Departing WSU President Kirk Schulz reflects on nine years in Pullman

Schulz: I’m in my ninth year at Washington State University, and prior to that, I spent seven years as president at Kansas State University, and when I took the job at WSU, I felt, if I could serve, you know, eight to 10 years in that position, that it would be time to let somebody else come in and have an opportunity to lead.

And at some point, I think, leaders can tend to get maybe a little stale, or you don’t have the same kind of ideas that you did maybe when you came in new. So when I talked to the board about a year and a half ago, I just said, you know, I think by the time we get to the end of my ninth year, it’ll be time for somebody else to have an opportunity.

And secondly, I also think that I wanted to be able to leave and transition to a new president and not sort of have an abrupt departure where I said, “Hey, I’m taking a job elsewhere. And, you know, good luck figuring out my replacement.” So that way the board could spend a full year searching for the next president of Washington State, and then there would be some transition time where the two of us would work together to make sure that when I formally step away on June 30, the new president has met major donors, met some of our legislators, spent time at all of our campuses and and feels ready to go.

So it was really a combination of, I felt I had done a lot of what I could do. I felt it was time for some new leadership and new ideas, and I wanted to make sure we did a smooth handoff, so that there’s not a lot of disruption and the university moves forward.

Are you retiring from the workforce?

I’m officially retiring from Washington State. What I’d like to do is have a year’s sabbatical. That’s in my contract. So once I formally hand over the baton to the next president, I’m going to be living in the state, doing some writing. I’ll do things that the next president deems that he would like me to do, if anything. And then following that year, that sort of paid study leave year, if you will, I’ll be officially retired from Washington State University.

And then what I’m going to do is I’d like to do some consulting, some board work, some things in the Pacific Northwest. So I’m not leaving the state. I’m not going to be fully retired, but if I wanted to serve as a university president, there’s no reason for me to go anywhere else. I just feel the timing is right, and looking forward to a little bit of the next chapter.

And then my wife is leading a major research center for WSU Tri-Cities, in Richland. She’s followed me around to some of these different jobs, and this is a really unique opportunity she’s got in front of her. And I want to make sure I’m doing some things to support her as she looks to build out an energy policy center.

A lot of universities are facing declining enrollments. What is Washington State University doing to try to increase enrollment?

Every year, we do more and more things, and it’s all additive. We will do on the spot admissions now. So we’ll go to college fairs, we’ll go to high schools. And if people meet a certain level of criteria, they walk away with an admission letter to Washington State University. Second, we’ve also shifted a little bit on paying fees. What we’ve done now is you can confirm that you’re coming to WSU, and some of those dollars don’t have to be paid until much closer to the fall semester. Then those dollars can be included in a financial aid package.

We switched to a national application clearinghouse. We had a homegrown system before, and now students can apply to WSU and all these other places really easily. You do one application that goes multiple places. Then we did a video this year people may have seen on Amazon that was profiling 10 of our students that are attending the Pullman campus. One is a transfer student. One’s a student athlete, one’s from Central Washington, about why they chose to come. So we’re really pushing our story out a little bit more effectively than we did pre-COVID.

And every year we’re just going to continue to try and innovate and do some new things. The final thing I’ll mention on this one is that we played the Apple Cup against University of Washington in Seattle and early in the year, and so we almost reinstituted something that used to be called Seattle Week for WSU, where we sort of had a whole bunch of people and different functions at WSU that all converged on Seattle. So we have something for business leaders and the community in the greater Seattle area to learn about agriculture and food and what WSU is doing in that space.

We also sent teams to 35 high schools in the Seattle area during that week, doing those on-the-spot admissions, and we saw a big bump in applications and acceptances year over year, just by being out, being present. We’re going to continue to innovate each year, and we’ve seen some positive results. Our entering class was up 2.5%, not overall enrollment. I want to make that clear. So we feel we turned the corner on enrollment, and it’s just going to take us a while to rebuild to back where we were pre-COVID.

Do public colleges do enough to make college affordable for more students?

That’s highly variable across the United States. In Washington, we’re very fortunate to have a very generous state aid program that is income based, and that really helps with the affordability for many Washington families. But if you talk to typical students who may be considering going to a four-year college or a two-year college, a lot of folks are not aware of what the state actually offers.

So I think that the broader answer to your question would be nationally, no. We talk a lot about why you could come to a school. You know, I got athletics, got nice dorms, great degree programs, but we don’t often talk about the cost part. We just kind of bury that a little bit nationally. And I think that what we’re going to have to do is reverse that. Instead of talking about how great the residence halls are, how many football games we won, I think we’re going to have to lead with what does it cost, a realistic number. What’s the average debt load of students coming out of that particular university?

Within the state of Washington, we’re talking about this a lot more. Fifty percent of students graduate from WSU with no debt. That’s a really important number, and that’s something that we have to keep pounding away at, and say, “Don’t decide you can’t come to Washington State University because you can’t afford it. Apply and let us work with you and your family and financial aid.”

So it’s up to the universities to do a better job of messaging. And kind of messaging people where they are, instead of worrying about some of the things that a decade ago might have been near the top of the list, where affordability, debt amounts, and what you can do with your college degree need to be at the forefront.

Despite the destruction of the old PAC-12, how would you describe the future of WSU athletics?

It’s a complicated question. So now we have a rebuilt PAC-12, and I’m going to be the first to admit, I’ve tried to tell all of our groups. I’m under no illusion that the rebuilt PAC-12 is like the old PAC-12. And sometimes fans will go, oh, it’s not the same. Well, you’re right, it’s not the same.

