Curriculum Vitae

Professional Experience

I)     University of Washington (2004 – present)

President
Professor, Evans School of Public Affairs

Chief executive officer for University of Washington with responsibility for all programs and operations of the University, reporting directly to the Board of Regents. The University of Washington is an AAU research university with annual revenues of approximately $3 billion, net assets of more than $3.7 billion and nearly 35,000 full and part-time employees. The University educates over 42,000 regular students and 31,000 extension students and is a national leader among all public universities (2nd among all universities, public and private) in research funding, attracting over $900 million in grants and contracts per year.

Major Accomplishments
 

The following accomplishments are a listing, although not a comprehensive one, of initial efforts undertaken during the first year and a half of my presidency.  As with all other accomplishments listed in these pages, they were achieved with the hard work and dedication of many individuals in the University community, including faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Commitment to Excellence: As one of the nation’s leading research universities and as a linchpin of our state’s economy and our region’s health care, the University of Washington has an established tradition of excellence as well as a responsibility to help maintain our state’s competitive edge. To that end, we have made assessments and initiated planning and implementation processes designed to build on our commitment to excellence in order to foster an environment that will lead to the best possible outcomes for our students and our state.

Leadership: Made new appointments to key leadership positions, including Provost, Chancellor of UW Tacoma, Vice President of External Affairs, Athletic Director, and Deans for the Business School, the College of Engineering, the School of Social Work, the Graduate School, the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and the Information School.

Campus Climate: Launched the Leadership, Community and Values Initiative, a multi-phase effort that will help us to recognize, enhance, and sustain leadership at all levels of the University.

External Affairs: Commissioned an internal study of the University’s preparedness for enhancing its reputation nationally and internationally. Reorganized external relations offices under a newly appointed Vice President, bringing together all government relations offices with media and communications offices and adding a new marketing office.

Diversity: Committed $400,000 to implement recommendations of institution-wide Diversity Appraisal Report, issued in December 2004.

Creation of New Department: With $30 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established a new Department of Global Health, a joint undertaking of the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health and Community Medicine.

Increased Funding: Moved aggressively to put the University on a more competitive financial footing with its peers. Results include:

• 6.5% increase in core education budget
• 7.0% average increase in faculty salaries.

Undergraduate Education: Guided by the strong belief that all UW students should benefit from a truly transformative learning experience, we have revitalized the University’s commitment to excellence in undergraduate education. Steps taken include:

• In collaboration with the Provost’s Office, charged the Committee to Improve the UW Undergraduate Experience to study and make recommendations regarding the attributes of an excellent undergraduate education at the UW.
• Instituted a Common Book program to provide all incoming students with a common intellectual endeavor to help them form important academic and social networks from the moment they arrive on campus.

State Governmental Relations: We have focused time and energy to establish effective working relationships with the State Legislature and the Governor’s Office, pursuing various strategies, including joint lobbying efforts with Washington State University, to secure funding and legislation vital to the future of the University and the state. The results include:

• 10% increase in state financial support (general fund and tuition) in the 2005-07 biennial budget and more than 1,100 new enrollments funded at levels significantly higher than prior biennia.
• Secured almost $10 million in new state funding in a non-budget year session for research initiatives in life sciences, global health and nanotechnology.
• Passage of legislation dedicating $350 million in future tobacco settlement revenues for life sciences research.
• Passage of legislation permitting UW campuses in Bothell and Tacoma to convert form upper division to four-year campuses

Private Fund Raising: In October 2004, we held Come Together Washington, a celebration of University and community achievements that also marked the public launch of Campaign UW: Creating Futures, the UW’s most expansive fundraising effort to date, seeking to raise $2 billion to support students and faculty as they search for solutions and expand their impact on our economy, health, culture, education, and environment. Since that time, the institution has raised over $500 million, for a total of approximately $1.7 billion. Notable successes include:

• Establishment of the University’s first endowed deanship, the Jungers Endowed Deanship in the College of Engineering.
• A $33.3 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for that will allow hundreds of talented students to pursue careers in public service law.
• For the first time in its history, the UW is poised to receive gifts from over 100,000 individuals this current year.

II) Louisiana State University (1999 - 2004)

Chancellor

Chief executive officer for Louisiana State University with oversight over all programs and activities of the University. Responsible for leading LSU in its pursuit of national distinction among American research universities. Direct supervisory responsibilities for all academic and administrative personnel, including all Vice Chancellors, Athletic Director and senior staff members. Represent the University to all constituencies including the LSU Board of Supervisors, Governor’s Office, State Legislature, Congress, state and national media, governmental agencies, donors and non-profit organizations.

