Virginia Tech president starts second year with plans for growth

15 Jul Virginia Tech president starts second year with plans for growth

BLACKSBURG — Last year’s highest-profile Virginia Tech “freshman” is beginning his second year by welcoming the largest entering class in the university’s history and planning for future growth.
Timothy Sands — or Tim, as he introduces himself — began his tenure as Tech’s 16th president in July of last year, replacing Charles Steger.
The 57-year-old former Purdue University provost spent much of his first year at Tech building relationships with alumni, state legislators and donors as well as recruiting new high-level administrators who will shape the university’s future for years to come.
And that future is expected to bring a bigger and more diverse student body, a change that could be both a boon and a challenge for Blacksburg.
Despite his short time in the position, Sands already has garnered praise for his ability to build relationships and good will by taking a populist approach to his job as the official face of the university.

“He gets a lot of energy from mixing with the students and interacting with faculty and even the Tech — board of visitors,” said Cordel Faulk, director of admissions for the University of Virginia’s law school, who recently stepped down from Tech’s governing board.
University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan said she has worked with Sands on both the Virginia Council of Presidents and the state’s Center for Innovative Technology board. “I find him to be very collaborative,” she said.
“I think his biggest accomplishment so far has been opening up Burruss Hall to the students,” said Blacksburg Mayor Ron Rordam. “Dr. Sands is very accessible to students.”
Early on, Sands identified himself with the Class of 2018, referring to his first year as his “freshman” year and attending a Hokie Camp session with new students at Smith Mountain Lake. He also regularly holds lunches with students and has amassed 10,000 followers on Twitter as @VTSandsman.
He has made himself available to campus employees by encouraging faculty and staff to register to have lunch with him and to invite him to events through an online process.
Sands said the position has forced him to be more extroverted than he is naturally, which he called challenging but also invigorating. Learning to use social media also is new.
“I did not do that before,” Sands said of Twitter. “It’s just a half an hour a day, but it’s a whole new language.”
Sands also has been praised for big-picture thinking.
“The most important thing is he sees himself as part of a broader being than just Virginia Tech. He understands that higher ed is very important for the economy of the state,” Faulk said. His “decisions will be felt, not just in Blacksburg, but in all of Southwest Virginia, and parts of Southside.”
“He’s got a very good grip on research. … He’s got a very good sense of where the opportunities there are moving,” Sullivan said.
And he understands the role public institutions have in creating and supporting new industries, she added.
In addition to spending time in Richmond talking with legislators, Sands has stayed busy recruiting staff. Several Tech vice presidents, including Provost Mark McNamee, have retired or stepped down, making way for a new administrative structure.
Sands has hired a new provost, Thanassis Rikakis, 51, who most recently was the vice provost for design, arts and technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Cornell University chief fundraiser Charles Phlegar has been named Tech’s vice president of the newly designed office of university advancement, which combines alumni relations with fundraising and public relations. Previously, alumni relations was a separate division.
Sands dismantled the office of the vice president for diversity and inclusion and instituted a president’s council to oversee an effort called InclusiveVT, which monitors the diversity goals and progress of every university unit and division.
“I feel very good about those two appointments,” Sands said. “And I think we’re on a great trajectory now.”
Sands, who has developed commercially successful devices and technologies as an engineer, said he soon hopes to announce the hiring of a new vice president for research who can “look for synergies between discovery and entrepreneurship” and help the university ramp up commercialization of new discoveries.
With those positions filled, “we should have a pretty stable group and be ready to go,” he said.
And where Sands wants to go is up.
With more than 6,000 students projected to attend this year, the Class of 2019 will be the largest in Tech’s history, and Sands said recently that he and his team are looking at ways to continue increasing enrollment.
Today, the undergraduate student body hovers at about 24,000. But Sands said he is working toward a total increase of up to 5,000 students over the next six to eight years — an effort he said is likely to make a Tech degree more affordable in the long run.
“It would be very hard for us to lower the cost of education across the board without growth,” Sands said.
But with efficiencies of growth, per-student costs are likely to decrease, he said.
The university has been growing over the past decade anyway, Sands said, although those increases had not been called an official strategy.
Right now, officials are looking at two scenarios — one that assumes that undergraduate enrollment will grow by 2,000 students, “and what would we do if we had 5,000,” Sands said.
“We already have capacity,” the president said. “The question is: How much extra will we need?”
Most of the growth will be on campus, Sands said. But some will spill over into the town. As yet, the university has not released any cost estimates or detailed plans for the increases.
Mayor Rordam is cautiously optimistic about the prospect of more students. But the growth has to be done intentionally and appropriately, he said.
The town relies on the university in many ways, Rordam said, pointing to the 2,500 high-tech jobs at Tech’s Corporate Research Center, the public transportation system supported largely by Tech students, and the economic impact of football and other university events.
“Our relationship has always been good,” Rordam said of the town and the university. “Growth is something we want to work on very closely.”
Blacksburg already is looking at the problems and advantages of student housing increases and has commissioned a study that has identified adding high-end student housing units as a path toward housing affordability.
Rordam said the study, which has not yet been finalized, identified not a need, but a market for luxury housing for up to 5,000 additional students.
He said preserving neighborhoods and quality life will require strategic policy decisions to manage that growth.
For his part, Sands will face challenges outside the Blacksburg campus and even the town. From historically low state funding rates for higher education, to pressure to show results from his early restructuring of Tech’s diversity and inclusion efforts, to fierce competition for reduced federal funding for research, his sophomore year will be no time to slump.

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