Q&A With Incoming UNM President Frank

FRANK: Well, I have microchallenge, that is I hope a short term challenge, which is to establish an effective relationship with the faculty. Obviously the faculty are looking at this transition with a high level of scrutiny, and they want a president that they believe listens to them and understands their needs, and is sensitive to what it takes to build a great university and to do their daily work.  I think I understand that, I just need to convey to them that I understand that. As you all saw in some of the articles you published, my first forays into that were a little bumpy. I didn’t convey it as well as I should have, so I’ve got to work better at my ability to reach out and let the faculty know that I understand what it takes to be a university faculty, and that I appreciate their skills and talents that are at UNM. In fact, I find them a very attractive part of why I want to be here. There’s great faculty and it’s a great opportunity. So as a big challenge in the short run, I’ve got to build that bond. I don’t see that as… it takes work. It just takes me meeting with these people, listening and getting to know what their issues are, and from what I’ve heard, things they’re bringing up are important issues that a president needs to understand and attend to, and I suspect that they’ll work nicely into my agenda. So that’s a little short term thing, and I don’t see that as what I put in a major agenda, because I think I can accomplish that, but it’s gotta be accomplished to get to any of the real stuff, in my view.
So in the things that would be more enduring, sort of if you want to say the five year term they’ve appointed me president for, No. 1 is we have to work on the graduation issue and retention issue. And I’m sure you all are aware that this is an issue that is not at all unique to the university of New Mexico, New Mexico’s numbers, give or take a point or two here and there, don’t differ a lot from a lot of public universities, public research universities. So it’s part of this major transition in the last eight years at the national level that every state has seen its budget dollars shrink and they want, the legislators and the consumers — students — want to know there’s a value to getting a college education. Part of that value is showing you go to college and you get a degree that has something you can take and advance yourself in the marketplace. To do that, you have to graduate a reasonable number of people in a reasonable time rate. So, even though it’s a fairly simple headline to put together, the mechanics of implementing and affecting retention and graduation are very complex and they touch almost every corner of the university, from financial aid and affordability issues on one side to the actual progress of a student and the information you provide students to make sure that they move through their degree in a reasonable time, and have the information to make good career and degree decisions, to making sure that courses are there at the right time at the right points.
Every university, you have bottleneck courses.  For example, I don’t know what it is at UNM, but at Kent State , a surprising one it’s our introductory chemistry labs. Only so many seats are available, we have a class of 4,400. We’ve got to move so many students through there. That becomes a limiting variable for how big our entering class can be and some of the internal dynamics. And so, I need to understand at UNM where those internal limiting capacities are. They probably know it, I just don’t know it yet from my operations.
But that’s an important variable there, so the progress through the graduation pipeline if you will, and then of course there’s the issues around advising, make sure students are engaged correctly, and the last and important point is are they getting the kinds of experiences that translate to the work world? We know, for example, that a student that does some sort of internship or work experience has a huge increase in their likelihood of graduating from college, and those are the kinds of students that employers like having come work for them. So most universities have those programs, but they’re scattered through the very decentralized  models that we built to run universities with, so they’re all over the place. You’ve got to organize them and try to make them more available to students. So there, you can see the broader range of issues that go from  how we recruit and admit students, to how we work with them in the first year during the general education courses, how we move them into a major and how you then make sure all the majors have the right kind of accoutrements, if you will, or things that enhance their employability and success in the post-graduation market. That’s a big issue. UNM has done a ton of work on this already. I’m impressed that a lot of the right things are there, and if you sort of think of that good to great concept, … the winding the machine. It winds and winds, and all of a sudden it reaches the momentum where it can start to work. I think a lot of the winding has happened, and so as a new president, I need to go in and understand where the winding is in good shape. And where it’s not, how I can facilitate it, and where it is how we can keep our eye on it and just stay focused and make sure we push it through so that those numbers improve.

JOURNAL: (Provost) Choauki (Abdallah) has done a lot of research on this topic. … He says we need to be nationally graduating about 60 percent just to feed the economy, that that’s really what we need as a country. Does that seem about right to you?

FRANK: Yes, he and I have stared a conversation about that. We have lots more talking to do. … I think 60 percent is a good number. I’m not sure it is the number, but it certainly is a good starting point for the conversation. Nationwide that moves us about 10 points from where we are at most universities, and it would move UNM into the right vicinity. So, the complexity of this means it’s exactly that, it’s a graduated set of goals we have to achieve. We’re not going to get to 60 percent as fast as anyone wants us to, or we want to, but we can set a series of goals to start moving us in that direction, and it’s an achievable number: 60 percent is an achievable number. It’s a challenging number, but it is an achievable number for the university. Of course, to get to 60 percent you’ve got to work on retention first. Retention from the freshman year to the sophomore year. UNM is losing what 22-23 percent of students, right in that chunk …

JOURNAL: It’s losing (more than) 25 percent, (the retention rate is) 74.1 percent.