Louisiana State University is the state’s and region’s only Research I university. It is a land-grant and sea-grant university, with 31,600 students, research expenditures exceeding $160 million per year and a total annual budget of over $600 million.

Major Accomplishments

LSU’s Flagship Agenda: As the state’s flagship university, LSU has a responsibility to provide the citizens of Louisiana with education, research and service that is competitive with the best public universities in America. To that end, through a highly collaborative effort, we established LSU’s Flagship Agenda. The Agenda is an action plan aimed at establishing LSU as a nationally competitive research university. All efforts to increase funding, gain broader institutional support and promote the University regionally and nationally are focused upon achieving academic distinction. We raised LSU’s sights and expectations and made great progress in all three areas of our mission: education, research and service.

State Governmental Relations: We pursued a number of strategies to work with both the Governor’s Office and the State Legislature, including an ongoing communications program assembling the “Tiger Caucus” and “Tiger PAC,” systematically bringing legislative leaders to campus for specific educational and social events, and working aggressively with the Governor’s staff and cabinet on shared initiatives. The primary goal was to demonstrate the central role LSU plays in the educational, economic and social development of Louisiana and to gain new funding for strategic initiatives. The results included:

• 22% cumulative faculty pay raise over last four years.
• 5% increase in State support during last four years, including $9 million annual funding for new Information Technology Initiative.
• 165% increase in annual capital construction funds (approximately $100 million increase) over four years.
• Legislative approval (requiring 2/3 majority vote of both houses) for tuition increases and new Academic Excellence fee providing a 40% increase in tuition and fee revenues.  Academic Excellence fee funding expended exclusively for more faculty (allowing more course offerings and smaller class size), student aid and graduate assistantships. 

Institutional Advancement: Sharply increased communications and public relations efforts to improve financial, political and emotional support for LSU.  This program included:

Statewide and National Speaking Tours: Routinely held social-informational events for “top-roots” leaders across the state and at national alumni hubs to deliver strategic, focused messages about the successes enjoyed by and challenges confronting LSU.  Included organized meetings with local media and editorial boards in each community.

Redesigned and Targeted Deployment of Print and Electronic Materials: Developed high quality video and audio materials, as well as targeted print materials, to promote specific messages about LSU through continuous mailings and media outlets.  Materials were tailored to specialized audiences including: political and opinion leaders, national higher education leaders, families and prospective students, donors, etc.

Integrated Successful Athletics Program in University Advancement Strategy: Enhanced name recognition and institutional image via a targeted public relations effort, including: PSAs, placements in print and electronic media and public events and appearances in conjunction with athletic events.  Successfully leveraged media attention of football national championship, achieving large-scale exposure for LSU’s academic messages in key media markets.

National Media Placements of Academic Success Stories: To improve national awareness of LSU’s academic strengths, we worked independently and with a professional placement service to place news stories on research and academic successes in regional and national news outlets.  Efforts focused on both broad outlets (e.g. New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American and Wall Street Journal) and professional outlets (e.g. The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Private Fund Raising: LSU began its first serious capital campaign in 1997 with a target of $150 million.  By July 2002, the campaign was completed, having raised over $255 million.  Funding targeted endowed faculty positions, construction projects and scholarships.  Notable successes included:

• 33 Endowed Chairs
• 265 Endowed Professorships
• $14 million for the new LSU Museum of Art, as part of $55 million arts center
• $7.5 million for the Cain Initiative in Science Education
• $15 million for Campbell Family 1000 seat Lecture Hall and Academic Center for Student-Athletes

Creating Nationally Distinguished Research and Graduate Education:  An array of efforts were underway to increase quality and quantity of research and graduate programs, to link these efforts to fields of great importance to Louisiana and the nation, and to strengthen key academic programs so that they competed at the highest levels of academic performance.

Foundations of Excellence Program: In collaboration with faculty planning committees, identified 12 academic programs to be singled out for special investments so as to improve their national academic standing.  Selection was based upon existing academic strength; importance to Louisiana’s economic, cultural and social development; probability of making significant improvements in national standing with available resources; capacity to leverage other funds and willingness of academic units to provide leadership within their fields.  Reallocated more than $15 million to the Foundations of Excellence Programs with significant success in terms of faculty recruitment, improved research and teaching facilities, leveraging of other funding and recruitment of higher quality graduate students.

