(smooth music) - Welcome to "At Issue", I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much for joining us.

There is a transition going on at Illinois State University, the former president Larry Dietz, has retired after seven plus years there, which made way for a new president with some new ideas and maybe working on implementing some of the old ideas too.

Please welcome to "At Issue", Terry Goss Kinzy, the new president of ISU, and we should say Dr. Kinzy.

- Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

I appreciate the invitation.

- Real quickly I wanna get into the ISU issues, but you have a degree in chemistry from Akron.

You have a degree in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve.

You have post-doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon in biogenetics.

Then you went to Robert Wood Johnson, at Rutgers the medical aspect, and now you're the president of a college or a university.

Why the transition?

- So that's a great question.

I trace it back to when I was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve.

I was privileged to have as my department chair the late Dr. Richard Hanson.

And I saw how much a leader could really make an institution and the department work for the people in it, and I always had that in the back of my mind.

When I went to Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, I was a full fledged researcher, spent all my time in the lab, enjoyed mentoring my students, but it was clear to me that I was looking for the opportunity to learn more about how to do more, to make an institution soar and to serve its students and faculty and fortunately for me over the time I was there I was able to slowly increase my administrative responsibility and at the same time, it could slowly reduce the amount of time in the lab.

So even through the time I was at Western Michigan, I still had a graduate student who graduated, still published two papers this year.

And I have one with colleagues at the national institutes of health that are submitted.

- On molecular genetics?

- On the study of how messenger RNA, which we've all heard a lot about because of COVID-19, is translated into the proteins that work in our body.

So all related to that aspect of science, yes.

- You mentioned COVID-19 so we might as well get this out of the way, the requirements with regard to students, faculty, staff, with regard to safe measures on campus.

- Yes and I have to say I'm very proud of our faculty, students, and staff.

They are working really well with our requirement for a mask in all indoor spaces, we're seeing great compliance.

And then we now require that any student, faculty or staff submit to the university, their vaccine proof, or they're tested once a week.

And what we're seeing is increasing numbers of people that are vaccinated, we're at 87% of our faculty, the last time I checked and 79% of our students in dorm.

So we're seeing really good response and we continue to educate and talk about why people should reassess getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

We have a lot more information than we did four, six months ago, so we're encouraging everyone to talk to authoritative people and reconsider.

- And with your background in mRNA, you can probably carry that message very well.

- I will and I always tell people, people act like mRNA is new, but it's been studied for decades and decades.

And because we have such strong basic research in this country and across the world, we were able to take a technology that had been in development for many, many, many years and quickly leverage it on this problem.

- So this is your first job as a president of the university.

What is the image you want to portray of Illinois State University?

What is the Kinzy administration?

- So for Illinois State University, it's the story of excellence.

Our goal is not to be the biggest or the smallest, our goal is to be the best in what we do and to have a university that's big enough to offer lots of opportunities, but small enough for individual attention.

And that tradition is one that I'm very proud to continue.

For me what I'd like to see is us to continue to focus on innovation and focus on entrepreneurship, looking for the new ideas, promoting a ground up ideas, approach to how we look for opportunities in higher education, in research, in scholarship, and keep moving forward.

- Along those lines, a new major that fits right into that image is the cybersecurity major.

This is an example of where you wanna take the university, at least in part?

- I think what's really exciting about the cybersecurity major is one is, we had support from state farm for getting this program forward.

This is a national need that's recognized out in the, in the United States and in the region.

And so responding to the needs of our community is one of the main things that universities should do.

Secondly, we know it's something that students are really interested in.

It's a chance for them to apply the knowledge that they can get at the university to real life problems.

And that's really attractive.

And in fact, I'm pleased to say that the newly remodeled space in Julian Hall is having its first courses this fall.

So I'm hoping that we outgrow that space and we're looking for opportunities to grow the program.

- And in terms of needs in the nation, you're expanding the nursing program.

- That's correct.

We are working to expand our simulation center, which is a critical aspect of efficient training of nurses so that they can get that hands-on practice, not just in their rotations, in the clinic, but actually on campus.

And I think there's more that we can do there.

We are certainly looking to meet the need for nurses at all levels, nurse educators, our frontline nurses.

I think we all recognize they've always been incredibly valuable, but now I hope we appreciate them more and that we can interest more people in serving in that way.

- And then one other major, actually you are in the process of trying to create a college of engineering to kind of elevate the interest in engineering at ISU.

But where is that right now?

That because you just can't do that on your own.

- No, this has been a process that started several years ago with a very careful market analysis by the folks at Illinois state and using some external experts in this area as well.