FRANK: That statistic, as bad as it sounds,  is not that different that a lot of universities. It’s a movable number. You can move it. What you’ve seen in some of the stuff around me is that we moved it very nicely at Kent. We moved it 6 points, and then all of a sudden it slipped back on us this year. So it’s a hard number to keep moving all the time, but we’ve now recovered. We think we’ve identified some of the things that weren’t working, we’re now back up to 5 percent up from where we were when we started.  But that’s where you start, the retention number, because you’ve got to get from the first year to the second year, and then that begins to move the graduation number over time.  So I think those are things I have to focus on as president. The provost needs to actually do most of this work. The provost and the people in … enrollment management and student affairs. Those are the two areas that are really the lead areas, but it affects dorms and everything else you have to touch there.

JOURNAL: If the combination of ACT/GPA in core subjects is a really good predictor for this graduation number — although the provost would say a lot of places are doing better than we would do with the same composite number — it gets back to the questions that we’ve bandied back and forth here for a decade, which is really: How much do we need to move our admission standards?

FRANK: I think UNM should set a standard for itself over time for being a university that really tries to serve the highest, best prepared students in New Mexico, in time. Right now, I think you have to go very slowly to address that. You really have to start at the lower end of where the skills deficiency is, which is basically math or reading skills, but where I see it, the most notable deficiencies are the math skills in the kids coming in right now. Maybe I’m just tuned to see it because we’ve worked very hard on this at Kent. We’ve put tons of resources into it and we think we have a formula that works around this math emporium model that teaches math differently. Traditional models in math lecture, and if you miss part of the lecture, then the lecture goes on and you do ok, you can maybe get a “C” in the course, but later on they go back and they rely, in math more than many other skills, on that fundamental fact that you know how to create decimals or you know how to do fractions, or you can do simple algebraic equations and build on that to the next step, but if you don’t get the next class you’re not going to pass. That’s what we see happening with a lot of traditional math models. But this math emporium model that was developed at Virginia Tech and Alabama has much more of a focus on a sustained, first as a very specific diagnostic tool that lets you see all the different skills where students are at,  and the next thing it does is once they diagnose where the skill deficiencies are, it puts kids in modules that address their deficiencies and then it requires continued rehearsals of all the areas.  You’re going back and making sure you don’t lose your mastery and then moving ahead section by section and checking back, so at the end of the day when you go through this kind of program, you do have proficiency at certain levels. So you could have proficiency that then lets you succeed at college math and get through those math classes, which moves a whole cohort of kids that have failed previously to have new degree availability because they’ve been choosing their major by avoidance of math rather than their true interests, and so it opens up some of the kind of STEM areas that we want to see more kids major in, lets kids succeed in degrees like nursing, where we  lost a lot of students because they can’t do basic math very well.
What were discovering at Kent is that the math deficiencies are much greater than we realized, that the floor is much lower than we would have ever predicted. So we had cut our diagnostic tool off at like fifth grade math, and we’re finding that we have admitted kids that look great on their GPAs in other areas but still can’t do that level. So we haven’t been specific enough in some of our diagnostic tools to understand where kids are going to struggle when they get to college, and I think this sort of new step were going into, were going to be much more — just like in medicine where we’re now much more individually specifying a disease course and personal interaction. We’re going to do the same kinds of things in education. There’s a lot of parallels in what’s happening in medicine and what’s happening in education, so we’ll have a much better sense of where those things are, and we can match them up. I’ve asked the provost to come up to Kent, bring the chair of the math department, and couple other key people, so they can look at what we’ve done on this math emporium. I’m not saying this is the solution. It’s the solution we’ve done at Kent that works, and I’d like him to look at it and tell me if he thinks it might work at UNM, but we have to do something about understanding that math deficiency, and nationwide this seems to be one model that has a lot of success. So, the key is getting kids ready to do the college curriculum when they have deficiencies , and then as you said  in your introduction of the question, GPA is the single best predictor (of college success.) The ACT adds information to that, but we still need to be very specific in understanding how to make sure kids are ready.  But overall at the end of the day, at the end of the time I’m president in 10 years, I would imagine that the admission to the university might be a little more competitive than they are today, and we would have all sorts of resources that would help kids compete to be ready for that, so were not turning kids away, but we’re preparing them to be a student at UNM. It’s not let’s just slam the door and say, “You’re out of luck, you didn’t do well, you came from a high school that didn’t prepare you well.” We’re going to say, “We’re going to prepare you to compete at UNM. And when you are at UNM and you graduate, you’re going to have graduated from the best university with the best education possible in the state.”

