UConn’s new president lining up priorities

Newly arrived UConn President Thomas C. Katsouleas is lining up his priorities, from doubling the university’s funds for research to expanding highdemand programs.

A plasma scientist and inventor, Katsouleas, 61, served as provost at the University of Virginia for four years before coming to Connecticut. Before then, he was the dean of the engineering school at Duke University and a professor at the University of Southern California.

He started at UConn on Aug. 1.

The CT Mirror interviewed Katsouleas in his new office on the Storrs campus.

Question: So why would you, a successful scientist and inventor, want to become a university president?

Answer: Well, you know, I started as a faculty member — in fact, as a researcher. But as a researcher I was teaching and enjoyed that. From there, I was recruited to USC to to be a tenured faculty member. My aspirations really were to have a very successful research group, to teach my students and really advance the field of plasma science and so I was happily doing that. But when I arrived at USC, the dean tapped me and said, ‘We’re having a little trouble with our physics sequence. About half of our students are getting D’s F’s and W’s — withdraws. Can you help take a look at that?’

I got involved working with the physics faculty and we worked together and made some improvements that seemed to help students and I developed an appreciation for sort of working in administration and having a bigger impact than just on my own students. And, from there, it grew.

Q: There’s a lot of discussion about the relevance of higher education and whether it is necessary to get a fouryear degree. How will you keep higher education relevant for high school students and their families?

A: No question it’s changing, and also that the perception doesn’t necessarily match the reality. If you look at Pew Survey results, families across America, students and parents increasingly are questioning whether there’s value in higher education. And yet the data clearly shows a strong correlation between more education and higher employment rates and higher salaries so that’s all in the data but, increasingly, it’s not in the narrative.

And there are a couple of expectations that are emerging. One is that for the first time, parents and students think the most important reason for a college education is to get a job, which seems obvious. But historically that hasn’t been the number one answer. It’s been to get a good education and the intrinsic value of that. So that’s one shift. And, increasingly, they’re questioning whether or not colleges and universities are delivering on that.

Q: What can you do about that?

A: The challenge for us is to change both the perception and the reality. And we’re working on that here at UConn in a couple of ways. We are reshaping and refining our message. We have several ideas on how we convey the message that UConn is for them, if they’re first generation students, if they feel like they’ve been marginalized or left behind by this economy. We give a lot of financial aid and many students from first generation families, in particular, don’t bother to apply for it because they they think it’s beyond them. So we need to strengthen our message about how strong our commitment is to financial aid. That’s one.

And of course that fits very well with who we think we are, both from a faculty point of view and from our state legislators’ point of view, as a land grant university. You know faculty believe we’re in the business of human development and the legislature understands that we’re in the business of workforce development and fortunately the recent research shows those two are not in contradiction at all, in fact they’re synergistic. The same types of experiences correlate with both.

Q: What do you think about the focus lately on encouraging students to earn certificates — to get usable skills — rather than undertaking a fouryear degree in, for instance, the humanities?

A: There’s certainly value to certificates and that kind of training, but it leaves off something that we’re trying to do with a liberal arts education. We’re trying to instill in students identity, agency and purpose and with a certificate you’re trying to instill in students a particular skill. You know for most students, over the course of their careers, their ultimate job doesn’t yet exist. So this is the danger of doing skillbased training — not to mention that the kind of wellbeing that we talked about previously doesn’t come from that kind of learning experience. It may lead to a nearterm job but it doesn’t lead to broader goals in life.

Q: Is there a plan to keep increasing the numbers of students at UConn or is the university at its max for at least awhile?

A: We don’t have a growth plan approved by our board at this point. That is a board level decision and something we’ll be engaging with them and talking about. I think we would like to grow in certain areas. I just visited the nursing school and met some wonderful students who were just come back from summer internships. They were telling me how well prepared they were by our nursing school compared to interns who are coming from other schools. Every single one of them has multiple job offers. There are many areas like that where there’s unmet demand and we’d like to meet that.

The state is in a difficult position to expand the block grants so it’s difficult for us to expand our student base without additional support from the state. And so we’re working now with some very valuable corporate partners in certain areas where they have interest in growing the workforce in areas relevant to their businesses and we’re hoping that that might become a novel path for bridging that gap in the new world.