The proposal was submitted at the end of June to the Illinois board of higher education.

It's there now for consideration.

And so we're hoping in the next month or two, it will be come forward for any further questions and for approval, so we're very excited about that.

We've gotten some feedback, we've been responding to questions that the board has.

So it's right in the middle of that process.

- You mentioned the board of higher education.

Let's talk a little bit about their role in terms of finances.

I don't even know where to start with finances at ISU because the board obviously advocates for more money.

If I understand the state budget, it's about level for higher education, maybe us just a slight increase.

So why is it that Illinois State University is at the bottom of all the public universities in receiving funds on a per student basis?

- That's a great question.

It was one I asked when I came here to interview for the job because certainly our institution provides an excellent product, right?

Our students are fantastic graduates when they leave.

Part of it is historic because the budgets have been flat and they've been historic as our student numbers have remained very stable and other universities have had some losses that will affect that number, but we're more than 40% below the next lowest university.

So there's a historical aspect of this, which is why it's important for us to advocate for getting away from historic budgeting and go more towards outcomes-based and more, current funding models in the state of Illinois for higher education.

- There's a hold harmless clause right now in the funding mechanism so you won't receive any less money.

But how will you as the leader of the university go about saying, we need to be equal to the other universities in terms of funding.

- I think it's demonstrating exactly why we need those fundings and the things that we're not able to do because we don't have the equivalent funding of some of our peers.

I would never wish harm on any of my colleagues or their institutions.

So the whole harmless clause makes complete sense.

For us, it's really showing how this would allow us to invest in our students, invest in the majors that we want to grow, to invest in research and creative scholarship, which is critically important for our students to have those hands-on experience while they're at Illinois state.

So to make sure that we've got the very best faculty at the cutting edge of their field, it's telling the story about what that investment and it really it's an investment by the state, would pay off in terms of again, attracting people to Illinois and having our students stay.

- So when we talk about the fact that Illinois state is at the bottom in terms of per student of funding by the state, as a matter of fact, 14% of your budget comes from the state of Illinois.

86% is from elsewhere, which raises the question of tuition.

How can you go about making sure that tuition remains at a reasonable level when you have these handcuffs on your budget?

- Well, one of the ways that we can do that is by looking at external funding from other sources besides tuition.

So a very robust advancement process where we're working with local donors, our alumni, local corporations that wanna invest in Illinois state because as the example I gave you with state farm, they know that that investment is gonna pay off in a way that will benefit everyone.

So that's an area that I obviously, will spend a lot of time working on.

We do have external grants and that's a very exciting way to help to grow our opportunities for our students and our faculty, but it's also thinking very carefully about how we spend our money.

I love efficiencies.

So are we making sure our systems are the most efficient?

Is our technology up to date?

It's all of those parts of the puzzle, while we work on the state funding.

Every university in this country that's a public university has seen challenges with the state funding.

I think for us, it's doing what we can to make the Illinois economy as robust as possible so that we can benefit from some of that extra revenue and that investment to keep our students here in Illinois.

- Let's talk about keeping students here in Illinois because there's a two-fold problem for all schools in Illinois.

One is the students are going to other states to go to advanced education.

And number two, the demographic cliff, as we call it, where there is in the next few years, there'll be a declining number of high school grads.

So in order to maintain that level enrollment of around 20,000 or so, what can you do to counter those two negative aspects?

- So there's several things that we're already doing at Illinois state.

So one is, is making sure that people know the Illinois state story.

I think if I can get you to bring your son or daughter on campus, they're gonna have a really amazing experience with our tour guides, seeing what we offer, the nature of our community.

And so I wanna make sure that we tell the Illinois state story to as many people as possible.

I think there's more of that we can do.

A second way is Illinois state would benefit from more international students, and that's also for our current students benefit, not just the revenue students would bring, but the fact that our students could be in classes with their peers from all over the world, because that's what the workforce is like now.

And that's the way that companies are.

They tend to be very international, people...

It's not just doing study abroad, which is a great experience, but also within the classroom, meeting people from other cultures is critical.

And then the third one, which I very much agree with the Illinois board of higher education in their strategic plan on, is adult learners.

Looking at our former students who maybe just didn't quite make it to their degree and helping them to see ways to come back into the university and finish those credentials that they were 50 or 75% of the way they are, I think that that's also...

Adult learners are great students because they are focused and they know what they wanna accomplish.

- But that might because they go elsewhere to work or have a career that might require online education, with that in mind, and with the experience of the Corona virus, what is the future of education at Illinois state with regard to in class versus online?