But if you look at all these other conferences out there, you look at what the SEC was eight years ago, you look at what the Big 12 was eight years ago – all these conferences have changed, and I think that’s OK. And to be honest, the rebuilt PAC-12 has a lot more schools that look a lot more like Washington State University, land-grant universities with similar academic and research profiles, like Colorado State, Utah State and so forth.

So I actually think the future in terms of our conference affiliation looks really bright for us, and I think we’re going to be very competitive athletically in that particular conference. We’re going to be in the western half of the United States, that footprint feels good. We’re not sending our student athletes, you know, to Chapel Hill or wherever, on a regular basis to have to compete. And I just think at the end of the day, as they get their degrees, this is a far better place for them to be. So that’s all the positives.

WSU got used to, for many years, getting a very large check annually from the PAC-12 conference. You know, $35-$36 million came in. And largely, if you say, how did we financially support our athletic program? It was off PAC-12 revenues. Our donors were modest. You know, our ticket sales were good, but not great. And that was the way we kind of funded athletics programs.

Well, now with the new PAC-12, when we get a new media deal done, there’s going to be instead of $35-$36 million, maybe we get $18 million each year, or $16 million, and what you wind up having is now a $20 million hole between what you used to get and what you have to get moving forward. So we’re going to have to get creative about how we close that $20 million gap.

What are some of the tasks that will immediately confront your successor?

We’re in the first stages of a comprehensive fundraising campaign for WSU. We’ve been very successful the last several years and raised a little over $150 million each year. We haven’t announced what the campaign goal is going to be, because you wait ’til you get sort of midway through the campaign.

We’re three and a half years in and have been really successful, but the new president is going to have to get on the road visiting with donors. I’ll get the campaign to about the halfway point or so by the time I leave. But the next president is going to have to step in and continue to be on the road, visiting with folks quite a bit.

The second thing is there’s been more interest recently in things like WSU divesting from fossil fuels and our endowments and things like that, and there’s a very active group on campus that wants to see some of that. So we put together a group to do a Sustainability Task Force, of what should the sustainable future for Washington State look like over the next 20 years. And they put together some ideas and some plans that have to be executed over several years. And working with the board, I just said, I think you’ve got to put this on hold until the new president’s here, because I’m not going to be here long enough. There’s a multiyear financial commitment on what sustainability looks like at WSU.

I mentioned athletics. I think if you look at the high stress points of my nine years, I would say, you know, the two are COVID and athletics. The final thing I’ll sort of say is there’s a dynamic tension at WSU between Pullman [and] our four other campuses across the state. Guess what? Everybody wants the president’s time. And you know, I chose our last several years to focus more of my time on the road, on all of our campuses, and not just most of it in Pullman and a little bit elsewhere. That’s helped with our fundraising. It’s helped with our presence in Seattle and these other communities. But it means you’re not at as much stuff that people will say, “Well, it would be nice to have the president here.”

Can you talk about some of your proudest achievements as WSU president?

I’m really proud of a lot of the buildings and physical infrastructure that we’ve done across all of our campuses. And if you look over eight or nine years, you know, we built a lot of new buildings and I think what I like about buildings, and one of the reasons that’s one of the things I mentioned, is, you know, buildings will last over 75 or 80 years. So if you do something like that, it is truly a long-term investment in the institution. And there’ll be groups of students 60 years from now [who] have no idea who Kirk Schulz ever was, but they know that’s where they did lab work, or where they had classroom spaces, or, you know, a place where maybe they met a spouse or discovered what they wanted to do in life.

The second is, I’m really proud of what we’ve done in fundraising and philanthropy, and we took ourselves from about a $110 million a year or so fundraising operation on average, and we’re now above $150 million per year on average. And I think that’s required a team effort, lots of work that I’m really proud to have been helping lead.

And then I think the third thing I would say is I think we have, maybe, reestablished a bigger presence in Seattle over the last three to four years post-pandemic than we had pre-pandemic, and I think that’s also been a concerted effort. This is a really important market over here for prospective students, for donors, for corporations. It’s where a lot of our students, on the Pullman campus, when they graduate, come back to work. And you know, we’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m proud of us kind of stepping into that space more than we probably did five years ago.

Any particular disappointment?

I think around enrollment, the fact that our overall enrollment has decreased. I think we look back at COVID, it really, really hurt WSU to be, you know, remote for as long as we were, and some of that’s the state we live in and the regulations. But if you look nationally at other states and other public universities, some may have been out for three to four months, and then they went back in person, I think they recovered some of their enrollment a lot faster. So I just think the whole enrollment piece has certainly been something that I wish had turned out maybe a little bit differently.

I would also say just the dynamic tension of the system. And you know, there were some letters written in the spring from some concerned faculty about the president, the president’s role, my role, and not being in Pullman enough. If you go back and talk to other previous presidents, almost everybody mentions that, but I certainly think that came to a head in the spring and I made some choices on how I was going to do that, and I mentioned that the next president’s going to have to do that.

But it’s unfortunate that some of that played out in public, in that form and fashion. But to be honest, to be a leader of a university for as long as I’ve had the privilege to lead WSU, that was really the first big public kind of spat, if you will. That’s pretty unusual. All in all, I’ll take it.

Do you have any particular memento, something from the school or your office, that you will take with you when you leave?

If I had to pick one item, it’s from our women’s basketball team winning the PAC-12 championship (last season). When we win those things, the president gets a ring, like a championship ring, just like the team gets. And I was just so proud of the fact it wasn’t just that they won, but WSU has a smaller budget. We weren’t expected to win. It was just a great group of young women, you know, you just wrapped the whole thing up.

We were the last PAC-12 women’s tournament champions before the conference all went away last summer. And I think if I look at my time here, it was such a remarkable achievement for WSU to be able to do that. If I have to pick one thing, I’ll have that ring until I’m 90. And be really, really proud of it. So that’s a great question.