs for a scholarship at 4%.
Again, we just have to focus
on a raiser focus on raising dollars for them.
>> Student Success Steering Committee,
is that something new,
or has it been here a while?
>> No. The Student Success Steering Committee
was an observation that when I
was provost that we had a lot of effort.
So I fundamentally believe our campus has
always cared about student success.
I believe faculty care about it deeply.
>> We had a Vice President for Student Success.
>> Correct.
>> Which used to be called Dean of Students.
>> Who was the VP of Student Success?
>> I guess the first one was Nancy King.
>> So what I think of as Student Affairs Division.
>> Student Affairs Division.
>> Anyway, I think we have
a tremendous heart for the success of our students.
But oftentimes because we're so big and we grew so fast,
a lot of the work is done in units and in silos.
And so really on Day 1 of becoming Interim President,
I formed that Student Success Steering Committee,
and that includes units that,
if I think about it,
are engaged intensely in student success.
So you've got the provost on there.
Obviously, the academics is incredibly important.
The VP of Administration is on there, Tricia Chastain.
Tricia oversees Residence Life.
Residence Life is a big part of success.
Student Affairs, same thing.
You think about what goes on in
the classroom is so important,
and certainly students aren't going to
graduate if they're not successful in the classroom,
but also the experience of being
at KSU and what that means is so important.
Student Affairs, Residence Life
play a huge role in that.
Our Chief Diversity Interim Officer
is also on that committee
because we need to think about how we need to better
serve all of our student body.
And so that committee was really tasked, first of all,
for just putting on the table
all the effort that's going on in
these student success initiatives
and then how we could weave
them together and coordinate them better going forward.
>> You had mentioned diversity a few minutes ago,
and being a majority minority now,
I looked up those figures recently, 48% White,
which I guess means non-Hispanic White in our figures,
and about 25% Black,
but another 5% reported two or more races.
And then you had all the
Asian background and what have you.
We're pretty diverse. Cobb County has
become much more diverse too.
>> Increasingly diverse. Correct.
>> The last figure I saw on
Cobb County 50.2% non-Hispanic White.
So Cobb County is right on
the cusp of being majority minority also.
>> Minority as well.
>> Because we draw students from
far and wide these days,
and not just Cobb County.
But still, we're reflecting
the place where we are in that growing diversity.
>> Correct.
>> Well, you might want to talk about this,
but I guess diverse issues in
higher education ranked KSU in
the Top 20 universities for
bachelor's degrees earned by African Americans.
>> I think it's just indicative of our student body.
And obviously, when we
have a large number
of African Americans that are taking classes here,
we're going to fit in that category.
So I think it's wonderful.
I think we have to do more to understand
our student body and to structure
it differently than we have before.
We're still behind,
and we will be behind for a while,
that our faculty and our staff don't
reflect our student body,
and that's going to be an issue.
It's an issue across higher education,
and it's going to take a while for that to be addressed.
But I think it's a problem in
that we need to have mindsets that understand
our students and that can help
develop programs for our students
that will help them be successful.
So we have to do our best to address in that area.
>> I know as far back as the '80s, Jerome Ratchford,
came here to work with minority students
and help them succeed and did a whole lot of things.
Could you just say a little bit more
about the effort today to particularly,
well, you mentioned first-generation students,
but maybe minority students, particularly.
I know we've got a number of
people in administrative positions to deal with.
>> Sure.
>> Could you talk about that a little bit?
>> So in our Office of Diversity,
Sonia Toson leads a number of programs,
and these are programs that are
targeted towards specific communities.
And so they've been very
successful in terms of having
these targeted programs to serve certain communities.
The issue is one of scalability,
and that we need to do more to scale these programs.
Given that we have more and more students
of these demographics,
we need to have more resources invested in these programs
that have proven to be successful to scale them up.
So one of them that I'm always just
really fascinated about is
a program called Achieve Atlanta.
So Achieve Atlanta is a program
in Atlanta proper that
works with Atlanta public school systems.
And it identifies students that have the propensity to go
to college, usually ethnic minority.
They have the ability to go to college,
but they may not have the mindset to go to
college or the example to go to college.