- That's a great question.

And that's a question that every single university should be asking themselves after this experience.

I think what's most important thing to remember is that high-quality online learning is, it's a very specific discipline.

There are incredible tools to do that.

We can help our faculty that want to do that, learn the best way to do it.

It's a little different than what happened with COVID where on one day's notice we were doing Zoom casting of people's lectures.

And so we have to commit to making sure that what we take in terms of where we learned students want to learn online or where we know there's need doing it in a way where we use the very best practices.

So it's not just what we did before, but how to do it best.

I think another way that I think about this also is making sure it's the right courses that are available online and at the right time, i.e in the summer.

For a lot of our students, they go home during the summer.

If we had more online courses in the summer, they'd probably take those courses from Illinois state rather than from a local university.

And so those are all opportunities that we're looking at right now and our provost, Dr. Aondover Tarhule is very interested in this opportunity as well.

- You mentioned the diverse nature of a large corporations today.

They don't operate just in America, they operate worldwide, but the diversity on the campus isn't what the university would like.

Is there a plan in place to attract more diverse population of students?

And for that matter more faculty staff that would present the picture of diversity worldwide.

- So I think one of the most important things you just said is exactly that it's not just recruiting a diverse student population, it's having a diverse faculty and staff, which is something that we want to work on.

And we currently Dr. Tarhule, our provost has established a working group to work on how we can increase the diversity outcomes in our hiring process.

What are some of the best practices nationally that would allow us to make sure we're recruiting a very diverse pool of applicants for our positions?

Because it turns out the best way to get a diverse outcome in your faculty that's representative, is to have a really great pool.

And so that group is already meeting, he just convened them this fall.

So we're hopeful that that'll be a big impact.

We can look at our HR processes to make sure that they are ones that promote the ability to bring in a diverse workforce and that we retain folks.

And so the second part of this is you've got to come here and you've got to feel like you're a part of the community.

You're valued, it meets what you need.

And so that's a place where we will also help our community because a diverse university body and a diverse university faculty and staff will help to make for a diverse Bloomington normal area.

- And you mentioned retaining those individuals because I imagine all universities and colleges are looking for a more diverse faculty and more diverse staff, which makes the challenge for Illinois state or Bradley or Eureka college that much more difficult because everybody... Are there enough candidates out there, or do you have to make sure that you present yourself as the ultimate, the best option for those few candidates?

- So there aren't enough candidates and that's our issue as a society and at all universities to make sure that we are bringing in a representative group of people all across this country that are going into the disciplines where we are looking to fill our academic institutions.

So we need to be part of the solution there that our graduate students are also diverse and that we help to support them in furthering their careers and wanting to stay in higher education.

We also, you mentioned a couple of our peer institutions.

I would also talk about Illinois Wesleyan and Heartland community college is making sure that we also work together, that our faculty feel part of a community.

And how can we also work to present a really attractive place to come?

Yeah, we need to be the best possible employer - Well, along those lines, it's not just the provost, it's not just Dr. Kinzy, it is maybe there is a minority, who's a math teacher and you need some more diversity in the math department.

How important is that professor to attracting, do they play a role?

The professors play a role in trying to say, this is, this has been a good experience you need to come here.

- So right everyone wants to be part of a community, and they are within a large community, which we would call Illinois state.

You have the community of your discipline.

You have the community of your gender, you have the community of your, of your race or your ethnic background.

And so for us, it's important to help to bring those groups together so people have a sense of community.

And that's why I'm really pleased that we have Dr. Doris Houston as the interim special assistant to the president on diversity and inclusion.

And we have an advisory committee to the president that will be looking at how can we advance that further across the institution?

One of the things we just launched is a following a pilot.

We are now training individuals within our community to be advocates for diversity on searches.

And so that's, it's not just telling people to do it, it's giving them the tools and it's engaging the whole community in that process.

So I'm very excited that that group will be starting next week.

They have their first training session in.

- In a similar vein, you have a multicultural center on campus, which is relatively new.

That plays a role in terms of the students, that may be attracted to ISU.

- So you are right, it's very new.

In fact, a couple of the rooms aren't even finished yet, but we've started moving in some of the student groups starting to have some events there.

We'll have an official opening in October, but we wanted to get it started at the beginning of the year.

That came on in less than two years with a lot of feedback from our students, it will continue to evolve.

There's things we need to look at to change it.

But what we want to do is have a space for our students where they can get together, whether it's our Asian Pacific island and Pacific Islander students to have sort of a space to organize themselves and also to hold events, but also where other groups that as they develop at the university, we can find ways to accommodate them.

