On Saturday, October 25th, Grizzly editors Sidney Belleroche and Nathaniel Nerone sat down with Joseph DeSimone ‘86, the Chair of the Ursinus College Board of Trustees, and discussed projections for Ursinus’ future. Below is part of the interview; the rest can be found on the Grizzly website.
Nathaniel Nerone `28: So, starting off quite broadly, from your perspective, what happened with the removal of President Robyn Hannigan?
Joseph DeSimone `86: Well, we’re not going to talk about personnel matters, so I’m not gonna go into that.
Sidney Belleroche `27: Then, do you mind if you give me an overview of what the Board of Trustees does? Can you give us a bit of your job description? Because the student body doesn’t necessarily know you guys
JD: Sure, sure. At colleges and universities, there’s sort of a shared governance model, and we have — the faculty have a really important role and they do pretty much everything related to the students — curriculum, classes, what it means to get a degree from here. There’s the administration, which is basically the entire operation of the campus, everything about it, just keeping the trains running and stewarding the campus itself. And then there’s the Board of Trustees, and we have a different role, and our role is making sure that the general direction of the college is aligned with where we want to go. Also, we do a lot with helping out with the fundraising, and we approve budgets and that sort of thing.
NN: How does that manifest? How do your day-to-day and your actions in meetings —
JD: Many of us are alumni of the college. The legacy of an institution depends on its success in the future, and as you can see from the Board, there’s a lot of talent on the board — separate from me! All my colleagues have amazing talents. We get people running Morgan-Stanley and major companies, people who have made a lot of progress in different social environments and the like, so we are eager about the future of the college. We fell in love with this whole premise that we want our students to emerge ready. A lot of us fell in love with the college that changed our lives and we’ve learned a lot in doing the different careers that we have, and now we want to have a hand to reach back and help youngsters get further ahead and not have to go through all the trials and tribulations that we have. And so we fell in love with this emerge ready program that’s implemented through the APEX program, this applied experiential learning. And, so, it was really making sure that that was the right direction for the college. Also making sure, “How do we implement it?” because it’s a big, heavy lift, right? To provide the corporate environment. You guys had exposure to that, making sure the nonprofits want to have interest in, making sure how we — with the Career counseling and all that. So, we basically play an evaluative role that are the plans lined up. Are we executing those plans? How much do those plans cost? What do we need to do to help fundraise? The thing that’s most important to realize — they’re all volunteers, and why do people give their time, their talent, their treasure on behalf of something they don’t have to? They care deeply about this place. We all do. And to have that kind of a purpose and mission behind what a board does and to try to power — our raison d’etre here at Ursinus is our students and our faculty: How do we support them? So everything we do, everything we do, has an eye towards the success of our students and faculty.
SB: So, then, that leads me to two questions. You were talking about how the board of trustees is primarily made of our alumni who love this school, who’ve grown up at this school. I get that sense that certainly with a lot of the students here, the recent graduates, so I’m asking about two things. One would be the future of this place: What is being done to ensure that students can continue loving the school, students can continue graduating from the school? I’m aware there’re quite a few challenges outside of Ursinus control or just the general landscape of higher education, so I wanted to ask what plans are there in place to continue this future that you’ve talked about? Will that be communicated with students in a timely manner when information is ready to be released?
JD: Well, I think you’re seeing it. We are on a trajectory with APEX and having everybody emerge ready. And part of the students emerging ready to launch their own careers post-Ursinus, whether it’s graduate schools or nonprofits or starting their own companies, we need to make sure the institution is ready. So, most of it right now, y’know, this phase of the College, this APEX phase, is really to make sure we’re ready for that. And so, everything we’re doing at the board level — so, we’ve been through a big strategic planning process, led by the faculty, led by the administration, and participation from the board. We’ve had some outside consultants come in, and we think we’re on an amazing trajectory.
SB: Do you believe that the students that are currently here right now will be able to experience the full effect of APEX?
JD: Well, so, we’re in transition mode right now, so we are asking that question all the time: “What are the things that the current students can participate in?” Not everything that we want to do in APEX is rolled out yet. Some of these early things — the career counseling actually should be ready for everybody now. We’d love to hear your perspectives, too, about other things, if there’s gaps. Any time something new happens, there’s no learning curve, there’s a doing curve, and, as we do these things, we’re gonna find things that are not going so well, or things we need to do better, or things — already going great and maybe we should do more of. And, so, I would encourage the entire student body to give us more thoughts if there are better ways to integrate what it is we’re already doing, and how we work through this transition so we come out on the other side together.
NN: Are you at all willing to comment on what are the biggest tangible concerns of the board right now?