They identify these students when they're
young and then they work with them
to plant this idea of going to
university in their minds
and work with them to help them be successful,
and then they go to colleges.
Before we started formally working with Achieve Atlanta,
we had students from
Achieve Atlanta that had chosen to come to KSU.
Achieve Atlanta reached out to us.
I think at that point,
and I'm not going to get the exact year,
we had about 18 of
their students here, and we didn't know it.
And so we began, and what they want is they said,
hey, they've been successful and they've made it.
They've gotten accepted to college.
We want to make sure they graduate from college.
So now we have a team of individuals and graduation
coaches that work with those students and
help navigate college along with them,
and as they face challenges,
help them to overcome.
When you talk about a graduation coach,
that's a pretty expensive proposition,
but yet it's been found to be successful.
And so that's just one example
of a program that is having an impact.
But the real challenge for us is scalability.
And I find I say that all the time
that 43,000 plus students,
how do we create an identity among all of these?
What does it mean to be an owl?
What does it mean to be a part of Owl Nation,
and how do we create that identity?
It evolves some over time,
but do we need to also be intentional about that?
That's an issue of scale.
It's the same thing with serving
now a majority of minority students on our campus.
And how do we navigate that?
How do we support them best?
And some of it is understanding,
make sure that we understand,
but also it's sourcing
and having the resources to do that.
>> It looked to me in the fact book that we're still
about 2/3 White in terms of
faculty and about 10% African American.
I know we've been working on this since the '70s.
But could you talk a little bit
about Kennesaw's effort to diversify the faculty more?
>> So it's two things. You have to be a place
that diverse faculty want to be and diverse staff too.
It's both faculty and staff.
So you have to make sure you're
a place people want to be,
and that's a constant effort.
That's constant work to make sure that we're
doing what we need to be to be an attractive place.
I think we've got some work to do in
that space, I really do.
You also look at your hiring practices,
and you have very frank conversations about what it means
to hire diverse faculty and the diverse staff.
I certainly get asked this question a lot
by students themselves that want to
see more examples of individuals that
look like them or have been on
similar paths as they have been.
And so it's a priority and it's also a challenge.
So one of the things we have to think about are
just the pathways of folks to get here.
How do we make pathways for diverse faculty
to come to KSU and diverse staff to come here?
Also, what can we do?
So if you're talking about the pathways,
what are we doing to help produce
faculty and staff of color?
So when we have the number of PhD programs
that we have and doctoral programs on our campus,
we need to be intentional about helping
to recruit future faculty,
future staff into those programs.
So we should be a part
of the solution to the big problem,
and that is a shortage of folks in the field itself.
I've been very appreciative of
the leadership that Sonia Toson has done in this space,
and we talk a lot about what it means to
be truly inclusive on a campus and
for people to belong
for them to be able to be
their authentic self and to be able to
voice what they feel and to be able to have
an impact out of their expertise that they want to have.
But it takes work. You don't
arrive at a place and say that you're there.
And it's absolutely all of our jobs.
It's not just Dr. Tosin's job.
It's all of our jobs.
They're doing some really great work right now in
the hiring process in terms of having
information to search committees
about how do we make sure that we have a great pool.
We want to hire the best people possible.
But one of the ways you do that is you
make sure you have a diverse pool,
and you make sure that you are
doing everything you can to have
the best pool possible, and what that means.
We've done this throughout the history
of KSU at different points in time.
And different best practices emerge every few years,
and ways of thinking about this and doing this work.
So Sonia and her team are rolling out
really a training session right now,
a training program right now for our search teams,
which I think is really important.
You have to be persistent and intentional.
>> I'm shifting gears a little bit.
I was looking back and
surprised that we weren't even in
R3 until, I think, 2015.
And then I guess,
late 2018, by,
I guess, the Carnegie classification,
we had much enough external funding and doctoral degrees
granted to the [OVERLAPPING] R2.
Can you say something about the Office of Research?
>> Sure.
>> I had to look them up
the other day to
find a person who was working over there,
and I was surprised how many people
at the Office Research now.
>> Sure. So we have a target
to grow our external funding by 20% a year.
>> 20% a year.
>> Yeah. And we're at about,
I think, just under 13 million right now.
