By Staff Writer Trevon Tucker
Dr. Gary Liguori is the current Dean of the College of Health Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. With nearly 30 years of experience in higher education, Dr. Liguori is running for the role of Chancellor of Eastern New Mexico University, potentially replacing current Chancellor Dr. Patrice Caldwell in the role.
ENMU’s The Chase had the opportunity to speak with Liguori on the phone, where he detailed his ideas for support and how his past has prepared him for a role of this magnitude.
Q: What made you decide to run for the role of university chancellor of ENMU? Did you apply yourself or were you offered the position?
A: I applied on my own, and I was drawn to it because of the school’s clear focus on student success. And I feel like that’s a good match with my career-long interest to help students succeed and maybe even transform their lives.
Q: What plans do you have to facilitate that goal?
A: Well, I think you have to have a lot of different support pieces in place for students. It’s more than just expecting them to show up to class and succeed. So being thoughtful around the admission process, looking at where there might be challenges or gaps early on, making sure they have good academic advising, making sure they have good study skills, those are some of the initial things that you want to do to ensure student success.
Ideally, having that support follow them throughout the time they’re at the school and not transferring them to different people along the way so they know who they can count on if those folks will be with them the whole way.
And then there’s other things like making sure the curriculum is easy to navigate and students have a clear direction and path how to get to graduation. And then building in things like experiential learning that allows students to connect what’s happening in the classroom with what’s happening in the actual job I like to do.
Q: It sounds like you’re very focused on streamlining and optimizing.
A: I would say optimizing, yes. Streamlining may or may not be the case. It depends on how things already are functioning, but optimizing, yeah.
Q: How about the staff? How do you plan on supporting them?
A: Well, if I were to be the one to come to ENMU, I’d want to look around at all the operations and just see what’s working really well, what needs a little boost to do better and where there might be changes to be made. So in regard to staff, I would take that same approach. I think staff usually have really great insight into what’s working or how things could work better, so I’d want to hear about that.
I certainly don’t have any plans to come in and make any changes on the front end unless it becomes obvious that there’s a need for changes. It’s a matter of supporting the work that they do, making sure they have the resources doing well, and mainly showing my appreciation for the work that they do.
Q: I saw while doing some background research that you were the Dean of the College of Health Sciences at the University of Rhode Island. What is that like compared to the position of President at ENMU?
A: There’s a lot of similarities. We’re a fairly large university compared to ENMU, about 14,000 undergrads. My college alone has roughly 3000 students, and it’s a new college, so that’s not common in higher ed. It’s a lot of logistics, managing personnel, and getting people to buy into the collective mission. Particularly at my school, we are heavily involved in fundraising. We’re heavily involved in working with officials around health care policy.
We do a tremendous amount in the communities. I have six different clinics that serve the public, so it’s a pretty complex organization. We do have a significant research enterprise, so we work across a broad spectrum of areas. And I think the multitude of responsibilities has been pretty well prepared. The deans basically manage their own colleges with almost exclusive autonomy, so you’re managing a pretty complex budget, lots of people and lots of moving parts.
Q: Interesting. What other professional credentials have you earned that are relevant to this position?
A: I think it’s a cumulative thing. I’ve been in higher ed for nearly 30 years. I’ve progressively taken on more leadership, more responsibility, more complexity, and so I think there is that natural process of growing in terms of knowledge and skills. Doing it in different environments brings in even more experience.
I have been fortunate to work with corporations all over the country and around the world, on advisory boards and things like that. I have not only published my research extensively; I have a pretty nice track record of writing books and I’ve worked as editor-in-chief of a journal. I think those are all very, very closely related to the higher ed enterprise, and that gives me the opportunity to see beyond the figurative walls of the campus.
Q: Where did you complete your higher education?
A: I did my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Central Missouri, and I did my Master’s degree at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, and my PhD at North Dakota State University.
Q: What unique advantages would you say you have for the position?
A: I bring a broad range of experience, having been at different schools in different cultures and different geographies with different missions, so I think that gives me experience seeing how things could work in some settings and, in fact, how they might not work in other settings. I’ve seen things fail. I’ve seen things succeed. I think that breadth of experience could be invaluable in a leadership role. I’ve seen many ways these things can get done well, and therefore I’m open to lots of ideas. Part of my experience is that I know there’s not only one way to get things done.
Q: You mentioned that you have lots of experience with other cultures. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
A: Well, I’ve worked in the southeastern US. I’ve worked in the upper Midwest. I now work in southern New England, which is just a stone’s throw from New York. You have the human culture that exists in those regions, and then there’s the political climates that differ. There are different funding models on how states fund higher education. And then this is just a unique culture that exists on any one campus. It’s never the same from one place to the other, so that creates a real mix of experiences, and the more of that you have, or in my case, the more of it I have, the better. I think it allows me to see potential possibilities in anywhere that I go.
Q: How will you work to engage with the unique culture of New Mexico specifically?
A: Well, I think what I’ve learned in my career is it’s best to come in and meet the people and find out who they are and what they’re passionate about and figure out how I could work with them to get the university to be a partner. It’s not about me coming in and saying, here’s what we do, or here’s what we want to do. It’s about really listening to the people, that’s the people on campus, the people in the community, and certainly the people in the state. That would be my number one objective, to understand who the people are and how they would see the university as a partner. I think as you do that, you learn about the culture and you figure out where best to put the resources and where best to kind of make things happen.
(Dr. James Johnston has been announced as the new chancellor of ENMU, he will take over the position on January 3, 2023.)