And then we do have some very robust, affinity groups I'd call them for faculty and staff as well.

And we're now looking through this advisory committee to the president about how we can also support them.

So there's a lot of work to do, but there are really great people at Illinois state that are invested in it and doing the work to do the benchmarking, to look at the best practices and to understand our culture, to help, to make us move forward.

- At the start of the program you mentioned that you didn't want ISU to be too big, you don't want it to be too small so 20,000 or so students.

That gives you the opportunity to have, when you mentioned Asian and Pacific Islanders.

Well, there may not be a lot of Pacific Islanders who come to a small university, but there may be enough that you can have those opportunities where they can find commonalities with other Pacific Islanders as an example.

- Yeah, and I think that that's why, the great thing about students is they want to get together and we want them to be into these communities.

And so the more communities we build around students' interests, the more likely they are to be successful.

We know that students that are engaged, whether it's student government, Greek life, affinity groups, all of them are more likely to be successful and be retained.

And so as these groups come together, and they come together very organically, often on their own, that will allow us to help to understand their needs.

I'm very proud of our student affairs team, they're incredibly student-focused.

And so they help to nurture these groups.

- We have just a few minutes left and I want to just kind of an open question as to, outside of funding, I know that's the big issue, but outside of funding, what's the biggest challenge you believe that you face in the next year or two that you wanna get over that hump?

- I think that the biggest challenge that I personally face as the new leader of Illinois State University, I mean, I'll give you a couple.

One is I've got a lot to learn, and so I tell everyone that I see my job as kind of synthesizer in chief.

I will meet with different people, I'll hear their ideas, their hopes and dreams.

And I look where I can bring people together to do really creative things.

And so over the next year, that's something that's really important to me, is to start to bring those ideas together because we're going into a new strategic planning process.

And so to me, you can call it a challenge, I'll call it an opportunity is, it's time to define the vision for the next five years of Illinois State University over the next 18 months to two years.

It couldn't be better timing for me because it's important that whatever we do that we've got a lot of people coming together with their ideas because that's how we'll get the best ideas.

So that challenge is really setting that course for the next, you know, what are we doing?

It'll be seven years from now, what does this college of engineering look like?

How do we make it a college of engineering for the year 2030 and not for 1987, that kind of future thinking is a big challenge because universities are very traditional and Illinois state has a very long history.

So getting to think to the future, that's a, it's a wonderful challenge, but that's probably the bigger, biggest one that I think.

- A long history, the oldest public university in the state of Illinois, 1857.

- Correct.

- And I wanna mention just real briefly that, you talked about earlier innovation and entrepreneurship.

It sounds like from my perspective, you want to look at new ways of doing things, new ways of bringing in new programs, entrepreneurship, innovation, maybe that's because you have a PhD in biochemistry.

I don't know.

- I think it doesn't have to be a new program to be innovative or entrepreneurial.

So if I had a program in, let's say something I don't have, so I don't get in trouble here, aviation, if I would find out that I could be at the cutting edge, and that industry was really worse, interested in more simulation, could I come forward to the university with the proposal to move in a new direction and then be able to understand how that investment would allow us to bring in more students, how it would impact the diversity of our students.

So you don't have to do something different.

You have to look at what you're doing and figure out how to do it the very best you can.

And that's one thing, new programs are one thing, but that also means sometimes we have to get rid of programs, which can be difficult to do.

And to be careful not to just grow everything.

I think and entrepreneurship means that people are willing to take some risks and try something new and know they're not gonna be judged if they don't get exactly what they want.

- Might there be a program that you are looking at to eliminate?

- No, for me personally, no, but as we talk to people, we have to make sure that we have the resources to support doing everything we do well.

And so should a department decide to potentially merge two programs because the field has become more interdisciplinary?

That could be something that is it's innovative, it's multidisciplinary, and it may actually boost their enrollment.

It might make them stand out relative to other programs.

I think it's allowing people the freedom to think about new approaches to what it is they wanna do.

- And with that, our half hour is up.

We can continue the conversation after the cameras are off, but let me say thank you to the synthesizer in chief, at Illinois State University, president Terry Goss Kinzy.

Thank you so much for joining us on "At Issue".

- My pleasure.

- And we'll ask her to come back in a couple of years and see what changes you've implemented in that period of time.

And with that, so concludes another edition of "At Issue", but we're back next week, this time with Congressman Darren Lee hood of Peoria, we'll get an Washington DC update on the next "At Issue".

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