We hit 18% this past year, so we're right there.
So our target is to grow by 20%
a year. How do you do that?
One of the most important things that you do is you build
an infrastructure to support our faculty in research.
And if you're going to be doing external funding,
they've got to write grants and you have to
have a team that can help
support on the grant writing side.
But also once the grant is awarded,
you need a post award team.
Because you really want the faculty that has
the talent to write the grant, secure the grant.
While they'll have to do some grant administration,
you mainly want them to do the research,
and so you have to have that team
that encompasses those faculty members
to help support them. A big focus that
our vice president of research, Dr. Corso,
has been doing in the two or three years that
she's been here is
training faculty that are interested in grant writing,
and where their field is conducive to grant writing,
training them how to do that and giving them seed money
and making sure they understand the process.
Nobody needs to just waste time writing a grant that's
not even in the right lane towards being successful.
And so people that have done it can
mentor those of us
who have not done it but want to get on that path.
And so there's also another part of
it is as we look at growing that external funding by
20% a year is making sure we have
the right faculty and making sure
that we're hiring faculty
consistent with our research mission.
That's important as well.
So if we want to grow by 20% every year,
one way is you make sure that you're
hiring faculty that know how to do that.
And not every faculty member obviously because
we still have a strong teaching mission as well,
but that you have a cadre of faculty that can come
in and they're intrinsically motivated to do it.
That's what they want to do.
And then we help support them through
this infrastructure that Dr. Corso is building.
So very, very pleased with the expertise that she brings
and also just with
her intentionality to do a lot of great work.
>> I've been focused on that
recently when Nicholas Kadanka not too long ago.
>> Good.
>> We're finishing editing the transcript.
>> Nice.
>> He's brought in the National Science Foundation Grant
every three years since 2006.
>> That's amazing, isn't it? Amazing.
>> And he certainly knows how to write a grant.
>> He does. He's impressive.
>> [inaudible] What's the R2 roadmap?
Could you say that a little bit?
I know that got updated recently,
can you talk about what the idea is?
>> Sure. So President Whitten
launched the Arch Roadmap
when she was our president and that
was probably in about early 2019 that
she did that and mainly the graduate dean,
myself as provost and then the VPR,
Vice President of Research,
we coordinated that process and it was very iterative.
We also worked very closely.
Now, I was provost at the time.
We worked very closely with
the colleges and with the deans.
But ultimately, what came out
initially was this framework.
That's actually very simple.
It's very pragmatic.
There's nothing overwhelmingly complicated about it.
And I really appreciate this because I think it
was Dr. Whitten's way of saying,
hey, let's focus on the basics.
Let's do those basic things that we
need to do and let's do them really well.
So what are the things we need to do?
We need to be great in undergraduate research and we
need to move the graduation rates.
I said undergraduate research.
We need to be great at undergraduate programming
and we need to move the graduation rates.
So all these things, Tom,
that we've talked about with respect to
advising and student success,
making sure that we had enough faculty to teach so that
our undergraduates could be
successful and that our graduation rate,
as I mentioned earlier,
that's where that target for 2028, 60%.
That's where it stated in
the R2 roadmap under the undergraduate pillar.
So it's really this idea about excellence in
undergraduate education and what
are some metrics for that.
So that was number 1. Number 2 was to grow
the graduate programs to be
10% of our overall enrollment,
and that would be enrollment and graduate programs.
But also to make sure that any programs that we put
on the books are programs that are
really relevant to the marketplace.
So a lot of
corporations and organizations are really craving
graduates in the fields of science in
the fields of computer science
and engineering and business.
So you've seen a lot of those types
of programs be put on the books.
And then the third area was this metric that we just said
about research where we're going to grow
external funding every 20%.
How do we build a research infrastructure.
When I became interim president,
we updated added another pillar
called the community pillar.
How can we make sure that we build
an inclusive campus here internally,
but also how can we connect
more with the external community?
So the roadmap is really very simple.
Right now the roadmap has excellence
in undergraduate, row graduate,
build that research infrastructure and make sure that
we build a good community internally,
but also connect more externally.
So there's nothing overwhelmingly complex about that,
but it's also the basics.
Are we really focusing on these basics?