Aggressively Expanded Federal Relations Effort:  Through focused collaborations with the Louisiana Congressional delegation, we substantially increased federal support for targeted research and service projects, reaching the top 5 nationally in FY2001 and FY2003.  These efforts, for example, yielded over $40 million in current year funding for Homeland Security research and training.  Federal relations efforts most aggressively focused on support for research applications of LSU’s synchrotron light source (CAMD), marine and coastal research programs, federal law enforcement collaborations and Homeland Security.

Information Technology Initiative: Based on the centrality of information technology and computational power to all science and scholarship, we structured a state-wide information technology initiative with the Governor and Legislature that provided LSU with $9 million per year to support research and education in IT fields of importance to the economy.  We created the Center for Applied Information Technology and Learning, which included a new 2.2 Tereflop Beowulf cluster computer.  We relocated a highly talented team from the Max Planck Institute in Postdam to lead the enterprise.  At full implementation, the initiative will allow LSU to bring 40 to 50 new faculty members to campus to work in specific fields of applied IT.

Bioscience Initiative: With the Governor’s Office, we created a state-wide initiative to strengthen the research capacity in several arenas of biotechnology and bioscience at LSU and other Louisiana universities.  The initiative allowed the addition of 10 to 15 new faculty and associated post-doctorates at LSU.

Enhanced Funding for More Competitive Graduate Stipends:  We established a funding plan that combined institutional, state and federal grant funding to add more than $6 million to graduate assistantship funding to improve the competitiveness of graduate student scholarship offers.

Stimulated Greater Grant and Contract Funding: Through changes in administrative structure and personnel, we created an environment more conducive to and supportive of the pursuit of funded research projects.  Progress was encouraging, with the 2002-2003 year’s grant and contract funding exceeding $120 million and total R&D expenditures in excess of $165 million.

Improving the Undergraduate Educational Experience: Initiated a series of programmatic efforts to enhance the undergraduate experience at LSU, many funded through the creation of an Academic Excellence fee.  These included:

Smaller Freshmen Classes: Nearly all freshmen take at least one, and usually two, core courses with no more than 25 students (most are under 20).  This allowed freshmen to develop relationships with faculty members and fellow students in a seminar style environment.

Residential Colleges: Four new residential colleges (with more under development) offered lower division undergraduates an opportunity to link their living and learning experiences.  Faculty members worked and lived within the building, kept office hours for advising, gave lectures in residential classrooms and provided academic support after classes.  Freshmen were paired with upper division students as academic mentors and took classes with fellow residents.  Lectures, activities and cultural events were brought into the halls, creating a strong academic community.

Increased Undergraduate Research and Experiential Learning: Expanded support programs for undergraduate research working directly with faculty through a variety of mechanism (e.g. Chancellor’s Future Leaders in Research program), increased participation in service learning programs and broadened opportunities for leadership development (e.g. the Arden O. French Leadership Institute).

Created Privately Funded State of the Art Undergraduate Lecture Hall and Academic Center for Student-Athletes: Working through the Tiger Athletic Foundation, we planned, designed, raised funding for and constructed a state-of-the-art lecture hall for all students and an academic center for student-athletes, considered by many to be the finest in the nation.  The planning, fund raising and completion of construction took only 22 months.

Improving Undergraduate Standards and Performance : To achieve our academic goals, LSU increased standards, expectations and performance of students, faculty and staff.  We engaged in ongoing efforts to address undergraduate performance through a variety of means, including: 

Increased Admissions Selectivity: Admissions selectivity for freshmen and transfer students was increased twice (2000 and 2002) and again for 2005.  The result was a rise in the average ACT score from 23.5 to 24.4, the highest in LSU history and well on the way toward the goal of 24.5 to 25 by 2005. 

Enrollment Growth: While increasing standards, enrollment grew significantly to a record high of 31,600 students.  Growth occurred both through rising freshmen enrollments and increased retention of LSU students.

Diversity: The diversity of the student body improved as standards increased.  With more aggressive recruitment efforts, enhanced financial aid, improvements in the campus culture and increased presence of minorities in leadership positions, enrollment of African American students increased twice as fast (10.1%) as the total enrollment (5.1%), bringing total African American enrollment to just under 10%.

Freshmen Retention rates: Retention of first time freshmen rose appreciably, from 80% in 1997 to just under 85% for fall 2003.  We believed this progress was attributable to new retention programs (e.g. residential colleges) and increased admissions standards.

