2 min read January 2023 — President of the University of West Georgia Brendan Kelly sat down with Focus: to discuss how the university is adapting to an evolving higher education sector, strategic planning initiatives and unique ways he is interacting with the local business community. “If you are willing to change, be dynamic and fail to succeed, which I believe the University of West Georgia is, then you will be successful,” he said. “We are going to be different than we are today in the future, and we will be successful as a university in 2030, 2040 and 2050.”
What have been some of the key highlights for the university in the past 12 months?
I started as president of the University of West Georgia in March 2020, so those first few months were a term of high anxiety adapting to COVID-19. We spent a lot of time planning, and over the last 12 months, we have gotten to see some of the fruit from the seeds we planted in that first year come to fruition. One highlight is that we saw college come back, which was especially true this year. When we came back last year for the 2021-2022 academic year, people still felt isolated. The underpinnings of a person’s life experienced at a university weren’t available in the same way. That changed this Fall. All of a sudden, we saw students gathering in a more robust way. A lot of that was intentional because we worked on being responsive to students’ requests and expectations. They requested services be available later, more places to collaborate and more places to gather, and we delivered. I charged one of the members of my team with being the “Vice President of Sit and Gather,” and that was his priority. We have also been intentional about our educational programming and not necessarily offering what we want to offer, but offering what employers need from their workforce. We are looking more at where the puck is going to land. We have been around for over 120 years, and we spent most of that being a very traditional university. Over the last two years, we have undergone stark changes toward the future.
How has higher education’s landscape changed in the past year?
The change that has occurred over the past year or two was a long time coming. COVID-19 certainly created some challenges, but technological innovation and offering virtual curriculum was long overdue. The mentality of college students has changed in what they’re looking for and expect of their college experience. They became more precisely acute. Expectations of us were higher, and I believe we pushed ourselves as an institution to meet them. We have to prepare them professionally, personally and in all dimensions of wellness with a community around them. The challenge is that there are fewer people going to college in the United States than there were two years ago, and that has been in the making for the past several years. We are all feeling the effects of that as universities. Most importantly, we will feel that in the economy because a less-educated America doesn’t put us in a strong position for success over time. We are trying to recalibrate to ensure access to our institution is made easier and that we are creating value at every turn. It’s a healthy correction for higher education, but it is also built in an atmosphere of serious enrollment headwinds.
Making the hybrid model of learning an option enhances the student learning experience. Research has shown for 15 years that hybrid learning is a better situation for students, because people activate their best thinking at different times. They also need the sense of community and enlightenment that comes along with being together in an in-person class. It has to be a mix.
How have your partnerships grown, and are you looking to add more?
We have many partnerships with many industries right now. Our partnership with Comcast provides enhanced service to certain segments of our campus that allows us to accomplish what we could not before. Many of our partnerships center around talent development and value creation. Companies are struggling to recruit talent, and we are the producer of talent. We are developing a partnership with Yamaha, and it started by us leading a thought forum and asking attendees what we as a university can do for them that we are not already doing. That is a new conversation higher education has not historically been willing to have with the business community. The partnership that emerged from that conversation was unique. Yamaha wanted to allow its IT professionals to do more complex work, but the majority of their time was spent solving more simple issues. The university identified ways for our students to tackle some of those lower-level problems, which gave invaluable experience to them and created a hiring network for Yamaha with our students.
What does strategic planning look like for the university going forward?
There is not an outcome talked about today that isn’t tied to our strategic plan. The three pillars of that are relevance, competitiveness and placemaking. We spend a substantial amount of time and effort staying very focused on those priorities. For example, when you come to a university, you also come to a university town. Over the last year, we have spent time nurturing that environment and intentionally connecting our businesses to the university. We are also partnering with the city to redevelop the corridor between the university and downtown to be more pedestrian friendly and add new amenities that don’t just serve university students, but create a richer quality of life. The boundaries of a strategic plan don’t stop at the boundaries of campus. They feed over into the community.
If you are willing to change, be dynamic and fail to succeed, which I believe the University of West Georgia is, then you will be successful. We are going to be different than we are today in the future, and we will be successful as a university in 2030, 2040 and 2050. My outlook is positive. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t hard, but I am optimistic about the future because I can see the types of things we are doing create a change in the value proposition for students, our industry and our community. If we can keep following that line of thinking, we are going to get positive outcomes.
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