And then when you say it gets updated,
what happens is the academic units
each year, say, this year,
so for academic year '22-'23,
we're going to focus on
those four pillars by doing these things.
Now remember, if you've got a target
in the undergraduate one,
of a graduation rate of 60% by 2028,
we need to make sure that we're doing the work in
the colleges that will move us towards that.
So this year, we have a dashboard that each dean
has where the dean can look at
what things they need to do better
in their college to help move
their majors and their programs
along their students along on that graduation rate.
Same thing with how are they growing the research.
So the roadmap helps us
make decisions about how
we allocate resources to support these things.
If a dean comes and wants to do a new graduate program,
but we don't think it's going to have
great demand in the marketplace,
we're not going to be able to move forward
with that because number 1,
we wouldn't get it approved
at the university system office.
But number 2, there's no reason to
put resources into something that's
not going to impact according
to the strategy and what we're trying to do.
>> I guess what was confusing me about
the R2 roadmap is it's only partially about research.
It's what kind of institution should an R2 be?
>> I love that. And I appreciate that.
So it is a little bit confusing because it has
that R in there. The research.
But what we've tried to do is ask all of
our colleges to look
at other R2 institutions as their peers.
And so what does
undergraduate programming look like at an R2?
What does research infrastructure look like at an R2?
What does growth and graduate programs look at an R2?
So it helps us to select
peers for us to go out and look at.
But I do understand why that it's confusing.
I think with President Whitten at that moment in time,
it was appropriate for us to say, hey,
research is going to be
a big component of who we're going to be in the future.
And I think that having that in the title
of this de facto strategic plan was pretty important.
I absolutely understand why
that can be a wee bit confusing.
But one of the biggest things that
we did in the context of roadmap
is to invest more in
the research infrastructure without a doubt.
We've also added, I guess,
at least two, if not three new PhD programs.
So that's in the graduate area.
So they all relate, they all connect.
We're really impressive in undergraduate research,
so just super pleased
with the work our faculty doing that space.
[OVERLAPPING] Our faculty,
I think that have a passion for
undergraduate research and for working with students,
it's such a benefit to those students
because they get that mentorship of the faculty member.
They get really advanced analytical training,
I think that happens,
education that happens, critical thinking.
I was at one of our science events
this past week and the students who were
engaged in undergraduate research were
doing a poster session
and they were presenting their research.
My goodness. So you're standing by those boards and
those students are talking about
their chemistry program or their physics program,
the research that they've done,
and it's so impressive.
Not only is the work impressive
but their ability to communicate about.
I'm a business person,
so it's a language I don't understand,
but just profoundly impressed by what they do.
We've also increased funding for that partnership,
the partnership of the faculty member
with the students so the student can
get some resources to help do that research.
Dr. Buddy coordinates.
>> [inaudible]
>> Absolutely. And Amy was
just the pivotal individual that allowed
the university to host NCUR,
which is a National Conference on Undergraduate Research,
which I think was a defining moment.
>> In 2019.
>> Yeah, I think it was a defining moment
for this institution,
and I think it helped a lot of us.
So business doesn't do a lot of undergraduate research,
and so I didn't have a lot of
history or understanding of that.
But when you see something like NCUR or quite frankly,
when you see these poster sessions,
it's a light bulb went off for me at
one poster session that I went to it's been
four or five years ago that Amy was hosting.
And just seeing the ability of
these students to talk through the work they've done.
And the work is impressive.
Their ability to communicate about it is
as equally impressive and they're proud.
It's such a personal experience.
It's not just reading it in a journal,
which is fabulous as well,
but it's the students interacting
with their audience as well as the material.
>> I used to think it was ironic that the reward for
doing a whole lot of research is that you
got a smaller teaching load.
And yet, I guess if you have a smaller teaching load,
you can do more mentoring if you're so
inspired with the students working with you.
>> Sure. Again, I used the term intrinsic because I think
the faculty members who do that have to be
intrinsically motivated to do it and they see value and
worth in it and
it's fun the event that I was at this past week.
There were faculty there and they were
very proud of the students
and the work that they had done.
>> Well, I have a few more things
I wanted to talk about with you.
>> Please.