JOURNAL: Beyond graduation, what are a couple of the other major things you see?

FRANK: Well, the research enterprise. I mean, what  defines a great public research university is a dynamic research enterprise. UNM is very good, is already on its way to great success there, but it’s competing in the most competitive market in higher education today. So I think the resources in New Mexico, partnerships that are available here with the labs and the new Kirtland Research Center are the best in the country, simply put. This is an incredibly rich environment. By building effective partnerships to these already best of practice enterprises that exist in New Mexico, we can advance the research enterprise here, I think quite successfully. That’s one where there’s advancement. Increasingly, the labs and those areas are moving into areas and some things that new Mexico already has a lot of opportunity around and has done a lot of groundwork in that can be, I think, reharvested, reinvigorated or refocused. Maybe it doesn’t need any of the re-, maybe it already is, but the university needs to join into that process. So, trying to move the research agenda up to compete with the very best public research universities slowly.  Everybody else is trying to get better too. This is like being an Olympian, you’re competing with the best of class.  Just because you want to be good doesn’t mean the other guy is going to stop running (or) is going to run slower just to let you catch up. You’ve got to work hard to get in there, so that means having some real areas of focus at the university, some investments in some of these areas where we really do use these partnerships with the  labs in other areas to be really the best, and be in that level of competition in the United States.
The third area that I think is important is the economic development activity the university sustains. You all know the university creates 38,000 jobs, it brings in more than $600 million outside the state. That was two years ago numbers, I think, I would imagine those numbers are increasing. But the universities, UNM, NMSU, all the state universities have an opportunity to help New Mexico become a thriving area that in the new knowledge economy that is at the cutting edge, so I think partnering with the community to envision New Mexico  as a leader of this new knowledge economy that’s developing with educated, ready… a citizenship ready to participate in this knowledge economy is something that UNM shouldn’t step back from that challenge. We should step forward and say we’re going to address it. Again, its like the other two things. A very tough issue. It’s not something that just because we say we want, we’ll do. But gradually, over time, I think the university can make a difference. So I’d say those are the top three.

JOURNAL: Going back to the readiness of students to enter UNM, what role does the school of education play there ?… Are we looking at just tweaks to how teachers are trained or does that really need to be overhauled?

FRANK: That’s an excellent question. It’s one that I probably don’t know enough about. I talked a lot at my candidate forums that I want to take my first 100 days and ask a lot of questions, and one of the questions I want to ask is to learn more about what’s happening in our College of Education, what their agenda is. I don’t really know that much about that level of programing right now. Across the United States, we know that our students are not performing at the level we want. There’s often a simple solution that there’s something wrong with our teachers. I think it’s a very complex series of interactive things. The College of Education should be the place though that both in research and practice address that issue, so I want to understand what our College of Education is doing in that area, how it’s setting forth to examine that, what kinds of laboratories they’re running, and that’s an issue of where the university can, I think, make a difference. I know the governor, I had lunch yesterday with the governor, and she spent a lot of time talking about basically K-12 work, maximizing education for work readiness types of things.  So she clearly has an interest in that. She clearly wants universities to participate in that. I believe universities can participate in that and we should. So I’ll spend some time with the education faculty and others in the Albuquerque and the state community to understand what’s going on. One of the initiatives that president Schmidly was engaged in that I thought is wonderful is the pipeline initiative with Albuquerque Public Schools, Central New Mexico and UNM. Those are the kinds of initiatives that we need to make a difference. I want to work with the leaders of those two institutions to look at that pipeline concept and see how we can really make that a dynamic, hopefully seamless process that serves students and looks at the kinds of issues all three institutions face in their education challenges.

JOURNAL: One of your predecessors, I think his name was Dick Peck was the one who said this, he said, “My definition of hell is being a university president at a school with two athletic departments.” Athletics as you know sometimes becomes the tail that wags the dog.

FRANK: It has been here for awhile.

JOURNAL: Well, look at Ohio State, for example. What is your experience dealing with that part of the institution and what are your general thoughts about the role of college athletics and its importance to the institution. What’s your take on this whole topic?