JD: It’s enrollment, for sure, right? That’s why we’re putting this whole program together. So, I would say, they’re all related: How do our current students and our new graduates succeed post-Ursinus? If you don’t do that well, nothing else matters, right? So that’s front and center. We think if you do that well, and the students here have a terrific experience, and we have — we truly change your lives like it did for many of us on the board, that you do that well, a lot of other things take care of themselves, including enrollment. But part of that too is, we gotta get the word out, because many of us are pretty passionate that we’ve got something special here, and that should be reflected in our enrollment numbers, too. And that’s a bit of — it’s not just marketing, I think it’s us repositioning the college as front and center with that, associated with APEX and the emerge ready program.
SB: So, is there a timeline or timetable in place for some of the, either things that you plan to implement, or a timetable for when we need to get some of these admissions numbers up? I know that–
JD: You sound like a board member. Yes, yes, we’re staring at plans now, and we’ve got to make sure that those plans are cascaded down throughout the organization, that people are effectively doing those things.
SB: I know that during the interview the now-former president mentioned that she had a two-to-three year plan, and, during the town hall yesterday, the college repeatedly stated that they wanted to sort of keep the same course that they’re going on. Is the former president’s plan what the board is trying to continue to implement? Or are there going to be tweaks to it, at all?
JD: So, I would say it’s our plan. It’s not — there’s no one individual’s plan that is. We have been working as a team, so that’s a team plan, and we’re on that plan. There’s no changes to the plan.
NN: Are you at all willing to comment — should these plans fail, what timeline is Ursinus working on financially?
JD: We’re in a good financial situation right now. We’ve got to get our numbers up. We do multi-year programming. We understand where we’re at. We got a reasonable endowment — it’s not Harvard’s or Stanford’s endowment, but we’ve got a good plan. We want to get our numbers up. A lot of schools around us have gotten their numbers up. We think we have a better product. We think we have better students. We think we have a better future, and we’ve got to make sure we’re executing on that.
SB: I would just like to briefly ask about the staff and faculty. With the staff and faculty, can you ensure that they’re going to be taken care of despite this precarious time? I’m aware that certain departments, like the Office of Disability and Access, currently they serve [a significant percent] of the student body, but there’s only two workers. Are there any plans in place to staff currently understaffed offices to ensure that the faculty and staff are well taken care of going forward?
JD: We just got back talking about shared governance and what different people do. That’s a great question to ask the president and the leadership team. There’s some details there that I’m not in the middle of to give you a specific answer to. But, but, but! Access is critical to the future of everything we do as a society right now, and a lot of that, it’s resources associated with that. So, we’re dedicating a lot of resources into this space. We’ve got a very diverse incoming class — that’s a front and center thing for us. I would say, the most important thing of that is the outcomes and what comes from that. The outcome of diversity of disciplines, the outcome of diversity of individuals, is really about learning, and knowledge, and innovation, and we learn the most from those that we have the least in common with. So, that’s a characteristic of everything we do here at Ursinus. Being first-generation to go to college, I lived about a mile from here. In fact, I just went and saw the house I grew up in. It was a new house, back then. My father was a tailor, born in Italy, and I was the first in the family to go to college. My sister went here too; she was a Physics major. She just retired as executive director of the Missile Defense Agency. Her and her wife live outside of Washington. And, you know, all of these matter a lot. This college has transformed our lives, and this was my insight into the world. It was a very diverse group back then, it’s way more diverse now. Way more diverse disciplinary-wise, in neuroscience and all these things, so that’s a front and center element for us here are Ursinus.
NN: I have just one final question: What hand would the Trustees play in any restructuring of the college or its academics?
JD: The faculty own the curriculum, and we support them. And they came back to us with “We want to grow. We want to do these new things,” and we listened and we helped formulate what does that look like? How do we support it financially? What is your execution plan? So, we play a governance role. We don’t get into the details, but we become a resource, because a lot of business leaders, a lot of financial leaders, a lot of social leaders, and they fire questions, make sure their plans are strong, and then we decide “Does it make sense?” and that’s where this emerge ready program and the APEX details associated with that — we thought was awesome. So, that’s where we’re headed.
NN: So you wouldn’t play a part in specifically deciding individuals’ employment or departments’?
JD: No, not at the board level. We don’t do that.
On Saturday, October 25th, Grizzly editors Sidney Belleroche and Nathaniel Nerone sat down with Joseph DeSimone ‘86, the Chair of the Ursinus College Board of Trustees, and discussed projections for Ursinus’ future. Below is part of the interview; the rest can be found on the Grizzly website.
Nathaniel Nerone `28: So, starting off quite broadly, from your perspective, what happened with the removal of President Robyn Hannigan?
Joseph DeSimone `86: Well, we’re not going to talk about personnel matters, so I’m not gonna go into that.