>> We've mentioned service,
but I know you've
always done a whole lot of things in your community.
Would you like to say something about
that and maybe the importance of
community service and maybe a side question on this,
do we still reward faculty for doing community service,
I know we don't do it the way we used to.
>> So I think most of the time we reward,
it has to be service in
terms of your last question there.
I think it has to be service related to the mission of
the university and the mission to higher education.
So that type of service,
certainly, in fact, I think more
engagement that our faculty do the better.
It's not a huge de facto percentage of their workload.
I think it's 10% typically.
And so oftentimes, that work is done internal service,
but certainly external service is valuable.
It just needs to be related to the mission of
the university and it should be rewarded.
We exists as a member of the community.
So we as an institution are
not an isolated island of ourselves.
So we're not an ivory tower.
So we exist as a member of our community.
We exist for the benefit of
really the taxpayers of Georgia and the state of Georgia.
And so we must see
ourselves as a member of the community,
whether that be, the Kennesaw community,
Marietta, Cobb County,
the State of Georgia, the City of Atlanta.
So we exist to have an impact in that way.
And I think we're better when we have
our receptacles into the community and we take feedback,
but also when we go out and impact the community.
So I've had an opportunity to
serve on a number of boards,
and those are great opportunities for me
in the leadership roles that I'm in
because I'm connecting with other people.
And it never fails that people don't say,
hey, I'd love for KSU to think about XYZ program.
I'd love to hire more of your students.
It's an availability of
the institution that is very tangible,
I think when we're in the community.
>> [inaudible]
>> That's right.
>> Are you still involved with
the Cobb community fountation?
>> I am not. So when I became provost,
I stepped down from that role,
but I certainly, enjoyed my time on that board
and met some wonderful people that I'm so
connected with today. It's a great board.
>> Was Tommy all good and running it at that time?
>> He was not the chair at that time,
but I believe still connected with.
I don't know Tommy personally,
but I've certainly heard his name many times.
>> [inaudible]
>> Agree.
>> You've been here forever.
>> For a long time.
>> Junior Achievement of Georgia,
you were on that for?
>> I was on that board for
a while, and what a great program?
I wasn't really familiar with
Junior Achievement until I got on the board.
And during that time, very innovative
leader of Junior Achievement, Georgia.
Probably the innovative leader
of Junior Achievement in the nation and he really created
a different model where Junior Achievement
gets embedded into
high schools and entrepreneurial training
is embedded into the high school.
And so real honored to be a part of that and what they do
at the Junior Achievement Discovery Center.
>> I guess our presidents have
historically been involved with the Com Chamber.
>> I am a member of the Com Chamber.
In fact, was at a meeting earlier this week.
So I'm on the executive board of the Com Chamber.
I think I'm doing their monthly events are called
Marquee Monday so I'm going to be
the Marquee Monday speaker in November.
Work with their leadership all the time.
And some of their leadership is on our foundation board.
So again, just this
interconnectedness. It's very important.
>> Anything else that you'd like to say
about your community service?
>> I am just grateful for the opportunity,
and I just think it's incredibly important.
I did a lot of that type of work when I was dean,
not as much when I was provost.
Provost is more of an internal role,
but I would enthusiastically return to it
as president. So important.
>> Well, before I forget it,
we've gone through a pandemic in
the last several years in the country and for a while,
I guess, just about all the classes
or all the classes were on land.
And how difficult was that to
manage a pandemic along with
everything else that you have to do?
>> It's funny to think about that
in retrospect now because
you really have to think about it as it emerged.
>> And I wanted to ask you too,
where are we in fall 2022?
Guess we're over now in terms of [inaudible]
>> For all practical purposes, it is over.
When you think about COVID 19,
we treat it like we do any other illness.
So the student goes to the student center
and there test positive,
it is up to them to let
their faculty member know, that type of thing.
So we're now in a situation where there's
no formal tracing that's going on or anything like that.
So it's now treated just like any other.
And we say this all the time, and it's true,
we stay in touch with our healthcare community
and we stay in touch with Cobb Health and CDC,
but we're following all standard protocols,
which there's not a lot of extra.
Right now, as you're filming this,
monkeypox is the big conversation.