FRANK: Well, it’s a complex issue. Let me answer the experience part first and then I’ll talk about the philosophical part second. The experience part is, I was a college athlete. I went through school on a scholarship in swimming, so I know what its like to be an athlete. My son’s an athlete at Kent State right now. He’s on the basketball team. So I know a lot about the participation side, the value of it, and the things that athletics brings to the table. At Kent State, athletics has a very strong graduation rates, and I think the same is true about UNM. I’ve seen some of the statistics.
So athletics do offer a slice —500 or so students —a great experience and help them prosper in the university, and so that part I admire, value and have personally benefited from. I’ve served in faculty roles of overseeing. When I was at Missouri, I was on the athletics oversight committee, so I’ve done the faculty part of it. At Kent State, as a member of  the senior management team, I’ve been a part of the issues we’ve had, the decisions we’ve had to make around athletics. But I’ve been a provost, not a president and they’re different roles. Ultimately, athletics sits at the president’s desk, not at the provost’s desk. So, some of this will be new to me, and I’ll have to turn to people who have some experience. It turns out President Schmidly is somebody that does have a lot of national experience in it, but I’ll have to look to the athletic director and other presidents I know nationally for a little bit of mentoring to make sure that I make the right decisions. My own view is that you have to set the structure up, and I said this several times in the interview —is that the president is responsible for athletics, you can’t go around the president to any other reporting points. The president has to accept that accountability and live and die with it, so to speak. So I intend to do that. That means I’m going to look carefully at the athletic programs, the values, the integrity of the program. My first meeting with the athletic staff, I will talk to them about my belief that these are student athletes, not athlete students and that while I’m president of UNM, those will be the values I encourage, ask for and expect from them, and that my job will be to work with them to address how we make that happen.
At the national level, we have designed a model of athletics that is probably not sustainable, that is, you see the leaks beginning to break with the Ohio State, the Penn State, all of these major scandals and the Bowl System and there’s just a variety of symptoms that show you that this is a way of engaging in athletics that probably isn’t sustainable in the long run. I think were seeing some of this bowl realignment as the first symptom that evolutionarily we’re beginning to see incremental changes and readjustments about how this works.  I don’t have the answers to what’s going to happen ultimately in big college athletics. I suspect during my first year, that’s a place I’m going to spend a lot of time trying to make sure I understand what these trends are and how UNM should be positioned in them, and what the best course is over time.

JOURNAL: One of the reform efforts led by presidents was the ability to do multiple-year scholarships and then the stipend. That’s about to be overturned, I think, and I believe UNM was among the rebels. … It seems like every time that the presidents try to reign this in, there’s just an awful lot of push back.  I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to even look at that issue, but it may be one that ends up on your plate.

FRANK: I suspect it will. And it certainly. I understand why its become a split. It’s basically the BCS schools wanting to take advantage of a higher revenue to do something that makes them more competitive than the smaller-budget schools. That $2,000 stipend is a significant hit for a lot of the smaller budget schools, so that’s, I think , the driving force of a lot of the national opposition. And this is a good dialogue in my mind, because there are a lot of students brought in to athletic programs.  My son, as I said, plays basketball. He lives with a kid who’s kind of an example of a kid that wouldn’t be in college if it wasn’t for his athletics scholarship. He comes from a  family that’s doing all it can to make ends meets. He’s at school, he doesn’t have an extra dime to spend on anything. He’s just struggling to survive, and he’s a kid that would benefit. He’s a great basketball player, he’s a 7-foot basketball player. … He’s the kind of kid that needs this money to survive. That’s what the intent of this rule is. So I’m sympathetic and understanding of that, but then you come down to the economic side. So it’s going to be a tough issue. I know where my own personal sentiments are, but I don’t know where I’m going to come down as a university president. I haven’t talked to Paul about it at all to hear what UNM thought.

JOURNAL: I guess one of the thoughts is that  it takes that kid you’re talking about and makes him less susceptible to that booster influence and selling the memorabilia.

FRANK: Right, right. And he’s the kind of kid that they’re going to approach. He played overseas last summer in some sort of international basketball league. That’s exactly what you want to do. That’s the right thing for that kid. Is it the right thing for a nationwide system of athletics, where it starts to break apart the haves and the have-nots, I don’t have enough knowledge to have a strong opinion yet on that issue.

JOURNAL: Paying college coaches, the costs, the salaries have just gone through the roof. Is there anything the presidents can do, is there any way to reign it in?

