I arrived to higher education administration the way many good administrators do — through the classroom. Teaching developmental psychology to undergraduates taught me that student success is rarely about aptitude; it's about engagement, momentum, and someone paying attention at the right moment. Everything I've built since is an attempt to institutionalize an individual moment at scale.
What the Classroom Taught Me About Leading Institutions
On Strategy
Strategy in higher education is not a plan — it is a set of decisions about what you will stop doing, what you will start doing, and how you will align everyone around both. The hardest part is not the vision; it is earning the trust of the people who have to carry it out. I build strategy from the inside out: listening first, diagnosing honestly, and communicating with enough transparency that people can see themselves in the change rather than being surprised by it.
On Data
I was trained as a researcher before I was an administrator, and that shapes everything. Data does not tell you what to do, it tells you where to look. The most dangerous thing an institution can do with data is use it to confirm what it already believes. I use data to surface friction, identify populations being underserved, and hold myself accountable to outcomes that cannot be explained away. My goal is always to move from "data rich, insight poor" to a system where real-time signals produce real-time action.
On Social Mobility
Retention and graduation rates are institution-level averages that can hide exactly the populations that need the most attention. I measure gaps as carefully as I measure aggregate outcomes - because closing the gap between first-generation and continuing-generation students, or between Pell-eligible and non-Pell students, is not a separate agenda from excellence. It is what excellence means at a public university.
On People
The most sophisticated system in the world fails if the people operating it do not believe in it. I invest heavily in the professional development, clarity of purpose, and psychological safety of the teams I lead, not because it is good management practice, but because a student-facing workforce that feels supported gives students an entirely different experience than one that does not. Culture is infrastructure.
On the Role of the University
Public higher education is the most consequential democratic institution in American life. It is where first-generation students become the first doctors, engineers, and civic leaders in their families. It is where a state makes a promise: That talent, not inheritance, determines what a person can become. That promise is only as good as the institution's willingness to build systems that honor it.
I became an academic because I believed education could change lives. I became an administrator because I believed institutions could be built to make that happen reliably - not just for students who already know how to navigate a university, but for every student who arrives with potential and uncertainty in equal measure. The work of a public university is not finished when it admits a talented class. It is finished when that class graduates at the same rate, with the same preparation, regardless of where they started. That belief has not changed. Everything else is tactics.