And so we are in conversation
in that respect with respect to monkeypox.
What is interesting is we have increased
cleaning protocols from COVID
19 that have essentially maintained.
So we've not started cleaning less than we were before.
And that's actually helpful because
the same disinfectants that
would help with COVID 19 would also help with monkeypox.
So we're following in that place.
In terms of managing the pandemic,
again, it was all emergent.
And I remember when we made the decision to,
I think, go online very quickly.
Part of what we were thinking was,
well, we've got spring break.
We were one of the latest spring breaks
really in the nation.
And so our thoughts at that time,
when we were going through the immediate shutdown,
which is everybody was shutting down,
and then how are you going to come back up online?
Some of our sister institutions
took a little bit longer to come back up,
but a lot of them were already in their spring break,
and we had a spring break out like 2-3 weeks.
And so in our naivete, we were thinking,
let's go down now, keep it going,
and we'll preserve that spring break and
students can still go on spring break.
You just didn't really know what you're dealing with.
It wasn't the old term that we're all tired of.
Everything was unprecedented as you were
just going with it as it.
>> I thought we're going to be over in a month or so.
>> Correct. So extremely
impressed with how our faculty transitioned to online.
Tomino as an institution,
we have really a strong backbone in terms of teaching
online and so we had a lot of faculty that
were already very well versed in how to teach online,
and a lot of them were very gracious
to help their colleagues who were not.
And we were trying to figure out
technology in the classroom and teaching schedules,
all kinds of things,
and just really impressed with how everybody rallied.
It wasn't perfect by any means,
I don't know that students would
say they had perfect experiences.
I think that's across the education gamut.
Then you have to start thinking
about you're shutting down,
you have to think about, how do you do a summer?
How do you do fall? How do you bring people back?
And really one of
the most difficult challenges
I think I've ever faced in my career.
I'll tell you, President Whitten was masterful at
how she navigated and very intentional, very decisive.
We worked very closely with the system.
University System office would have
regular updates to us with information from the CDC,
information with how to handle
certain situations because now you're getting
into a lot of
HR territory where you don't have staff here,
and what do you do?
And how do you do FMLA?
And just so many
different scenarios that have to be handled.
I'm glad it's over, Tom. [LAUGHTER]
>> I bet. Well,
we run through your transitions
from without really even mentioning them,
we just have merged together.
You're going from dean to
provost to the president, I guess.
But I guess probably should say for the record,
I guess it was January 2019 when you became provost.
>> I think it was February 2019.
>> That's right. It was announced in January,
became effective February 18.
>> There it is.
>> 2019. So you were dean until that time.
>> Correct.
>> And Wynda Nople was interim provost for a while.
>> She was provost,
I don't remember when she started.
I remember her last day was
October 31 of 2018
because it was Halloween. So I remember that.
[LAUGHTER] And that was her last day.
I was in one of her last meetings.
And if you remember, Ron Matson
was the interim for provost
between November and December
and January interim provost.
So he stepped into that role in that period of time.
>> So I guess
when they came in Ken Harmon became interim president.
>> Correct. So Ken Harmon became
interim president in, what was it?
February of 2018, I guess,
and then Linda stepped into that role immediately.
So about that time.
>> So she was there from February until end of October.
>> Until the end of October.
>> And then run and then you came in.
>> Correct.
>> It sounds like
you had a very close relationship
with Pam Whitten. Is that?
>> We did. So Pam
and I worked very closely together, I think.
And I certainly understand
this now being in the president's role,
you've got 11,
12 cabinet members and you work closely with all of them.
Because we're an institution
and the academic mission
is the core mission of the institution.
So obviously, you work very closely with the provost.
But as provost I began to realize
how much reliance we have on all these other units.
Whether it be IT, whether
it be administration where you're
dealing with HR facilities,
same thing with fiscal services.
All legal, all these different areas are so important.
But the academic mission part is really key,
and that's really under the provost.
And so as president
you know that it's a very important area.
Now, Pam had been a provost,
so she knew how to provost.
She knew what that job was.
Pam is extremely bright and has deep knowledge.
She'd been a provost, but she has
deep knowledge obviously in
that area because she'd been there.