FRANK: I love the quote from Mike Martin, who used to be president at NMSU and is now at LSU.  He’s a good friend of mine. We were together at Florida. When he raised Coach (Les) Miles salary at LSU and said, “I know as an economist this is the wrong thing to do, but as a president I have to do it.” The presidents are caught. This is a really thorny conundrum because the presidents, I think they know what they want to do, but they’re caught in this very powerful conundrum of external forces where it’s very hard to make the right decisions. I think ultimately there will be some of this shaking out in the economic world that will drive the presidents, hopefully, to have more control of the issue.  But I don’t see many presidents right now having the ready-made ability to make these kids of decisions.

JOURNAL: When Utah went to the Pac-12 … their piece of the TV package will be about $20 million per year. Their piece in the Mountain … was about $2 million. So over 10 years, you’re talking about $200 million versus $20 million.

FRANK: There’s no choice. … That’s the problem. There’s a lot of money in this game now, and the money is so big that it is driving the equation. We have a platform that’s not designed for this kind of economic activity. No one ever envisioned that this kind of money would be at stake in this. So, it’s a paradigm that’s going to have to be adjusted somehow. I wish I had the solutions. I wish I even had a clear understanding of all the dynamics, but that’s a big learning point for me.

JOURNAL: Speaking of money, how much emphasis did the regents put on fundraising in your new role?

FRANK: It was clearly one of the things they expected. They think UNM can do better in fundraising.  And, they believe that there’s a lot of opportunity for UNM in fundraising. With what they told me, I think I have to agree with them on both counts. I think UNM has a significant amount of potential in fundraising, and I think it’s going to take some focus from the president, from the foundation, from the development officers and the deans, who are already working pretty hard out there from what I can tell. So I think it’s an area of opportunity. Some of that opportunity is not in New Mexico. New Mexico graduates are all over the place.  I got a congratulatory email from one of my former teammates who lives in London. New Mexico is worldwide at this point. So the foundation and the development officers have to recognize it’s not all in New Mexico. You have to reach out to the whole country, and I think they’re ready to do that.  Through my brief conversations that I had during this whirlwind, meet people for seven second interview process I’ve been through, everybody seemed to want to embrace the challenging. No one seemed to say, “Oh. we’re doing a good job.” They all said, “We can do better, we want to do more.”

JOURNAL: There’s been some debate, this new set up with the foundation being kind of its own thing out here is relatively new, and it’s my sense still a bit controversial. I think there’s even some dissension among the regents about whether it’s the right model. I don’t know what kind of experience you have in this area, but have you looked at this?

FRANK: I haven’t looked at it deeply, but the model they moved to is the model I have experience with. It’s the Florida model where I was a dean for 12 years and in fact, ironically, Paul Robell — who was the vice president for  the foundation at Florida the whole time I was there — just the week before I came here for my interview was here consulting with this foundation on,  you know, issues they face and so I’m comfortable with the model they moved to. I’m not saying I believe it’s the right model, but it is certainly a model I know and have worked in, and I’ve seen it at Florida.
Florida went from being a sort of  middling foundation in 1995 to being a major foundation player in a period of  like 10 years. So that was a combination of the right president, the right foundation leader, the right state environment, but it is a model that worked there. It could conceivably work here.  I think I need to … you know, I didn’t even have a formal meeting with (UNM Foundation President) Henry (Nemcik) during this process. I met with him informally, but I haven’t met with him formally, so I need to get educated on how exactly the model works and understand more of its details. But I see that whatever model the university finally settles in,  I assume for now  it’s going to be the current model since it’s there, that this is something we want to push and take advantage of because the state is clear,  that even though it looks like we have a better year this year, the state is not going to be pushing a lot more money at the university. You’ve gotta find new ways to support it. And since New Mexico hasn’t exploited this opportunity, there’s a jump that the university can take there.  It will be quite positive for it. It helps kids, it helps the research agenda. It’s certainly for everybody.
In fact, I talked to the governor about some ideas I have about how we can better partner with the state around development ideas yesterday, so I’m trying to rethink things.

JOURNAL: How do you think being an athlete sets you up for the rest of your career at UNM?

FRANK: I think it’s an advantage. Obviously, it gives me a little bit of a cache here that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Probably it doesn’t help me as much as just having lived in New Mexico for many years does. But you know, athletics teaches you tons of things about life in a little laboratory that is  a very powerful lab. It puts things in your field of vision that in other parts of your life you can avoid — success and failure and personal commitment and dedication. You know, it’s just very dramatic.
So I learned a lot being an athlete here. I learned a lot about what it means to work with a talented bunch of people and what you can personally benefit in if you’re not the most competent person among those and the value of role-players. And so those are all things that have applied to lots of different things I have done since then in my life.
I like athletics. I’ve pushed my sons hard to be involved in athletics. I think it teaches lots of important life lessons. So I think it will help me here. I don’t know how much — outside of the world of Lobo lettermen — how much most people care about it, but the Lobo lettermen all like it. They’re all thrilled that I’m here. Each one of them comes up and tells me what sport they lettered in and what year, so it works for that group. Some of them have been very successful, so I think that can help with development, too.