Sidney Belleroche `27: Then, do you mind if you give me an overview of what the Board of Trustees does? Can you give us a bit of your job description? Because the student body doesn’t necessarily know you guys
JD: Sure, sure. At colleges and universities, there’s sort of a shared governance model, and we have — the faculty have a really important role and they do pretty much everything related to the students — curriculum, classes, what it means to get a degree from here. There’s the administration, which is basically the entire operation of the campus, everything about it, just keeping the trains running and stewarding the campus itself. And then there’s the Board of Trustees, and we have a different role, and our role is making sure that the general direction of the college is aligned with where we want to go. Also, we do a lot with helping out with the fundraising, and we approve budgets and that sort of thing.
SB: What is being done to ensure that students can continue loving the school, students can continue graduating from the school? I’m aware there’re quite a few challenges outside of Ursinus control or just the general landscape of higher education, so I wanted to ask what plans are there in place to continue this future that you’ve talked about? Will that be communicated with students in a timely manner when information is ready to be released?
JD: Well, I think you’re seeing it. We are on a trajectory with APEX and having everybody emerge ready. And part of the students emerging ready to launch their own careers post-Ursinus, whether it’s graduate schools or nonprofits or starting their own companies, we need to make sure the institution is ready. So, most of it right now, y’know, this phase of the College, this APEX phase, is really to make sure we’re ready for that. And so, everything we’re doing at the board level — so, we’ve been through a big strategic planning process, led by the faculty, led by the administration, and participation from the board. We’ve had some outside consultants come in, and we think we’re on an amazing trajectory.
NN: Are you at all willing to comment on what are the biggest tangible concerns of the board right now?
JD: It’s enrollment, for sure, right? That’s why we’re putting this whole program together. So, I would say, they’re all related: How do our current students and our new graduates succeed post-Ursinus? If you don’t do that well, nothing else matters, right? So that’s front and center. We think if you do that well, and the students here have a terrific experience, and we have — we truly change your lives like it did for many of us on the board, that you do that well, a lot of other things take care of themselves, including enrollment. But part of that too is, we gotta get the word out, because many of us are pretty passionate that we’ve got something special here, and that should be reflected in our enrollment numbers, too. And that’s a bit of — it’s not just marketing, I think it’s us repositioning the college as front and center with that, associated with APEX and the emerge ready program.
SB: So, is there a timeline or timetable in place for some of the, either things that you plan to implement, or a timetable for when we need to get some of these admissions numbers up? I know that–
JD: You sound like a board member. Yes, yes, we’re staring at plans now, and we’ve got to make sure that those plans are cascaded down throughout the organization, that people are effectively doing those things.
SB: I know that during the interview the now-former president mentioned that she had a two-to-three year plan, and, during the town hall yesterday, the college repeatedly stated that they wanted to sort of keep the same course that they’re going on. Is the former president’s plan what the board is trying to continue to implement? Or are there going to be tweaks to it, at all?
JD: So, I would say it’s our plan. It’s not — there’s no one individual’s plan that is. We have been working as a team, so that’s a team plan, and we’re on that plan. There’s no changes to the plan.
NN: Are you at all willing to comment — should these plans fail, what timeline is Ursinus working on financially?
JD: We’re in a good financial situation right now. We’ve got to get our numbers up. We do multi-year programming. We understand where we’re at. We got a reasonable endowment — it’s not Harvard’s or Stanford’s endowment, but we’ve got a good plan. We want to get our numbers up. A lot of schools around us have gotten their numbers up. We think we have a better product. We think we have better students. We think we have a better future, and we’ve got to make sure we’re executing on that.
SB: I would just like to briefly ask about the staff and faculty. With the staff and faculty, can you ensure that they’re going to be taken care of despite this precarious time? I’m aware that certain departments, like the Office of Disability and Access, currently they serve about 40% of the student body, but there’s only two workers. Are there any plans in place to staff currently understaffed offices to ensure that the faculty and staff are well taken care of going forward?
JD: We just got back talking about shared governance and what different people do. That’s a great question to ask the president and the leadership team. There’s some details there that I’m not in the middle of to give you a specific answer to. But, but, but! Access is critical to the future of everything we do as a society right now, and a lot of that, it’s resources associated with that. So, we’re dedicating a lot of resources into this space. We’ve got a very diverse incoming class — that’s a front and center thing for us. I would say, the most important thing of that is the outcomes and what comes from that. The outcome of diversity of disciplines, the outcome of diversity of individuals, is really about learning, and knowledge, and innovation, and we learn the most from those that we have the least in common with. So, that’s a characteristic of everything we do here at Ursinus. Being first-generation to go to college, I lived about a mile from here. In fact, I just went and saw the house I grew up in. It was a new house, back then. My father was a tailor, born in Italy, and I was the first in the family to go to college. My sister went here too; she was a Physics major. She just retired as executive director of the Missile Defense Agency. Her and her wife live outside of Washington. And, you know, all of these matter a lot. This college has transformed our lives, and this was my insight into the world. It was a very diverse group back then, it’s way more diverse now. Way more diverse disciplinary-wise, in neuroscience and all these things, so that’s a front and center element for us here are Ursinus.