Increased Graduation Rates: As a result of a number of years of increased admissions standards and retention efforts, graduation rates rose sharply.  In 1997, six year graduation rates were 47%, while in 2003 the graduation rate reached over 58%.  It is anticipated that the 2004 freshmen class, given its academic qualifications, will have a graduation rate of 63% - 65%, our goal for the year 2005.

Engaging the University with the Community and Beyond: One of LSU’s roles was to deploy its intellectual resources to serve the community, the state and beyond, so as to help address the pressing issues of the day and to engage citizens in the affairs of the University.  It was important for LSU to refocus its efforts on supporting the city of Baton Rouge and reconnect the University with the community.  We did so in a number of ways, including:

University Neighborhood Redevelopment: The neighborhood to the north of LSU was an economically distressed area of the city.  We created new working relationships with the citizens and business leaders of the neighborhood.  By providing staff support, legal and planning advice and political support, we helped create a new business association, winning HUD and HHS grants for design work and for the provision of services to the neighborhood.  LSU was a key partner in a successful bid for a HOPE VI grant from HUD totaling nearly $19 million for urban renewal in the neighborhood.  We also worked directly with major real estate developers for mixed use redevelopments on both the north and south sides of campus.

Partners in Citywide Development Projects: Recognizing that the University’s ability to recruit and retain faculty, staff and students was dependent upon being part of a vibrant community, we were active participants in the redevelopment of much of the city of Baton Rouge through a number of citywide efforts, including: “Plan Baton Rouge,” “Baton Rouge Green” and the Downtown Development District.  The new facilities master plan for the LSU campus was designed to integrate with the planning and development efforts of the city and the state.  We also launched new collaborative efforts with the Baton Rouge Recreational and Parks Commission, particularly centered on rejuvenation of the University Lakes area east of campus.

Improving K-12 Education in Public Schools: LSU was the leading partner with K–12 education in the provision of teacher education and continuing education and professional development for veteran teachers.  We “adopted” two neighborhood schools as professional practice schools in which our faculty and students worked side-by-side with classroom teachers.  As a “Holmes Program” school, the LSU education program offered these schools intensive support and enrichment.  Additionally, we secured substantial private gifts to support the integration of the College of Basic Sciences faculty into the design and delivery of science teacher preparation. LSU also operated a “Lab School” on its campus offering K-12 education to the community.

Partnered with State, City and Nonprofits to Create World Class Arts Center Downtown: To stimulate greater engagement with the Baton Rouge downtown district, we joined forces with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the State to raise funds for and build a $55 million visual and performing arts center—the Shaw Center for the Arts—that houses the LSU Museum of Art, outreach classrooms and studios for the School of Art and a gallery for student and faculty art.  Additionally, the Shaw Center holds a 300-seat, state-of-the-art performing arts theatre, a new home for the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge and a series of art galleries and restaurants, including a rooftop café and sculpture garden overlooking the Mississippi River.  Designed by Schwartz-Silver of Boston, the complex provides a signature building on the Mississippi and has had a transformative impact on the city.

Dramatically Improved Public Opinion: The enhancements in academic performance, active engagement with the state and community and aggressive public relations efforts had a positive impact on public opinion of the strength and value of LSU.  This was reflected in the media, in editorial opinions and in conversations across the state, as well as in the growth in resident and nonresident applications.

Reformed Intercollegiate Athletics into a Highly Successful Program:  It is essential to recognize the important positive role intercollegiate athletics can play within the University, as well as to note the difficulties that can arise from a dysfunctional athletic program.  With this in mind, a series of steps—including a number of key personnel changes—were taken to render LSU’s athletic program more successful in terms of the educational and athletic success of our student-athletes and to assure that the program represented the values of the University and presented itself to the state and the nation in a manner that reflected well upon the University. These actions had a significant positive impact in all regards.

III)      University of Connecticut (1995 - 1999)

Chancellor
Professor of Political Science

Served as chief operating and academic officer for the University with responsibilities for the administration of all activities and resources that relate to the main campus in Storrs and the five Regional Campuses.  Direct supervision of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Administration, Vice Chancellor for Business and Administration, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Vice Chancellor for Information Services, the academic deans and a variety of directors.  Represented the University to outside constituencies, media, the Board of Trustees, Department of Higher Education, Governor’s Office, Connecticut General Assembly and various governmental agencies and private organizations.  Active and successful fundraiser.  Member of the boards of the UConn Foundation, University of Connecticut Educational Properties, Inc., Connecticut Technology Council, Haskins Laboratories, Connecticut Science Center and Sea Grant Senior Advisory Board.