JOURNAL: I was wondering about the comment about trying to take kids in New Mexico communities who are not prepared and should be, and give them the skills to move forward  … Should UNM be that involved in remediation or should it be left to the two-year community colleges?

FRANK:  Well, you know I think ultimately, if you were to say, `where should we be in 10 years?’… Interestingly, I asked the governor the same question yesterday — almost the same question — what does she see the role of the university, assuming she serves two terms, what would she like to see in the relationship between the university and education and the state at the end of her terms? And she said she thought the university shouldn’t do remediation, that students should come fully prepared. And I told her that I thought that was an ideal vision, but I didn’t know if it could be done  in the timeline that she … in eight years as governor, that eventually we should try and  move to that. My own personal view is that we should have ways that students that are generally prepared for the university but need some remediation can loop out and get that remediation  and come to the university — either coming in through a community college step or something like that, but then come to the university in a seamless way and gain admission.
In Florida, they have a great system of community colleges, where students have  really well-defined articulation agreements so a student went to the community college, gained their credit, came to the university and the articulation was defined. Now in New Mexico, at least according to the governor, that’s not the case. The articulation agreements between the branch campuses and the community colleges and the universities aren’t well-established, so I think there’s a piece of work that can done around that articulation agreement that would greatly enhance the flow of students from one setting to another and address some of these remediation issues and maybe make it a little less of a `yours or mine’ and more of just `we do it here and then we flow to this point.’ And I think part of the problem right now is the way the funding formula works. It’s  a `yours or mine’ and people are not … we’re are not marrying the policy part to the pragmatics. It sounds to me like the governor is going to try and drive some of that articulation stuff. I think that’s for the better. Universities’ll fight it because it’s difficult work. It’s very time-consuming, but it probably is the right thing to happen for students and the public over time. So  I certainly would support the articulation conversations. And the more articulation agreements you can have, the more students can flow seamlessly from setting to setting, the better their outcomes will be.

JOURNAL: One thing that had come up during this presidential search, and that seems to come up during every presidential search at UNM, is what is UNM really  and what does it want to be and what should it try to be. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

FRANK:  Yeah, it comes up at every university during the presidential search because there are always moments of anxiety and everybody becomes uncertain and all the different stakeholders step forward with their view of what it should be.

To me, as the flagship university of the state of New Mexico, the University of New Mexico has to establish itself as a great public research university, and to me each of those words are very important. Public. Research. University.

I was talking with a group yesterday, and I was saying, public means it’s going to be … it belongs to the state and the state has an interest and investment in that university and is supporting that university. Now in recent times, state support of universities is less than it used to,  but that’s the reality of the world. They still have an investment in it, so it belongs to the people of the state. It’s a source of pride and a source of advantage to the state. So that’s one step.

The research part — since it’s a flagship university, I think it has to be committed to discovery in the broadest sense. And by … when we talk about discovery, we can be talking about things in physics or in biomedical engineering that lead to patents that lead to great economic development. Or we can be talking about in the humanities, understanding the history of the world or writing better music and creating new dances. So whatever it is, it’s broadening the horizons of the disciplines that participate.

And the last part is the university. And the university means that, you know, we’re committed to this 600- year tradition that has defined higher education in the United States. It dates back to Germany in the 16, 1500s, and  it’s a model of shared governance that says that the faculty have a role in the direction and management of the university and that we recognize them as special employees and in the vernacular of the rest of the world, they’re similar to what we now call knowledge employees.

When you go out into a lot of companies that do  knowledge creation, they treat their employees a lot like we treat faculty —  with more input, a little less of the daily management that you might see in a more structured business and so this knowledge business that universities have been in for a long time, which is similar to knowledge businesses here .. I mean that has certain parameters as well.

So UNM is a public research university. It should be the leader in the state. It should be in contention in the national discussions, in my view. And every time I talk, I’ll say the same thing. I don’t think this is a view I’ll change after my 100 days. But that’s where UNM should direct itself. There may be some places  we have to do some different things, but those are the premises I believe are important and I guess are values that I hold that I’ll espouse.