But she also had deep knowledge in
all the other areas of the cabinets as well,
probably more so than I've ever seen anyone have
deep knowledge in an area that's not their main area.
So I both learned from her as a provost.
And then obviously, she's a president who had
very distinct things that
she wanted to do and to get done.
So I learned a great deal from Pam and learned
a great deal, very decisive.
As I mentioned, the R2 roadmap a moment ago,
that was a fundamental.
The R2 roadmap are
fundamentals that an institution should be about.
Fundamental. You don't get more fundamental than,
how are you doing undergraduate?
How are you doing graduate?
How are you doing your research?
You just don't get any more fundamental than that.
And I believe she was brilliant and wanting to put
together that plan to
cause us to think on these fundamentals,
especially given the tremendous growth that we had.
Because sometimes, our growth was wonderful.
And let me make sure I say,
I would always rather have the problems associated with
the growth rather than
the problems associated with not growing.
But when you grow, you want to do it strategically
intentionally in a discipline format.
And I think she brought a lot of discipline to
our thinking and to what we needed to do.
>> I know that when you're in R2,
you focus and invest in all the R2 you can do.
But is there any vision for becoming an R1 sometime?
>> Not in my vision right now.
And I say that because I think we have
so much work to do in terms of being in a great R2.
And so if you look at how they classify it,
it's external funding and it's the number of PhDs.
So the number of research doctorates you produce.
So we need to do well on both of those.
I believe we have solidified our R2 status,
we are in good standing on that.
But both of these things are key
in core to our research mission.
So we're going to continue to focus on those.
But there's zero target in mind of saying R1.
Every now and then somebody will tell me that.
They'll actually say to me, well,
I know you want to be R1.
I'm like, I really don't.
I want to be the best R2.
And we've got colleges,
that's really what we put before the colleges,
is how can you be the best R2 in the arts?
How can you be the best R2
in business or in computer science?
That's what we're focused on right now.
>> Is there anything about
your vision for the future that we haven't
talked about in the areas we've looked at?
>> I think we've touched on them.
I'll run through them very quickly.
I think we need to solidify
our position as a research institution.
I think that's incredibly important.
We've got to move our graduation rates,
maybe part that we didn't talk about completely.
When you think about graduation rates,
you're thinking about students
improving their graduation rates and important.
Let's graduate more in four years rather than six.
But I want our students
to have a great experience while they're here,
and I think they do.
I just wanted to be more of
a quintessential KSU experience
and we've got to define what that
means. What does that mean?
So I think we have a lot of
emergent things that are great about KSU,
but what can we do to be more
intentional about that part of it?
I want to see our athletics grow and flourish.
I want us to be more known as an institution.
And whether we like it or not,
I think athletics is a big part of that.
So we'll be doing some things that help
us move the needle in that space.
>> Another thing I had written down is we got
a new campus communication structure.
>> So when I came in as interim,
I wanted to do interim president.
So in 2021 in July,
we put together some standard emails
that come out from the university with
certain priorities for different types of emails.
So I'm not going to get all the names.
So there's KSU announcement that comes out
and then we'll have some routine stuff.
There's news from the nest it has a certain type of.
There's a monthly message that I do,
there's a monthly message that the provost will do.
And so what we wanted to do
is we sat down around the table and we said,
how can we really think about what we communicate?
Because we're a big place and it's hard to communicate.
It's hard to get information to people,
so we need to be intentional.
And by the way, we put together this new structure,
but it is never set.
We're always having to reevaluate
how we can do better on it.
So we have these different options
for different types of news that needs to go out.
So there's one of them if there's an announcement.
Hopefully this fall, we hire a new provost,
and there will be an announcement that will be
set aside that uses one of those mechanisms.
I think that's news from the nest.
I get them confused on which is which.
So that's what we did in that way.
>> Well, hopefully in two or three years
we can come back and interview you again
about all the things that have happened
and how these visions have worked out.
>> That would be fun. I would enjoy that time.
>> Is there anything that we haven't talked about
that you'd like to get into the interview?
>> No, I think we've covered so much,
appreciate the opportunity to do this and just
appreciate the opportunity to talk with you.
>> Thank you very much.
>> Thank you, Tom.