After about five months on the job, J. Patrick O’Brien will be officially installed as president of West Texas A&M University on Oct. 21. He has extensive administrative experience in higher education, most recently serving as dean of the College of Business Administration and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Here, he shares his thoughts about being president and his vision for the university.
J.
Patrick O’Brien
You graduated from Auburn and Oklahoma State. In your career, you have been a dean at Jacksonville State University and Loyola University New Orleans, department head at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and visiting associate professor at Auburn. How has this experience prepared you for the position of president?
Being in different positions at different institutions has provided a wealth of experiences and perspectives upon which to draw. As a department head at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and as a faculty member at Auburn, I worked closely with faculty in agriculture. This was good experience given the role of agriculture at West Texas A&M and in the Panhandle economy. At Loyola University New Orleans, a principal responsibility was fund raising and alumni relations. Additionally, at Loyola I facilitated the strategic planning process for the university, a process that required me to work with faculty, staff, students and administrators from every area of the university.
What’s the main difference between being a university dean and a president?
The primary difference is the scope of responsibilities. For instance, as a dean, I had very little occasion to deal with the athletics programs other than as a spectator or as an academic administrator concerned with the progress of a specific student. A president has responsibility to ensure institutional oversight of all of athletics.
As a dean, I had responsibility for the use and maintenance of the business school building. A president has ultimate responsibility for the entire physical plant of the university.
The number of individuals relying upon you to make good decisions is greater as president than as a dean.
What are your top three tips for success as a university president (or other key leadership role)?
- Respectfully listen to the voices and concerns of your major stakeholder groups.
- Provide consistent leadership.
- Be a passionate advocate for your institution.
What was the biggest “culture shock” you found upon moving to Canyon from New Orleans?
The lack of absolutely superb Cajun and Creole restaurants! However, we have found the hospitality of the residents of the Panhandle and of West Texas A&M University to be fantastic.
Your home in New Orleans was severely damaged during Hurricane Katrina, and for many months, you lived on the second floor and went outside to a FEMA trailer for cooking and showering. What did you and your wife, Karen, learn from this ordeal?
The ordeal strengthened the bond between us. We were reminded that the material things are not all that important. The more important things are family, faith and relationships. We also learned that the jambalaya MRE is much, much better than the sloppy joes!
WTAMU has had only 10 presidents in its first 96 years. What do you think accounts for this longevity?
In part, this is due to the fact that President J.A. Hill served from 1918 through 1948—a total of 30 years, and President James P. Cornette served for 24 years, 1948 through 1972. President Russell Long served 11 years, from 1994 through 2005. The other six prior to me served an average of five years each.
The university in the past has been very successful in selecting talented individuals who were dedicated to the institution.
What has been your biggest “lesson learned” during your first few months as president?
Time must be managed extremely well. It would be very easy to get bogged down with paperwork and busy work. Time must be set aside to think and reflect and to interact with stakeholder groups. Appropriate delegation of responsibilities is essential to effective time management.
Since becoming president, you have initiated a review of the university’s strategic plan and overseen an academic realignment that, among other things, created a new College of Nursing and Health Sciences.What are some of the other major initiatives under way at WTAMU?
Emphasis over the next several years will be concentrated in five areas:
- Academic excellence
- Enrollment
- Learning environment
- Student success
- Outreach
Consistent with the core values of the university, we seek to develop nationally and regionally prominent academic programs. By enhancing academic excellence we seek to elevate the university’s reputation as evidenced by rankings in such publications as The Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report.
Over the next five years we propose to position ourselves to pursue the highest level of accreditation for those programs for which there is national and/or regional accreditation. We need to develop new innovative programs that meet the needs of the local area and society in general.
Over the next five years, we will seek funding for endowed chairs and professorships—providing us with the ability to better reward, retain and attract outstanding faculty members.
To ensure that our curricula, our pedagogy and student support services are cutting edge, we propose also to significantly increase funding for faculty and staff development—funding for on-campus workshops, travel to professional meetings, and participation in off-campus workshops. We need to be willing to try new approaches in how we teach, in what we teach. We must be willing to fail and to learn from our mistakes. We only fail if we ourselves do not change.
And to highlight those programs of particular strength, we propose the establishment of at least three Centers of Excellence by the beginning of academic year 2010-2011.
We will seek to increase headcount enrollment at the university to 9,000 by fall 2011. To accomplish this, we are going to have to increase enrollment of our freshmen classes, increase the number of transfer students from junior colleges, increase enrollment in our graduate programs, and, equally important, enhance retention of the students we enroll.
We plan to improve our retention rate of first time freshmen from their first to second year from the current 66 percent to 75 percent by academic year 2010-2011. As we increase enrollment, we need to pay particular attention to the diversity of our student body.
We also plan to develop a learning environment which draws in highly qualified students and retains them with WT. We need to refurbish our classrooms, develop new smart classrooms, establish an undergraduate student research program, and establish opportunities for students to participate in study abroad and semester exchange programs with universities in other countries.
Over the next several years we are going to commit upwards of $400,000 per year for refurbishment of classrooms and conversion of classrooms to smart classrooms. To ensure we maintain the historic strength of WT—personal attention and close interaction of students with faculty and staff—we need also to decrease our student/faculty ratio and decrease average class sizes.
The emphasis of the last theme—outreach—is to change us from being a “best-kept secret” to a high-visibility university. We are developing a robust marketing program for the university.
We are going to host more alumni functions off campus; increase our presence in the community through service on boards and committees; and we are exploring the feasibility of expanding our physical presence in Amarillo. Over the next several months, we are also going to restructure our university relations offices: development, alumni affairs, public relations and marketing so as to make our outreach program more effective.
What is your long-term vision for the university?
It is my desire that WTAMU be a first choice institution—first choice for students, for faculty and staff, and for employers and graduate schools.
When prospective students are thinking about pursuing a university education in a field in which we have a degree program, I want WT to be their first choice. When a prospective faculty or staff member is thinking of a university in which to be employed, I want WT to be their first choice. And, when an employer is looking for a graduate to hire, I want WT to be their first choice. And when graduate schools come looking for graduate students, I want WT to be their first choice.
When we have succeeded in making WT a first-choice institution, then WT will have achieved its rightful place in higher education.