JOURNAL:  The university has gotten a lot of outside criticism about  the way that it budgets and manages its administrative tier. The Legislature is quick to comment on the number of vice presidents.

FRANK: I’ve never heard as much about vice-presidents as I have in the last few weeks.

JOURNAL:  So I’m curious about your thoughts and if you’ve had a chance to take a look at the way that structure works and if you think that structure, the way it stands now, is  an efficient one.

FRANK:  You know, all I know is it’s a real bone of contention among the legislators. The governor mentioned some of her thoughts about it yesterday to me … You know, the regents are certainly aware of it. Our community people are certainly aware of it. So I have heard a ton about it. I’ve done a quick skim-through and looked at it. You know to be honest, I’m not sure the numbers are greater than some other universities, but it’ll be part of my hundred-day agenda to really drill down and understand more about how many we have and what their responsibilities are. And I understand some of it has as much to do with some salary changes in those people with no real change of responsibility. It’s sort of a process issue as much as a number issue. Now, the number issue becomes shorthand for the process issue, and so I think I have to understand more about both of those and so that’s a hundred-day issue. I’m going to … I’m thinking about employing a technique that — my best friend just became president of the University of Tennessee last year, and so we’ve talked a lot about things he’s done in the transition. One of the things they did at Tennessee is they got an outside company that does national salary reviews, and they actually work in higher education, to come in and review. They have three campuses, but they came in and reviewed all their campuses, and they use national, regional benchmarks, titles. And so he said it was tremendously helpful at Tennessee to help them really get a clear handle on who’s underpaid, who’s overpaid, who’s out of titles, and it’s their business. It’s this company’s business. It’s all they do, so they seem like you know —  during my hundred days, I’m going to ask, `would bringing this company in be a good solution for UNM?’ Right now, it seems like a great solution because they bring expertise. They help you understand the environment, they help you benchmark against national situations,  and I think they also understand that there’s a regional market for certain jobs and a national market for other jobs. So at the university, we may have a regional market for our staff jobs, but we certainly have a national market for our faculty jobs. We’re competing with Harvard and Johns  Hopkins and Michigan and everybody else for the faculty we want. So, you know, they seem to have a sense of this. So my inclination is that this would …  my hypothesis today is that this group could bring a lot of clarity to this conversation. They  may not solve some of the political dimensions of it, but at least it would bring some facts to it.

So I’m interested in exploring that option and seeing if that might not help. Either way, though, there’s a political dimension of the conversation that the university has to address and so that has to be part of my hundred days exploration, too, of how are we gonna once and for all address this  and get it behind us?  It’s become an unnecessary headache, in my view, and it’s clouded a lot of the good things the university does with this sort of perception that it’s  top-heavy and overpaid. So we’ve got to find a way to get our arms around this and manage it better than it has.

JOURNAL:  So how does the next six months work for you?

FRANK:  I start June 1, so between now and June 1 I’m going to try and — you know, I’ve been asking the key stakeholders of the university, `Tell me what you think I could learn most efficiently — while I still have another job — about UNM so when I get here, I’m ready to engage. And I’ve gotten some very good ideas from them. So I’m still collecting that information, but  I’ll come back a couple times and probably try and start some of those faculty meetings that I mentioned earlier, just to bridge into the faculty and to know their issues and maybe some other key community groups during that time. But I won’t be too involved. President Schmidly  is here until June 1st, and he’s the president and he needs to run the university, but I can do a lot of learning during that time.

June 1, I arrive and I’m going to spend those first hundred days in what I hope is a series of meetings with as many key stakeholders in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, across the entire New Mexico community, even outside of New Mexico, if need  be, to just ask them, what do they see the university doing, how can the university do better in their minds, how do we serve them, what are their issues they want me to understand.

At the end of that hundred days, I  hope I’ve gotten enough information to begin to put together a vision, a plan, an idea that I can work  with the faculty on to make more of a five-year plan for my first term as president.

Faculty has begun to work under the aegis of the provost on an academic plan, so my idea is that these would sort of mesh. Towards the end of the hundred days, we’d begin to … I’d  have some ideas, they’d have ideas — hopefully there will be a dialogue before then— but there’ll be an integration of these things as we go forward so that we get a university/community vision and that that would become a blueprint for my first term.

And, you know, these things are nothing more than a series of marks on a trail, and hopefully the trail goes where you think it’s going. But sometimes you have to reroute the trail when things happen  you don’t expect. You know, if we have another 2008 economic decline, it’s gonna change things then, if the economy continues a slow and careful improvement, like seems to be the case right now …  So that’s how I envision doing it right now.

