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What were the things that you knew you wanted to accomplish when you arrived?
I said, initially, that we needed to do three things. The first was to change our approach to student recruitment. We needed to bring into a single community all of the people who are responsible for admissions, financial aid, registration, student academic support and career planning, so that those would become seamless operations and not mysterious units in the university. And we needed to do some long-range enrollment planning. So we hired Mark Rubinstein [vice provost for enrollment management], who is exceptional, and he undertook to do that.

The second thing I wanted to do was to change the manner in which the university was distributing its resources to programs. When I arrived, UNH was still using a budget process that was left over from a time when the university was much smaller and not as research-intensive. We needed a process that moved budget decisions closer to the units responsible for teaching and research. ... Not only did we change the model, but we also changed the processes for decision-making.

The third area I wanted to address was private support. It appeared to me that there was substantial potential for private fund raising that the university was not aggressively pursuing. We committed ourselves to a major campaign to increase private support in specific areas that make a critical difference in the university's overall excellence. ... The campaign has four main goals: to make a UNH education accessible to talented students, regardless of their family income; to recruit and retain outstanding faculty members; to strengthen selected academic programs of distinction; and to provide modern technology and other essential learning tools to all members of the campus community. We had a fifth underlying goal: to maintain a campus environment that fosters discovery, creativity and community. And we are succeeding in meeting all those goals. We have received gifts for student scholarships and student-based programs like the university undergraduate research program. We have created faculty chairs and professorships and provided endowments for some of our hallmark programs. And we've received gifts for what we call tools of learning--equipment, technology, electronic library collections, classrooms equipped with the latest technology, even a playground for the Child Study and Development Center.

Another area of emphasis: The quality of the faculty suggested to me that we should be able to leverage more external research support than the university was getting when I first arrived. So we organized ourselves to do that, and now the external funding is at a high level [$81.9 million]--an unusually high level for a faculty that doesn't have a medical school. And we continue to develop the entrepreneurial campus, where faculty members and students work on research funded by industry quite directly. What was the strategy for the capital campaign? Why did it work so well? It worked because the cause was a good one--not because we were clever, but because we were clear. And we were also disciplined. We chose not to put bricks and mortar into this campaign. We said we would invest in academic programs, and we chose as targets for gifts those programs that either were at the top of their fields or close enough that with private funds they could reach the top of their fields. Some of our very strongest research programs are cross-disciplinary. In this campaign, we focused on programs which have high visibility and reputation and also have connections to many other programs across the institution. So we expect the campaign to benefit almost every program at UNH directly or indirectly. ~

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