JOURNAL: You’re still provost, until …  When do you finish that?

FRANK: … I know I’m provost. I was on the phone for an hour this morning hearing the things the president thinks I should have been doing while I was out here interviewing, so that’s the kind of president I work for for another few months out there,  and he’s a very ambitious and driven guy. So, yeah,  I’ll probably stay in that role until May sometime, and then I’ll transition out and then come down here and set up and try and be ready to go to work on June 1 or 2, whatever. I don’t know how the calendar falls around then.

JOURNAL:  Dr. Schmidly has some kind of contract that they were actually paying him to have this conversation, this meeting. Do you have any arrangement set up?

FRANK: No. I do things out of passion and personal … I do things I believe are the right things. I’m not getting anything paid by … they’re gonna cover when I fly down here, they’ll cover my cost to fly down, and my hotels, and stuff like that. but that’s all I have really. I guess if I fly somewhere else, they’ll cover that.
That’s all I have submitted.

JOURNAL: How do you feel about the presidential home?

FRANK : I love the presidential home. i mean it’s a beautiful home. It’s sweet memories for me, as a kid, as a student walking by and seeing it, so the idea of living in it is both special to me because of being a UNM student, and I like  the symbolism of a president that lives on campus. I’m not sure… from what I’ve heard from my other president colleagues, I’m not sure the experience of living on the campus day-to-day is quite as exalted as the imagery of it is.  But you know, I certainly  heard from a lot of people in the community that they like the idea of having the president in the house. It means something to the community. A lot of people have really sort of seized on that one point of this whole conversation and said, `boy, that ‘s great, you’re gonna live in the house.’ And the house is , you know, it’s an unusual house. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in it. You go on the ground floor, it’s a lot of entertaining space. The upstairs is actually much like a small apartment. So we’re going from a full regular house of … We have a huge house in Ohio, like 5,000 square feet. We’re really downsizing to move into it, so it’s gonna be, personally, it’s going to be complicated because we’re going to have  to store half our house with stuff that won’t fit in there.

JOURNAL: You talked earlier about wanting to build a better relationship with the media. What’s your idea of what that relationship should be?

FRANK: Well, first, I think pretty frequent dialogues between myself and the key people at UNM that handle these areas with the different media to understand what you think and you understand what we’re thinking so that hopefully when really sizzling, interesting things happen, there’s a better platform for the exchange of information and maybe better trust about how information will be handled during those high stress periods. I ‘ve always felt, in all my jobs, I’ve felt that the media has a great advantage to helping  the university spread the word of what they want to do, what they want to achieve, what their dreams are. So I’ve always had a fairly open door policy with the press that, you know, they want to talk to me, I’m going to talk to them. Student reporters I sometimes draw the line with, but when other reporters call me, I answer their calls and either say, `I can help you or I can’t help you,’ and I try and know them as people a little bit. I’ve been treated pretty well by the press in Ohio, and we’ve been through some tough times there, so I think I was able to develop an effective relationship with most of  them. Although I did tarnish my relationship, I think, with the Beacon-Journal yesterday because I didn’t return a phone call to Carol Biliczky, the reporter who covers the university there. So in general, it’s just I don’t see the media as my opposition or some group that I have to wall myself off from. I see them as potentially a  great source of marketing for the university, to be honest. If we’re doing good things and I ‘ve got a great story to tell, I  should come and tell the story, and if it’s the right story, it’s going to resonate with the community and the media is the vehicle that gets it to the community. So it should be a win for all of us. Now there are going to be days when things don’t go so well and we have slightly different roles in the conversation and during those times, you want to have the relationship that maybe the media could  sometimes tell you things that you need to hear that you might not be hearing from  people around you.

When you’re in a university leadership position, or any leadership position, even if you’re meticulous about trying to get a broad  view around you, you’re not going to get as broad a view as you need on a day-to-day basis. So the media  becomes your little alarm clock — boy, there’s something going on here I haven’t paid enough attention to. So I see more value than anything else. But let’s see where I am on that in two years from now.

JOURNAL: Thank you for coming in. You’ve been very generous with your time. I know you’ve got a lot of stuff to do. Is there anything you want to talk about that we didn’t touch on?

FRANK: No, you touched on great issues. I just hope it’s clear that I believe the University of New Mexico has enormous contributions to make to the community. And during my presidency, I’ll do anything I can do to try to achieve those contributions and I’ll work with you and the community leaders to try and achieve those things. And I hope we have a lot more conversations. I hope it comes to be a routine part of all of our lives.